Everytime I listen to Nirvana I can’t help but feeling sad, not over the anguish Kurt Cobain must have felt during his life, but over the tremendous promise wasted when he killed himself. I was listening to a random iPod mix recently when this track came on that blew me away. It was an infectious riff from a warmly overdriven and saturated guitar accompanied only by highhat and bass drum – no vocals. The melody is so simple that you are forced to concentrate purely on the sound of the distortion, which despite the repetitive ohm-like nature of the tune, varies widely with the progression of the song and is rich with the bleeding overtones of modern high-gain.
I have my iPod hooked up directly to my car’s stereo and placed in my glovebox so that I am not tempted to look at the screen while driving. The whole way home from work I was wondering which of the multitude of new artists I’ve recently loaded it could be. Of course it ended up being a demo track called "Grey Goose" off of With The Lights Out, the Nirvana box-set released last year. It’s moments like these when I sigh the heaviest. The idea that this remarkable light of musical creativity has gone out of the world forever depresses me to no end. I’ve actually started to think the only way I can truly love an artist is if I find out that they’ve committed suicide.
Not that I blame them. I have been there and know the void they stare into, though thankfully I can see enough positives in life to outweigh the gloom. Plus I am not so unfortunate as to be burdened with the prodigious talent that dooms musical genius to an average life expectancy of 32.7 years, seemingly the going rate these days. Kurt Cobain is not the first time this has happened to me, the following artists reveal a pattern of devotion which should be disturbing to any psychiatrist.
Ian Curtis – lead singer of Joy Division – by hanging. Nothing is more haunting to me that the sound of Curtis’ voice, it eats deeper into my soul with each gloomy verse. Joy Division is the one band whose every song I love. It sounds depressing to say that they have written the soundtrack to my life, because I couldn’t be that goth, but it’s closer than anything else has come. One of the most moving songs is "Atmosphere", whose lyrics underscore the general theme of alienation which runs throughout Curtis’ verse:
People like you find it easy
Aching to see, walking on air
Hunted by the rivers, through the streets
Every corner, abandoned too soon
I could go on, typing from memory the lyrics to nearly all of their songs with a footnote on how each made me feel the first time I heard them.
Jeff Buckley – muse of God – accidental drowning. Well at least his death wasn’t intentional – or people don’t tend to think so. There was nothing in his personality to indicate such a self destructive tendency. Instead his death is described as a fanciful dip into a tributary of the Mississipi, though perhaps ill-advised given he was fully clothed at the time. Jeff’s dreamy spirit in life probably most contributed to his death.
Given that it was an accident you would think I would be less burdened by his early demise except for the fact that he was one of the most brutally talented musicians in the history of modern music. I’ll never forget when my friend Marie first lent me his Grace cd to listen to on my way home. As I was parking my car on the street, the song “So Real” came on and I couldn’t move. When the song finished I turned my car off and began sobbing.
I just couldn’t believe that someone could be so talented, that after hearing just one of his songs I could so closely identify with him, and that he was (again!) already dead. Worse still was later when my friend Steven gave me a live DVD of him performing in Chicago in ’95 - it was at the same small venue down the block from my apartment where I had seen Sonic Youth that fall. Had I known about him I could have seen him perform just 6 months prior to that fateful swim in the Wolf River.
Elliott Smith – acoustic balladeer – self inflicted stab wound in the heart. Rounding out this quartet of melancholy is the artist most recent to pass, this time definitely by his own hand and in a manner which expresses the innate creativity of his being – even his suicide was a metaphor. He is actually someone who’s music I listened to more closely after I found out he had killed himself.
There it was, right in the middle of my cd collection, his eponymous album staring me in the face. I had no excuse for why I hadn’t listened to it much, and I felt guilty about just now tuning in. I mean, what if it was bad? Perhaps his death would affect me only as much as those of the lead singers of INXS, The Gin Blossoms, and Blind Melon (in descending order of apathy.) But it wasn’t bad, it was fucking good, and I was suddenly ashamed of myself. From “Needle in the Hay” to “Clementine” to “St. Ides Heaven” – each lyric more perfect than the last.
Only later when watching Good Will Hunting would I recognize his lasting contribution to the success of that pseudo-indie film with the lyrics to “Between the Bars”:
Drink up baby, stay up all night
The things you could do, you won’t but you might
The reflection you’ll see, that you’ll never be
The promises you’ll only make
The fact that most every song he has written has to do with drug or alcohol abuse may be a subtle clue as to what led him down his eventual path. I can only judge myself, however, for not taking the opportunity to see him at the Fillmore when he played there in 2001.
