The Needle and the Lens: Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock 'n' Roll to Synthwave 9781452970318, 1452970319

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THE NEEDLE AND THE LENS

Also by Nate Patrin Published by the University of Minnesota Press Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-­Hop

The Needle and the Lens POP GOES TO THE MOVIES FROM ROCK ’N’ ROLL TO SYNTHWAVE

Nate Patrin

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

Copyright 2023 by Nate Patrin All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-­1-­5179-­1324-­3 (pb) LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023019869 Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. 30

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For Charlie Stolerow, projectionist at Chicago’s State–­Lake Theatre, who ensured at least a few more generations of cinephiles in the family

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Contents

Introduction  ix Scorpio Rising, “He’s a Rebel”   1 The Graduate, “The Sounds of Silence”   10 Easy Rider, “The Pusher”   19 The Harder They Come, “Many Rivers to Cross”   29 American Graffiti, “Do You Want to Dance”   38 Saturday Night Fever, “Disco Inferno”   48 Killer of Sheep, “This Bitter Earth”   58 Apocalypse Now, “The End”   68 Repo Man, “When the Shit Hits the Fan”   80 Krush Groove, “King of Rock”

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Blue Velvet, “In Dreams”   104 Wayne’s World, “Bohemian Rhapsody”   117 Jackie Brown, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)”   132 Belly, “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)”   147 The Royal Tenenbaums, “Needle in the Hay”   161 Drive, “A Real Hero”   175 Outro: Twenty-­Four More Great Needle Drops   191 Acknowledgments  209 Notes  211 References  217

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Introduction

Let’s start with a thought exercise. Think of a movie: the first one that comes to your mind is OK, though if you want to cheat a bit and mull things over until you can come up with a film that’s definitively profound or deeply meaningful to you, that’s fine. Now turn over your memories of this film inside your head for a bit and think of the whole mise-­en-­scène, all the visual and world-­establishing elements that place you in that film’s world. Think of all the associations and feelings that go with it, perhaps even establish your vision of this movie—­whether it’s vaguely remembered or known by heart—­as a sort of holistic assemblage of set pieces and bits of dialogue and actors’ faces and moments of physical movement and plot developments and edits and camera positions. Now: how quickly did the music featured in the film become part of that mental collage? It’s impossible to speak of any universal filmgoing experience and the impressions gathered from watching a movie, but the music has to be there, right? In fact, can you even think of a film where music wasn’t an element at all? Sure, there are plenty that feature unmemorable music, or mediocre music, but with rare exceptions—­verité experiments like The Blair Witch Project (which nevertheless saw a separate soundtrack release “inspired by” a character’s unheard mixtape), or some of the more tense entries in the Alfred Hitchcock filmography like Rope or The Birds (the latter of which provides a different sort of avian musical cacophony)—­most filmmakers will refuse to sacrifice music’s potential to help steer the viewers’ emotional response to the film, or at least to provide a bit of incidental atmosphere. Even a notable example like Fritz Lang’s

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Introduction M, which doesn’t actually feature a “real” score anywhere (including, unusually enough, its title card), hinges one of its most dramatic elements of unsettling characterization on music by giving Peter Lorre’s titular child-­ killer antagonist the habit of whistling the distinctive melody from Edvard Grieg’s orchestral piece “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” When we are talking about the importance of music in film, we are talking about a medium that literally incorporated music before it was technologically possible: until movies came with sound, they came packed with sheet music for an in-­house pianist to play. So when you stop to think about your favorite movie, it’s inevitable that a certain name will emerge. Maybe it’s someone like John Williams (Jaws; Star Wars), who became one of the most revered composers of the twentieth century solely off his film scoring. It could be the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein (South Pacific; The Sound of Music), whose work for popular Broadway musicals consistently lent itself to even more popular film adaptations. Maybe Quincy Jones (In the Heat of the Night; The Italian Job) came to mind—­someone who was embedded in every facet of popular music from performing to production to composition, and happened to write several memorable film scores on top of all that. Or maybe you thought (like I did when I envisioned this book) about a song that was never intentionally envisioned as a piece of a film soundtrack at all. Colloquially, these songs are referred to as “needle drops”: songs that place the film in a world that’s not hermetically sealed off from the intrusions of other pop culture media, but more in keeping with our own. Sometime between the emergence of youth-­marketed hot rod / motorcycle gang / juvenile delinquent pictures in the late ’50s and the emergence of the countercultural experiments of New Hollywood in the late ’60s, directors started to use already-­familiar recordings of pop songs to situate their films and their characters in ways that could feel more tangibly real: if Bill Haley’s “(We’re Gonna) Rock around the Clock” or Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” were part of our lived experience, they could be part of Blackboard Jungle or Dr. Strangelove, too. In this sense, the needle drop is a strange yet vital component of narrative film—­an often direct and instantly memorable way for a director to steer the tone of the film by incorporating a crucial element that they had no hand in creating. It’s an element in film that hinges on association:

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Introduction either you know the song the film’s using on the soundtrack, and that informs your impressions of the goings-­on in the actual film; or you don’t know the song but the film’s context is giving it a permanent, secondary context that will linger in your mind the next time you hear it. It seems simple and straightforward enough on the surface: here’s a love scene or a car chase or a fight, maybe put a slow jam or a drum ’n’ bass instrumental or a rowdy blues-­rock number on the soundtrack to heighten the impact. But it’s proven to be such an inseparable element of so many approaches to filmmaking that it necessitated the creation of a new movie-­ biz profession—­the music supervisor—­to keep all the legal and financial and aesthetic pieces in place. That just reinforces how the needle drop can be an extremely powerful way for a film to signify so many important elements: they’ve been used to place a period piece in a clear but unique historical context, show off a particular director’s auteurist style in the same way that set design or costuming does, add further depth to a character’s personality traits, or bring an additional heightened sense of emotional resonance that can’t be captured by cameras and performances and environs alone. Naturally, this can cause a lot of problems, as a bad needle drop can take you right out of an otherwise engaging movie. Maybe it’s an unintentional but nagging anachronism in an otherwise historically immersive period piece (like the 1981 Kool & the Gang single “Get Down on It” being played during a party in 1977-­set The Nice Guys). Even worse, it could signify the fact that the film is a period piece by using a string of obvious hits, context be damned (like Captain Marvel’s relentless hey, remember the ’90s?! elbow-­nudges). Or it’s a little too obvious and on the nose, like any time a film set during the Vietnam War uses Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” in the hopes that John Fogerty’s actual insight will rub off onto an otherwise pro forma scene. Sometimes it’s just already been done before and to more memorable effect, and all this later film’s piggybacking needle drop does is remind viewers of that earlier, likely better film (see: any movie released after its iconic use at the conclusion of Fight Club that sets a key scene to the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”). In rare instances, the movie can actually feel like much of its characterization and purpose is to be known for its needle drops—­think Edgar Wright’s charmingly geeky yet slightly over-­meta 2017 feature Baby Driver, in which Ansel

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Introduction Elgort’s getaway driver protagonist is basically the music supervisor of his own life, always on the lookout for the coolest and most exciting songs to accompany his own exploits. Still, who can blame him? When a carefully deployed, perfectly recontextualized pop song hits in just the right way, it can create moments so indelible and arrestingly powerful that they completely rewire both how we listen to music and engage with filmic narrative. Sometimes it can be as simple as a strong juxtaposition creating a symbiotic relationship. Mike Oldfield might not have written “Tubular Bells” with horror in mind, and William Peter Blatty might not have had prog rock on the brain when he wrote the original novel and, later, the screenplay adaptation of The Exorcist. But William Friedkin had the notion to capture something both childlike and suspenseful to score the film, which led him to discover “Tubular Bells” in the Warner Brothers library. His decision to use an odd portion of an otherwise commercially questionable prog-rock opus as a motif both amplified the impact of the film’s early dread-stoking moments and turned a slow-selling LP on a nascent label called Virgin Records into a multi-million-dollar hit. Such symbiosis can go even deeper, becoming an integral part of the auteurist vision. Take Martin Scorsese: for all the distinct themes and innovations and perspectives he’s introduced into the language of mainstream American film, from his unconventional usage of narration and framing devices to the powerfully intuitive rapport he has with his editor Thelma Schoonmaker to his deeply thought-­out examinations of spirituality and guilt and familial ties, it’s the way he toys with the rhythms and messages and histories and personal associations with pop songs that stands out as one of his key contributions to the language of the movies. His work is so singular, in fact, that it’s kind of difficult to really write about in the context of its outside impact on music—­think about what he did in incorporating Derek & the Dominos’ “Layla” into GoodFellas or the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” in Mean Streets, and it’s hard not to just get immersed in the world of Scorsese’s storytelling, rather than being able to speculate about how those songs themselves continued to exist in our own. The sixteen movies I write about in this book—­and the sixteen songs they lifted, or appropriated, or revitalized—­operate just a bit differently than that. The filmic conversation with the music they use is a bit more two-­way, whether they’re catalysts for broader trends in needle drop usage

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Introduction (Scorpio Rising, The Graduate, Easy Rider), music-­centric films that wind up using preexisting songs to shape new versions of history (The Harder They Come, Saturday Night Fever, Krush Groove), engagements with pop music as avenues to heighten a certain sense of stylization and aesthetic distinctiveness (Belly, The Royal Tenenbaums, Drive), or films that use their musical elements and connections to inspire broader conversations and even reckonings with the way we engage with music in our day-­to-­day lives (Killer of Sheep, Repo Man, Wayne’s World). Keeping in mind that some of the movies’ greatest soundtrack moments and engagements with popular music were brought about as purpose-­built pieces intended first and foremost for films—­think Public Enemy’s stunning “Fight the Power” exploding across the titles to Spike Lee’s 1989 masterpiece of a statement film Do the Right Thing, or the folk numbers written for the Coen Brothers’ character study in thwarted ambition Inside Llewyn Davis, or any number of tailor-­made soundtracks from Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly to Kendrick Lamar’s Black Panther—­there’s plenty worth studying in that context some other time. But it’s the songs that films found a new purpose for, a secondary usage that became a primary statement, that we’ll be looking at—­and listening to—­with all the transformative power they can hold.

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Scorpio Rising, “He’s a Rebel” SCORPIO RISING (1964, DIRECTED BY KENNETH ANGER) THE CRYSTALS, “HE’S A REBEL” (1962, PHILLES)

For sixteen minutes, we watch a man as he begins a transformation process. He reassembles and customizes a motorcycle, reads comic books in a teenage shrine to James Dean–­inflected rebel culture, and dresses himself in a biker outfit that’s simultaneously utilitarian, countercultural, ritualistic, and fetishistic. If there is a single thread tying all these ideas together, it’s a sense of mortality—­almost a celebration of it, strewn with skulls and photos of dead idols and newspaper clippings about fatal motorcycle wrecks. This is paired with the sense that the inevitability of death itself is the motivation to live outside anybody else’s rules. And all the while, there is no dialogue—­no sound at all, for that matter—­aside from a soundtrack of late 1950s and early 1960s pop songs that appear to comment on (or serve as a counterpoint to) both the internal and external depictions of the man’s psyche. Then “Scorpio” finally emerges. We see him leave his apartment, interspersed with footage from a blue-­tinted black-­and-­white Bible film featuring Jesus with his disciples in tow. (At one point, during a scene where Jesus restores sight to a blind man, there are split-­second cut-­ins of nude bodies, including a man holding his cock through the unzipped fly of his jeans.) The juxtaposition is, at least to modern eyes, both blasphemous and celebratory—­a prototype of the “Jesus freak” movement that would emerge within ten years to posit Christ as savior of a lost counterculture, an antiauthoritarian figure who embodied peace and love. But in 1964, there’s no “Spirit in the Sky” or “Jesus Is Just Alright” to make this concept clear. Instead, as the Jesus film footage is juxtaposed with Scorpio’s

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Scorpio Rising rituals—­walking down a dark Brooklyn street; sticking a phony traffic ticket on a presumed rival’s motorcycle; finally arriving at a cartoonishly demonic costume party—­there’s a Phil Spector–­produced choir making plainspoken what future Kenneth Anger collaborator Mick Jagger would declare with looming unease: every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints. Rebellion is religion, and we’re on our way to church.

The notoriety of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising cast a long shadow over its reputation as an actual artwork. The restrictive motion picture censorship edict known as the Hays Code was disintegrating throughout the 1960s, with the topless female nudity in Sidney Lumet’s 1964 The Pawnbroker marking a turning point in acceptable depictions of adult themes. But even within striking distance of 1968’s establishment of the MPAA film rating system, Scorpio Rising proved scandalous, often more by association than explicitly. In a wild collision of censorious backlash and revanchist fascism, its earliest screenings were protested as “obscenity” largely because, according to Anger, members of the American Nazi Party saw the film’s biker gang hanging swastikas and appropriating Nazi iconography in their fashion and anonymously tipped off the Los Angeles vice squad.1 (The California Supreme Court would later rule in Anger’s favor.) It’s one of those films that, through the eyes of a ’60s moralist, seems filthier than it is; it’s more suggestively erotic than shockingly pornographic, especially by the standards of New Hollywood films released a mere decade later. Without its erotically charged imagery, it might be difficult for a twenty-­ first-­century viewer to fully embrace the pre-­Beatles selection of R&B, rockabilly, girl groups, trad-­pop crooning, and surf rock in Scorpio Rising as being as dangerous or subversive as it originally felt. Regardless of whichever delinquency-­anxious propaganda got thrown its way when it was released, this era of music is still given short shrift by contemporary mainstream pop culture as a means of rebellious energy. One of the great gags in the 2007 music biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is a scene where Cox and his band send a crowd of 1953 high schoolers into a violent, orgiastic frenzy from a completely anodyne G-­rated love song about hand-­ holding. At one point, a priest condemns this feather-­light song as “the devil’s music” before promptly being punched out by a teenager.

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“He’s a Rebel” That intrinsic joke—­the absurdity of such innocuous music causing a moral panic and an outbreak of sex and violence—­could stir up laughter far earlier than that. A February 21, 1975, New York Times reappraisal of Scorpio Rising called the soundtrack “hilarious,” though the air of nostalgia seems to have permeated the subcultural art house atmosphere to the point where its aesthetic datedness took on an entirely different cast. “Oddly enough, the references to the nineteen-­fifties, which seemed dated and rather ponderous in 1965, don’t make the film appear old-­fashioned now,” stated Nora Sayre, who may have theoretically found entertainment a couple weeks later at an early CBGB performance of the neo-­delinquent, leather jacket–­clad Scorpioids who called themselves Ramones.2 Anger might not have set out to make a carbon-­dated time capsule of Eisenhower/Kennedy youth culture, but by the time music journalists like Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus came around to give that era’s music deeper insight and respect, psychedelia and primordial heavy metal had rendered it passé to a nearly permanent extent. Scorpio Rising preserving some of that original ambient danger with its imagery earns it as much power in the reclamation of pre–­British Invasion postwar rock and pop as it does in the establishment of a transgressive language of underground film. But whether a contemporary audience for Scorpio Rising is shocked by its content or not, the film’s reputation has shifted for the better, censorious declarations of its lurid focus on sex and death receding in favor of its ability to capture (and mutate) a particular slice of counterculture in transition. In a more straightforward way, Scorpio Rising is the first film to really embody the music video as we know it, allowing each song an opportunity to both give Anger’s imagery a particular narrative charge, and receive its own iconographic associations from that imagery in turn. Anger’s trick of eliminating dialogue entirely—­a stylistic touch born out of necessity, as he got his start working with a 16 mm Ciné-­Kodak home movie camera without sound—­put more emphasis on the image itself, with the pop soundtrack of Scorpio Rising filling in the blanks when it came to characterization and narrative. With music as the only audio in the film, it constructs an abstracted but perfectly understandable and logical narrative of someone who constructs his own image—­both literally in the form of his motorcycle, and figuratively in the cultural icons that inform his manner of dress.

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Scorpio Rising So what was the pull of “He’s a Rebel” in particular that Scorpio Rising found itself amplifying? Anger has pinpointed the astrological sign of Scorpio as one that controls both the sexual and the mechanical.3 And if any pop music of the ’60s was mechanically engineered to sell sex—­ relatively chaste in words (though maybe not in performance) as it might have been early in the decade—­it was that colossal edifice of orchestral intensity that Phil Spector concocted for his renowned Wall of Sound approach. Before being eclipsed in the mid-­’60s by Berry Gordy’s simultaneously more ornate and more from-­the-­gut string of Motown hits—­one of which, Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave,” immediately precedes “He’s a Rebel” in Scorpio Rising—­Spector and his Philles Records label had one of popular culture’s firmest grasps on what teenage America would build itself from and transform into. Spector was only a couple years removed from being a teenager himself when he produced and issued the Crystals’ “He’s a Rebel”; when it peaked at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November ’62, he was still about a month away from turning twenty-­two. (Spector’s birthday being the day after Christmas makes using “He’s a Rebel” as a soundtrack to Jesus film footage a minor but amusing juxtaposition.) And the following February, when Philles released a full-­length Crystals LP with “He’s a Rebel” as the title cut, the album was issued with a sleeve featuring an illustration of a grinning biker in leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, perched on a tricked-­out motorcycle which he straddles to crotch-­pinching effect. The lyrics didn’t mention what kind of rebel he was, but the LP cover filled in the blanks before Anger could. So we have an archetype. How, then, does Anger mess with it? Anger had developed a fascination with the teachings of occult icon Aleister Crowley, building on a keen sense of mutable iconography and the belief in the power to conjure transformational states in the form of “magick.” (Pre-­ cinema still-­image projectors, the precursors to twentieth-­century slide projectors, were called magic lanterns—­Anger just transmuted that power to moving pictures, several of which were part of what is widely called his Magick Lantern Cycle.) The outlaw biker deconstructed in Scorpio Rising resonated as a foil to the post-­WWII order of straight-­world culture that stifled three generations of disaffected outsiders in the ’60s—­shell-­shocked GIs, the Cold War–­soured beatniks of the Silent Generation, and the young

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“He’s a Rebel” boomers searching for something different and cool to break from the conformity expected of them since childhood. Anger just took that resonance and added a new frisson of queer desire, fascist flirtation, and eventual self-­destruction. The Brooklyn bikers Anger filmed weren’t in on the trick. The moments where the film feels like a documentary are legit, and nothing—­ not the pants-­off, condiment-­smearing initiation sequence, nor the actual fatal motorcycle race accident in the film’s waning minutes—­is staged. Rather than specifically directing their actions, Anger shot around them in ways that downplayed their reality—­straight men with mostly off-­screen girlfriends—­and recontextualized their existence as something far more sensual than aggressive, where violence and even death itself feel more romantic than brutal. A straightforward documentary’s soundtrack depicting these bikers might have gravitated toward the sounds of toughness and machismo—­the riotous guitar distortion of Link Wray, maybe, or raucous foundational rock hits by Bo Diddley or Chuck Berry. But in nearly every case of imagery/soundtrack juxtaposition that drives the film, especially “He’s a Rebel,” the leather armor of masculine toughness is similarly undercut by the sound of pop music that, in its expressions of longing and love, projects as distinctly feminine and often liminally queer. In some ways, it was largely a matter of timing—­with the sole exception of Ray Charles’s 1961 single “Hit the Road Jack,” the entirety of the film’s soundtrack hinges on Top 10 hits of 1962 and 1963, the interzone between the waning influence of early rock and the boom of the British Invasion where girl groups and teen idols ruled the day—­largely thanks to the purchasing power of young women. “He’s a Rebel” resonates the most in Scorpio Rising because it’s all about being attracted not merely to rebellion itself but to the man who is mistaken for a rebel—­especially if the rebellion is, per Marlon Brando’s famous The Wild One quote, an intangible and open-­ended one steeped in existential aimlessness (“What are you rebelling against?” “Whadda you got?”). Sometimes that perceived rebel is a prophet like Jesus, sometimes it’s an authoritarian like Hitler, sometimes it’s just a man in tight pants with no real plan to do anything but eventually die like the rest of us. “Why is he always the one / To try the things they’ve never done?” ask the Crystals, before they sing the hook that reveals the “rebel” is a label foisted on him

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Scorpio Rising from a larger, more conformist crowd: “He’s always good to me / Always treats me tenderly / ’Cause he’s not a rebel, no, no, no / He’s not a rebel, no, no, no, to me.” He’s not an object of danger, but of desire. And to pile on further the irony of perception, illusion, and misdirection that this pairing of song and image creates, the Crystals of “He’s a Rebel” weren’t actually the Crystals. Gene Pitney had written the song specifically with them in mind, aiming to create something with the string-­laden verve of their earlier single “Uptown,” but Spector’s position as the head of Liberty Records’ West Coast A&R would lead to a series of conflicts and claim-­ jumps that complicated the whole situation. After hearing Pitney’s demo, Spector was so convinced that the song would be a hit that he quit his A&R gig to focus full-­time on production and running Philles Records. Snuff Garrett, Liberty staff producer and a young tastemaker in his own right, undercut Spector by giving “He’s a Rebel” to Vikki Carr. That led Spector to rush-­record his own version—­one he was so impatient to get to the airwaves that he couldn’t even wait to fly in the Crystals from New York. Instead, he brought the Blossoms into the studio to record it, then released it credited to the Crystals anyways. It hit #1. Carr’s version stalled at #115. Blossoms lead singer Darlene Love expected it to lead to bigger things, but Spector pulled the same faux-­Crystals billing stunt with “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” and only her breakout performance on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector highlight “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” kept her from near anonymity during her years working with Spector. The funny thing is that “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” was kept alive in the public consciousness well past the 1960s for several reasons, one of the most significant being its placement on the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s classic 1990 gangster film GoodFellas. And it was Scorpio Rising that convinced a young Scorsese to turn to pop songs as a crucial ingredient in his own films, a way to ingrain part of his own personality and experience into his work. As collected in the interview anthology book Scorsese on Scorsese, the director recalls seeing Anger’s film in 1969 and being shocked less by the “Hell’s Angels stuff” than the use of music: “This was music I knew, and we had always been told by our professors at NYU that we couldn’t use it in student films because of copyright.”4 (Anger had spent $12,000 in 1964 clearing the rights to the songs, which was likely far beyond any film school student’s budget.)5 “Now here was Kenneth Anger’s film in and out of the courts on obscenity charges, but nobody seemed to

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“He’s a Rebel” be complaining that he’d used all those incredible tracks by Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, and the Rebels. That gave me the idea to use whatever music I really needed.” Funny enough, the presence of “He’s a Rebel” likely made Scorsese misremember one of the bands: Duane Eddy and the Rebels were major contemporaries of the bands on the Scorpio Rising soundtrack, but they didn’t appear on it. Between detailing a conceptual foundation for music videos and opening the door for Scorsese and his contemporaries to turn to licensing pop music as a part of their films’ mise-­en-­scène, Scorpio Rising lingers in both film and music history as a lodestone that never lost its transgressive thrill with time. Sometimes the thrill was adapted to someone else’s ends: Anger recalls discovering that the Sex Pistols had screened Scorpio Rising as a backdrop to their concerts, cutting out the soundtrack and playing their own music, which changed the tone of the film and shifted the balance from queer desire to pure id-­driven chaos. (“I got to know them a bit later on and I didn’t object,” Anger told website The Quietus. “There was no point, because they already did it!”)6 Some homages treated its source material more mutably. New wave superstar Adam Ant, albeit in his mid-­’80s decline years, paid homage to the film with a song of the same name on his 1985 ’50s throwback Vive Le Rock (“Four young men, greasy hair / Don’t know zip / Leather jackets, big packets / Into it, into it”). And that romanticized danger seeped into later, directly referential songs of the same title by electronic band Death in Vegas and indie rockers the Mountain Goats & John Vanderslice. And Matthew Dear’s 2012 indie-­dance single “Her Fantasy” received a video treatment that directly referenced the erotic surrealism and visual abstractions in Scorpio Rising, albeit owing significantly less to its biker-­culture origins and more to Anger’s ineffable sense of the occult. As someone more in tune with the vulgar and popular B movie trash aesthetic than the cloistered world of ’60s avant-­garde, Anger’s own post–­ Scorpio Rising career was also tangled up in the strange machinations of rock ’n’ roll. His fascination with youth culture and the eroticism of machinery saw a brief reprise with 1965’s Kustom Kar Kommandos, a project that aimed do for hot rod culture what its predecessor did for bikers. Unfortunately, it was a sequel in miniature: all Anger could release when he ran out of money was essentially a three-­minute proto–­music video for the Paris Sisters’ version of Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” set to footage of

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Scorpio Rising a young man inspecting, cleaning, and driving a car that the camera shot like ethereal pornography. His next project, Lucifer Rising, was initially deeply tied to the music and lead performance of a young man named Bobby Beausoleil. The two got along well enough until the shoot started to drag on and they got on each other’s nerves, with their clashing personalities and artistic frustrations proving too much for either party. When Beausoleil finally moved out of the house where he’d been staying with Anger in the fall of 1967, Anger used the opportunity to claim that Lucifer Rising had been sabotaged by Beausoleil taking Anger’s equipment and footage with him, supposedly burying it in the desert. Beausoleil maintained that this was a ploy on Anger’s part to avoid revealing to his creditors that he hadn’t done enough work on the film and spent all his money on living and recreational expenses. Anger briefly considered this the end of his film career, going so far as to announce its dead-­at-­twenty obituary in the Village Voice. But when he traveled to London in 1968 in search of financiers, he made friends with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, with Anger envisioning Jagger for the title role in a revamped Lucifer Rising. Some leftover Lucifer Rising footage would be repurposed to create a new film, 1969’s Invocation of My Demon Brother, that featured both appearances from members of the Stones and a Jagger-­composed piece of noisy, abstract, unnerving (and somewhat annoying) Moog synthesizer music as the score. The perception of biker culture would change drastically from its Scorpio Rising romanticism by the end of the decade: Hunter S. Thompson’s 1967 book Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs recalls a group of them being furious at Scorpio Rising, finding no connection to “all this crap about us being queers,” and the wild-­haired, distinctively unpretty (and super-­hetero) reputation of the outlaw biker took full precedence in the public imagination by the time they rampaged at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in December ’69. It was Altamont and the Rolling Stones’ role in the disaster that would eventually cause Jagger to distance himself from Anger—­though contrary to popular belief, it was “Under My Thumb” that the Stones were performing when the Angels killed concertgoer Meredith Hunter, not “Sympathy for the Devil,” the closest Jagger would ever get to depicting Lucifer.

