Top 50 Songs of the Decade, #34 - "The Isolation of Mister," John Mellencamp

John Mellencamp, grizzled veteran.  It's been one of the most remarkable transformations in the history of rock music.  It's one of my favorite stories.  When he first emerged in the late 1970s, his management packaged him as a pretty boy, almost David Bowie-ish, type.  It went about as well as one would have expected.

By the early 1980s, he was John Cougar Mellencamp.  He had a couple of massive hit singles, and by the mid-eighties the albums he was releasing were as good as anyone's.  He'd reclaimed his career, and his name.  From that point on, he's been John Mellencamp.



Mellencamp described the song in a 2014 interview as "a song about men and how we rationalize and isolate ourselves from our regrets and mistakes."



Reinvention, artistic redemption, and ultimately triumph.  Not bad for a career arc.