And so the pattern continues. It makes me want to scare up some Arcade Fire tickets. You know, just in case.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Saturday, June 18, 2005
An Everflowing Font
I have always learned first about good music from my brother Brian. Sometimes I forget the impact he has had on my musical taste growing up. It all started early – probably when I was 7 or 8. I remember at school everyone was listening to Shaun Cassidy. I was getting ready to buy my first album and had decided on a scratched copy of Kiss Alive mainly due to it’s bargain price of 50 cents and the fact that some friends at school were into them. I brought it home, and was excited to show Brian, who had a great collection of albums. He could tell I was excited and wanted to encourage my musical growth but I could see the disappointment in his eyes.
After listening to this craptacular assembly of primordial hair metal for a week, I decided in the end it would be best to melt the album in the burn barrel in our back yard. Then to further show my distaste I hung it on a nail on my wall. I wanted to prove to my brother that I understood now what he had said in a moment with his eyes – that you know good music when you hear it, and that most people don’t even try to differentiate.
It was that Christmas that he bought me The Who Live at Leeds double album. I remember holding the yellow foldout in my hands and thinking wow this must be some heavy shit. I ran upstairs to listen to it. I heard “My Generation” for the first time and felt a connection with the music even though I knew I was too young to understand what Roger Daltrey was really singing about. When I tried to tell my friends at school that I was listening to The Who they just didn’t get it. Funny enough Brian recently sent me the album in mp3 format and it instantaneously found its way to my iPod – “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me…” I still love that stuff.
Thus began the journey. The next moment musicaux I remember was when he brought home Pink Floyd The Wall one day. There is one part on that album where there is this intense sound of bottles breaking against a wall. Brian took special care to point it out to me and I was instantly fascinated by the intersection of music and performance art. We listened to that album pretty much non-stop for the next two months.
Then one morning I was watching The Today Show and Gene Shalit had the nerve to try and review it. He must have been under pressure as it had become a sensation and he probably wanted to appear hip enough to have heard of it. At any rate he panned it for just some of the most retarded reasons ever, including the use of ambient sounds between tracks, saying they were distracting and often too violent. Thanks to my brother’s tutelage, I saw through this whole charade at the tender age of 10. The album has since gone platinum 23 times over.
But these two examples are more mainstream than most of what my brother listened to as we were growing up. He listened to not just Frank Zappa, but Captain Beefheart, whose was the much, much weirder one, and of course Little Feat. He had a whole bunch of punk music, including the Plasmatics, Stiff Little Fingers, and this awesome album called Black and White by the Stranglers.
Actually Stiff Little Fingers’ “State of Emergency” off of Inflammable Material had a guitar riff which haunted me for 25 years until I figured out who it was again after hearing one of their songs in the movie High Fidelity. I recently returned the iPod favor by sending Brian both Black and White and Inflammable Material on mp3. BTW, if the RIAA is reading this I want them to know that these are personal copies from licensed source material and were sent to my brother for sampling purposes only so that he may go out and buy the albums himself if he so desires. :>)
Later, when I was in college, I would first hear Joy Division, the Pixies, and Sonic Youth from my brother’s collection. If I only knew at the time the impact that these three bands would have on me later in life, I might have started speaking in tongues. But like everything else, I had to grow into them because they were really much deeper in substance than what I was listening to then. I like to think I’m the one who tipped Brian off to Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing's Shocking, which I think he thought was a little too intense at first. We both needed to connect with our ur-punker to really start understanding the heavy guitar sounds of the 90s.
One of those summers we would see Tool at Lollpalooza in Des Moines together. They were on the second stage, and man did it make an impression on me. I’ll never forget a head-shaven, shirtless, and ripped Maynard James Keenan jerking epileptically back and forth for an intense 45 minute set, only to be followed by some perverted puppet show.
Primus also played at that concert and I vividly remember Brian kept yelling between songs “Play Tommy the Cat!” I don’t think they ever played it but it was damned funny anyway. Around that time we also saw Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins open for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. All three of these bands have since betrayed me, but at the time they were awesome and hadn’t yet gotten so full of themselves.