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“He’s a Rebel” The tormented production of Lucifer Rising might have proven the documentarian / licensed-­music approach of Scorpio Rising to be the better option, and working with rock stars seemed to become the big hitch keeping Anger’s project from reaching fruition. Anger attempted to recast Jagger’s brother Chris as Lucifer, then fired him, leaving him in a cameo role. Marianne Faithfull, the iconic pop singer and onetime girlfriend to Mick, was more successfully cast as the goddess Lilith, though by the time the shoot was complete her career was taking a tragic downturn thanks to a drug-­damaged decline (from which she recovered only decades later). And when a soundtrack Anger commissioned from fellow Aleister Crowley enthusiast Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin fell through after years of stop-­start effort, Beausoleil wrote Anger attempting to make up for past grudges and suggesting his own services once again to complete the score. It was finally completed from prison, where Beausoleil was serving a life sentence for killing fellow Manson Family associate Gary Hinman. After all this, there’s one last piece of influence that Anger had on the music world. He earned another kind of notoriety as an author, particularly after publishing his Hollywood Babylon books, detailing (and often fabricating) the sordid lives, shocking scandals, and morbid demises of film stars. Rockers noticed this, too, and delivered a remarkable twofer in 1978: Jersey punks the Misfits were inspired to write a song of the same title (“Flesh ancient monster design / Unlit pornographic sign / Where did they come from tonight? / Who came along for the ride?”), while UK power pop star Nick Lowe turned the book’s claims of Marie Prevost’s postmortem consumption by dachshund into the dark-­humored “Marie Provost” (the chorus: “She was a winner / That became the doggie’s dinner”). It was the kind of sensationalist stuff that, in a modern incarnation, could easily feature a prominent place for Spector and his 2003 murder of actress Lana Clarkson. Not that pop Svengalis were much substitute for the glamour of Anger’s beloved and/or loathed Old Hollywood. Interviewing Anger for Los Angeles art zine wet in 1980, Ann Bardach asked him if he thought “rock stars have replaced the old Hollywood stars?” Anger’s response: “In the sense that history repeats itself as farce.”7

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The Graduate, “The Sounds of Silence” THE GRADUATE (1967, DIRECTED BY MIKE NICHOLS) SIMON & GARFUNKEL, “THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE” (1965, COLUMBIA)

From the first moment we see Benjamin Braddock, staring into space from his seat on an airplane returning home to California from his time earning a college degree on the East Coast, it’s clear there’s something gnawing at him. That blankness is still present as we see him walking through the airport, though his walk abruptly and invisibly transitions to a standstill as the moving sidewalk at LAX takes up all the work of forward momentum for him. He occasionally glances around, taking in surroundings that may be familiar to him but appear clinical to us, endlessly scrolling white tiles serving as the background to his impassive journey. We get glimpses of other arrivals walking past him, using the people mover to hasten their pace, but Ben just lingers at the right edge of the frame, constantly moving leftward even as he stands still, an inversion of the traditional Western visual language of depicting forward progress as a left-­to-­right motion. The empty space in front of him is a practical bit of framing—­the credits of The Graduate at the left side of the frame are separate from his presence, without overlapping him—­but it also gives him the appearance of a finished product on an assembly line waiting for someone to come by to send him out into the world. Nobody does. When the camera finally lets him ride the people mover off-­screen, we cut to a shot of his luggage, also on a conveyor belt. This is where the credit “songs by paul simon sung by simon and garfunkel” first appears. And the song that scores this sequence, “The Sounds of Silence,” will turn out to be a leitmotif. In the opening credits, it’s a mere hint of what level of alienation, ennui, and aimlessness will eventually drive Ben to rebelliously

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“The Sounds of Silence” upend the future his family and their associates believe he is ordained to succeed in. In a deliberate clash between the diegetic sounds that echo through the airport, it jockeys for attention with the constantly running prerecorded people mover and baggage claim instructions that provide the only other dialogue in the credit sequence. “But my words like silent raindrops fell / Please do not leave your car unattended.” The musical juxtaposition makes the whole scenario feel like a tug of war between knowing your proper place and sinking into existential detachment, where even a luggage-­tag reminder (“do they match?”) comes across like an omen of clashing personalities. When the credits and the song conclude, Ben is home, seated in front of an aquarium, looking no less faraway than he did on the airplane. The second time we hear “The Sounds of Silence” in the film is roughly at the thirty-­eight-­minute mark, and directly after the scene where Ben and Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father’s law partner, finally commit to a sexual affair. This time, it soundtracks a montage, one that cuts between Ben literally drifting aimlessly in his parents’ swimming pool and the similar aimlessness in his now-­routine subsequent encounters with Mrs. Robinson. This affair will also become its own form of predictable, dead-­end routine—­another example of Ben being used for his youthfulness to stave off the aging ennui of his elders. And as Ben’s outward blankness is directly countered once again by the song’s emotional tumult, it’s hinted that the outward appearance of accepting this aimlessness as his fate hides that same kind of tumult beneath the placid surface. After “The Sounds of Silence” soundtracks Ben both rigidly following the structures around him and then deliberately breaking them—­only to find a new structure keeping him cloistered—­other preexisting Simon & Garfunkel songs are introduced to the soundtrack as additional motifs. “April Come She Will” appears immediately after the second “Sounds of Silence” needle drop, a continuation of the ennui theme that compares the arc of a relationship to the fleeting warmth of spring and summer receding into a cold autumn. After an intentionally disastrous date night with the Robinsons’ daughter Elaine, whom Mrs. Robinson discourages Ben from seeing (despite the Braddocks’ insistence), the diegetic appearance of “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine” blaring from a neighboring group of hippies at a drive-­in restaurant only agitates him further—­he’s clearly not as carefree as them, and the song’s upbeat, consumerism-­spoofing snark is

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The Gr aduate somebody else’s soundtrack, not his. “Scarborough Fair / Canticle” rounds out the recontextualizations: when we first hear it, Elaine has just realized that Ben has been having sex with her mother, and he’s now shut out from the both of them, having trapped himself in an even more unworkable situation. Still, he pursues Elaine—­“she once was a true love of mine.” Ben finally concludes that there’s only one real outlet of escape. It’s Elaine that he grows to love, finding someone with a similar prefab readymade tomorrow that they can break free from together. After throwing the Robinsons’ marriage into disorder with his affair, he escalates the situation further by provoking, then helping Elaine flee her own wedding. But this only guarantees that the two of them are left detached from their parents’ ordained fate and in anxious search of their own, the happiness of liberation giving way to the anxiety of the great wide open. Even the bus they hop on in cathartic glee leaves its destination unknown to the viewer, and unimportant to its two new passengers. The two young escapees appear triumphant at first, like they just pulled off a daring bank heist. Then that glee starts to fade, ostensibly under the implied judgment of the other passengers, most of whom are an entire generation older than them. But since “The Sounds of Silence” has been previously cued up as an example of an internal turmoil masked by outward reactions, it becomes clear that the ambivalence on the faces of Ben and Elaine aren’t reactions to being looked at, but an emotional interior life that the two of them have to reconcile. And something about the way that last chord hits makes it feel like that reconciliation will be a long, difficult process.

The Graduate was a massive sensation, an early salvo in a wave of films—­ along with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde—­that took advantage of a convergence of revolutionary changes. The moral censorship of the Hays Code was crumbling fast, freeing filmmakers to create anything from titillation and gore-­fueled B movie cult classics to highbrow dramas that flouted the old rules of moral uprightness. And a groundswell of inspiration from Japanese, European, and art house American fare was energizing a generation of directors whose reverence for film history was only matched by their insistence on breaking free of the moribund cycle of mid-­’60s mainstream Hollywood’s safe bets. With the prospect of the surging youth

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“The Sounds of Silence” dollar driving a considerable amount of success for these films, even films steeped in iconoclasm and controversy could be used in the service of consumerism. While The Graduate didn’t necessarily spark a run on Alfa Romeo roadsters like the sleek red Spider that Dustin Hoffman drove in the film—­a bit of product placement apocryphally credited to Dustin Hoffman’s Alfa-­importing uncle—­it did change film merchandising in a more significant way. Anyone who’s hit a thrift store or a garage sale will probably recognize the ubiquity of soundtracks from the ’60s in old stacks of vinyl—­usually Broadway original cast recordings or soundtracks to movie musicals like The Sound of Music. Original film and TV scores by the likes of Ennio Morricone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), Vince Guaraldi (A Charlie Brown Christmas), and John Barry (Goldfinger) met with significant chart success as well. Practically all these albums offered music for the first time that you couldn’t hear elsewhere, which makes the soundtrack release of The Graduate something of a bizarre yet instructive exception. An odd mishmash of previously released Simon & Garfunkel folk-­rock classics, one new song included in fragmented form, and a series of largely anonymous lite-­jazz compositions by Dave Grusin somehow took the charts by storm, and offered an early blueprint for record labels to repackage their back catalogs. It would almost feel like cynical, commerce-­driven showbizzery if it weren’t the direct result of an auteur’s stubborn creative vision. In the span of five years, Mike Nichols had his own graduation, transitioning from the influential, Grammy-­winning improv comedy team of Nichols & May (with fellow future director Elaine May) to an acclaimed and in-­demand director of Broadway plays. His film debut, 1966’s Elizabeth Taylor / Richard Burton drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a watershed moment in maturity for Hays-­disintegrating Hollywood films; despite its prototypical version of an R rating (“no one under 18 will be admitted unless accompanied by his parent,” states a footnote on the poster), it was the highest grossing box office hit of the year. Add on to that the film being nominated for every Academy Award it was eligible for, winning five of them, and Nichols’s follow-­up was afforded just about as much leeway as a product of 1960s Hollywood would allow—­not total carte blanche, but enough to let him get away with casting a then-­unknown Hoffman as the lead. (Even if he had to release it through Embassy Pictures, an indie that

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The Gr aduate had made its coin importing both sword-­and-­sandal and art house movies from Europe.) With The Graduate focusing on a youthful protagonist and the emergent generation gap that shadows his entropic bummer of an existence, Nichols had to find a way to make his film feel connected to an audience who might see part of themselves in Ben or Elaine. Already in his mid-­thirties yet still irreverent enough in spirit to make an existential connection to an emerging counterculture, Nichols found inspiration in the poetic folk-­rock of Simon & Garfunkel. As a duo that rose to prominence on the strength of “The Sounds of Silence,” a song that originally caught on in spring 1965 when East Coast college students made it a surprise radio hit, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were already experienced with the phenomenon of having their music fussed with and reworked beyond their original vision. Columbia producer  / A&R rep Tom Wilson, who had recently shepherded Bob Dylan through his new electric rock phase, decided that “The Sounds of Silence” needed a similar treatment, and brought in some session players to overdub it—­including Al Gorgoni and Bobby Gregg, the guitarist and drummer respectively from Dylan’s sessions for “Like a Rolling Stone.” (Notably left out: organist Al Kooper, a friend of Simon’s who was nevertheless considered too integral to Dylan’s new sound to spread the wealth.) It wasn’t a matter of simple hackwork to make the acoustic number into something that could share the folk-­rock airspace with Columbia labelmates like Dylan and the Byrds. The after-­the-­fact rhythm section found that the tempo was shiftily elusive, and Simon & Garfunkel’s engineer of choice, Roy Halee, did his best to distract from that by dousing the recording in reverb. (Reflecting this expansive treatment, if inadvertently, the song title was also altered—­it was originally “The Sound of Silence,” singular.) But it clicked, and to nobody’s surprise but the actual original artists—­ who hadn’t been consulted since they had technically split up at the time—­the remix was a smash. Simon, schlepping through a solo jaunt in Europe, didn’t even know about it until a September day in Denmark, where he took a habitual glance through Billboard and was startled to find that an album cut from Simon & Garfunkel’s 1964 commercial flop debut Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. was burning up the charts. When Wilson finally shipped a copy of the single to Simon’s flat in London, the singer was appalled—­flatmate and future “Year of the Cat” hitmaker Al Stewart recalls him recoiling when “the rhythm section slowed down at one point

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“The Sounds of Silence” so that Paul and Artie’s voices could catch up”1—­but hitting #1 by January ’66 and notching a gold record has a way of making that kind of apprehension vanish. Paul left England for New York, and Simon & Garfunkel were a duo again before the snow melted. A rush job made to capitalize on the song’s success, fittingly titled Sounds of Silence (while omitting the titular “The”), kept their momentum going forward while they worked on the more autonomously created material for Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. They were given four months to finish that album—­a budget-­bloating rarity in those days—­and wrapped in less than three. The LP both hit and flew off the shelves in October, peaking at #4 on the Billboard album charts. More important, it solidified the reputation that “The Sounds of Silence” helped build of Simon & Garfunkel as not only folk-­rock superstars but the profoundly affecting twin voices of a generation in turmoil. Nichols’s own generation-­in-­turmoil project picked up on that in short order. The director’s brother had sent him copies of both of Simon & Garfunkel’s ’66 albums, and Nichols put them on first thing in the morning as a way of greeting the day before heading for the film shoots. After a long day at the Paramount lot, he’d come back to the house he was renting—­a Hollywood residence previously owned by Cole Porter—­and play those albums again as he drifted off to sleep. Soon, Nichols was playing some of these songs as temp tracks, using them to figure out the pace of editing and the particular mood a scene needed to convey. It took less than two weeks for the epiphany to hit: this is your soundtrack. “We wrote out that famous montage sequence shot by shot,” Nichols told Time Out New York in 2012, referring to the sequence that cuts between Ben floating in his parents’ pool and rendezvousing in a hotel with Mrs. Robinson. Using a reprise of “The Sounds of Silence” nails down what its opening-­credit appearance suggests—­that even something as drastic as this affair hasn’t dislodged Ben from his aimless path, and there’s still a lot of anxiety beneath that supposedly blank expression. “[Film editor] Sam O’Steen worked on weekends, so the next Saturday I brought the track over and it was like, Holy shit, this fits exactly and it’s twice as powerful! It’s one of those miraculous moments you get when you’re making a movie, where everything somehow comes together. It’s better than sex. . . . Okay, maybe not better, but it’s indescribably fantastic.”2 All he needed to do was get a few important parties to let him make that

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The Gr aduate happen. First, Nichols went to Columbia chairman Clive Davis to see if he could clear the rights to Simon & Garfunkel’s music. Davis knew enough about The Graduate and Nichols’s reputation to envision a soundtrack album becoming a big hit piggybacking off the potential success of the film, so that was simple enough. The tricky part would be seeking approval from the artists themselves. Paul Simon’s personal experience with the commercial side of pop music made him about as skeptical as one would expect of a songwriter who notched his first major success with a song practically taken out of his hands. He’d gotten an early job selling songs to record labels for a publishing company, and when he finally decided to make a stand and stop giving away his own work, it was “The Sounds of Silence” he stood by, and from there on out he owned and published his own songs. Having the song become a hit two years later off Wilson’s remix meant that was likely the last artistic compromise Simon would ever have to make, so any further repurposing of his music would have to take particular care with it. Simon had experience when it came to testing market demand for endorsements and ad placements, and liked to lead on potential clients just to hear the size of the numbers they’d throw around. (In a 1972 Rolling Stone interview, Simon mentions that their manager Mort Lewis would say, “‘They offered us $25,000 for a Coke commercial, I think you could go more if you wanted to do it.’ ‘How much more?’ I would say. ‘Well, maybe we could get $50,000.’ ‘Well, let’s see if they’ll go 50.’ Then they’d say 50, and we’d say, ‘Nah, but we wanted to know, would they pay 50?’”)3 Fortunately for Nichols, Simon liked the script, and Simon & Garfunkel made a commitment to write some new songs for the film. Unfortunately for Nichols, that commitment was hampered by Simon & Garfunkel’s touring schedule; by the time Simon came through with a few new offerings, Nichols and producer Lawrence Turman had already grown attached to “The Sounds of Silence” and “Scarborough Fair” as temp tracks. In a 2018 retrospective for The Atlantic, Turman recalled that “[Nichols] turned to me and said, ‘We’ll be so used to these old songs, we won’t like the new ones,’ and I said . . . ‘Well, we’ll use the old songs!’ And that’s exactly what we did.”4 Their suspicions were mostly proven right when they finally received two new offerings from Simon & Garfunkel. While SoCal alienation tale “Punky’s Dilemma” and the dead-­end-­relationship lyrics of “Overs” fit the setting, neither of them fully clicked with Nichols, so Paul and Art threw

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“The Sounds of Silence” a Hail Mary with a then-­incomplete song, working title “Mrs. Roosevelt.” Fortuitously, “Roosevelt” and “Robinson” both fit the same meter, and Simon & Garfunkel would grace The Graduate soundtrack with an early, incomplete, yet still impressive early version of one of their signature songs. In the film, it became a motif in the last act, soundtracking Ben’s endless back-­and-­forth journey between SoCal and Berkeley in an attempt to intercept Elaine before her wedding. But the song didn’t emerge in its final form until their 1968 album Bookends, appearing alongside the other two Graduate soundtrack candidates that Simon liked enough to carry over onto the new album. It became the first song to win Record of the Year at the Grammys in 1969 that could more closely be described as rock than pop, but strangely enough it was declared ineligible for the Academy Award for Best Original Song; despite being written specifically for The Graduate, its subsequent rerecording for its 1968 single release misled the Academy to believe otherwise. “The Sounds of Silence” might be the more important theme anyways. Joseph Levine, who was backing the film financially, was skeptical at best about using in the soundtrack songs the audience already knew. Turman recalls showing him the final cut of The Graduate and getting some glowing yet qualified enthusiasm: “‘It’s the best ever, and once you get the new songs in, it’ll be fantastic!’ We said, ‘But, Joe, those are the songs we’re using.’ And he just turned [ashen]. He said, ‘But every kid in the country knows those songs! They’ll laugh you off the screens!’”5 Still, despite his opposition to using old songs with no direct connection to the film’s plot, he was impressed enough with the effective usage of “The Sounds of Silence” in the opening credits that his skepticism was held at bay. And in the end, that’s one of the great artistic legacies of the soundtrack to The Graduate: a song didn’t have to be about the plot to advance the plot—­or gain insight into a character’s inner workings. Ben’s emotion-­ masking ennui was the perfect setting for “The Sounds of Silence” to make the film’s subtext into text, and its usage in multiple contrasting moments of film editing proved that the right juxtaposition could bring out resonant, evocative elements in a song that might not have been clear before. The rhythm section in Wilson’s remix might have had difficulty with the timing, but Nichols and editor O’Steen knew just how to move through it. There’s one other funny catch to The Graduate and its music: the presence of Dave Grusin. The Graduate was one of three film scores a

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The Gr aduate then-­thirty-­three-­year-­old Grusin contributed to in 1967; and while it’s not exactly an afterthought, in the film it serves as a sort of foil, square adult jazz providing the ambient noise of Ben’s unhappy moments of surrendered control. In filmic terms, it’s completely diegetic “background music,” in contrast to the more non-­diegetic usage of Simon & Garfunkel’s music (“Bright Green Pleasure Machine” excepted). And it also emerges as a sort of audio cue that underscores the film’s themes of a generation gap: listening for pleasure versus listening for insight, the outer world encroaching against an inner world unfolding. Regardless of how interested or apathetic the film’s target audience may have been to Grusin’s music, The Graduate soundtrack was a smash: two million copies were sold in the United States alone en route to a #1 placing on the Billboard 200 starting in April, the first of a dominant twofer that was succeeded immediately by Bookends at the album chart’s peak position. With both LPs taking turns putting Simon & Garfunkel’s name at the #1 slot for sixteen consecutive weeks in 1968, the folk-­rockers who were plucked from oblivion with an assist from “The Sounds of Silence” went on an unbroken run of chart-­topping albums that only the Beatles and the Monkees could match. Still, Simon wasn’t enthused about the idea of putting a couple already-­ released songs and one more-­or-­less unfinished number out as a soundtrack with Simon & Garfunkel’s name all over it, considering that it would give the appearance of their material being stretched thin in a way that wasn’t as evident in the film. Complicating things further: Bookends would be in record stores by spring ’68, which meant that Simon & Garfunkel would be creating competition for themselves. Columbia compromised by highlighting the soundtrack more as a record of the film than a new collection of Simon & Garfunkel music, with the cover photo depicting a still from the movie, back cover liner notes spending more space discussing the motion picture than the music, and no photos of Paul and Art anywhere to be seen. The song became subservient to the film, even as the film renewed its life.

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Easy Rider, “The Pusher” EASY RIDER (1969, DIRECTED BY DENNIS HOPPER) STEPPENWOLF, “THE PUSHER” (1968, DUNHILL/ABC)

Wyatt and Billy are two bikers, a flag-­festooned piece of human Jasper Johns pop art and a shaggy, manic cowboy respectively, who have just smuggled a formidable stash of cocaine from Mexico to Los Angeles. Their squirrelly connection, played with a not-­entirely-­staged edginess by Phil Spector, meets them just outside the grounds of LAX with his chauffeur (and presumable bodyguard), who wields a cane topped with a death’s head skull. The connection tests out the goods while intermittently flinching out of paranoia at every airplane that screams overhead, the whole scenario panning out with wordless anticipation and taut back-­and-­forth closeups as the soundtrack is dominated by the deafening whir of jet engines. A deal is eventually done with a minimum of fuss despite the connection’s jittery demeanor, both bikers barely able to restrain their excitement as they find themselves on the verge of a score that will set them up for at least the foreseeable future, maybe even for life. The first chord hits at the moment of truth, Wyatt stepping out of the connection’s gleaming mahogany Rolls-­Royce as the transaction’s completed. The song is Hoyt Axton’s “The Pusher” as performed by Steppenwolf—­a feral, thousand-­yard-­stare slab of psychedelic blues rock that simultaneously sounds like a preemptive funeral and a bong-­session soundtrack. It churns away with seething doomsayer clarity as our protagonists barrel down a desert dirt road in a beater pickup truck, sagebrush haze melting into the rack-­focus fetishism of Billy’s flame-­airbrushed chopper and Wyatt’s star-­spangled counterpart. Then come the lyrics. “You know I’ve smoked a lot of grass / Oh lord,

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Easy Rider I’ve popped a lot of pills”—­an admission, by 1969 standards, of hedonistic amorality—­but there’s a line to be drawn. As Wyatt conceals his big-­ dollar stash inside the fuel tank of his bike, a visual metaphor that would only become more pungent during the oil crisis of the early ’70s, Steppenwolf singer John Kay makes it clear where that line is: “You know I’ve seen a lotta people walkin’ round with tombstones in their eyes / But the pusher don’t care if you live or if you die.” Before it became in vogue again during the ’70s to the point of being nearly mandatory at parties, coke’s reputation straddled that uncertain line between casually recreational and addictively life-­ruining. Whether that makes Wyatt and Billy (and Spector) benevolent dealers or subhuman pushers is unclear, and the song ends before the second verse lays out the distinction—­and the third verse’s declaration of “total war on the pusherman.” But the point being made, the two bikers are finally free to detach themselves from that calling, having found the conditional liberation that comes from pocketing fat stacks of cash in a hypercapitalist country, and Wyatt ditches his watch before he and Billy ride off, a significantly more famous Steppenwolf number, “Born to Be Wild,” rolling beneath the opening credits. They’ve traded their old lives for new ones, but it remains to be seen which of these lives people see fit to threaten.

Easy Rider broke everything. It cost under half a million dollars and took in $60 million at the box office, was shot like both a psychedelic phantasmagoria and a cinéma verité travelogue, and featured a pair of antiheroes that died in the end—­not because they broke the law, but because they had the desire to find America in parts of the country that didn’t want them to find it. It made Dennis Hopper the most in-­demand emerging director in film, saw Peter Fonda become a star on the level of his father Henry, and pulled supporting actor Jack Nicholson back from the brink of retiring from acting completely. And after it proved that the youth market for cutting-­edge wide-­release films wasn’t just a short-­term fluke driven by Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, it completed the catalyzation of what soon became known as New Hollywood. The anti-­establishment sentiments that had been ricocheting through America, not just politically and sociologically but in the world of pop culture, were about to invigorate the American film industry through one of its most creatively fearless periods ever.

