Meat Loaf's cellphone ad proves rock is the new family value

If one adjective (besides "gigantic") adequately describes Meat Loaf, it's "game." Rock's operatic jester has tried plenty of angles in his surprisingly long-lived career: He's acted in the Broadway production of "Hair," served as John Belushi's understudy in "The National Lampoon Show," helped make history as part of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and huffed oxygen to keep going onstage back when the album "Bat Out of Hell" made him a star in the late 1970s.

So any accusations that he's sold out by participating in an AT&T ad are just silly. Mr. Loaf never had any pure ideals to protect; that's one of his best qualities.

"Paradise by the GoPhone Light" promotes AT&T's prepaid wireless service by turning one of the Loaf's most recognizable hits — a hilarious mini-epic in which our boy attempts to seduce a date while the late, legendary commentator Phil Rizzuto calls the play-by-play — into a father-son duet about the teen's need for a cellphone.

Former '80s mall sweetheart Tiffany plays Mom, while the actor Adam Cagley, who looks like a mini-Loaf, steals the show as Junior (Isaac Young ghost-sings his part). The New York- and Atlanta-based advertising firm BBDO created the spot.

Kids might like this ad, but it's really meant for their folks, and the turn it takes from previous GoPhone ads (made for Cingular, before that company merged with AT&T) says something interesting about intergenerational rock. Let's face it: Mainstream rock is the new parlor music, passed down via toddler-sized Ramones T-shirts, daddy-and-me dates to Lollapalooza and self-esteem lessons at Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls.

BBDO's previous ads for the program played on the cliché that, as Will Smith once rapped, parents just don't understand. The spots twisted the truisms of the generation gap to show that the right service plan can help families rekindle the love adolescence can destroy.

"I never hated you, and I never will!" a daughter petulantly shouts at her mother in one ad as she stomps up the stairs with her new GoPhone. "You are the most grateful little... ," Mom replies to the dust her girl has kicked up. (It's no accident that the spot's actors look like cleaned-up versions of Holly Hunter and Evan Rachel Wood in every mom's favorite horror flick, "Thirteen.")

The Meat Loaf ad also presents the GoPhone as the solution to discord, but it operates on the principle that harmony is the family's natural state. And that peace comes through music. When Junior asks the Loaf for a phone, the singer simmers for a moment, then agrees by breaking into song. Junior joins him, as does Mom — they all dig rocking out to the sound of the 1970s. Classic rock bridges the gap the tech-soaked age of video games, Facebook and hip-hop has redefined.

The clip's domestic bliss continues classic rock's drift away from rebelliousness and toward family fare, despite the best efforts of third-generation stripper-lovers Buckcherry, who nostalgically long for the dirty days of Axl and the Crue.

Maybe Ozzy wrecked it all on the Emmy-winning "The Osbournes" by showing that even a drug-damaged bat-decapitator can be a No. 1 hubby. Now KISS king Gene Simmons, a more cogent paterfamilias, has his own mom-and-pop reality show, and Twisted Sister drag queen Dee Snider's son Jesse has a chance of winning it all on the celeb-spawn show "Rock the Cradle." The Meat Loaf ad simply follows in this pattern of mildly spicy metal middle age.

And none of these projected dreams would resonate if they didn't seem right in the real world. The counterculture has utterly fragmented; rebellion is old hat. Rock, made for big crowds and sweeping statements, works best these days as a means of communicating the all-American values of independence, personal flash and weekend-warrior partying. Meat Loaf really is Ward Cleaver — or at least Homer Simpson. The release his music offers is good, clean fun.

And as his TV son sings as he anticipates that cute little mobile, for that we'll love him 'till the end of time.