And the story continues today. With the advent of the iPod and the internet our mutual exploration of great music has only accelerated. Brian’s recent recommendations have including the following amazing bands: Arcade Fire, Spiderbait, Death From Above 1979, The Futureheads, Deerhoof, Fiery Furnaces, Red Red Meat, Can, Le Tigre, TV on the Radio, Smoosh and The Kills. For my part, I hope I introduced him to The Shins, The Dandy Warhols, The Libertines and Elliott Smith.
BTW, if you haven’t heard of any of these bands, don’t fret. It’s just the evil music establishment suppressing the unique talents of the world with their mass-produced pap. If not for my brother, I would never have heard of them either, and all I can say is, thank God for him, because otherwise I would have lost all faith in music today. Good music lives on as always, still underground, but worth the trouble of looking for it, along the path my brother first led me down oh those many years ago.
After listening to this craptacular assembly of primordial hair metal for a week, I decided in the end it would be best to melt the album in the burn barrel in our back yard. Then to further show my distaste I hung it on a nail on my wall. I wanted to prove to my brother that I understood now what he had said in a moment with his eyes – that you know good music when you hear it, and that most people don’t even try to differentiate.
It was that Christmas that he bought me The Who Live at Leeds double album. I remember holding the yellow foldout in my hands and thinking wow this must be some heavy shit. I ran upstairs to listen to it. I heard “My Generation” for the first time and felt a connection with the music even though I knew I was too young to understand what Roger Daltrey was really singing about. When I tried to tell my friends at school that I was listening to The Who they just didn’t get it. Funny enough Brian recently sent me the album in mp3 format and it instantaneously found its way to my iPod – “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me…” I still love that stuff.
Thus began the journey. The next moment musicaux I remember was when he brought home Pink Floyd The Wall one day. There is one part on that album where there is this intense sound of bottles breaking against a wall. Brian took special care to point it out to me and I was instantly fascinated by the intersection of music and performance art. We listened to that album pretty much non-stop for the next two months.
Then one morning I was watching The Today Show and Gene Shalit had the nerve to try and review it. He must have been under pressure as it had become a sensation and he probably wanted to appear hip enough to have heard of it. At any rate he panned it for just some of the most retarded reasons ever, including the use of ambient sounds between tracks, saying they were distracting and often too violent. Thanks to my brother’s tutelage, I saw through this whole charade at the tender age of 10. The album has since gone platinum 23 times over.
But these two examples are more mainstream than most of what my brother listened to as we were growing up. He listened to not just Frank Zappa, but Captain Beefheart, whose was the much, much weirder one, and of course Little Feat. He had a whole bunch of punk music, including the Plasmatics, Stiff Little Fingers, and this awesome album called Black and White by the Stranglers.
Actually Stiff Little Fingers’ “State of Emergency” off of Inflammable Material had a guitar riff which haunted me for 25 years until I figured out who it was again after hearing one of their songs in the movie High Fidelity. I recently returned the iPod favor by sending Brian both Black and White and Inflammable Material on mp3. BTW, if the RIAA is reading this I want them to know that these are personal copies from licensed source material and were sent to my brother for sampling purposes only so that he may go out and buy the albums himself if he so desires. :>)
Later, when I was in college, I would first hear Joy Division, the Pixies, and Sonic Youth from my brother’s collection. If I only knew at the time the impact that these three bands would have on me later in life, I might have started speaking in tongues. But like everything else, I had to grow into them because they were really much deeper in substance than what I was listening to then. I like to think I’m the one who tipped Brian off to Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing's Shocking, which I think he thought was a little too intense at first. We both needed to connect with our ur-punker to really start understanding the heavy guitar sounds of the 90s.
One of those summers we would see Tool at Lollpalooza in Des Moines together. They were on the second stage, and man did it make an impression on me. I’ll never forget a head-shaven, shirtless, and ripped Maynard James Keenan jerking epileptically back and forth for an intense 45 minute set, only to be followed by some perverted puppet show.
Primus also played at that concert and I vividly remember Brian kept yelling between songs “Play Tommy the Cat!” I don’t think they ever played it but it was damned funny anyway. Around that time we also saw Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins open for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. All three of these bands have since betrayed me, but at the time they were awesome and hadn’t yet gotten so full of themselves.