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“The Pusher” The catch was that Easy Rider was also the end of something in itself. The acid biker movie to end all acid and biker movies, it refracted Fonda’s earlier roles in Roger Corman cheapies like outlaw motorcycle gang also-­ ran The Wild Angels (1966) and LSDsploitation freakout The Trip (1967), the latter of which brought Hopper and Nicholson into the equation. But by the time Easy Rider was on screens in the summer of 1969, the optimistic naivete of 1967’s Summer of Love had bled out into the gutter. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, a long hot summer of riots, the escalation of the Vietnam War into the Tet Offensive, the chaos of the Democratic National Convention, and the election of law-­ and-­order right-­winger Richard Nixon as president saw to that. Easy Rider thus feels something like the omega to Scorpio Rising’s alpha. Post-­Beats death-­drive delinquency is subsumed into the traumatic weight of a horrific year in American history. Anger’s gay desire is replaced with homosocial existentialism, which in turn is antagonized by a good ol’ boy mutation of homophobia that targets straights for not being straight enough. (One member of an insular, multigenerational group of small-­town Louisiana diner patrons calls our protagonists out as “Yankee queers.”) And after a journey to find out if the spirit of America the nation prided itself on still existed anywhere—­if it ever did—­the closest we get to an answer is Fonda’s enigmatic epiphany that “we blew it.” Shortly after that realization, Fonda’s Wyatt and Hopper’s Billy are drive-­by shotgunned to death in an act of random violence, Wyatt’s American-­flag chopper and its money-­stuffed gas tank going up in flames. Hopper has stated that Easy Rider was the first Hollywood movie to actually capture something of the counterculture from more than just a cheap exploitative perspective—­and they captured it right as that experience was becoming corrupted, commercialized, and no longer attainable. Less than a month after Easy Rider opened, the Manson Family murders took place. That makes “Born to Be Wild,” the Steppenwolf song that blasts through the film’s opening credits, something of a red herring when it comes to epitomizing what the film means. It’s inarguably the most famous song associated with the film, and almost singlehandedly responsible for Steppenwolf’s reputation as biker rock; John Kay’s various incarnations of the band have played the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally ten times between 1990 and 2018. But in Easy Rider it’s a call to liberation that any repeat viewer can recognize as doomed; the line “Fire all of your guns at once / And explode

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Easy Rider into space” takes on a bitter irony when you know what happens in the final scene. So how does “The Pusher” get more deeply at the heart of Easy Rider? It’s a song from a countercultural rock band that recognizes both the power of recreational highs and the ability for those highs to destroy you, and the protagonists of the film are caught between being the good-­natured escapists they see themselves as and the malevolent force of disorder they’re assumed to be. We know Wyatt and Billy as dealers—­as a verse in “The Pusher” left out of the film clarifies, men who will “sell you lots of sweet dreams”—­but the law-­and-­order world refuses to differentiate between that and their resemblance to pushers, who “ruin your body” and “leave your mind to scream.” That tense diner scene, heightened by the presence of a group of fascinated, flirtatious young women who appear smitten by the protagonists, gives an insight as to how Wyatt, Billy, and Nicholson’s tag-­along lawyer George must look to their redneck adversaries: like a corrupting force here to ruin your peace and quiet, steal your daughters, and poison the well with heroin. Naturally, the song’s writer and the band that covered it both have deeper reasons to make this dichotomy clear. Hoyt Axton was a country-­ folk singer out of Oklahoma who was practically destined for a stake in the music business. In 1956, the same year he graduated from high school, his mother Mae Boren Axton’s cowritten song “Heartbreak Hotel” became Elvis Presley’s first smash hit for RCA. While Hoyt wasn’t much of a hitmaker in the ’60s, he was a regular in the West Coast folk scene, including frequent gigs in West Hollywood’s Troubadour. While many of his songs were amiable and upbeat—­his most famous would be “Joy to the World,” which Three Dog Night made into a hit in 1971—­his own experiences with addiction, whether it was his cocaine habit or the overdose death of a friend, were never far from his mind. John Kay, meanwhile, had a more chaotic upbringing. The future Steppenwolf frontman was born Joachim Fritz Krauledat in what was then East Prussia, Germany in the waning years of World War II, and by the time he was five his mother had ferried him through the East German Soviet occupation zone into West Germany as a postwar refugee. His rock ’n’ roll education and his English lessons both came through the Armed Forces Radio Service, and his political awareness came in part from watching newsreel footage of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution—­film footage that had been

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“The Pusher” shot by future Easy Rider cinematographer László Kovács. As a teenager Kay became fascinated by the folk revival of the early ’60s, and was soon participating himself as both fan and singer, having split his time between Toronto, Buffalo, and Los Angeles. It was at the Troubadour that Kay first saw Hoyt Axton perform “The Pusher,” which he recalls as having “brought down the house every time he played it.”1 It was a three-­chord blues that was easy to play and resonated with Kay’s perspective when it came to good drugs and bad drugs, so once he hitchhiked his way back to Toronto and started playing coffeehouses “The Pusher” was a major part of his setlist. That carried over to his blues-­ rock band the Sparrows (later the Sparrow, singular), who by 1967 would develop a juggernaut twenty-­minute-­plus version that spent its first half building off a nightmarish psychedelic freeform noise soundscape. As the Sparrow became Steppenwolf, “The Pusher” was pared down to a more manageable length but remained a mainstay of their setlist, often as a focal point. This often led to something of a moral paradox: this was an antidrug song that courted controversy not due to its de facto condoning of weed and a mockery of its supposed status as a “gateway drug,” but because the word “goddamn” was prominently and repeatedly featured in the chorus. This was particularly noticeable in the South, as Kay pointed out in a July 11, 1970, interview with UK pop publication Melody Maker: We were in North Carolina and they said we could do “The Pusher” as long as we didn’t say “Goddamn.” Well there were three ways we could play it, and 7,000 people had paid money to see this thing so the way we did it was to blow a police siren when we came to “goddamn” and 7,000 people sang the word in the audience. They are strange people in North Carolina. They will lynch a Negro, but won’t say “goddamn.”2

Much of Steppenwolf’s current reputation hinges on their being one of the earliest major hard rock bands of their day. The usage of the phrase “heavy metal thunder” in “Born to Be Wild,” written by former Sparrows member Mars Bonfire, brought William S. Burroughs’s late-­stage-­ junkie terminology into an entirely new context. But Kay tended to value finding human connection and getting at what his audience was thinking more than he did just aimlessly entertaining them. Though his stage presence was formidable—­a September 16, 1969, concert review by John

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Easy Rider Mendelssohn of the Los Angeles Times likened him to “moving around like a sinister crab”—­he was also something of a philosophical messenger who wanted to make sure that message wasn’t getting overwhelmed by surface-­ level readings or getting watered down by commerce. An interview with Hullabaloo in February 1969 made Kay’s relationship with his audience clear: Well, you have the audience as a large group of people applauding after songs, and you try to guess what it was that made them dig the song. Was it the lyrics or the tempo or the rhythm? Did they dig “The Pusher” because they really understood what it was about, or did they dig it because they think that saying “god damn” is a good way of rebelling against authority? Sometimes you’re left wondering. But you don’t wonder when you get these kids backstage. There, they really ask you some very pointed questions. They want to know, first of all, if you’re for real or whether you’re talking about something that will mean money for you. They want to know if you really care about the issues or if you talk about them because it’s a groovy thing to do at the moment. Some of them are just normal kids—­externally, physically, they look like anyone else—­but they’re concerned; there are a few who are concerned. Usually, what they come up with is: “I’m in this hick town, there are just a few people who basically share my ideas, and what are we going to do or what can we do to actually change things even on a local level?” And when you get questions like that, you have to really sit down and say to yourself, “What would I do if I were this kid?”3

Raybert Productions seemed interested in asking the same questions. As the brain trust behind the initial success of the Monkees—­first as the protagonists of a TV series, then as an actual band—­Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider knew both how to capitalize on youth culture and how to take that success in unexpected new places. The “Prefab Four” might not have always been taken seriously by rock purists, but they would win over their young audience with personable comedy and top-­notch pop songs written by the likes of Neil Diamond, Harry Nilsson, and the team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King. As it became clear over time that the members of the Monkees had their own creative ambitions, Rafelson—­with an assist from cowriter Nicholson—­put those ambitions to the test in 1968’s Head. That film fractured the band’s relationship with Raybert, and it flopped both at the box office and on the album charts; the soundtrack peaked at #45, whereas in 1967 their earlier records spent twenty-­nine nonconsecutive

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“The Pusher” weeks at #1. But both the film and the soundtrack album had long-­tail cult cachet for their darker tone and more sardonic form of comedy, and what countercultural cred it had would be expanded on greatly with Raybert’s next project. Compiling the soundtrack for Easy Rider wasn’t exactly an ordeal, but it was a process constantly in flux. The decision to go with rock songs instead of a score was partially a financial move, as commissioning and recording an all-­new traditional soundtrack wouldn’t fit the film’s shoestring budget. Putting so much of the film’s money into shooting in 35 mm color was the culprit; it was also one of the keys to the film’s success, especially when Kovács’s stunning landscape cinematography was paired with songs that served as their own form of plot commentary. Initially the songs were pared down from a selection of two hundred records or so—­some from Fonda’s collection, some from Hopper’s—­with the latter wanting to establish a sort of “time capsule” fueled by FM radio’s nascent experimentation, freeform anti-­format, and deep-­album-­cut tastemaking. It was a similar situation to The Graduate where the temp tracks Hopper picked out proved more compelling than the prospect of an original set of songs—­in this case, earmarked to be provided by the then-­nascent supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash. Stories as to why that particular band didn’t make the final cut differ between the film’s two motivating creatives. Fonda, a weed-­smoking buddy of David Crosby, recalls bringing the group into a screening and inviting them to watch it either with or without the existing rock songs as a temp track. “They said, ‘Well, let’s hear it with the music on.’ And Stills had a six-­string guitar with him. He never touched the guitar. They . . . basically said at the end, ‘We can’t beat that. We can’t even get near that.’”4 Hopper’s version is less flattering to CS&N. In numerous interviews, Hopper has claimed that he was turned off by Columbia Records sending a limo to pick him up for a listening session. With an odd mix of frank politeness and wigged-­out maniacal tunnel vision, he told the band that despite their musicianship and appeal, “I’m gonna have to say no to this, and if you guys try to get in the studio again, I may have to cause you some bodily harm.”5 That said, David Crosby has repeatedly claimed on Twitter that Hopper based Billy’s walrus-­stache cowboy look on Crosby, so at least a little of their influence remained in the film. Another major player in the soundtrack’s evolution was Joel Sill, who had his own Raybert-­friendly connection to the Monkees as his father

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Easy Rider Lester was their musical supervisor and head of their label Colgems. (Lester was also Phil Spector’s partner in Philles Records—­the les half of the name—­before being forced out.) Sill was the executive music producer for Easy Rider—­the first of many soundtrack gigs that later included similar credits for La Bamba and Forrest Gump—­and it was his job to get all the rights sorted out. Steppenwolf would be easy enough: at the time, Sill worked at Dunhill Records, which had put out Steppenwolf’s first few records, including their 1968 debut, which included both Steppenwolf songs that appear in Easy Rider. This wouldn’t be the band’s first experience with Hollywood, either. 1968’s Candy, a psychedelic sex farce based off a novel by Easy Rider semi-­cowriter Terry Southern and his cowriter Mason Hoffenberg, included a new song, “Rock Me,” which had been written for the film, as well as their hit single “Magic Carpet Ride.” (Aside from a new Byrds song, “Child of the Universe,” the remainder of the soundtrack was rounded out by Dave Grusin. Busy year.) Kay told CBC radio program As It Happens in 2019 that he was initially skeptical about his band’s music being included in the film: “Initially, I thought, well, wait a minute—­it’s about motorcycles. The last thing that I know Peter [Fonda] did was something called The Wild Angels, and that was a bit of a turkey, so you know, what’s this going to be like?”6 A screening with a few other musicians—­including members of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Band—­proved convincing enough, especially once the film’s shock ending left them dumbstruck. On film, the legal wrangling seemed invisible, and the end result was about as close as Hopper could get to his ideal of a narrative soundtrack. As an art house piece, Easy Rider’s focus on creating a full and varied audiovisual experience was deeply effective and innovative in ways that seem familiar now. Several pivotal moments focus entirely on music at the expense of dialogue or sound effects; for a road movie the sound of motors is significantly less prominent than the songs, which prove even more propulsive. The Band’s country-­rock ballad “The Weight” is used as a backdrop for a southwestern travelogue that lingers on the region’s natural beauty. The irreverent giddiness of the Holy Modal Rounders’ “If You Want to Be a Bird” underscores the addition of Nicholson’s George to the road trip, announcing his presence as a halfway-­square who’s more than willing to take his mind in some unusual directions. And the abrupt transition from the Fraternity of Man’s weed-­country goof “Don’t Bogart Me” to the heavy psych-­ blues lurch of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “If Six Was Nine” announces

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“The Pusher” the riders’ arrival in a bucolic-­seeming part of small-­town Louisiana with sinister foreboding. But not every label or artist was willing to play ball. Despite “The Weight” being used to memorable effect in the film, the rights didn’t extend to the actual soundtrack album of Easy Rider, and ABC/Dunhill had to bring in a band called Smith to serve as semi-­soundalike ringers on a cover version. Bob Dylan was originally called in to give his blessing for the usage of “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” for the film’s final reel, but Fonda couldn’t get Dylan’s blessing, and both film and album saw the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn covering the song instead. As a make-­good, Dylan wrote the first verse of what would become the end-­credits song, “Ballad of Easy Rider,” which was completed by McGuinn, but Dylan refused to allow his name to be included as a cowriter in said credits. Fonda claimed after the fact that this was because Dylan balked at the ending, that Bob wanted to see some measure of revenge from Wyatt after Billy gets shotgunned.7 An odd demand from someone whose own earlier work was steeped in stories about miscarriages of justice, but it held fast. As an album, Easy Rider (Music from the Soundtrack) feels a bit slight compared to the jam-­packed all-­star compilations that would become the standard in future decades. As much as it pioneered the trend of commercially releasing soundtracks featuring artists from multiple labels—­not just Dunhill/ABC (Steppenwolf, Smith) but Columbia (the Byrds), Elektra (the Holy Modal Rounders), and Reprise (Hendrix, the Electric Prunes)—­it works less as “music from the film” and more as music for the film, a semi-­ narrative in itself that evokes the movie’s story and feel every bit as much, if not more so, than the stills from the picture that grace its back cover. The legal rights involved eventually guaranteed that the album would go out of print, but the impact was already made, and a string of Easy Rider–­inspired existential road movies would follow—­though only 1971’s Vanishing Point could make a claim to having even a fraction of the zeitgeist. And where legacies are concerned, “The Pusher” seems to have a bit more life in it than “Born to Be Wild.” The latter song’s afterlife as shorthand for comedic faux rebellion has dulled its power in dispiriting ways. It was brilliantly lampooned as an ironic soundtrack to the RV-­driving yuppies of Albert Brooks’s Lost in America (1985), where the freedom-­ seeking, rebellion-­craving Brooks waves cheerfully at a passing, Hopper-­ esque biker and—­like the goons threatening Hopper at the end of Easy

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Easy Rider Rider—­gets flipped the bird for his troubles. Further indignities across the decades included the horizon-­broad slapstick of Problem Child (1990), the clunky Eddie Murphy talking-­animal schtickfest Dr. Doolittle 2 (2001), and a 2021 commercial for Pampers. But “The Pusher” still chills, even in an age where marijuana is increasingly decriminalized and the biggest pushers are the pharma companies. It’s not indelibly associated with Easy Rider to the same extent that “Born to Be Wild” is, but its place in that back-­to-­back Steppenwolf block does provide the real establishing heart of the film: we should be put on this world to experience freedom, but not at the cost of other people’s health or well-­being. And sometimes a song can make a better case for that sentiment than a film can—­especially for someone like John Kay, who appreciated the usage of his music in the film but in a different, less-­holistic way than most other viewers. When Kay watched the film for the first time with Peter Fonda, he thought it was fantastic, but he wanted to confirm one important detail: was the film shot in black-­and-­white? The singer behind the first two songs to appear on the soundtrack was completely colorblind.8

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The Harder They Come, “Many Rivers to Cross” THE HARDER THEY COME (1972, DIRECTED BY PERRY HENZELL) JIMMY CLIFF, “MANY RIVERS TO CROSS” (1969, TROJAN)

Ivanhoe “Ivan” Martin has had nothing but rotten luck from the moment he stepped off the bus to West Kingston. A callow youth from the country, he’s been taken advantage of at nearly every step of his journey, having made the trek from his family’s farm to the shantytowns in a bid to make it big as a singing star. And it’s not just the small-­time con men, like the pushcart vendor who steals his luggage, who screw him over. He discovers that Hilton, the star-­making music mogul, has little patience or enthusiasm for aspiring singers. And when he tries to find a day job, he’s rebuffed by the foreman at a construction site for not having enough experience in skilled labor. So as he trudges wearily through an upper-­class neighborhood, as if in hopes that some of its wealth will rub off onto him via osmosis, we hear the voice of Jimmy Cliff begin to sing: “Many rivers to cross / But I can’t seem to find my way over.” The music fades as Ivan tries his luck again, asking a housewife if there are any odd jobs she can pay him for, but even after he’s reduced to flat-­out begging for a dime, she refuses to help him. The music returns, picking up where it left off, as Ivan rises from a dejected slump against a red-­black-­and-­green-­painted shanty wall. He drifts through a market, but no sooner does he set his hand on a piece of produce than the shopkeeper holds a machete to his wrist, pegging him for a likely thief. Eventually, he’s reduced to considering sifting through a dump with dozens of other impoverished citizens in search of something, anything he can use, though he turns away before he commits to the idea. When the gospel-­tinged “Many Rivers to Cross” and the scenes of Ivan’s struggle

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The Harder They Come to hustle up some work both conclude, he finds himself at the church his mother recommended he visit to look for guidance. The choir there is singing a more traditional number, “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” but Ivan’s situation remains desperate.

At the time he wrote “Many Rivers to Cross,” Jimmy Cliff’s own situation wasn’t that much better. He’d arrived in England in 1965 after spending nearly all his teenage years working his way toward a stable music career, a path that took him through the more unscrupulous corners of the Jamaican record business, with a stopover at the 1964 New York World’s Fair as part of an exhibition of Jamaican musical culture. Coming to the UK was Chris Blackwell’s idea—­Blackwell being the Island Records founder who took reggae international and would become one of pop music’s biggest players. Cliff was laboring under the hopes he’d get the same kind of break Blackwell found other singers of the West Indies, like fifteen-­year-­old pop-­ ska sensation Millie Small, whose 1964 single “My Boy Lollipop” became a massive transatlantic smash even amid peak Beatlemania. The problem was that Cliff was still trying to figure out who he was as a musician. Prejudice was never far from worsening his situation; he was kicked out of at least one studio apartment when the landlord objected to a Black man staying there.1 But Cliff’s come-­up was further complicated by the fact that the British appetite for Caribbean music, whether it was the upbeat sounds of ska or its slower, more slippery mid-­decade offshoot rocksteady, hadn’t yet been whetted. Cliff would integrate folk and soul into his repertoire, which would work to his benefit; he’d tour as a support act for rock acts like the Who and the Spencer Davis Group, or as part of soul and blues revues featuring the likes of Freddie King and Junior Walker & the All-­Stars. But that versatility came at the cost of an identity crisis—­ albeit one more thrust on him by the music press than anything. Then the hits came. “Waterfall,” a 1968 single, won him some attention via that year’s International Festival of Song in Brazil, and the song’s success there helped kick Cliff out of a rut. The following year’s “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” perked ears in the States, the UK, and Jamaica, a clear-­eyed and hopeful crossover bid that smuggled in some weapons-­ grade bottom-­end groove beneath its pop-­friendly strings. “You Can Get It If You Really Want” did well enough for Cliff, but it wound up an even

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“Many Rivers to Cross” bigger success when it was covered by Desmond Dekker, proof that Cliff’s strengths could be at least partially attributed to his skills as a songwriter. Still, Cliff’s voice itself was hard to deny—­the press caught on to his soul-­ indebted high-­note singing as similar to Percy Sledge, but without the latter’s ready-­to-­shatter fragility—­and the combination of resonant singing and pop-­profound songwriting was enough to make a single like “Vietnam” the envy of Bob Dylan. Throw in a cover of Cat Stevens’s “Wild World” that immolated the smug original on contact—­Cliff actually sounds regretfully sympathetic instead of condescending—­and he started looking very much like reggae’s big international can’t-­miss star of the ’70s. History tends to gloss over how quickly Cliff confounded those expectations. Cliff’s next move was to record Another Cycle in Alabama’s legendary cradle of soul Muscle Shoals, inspired in part by how well the session band the Swampers gave the New York–­recorded “Many Rivers to Cross” an atmosphere worthy of Wilson Pickett or Aretha Franklin. But an audience expecting more deep roots reggae was thrown by an album heavy on southern R&B instead. By 1972, he’d earned a reputation for not wanting to be pigeonholed as a reggae artist, which he explained to Let It Rock reporter Charlie Gillett as a pragmatic move: “I felt that I wanted to show that I can do other than reggae, because at the time everybody was putting reggae down”—­“everybody” in his case meaning “the press, and the radio station.” And yet he’d also risked alienating his Jamaican fans with the crossover moves, too, admitting that “it cast a shadow on my career. It could have been a light . . . but it wasn’t.” Fittingly enough, Gillett’s piece seemed to be steeped in a frustration that Cliff wasn’t catching a break from the British listening public or the media: “The British music business—­from TV and radio producers through night club bookers to fashion-­conscious journalists—­should be ashamed that this talented man has had to wait until a film-­maker recognised his ability.”2 The filmmaker was Perry Henzell, and the movie was The Harder They Come. Cliff’s unlikely but indelible leading-­man role in a story about an aspiring singer turned outlaw was the first all-­Jamaican feature motion picture, a drama with documentary-­caliber rendering of a land the tourists don’t see. Cliff told Vivien Goldman in a 1979 Melody Maker career retrospective that Henzell saw something arresting in the photos on Cliff’s self-­ titled 1969 LP—­the one that “Many Rivers to Cross” appeared on: “He said that in the face on the front he saw a positive person, and in the face on the

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The Harder They Come back he saw a negative person.”3 That duality was key to the film, in which the naive, hopeful country boy becomes so manipulated and corrupted by the forces that keep him in poverty that he has no choice except to become a gunslinging rebel. Memorably described by ad copy as “Top of the Hit Parade—­and Number One on the Most Wanted List,” Ivan’s arc is that of a pop singer turned weed dealer who earns infamy after gunning down multiple police officers in a desperate bid for self-­preservation. He becomes a fugitive whose notoriety means a big hit—­the titular “The Harder They Come”—­for Hilton, the rip-­off record producer who cut his session. Late in the film, there’s a cynical exchange between Hilton and the corrupt weed-­supplier cop who’s obsessed with capturing Ivan. “Do me a favor,” says Hilton. “You tell me when you catch him, so I can get him to make another record for me before you string him up.” It sounds like the stuff of myth, but it’s also an echo of Ivanhoe Martin’s real-­world namesake Vincent “Ivanhoe” Martin, aka Rhyging, who was hailed as an outlaw folk hero in late ’40s Jamaica for his lurid exploits and audacious statements to the press. Rhyging wasn’t involved in either the music business or the marijuana trade, but updating his character to a more early ’70s milieu—­complete with a bravado gleaned from spaghetti Westerns—­made Cliff’s version of Ivan feel every bit as real (and mythological) as the genuine article. Pivotally, the music itself wasn’t the only credible part of the film’s take on the Jamaican recording industry. Hilton gives Ivan a flat twenty dollars for his recording—­no royalties, no residuals, just barely enough to put him in a new set of threads or two. As didactic as Hilton’s declaration might sound that “I make hits, not the public—­I tell the DJs what to play,” there really was a small group of tastemakers that held full control over the dozens of singles artists cut every month. In the real world, during Cliff’s come-­up in the ’60s, a singer’s destiny was in the hands of producers and selectors like King Edwards, Duke Reid, Coxsone Dodd, and Prince Buster. (Buster himself shows up in a cameo, rejecting Ivan’s efforts to promote his single independently because doing so would bring Hilton’s wrath down on his head.) Despite the appearance of a competitive market, most of these producers had limited scope to break a record nationwide: even if a blue-­flame-­ hot hit could convince one of these other sound system operators to spin

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“Many Rivers to Cross” a song they didn’t have a hand in producing, spreading it further required taking to the airwaves. And that meant you either went through an independent station, or you more likely had to push it through state-­owned radio, which was reluctant at best to promote anything with the air of protest or “slack” morals. That becomes one authority-­flouting key to Ivan’s story: when the police try to make Hilton cooperate by pulling Ivan’s hit from circulation, Hilton laments that this is one case where the public really did make the hit: “I can’t make this record die again. Yes, I can usually do it . . . but it’s gone too far now.” The song’s on the charts, the people love an outlaw, and Ivan’s finally getting his share of what’s his. Cliff’s semi-­autobiographical connection to the film’s plot is strictly tied into music alone, with any criminal activity on his part being petty at most. He recalled to the NME’s Penny Reel in September 1980 that he used to run with gangs, but only by association, and that he was more empathetic than full-­on initiated. (As he put it: “I wasn’t personally a bad man, because if I was a bad man I would be the baddest man.”)4 Still, he had Ivan’s hustle as a musician even as a young teenager. In 1961, after moving from his family’s North Coast farm to Kingston in search of stardom, a fourteen-­year-­old Cliff convinced Chinese Jamaican restauranteur / record shop owner Leslie Kong to put out his song “Dearest Beverley”—­a canny move since Cliff figured sharing the titular name with the shop itself, Beverley’s, would appeal to a businessman’s mindset. Beverley’s soon became a label in its own right, and the following year Cliff had graduated to A&R and brought another young singer named Bob Marley to Beverley’s, where he recorded his debut single “One Cup of Coffee.” Nearly every other reggae great to emerge in the 1960s—­Desmond Dekker, the Maytals, Joe Higgs, John Holt, Derrick Morgan—­cut sides for Beverley’s in the ten years the label was in operation, a run only halted by Kong’s death of a heart attack in 1971, at age thirty-­seven. (Kong has a cameo in The Harder They Come, too—­during a scene where Ivan watches the Maytals record “Sweet and Dandy,” Kong’s the producer/engineer at the boards, just like he was in real-­world 1969.) Then came the aforementioned 1964 New York World’s Fair and signing with Blackwell and the struggle to make it in the UK. When Cliff sings in “Many Rivers to Cross” that “Wandering I am lost / As I travel along the white cliffs of Dover,” he’s not being metaphorical: he spent a week wandering through the county Kent port town, homeless and miserable, an abbreviated but still agonizing and alienating parallel to Ivan’s search for

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The Harder They Come work and purpose early in the film. With the hurt of his words and the beauty of his voice both coming from a genuine place of raw emotion, it’s easy to see why Cliff could settle so readily into the role of a modern-­day Jamaican desperado—­it’s something of a there-­but-­for-­the-­grace situation where the real-­life outcome was unusually brighter than the one on film. “Many Rivers to Cross” isn’t the only preexisting Jimmy Cliff song to be repurposed for the film, but it is maybe the least ironically deployed, aside from the contemplative, introspective Another Cycle selection “Sitting in Limbo.” Aside from the dynamite title cut written for the film—­one of popular music’s great mergings of disillusionment and resilience—­the most omnipresent selection, and the song that opens the film itself, is “You Can Get It If You Really Want.” It’s a total misdirection from the word go, happy island music that gets cut off when the bus Ivan’s riding into town is held up by a truck trying to cross the same narrow bridge in the opposite direction. It also poses one of the film’s most paradoxical intersections between the real world and the film’s story: Cliff-­as-­Ivan, whom we know for his singing voice by the time the film’s halfway through, is seen doing weed business while Cliff-­as-­Cliff’s song plays on the radio. And as life and film forget who’s imitating who, we hear one last snippet of that upbeat anthem of hard work and achievement right before Ivan’s gunned down by the cops, intercut with footage of him, his eventual betrayer Jose, and the rest of a cinema audience cheering on the invincible Western hero Django. Life’s not a movie, except when it is. In the span of two months, The Harder They Come went from a raucous, delighted June 5, 1972, premiere in Kingston to a showing at Italy’s prestigious Venice Film Festival in the company of films by greats like Satyajit Ray (Seemabaddha) and Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange). Its American release, distributed through cheapie-­mogul Roger Corman’s New World Films, was considered by critics to be a novel if familiar take on Blaxploitation, albeit one with a bit more political and social insight (and the unusual status, thanks to its heavy patois, of being an English-­ language film with English subtitles). And whether or not critics appreciated the film on those terms—­the New York Times’s A. H. Weiler praised its verité feel while noting that “it isn’t particularly polished in its acting or melodrama,”5 while Roger Ebert thought that the film’s second half succumbed to “the filmmakers’ . . . memories of American black exploitation

