Pynchon Music: Pat Benatar

Pat Benatar, aka Pat Andrzejewski from Brooklyn, NY, rocked the world from the early 70’s until the early 90’s, reaching her heyday in the 80’s. Albums like Crimes of Passion and Precious Time marked her as a full-blown stadium rocker despite her diminutive stature, and she had a number of platinum records as well as Grammy Awards for both Best Female Rock Performance in 1980 and for the single “Fire and Ice.” By 1988, however, she was losing ground, and didn’t release another album until 1991: the disastrous blues record True Love. A critical and commercial failure, it prompted her to return to mainstream rock on the 1993 record Gravity’s Rainbow. Featuring a lot of orchestration and great production values, it was too little too late. Both radio and record-buying public had lost interest and the album slipped off the charts shortly after its release. It has little to offer a Pynchon fan other than its title and flattering reference, which is sad since, at one time, Ms Benatar was a pretty hot rocket.