And the story continues today. With the advent of the iPod and the internet our mutual exploration of great music has only accelerated. Brian’s recent recommendations have including the following amazing bands: Arcade Fire, Spiderbait, Death From Above 1979, The Futureheads, Deerhoof, Fiery Furnaces, Red Red Meat, Can, Le Tigre, TV on the Radio, Smoosh and The Kills. For my part, I hope I introduced him to The Shins, The Dandy Warhols, The Libertines and Elliott Smith.
BTW, if you haven’t heard of any of these bands, don’t fret. It’s just the evil music establishment suppressing the unique talents of the world with their mass-produced pap. If not for my brother, I would never have heard of them either, and all I can say is, thank God for him, because otherwise I would have lost all faith in music today. Good music lives on as always, still underground, but worth the trouble of looking for it, along the path my brother first led me down oh those many years ago.
Friday, June 10, 2005
A Baking Powder?
Kenny Rogers made the song “Oh Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town” a popular hit in 1968. It is a wonderful song for many reasons - it has a nice melody, a solid verse-chorus-verse structure, and suits Roger’s voice well. This is back when country was still country instead of the pop crap it is today. What I love about it most though is the tuneful melody that belies the downright shocking subject matter of the song.
The song is about a Vietnam War vet “whose legs are bent and paralyzed” and whose wife has taken to running around on him. He isn’t just some down-on-his-luck fella who is unlucky in love, he’s actually physically incapable of satisfying his wife.
The wife, for her part, may be one of the most rotten people ever portrayed in a country song, for she seems to feel no remorse for her actions. She “paints up her lips, rolls and curls her tinted hair”, and “contemplates going out somewhere”. Poor guy, we think, isn’t love a bitch? But in the final verse we get this:
She's leaving now cause
I just heard the slamming of the door
The way I know I've heard it
Some 100 times before
And if I could move I'd get my gun
And put her in the ground
Oh Ruby
Don't take your love to town
Wait a minute! What was that last part? Right before the chorus? Jesus Christ! I thought I was listening to a little ditty about a lovelorn broken-down man, but this is turning into a scene from Full Metal Jacket.
I love it though, because it doesn’t try to candy-coat reality. This is what art should do, convey genuine emotion within the realm of the accepted forms of expression. Kind of like putting an aspirin into a lil’ smokey and feeding it to your dog. The fact that Kenny Rogers is singing it just blasts it off the charts in my book.
Another fine example exists with the song “Goodnight Irene”, a folk song performed by many but made famous by Leadbelly in a 1950 rendition. At first blush, it appears to be about a man who is infatuated with a young girl. When he can’t have her in the real world, he decides he can at least “get you in my dreams.”
This all seems innocuous enough, though there are some definite overtones of a Lolita complex. It’s the next stanza, however we learn that his inability to have her has led to some desperate thoughts:
Sometimes I live in the country
Sometimes I live in the town
Sometimes I have a great notion
To jump into the river and drown
This sounds like a verse written by someone with a depressive illness. Still it appears he may be merely prone to exaggeration, as many of us can be in love, and the chorus is still pretty:
Irene Goodnight, Irene Goodnight
Goodnight Irene, Goodnight Irene
I get you in my dreams.
In the third verse we find out that man is actually married, and he is advised to go home to his family instead of spending all of his time out drinking and gambling. This is already pretty dark territory for a folk song, but it’s the final verse that caps it off:
I love Irene God knows I do
Love her till the sea run dry
And if Irene turns her back on me
I’m gonna take morphine and die
Now this was a popular song, mind you. It probably sold tens of thousands of records, and yet it is about a married man, with children, whose is so infatuated with a young girl that he is suicidal, and furthermore wouldn’t mind indulging in his morphine habit to finish himself off. I don’t know about you, but the first time I actually understood the lyrics this became one of the greatest songs ever.
The last song I want to talk about deals with a subject matter lighter in tone, though still heavier that what the music implies. The song is “Do you know the way to San Jose?” written by Burt Bacharach and sung by Dionne Warwick. This is one of the happiest melodies ever - almost saccharine to the point where you can’t possibly like the song. But listen to the lyrics, and you realize she’s not just directionally challenged about her home town so much as she’s royally ragging on Los Angeles:
L.A. is a great big freeway
Put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they'll make you a star
Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass
And all the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas
Bum bum bum-bum bum bum bum-bum bum bahhhh! A little bitter here, not that I blame her. In the second verse she sings about how nice San Jose is by comparison and how she can find “piece of mind” there. Then in the third verse we get this:
Fame and fortune is a magnet
It can pull you far away from home
With a dream in your heart you're never alone
Dreams turn into dust and blow away
And there you are without a friend
You pack your car and ride away
Basically the song is saying “Fuck LA, the people are assholes, everyone thinks they’re talented but most of them suck, I’d much rather go back home where at least people know me.” If she only knew the dystopian nightmare post Silicon Valley era San Jose has become. Just kidding, San Jose.