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“Many Rivers to Cross” movies”6—­a consensus appeared to form that the biggest strength of The Harder They Come was the soundtrack. In the context of the film itself, many of the non-­Cliff selections round out the general atmosphere and personality of its surroundings, a direct connection to reggae’s actual origins. All reggae is considered slack and forbidden by the literally Bible-­thumping preacher Ivan finally finds work with; and while Ivan sneaks in some time listening to reggae when he can, his coworker Longa taunts him with intimations that Ivan’s trying to be the same kind of pistol-­toting bad man that the Slickers’ song “Johnny Too Bad” describes on the workshop radio. (This is well before Ivan even shows the slightest sign of violence, though Longa is the first recipient of it when he tries to steal the bike Ivan’s worked for months to restore; the escalation from shoving match to broken-­bottle-­wielding, face-­slashing horror is where Ivan first emerges as a take-­no-­shit rebel.) The Slickers themselves are a prime example of reggae’s history of elusive attribution, driven in part by Hilton-­inspiring moguls like Ken Khouri and Byron Lee (the latter of whom recorded “Johnny Too Bad”), who laid the foundation for reggae’s success while simultaneously keeping many musicians poorer and deeper in obscurity than they should’ve been. In contrast to the scenes of more traditional, American-­style gospel in the church where Ivan works, there are religious lamentations of a deeper, more sorrowful perception in the Melodians’ “Rivers of Babylon.” Scotty’s “Draw Your Brakes,” a memorable take on the standard “Stop That Train,” is both a fine example of versioning—­taking a preexisting instrumental and supplying new vocals and mixing, a major component of the nascent dub movement—­and the soundtrack’s rare example of a love song alongside the Maytals’ “Sweet and Dandy.” The other Maytals cut on the soundtrack, “Pressure Drop,” is far and away the most jumped-­up and ferocious selection, deceptively warm harmonies luring you in to a world of karmic justice and divine retribution: “I say and when it drops, oh you gonna, feel it / Know that you were doing wrong.” And, of course, there’s Desmond Dekker, whose “007 (Shanty Town)” touched on both the political and the rude facets of reggae and Jamaican culture on intertwined levels. It’s a classic of rocksteady that introduces the rudeboy-­as-­film-­icon themes The Harder They Come would make more explicit. It’s also a bit of an inadvertent jab at Jamaica as interpreted by earlier cinema: “007” invokes the James Bond franchise, whose first film, 1962’s Dr. No, depicts a much more

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The Harder They Come imperialistic and condescending view of Jamaica and its culture, in thrall to a white British sense of machismo and world order. Given the film’s spotty midnight-­movie distribution in comparison to the soundtrack’s readily available pleasures—­the film didn’t even get general release in the States until 1975—­The Harder They Come became one of those movies that’s considered secondary to the music it contained. It’s not like the film was easily divorced from its music; the latter proved not only more accessible but a supposed bellwether for an industry-­buoying reggae boom. No matter that most American journalists (and several British ones) found it impossible to resist namedropping Johnny Nash’s pop-­ crossover “I Can See Clearly Now” as the standard of success against which Cliff and company would be held. And no matter that a number of them hinged the potential future of reggae stardom on an Americanization that never arrived. (A May 1973 Newsday piece by Robert Christgau cited Jamaican radio DJ Jeff Barnes as believing that “[Bob Marley and] the Wailers’ rhythms are too slow to reach the Black audience.”)7 As long as critics and listeners could find some connection between the sounds of Jamaica and their own stomping grounds, they had something to latch on to, even if it were just a superficial shared interest in smoking ganja. But things got strained in the States once the buzz from The Harder They Come died down and the #1s from Kingston failed to materialize on the Billboard Hot 100. In December 1974, the Village Voice proclaimed the movement all but dead in the USA: For a while it appeared that reggae was Pop Salvation. This was determined by a small number of white music taste makers who’d seen Jimmy Cliff in that tale of a young Jamaican’s rise to number one on both the record charts and the most wanted list, The Harder They Come. The soundtrack introduced a new kind of black music that combined the impact of rock n roll and the innate vitality of the blues with a culture that held dope smoking as a near sacrament. Big name rock musicians began looking for spice in the studios of Kingston, making it virtually certain that the “Jamaican Sound” would be the sound of the ’70s. It hasn’t happened.8

Still, whose standards were failing to be met here? It was like 1966 all over again, Jimmy Cliff scrambling once more to balance his roots and his eclecticism. Leslie Kong’s death was a major blow to his spirit and his career, and then he broke acrimoniously with Island after feeling creatively

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“Many Rivers to Cross” stifled by Blackwell’s plan to market him as an Ivan-­esque rebel. And while Cliff signed with Reprise and fumed about Blackwell’s financial transgressions—­his 1974 song “No. 1 Rip-­Off Man” says it all—­Blackwell and Island signed Bob Marley and the Wailers, who became the standard-­ bearers for reggae as Cliff continued his R&B crossover sound. But Cliff remained a formidable live singer, an international-­minded free spirit, and a man who could still put his own music out on his terms. In that ’79 Goldman Melody Maker profile, he seems satisfied with his status as a formative influence: “I know my work is a pioneer work. . . . The music coming out of Jamaica now, I pioneered internationally. Everyone has their work, that is mine.”

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American Graffiti, “Do You Want to Dance” AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973, DIRECTED BY GEORGE LUCAS) BOBBY FREEMAN, “DO YOU WANT TO DANCE” (1958, JOSIE)

It’s the heart of a night in which four friends in small-­town Modesto, California—­clean-­cut high school class president Steve Bolander, his bookish friend Curt Henderson, gawky dork Terry “The Toad” Fields, and hot-­rodder John Milner—­are undergoing personal revelations. As they go their separate ways following the start of the film, they each wind up in their own various predicaments. John’s is especially mortifying: as he attempts to reckon with his status as the town’s enviable yet world-­weary king of the drag racers, he appears to be a washout at age twenty-­two. And when an entreaty to a group of girls to go for a ride goes awry, he’s left with an unwanted passenger—­the snotty tween Carol, who seems to exist solely to make John feel elderly by comparison. Milner hates being seen with Carol—­especially when his newest rival shows up. Bob Falfa and his girlfriend pull up next to Milner’s ’32 Ford in a tricked-­out ’55 Chevy, and the two proceed to exchange insults with a cockiness that seems to mask Milner’s seen-­it-­all-­before ennui. The howl of enigmatic, legendary DJ Wolfman Jack resonates through both drivers’ radios as they pull up to a red light, and the mood turns electric once Bobby Freeman’s up-­tempo rocker “Do You Want to Dance” is cued up. Then Falfa hits below the belt: “Hey, that’s a tough-­lookin’ girl you got with ya, man! Whaddya doin’, tryin’ to pick up a few extra bucks babysittin’? Hey doll, why don’t ’cha c’mon and ride with me . . . in about ten years.” Milner blows up: “Now leave her outta this! This is just between you and me!” The light turns green and they take off, engines snarling, uncaged—­and it soon becomes evident that Falfa’s got the faster car. The victor runs the next red

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“Do You Want to Dance?” light as Milner slows to a stop, and as Carol marvels at Falfa’s driving—­ “Wow, he’s really fast, isn’t he?”—­Milner spits back, “Yeah, but he’s stupid,” with the resignation that comes with knowing drag races aren’t won with smarts.

Nostalgia is a dicey prospect even at the best of times. Sometimes you’ll get a piece of work that looks at a particularly strange or difficult era and marvels at how we ever got through it—­the TV series Mad Men, for example, which resonated because it was unafraid to examine the loneliness and self-­destruction beneath the surface of a prosperous mid-­century America. But more often, it’s a glassy-­eyed gaze back at a past that its audience considers preferable to the present, an artificial dose of memory-­stoking that not only promises comfort through recognition, but substitutes that recognition for comprehension. Remember this thing? You had it during the Better Times. We’re comfortable revisiting the past because at least we know how it ends—­unlike the present we’re stuck in. Wistful looks back at the past are at their most potent when our present is at its worst. The dawn of the 2020s—­pandemic-­battered, economically broken, politically dysfunctional, and ecologically doomed—­has ensured the continuation of a relentless barrage of ’80s and ’90s revisionism that, through pure oversaturation, feels like it’s lasted longer than those decades themselves. But the catch about spending so much time in the past is that it starts to get easier to notice when history starts echoing. The last time nostalgia was this pervasive in popular culture, America had just spent the better part of a decade trying to wake up from a disillusioning nightmare—­ from the JFK assassination to Watergate, with all the riots, deaths, and war to accompany it all. That’s how the 1950s became America’s epochal Rosebud. Extend the definition of that epoch to, say, the summer of 1962, just before the heightened nuclear anxiety of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and you have the golden era that so many conservatives (and a distressing number of liberals) hold up as the last time America really seemed to work at its peak. It was all illusory: the postwar economic boom couldn’t last indefinitely, and the spread of mass media with the omnipresence of television meant that it was easier than ever to find out what kind of turmoil simmered beneath the artificially placid surface. But for a certain strain of artist, there was a responsibility

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American Gr affiti not to highlight this unease and pain, but to relieve it, distract from it, give people something to look forward to as a rare respite from it. Most of the Movie Brats of New Hollywood saw nostalgia for the 1950s with skeptical eyes, or at least clear ones. Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970) pulled off the stunt of making an anti–­Vietnam War film by setting it in the Korean War instead. Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) depicted early ’50s Texas as a place with little potential for change or even a future for its torn-­up high-­schooler protagonists. Terrence Malick’s debut feature Badlands (1973) juxtaposed a rich, painterly cinematic feel with the troubling attraction between a murderer and his young girlfriend, a period piece based on the 1958 crime spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. And Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), true to Mario Puzo’s novel, used the 1950s as the backdrop for Michael Corleone straying from his promise to take his mob family into legitimate business. These were all adaptations, granted, but in depicting the 1950s with the same unflinching, historically vivid cynicism as they would their contemporary times, a whole wave of screenwriters and directors deromanticized the recent past in an effort to figure out how the present had gone to hell. George Lucas had no interest in that. He liked straightforward good-­ versus-­evil stories; and even though he tended to agree with his peers on what good and evil were, he found himself unable to commit to creating similarly ambivalent or disenchanted stories about flawed people. The idea of a “lost innocence” that was going around among artists of his generation had a pull, though. It’s just that, after flopping with a dystopian sci-­fi take on a world free of human bonds and emotions with THX 1138 (1971), Lucas aimed between the lines with his next project. Instead of showing people being robbed of their idealism and hope and future, Lucas would spend the audience’s time steeped in that idealism and let their own memories fill in the blanks of what happened later. And so American Graffiti emerged onto screens with such a concentrated dose of memory-­stoking precision and detail that it felt like a movie actually shot in 1962. Not in the style of films of the era, but with a lens that gave an early ’70s documentarian feel to a painstaking reproduction, an artificial past made to look as real as anything going on in the present. Haskell Wexler’s cinematography—­which Lucas likened to “a 1962 ‘Hot Rods to Hell’ jukebox”1—­captured a small town after hours with the same

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“Do You Want to Dance?” kind of naturalistic, grainy verisimilitude he used for Medium Cool (1969), his narrative-­meets-­documentary film (and sole feature) set during the teargas-­and-­billyclub chaos of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. That was the visual half of the film’s you-­are-­there immediacy. Just as important, to Lucas and the record business alike, was the soundtrack. When American Graffiti underwent its low-­budget, twenty-­eight-­day shoot in summer 1972, Easy Rider still stood head and shoulders above successive New Hollywood films in its licensing and use of preexisting music. Lucas had a far more ambitious task: instead of a contemporaneous time capsule, he’d have to go back through his memories—­and his collection of 45s and 78s—­and build a sort of canon that captured the actual sound of his protagonists’ restless late-­night cruising. In a film taking place largely inside and around cars, the very epitome of early 1960s small-­town Northern California teenage life, Lucas made the decision to soundtrack the pictures not with a score, but with the accompaniment of car radios. This move would make nearly every song completely diegetic, practically unheard of in a narrative feature film. The closest there is to an exception, Bill Haley & His Comets’ “(We’re Gonna) Rock around the Clock,” appears under the film’s still-­photo title card as a seemingly wise-­assed nod to its role in the opening credits of 1955’s juvenile delinquent drama Blackboard Jungle. And even then, it’s preceded by the sound of static, radio tuning, and a call letters announcement—­the mysterious XERB—­before a station ID chimes in during its final seconds, harmonizing with Ron Howard’s first line of dialogue. The song’s a part of this world, not a commentary on it. And that helps make the film’s depiction of ambivalent, future-­ wary coming of age feel less like an outsider’s gaze and more of a trip down memory lane. Or a meta-­trip. Because despite the film’s late summer ’62 timeframe, less than a quarter of the film’s music is actually from the 1960s. Part of the bargain when it comes to the characters in the film is that whether they declare it or not, they’re already looking backward to what they believe are better times. It’s the most obvious when Milner (played with seething yet sympathetic exasperation by Paul Le Mat) and Carol (Mackenzie Phillips, radiating twerpish charisma) fight over control of the radio when the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ Safari” comes on: she thinks they’re “boss,” he can’t stand that “surfin’ shit.” “Rock ’n’ roll’s been going downhill ever since Buddy

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American Gr affiti Holly died,” grumbles Milner, an echo of the sentiment that drove Don McLean’s “American Pie” to the top of the pop charts six months before Lucas started filming. It’s worth noting that the only song during the film’s narrative portion that feels like it’s representing a truly new cultural phenomenon of the time—­a harbinger of things to come, rather than a bridge or a transition between eras—­is Booker T. & the M.G.’s “Green Onions,” the instrumental hit that signaled the emergence of Memphis soul as a dominant sound. (This is as good a place as any to mention that the actual best music movie of 1973 is Wattstax, the film of the massive festival that Stax Records hosted at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum the previous year.) “Green Onions” is, aside from Milner’s hated “Surfin’ Safari,” the only song that was actually recorded and released the year the film’s actually set. It’s almost like the film’s tagline, “Where Were You in ’62,” is answered by the soundtrack with “Anywhere but the actual ’62.” “Green Onions” is the song that plays leading up to the climax of Milner’s storyline, where he finally faces off in a drag race against Falfa (a roguish young Harrison Ford in his breakthrough role), and wins—­thanks to Falfa’s Chevy skidding off the road after a blowout and rolling itself through a field. And while the song fades before the drag race actually begins, it emerges again in an eerie way: there’s a moment of tension as we see a brief long shot of Milner’s Ford, the interchange between Steve Cropper’s guitar and Booker T. Jones’s organ rendered as a distant, tinny afterthought as he drives to the scene of the wreck. Cut to Falfa’s burning, overturned car: its occupants have miraculously survived, but everybody’s in a total panic. This is the sixties the audience knows, ominous and hazy. If “(We’re Gonna) Rock around the Clock” is the beginning of it all, the Beach Boys return to play the end. “All Summer Long” is the only song in the film to postdate the setting (not counting the recorded-­for-­the-­film selections by Flash Cadillac & the Continental Kids, who play a couple just-­ like-­the-­oldies at a school dance but are technically date stamped 1973). Its role is to provide the end credits music, and it plays right after we find out the fates of the film’s four male leads, none of which is particularly happy. Ron Howard’s character Steve has an unexciting settle-­down life as an insurance agent, still living in Modesto. This, despite emphasizing to his friend Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) that one of the benefits of college was getting to leave “this turkey town,” something Steve was reluctant

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“Do You Want to Dance?” to do. Meanwhile, Curt’s present-­day fate is that of a writer in Canada—­ presumably having moved there for the same reason many conflict-­averse people his age moved there. Terry is the obligatory victim of the Vietnam War, being reported as MIA in An Lộc in 1965. And Milner? He was killed in a car crash caused by a drunk driver in June 1964—­a month before “All Summer Long” was released as a single. That was the closest American Graffiti came to bumming anybody out. Lucas vocally resisted the idea of following his fellow New Hollywood directors in creating downer films. In a 1977 profile for Rolling Stone, he described his motivations for making American Graffiti in terms that sounded not only nostalgic, but reactionary: Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology . . . looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does. Anyway, I became very aware of the fact that the kids were really lost, the sort of heritage we built up since [World War II] had been wiped out in the Sixties and it wasn’t groovy to act that way anymore, now you just sort of sat there and got stoned. I wanted to preserve what a certain generation of Americans thought being a teenager was really about—­in a strong sense from about 1945 to 1962.

After American Graffiti, Lucas claimed that “kids today of that age rediscovered what it was to be a teenager . . . there was no cruising and then, all of a sudden, it all started up again.”2 And that renewal of traditional values—­or at least a particular youth-­ culture version of traditional values—­hit paydirt with the soundtrack. The film itself was the big push that completed the elevation of disc jockey Wolfman Jack from a cult hero to the king of American rock radio personalities. The presence of his mysterious voice was scattered throughout the movie’s AM-­broadcast backdrop like a one-­man Greek chorus until, after being sought out by Curt in an effort to reach out to a mysterious woman he’s fallen for, the Wolfman is finally revealed as a soft-­spoken romantic. The fraction of a profit-­sharing point that Lucas gave him for his appearance wound up a massive windfall when the film made its budget back over fiftyfold, giving him enough residuals to shrug off an aborted stint at New York’s WNBC and parlay his fame into countless TV and movie guest spots. But it was the entirety of the soundtrack itself—­commercially released

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American Gr affiti as a double LP, 41 Original Hits from the Soundtrack of American Graffiti—­ that sparked its own run on rock nostalgia. A succinct way to describe the time conjured up by the movie is “post-­Elvis, pre-­Beatles”—­an era neatly delineated by the collection of songs on the soundtrack, albeit missing both parties in question. (The Beatles didn’t belong; Elvis did, but Colonel Tom Parker wanted far more money for the rights than the filmmakers could afford.) One of the reasons American Graffiti was considered such a gamble for studios was the assumed cost of licensing more than forty songs, and the likely headache of gathering them all under the umbrella of one label. The budget for securing all these rights—­done through a deal that promised the same flat fee for every publisher—­was stated to be in the ballpark of $90,000, more than 10 percent of the film’s meager budget. Fatefully, the film finally getting picked up by Universal meant that parent company MCA could deal with all the hassle, and it succeeded in translating Lucas’s personal jukebox to film—­even if it meant film attorney Tom Pollock going all the way to Tennessee to convince the late Big Bopper’s mother to let them use “Chantilly Lace.”3 Gil Rodin, an executive producer for soundtracks at MCA, then went to each record company that held the rights to the songs and collected every single master tape, making sure that the soundtrack featured the best audio fidelity available. “Kids understand sound today,” he told Billboard in November 1973. “A record company can’t afford to put out anything but the best quality sound possible.”4 And the soundtrack sold millions, peaking at #10 and spending forty-­ one weeks on the Billboard album charts—­one for each song on the record. If the movie itself being a surprise success wasn’t enough, the soundtrack’s triple-­platinum clout led MCA to release two additional double-­LP compilations, albeit ones featuring music contemporaneous with but (aside from 41 Original Hits omission “Gee” by the Crows) not actually featured in the film. Aside from the title and the prominent cover shot of Milner’s yellow Ford, More American Graffiti (1975) and American Graffiti, Vol. III—­ 31 Super Oldies (1976) were largely indistinguishable from contemporaneous compilations. They weren’t even first-­of-­a-­kind: by the time American Graffiti was released, the K-­Tel imprint Increase Records had stretched its year-­by-­year radio-­reproduction series Cruisin’ from 1955 all the way to 1970. But with a post-­merger-­era Hollywood striking gold in merchandising previously released but out-­of-­print material, American Graffiti would

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“Do You Want to Dance?” establish the idea of the period-­piece soundtrack as a permanent fixture of record store shelves, a tie-­in precursor to the reissue boom. In many ways, American Graffiti was the culmination of a trend as much as it was the embodiment of it. Flash Cadillac & the Continental Kids, who appear in the film as a band called Herby and the Heartbeats, include “At the Hop” as one of their numbers—­likely a nod to Sha Na Na’s retro sideshow performance at Woodstock. Flash Cadillac released their greaser throwback of a self-­titled debut in 1972, the same year that a musical titled Grease hit Broadway and notched seven Tony nominations. Also that year, the ABC anthology series Love, American Style included an unaired pilot starring Ron Howard (“Love and the Television Set”) that would not only inspire Lucas to cast him as Steve, but would, thanks to the success of American Graffiti, resuscitate the pilot’s premise and turn it into a series called Happy Days. Elvis and Chuck Berry hit #2 and #1 on the ’72 Billboard Hot 100, respectively, with “Burnin’ Love” and “My Ding-­a-­ Ling”; and while neither of those hits were in the same league stylistically (or, in Berry’s case, artistically) compared to their ’50s classics, they still proved their brands were in demand well into the era of Alice Cooper and Grand Funk Railroad. And Bette Midler, a favorite of the gay clientele at New York’s Continental Baths, released her debut album The Divine Miss M in November ’72—­leading off with a torch song, ether-­frolic version of “Do You Want to Dance.” This revivalism was all well and good, but it came with some questionable baggage. A December 1972 piece for the New Yorker by Ellen Willis saw the author reckoning with fanzine-­spurred entreaties to return to rock’s basics. Willis pinpointed the time period that American Graffiti would go on to celebrate as “dull, mean years—­at least for middle-­class high school girls.” And while she admitted to enjoying two of the era’s throwbacks, the largely forgotten glam-­adjacent Five Dollar Shoes and the more successful Hoodoo Rhythm Devils, she couldn’t shake her skepticism over a reactionary atmosphere around it all. “We’re supposed to get back to the mythic crudity and crassness reputed to be at the heart of rock and roll before it was corrupted by meaning, sensitivity, taste, and the like. The aestheticians of the backlash may overlap with the fifties-­R&B nuts we’ve always had with us, but in general they take the spirit rather than the sound of fifties rock as their inspiration—­particularly the Dionysiac illiteracy of Jerry

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American Gr affiti Lee Lewis and Little Richard. Punk-­rock has become the favored term of endearment.”5 Cue “Do You Want to Dance” as covered by the Ramones five years later, on the Cold War–­redolently titled Rocket to Russia. There was clearly a preexisting interest in looking back at the era when the people who were teens in the ’50s and early ’60s had fewer worries, but that interest lingered long after American Graffiti left theaters (and the pop charts). By the end of the ’70s, punks and the straight world alike were immersed in the aesthetic with an odd mixture of reverence and grotesquerie, the retro iconography and references of groups like Misfits and the Cramps emerging around the same time sincere mourning over Elvis’s August ’77 death was creating a cottage industry. Even in later mutated forms that prized absurdity and camp over straightforward saudade—­such as Paul Reubens’s manic eternal-­child character Pee-­wee Herman, or John Waters’s loving-­ if-­irreverent ’62 period piece Hairspray (1988)—­there was still an air of innocence to be instilled, even if it was largely there to be punctured and poked at. That could be why More American Graffiti—­the 1979 sequel, not the 1975 compilation—­was such a major swing-­and-­a-­miss. The original film told us what happened to these characters as the ’60s wore on, but putting viewers through the paces of watching what happened to these characters turned out to be unappealing, and in some cases, a direct clash with the tone the first movie had set for them. Janet Maslin was pithily dismissive in a New York Times pan: “The times—­the story is scattered like buckshot from 1964 to 1967—­have grown dangerous, but these people haven’t awakened at all. They’re still the same fun-­loving rock-­and-­rollers, and there’s nothing they can’t trivialize. So here is a comic look at campus rioting. Here are the beach party aspects of the Vietnam War.”6 To capture the same energy as the original American Graffiti, it required another generation’s nostalgia for another supposedly more carefree time—­Bicentennial America—­for a movie to hit those same ensemble-­cast strengths with Richard Linklater’s 1976-­set, 1993-­released Dazed and Confused, swapping out hot rods and Buddy Holly for muscle cars and Foghat while keeping the teenage hangin’ around vibe largely the same. But in the end, American Graffiti and its atmosphere do more than offer cheap nostalgia and things-­were-­better-­then simplicity. That first meeting between Milner and Falfa is a remarkable moment in a film already deeply

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“Do You Want to Dance?” infused with an emotional strength and a visually arresting immersion. And “Do You Want to Dance” is the ideal ironic music cue for that scene, where the music of romance pierces a doubly unromantic moment. Milner doesn’t want to dance with Carol—­she’s nearly a full decade younger than him, a nuisance, and not even into the same music as he is. His partner here is Falfa, and the “dance” in question is a gasoline-­age version of the old Western trope of shooting at a hapless victim’s feet, a young gunslinger in a Stetson riding into town and aiming for the king of the road. Their movements are straight-­lined and the goal is to end this dance as quickly as possible. And for a twenty-­two-­year-­old Milner, who’s too old for sock hops but still clings to the songs that played during his own high school years, it’s the shared invitation of that song that gives him one last jolt of determination. The only thing he’s changing is gears, but going nowhere fast is still movement.

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Saturday Night Fever, “Disco Inferno” SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977, DIRECTED BY JOHN BADHAM) THE TRAMMPS, “DISCO INFERNO” (1976, ATLANTIC)

The 2001 Odyssey is jumping tonight. The man in the DJ booth is Monti Rock III, the flamboyant voice at the center of a handful of mid-­’70s hits by Disco-­Tex and the Sex-­O-­Lettes, and the scene he’s overseeing is filled with prospective couples making their way from the nightclub’s seated area to its garish, iconic lit-­up dance floor. As the illuminated, multicolored grid and the wheeling spotlights above cast vibrant reflections on the dancers in the otherwise dimly lit club, the song that serenades them is the raucous, pulsating 1976 single “Disco Inferno” by R&B group the Trammps, a Philadelphia institution who sound right at home in this Brooklyn venue. It’s not the biggest discotheque, but that just pulls the crowd closer and tighter. And slicing through that crowd like a shark fin through an ocean’s surface is one Tony Manero, a garishly dressed, immaculately coiffed young lover boy aiming to work his sinuous charms on both the crowd and the woman he’s dancing with. Tony’s moves are studied but elaborate, a lanky, slinky, full-­body contrast to the simple spins and shimmying of his dance partner, and his dirtbag friends look on with a mixture of admiration, inspiration, and envy as Tony threatens to escape the orbit of his dance partner entirely and ascend into the center of everybody’s attention. It’s only when the DJ switches to a more Latin-­inflected song—­much to Tony’s dismay—­that Tony abandons the dance floor and returns to where his friends are sitting, reverting to the personality he resorts to when he’s not dancing: a self-­conscious nobody, hiding behind the socially mandated veneer of a macho douchebag. Another night not long afterward, Tony and his friends are joined at

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“Disco Inferno” the 2001 Odyssey by Tony’s older brother Frank Jr., who had been considered the big success of the Manero family for becoming a Roman Catholic priest. So when Frank Jr. reveals to the family that he’s left the priesthood, it throws the whole family into an even deeper level of a turmoil, which their father’s unemployment had already made difficult for Tony to deal with. Frank Jr. has decided to join Tony in the latter’s favorite escapist venue, and appears to good-­naturedly humor Tony’s pursuits. So he’s right there to witness Tony work his disco lothario game on a young woman, Connie, who gives him a purring come-­on through her thick Brooklyn accent: “So tell me, are you as good in bed as you are on that dance floor?” “Disco Inferno” is, once again, the soundtrack to Manero’s couples dance routine, but his enthusiasm just isn’t there, and he’s brought the douchebag side of himself onto the floor with him: “Y’know, Connie, if you’re as good in bed as you are on the dance floor, I’ll bet you’re one lousy fuck.” Then the DJ segues into the Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing,” Tony scowls to Connie, “Aw, forget this,” and he breaks off from her to show off his moves—­ solo—­as the entire crowd cedes the dance floor to him.

The rise and fall of disco was one of the most perplexing phenomena to dictate popular culture in living memory. In the span of half a decade, disco grew from an opulent, up-­tempo, dance-­driven offshoot of R&B to the primary pillar of the record business’s future, and from there to relentless watering-­down and overexposure until it became a pariah genre. Dance music itself would maintain a strong hold on pop after the “death” of disco at the turn of the ’80s—­in fact, its digital mutations would go on to drive much of modern music nearly fifty years on, with many of the shifts in perception being largely semantic. A disco in 1976 compared to a club in 1986—­or 1996, or 2010, or today—­serves an identical purpose, just with different aesthetics. Dance, drink, get high, and hope to get laid, all under pulsating lights: it’s an impulse that no era can truly lay sole claim to. But as branding went, disco qua disco bore the indelible mark of a too-­ much-­too-­soon craze that a corporate music industry beat into the ground before tossing it to the curb. And while the damage to the idea of the dance club in mainstream music was minimal at best—­what are the beloved synthpop of the ’80s, the rave of the ’90s, or the EDM of the 2010s but further expansions of the disco impulse—­it still caused a moment of major

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Saturday Night Fever cultural turnover that left many veteran artists reduced to broken-­down, broken-­up backlash casualties. And few of them had the kind of claim on the genre’s roots as the Trammps—­or as prominent a place on the movie soundtrack that pulled those roots right up out of the ground. Formed in Philadelphia as a culmination of a few previous soul group incarnations—­the Volcanos, then the Moods—­the Trammps released their first single in 1972 when “disco” meant a venue but not yet a set-­ in-­stone genre. Their makeup was fairly unusual in that they were a self-­ contained unit that also consisted largely of session players: Ronnie Baker, Norman Harris, and Earl Young formed the instrumental backbone of the Trammps while also being omnipresent contributors to dozens of other groups. Young in particular held a remarkable position, simultaneously acting as the bandleader, bass singer, and drummer—­that latter role being one of the most important yet most overlooked ones in postwar twentieth-­ century pop music. As the man behind the kit for not only the Trammps but Philadelphia International Records’ studio powerhouse MFSB, Young would have the enviable task of providing the rhythmic backbone for the orchestrally lavish yet eminently danceable Philly Soul sound. And in the process, his offbeat-­accenting, hi-­hat-­heavy, four-­on-­the-­floor playing found favor with early ’70s dance club DJs, who gravitated toward records on which he played because they were recorded and mixed in a way that made the beat easy to pick up and segue with. Combine that technique with PIR’s immaculate, often experimental engineering—­Young would do everything up to and including leaving his wallet on a snare to capture a particular resonance—­and nothing sounded better on a high-­end sound system. Get the right subwoofers and it was the closest music would come to actually feeling tactile without the aid of psychedelic substances. With that groove attack completed by the lower-­than-­low end of Baker’s bass playing, the MFSB crew would not only invent what we know as the disco rhythm, they’d perfect it—­at least until Chic showed up in ’77 to elaborate magnificently on it. But until then, emerging with their work on Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ 1973 hit “The Love I Lost,” their rhythm was unbeatable, putting the lie to disco’s reputation as soullessly mechanical automated music. Now put that sound to work for the Trammps, a vocal group that modernized the soul harmonizing and vocal rapport of rhythm and blues predecessors like the Coasters and the “5” Royales, with

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“Disco Inferno” gospel-­hewn lead tenor Jimmy Ellis providing the perfect blend of melodic runs and percussive emphasis, and you’ve got something supernaturally powerful. A string of singles (including the 1972 #17 hit “Zing Went the Strings of My Heart”) and an LP on Buddah Records (1975’s great-­if-­belated compendium The Legendary Zing Album) preceded their first and only album under the aegis of PIR, a self-­titled release on the Harris-­Baker-­Young imprint Golden Fleece that dropped in the summer of ’75. (One cut from that album, “Where Do We Go from Here,” was the last song ever played at New York’s cradle-­of-­disco landmark Paradise Garage when it closed in 1987.) Once they signed to Atlantic, their successive singles did even better, with “That’s Where the Happy People Go” and “Disco Party” both hitting #1 on Billboard’s dance club charts in 1976. But “Disco Inferno” was their revelation. When the title cut to their second Atlantic LP hit the dance charts and took only four weeks to peak at #1—­tied into two other songs, “Starvin’” and “Body Contact Contract”—­it became one of the fastest-­rising singles in the chart’s young history, matched only by its immediate successor in T-­Connection’s “Do What You Wanna Do” and not bested until Prince’s “When Doves Cry” hit the top after three weeks in 1984. Even considering its omnipresence over nearly half a century, it’s easy to figure out why it held such lofty status. The opening is one of the biggest wallops to ever come from the Philly Soul sound—­a pendulum-­swinging roller coaster of an intro where both the strings and the bass freefall out of control until they bungee back up to a hundred-­ story height. Jimmy Ellis’s lead vocal is particularly gutsy; rock snobs who loved to claim that disco “lacked balls” must have missed his performance, sending lines like “Satisfaction / Came in a chain reaction / I couldn’t get enough / So I had to self-­destruct” farther than even the longest Reggie Jackson moonshot homer. It was the only song on the album produced, arranged, or written by their keyboardist Ron “Have Mercy” Kersey; he more than earned his nickname with it. Disco cognoscenti dug it from the start. Tom Moulton, the pioneering mixer/producer who worked regularly with PIR to create extended disco mixes of their releases, concocted a mammoth nineteen-­minute 12″ acetate that was eventually pared down to a more manageable eleven minutes. (“I loved the Trammps,” Moulton told Bill Brewster in 1998. “I would’ve done their songs for nothing. Anything they did, they just brought out a

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Saturday Night Fever joy inside me. Like I was at a church revival. It was an honor.”)1 In his January 8, 1977, “Disco Files” column, Vince Aletti said it was “no surprise” that “Disco Inferno” was the talk of the town, comparing the album’s release to “the premiere of a Major Motion Picture or the publication of a Major New Novel” and declaring that while it was “nothing new,” it “certainly establishes them as the very best at what they do . . . scorching hot music and searing vocals.”2 Before January was out, Aletti praised “Disco Inferno” as part of an exciting new crop of records, along with more club-­bound classics by Cerrone (Love in C Minor) and Loleatta Holloway (Loleatta). In his February 12 survey of discos across the country, all four listed—­in Phoenix, New York, Newark, and Los Angeles—­had “Disco Inferno” in heavy rotation.3 That made it something of a gimme by the time Tony Manero danced to it in December ’77. But to the diehards, “Disco Inferno” was the kind of song that went from a hot new thing at the beginning of the year to a well-­rinsed standby near the end of it. François Kevorkian, whose career has spanned from early disco to the 2010s EDM boom, recalled that by autumn of that year, his gig at the commercial-­crowd club New York, New York was reliant on big hits to the point that “I had to play [‘Disco Inferno’] so many times I became ill.”4 And that was before the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack boosted it back onto the Hot 100 in the spring of ’78, a #11 slot on the Hot 100 (compared to its #53 position the first time around), giving it far more life on the charts than anything from their November ’77 LP The Trammps III could ever manage. The clubs made the song on the dance charts, but Saturday Night Fever pushed it to the pop charts—­just the simplest example of the dichotomy between the disco reality and the film’s fabrications. And the fabrications were almost entirely total. One of the most infamous facts about Saturday Night Fever is that it was based on a 1976 Nik Cohn article for New York magazine, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” that Cohn revealed decades later to be almost completely made up. A February 1995 piece for South Africa’s weekly newspaper Mail & Guardian saw Cohn admitting that Vincent, the “best dancer in Bay Ridge [and] the Ultimate Face” protagonist of his story and inspiration for Tony Manero, didn’t actually exist: “I’d only recently arrived in New York. Far from being steeped in Brooklyn street life, I hardly knew the place. As for Vincent, my story’s hero, he was largely inspired by a Shepherd’s Bush mod whom I’d known in the Sixties, a one-­time king of Goldhawk Road.”5

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“Disco Inferno” Aside from an entirely different continent, decade, and subculture informing the characterizations that Cohn brought to his story, the film did manage to capture a particularly vivid corner of Brooklyn and its disco scene. That’s thanks in part to John Travolta’s pitch-­perfect portrayal of a messed-­up, frustrated young lothario on the verge of figuring out if he’s going to follow in the footsteps of his dirtbag friends or find something better across the East River. When he scouted the 2001 Odyssey for inspiration, Travolta’s preexisting fame as the teenage himbo Vinnie Barbarino in TV’s Welcome Back, Kotter meant he drew envy-­stoking attention: “A couple of guys would be talking to me, their girlfriends would come up, they’d say, ‘Hey, stay away from him, don’t bug Travolta. Don’t bother me, I’m talking to The Man!’ And they’d actually push the girls away: Tony Manero’s whole male-­chauvinist thing. I got it from watching those guys in the disco.”6 But Travolta got his moves elsewhere. A 2007 Vanity Fair retrospective saw him reveal that, as a teenager, “I liked black dancing better than white dancing. I used to watch Soul Train, and what I wanted to create was a Soul Train feel in Saturday Night Fever.” His famous strut at the beginning of the film “was the walk of coolness. I went to a school that was 50 percent black, and that’s how the black kids walked through the hall.”7 Travolta hesitated to take the role because he didn’t consider himself a great dancer—­romantic partner and close friend Diana Hyland had to urge him to go for it—­but he was soon guided into the disco world by dance gurus Deney Terrio and Lester Wilson. Terrio, a white man, later parlayed his notoriety as Travolta’s dance coach into a gig hosting syndicated TV dance competition series Dance Fever. Wilson, the Black gay man who did the lion’s share of choreography for the film, would continue to work for film and TV until his death in 1993, but he never got quite the mainstream face-­ of-­dance shine that Terrio did. That cultural imbalance carries through to the soundtrack—­a double LP that sold over forty million copies and gave disco a major boost in the public spotlight, thanks largely to the combined success of the film itself and the music of the Bee Gees. A lot has been made of how producer Robert Stigwood used the film to take his RSO Records stalwarts, who’d already reinvented themselves from ’60s baroque pop-­ rockers to mid-­’70s blue-­eyed soul, and transform them into the biggest band in the world. Their 1975 LP Main Course had notched two Top 10 hits out of their Miami-­baked turn toward disco, which had fully reenergized

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Saturday Night Fever them after years of struggle and acrimony. The Stevie Wonder–­esque synth shuffle of #1 hit “Jive Talkin’” and the glittery high drama of #7 hit “Nights on Broadway” put them in the unexpected company of the Miami hitmakers on TK Records—­like a somewhat more sophisticated take on KC & the Sunshine Band’s giddy party jams—­and also typecast them in ways they’d eventually push back against. One of the keys to that success, and the backlash against it, was Barry Gibb’s (in)famous falsetto, which first appeared as a series of ad-­libs during the outro to “Nights on Broadway” and pierced through the throb of Fever soundtrack centerpieces like their ’76 hit “You Should Be Dancing” and the massive, written-­for-­the-­movie “Stayin’ Alive.” As acknowledged by Barry, particularly in the 2020 documentary The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, that voice was inspired directly by soul singers like the Stylistics’ Russell Thompkins Jr. and the Delfonics’ William Hart. But the Stylistics and the Delfonics were pigeonholed as R&B acts—­meaning they were marketed and portrayed as products for a Black audience—­while the white Bee Gees were considered more of a general, all-­genre pop act. This was the key to making the biggest disco crossover album in history: the idea, lost somewhere in the turn toward “serious” rock music in the late ’60s, that straight white people also wanted music they could dance to. But the Bee Gees weren’t alone in this whitewashing dilution. And the deeper questions brought up by the soundtrack are just as key to figuring out how Saturday Night Fever presented an incomplete portrayal of disco culture. While the Bee Gees–­written and performed material dominated the album, much of the remainder of the double LP’s worth of tunes was filled out by kitschy stuff like Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” and David Shire’s similarly disco-­goes-­classical take on Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain.” And only three songs out of the nineteen included on the soundtrack album—­“Disco Inferno,” Kool & the Gang’s “Open Sesame,” and Tavares’s version of the Gibbs-­penned “More Than a Woman”—­ feature Black voices. (Instrumentals like MFSB’s “K-­Jee” and Ralph MacDonald’s “Calypso Breakdown” provided additional representation, but to anonymizing, borderline-­colorblind effect.) Compare that with some of the hot hits listed on contemporaneous New York disco playlists of 1977. April 9, 1977, Nicky Siano at the Gallery: Syreeta, Natalie Cole, and Patrick Adams’s studio project Cloud One. May 7, 1977; David Mancuso at the Loft: Idris Muhammad, Loleatta Holloway, and

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“Disco Inferno” Teddy Pendergrass. October 8, 1977, Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage: New Birth, Thelma Houston, and Diana Ross.8 Straight or gay, Black, Latin, or white, DJs in the disco-­pumping heart of New York centered Black artists even when Europeans like Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk, and Cerrone began to introduce a new techno-­continental strain of sound to the mix. While Aletti’s review of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack—­released in advance of the film itself—­was positive, it’s also a fascinating exercise to contrast the album’s contents with what was going on in the discos as 1978 loomed. Bee Gees aside, Saturday Night Fever was largely selling the sound of 1975–­76 in the waning weeks of 1977, when songs like the synthesized euphoria of Donna Summer’s Moroder-­produced “I Feel Love” and the sophisticated musicianship of early Chic hits like “Everybody Dance” were pushing the disco sound in new directions. Now couple that with Travolta’s perception early in production that Saturday Night Fever would be a recent period piece about a fading trend. “It was on its way out. The clothing I wore in the movie, the polyester this and that was all finished when we did the movie,” he stated in one interview.9 It was a revival that came across as regressive: the film considered the definitive document of disco isn’t just a whitewashed, straightwashed version of a much more diverse movement, but a cynical mutation of it. While disco culture was originally a confluence of intersectional cultures—­Black, gay, and Latin in particular—­we only see these cultures as objects of ridicule among Tony and his friends for most of the film. There are signs on the margins of Tony acknowledging the Black aspects of the art form—­a Commodores poster joins Rocky, Serpico, and Farrah Fawcett on his bedroom walls—­and sparse admissions of his picking up his swagger from secondhand knowledge. (Stephanie: “Nice move. Did you make that up?” Tony: “Yeah, well, I saw it on TV first, then I made it up.”) But in a movie where one of the earliest acknowledgements of ethnicity outside Bay Ridge Italian is Tony chortling some ethnic slur–­filled sex jokes to get a laugh out of his friends, the racial implications are impossible to ignore. In the film, that segregation stands out most starkly during the climactic dance scene. Tony and his friends have just come back from the hospital after attempting to violently avenge one of their crew’s beating at the hands of a Puerto Rican gang—­a matter complicated by the beating victim’s later confession that this gang might not even have been the actual culprits. The first dance contest competitors we see are a Black couple who

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Saturday Night Fever get down to “Open Sesame,” and the mostly white partisan crowd boos them when their routine ends. Tony and Stephanie follow that act, swaying and slinking to the Bee Gees’ version of “More Than a Woman” in what a more crowd-­pleasing film would present as the most carefree and deserved moment of victory. Despite being challenged by a Puerto Rican couple’s spectacular routine to “K-­Jee,” Tony and Stephanie are awarded the grand prize, the Puerto Ricans runners-­up. (The Black couple don’t even make the podium.) As “Stayin’ Alive” plays, a disgusted Tony, struck with a sense of frustrated justice, gives his trophy and $500 cash prize to the second-­ place couple. It’s a disillusionment that almost feels like an epiphany until he cruelly attempts to rape Stephanie afterward, the start of a brief but steep descent into tragedy that has him rethinking his whole existence. Divorced from the idea of disco purism and cultural appropriation, Saturday Night Fever still works well as a class study, a blue-­collar dreamer’s perspective on a scene retrospectively considered the bourgeois pursuit of Studio 54’s rich, beautiful people. Tony and friends are into booze, not cocaine; their ride is a beater ’60s Impala, not the Mercedes or Cadillac they enviously eye on a car lot. Over the course of the film, it becomes clear that Tony’s attachment to the disco is his only form of escape from a dead-­end job at a hardware store and a stressful life at home with his overbearing parents—­and when that escape is intruded on by his illusion of meritocracy being shattered, he takes that out on everyone around him. He abandons his first dance-­partner girlfriend, the tough-­but-­sympathetic Annette, for being sexually unavailable, then sexually assaults Stephanie when she proves to be unreceptive to his advances. In the end, Tony abandons it all—­his gang, Annette, the Odyssey—­in an effort to reconcile with Stephanie in the promised land of Manhattan. But after the dance contest, we don’t hear any more disco—­just a downtempo Bee Gees ballad, “How Deep Is Your Love,” that plays during the ending credits. Dancing and music have become tied in so deeply with everything Tony does wrong in the film that it’s tempting to hear the soundtrack in an unnerving, often tragic light. “Disco Inferno” accompanies his first trip to the dance floor, but it’s long distant by the last scene, and an admission Tony makes to Stephanie earlier in the movie—­“Dancin’ can’t last forever, it’s a short-­lived kinda thing”—­echoes the film’s original tagline, “Where do you go when the record is over . . .” That gives an extra weight to an early scene that hinted at disco-­as-­fad, the domain of aging,

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“Disco Inferno” pathetic sleazes like the dance studio instructor who brags about scoring with 65 percent of the Odyssey’s female clientele. Where does he go when the record’s over? To a class where he teaches seniors to boogie down to Rick Dees’s abysmal novelty hit “Disco Duck.” If disco had its origins as a polycultural communal experience, Saturday Night Fever depicts its eventual fate as the hopelessly straight mating-­ritual pickup joint that earned rockers’ mortified loathing. That loathing calcified into backlash, the grievances of hesher teens and college wiseasses manifested in Chicago’s summer ’79 Disco Demolition Night and the Manero-­mocking death-­before-­disco sentiments displayed in early ’80s comedies like Airplane! and Stripes. And the disco backlash came for everyone who ever got hit with light reflected off a mirror ball. Many of its practitioners not only survived but helped shape the ’80s—­Giorgio Moroder and Chic’s Nile Rodgers remained massive MTV-­ darling hitmakers for artists like David Bowie and Duran Duran—­while UK synthpoppers like New Order and American club-­cultivated artists like Madonna carried remnant sounds into new chartbusters. But veteran groups like the Trammps were left as casualties, with “Disco Inferno” used as a goofball punchline for the Ghostbusters film, the Tiny Toon Adventures animated series, and a namesake loser of a heel wrestler in WCW to denote hapless uncool. The Bee Gees were hit hard, too, but at least they took on a second life as hit songwriters. The Trammps’ last album for Atlantic dropped in 1980, and just like that, they were yesterday’s news. Fortunately, that’s not the big takeaway that Earl Young got from the success of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Regarding his “Disco Inferno” backup vocalist / “K-­Jee” drummer double duty, “I’m one of the few people to receive two Grammys on the same album doing two different things,” he remarked during an extended interview for the BBC/WGBH documentary TV series Rock & Roll in 1995.10 And the pull of the beat he pioneered? That’s stayed alive forever.

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Killer of Sheep, “This Bitter Earth” KILLER OF SHEEP (1978, DIRECTED BY CHARLES BURNETT) DINAH WASHINGTON, “THIS BITTER EARTH” (1961, MERCURY)

Stan (Henry Sanders) is a working-­c lass employee at a slaughterhouse in Los Angeles’s mostly Black Watts neighborhood, an existence that helps him support his wife (Kaycee Moore) and two kids but doesn’t provide much more than the minimum subsistence—­financially or emotionally. And while we watch intermittent scenes of his children and other neighborhood kids running and playing outdoors, living just for the joy of it, the main thread of Stan’s disillusioning life carries the film through a series of vignettes that are more an accumulation of annoyances, mishaps, and miseries that compound the sense that Stan’s merely functioning rather than really living. His job is both numbingly drenched in the air of animal death and steeped in a lingering vestige of agrarian life amid a city typically portrayed as sunny and glamorous. There are moments of attempted respite, but they’re short and ambivalent. And the most striking one is when Stan attempts to reconnect with both his concerned wife and his own emotional well-­being. It’s a lingering moment of intimacy: for more than two and a half uninterrupted minutes, Stan, shirtless, slow dances with his wife, both their movements almost meditative in their incidental grace. It’s not a showy effort, not a Hollywood moment of romance, but a physical effort to recollect and reclaim something that’s been lost, the kind of affection infused with longing and need and hope. The soundtrack to this moment, Dinah Washington’s recording of Clyde Otis’s “This Bitter Earth,” is from another time and place, the lingering sounds of a moment where maybe things felt more optimistic for both Stan and his wife, scoring a dance that turns out to be literally

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“This Bitter Earth” going through the motions. The first time you see it, it’s not quite readily apparent, but knowing how the dance ends—­moments after the music does, with Stan breaking off contact and leaving his wife sobbing over his disconnection as her voice-­over retreats into flashes of what sound like her own lingering memories—­it’s possible to spot a certain vacant disconnect in Stan’s eyes, that failure to shake off the ennui even amid what should be one of those rare moments of pure happiness.

In the early 1970s, Black American cinema was considered primarily as a vein for style-­drenched forays into a culture that had, until quite recently, been considered an impenetrable fortress of Otherness. When that Otherness was pushed back against, particularly in the mass-­media epoch that turned the civil rights movement into a regularly broadcast feature of American life, the market gradually opened for further depictions of Black America—­most often fictionalized, lightly or luridly, and typically in ways that emphasized their lives as either comedic or action-­packed. You could have a film where Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, and Richard Pryor all ricocheted outlandish jokes and goofy scenarios off one another, or one where Richard Roundtree or Isaac Hayes worked outside the law as PIs or bounty hunters to target a criminal element as ass-­kicking quasi-­vigilante heroes. You could even have gangster antiheroes like Ron O’Neal’s coke dealer in Super Fly, so long as he’s looking for a way out of the game and Curtis Mayfield’s music is there to remind us with a supernaturally felt empathy for the pusherman’s victims that this is not the life you want. The 1970s saw openings for Black media autonomy, but the messages that audiences and financiers outside that world expected were still being adjusted in an attempt to figure out what would work for a more multicultural mass audience. And for a Black viewer—­or any viewer outside the assumed white, middle-­class audience viewing a depiction of their own culture—­seeing faces on the screen that look more like yours doesn’t always register when the experiences are still impossibly foreign to your own. Action and comedy made for excellent film in an escapist sense, but when viewers are not living their lives as trickster wiseasses or Bad Motherfuckers, the representative dissonance can gnaw at them almost as much as exclusionary invisibility can. So when a new wave of independent, film studies–­steeped cinephiles emerged in the 1960s in search of something

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Killer of Sheep different, it opened up a few new doors for filmmakers to express their own perspectives—­ones that they recognized as more personal and even idiosyncratic than what even a slowly progressing mass market typically demanded. Charles Burnett was one of them. Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1944, he had moved with his family to Watts three years later and was deeply informed by the area’s Great Migration–­fueled sense of blue-­collar relocated southernness. Initially he went to school to study to be an electrician, seeing it as the necessary reliable career that would hopefully help support his hobbyist interest in artistic storytelling. But when his creative impulses became impossible to ignore, he switched to studying writing instead. During the 1965 Watts Riots—­sparked by a history of police brutality and catalyzed by the arrest of Marquette Frye, a junior high classmate of Burnett’s—­Charles would see the smoke columns rising from his neighborhood on the bus ride home from a job search, a constant dose of reality piercing the veil.1 Reconciling it all took a significant amount of hard work and study, but eventually Burnett earned his BA in writing and languages at UCLA, and the intersection between his love for writing and his lifelong fascination with photography became the catalyst for his entrance into film studies. “Before entering UCLA, I was very illiterate about the cinema,” he admitted to La Revue du cinema in a 1981 interview. “I didn’t know film history well at all, and I only gradually became interested in the work of directors and cinematographers and learned to recognize it. I was also impressed by old movies, especially the French films of Vigo, Renoir, and Bresson, and the old Hollywood movies as well.”2 Under the tutelage of Basil Wright, the English documentary filmmaker/scholar/critic, Burnett learned the importance of humanist perspectives alongside the importance of documenting reality in a non-­revisionist manner, separated from the filmmaker’s own values. Still, Burnett filmed Killer of Sheep in a way that was at least somewhat informed by the values and experiences he shared with its working-­class subjects, all while attempting to reconcile how much his college education made his life path diverge from those of his peers. In that way, the film he would eventually submit as his MFA thesis in 1977 was positioned as a depiction of a Black experience, but not in an attempt to either pigeonhole or universalize the lives of the film’s subjects. Burnett was crucial to the UCLA

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“This Bitter Earth” Film School’s development of the Black Independent Movement, aka “The LA Rebellion,” a strain of filmmaking that emphasized a broader scope of concerns beyond (yet still encompassing) race in America, including matters of class struggle and solidarity with underrepresented regions of international film. In solidarity with fellow Black filmmakers Julie Dash, Billy Woodberry, Haile Gerima, and Larry Clark, Burnett was able to highlight independent film’s necessity to portray people outside mainstream film’s purview as non-­monolithic individuals with autonomy and lived experience, not just as ciphers. Yet Burnett still harbored some self-­consciousness—­and not just because he’d experienced an education that many people in his community couldn’t connect with. When during a barbershop visit he expressed a fondness for the creative work and activism of Paul Robeson, some of the barbers—­who, like Burnett’s parents, had moved to Watts from the South—­dismissed him as unpatriotic due to his communist sympathies and subsequent critiques of American policy. “I said, ‘What? This is a guy who was fighting for you, standing up for your rights, protesting segregation, and so forth,’” Burnett told the journal Positif in 1990. “They asked me what I knew about picking cotton, about segregation and all those things. I’d made them angry.” One jokingly offered to buy him a one-­way ticket to Russia.3 So creating a story that didn’t impose an obvious moralistic message onto the characters in the film while still provoking deep analysis and discussion required a deft touch. Killer of Sheep, along with subsequent films like My Brother’s Wedding (1983) and To Sleep with Anger (1990), was informed by and often compared to the Neorealist films of postwar Italy, though Burnett found the poetic realism and minimalism of the aforementioned French filmmakers just as important (or even more so) to the actual spirit of his work. In making a film about a working-­class corner of the world, Burnett wanted to make something impressionistic, something that showed the character and all the strengths and weaknesses of its main subject while portraying him going through a life that seemed unlikely to change. “I’ve worked on (and seen) many movies about the working class that showed the exploitation, then the consciousness raising, the organization through unions, the victory, and so forth,” he told La Revue du cinema. “But in reality, it doesn’t happen like that. The people I know are out of

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Killer of Sheep work; the kind of movie where all the problems get solved can’t be of any interest to them. Life is not an object lesson of the type A + B = C.”4 Stan’s inability to find a way out of his rut is the focus of the film, and the fact that it isn’t resolved by the traditional narrative routes—­no sordid turn to crime, no deus ex machina stroke of good luck, no by-­your-­bootstraps fantasy of salvation through toil—­makes it one of cinema’s great portraits of working-­class life in a post-­prosperity America that didn’t quite realize yet that the decline would just keep going. When not having to rely on the Salvation Army is what Stan considers the barometer of whether or not someone’s actually struggling, the idea of class mobility—­and the better life that mobility (sometimes falsely) promises—­seems abstract at best. Burnett’s choice of music in Killer of Sheep reflects his philosophy in several respects, some of which were utilitarian, but all of which had the weight of his lived experience. As one of the handful of ways he could connect his smaller-­scale project to a broader audience, he made popular and classical music of all sorts a constant presence in the film, most of which fell in the general (and extremely broad) scope of Black American music throughout the twentieth century—­everything from Scott Joplin to Earth, Wind & Fire. This was a surprisingly rare move for any film that wasn’t a period piece or otherwise bound to the depiction of a wide stretch of time, but Burnett’s purpose was both personal and sociocultural: with the depiction of a multigenerational experience in Watts, from his parents’ generation to his own’s to that of his generation’s children, there are some things that seem to linger, familial and community connections made through a shared relationship to music. Burnett put it this way when I spoke to him, on the subject of his relationship with the blues and the usage of Little Walter’s 1952 song “Mean Old World” in the film, deployed during one of Stan’s slaughterhouse work scenes: I always liked that piece of music. When you’re quite young, you play the blues, you don’t really understand what it’s about until you get older; I didn’t realize the lyrics and what they meant, [though] I sort of experienced what these guys are singing about. If I’d been older and more experienced, the music and what it meant would probably [feel] a little different. Most of the guys I hung out with were older, and they were into the blues with me. It was more meaningful to them, and I was just following on—­because everyone else liked it, I liked it.