BTW, Dionne, if you’re reading this, from San Francisco you can just take 101 South about 50 miles.
The song is about a Vietnam War vet “whose legs are bent and paralyzed” and whose wife has taken to running around on him. He isn’t just some down-on-his-luck fella who is unlucky in love, he’s actually physically incapable of satisfying his wife.
The wife, for her part, may be one of the most rotten people ever portrayed in a country song, for she seems to feel no remorse for her actions. She “paints up her lips, rolls and curls her tinted hair”, and “contemplates going out somewhere”. Poor guy, we think, isn’t love a bitch? But in the final verse we get this:
She's leaving now cause
I just heard the slamming of the door
The way I know I've heard it
Some 100 times before
And if I could move I'd get my gun
And put her in the ground
Oh Ruby
Don't take your love to town
Wait a minute! What was that last part? Right before the chorus? Jesus Christ! I thought I was listening to a little ditty about a lovelorn broken-down man, but this is turning into a scene from Full Metal Jacket.
I love it though, because it doesn’t try to candy-coat reality. This is what art should do, convey genuine emotion within the realm of the accepted forms of expression. Kind of like putting an aspirin into a lil’ smokey and feeding it to your dog. The fact that Kenny Rogers is singing it just blasts it off the charts in my book.
Another fine example exists with the song “Goodnight Irene”, a folk song performed by many but made famous by Leadbelly in a 1950 rendition. At first blush, it appears to be about a man who is infatuated with a young girl. When he can’t have her in the real world, he decides he can at least “get you in my dreams.”
This all seems innocuous enough, though there are some definite overtones of a Lolita complex. It’s the next stanza, however we learn that his inability to have her has led to some desperate thoughts:
Sometimes I live in the country
Sometimes I live in the town
Sometimes I have a great notion
To jump into the river and drown
This sounds like a verse written by someone with a depressive illness. Still it appears he may be merely prone to exaggeration, as many of us can be in love, and the chorus is still pretty:
Irene Goodnight, Irene Goodnight
Goodnight Irene, Goodnight Irene
I get you in my dreams.
In the third verse we find out that man is actually married, and he is advised to go home to his family instead of spending all of his time out drinking and gambling. This is already pretty dark territory for a folk song, but it’s the final verse that caps it off:
I love Irene God knows I do
Love her till the sea run dry
And if Irene turns her back on me
I’m gonna take morphine and die
Now this was a popular song, mind you. It probably sold tens of thousands of records, and yet it is about a married man, with children, whose is so infatuated with a young girl that he is suicidal, and furthermore wouldn’t mind indulging in his morphine habit to finish himself off. I don’t know about you, but the first time I actually understood the lyrics this became one of the greatest songs ever.
The last song I want to talk about deals with a subject matter lighter in tone, though still heavier that what the music implies. The song is “Do you know the way to San Jose?” written by Burt Bacharach and sung by Dionne Warwick. This is one of the happiest melodies ever - almost saccharine to the point where you can’t possibly like the song. But listen to the lyrics, and you realize she’s not just directionally challenged about her home town so much as she’s royally ragging on Los Angeles:
L.A. is a great big freeway
Put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they'll make you a star
Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass
And all the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas
Bum bum bum-bum bum bum bum-bum bum bahhhh! A little bitter here, not that I blame her. In the second verse she sings about how nice San Jose is by comparison and how she can find “piece of mind” there. Then in the third verse we get this:
Fame and fortune is a magnet
It can pull you far away from home
With a dream in your heart you're never alone
Dreams turn into dust and blow away
And there you are without a friend
You pack your car and ride away
Basically the song is saying “Fuck LA, the people are assholes, everyone thinks they’re talented but most of them suck, I’d much rather go back home where at least people know me.” If she only knew the dystopian nightmare post Silicon Valley era San Jose has become. Just kidding, San Jose.
BTW, Dionne, if you’re reading this, from San Francisco you can just take 101 South about 50 miles.