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“This Bitter Earth” I didn’t really have the . . . depth there, but I liked the music because I grew up with a nostalgic element to it. And I remember not even knowing that I had it growing so much as a part of me. There was a period where I wasn’t listening to anything except rock and roll. But I just remember walking down the street, humming these [blues] tunes.5

Blues in the early-­mid 1970s, meanwhile, was at an odd point in its history. The likes of the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck had used its mythos and its structure to build multimillion-­dollar edifices to its influence, all while subsuming it into the increasingly white-­coded world of rock ’n’ roll. Some artists met that tendency halfway, and spent their later careers playing all-­star jams with blues-­rockers—­Howlin’ Wolf cutting a session with Clapton, Steve Winwood, and members of the Rolling Stones (1971’s The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions), Muddy Waters recording with Winwood and Rory Gallagher (1972’s The London Muddy Waters Sessions), and John Lee Hooker teaming up with Canned Heat (1971’s Hooker ’n Heat) or Steve Miller (that same year’s Endless Boogie). Other veterans like B. B. King, Albert King, and Bobby “Blue” Bland were releasing records that were fantastic in their own right, but were infused with a lateral crossover sensibility that pulled their sounds significantly closer to their R&B contemporaries. Meanwhile, archival and reissue material was still hard to come by; in many instances, Burnett’s choice of soundtrack relied on what was physically available to him. Before picking “This Bitter Earth,” Burnett had a different song in mind: “Sad Lover Blues” by the Panamanian American Luis Russell and His Orchestra from 1946. It’s a similar tempo, and would have infused a similar melancholy and ambivalence into the scene, but having Stan and his wife dance to a song from twenty-­five years previous to the film instead of ten places that scene’s longing and alienation in a different light, considering how much younger the characters would have been when it came out—­adults finally discovering the meaning of a blues that might have eluded them as youths. But the vagaries of time caused another problem in itself: the copy of the song Burnett wanted to source the music from was on a brittle 78 rpm record, and there was a crack running through it that made it unplayable. By the time he’d found another copy, the Dinah Washington version of “This Bitter Earth” he’d used as a substitute had grown to fit the scene so well that he shelved “Sad Lover Blues” entirely.6

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Killer of Sheep It would, however, be used in the trailer to the film when it was finally restored and given wide release in 2007. The preservationist aspect is notable in itself: Burnett wanted to create something of a musical history of Black popular music in tandem with his depiction of a segment of its audience who felt it bone deep. But Killer of Sheep had at least one particularly unusual cross-­media relationship with the music that hadn’t necessarily been thought of in a commercial sense: can a film be blues? Not necessarily based on its soundtrack—­though the presence of music by Little Walter, Lowell Fulson, Arthur Crudup, and Cecil Gant in the film acted as a solid reminder—­but based on its sense of an old world having been left behind yet still permeating your experience, of once-­familiar, now-­distant time and place retaining a haunting presence in its occupants’ lives, both sorrowfully and beautifully. It’s not nostalgia, per se, but a living structure of being in the world, a heightened awareness of futility or frustration or desire that expresses itself with an unmediated and direct emotional power—­and, funnily enough, finds some moments of joy through it. As a sub-­$10,000 student film directed by a then-­amateur enthusiast at the dawn of his career, with lead Sanders as its only professional actor and a 16 mm black-­and-­white film stock as its medium, Killer of Sheep has that sort of “here’s a tape recorder, now sing” quality to it—­including inspired moments of spontaneity and improvisation, like Moore’s diatribe against two men trying to rope Stan into a criminal plot—­that made Alan Lomax’s field recordings of folk and blues feel so detached from the machinery of show business. There are, in fact, very few indications other than a few stray fashion choices that we are in what is commonly depicted as the seventies. The one clear contemporaneous reference is a small but touching moment where Earth, Wind & Fire’s 1975 R&B ballad “Reasons” provides a sing-­along moment for Stan’s young daughter (played by Burnett’s niece Angela)—­who may very well not know the blues yet herself, but likely will soon enough—­ while Stan’s wife, anticipating a romantic moment with her husband, does her face. (For all its simplicity, the moment where Stan’s wife stops to watch her daughter sing with a reflective smile on her face is one of the sweetest depictions of familial love in independent American cinema.) It feels more like a place where a few things may change with the times, and styles may shift, but the blue-­collar setting—­and the grayscale palette that mutes the

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“This Bitter Earth” era’s Day-­Glo flourishes—­retains some longer, deeper sense of being in a life that too often seems like a holding pattern. That makes the inclusion of Dinah Washington worth diving into in a musicological sense. For all her talents and the popularity it won her, her reputation among the jazz-­purist set suffered from the perception that she was crossing over—­losing her roots, selling out, becoming someone besides herself. As a richly emotive jazz vocalist with a facility with rhythm and blues, pop, and just about any other genre you could throw at her, Washington was such a steady presence in the R&B top ten in the late ’40s and early ’50s that incursions to the mainstream pop music world would be inevitable. The 1959 What a Diff’rence a Day Makes! LP was the shock that landed her a Top 10 single and Best R&B Performance Grammy from the title cut, positioning her as the vocal force of an album that relied heavily on lavish orchestral arrangements and decade-­old pop standards. Within two years, the LP Unforgettable—­which opened with “This Bitter Earth”—­would render that shift into a formula of sorts. The sound wasn’t particularly distant from the rightly revered, string-­drenched productions Ray Charles was helming around the same time, but it was still shrugged at by aficionados of her early work who preferred raw brassiness to symphonic opulence. But that’s the danger of being perceived as a “crossover” artist. A musician may make a move like that just to explore their range or bring something uniquely their own to a mainstream style and the audience that goes with it, but that can be seen as abandoning a more “legitimate” down-­to-­earth audience—­often less by the standards of the actual audience than by the cognoscenti who see that audience as a proxy for artistic legitimacy. Burnett resituating “This Bitter Earth” as the theme to Stan’s dance with his wife brought out the truth of the matter, that there is no predictably typical audience for any given piece of music when it becomes popular enough. Why would working in a slaughterhouse, or being married to a man who does, preclude a love for lush pop standards sung by an artist as expressive as Washington? For decades after its 1978 completion, Killer of Sheep was nearly impossible to track down for viewing. Despite winning fans in Europe, including a Critics’ Award at the 1981 Berlin International Film Festival, Burnett was reluctant to put the effort into clearing the rights to all the music for what he considered a thesis film not meant for wide release. But the film’s

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Killer of Sheep reputation held, with many critics and cinephiles declaring it maybe the closest American cinema ever got to capturing the same feeling as Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 Italian Neorealist masterpiece Bicycle Thieves, and its 1990 inclusion as one of the first fifty films in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry ensured its reputation as one of the best movies you couldn’t readily see. You can see it now, of course, but it’s not the same film—­not exactly. When it came time to restore it in a joint 2007 effort by Milestone Film and Video and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, it took a bit of financial assistance and legal legwork to get all the music rights sorted out. The effort was aided by $75,000 from director Steven Soderbergh, a canny user of pop-­song soundtracks himself (Out of Sight, The Limey, and Magic Mike being some of his most memorable). But there was one sticking point: “Unforgettable,” the title cut from the same Dinah Washington album as “This Bitter Earth,” was unable to be cleared because the owner of the publishing rights to the Irving Gordon–­penned standard refused to lease them to Milestone. This meant trouble for the final scene of the film, a vignette where Stan—­looking actively frustrated, even angry, more than any other point in the film—­sends a succession of still-­living sheep to their eventual fate, whipping them with a cloth and stringing them up by their legs. Instead of the ironic counterpoint of a simmering love song accompanying Stan’s soul-­deadening job, Burnett made the choice to reprise “This Bitter Earth”—­a similar-­sounding selection, true, but also one that provided a more ambivalent ending, Stan’s bloody toil scored by the same song that accompanied his heartache-­ridden attempt to reconnect with his wife. Does changing the song change the ending of the film? That seems to be an interpretation left to the viewer; Burnett has only hinted at or shrugged off the implication that it has on more than just a surface level.7 Thankfully, a film that was created in part to chronicle a once-­vanishing part of Black music history has itself been preserved, and with it, its own iconography for future generations to discover. (One scene, featuring children jumping from one three-­story-­high apartment roof to another in an act of everyday-­daredevil youthfulness, had one of its frames lifted to become the cover of Brooklyn rapper/actor Mos Def’s excellent 2009 album The Ecstatic.) And the old blues songs that Burnett sourced from his own family’s collection can be heard more readily now, with reissues becoming

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“This Bitter Earth” one of the most lucrative and preservationist tendencies of the music business from the CD era to streaming; all you need to do now to hear “Sad Lover Blues” is find a copy of his remastered compilation Giving You Jazz! online along with fifty-­eight other recordings of Russell’s. It’s like the market discovered what the subjects of Killer of Sheep and other working-­class people knew all along: you don’t just throw away old things as long as they still work.

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Apocalypse Now, “The End” APOCALYPSE NOW (1979, DIRECTED BY FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA) THE DOORS, “THE END” (1967, ELEKTRA)

For just over a minute, we are subjected to a shot that exhibits the brutality of the Vietnam War, as expressed without any visible on-­screen human presence. It’s a wide shot that fades in, silently, on a grove of trees at the edge of a clearing, radiant, verdant green framed under a partly cloudy sky. Then, whisking by like a phantom, is the brief silhouette of a helicopter, accompanied by a surrealistic bit of Foley that sounds less like a chopper’s engine than a bolo being swung rapidly through the air. Acrid-­looking yellow smoke starts to waft through the frame—­and then, as if to embody the sonic qualities of that smoke, we hear a guitar, played with a sort of serpentine scaling in a style that halfway resembles the raga of Indian classical music. The smoke builds as the music does—­a quiet, steady drumbeat, then a trembling tambourine—­and we see another brief helicopter fly by a split second before all hell breaks loose. The jungle is immersed in a screen-­ flooding napalm conflagration, one that explodes right as the voice of Jim Morrison intones, with dazed solemnity, that “this is the end.” But it’s just the prelude. As the song continues through the flames and the smoke, the upside-­down face of Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) appears superimposed over the inferno, glossy with sweat and fixed with a stare that seems to linger much farther than a thousand yards. Helicopter rotors whir in contrast to the ceiling fan in Willard’s Saigon hotel room, his environs a blur between the wartime front he’s all too familiar with and the room that provides no respite from it. The song initially seems to recede into the background—­shortly after Morrison sings “all the children are insane”—­for a brief interlude where Willard attempts to

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“The End” confront his inner turmoil and the idea that being detached from the front is making him weak. But it explodes onto the soundtrack once again as his cooped-­up anxiety finally fuels a violent outburst, Morrison’s voice barking in outbursts of profanity as Willard, in a preview of the film’s climax, stares dead-­eyed into a conflagration—­then mutilates himself by karate punching a mirror, smearing his own blood all over his face and falling into an alcohol-­soaked emotional abyss. Despite this volatile mind state—­or maybe because of it—­Willard is given an important mission: Special Forces operative Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) has apparently become mentally unsound and disobeyed his commanders in order to wage his own unauthorized guerilla operation from a Cambodian outpost. Rumors abound of his cultlike command of the soldiers and villagers who are in thrall to him, who see him as something of a living deity. After a long journey up the Nùng River, one that sees Willard facing escalating horrors and the deaths of several crewmen on his boat, he finally finds Kurtz’s camp and confronts him, only to realize he has no idea what to do after Kurtz regales him with a series of philosophical monologues that bring the tragedy of Kurtz’s experiences into focus. Eventually it becomes clear that Kurtz is letting Willard roam free throughout the outpost because Kurtz wants to die a noble death at the hands of a fellow soldier; while the rest of the villagers in the outpost ritually slaughter a water buffalo, Willard takes up a machete of his own and kills Kurtz to the reprise of the same up-­tempo movement of “The End” we hear during his self-­destructive hotel outburst. Then the music ends, and Kurtz, dying faceup, finally gasps out, “The horror. The horror.”

Remembering the Doors favorably means taking a lot of odd contradictions and sometimes-­embarrassing pretense as part of the package. But it’s not out of the question to invoke Jim Morrison as an iconic, epochal, even definitive sex symbol who also happened to present himself as more intellectual (or at least artsy) than predecessors like James Dean or Elvis Presley. Establishing the lead singer and primary songwriter of a band as some sort of heartthrob poet—­Bob Dylan with movie-­star cheekbones and borderline obscenely fitting leather pants—­was a remarkable twofer, drawing in awestruck teenage idolizers and philosopher rock critics alike. This would be the “rock star” frontman template for decades, from Robert Plant

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Apocalypse Now to Trent Reznor to Gerard Way: objects of desire who would also lay some profundity on you, or at least as much profundity as big-­dollar arena rock would allow. Morrison’s version of profundity, however, was steeped in death and annihilation. “Light My Fire,” the song that gave them a surprise #1 hit in April ’67 when Elektra cut its seven-­minute sprawl down to fit a single, compared the prospect of love to “a funeral pyre.” A month before, a headline in the Williams College News referred to a live performance—­ characterized by writer John Stickney as infused with eroticism and terror—­with the surprisingly prescient genre-­labeling description “Gothic Rock Is Their Thing.”1 It was that particular combination of heaviness, libido, and theatricality that made their records so different, something the release of their 1968 sophomore LP Strange Days inspired Los Angeles Free Press writer Gene Youngblood to call “the cruel theater of Artaud, and of ‘Marat/Sade.’ . . . The theater of the absurd, Grand Guignol in electronic shrieks.”2 Unfortunately, that level of intensity and shocking newness became difficult to sustain, especially when Morrison’s alcoholism and growing disenchantment with the live-­concert grind caused him to start acting out in what looked like a wave of self-­destructive apathy and aimless contempt. A couple of disappointing mid-­career LPs and impatience with how he seemed trapped in his own image culminated in his spur-­of-­the-­moment decision to (at least purportedly) whip out his dick during a March 1, 1969, concert in Miami, a stunt that made him the center of a moral decency crusade and got him a six-­month prison sentence. Morrison decamped for Paris shortly after completing sessions for his last Doors LP, L.A. Woman, and never served time. He died on July 3, 1971, under circumstances vague enough that rumors persisted for years of him faking his death. He’d have prospective heirs throughout the rest of the decade, like Iggy Pop, the Detroit proto-­punk whose self-­mutilating stage performances and wolverine-­growl voice made Morrison seem deadpan in contrast, and Patti Smith, who took the merging of beat poetry and rock ’n’ roll to even more tightly intertwined examinations of personal rebellion. Not to mention the very idea of “gothic rock”—­particularly the British version of the concept that made bands like Joy Division, Bauhaus, and the Cure resonate so deeply at the end of the ’70s and well into the next decade.

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“The End” But Morrison’s spirit would continue to haunt rock music in his physical absence, and that presence would seep into popular culture through a particularly strange set of circumstances. When Francis Ford Coppola interviewed screenwriter John Milius in 2000 about his working process on the script to Vietnam drama Apocalypse Now—­a long-­in-­the-­making idea dating back to the late ’60s, born out of a vision that he would be the first screenwriter to successfully adapt the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness—­Milius stated that he “wrote the entire script [while listening] to Wagner and the Doors.”3 Later, on the subject of directing his own films, he quipped that the Los Angeles psychedelic rock band’s music was ideal for motivating his actors toward violence: “When I want some good pagan carnage, I put on the Doors.”4 The Vietnam War holds a place in the American psyche that no amount of deconstruction or revisionism will ever really dislodge. It’s not just that it was one of the costliest consequences of the United States’ post-­WWII status as the Cold War’s premier world police officer—­a war that ended in a superpower’s humiliation, a mass reckoning with that superpower’s role in the world, and a powerful, still-­simmering backlash against the ideologies that opposed the war at home. That’s because it was the first mass media war, and the first to be embroiled in market-­driven efforts to shape the culture of the youth expected to fight that war. The ensuing generation gap might have been exaggerated at the time; many WWII and Korean War veterans agreed with their children that combat was not an ennobling experience but an absolute nightmare that nobody should be needlessly subjected to. Other segments of the nascent baby boomer generation supported the war by a noticeable majority in the mid-­sixties, at least until it became clear it was becoming increasingly unwinnable. But when your TV is broadcasting unprecedented footage of a grisly conflict in progress, where you get to see what actually happens in war—­including to the combatants on your side—­what can the media do when it cuts to commercial or you turn the channel? You have to address it somehow. You better do it in a way that doesn’t piss off the sponsors. And you absolutely, positively must know your audience—­which, ideally, is everyone. And so pop culture gave us myriad versions of the Vietnam War, ones far more complicated than previous eras’ simple patriotic notions that America was doing the right thing in every other international conflict.

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Apocalypse Now Greater exposure to the facts led to broader ideological divides, which led to distinct countercultural breaks with mainstream American culture, which eventually led to a sort of atomization of popular culture into subcultures—­which differed from countercultures in that they were deliberate efforts to unify ideologies and what would, in the late 1970s, be codified as “lifestyles.” Hate the war? Buy this record, see this movie, wear the T-­shirt—­but don’t worry, if you support our boys, we’ve got plenty for you, too. Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets” hit #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1966, roughly equidistant to the Graduate-­inspiring New Year’s #1 ennui-­protest “The Sounds of Silence” and the Rolling Stones’ bleak “Paint It Black.” Actual anti-­war sentiment in pop music of the time has been well chronicled, and for good reason: it was present no matter the genre. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, plenty of recorded pop songs directly and bluntly addressed the war while it was happening—­in far-­flung genres including mainstream R&B (Edwin Starr, “War”), psychedelic rock (Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun”), early heavy metal (Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”), country folk (Johnny Cash’s “Man in Black”), proto-­punk (MC5’s “Human Being Lawnmower”), reggae (Jimmy Cliff’s “Vietnam”), and roots rock (Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son”). And all that came years after folk singers like Bob Dylan (1963’s “Masters of War”), Phil Ochs (1964’s “Talking Vietnam”), and Tom Paxton (1965’s “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation”) first broached the subject in song. Or the songs that directly addressed the experiences of soldiers’ lives after coming home from war, like John Prine’s 1971 “Sam Stone” or Funkadelic’s 1973 “March to the Witch’s Castle,” both of which empathized with the men so destroyed by the experience they fell victim to outside neglect and turned to heroin just to cope with what was then not yet called PTSD. But what becomes part of the Vietnam soundtrack when you’re trying to show, not tell? What makes for good pop might make for sledgehammer-­ blunt cinema, and scoring footage of Vietnam with straight-­up anti-­war songs—­especially fictionalized footage for a specific narrative end—­only puts a hat on a hat. Francois Truffaut famously stated in a 1973 interview with Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel that “every film about war ends up being pro-­war,” with Siskel’s ensuing thoughts concurring that “every war film, just like every war, has its heroes, and that, too, seems to cut across any anti-­war sentiment. As Truffaut said, it makes violence

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“The End” ambiguous.”5 What do you do with that ambiguity, then, when you add on further layers of obfuscation—­when the director’s eye and the screenwriter’s narrative are commented on by a completely non-­diegetic pop song created for an entirely different purpose? It’s a choice on the part of the filmmakers, but what does that choice mean? Milius’s enthusiasm for the Doors’ music was shared by Coppola, and not just coincidentally: Coppola was classmates at UCLA’s film studies department with Jim Morrison, an ambitious student who was making avant-­ garde shorts that baffled just about everyone but fellow film student Ray Manzarek. Coppola remembered him as a “very shy, sweet, brilliant guy” who spent some time dating Coppola’s sister Talia.6 (In 1970, Talia would marry a different sort of musical artist entirely: film composer David Shire, who scored Coppola’s 1974 surveillance-­paranoia classic The Conversation and contributed to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, among others.) When initial director George Lucas abandoned his efforts to bring Milius’s Apocalypse Now script to screen—­the bombing of THX-­1138 scaled his ambitions down to the more modest American Graffiti—­bringing in Morrison’s old acquaintance Coppola to direct a screenplay fueled by the energy of the Doors’ music seemed like a perfect bit of destiny, or at least a happy accident. And “happy accident” also describes how many ways “The End” turned out to be the one Doors song that became integral to the film. During the tortured, notoriously snafu-­fraught, budget-­doubling production of Apocalypse Now in 1976–­77, the film was beset by an endless series of setbacks—­ lead actor Martin Sheen suffering a heart attack, costar Marlon Brando being repeatedly uncooperative, Typhoon Olga wiping out a bunch of the film’s Philippine sets, and a series of big-­budget set pieces being cut from the final film, among other budget-­bloating, director-­indebting disasters. (When Lucas made colossal bank off Star Wars, Coppola sent his own film’s original director a tongue-­in-­cheek congratulations by telegram: “Send Money. Francis.”)7 Coppola, for all his excesses and frustration-­driven revisions, could do with a stroke of circumstantial luck. It happened when he rescued a series of outtakes from a barrel meant for disposal, and was struck by the footage he reclaimed of a napalm drop annihilating a grove of trees—­one specific shot, a stark, screen-­filling tableau perfectly parallel to the horizon, where a lingering glimpse of the foliage is disrupted first by a passing helicopter, then a jaundiced chemical

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Apocalypse Now haze, before the fiery conflagration erupts and the camera slowly begins to track it like a stunned, horrified observer. A copy of the Doors’ first album was sitting nearby, since at one point, the work print was scored by several of the band’s songs—­a decision made by Coppola after speaking to veterans who found, as sound editor Walter Murch recalled, “an edge to it, a strung-­out-­ness that reminded them of the situation that they were in, in Vietnam.”8 That soundtrack concept was largely scrapped when the filmmakers decided, in Murch’s words, that it “was almost too apt—­the songs seemed to have been written by somebody who was taking a hammer and driving the point of the scene home, even though the work had been written ten or fifteen years earlier [and] had nothing to do with the film. That’s not the function of music, the function of music is to be in a kind of parallel harmonic relationship with the film.”9 But from that discarded idea, Coppola salvaged one key music cue out of an almost absurdist perspective. “I thought it was sort of amusing, the idea of starting a movie at the beginning with a song saying, ‘This is the end,’” he recollected in 2019. “And just for the hell of it I took that and grabbed the footage of the napalm drop, and I just thought it looked terrific. I could have picked another and it wouldn’t have looked interesting, it was totally accidental. Fate gave me that beginning!” Sound editor Walter Murch witnessed that revelation, recalling to Salon in 2000: The film never began that way in the script. . . . We took things from the end of the film, and put the Doors’ [“The End”] and worked that in—­so that somehow the end of the film is contained in the beginning. And then, once that was in place, there were shots done specifically to feed that thought. The images of Willard in his room alone drunk were actually character-­rehearsal shots. . . . Those shots at the time were not meant to be in the film, but such amazing things came out of it that we felt, all right, let’s put that shot of the helicopters and the jungle together with this stuff and see what we need to get from here to there.10

So before the movie changed the fortunes of the Doors, the Doors changed the structure of the movie. That wasn’t the only twist of fate that the Doors presented to the film’s editing and rhythms. When the decision to use and license “The End” was finalized, the Doors’ record label Elektra was contacted to send a recording of the song to the sound and music department. For whatever

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“The End” reason—­accounts vary as to whether it was the label making a mistake, or Coppola’s old friend Manzarek wrangling a favor—­Elektra sent rerecording mixer Richard Beggs the four-­track master tapes by mistake, including both studio takes of the song’s original recording and the separate tracks that contained each instrument and voice. Beggs discovered elements of the song, including part of Morrison’s vocal track and elements from an alternate take, that had been buried in the mix and excluded from the final album version. “He goes on at length, reiterating this phrase, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” Beggs described, “and when I opened up that channel and heard that, in conjunction with the image [of Willard in the hotel room] . . . this is fantastic. The fact that it had never been heard before was like discovering gold.”11 There are other well-­deployed rock songs in Apocalypse Now besides “The End.” The soldiers on Willard’s boat listening to the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” reflect the song’s simultaneous expression of frustrated anger and cathartic joy, providing the backdrop to Willard’s anxious, mission-­studying unease pitted against his crewmates’ carefree dancing and an impromptu waterskiing session. And a cover of Dale Hawkins’s 1957 rockabilly standard “Susie Q” soundtracks a disastrous, riot-­ interrupted USO show featuring soldiers losing their minds over the appearance of a group of Playboy Bunnies. (Another Lucas connection: the band performing the song is Flash Cadillac & the Continental Kids, making their second big Movie Brats appearance after their performance in American Graffiti.) But the effect “The End” has in the film is indelible. As the counterpoint to the film’s other famous rewiring of a recognizable song—­ Colonel Kilgore’s famous deployment of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in his napalm-­dropping gusto—­“The End” draws the line: the commanders use music to terrify the enemy; the soldiers use it to try and keep their own heads on straight. But there’s a few levels of dissonance here in the relationship between artist and influence. Milius was a gung-­ho conservative who tackled writing Coppola’s Vietnam film like it was a consolation prize for not being able to serve in the marines during the war because of his asthma. The Doors, from all outside appearances and many after-­the-­fact interviews and autobiographies, rejected this patriotism in favor of a more countercultural and even cynical sense of what America had become in the 1960s—­which, in their time, made them one of the most controversial bands in the country.