Sunday, June 05, 2005
Movies To Listen To
There are two flavors of movie soundtracks nowadays, those which consist of original compositions and those which are collections of popular songs picked for their relevance to the theme at hand. Actually a lot of modern films have a mixture of both, and I feel there is a lot of art in the approach to either. Music can still make or break a film for me, and I feel the person in charge of conceptualizing the music for the following films did an excellent job, often transforming the celluloid into a gesamtkunstwerk that would make Wagner proud.
Crumb – This documentary about the underground psychadelic cartoonist Robert Crumb is an amazing peek at the subconsciousness of one of counter-culture’s greatest heroes. Crumb’s nostalgic sensibilities lead to his unilateral dislike of modern music, and so director Terry Zwigoff populates the background of montage scenes showing samples of Crumb’s work with old blues and jazz music, much of it retrieved from Zwigoff’s own collection of 78s.
The most poignant of all is a simple piano rag which plays as Crumb’s “America, A History” visually tells the story of the transformation of American society from pastoral beauty to post-industrial ugliness. You wouldn’t expect a rag to sound so sad, but it perfectly outlines the sense of hopelessness felt in the face of the battering onslaught of human progress.
Shawshank Redemption - Though you could consider this a populist movie (currently ranked #2 all time by users on the Internet Movie Database – The Godfather is #1) it has always amazed me how well it holds up over time. If it’s showing on some non-premium cable channel I am compelled to watch it to the end, half-hour commercials and all. One of the reasons is the final scene where Morgan Freeman is walking up the beach to see Tim Robbins working on that old boat. It is accompanied by some of the most beautiful and uplifting music I think I’ve ever heard.
The subtitle of the Stephen King short story the movie is based on is “Hope Springs Eternal”, and this music is the perfect embodiment of that. It caps off a very memorable sequence that starts when the Freeman finally gets out of jail. He initially finds it hard in the real world, and we think he will surely meet the same fate of Brooks, the elderly ex-con who earlier in the film had hung himself. Instead, with the immortal words “Get busy living, or get busy dyin’, that’s damn right,” he decides that life is worth the struggle after all, and we are treated to one of the best movie endings ever.
As he walks up the beach, the strings of the orchestra hang as if suspended in the air, flirting with resolution but not quite getting there, much like the Adagietto movement from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. It’s the freeing of a spirit that’s been held down far too long. It sounds corny, but I can’t watch the end of this movie without having a better outlook on life afterwards.
Fargo – the haunting violin which begins and ends this Coen Brother’s masterpiece is the work of Carter Burwell, probably the best original movie music composer out there today. He has scored every one of the Coens’ film, but I think his work on Fargo is his best. The violin is almost like a funeral dirge, accompanying the images of cars rolling through the blustery snowy landscape of a Minnesota highway in winter.
We don’t understand the significance of these images quite yet, that these are police vehicles chasing down the protaganist who has had his wife kidnapped. Instead they are just beautiful images accentuated by the music that could stand on their own as an art piece. The film has some very funny parts, but this music portends the somber nature of the plot before we are introduced to a single character. Then at the end of the film it brings us back full circle, this bittersweet melody bookending a sad morality fable that could happen anywhere, not just in Minnesota where everyone seems to talk funny.
Gattaca – Now I know what you’re saying – Gattaca? You may have never seen this movie or even know who was in it, but it is another one of my favorite movie soundtracks. In it, Ethan Hawke plays Vincent, a character in a society so obsessed with genetic perfection that he is denied admittance to Gattaca (the future’s version of NASA) on account of his inferior DNA. He was “God-born”, i.e. without the aid of the genetic enhancements that would have guaranteed his success in society’s upper echelon.
Still he is determined to beat the agency at it’s own game by borrowing the identity of Jerome, a test-tube baby non-pareil played by Jude Law. Law’s character decides that being too perfect can have it’s downside, however, and it’s actually the music which accompanies his suicide at the end of the movie that always makes me cry. At the same time Vincent is blasting off into space on his first mission, Jerome incinerates himself in the chamber the two had previously used to burn away any trace of Vincent’s inferior skin cells and hair follicles.
I always get choked up watching this scene, I can’t really explain it. There is sadness for Jerome, but triumph for Vincent. The music soars with the power of the human spirit, much like in Shawshank, only this time in a minor key that lends a sobriety to the celebration. At the end we are left with Vincent’s spare monologue – a simultaneous expression of hubris and humility:
“For someone who was never meant for this world, I must confess I'm suddenly having a hard time leaving it. Of course, they say every atom in our bodies was once part of a star. Maybe I'm not leaving... maybe I'm going home.”
Crumb – This documentary about the underground psychadelic cartoonist Robert Crumb is an amazing peek at the subconsciousness of one of counter-culture’s greatest heroes. Crumb’s nostalgic sensibilities lead to his unilateral dislike of modern music, and so director Terry Zwigoff populates the background of montage scenes showing samples of Crumb’s work with old blues and jazz music, much of it retrieved from Zwigoff’s own collection of 78s.
The most poignant of all is a simple piano rag which plays as Crumb’s “America, A History” visually tells the story of the transformation of American society from pastoral beauty to post-industrial ugliness. You wouldn’t expect a rag to sound so sad, but it perfectly outlines the sense of hopelessness felt in the face of the battering onslaught of human progress.
Shawshank Redemption - Though you could consider this a populist movie (currently ranked #2 all time by users on the Internet Movie Database – The Godfather is #1) it has always amazed me how well it holds up over time. If it’s showing on some non-premium cable channel I am compelled to watch it to the end, half-hour commercials and all. One of the reasons is the final scene where Morgan Freeman is walking up the beach to see Tim Robbins working on that old boat. It is accompanied by some of the most beautiful and uplifting music I think I’ve ever heard.
The subtitle of the Stephen King short story the movie is based on is “Hope Springs Eternal”, and this music is the perfect embodiment of that. It caps off a very memorable sequence that starts when the Freeman finally gets out of jail. He initially finds it hard in the real world, and we think he will surely meet the same fate of Brooks, the elderly ex-con who earlier in the film had hung himself. Instead, with the immortal words “Get busy living, or get busy dyin’, that’s damn right,” he decides that life is worth the struggle after all, and we are treated to one of the best movie endings ever.
As he walks up the beach, the strings of the orchestra hang as if suspended in the air, flirting with resolution but not quite getting there, much like the Adagietto movement from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. It’s the freeing of a spirit that’s been held down far too long. It sounds corny, but I can’t watch the end of this movie without having a better outlook on life afterwards.
Fargo – the haunting violin which begins and ends this Coen Brother’s masterpiece is the work of Carter Burwell, probably the best original movie music composer out there today. He has scored every one of the Coens’ film, but I think his work on Fargo is his best. The violin is almost like a funeral dirge, accompanying the images of cars rolling through the blustery snowy landscape of a Minnesota highway in winter.
We don’t understand the significance of these images quite yet, that these are police vehicles chasing down the protaganist who has had his wife kidnapped. Instead they are just beautiful images accentuated by the music that could stand on their own as an art piece. The film has some very funny parts, but this music portends the somber nature of the plot before we are introduced to a single character. Then at the end of the film it brings us back full circle, this bittersweet melody bookending a sad morality fable that could happen anywhere, not just in Minnesota where everyone seems to talk funny.
Gattaca – Now I know what you’re saying – Gattaca? You may have never seen this movie or even know who was in it, but it is another one of my favorite movie soundtracks. In it, Ethan Hawke plays Vincent, a character in a society so obsessed with genetic perfection that he is denied admittance to Gattaca (the future’s version of NASA) on account of his inferior DNA. He was “God-born”, i.e. without the aid of the genetic enhancements that would have guaranteed his success in society’s upper echelon.
Still he is determined to beat the agency at it’s own game by borrowing the identity of Jerome, a test-tube baby non-pareil played by Jude Law. Law’s character decides that being too perfect can have it’s downside, however, and it’s actually the music which accompanies his suicide at the end of the movie that always makes me cry. At the same time Vincent is blasting off into space on his first mission, Jerome incinerates himself in the chamber the two had previously used to burn away any trace of Vincent’s inferior skin cells and hair follicles.
I always get choked up watching this scene, I can’t really explain it. There is sadness for Jerome, but triumph for Vincent. The music soars with the power of the human spirit, much like in Shawshank, only this time in a minor key that lends a sobriety to the celebration. At the end we are left with Vincent’s spare monologue – a simultaneous expression of hubris and humility:
“For someone who was never meant for this world, I must confess I'm suddenly having a hard time leaving it. Of course, they say every atom in our bodies was once part of a star. Maybe I'm not leaving... maybe I'm going home.”
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