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Apocalypse Now So when Milius actually met the surviving members of the Doors after the film’s release and told them that he’d always heard them as “music of war,” he recalled them being “just horrified . . . they said ‘this is the exact opposite of [us] . . . how could you get this [idea]?’”12 It was a case of never meeting your heroes—­not because they’d disappoint you, but because you’d disappoint them. Drummer John Densmore stated as much in his 2009 autobiography Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors: “Vietnam was called a rock-­’n’-­roll war because the soldiers chose to listen to it to help them survive, which is quite different from some of today’s film directors (modern-­day generals) using rock to drum up patriotic reverie.”13 That’s not the effect “The End” has in Apocalypse Now, granted—­the total vibe is more of a piece with the song’s intent, the sense of ultimate finality and the fear that comes with facing that oblivion. But what does “The End” mean as a deeper lyrical motif, both in and out of the context of the film? Its actual lyrics had a sprawling evolution, starting as a simple breakup song (“this is the end, beautiful friend”—­of a relationship, at least) and exploding outward into a gaze into the abyss, a psychedelic panic attack culminating in overwrought oedipal theater. Kill the father, fuck the mother—­only there are no mothers in Apocalypse Now, and it’s still left to blue-­skying interpretation as to whether Brando’s Colonel Kurtz had any paternal-­figure status for Willard. There is a notable father involved in the film, however: composer Carmine Coppola, who was chosen by his son to partially score the film. There’s also another father worth singling out when it comes to the Doors’ relationship with Vietnam: Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison. Morrison was commander of U.S. naval forces during the 1964 confrontation in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the muddled and misreported exchange of fire between American and North Vietnamese warships that drew America right into the thick of the war. Early in his career with the Doors, Morrison claimed that his parents were dead; instead, they both outlived him by more than thirty years. In the April 1969 Crawdaddy! Michael Horowitz penned a massive profile that went above and beyond to find the man behind the Door, finagling an interview with Morrison the Elder under the pretense of doing a piece on “The New Navy.” He got little more than vague stonewalling and nonspecific references to the fact that “I never pressured my . . . family, and as it turns out, neither one of [my sons] has shown any interest in a military career.”14

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“The End” At least not literally. Figuratively, there was “The Unknown Soldier,” the first single from the Doors’ 1968 LP Waiting for the Sun. An unambiguous anti-­war song, it was released as a short film, a sort of proto–­music video featuring Morrison himself being symbolically executed by firing squad. That stagey drama is intercut with actual graphic imagery of dead and dying soldiers on the Vietnam battlefield, before footage of people celebrating the conclusion of WWII provides the triumphant “war is over” conclusion that turned out to be a far cry from the reality of Saigon ’75. In the aforementioned Crawdaddy! piece, Horowitz remarked: Morrison attains a bizarre duality in The Unknown Soldier. He is killed on the screen but survives triumphantly in sound. He is both victim and victor, martyr and apostle. Unfortunately, this is a dangerous combination. It implies that for every part of ecstasy, we must have one part death. You wanna end the war, boys and girls? Kill your favorite rock singer first.15

And if killing him turned out to feel like a mistake, there was always the option of keeping what was left of him perpetually alive. Apocalypse Now wasn’t quite the beginning, but only its repeated delays prevented it from beating An American Prayer to the market. That album, put together by the surviving members of the Doors and released in November 1978, took unreleased recordings of Jim Morrison reading his poems and set them to music. It didn’t sound like the band from ten years back; jazz-­enthusiast drummer Densmore and genre-­agnostic keyboardist Manzarek had gone far enough into their own new things that despite the bluesy tendencies of guitarist Robbie Krieger, the more memorable and fleshed-­out songs sounded a lot more like the heavy-­bottomed funk of the Brothers Johnson than anything off L.A. Woman. But at least it was something different, an intriguing what-­if that saw the still-­adventurous members of the band living in the present. And not long afterward, a wave of recognition by younger musicians who’d grown up on the Doors would lead to a number of cross-­ generational acknowledgements and collaborations that peaked with Ray Manzarek’s production on punk band X’s classic 1980 debut Los Angeles. (The band covered the Doors’ debut-­album deep cut “Soul Kitchen,” while Ray played keys on four other songs.) Yet while Apocalypse Now gave one Doors song a startling new context when it finally hit theaters in the summer of ’79, the Doors revival went on

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Apocalypse Now far longer than anyone expected, and offered little in the way of actual new material or revelatory ideas. There was a 1980 Morrison cash-­in bio, Jerry Hopkins’s and Daniel Sugerman’s No One Here Gets Out Alive, which was criticized by writers, band members, and Doors record producer Paul Rothchild for being a sensationalized and often fabulist account of the band. But people still bought it to the extent that it became a bestseller, just like they wrung platinum out of the 1980 Greatest Hits, a watershed compilation intended to draw younger listeners back into the band that peaked at a surprising #17 on the album charts. (The fact that it was subsequently followed by additional repackaged best-­ofs and box sets at what seemed to be a three-­a-­decade pace might have been overkill.) By 1981, the phenomenon was so hard to escape that the September 17 issue of Rolling Stone put a photo of Morrison on the cover and gave it the snarky headline “He’s Hot, He’s Sexy and He’s Dead.”16 A lot of discussion of the Doors after that initial wave has felt like trying to get one last high off a cashed bowl, with fatigued mockery meeting every effort at overly reverential swooning. Director and Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone’s attempt to capture the spirit of the Doors in his 1991 biopic of the same title earned mixed reviews from critics and a colossal eyeroll from LA’s great scenester/writer Eve Babitz, who wrote a more honest, warts-­ and-­all remembrance of Morrison for Esquire in March ’91 that rendered the film hilariously trite by comparison. “What I want to know about Oliver Stone,” she demanded, “is not whether he can get it up or not, but why anyone in the ’60s would join the Army, would go to Vietnam and become part of the war and murder and atrocity, when the action for Real Men was on Sunset Strip, the Lower East Side, and in San Francisco. Why did he join them, and why is he now in love with our Jim?”17 And did you even have to be in love with Jim to wring his essence dry? After all, the on-­the-­nose Doors overload that Murch rejected in Apocalypse Now was deployed to as-­anticipated sledgehammer effect in Robert Zemeckis’s 1994 boomer nostalgia blockbuster, the Oscar-­magnet Forrest Gump, with no less than five Doors numbers clattering through its Joel Sill–­ supervised soundtrack to hilariously obvious effect. (The worst offender: Morrison sings the “Love Her Madly” line “Don’t you love her as she’s walking out the door” as a main character, Forrest’s longtime friend/lover Jenny, is literally walking out a door.) In a film that seems to be taking advantage of the intra-­generational wedge driven between counterculture and All

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“The End” Things Good about America, where the good-­natured, go-­with-­the-­flow Forrest succeeds where his rebellious sweetheart suffers, struggles, and eventually perishes, a soundtrack that didactic practically points at bands like the Doors and warns “this way lies death.” Maybe it’s easy to blame Apocalypse Now for a revival that turned a fascinating, often excellent band into a series of rudimentary tropes. But linger inside that actual moment where song meets film and you can still feel what it captures: if you want to experience the attempted scope of the Doors’ ambition without the baggage of irony or embarrassment, hagiography or overexposure, Coppola’s wave of explosions and night terrors and bloodletting makes for a stark reminder. It’s an anti-­nostalgia of sorts, one that values the artists who helped us while damning the times they helped us through. “I mean, the war is essentially a Los Angeles export, like acid rock,” Coppola once remarked to his casting director in a 1976 profile for The Atlantic—­though he never elaborated on whether he meant the war being a Hollywood-­level spectacle, or if he was citing the presence of Southern California’s litany of defense contractors.18 And that Horowitz Crawdaddy! piece finds a quote from Gloria Stavers, then the forty-­one-­ year-­old editor of teen-­girl-­marketed mass-­market fanzine Sixteen, that gets to the heart of why the Doors persist, even today: The quality Morrison has got  .  .  . is that anybody can read what they want into him. The teenagers see their thing, the secretaries in my office have become entranced by him, the New York hippies at the Fillmore dig him. There’s something for everybody. But it’s still Whole. He walks through the fire and he comes out Whole.19

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Repo Man, “When the Shit Hits the Fan” REPO MAN (1984, DIRECTED BY ALEX COX) CIRCLE JERKS, “WHEN THE SHIT HITS THE FAN” (1983, LAX)

In a matter of weeks, a young, disillusioned Los Angeles punk rocker named Otto, rejected by his friends and without any real job prospects to speak of, has fallen in with an unlikely group. In joining up with a crew of car repossession agents, he’s initially subject to a succession of indignities that come with attempting to reclaim vehicles from people behind on their payments: he gets shot at, pepper-­sprayed, and even beaten up by a ska band. But the stakes get a lot higher and exponentially weirder when an unusual $20,000 bounty for a particular twenty-­year-­old Chevy crosses the transom and a host of government agents and alien-­conspiracy theorists get involved. Bewildered by the fuss over this ’64 Malibu, Otto decides to meet with two interested parties—­Leila, an employee of “United Fruitcake Outlet,” and Agent Rogersz, a cold-­mannered fed with a metal hand—­at a rinky-­ dink nightclub in Silver Lake. It proves to be an unpleasant experience. It’s bad enough that he fails to get a good lead on the car from Leila and Rogersz, who in turn seem unable to fully convince him of the importance of the situation. It’s worse still that his former friends—­recidivist criminal Duke, Otto’s ex-­girlfriend Debbi, and liberty-­spike-­haired dimbulb caricature Archie—­happen to show up at the club, too, and interject themselves into the conversation with alternately threatening, hostile mockery and obnoxiously faux-­ingratiating “hey let’s all huff butyl nitrate and put this behind us” social pressure. But worst of all, there’s a band playing at the club, and they absolutely suck. Punk devotees might recognize these guys, despite their Holiday Inn lounge-­act tuxedos and acoustic guitar / drum

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“When the Shit Hits the Fan” machine setup, as LA’s own enfants terribles Circle Jerks, apparently reduced to playing a cheapie rendition of their welfare-­state commentary “When the Shit Hits the Fan.” And with an exhaustion that transcends mere physical tedium, Otto regards the band with an ultimate statement of witheringly embittered embarrassment: “I can’t believe I used to like these guys.”

Nearly every subculture has its reckoning with the bored teenage suburban boy. Sometimes he’s a newly liberated figure, an inductee into a new way of thinking that allows him to finally, fully break from the social strictures of his family and his community. Sometimes he’s a confused, alienated victim trying to find some catharsis in one of the few places offered to him. And sometimes he’s just a conduit of cruel destruction, the learned behaviors of generational abuse and toxic (yet narcotic) masculinity sending him out into this new world like a colonizer, a latecomer trying to take over a scene through force. The Southern California punk scene had no shortage of these kinds of bored teenage suburban boys, and from its inception in the late 1970s there was a constant and ongoing struggle with getting their behavior in check, lest they wind up destroying the scene from the inside with idiocy and violence. Other subcultures had to contend with rich-­kid hippies or straight-­ macho disco floor monopolizers who operated under the impression that the scene was there solely so they could get laid. Punk, especially the faster–­shorter–­louder teardown of its LA-­and DC-­popularized hardcore variant, attracted a different breed of hanger-­on: the aimless goon who got his kicks from the id instead of the libido, who loved the music because it made for a good soundtrack to wrecking every person, place, and thing he could get his perpetually clenched fists on. Patrick Goldstein reported in the June 29, 1980, Los Angeles Times: While most club-­owners agree that only a small minority of punk fans actively incite violence, several area clubs have banned bands like the Germs, the Circle Jerks, and Black Flag, whose followers provoke the most trouble. Hong Kong Cafe manager [Kim] Turner now has blacklisted more than half a dozen groups, mostly Orange County–­based punkers like Agent Orange, Middle Class and Eddie and the Sub-­titles. . . . Other club managers and regular club-­goers blamed the violence on organized Huntington Beach–­area punk gangs who

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Repo Man make a practice of pummeling each other and Slam dancing at area clubs. . . . According to [Rubber City Rebels singer Rod] Firestone, “It’s these beach kids who missed out on the punk era and don’t know it’s passe now . . . they just want to come out and throw beer bottles and get their licks in. I wish they’d go start their own teen club where they could beat each other up.”1

It’s worth noting that the source point for some of these ugly conflicts was often the same region of the state—­Orange County, including its surfer-­ jock dominion Huntington Beach—­that went all-­in on supporting punk political enemy #1, Ronald Reagan, later that year in his bid for the presidency. The conflicts between insider misfits and outsider bullies would dominate coverage of punk’s most Hollywood-­adjacent scene, both in the news and on fictionalized TV dramas, which seemed to have the knock-­on effect of just attracting more violence-­horny interlopers. If calling somebody a “poseur” wasn’t withering enough, you could always refer to a notorious 1982 punxploitation episode of the popular Jack Klugman medical drama: You act like you learned about us from a bullshit TV show, you Quincy punk. At a glance it seemed exclusionary, much like the hardcore kids’ similar disdain for new wave, synthpop, and heavy metal on what felt more like pure aesthetic terms. But when a scene’s besieged with outsiders who are not merely uncool, but dangerous enough to jeopardize an entire musical ecosystem, it’s also a matter of self-­defense. A band upstate from San Francisco, the Dead Kennedys, nailed that frustration the hardest in their 1981 outburst “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”: “Stab our backs when you trash our halls / Trash a bank if you’ve got real balls.” Maybe that’s why Keith Morris flat-­out stated to Sylvie Simmons in a 1982 Creem profile that “we’re not a punk band.” In some ways, that statement was a necessary inroad: you can be a regular-­enough dude who wears an anti-­uniform T-­shirt and jeans and has still hung on to his old Led Zeppelin LPs, and still get riled up as part of the scene all the same: “We just play really aggressive music. Burn, you know . . . just go.” If anyone needled Morris to get a haircut—­hardcore’s squarehead, buzzed-­and-­shaved ranks inverting the cool/square hairdo dynamics of the ’60s countercultural panic—­Keith would simply retort, “Why don’t you step out in front of the first truck that drives by?”2 Keith’s band was surly enough for the punks, to be sure. Circle Jerks

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“When the Shit Hits the Fan” were memorably described in a Melody Maker profile that same year with the declaration that they “hate life in general. They hate routine, tradition, the press, the bomb, the President, the Government; they hate class structures, hierarchies, morality, comfort; they hate America!”3 Or, at the very least, they found it ridiculous, operating under the perspective that all the best things about America were made in the service of fighting its own institutions. And in the ’80s, those institutions were appearing increasingly cruel and insipid at the same time. Keith Morris was ready for that, at least. Before they’d met, Keith and his future bandmate Greg Ginn both saw the Ramones bring their bang–­ bang–­bang hyperspeed garage-­punk sound to Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip club the Roxy in ’76. The NYC band’s influence, combined with their even more unhinged and maniacal predecessors in Detroit’s own Stooges, were two primary influences in the band that Keith and Greg would form; initially dubbed Panic, the name “Black Flag” was suggested by Ginn’s brother and visual artist Raymond Pettibon to represent the opposite of the white flag of surrender. (The insecticide brand was a bonus connotation; when New Romantic sensations Adam and the Ants showed up at the Sunset Strip Tower Records they were met by an armada of egg-­throwing punks bearing the slogan “black flag kills ants on contact.”)4 Morris’s tenure with the band was over before the ’70s were, but not before he served as lead snarl on the four-­song, five-­minutes-­and-­change EP Nervous Breakdown, released in January ’79 as the first offering of fledgling indie label SST Records. The whole thing is a Ramones-­but-­meaner take on punk: played so fast it minted the idea of “hardcore” as Los Angeles knew it, and riddled with short but intense bursts of alienated post-­ adolescent frustration. Somehow, the shortest and last song on the whole thing was the most evocative: the fifty-­one-­second “Wasted” was a travelogue through a drug-­addled succession of identity crises, brought on by the tug of war between communal belonging and anti-­conformity in Hermosa Beach: “I was a hippie / I was a burnout / I was a dropout / I was out of my head / I was a surfer / I had a skateboard / I was so heavy man, I lived on the Strand.” Eventually when Morris left Black Flag due to creative differences, he took “Wasted” with him, made it even shorter in both length and melody, and plunked in the midst of 1980’s Group Sex, the first album by his new group Circle Jerks. Despite being cut before it became official that Ronald

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Repo Man Reagan and his cohort in the conservative Moral Majority would be running the country for the rest of the decade, the disaffection, even when apolitical, seemed like a refutation in advance. It was a rebuke of greed-­is-­ good conspicuous consumption (“Beverly Hills”), a declaration of powerless fury against authority (“Back against the Wall”), and a damnation of a world so apparently toilet-­bound that having a vasectomy (“Operation”) was depicted as a moral obligation. When the politics got more explicit, they wound up inadvertently gaining a distressingly long shelf life. According to “Paid Vacation,” which eyerolled at American efforts to support the mujahideen’s efforts against the USSR: “It’s not Vietnam / Just another oil company scam / Salute that flag for Uncle Sam / Get your money out, place your bets / It’s Afghanistan!” And second LP Wild in the Streets took that frustration and made its targets more specific: the nuclear annihilation panic of “Stars and Stripes,” the anti-­injustice hemorrhage of anger sardonically titled “Political Stu,” the casting of the “Moral Majority” as censorious enemies of the First Amendment, even the Class Warfare 101 of “Letter Bomb” (“Sweep your floors / Empty your trash / You’re the one who makes the cash”) positioned Circle Jerks as not just a protest band but a potential gateway for leftist thinking in the midst of a conservative American regime. Maybe that’s why Golden Shower of Hits feels like something of a pullback. Released in 1983, it was the end result of a period that Morris described as “starstruck and struggling.”5 The band was riding along with a new management team that had plenty of access to cocaine and swanky digs in a former dentist’s orgy house in the Hollywood Hills. What they didn’t have access to was some magic bullet to get Morris’s inspiration flowing amid all this. The title cut’s inspired concept of retrofitting a medley of cheesy pop hits to tell the story of a couple falling in and out of love was a funny way to deal with writer’s block, but the rest of Golden Shower of Hits felt more like a band attempting to regroup with what they’d gotten their foot in the door with: expressions of inward frustrations and outward rage, most of them directed at smaller-­scale, personal scenarios like relationships (“In Your Eyes”), conformity (“High Price on Our Heads”), and substance abuse (“Red Blanket Room”). It wasn’t diminishing returns, but it was something of a holding pattern, albeit a well-­received one in the end. But punk had changed drastically in those few years, a gigantic wave that crashed through Los Angeles only to recede when venue closings,

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“When the Shit Hits the Fan” new trends, and fatigue from the remnant violence started changing the character of the scene. By 1984, punk’s loud-­fast-­rules approach had mutated into a variety of offshoots and taken veteran acts in wildly varying directions; while the poseurs and meatheads were circling a clogged drain, the core of the LA punk movement started sprawling out. X and the Gun Club provided a tense, wiry atmosphere that would grow to owe increasing debts to roots rock, the Minutemen’s steadfastly leftist econo jams pulled off a terse virtuosity that flirted with free jazz, and Black Flag—­now fronted by the ultra-­intense Henry Rollins—­was increasingly given to Greg Ginn’s enthusiasms for halfway-­to-­metal guitar wailing. Beyond that, any regional movement with the hopes of going national had to contend with a panoply of scenes across the country with their own core concepts and tangled politics, leaving punk in the United States in constant flux between Balkanization and next-­big-­thing conquest. This puts Repo Man at a volatile point in punk history—­or at least a bit more volatile than its baseline level of disorder and experimentation. Alex Cox was a British ex-­pat who moved to Los Angeles for the purposes of studying at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. He’d left his studies in the same field at Bristol University in 1977, right as groups like the Sex Pistols, the Damned, and the Clash were becoming the most notorious punk bands in England, and carried some of that anarchic energy across the sea to his new digs for his student film Edge City. Completed in 1980, the forty-­minute featurette depicts Los Angeles in a way you could only get from an outsider immersing himself in its machinery: freeway sprawl and car-­radio chatter, claustrophobic apartments and desolate commercial spaces, the stress of free-­flowing hostility and artistic compromise, all run through with a very British combination of tandem revulsion and fascination with all things America. That opened the door for his first full-­length feature, a film (very) loosely based around his Edge City actor Ed Pansullo’s experience riding shotgun with an auto repossessor named Mark Lewis. Repo Man would center around the exploits of a number of people, including a repo agency and their callow young recruit Otto Maddox, attempting to track down a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu with a huge reward at stake and something mysterious and deadly in the trunk. Cox had become immersed in the Los Angeles punk scene and originally planned to cast members of the band Fear as the four primary members of the repo agency. When that proved unfeasible,

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Repo Man he still mapped the band members’ personalities on the characters—­ including the “always intense,” speed-­snorting, quasi-­mentor figure Bud, played with cantankerous brilliance by legendary character actor Harry Dean Stanton. And the film’s grimy mise-­en-­scène felt punk even before factoring in the music, a continuation of Edge City’s focus on chaotic urban landscapes and the endless sea of concrete as its own kind of Wild West desert packed with modern-­age outlaws. Otto is one of them, or wants to be. As played by Emilio Estevez at the peak of his teen-­flick Brat Pack powers, he’s fairly convincing as a surly, alienated youth who finds rejection everywhere he looks. His grocery store job is a will-­sapping dead end, his parents have succumbed to a cultlike televangelist, and even his friends in the punk scene wind up taking advantage of his trust before kicking him to the curb. Maybe he didn’t quite “get it”: at one oddly beautiful moment in the film, we see a dejected Otto drinking generic beer on the railroad tracks under the Fourth Street Bridge and yelling the lyrics of a Black Flag song as an attempted catharsis. But it’s not an early classic of teen anxiety like “Wasted” or “Nervous Breakdown,” or one of their more ferocious Rollins-­era declarations of fury like “What I See” (“I want to live / I wish I was dead”) or “Damaged II” (“I’m confused, leave me alone, I don’t wanna be wrong / When I talk to you my mind falls apart”). Instead, it’s “TV Party,” one of their more sardonic songs about sitting around glued to the television like an idiot. Seeing a young punk take out his angst by forlornly singing “Don’t talk about anything else / We don’t wanna know / We’re dedicated to our favorite shows” before screaming “Saturday Night Live! Monday Night Football! Dallas! Jeffersons! Gilligan’s Island! Flintstones!” reveals him as someone whose go-­to catharsis anthem is a goof, a move as ironically unexpected and unsentimental as you’d want from a punk film. There are other signs that Otto isn’t quite the dead-­set hardcore lifer he appears to be. One deleted scene that was cut due to music clearance costs has him decompressing in his bedroom / parents’ garage as he listens to NYC’s Talking Heads’ 1983 new wave–­funk hit “Burning Down the House”—­the wrong coast, wrong style, and wrong attitude for the LA hardcore set. But he’s quick to shift his allegiances and adjust his principles accordingly. When Bud attempts to recruit him into the repo business, he initially protests by pouring his introductory beer onto the agency’s floor, but

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“When the Shit Hits the Fan” after the employees show more amusement than contempt for the gesture he decides to roll with it—­at least the pay seems good, and it beats being a fry cook (“room to move” to a managerial position in two years notwithstanding). In punk and other subcultural parlance, this would be considered “selling out,” especially after Otto trades in his grimy punk threads for a dress shirt and tie. “If you look like a detective people are gonna think you’re packing something,” according to Bud. It’s a different uniform, but the same purpose: fit in with your friends, intimidate everyone else. About fifty minutes after their Golden Shower of Hits song “Coup D’etat” soundtracks Otto’s arrival at what would be his last punk rock house party, Circle Jerks eventually show up in their own instant-­makeover looks, and we get that lounge-­band scene that makes them look like a bunch of total dorks. “Alex wanted an acoustic version of ‘When the Shit Hits the Fan,’ so we recorded one for the movie,” recalled Morris. “I did the vocals, and Greg [Hetson], Earl [Liberty], and Chuck [Biscuits] all played acoustic guitar along to a taped drum track. It was our first—­and last—­recording session with that lineup. The irony is that it’s the only recording of Chuck Biscuits’s time in the Circle Jerks, one of the best rock drummers in the world, and he’s playing acoustic guitar accompanied by a drum machine.”6 (This does make their performance—­a diegetic, reworked version of a song instead of a re-­use of the existing recording—­an outlier in this book’s examples. But as a comedic subversion of the trope of the needle-­drop moment itself, it’s still punk as fuck.) Filming was an all-­day effort for just that one scene, and between the heat, the hours spent waiting in a trailer, and the insufficient amount of beer to keep them entertained, the band was apparently in a sour mood when actor/musician Zander Schloss approached them. Schloss, who played Otto’s gawky semi-­friend and grocery store coworker Mike, was a member of the band Juicy Bananas, which had a short-­lived reign as the Compton–­Watts area’s premier white funk band. (Their sole recording, “Bad Man,” was an instrumental composed for the Repo Man soundtrack, featuring a monologue from actor Sy Richardson—­the granite-­voiced hard-­ass with the ironic beer-­inspired nickname Lite—­in proto–­Pulp Fiction Samuel L. Jackson mode.) Both Morris and Schloss remember the introductions being somewhere between awkward and openly hostile, but after the film wrapped Schloss heard Circle Jerks were looking for a new

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Repo Man bassist to replace the departing Earl Liberty. By dint of being one of the only guys to have his shit together for the audition, he got the job by default, and has been a core member of the band ever since. The funny thing about the Repo Man soundtrack—­or at least one of many funny things—­is that it’s one of those instances where it was the soundtrack album’s success that kept the film afloat, rather than the traditional vice versa. Repo Man was technically a major studio film, released through Universal Pictures and executive-­produced by Monkees alum Michael Nesmith, but its low-­budget origins and art-­film feel—­at least art-­ film compared to risible circa-­’84 mainstream comedy fare like Revenge of the Nerds or Bachelor Party—­didn’t convince Universal the film had a long tail. It was pulled from its regional twenty-­nine-­screen release in Los Angeles after only two weeks, owing to either poor earnings (according to the trades) or a change of the guard at Universal (according to Cox). What kept the film going, Cox claimed, was the unexpected success of the soundtrack;7 it had sold surprisingly well on MCA’s short-­lived imprint San Andreas Records, and Universal’s parent company, MCA, had a vested interest in keeping the film in the public eye. If that meant the new bigwigs at Universal decided to try remarketing the film as a wacky teen comedy and creating a hilariously bowdlerized edit for broadcast TV (most memorably dubbing over any instance of the word “motherfucker” with “melon farmer”), at least the critical response and a healthy afterlife on the burgeoning mid-­’80s VHS market made sure the film got to all the right eyes and ears. Another funny thing about the Repo Man soundtrack is that it doesn’t quite capture a single definitive portrait of mid-­’80s Los Angeles punk—­ instead, it encompasses something stranger, more uncertain, more unstuck in time. The title cut is a masterpiece of punk angst featuring one of the genre’s original forebears, Iggy Pop, howling youth-­apocalypse panic over a band consisting of former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones and the rhythm section of Blondie—­three different early facets of punk, from Detroit prototypes to UK revolutionaries to NYC artistes turned pop stars, all having a blast at a moment where trendsetters might consider them past their prime. The hardcore set is well represented by the aforementioned Fear, Black Flag, and Circle Jerks, but the one big get in retrospect was Suicidal Tendencies, whose “Institutionalized” became one of the first hits in the metal-­meets-­hardcore fusion of crossover thrash.

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“When the Shit Hits the Fan” And the rest of it is rounded out by genre-­hopping oddity, from the new wave sleaze of Burning Sensations’ Modern Lovers cover “Pablo Picasso” to the Latin garage-­punk of the Plugz. It was the latter group most responsible for the non-­diegetic musical moments of the film, with singer/guitarist Tito Larriva leading the creation of an immaculate vibe-­nailing style that hit like a cross between Ennio Morricone scoring a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western and the tense synthscapes John Carpenter composed for his own sci-­fi films. (For all of Repo Man’s cult-­sensation cachet, all those soundtrack cues—­aside from the haunting LP-­closing instrumental “Reel Ten”—­ have yet to be commercially released anywhere.) Gleaning a future of punk-­as-­genre from the Repo Man soundtrack feels a bit beside the point—­it’s a gateway, for sure, but there are so many odd paths leading outward that the destination is left unknown. And if Repo Man is a punk film that engages with punk culture and punk philosophy, it’s a strain of it that is constantly looking for life outside those structures. The film portrays a version of Los Angeles constantly overlooked by ’80s Hollywood: the working-­poor neighborhoods, the fading semi-­industrial outskirts, the bland and the trashed and the lonely, all occupied by lives that get by on subsistence but don’t seem to have much else. One of the undercurrents of the film, the Malibu as driven with sweaty panic by one J. Frank Parnell (played by Fox Harris), is tied in with the ludicrous nature of the neutron bomb, a “moral weapon” designed to kill invading forces (and anyone else) while leaving buildings intact. While Parnell is depicted as the bomb’s inventor—­and, considering what happens when you open the Malibu’s trunk, its possible transporter—­the real-­life “father of the neutron bomb” Sam Cohen would later get in touch with Cox, finding it flattering to see his work addressed with such accuracy—­ “from the nuclear strategist’s standpoint,” at least, according to Cox.8 Considering that Los Angeles punk’s first-­wave greats the Weirdos could claim their 1978 single “We Got the Neutron Bomb” as one of the early scene’s signature songs, it made a perverse sort of sense. But according to Circle Jerks’ Greg Hetson, as related in 2001’s book We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of LA Punk, 1984 was also the beginning of “The Dark Years of Punk”9—­where the violence, the cops, the venue closures, and culturally disparate new developments like crossover thrash and hair metal shrank the punk audience down to its truest believers, or what few were left. And maybe it’s Otto’s abandonment of punk that

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Repo Man gives Repo Man its most accurate look at the scene. Here’s a burned-­out young man amid an identity crisis listening to a watered-­down and embarrassing version of a band he once rocked out to with friends who would later betray him. And after an untold amount of time attempting to finagle cars back from the struggling people who can no longer afford to pay for them—­which, in “nobody walks” Los Angeles, might as well be a prison sentence—­he has to hear this band sing lyrics that seem to mock the poor with Reaganite language, invoking fictional welfare queens (“ten kids in a Cadillac”) and semi-­sarcastically espousing talking points that right-­ wingers would use in their efforts to slash the social safety net (“Social Security has run out for you and me”). I can’t believe I used to like these guys. It should be noted that Otto’s old friends Duke, Debbi, and Archie made off with the sought-­after Malibu earlier in the film prior to their appearance at the club hassling Otto. But when they leave the club the car’s original owner Parnell is there attempting to reclaim it. After the punks confront him in an effort to swipe the car back, Archie makes the mistake of opening the car’s trunk, a move that vaporizes him instantly. Duke and Debbi are so alarmed by this development that they retreat, but not before nervously deciding to abandon their claim on the Malibu to commit some other crimes: “Yeah,” Duke mutters dazedly, “let’s order sushi and not pay.” Confronted with something that existentially horrifying, the tough guy is reduced to a bougie-­aspirant dine-­and-­dasher. As the film hurtles toward its surreal climax, Otto crosses paths with Duke and Debbie one last time, in a wrong-­place-­wrong-­time shopping trip at a liquor store that Otto’s former friends attempt to rob. A gun-­drawing Mexican standoff goes haywire, leaving Duke dying of a shotgun wound and Debbie vanishing into the night after rebuffing Otto’s offer to make her a “repo wife.” And when Duke chokes out his regretful dying words to Otto—­“I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate . . . and yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am . . .”—­Otto’s retort is brutally realist, a learned response after confronting a world of the underprivileged: “That’s bullshit. You’re a white suburban punk just like me.” “Yeah,” gasps Duke, “but it still hurts.”

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Krush Groove, “King of Rock” KRUSH GROOVE (1985, DIRECTED BY MICHAEL SCHULZ) RUN-­D MC, “KING OF ROCK” (1985, PROFILE)

We open on a brief montage of assorted views of the New York City skyline before those establishing shots usher us into the tighter confines of a recording studio. Run and DMC, the two rappers who make up two-­thirds of the group of the same name, are getting ready to record their new record, lightly squabbling with studio personnel Rick Rubin, Kurtis Blow, and Russell Simm—­wait, no, scratch that, Russell Walker. “It’s time to get serious, man,” Walker tells Run-­DMC, and [Run] shoots back, “We are serious . . . yo, just give us a little bit more snare in the speakers, we be all right, know ’m sayin’?” Kurtis eggs them on—­“Do it right this time, and I want rock ’n’ roll, baby!”—­and they roll tape on a song much of the audience will already know by heart: “I’m the king of rock, there is none higher / Sucker MCs should call me sire / To burn my kingdom, you must use fire / I won’t stop rockin’ till I retire!” As the session goes on, we cut back and forth between a time-­jumping montage of the record going out into the world: we see it getting pressed, the copies arriving at the dorm room that doubles as the distribution center and primary office of record label Krush Groove, being performed live by Run-­DMC at a nightclub, and spun by their DJ Jam Master Jay at his car wash day job. It also provides the background music as the three members of the Fat Boys prepare to head to school: Kool Rock-­Ski makes a Bundt cake and stuffs it in a lunchbox, Buff Love does some beatboxing while he irons, and Prince Markie Dee tries to sneak a look up a woman’s skirt as she walks up the stairs to an elevated subway train. (Her boyfriend dumps his soda on Prince’s head in retaliation, much to his bandmates’ amusement.)

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Krush Groove The entirety of “King of Rock” plays out this way, and its moment in the film’s opening credits only ends when the Fat Boys switch off their boom box at the conclusion of the song. “Those boys are def! They are def!” exclaims Markie Dee. “We’re gonna be as big as them once we play the Fever.”

Cinematic attempts to capitalize on the rise of hip-­hop as a culture went through nearly as rapid a succession of changes and perspectives as the music itself did. The best early portrayals hit when hip-­hop was in what would later be recognized as the sunset of the “old school”—­that stretch of time in the late ’70s and early ’80s when the uncommodified, almost guerilla-­tactic scene of park-­bound rap and DJ sets, impromptu breakdancing sessions, and cover-­of-­night subway car graffiti murals began to spawn record deals and TV shows and art gallery showings. In cinema, these early depictions came from independent filmmakers who prioritized the immediacy and credibility of documentary. This could be done directly, like Tony Silver’s 1983 graffiti-­centric Style Wars, brought to its first wide audience through a 1984 PBS airing and framed similarly to a multi-­perspective street-­level news piece. But that approach also lent energy to a more docudrama-­styled movie, where filmed performance of music, dance, and graffiti was the backbone for a fictionalized narrative—­ namely Charlie Ahearn’s 1983 feature Wild Style, the filming and completion of which spanned 1981 and 1982 at the peak of hip-­hop’s NYC art scene crossover and its emergence into mainstream pop culture. Then came the cash-­ins. If you were lucky, you got something like 1984’s Stan Lathan–­directed Beat Street, a colorful if somewhat watered-­down combination of the Style Wars / Wild Style milieu that skirted kitsch but still paid respect to real-­world pioneers. For many members of the international filmgoing audience, it was one of their first chances to see acknowledgment of genre catalysts like DJ Kool Herc and Soulsonic Force, early rap superstars like Treacherous Three and Melle Mel, and dance squads like Rock Steady Crew and the New York City Breakers. If you were less lucky, you were suckered into watching the sub-­Fame quasi-­urban camp of the Cannon Films Breakin’ movies, both of which dropped in ’84 and whose legacy is best left to the fact that the second entry’s subtitle, “Electric Boogaloo,” is a go-­to joke reference for ridiculous sequel names. In case one has any further questions about how close the Breakin’ brain trust was to

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“King of Rock” grasping the essence of hip-­hop, note that Ice-­T, still a couple years prior to helping revolutionize West Coast gangsta rap, appeared in both films—­ and was credited in the first as “Featured Rap Talker.” Eventually, somehow, a major Hollywood offering would at least try to get it right. But even with the blessing of one of hip-­hop’s earliest moguls and an all-­star cast of credible artists who were still at the earlier stages of their fame, Krush Groove came across as a little too frivolous and disjointed for the story it was meant to tell. Def Jam Recordings was initially conceived in part by NYU student Rick Rubin as a DIY way to put out singles by his punk band Hose, but he and cofounder Russell Simmons soon turned their focus to hip-­hop. It was a natural fit, since Rubin saw a lot of potential punk-­style attitude in hip-­hop, and Simmons had been making his way in the promotions game for years before getting into the label business. There was another important connection, too: despite not signing to this fledgling new label, Simmons’s brother Joseph—­initially encouraged to rap by Russell, a committed hip-­hop head ever since getting his mind blown by an Eddie Cheba DJ set in 1977—­was already starting to make waves in the emerging hip-­hop trio Run-­DMC. As fate, effort, and inspiration would have it, this would give rise to a group intent on rewriting the stylistic rules of hip-­hop, in part by smartly mutating its sound into something that would better fit the combative tension of America’s Reagan years. Starting with their very first single, 1983’s “It’s Like That,” Run-­DMC pulled off their genre-­changing coup by transitioning from the old school’s up-­tempo disco/funk influence to a somewhat slower, more aggressive and emphatic style. It was a bit closer to the drum machine–­driven, synthesized sounds of new wave, electro, and pop, but still adhering to the fundamentals of pop-­and-­lock breakdanceability and the importance of the DJ. They dressed more like the audience than the army of colorfully leathered-­and-­studded Rick James fringe-­flaunters that many old-­schoolers resembled, an inadvertent reflection of the same aesthetic simplification as the anti–­rock star shirt-­and-­jeans punk bands on both coasts underwent. And they made the stress-­tested resilience of inner-­city early ’80s NYC an integral part of their personae in ways that took the precedent of Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s protest jam “The Message” into an assumed default: they may not be rapping about broken glass everywhere, but they sounded like they were more than used to it.

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Krush Groove Even if they came from the comparatively upwardly mobile neighborhood of Hollis, Queens, not quite the fire-­gutted, neglect-­scarred battleground that the late ’70s South Bronx of hip-­hop origins was, they hit so many of the same nerves for listeners both inside and outside the five boroughs that they easily fulfilled the early potential for hip-­hop to sound far bigger than even New York itself could contain. Subsequently, Run-­DMC came across as a group conversant in multiple worlds, creating a crossover potential that rivaled any rap group or individual star—­even before they became famous enough to break MTV’s rap barrier. In terms of mainstream stardom, the big moment is typically pinpointed as their 1986 Aerosmith-­ assisted cover of the classic rock icons’ “Walk This Way”—­the song that finally convinced a generation of record buyers, listeners, and labels that this hip-­hop thing might not actually disappear just because breakdancers stopped showing up in McDonald’s commercials. But the route Run-­DMC took to get there ran through some strange places, one of which would come into being thanks in part to the success of a label they were only tied to by family. Within less than a year of issuing its first hip-­hop singles in 1984, Def Jam would become a prominent enough player in the rap record business that it became the subject of a prominent Wall Street Journal profile. Robert “Rocky” Ford Jr. was a close friend of Simmons—­a “guru,” in Simmons’s words—­whose connection to hip-­hop ran deep, including authoring a July 1, 1978, Billboard article, “B-­Beats Bombarding Bronx,” that’s considered the first high-­profile news item about the genre. It was on Ford’s urging that Meg Cox, a culture-­beat writer for WSJ, met up with Simmons to take in a show at the South Bronx’s “it” rap club Disco Fever—­the venue that would provide a primary, pivotal setting in Krush Groove—­and grab a choice opportunity to get in on chronicling this rising phenomenon. Maybe not at the ground floor, but at least the mezzanine. Cox’s article, which was published on December 4, not only highlighted the emerging star status of Run-­DMC—­albeit in terms that seem almost comically obvious now (“They don’t sing and they don’t dance. They just talk, over a driving, monotonous beat, in rhymes”)—­but depicted Russell Simmons as a “mogul of rap” in a way that seemed to anticipate a status he wouldn’t fully meet for another several years, at which point he’d wind up setting a nearly impossible new standard for it.1

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“King of Rock” In any case, the article made him seem like a big enough deal to Menahem Golan, who was a mogul himself, just not of rap, despite his “best” efforts in coproducing the Breakin’ movies for Cannon. But spending so much time seizing on opportunities with an almost feverish immediacy means at least some of them have to pan out, and in early ’85 Simmons agreed to meet with Golan to hash out the details of a potential film project. In a Village Voice profile published April 30, 1985, writer Nelson George accompanied Simmons and Ford to a meeting with Cannon reps, with the understanding that if the movie people tried to snow Russell he’d go into what George described as a fuck-­you wiseass mode à la Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop.2 Simmons was understandably skeptical of every half-­attentive bit of lip service the Cannon people made to caring about hip-­hop, and he thoroughly dismissed any of the production company’s hopes of making a quickie cash-­in—­working title Rappin’—­because, in his words, “I’ve been working for 10 years to make this music mean something . . . you can come in with one film and ruin everything I’m trying to build.”3 There might not have been any one single specific breaking point—­though a full-­page Variety ad stating that this Rappin’ movie would be shot in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh?) was singled out—­but Simmons made it crystal clear that any rap movie with his name within even a mile of it would have to be far more legit than the production company that gave us Ninja III: The Domination was capable of. Rappin’ was eventually retooled by Cannon into a Simmons-­ less vehicle for Mario Van Peebles, who was overdubbed in rapping scenes by Sugarhill Gang’s Master Gee. Upon its 1985 release, the New York Times’s Janet Maslin called the film “so synthetically good-­natured that the music has almost none of the rude, confrontational quality that otherwise makes it popular.”4 The day after Simmons told Cannon to hit the bricks, he teamed up with an executive producer closer to home: George Jackson, a Harlem native far closer to Simmons’s age and background. This would be Jackson’s first major film credit, but it helped that he had an in with director Michael Shultz. Shultz had directed one of Simmons’s favorite films, the 1975 Black high school nostalgia comedy Cooley High, and would have an even bigger hit the following year with the Rose Royce–­soundtracked ensemble comedy Car Wash. The bad news was that Shultz was still attempting to

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Krush Groove salvage his reputation after helming possibly the worst musical ever made: 1978’s Beatles-­bastardizing Bee Gees / Peter Frampton vehicle Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a film so bad it made George Burns seem charmless, forced Steve Martin into a state of pure unfunny, and left little but a really good Earth, Wind & Fire cover of “Got to Get You Into My Life” to show for it. Still, even as he was concurrently working on another ambitious, music-­heavy project with Motown’s Berry Gordy—­the post-­Blaxploitation kung fu–­meets–­MTV spectacle The Last Dragon—­Shultz and company saw plenty of promise in a hip-­hop film. The initial idea was much simpler, though: just stage a concert like Fresh Fest, and make a documentary about it. (The working title, Rap Attack, was a hint that they’d at least been paying enough attention to the hip-­hop scene to lift the name of Mr. Magic and Marley Marl’s bedrock WBLS radio show.) The inaugural 1984 edition of the Swatch Watch NYC Fresh Festival, the first-­ever hip-­hop arena tour, featured a who’s who of young but top-­of-­the-­line rap acts, including Kurtis Blow, the Fat Boys, and headliners Run-­DMC. It would prove to be the first of many coronations for Run-­DMC in particular, and just eight days after the tour-­concluding show at Oakland Arena on December 9, their self-­titled 1984 debut album became hip-­hop’s first 500,000-­unit selling gold LP. If nothing else, the timing was perfect. Simmons had more ambitious ideas, ones that would put this young rap mogul (or someone not unlike him) at the center of the movie. After some disagreements with screenwriter Ralph Farquhar—­whose son, incidentally, would become a legendary fixture in the Los Angeles underground hip-­hop scene as the perceptively motormouthed abstract rapper Busdriver—­a screenplay was written that would cast the world around Simmons’ enterprises as a sort of ensemble comedy / romance / concert film / record-­biz drama. Rick Rubin would play himself. So would all the artists who came into the film through both the Def Jam label and Simmons’ affiliated Rush Productions management operation, many of whom had just rocked the Fresh Fest stage. But Simmons, who was already developing a bald spot before hitting thirty, wasn’t considered leading-­man material. And while Simmons and Rubin stumped for the Russell role to go to Fab 5 Freddy, the polymath raconteur who was never more than a degree separated from pretty much everyone in the hip-­hop world at the time, the

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“King of Rock” producers opted to pick future LA Law featured cast member Blair Underwood instead to play the role of “Russell Walker.” If that was the limit of Hollywood meddling in the Def Jam world, Krush Groove might’ve been a better movie—­maybe even a genre-­defining movie, one with a revelatory soundtrack and outlaw cachet, a The Harder They Come for hip-­hop. Russell Simmons was tied into two parallel revolutions at once: the stardom of his brother, and the cultivation of a brand that would give that sibling’s blueprint-­redrawing group a lot more stylistically simpatico company within the next couple of years. That really was all the movie needed to be, even if it had to feature a version of Simmons and his label that had the serial numbers filed off. Krush Groove’s title comes from the name of the Def Jam stand-­in label at the center of the movie; and while it’s the least bewildering of the film’s takes on alternate-­universe hip-­ hop—­one shooting-­up-­the-­charts montage features appearances from bafflingly named phony rap acts like “Taller Than You” and “Huh! Huh! Huh!”—­the faux label at the center of the film feels like a casualty of the movie’s revisionist weirdness. It takes what is already a fascinating work of music history in progress and makes it into haphazard dramedy. The role of Run-­DMC in the film stands out as the most egregious fictionalization. The group’s actual come-­up wasn’t particularly complicated: they were observant enough to know hip-­hop would need to resonate as an accessible aesthetic if it were to survive past its first few years in a mainstream world that would otherwise move on from “Rappers Delight” and the breakdancing craze. Not only that, they were daring enough to pull off one of the most lucrative yet artistically valid ways to do this. Making their vision of hip-­hop more intensely iconoclastic yet stylistically accessible and relatable and current was the key—­“it’s all brand new, never ever old school,” as “King of Rock” memorably declared. Krush Groove depicting them as rising stars without much of a contrasting musical background to rise amidst—­or against—­ignored all the fundamental changes a group like them brought to hip-­hop. The film’s also a weird case study in recent history sometimes being the easiest kind to revise. Krush Groove depicts Run-­DMC as a scrappy, borderline-­struggling group that records for an indie label based out of a dorm room. Financially, they’re so close to the margins that Run and Russell must ask their preacher father for a loan to get more copies of “King of

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Krush Groove Rock” pressed. (In the real world, the Simmons brothers’ dad was a public school administrator; the preacher of the family would eventually turn out to be Run himself, who became an ordained Pentecostal minister in 1995.) But by the time Krush Groove hit theaters in late October 1985, “King of Rock” and the album of the same title had already become legacy-­building smash hits, with the LP only taking about a month after its January ’85 release to match the debut’s gold-­record sales. While their DJ was depicted in Krush Groove spinning “King of Rock” for an audience of fellow car wash employees (and their unappreciative boss), fans in the real world knew that a few months earlier, they’d actually performed it for a crowd of nearly ninety thousand at the Philadelphia stage of the transatlantic mega concert Live Aid. It might’ve been a cloudy verge-­ of-­superstardom breakthrough to visualize when they first hit the booth to record “King of Rock,” as they’re depicted doing in the opening credits, but they were far closer to it at that point in time than they were to a job scrubbing Subarus. It’s as if A Hard Day’s Night opened with the Beatles still playing the Cavern Club. This revisionist fiction also comes across as not just potentially confusing to the layperson, but a bigger disservice to the other architects of the music, whether they were behind the scenes or given a prominent credit on a real-­world record sleeve. It’s as simple enough as portraying the “King of Rock” recording session as being orchestrated by Russell not-­Simmons and the actual Rick Rubin, the latter of whom was already earning a rep as the hip-­hop figure who did more than any of his predecessors to produce and market the genre with rock-­crossover potential. But that rep only obscures the fact that Larry Smith, Russell Simmons’s actual coproducer on “King of Rock,” was one of the primary sonic architects of Run-­DMC’s sound and the success that came with it, with a drum-­machine and guitar-­ driven sound that wasn’t so much a contemporary of Rubin’s approach as a precedent for it. That Rubin-­for-­Smith substitution only feels more telling when you factor in the actual business politics going on between Simmons and Smith at the time. A few months before Krush Groove was set in motion, Smith had signed his publishing to Zomba Music, an independent whose imprint Jive Records became a major player in hip-­hop thanks in part to the Smith-­ produced hit records by the label’s top rap group Whodini—­a group that Simmons also managed. (Despite their prominence and importance to

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“King of Rock” hip-­hop at the time, Whodini were a nonentity in the film for reasons that remain elusive.) Unfortunately for Simmons, Smith’s publishing deal sabotaged Simmons’s promise to earmark that publishing money for another deal he was attempting to finalize with a different label, a maneuver that left Simmons wide open for the possibility of looking like a double-­dealing snake to the more-­established gatekeepers in the record business. Nothing ever really came of that potential conflict, but it was hard not to see something in their ensuing split. Smith and Simmons would remain amicable on personal terms, but when it came time for Run-­DMC’s third album, Rubin had replaced Smith behind the boards in real life. Rubin, of course, would go on to become famous as a genre-­transcending music industry fixture, an eclectic beardo-­guru who’d work with everyone from Slayer to Johnny Cash, while Smith’s résumé would trail off somewhere around the cusp of the ’90s. For all it got wrong, it’s funny how Krush Groove accidentally guessed how this winner-­penned history would play out in the future, but it still feels like a raw deal for Smith. Def Jam itself, of course, was still in its early phase of establishing itself at the time of Krush Groove’s filming, but they had already coalesced around the ability to record, release, and promote a genuine hit record remarkably early on. T La Rock and Jazzy Jay’s 1984 single “It’s Yours,” which featured Def Jam branding on the label but was otherwise released through electro-­rap producer Arthur Baker’s label Partytime, was such a massive hit in New York underground hip-­hop circles that it was all the proof Simmons and Rubin needed that they could be in this for the long haul. And the second single to receive the Def Jam imprimatur—­this time, as a fully autonomous label—­came into existence thanks to two parties in particular with weird but unforgettable, show-­stealing moments in the film. In 1984, an eighteen-­year-­old Adam “Ad-­Rock” Horovitz was splitting his time between punk band the Young and the Useless and a group of goofball rap enthusiasts who were calling themselves the Beastie Boys. That latter group and their 1982 Carvel ice cream shop prank call single “Cooky Puss” worked at a kind of askew angle to what was emerging in hip-­hop at the time. But the EP the song appeared on was a big enough hit among underground rap heads and curious art-­world scenesters to get the attention of Simmons and Rubin, with the latter’s NYU dorm room becoming a go-­to hangout spot for Horovitz, Michael “Mike D” Diamond, and Adam “MCA” Yauch.

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Krush Groove Ad-­Rock liked spending his time there learning to make beats, and he also had a thing for going through all the demos that arrived there in the wake of the success of “It’s Yours.” One tape that caught his attention was from a sixteen-­year-­old from Queens who went by the name LL Cool J; after convincing Rubin to get in touch with the young rapper, Ad-­Rock would be the producer to provide the titular demand for LL’s debut single “I Need a Beat.” That’s a far more nuanced origin story—­and one that, in retrospect, feels more fascinatingly intertwined as a bit of pop-­culture destiny—­than what we get out of Def Jam’s first two household names as they appear in the actual film. The following year, the Beastie Boys would ride off the momentum of their December ’84 Def Jam debut “Rock Hard,” Rubin’s AC/DC-­riffing answer to Run-­DMC’s similarly metallic breakthrough “Rock Box” and just the second Def Jam single proper. “She’s On It,” their end-­of-­summer ’85 single, was tied into Krush Groove as their contribution to the film, and they perform it in the context of a talent show where they appear to get a mix of cheers and boos, looking for all the world like the white-­rapper equivalent of “Rowdy” Roddy Piper playing wrestling heel to fans desperate to see Hulk Hogan kick his ass. But their actual, non-­filmic 1985 had already been exponentially more chaotic: Russell Simmons had wheedled his way into getting them a gig opening for Madonna, who at that point was arguably the biggest emerging pop star in the world. The Beasties would then spend the entire Like a Virgin tour performing with the clear intent of alienating as many concert attendees as possible with their snotty punk-­ rap antics. The crowd detested them, the press was aghast, and Bill Adler’s press release for Rush Productions gleefully compared the whole ordeal his boss had helped orchestrate to Jimi Hendrix opening for the Monkees in ’67.5 As for Madonna, she thought the whole situation was hilarious. That is a movie worth making right there. But LL’s cameo is the real revelation. During one tangential plot point, the Krush Groove label is holding auditions for new artists, but they’re over by the time the brash young rapper and his crew—­hype man E Love and DJ Cut Creator—­barge in with portable stereo in tow. Despite the objections of everyone else in the room, a young, hungry, and agitated LL just shouts “Box!,” Cut Creator’s cue to hit play on the Rubin-­coproduced instrumental for the made-­for-­film “I Can’t Live Without My Radio.” LL performs the first verse of the song with so much beyond-­his-­years intensity

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“King of Rock” and authority that the Krush Groove brain trust immediately surrenders to the barrage and signs him on the spot. Ironically, LL would benefit more from his cameo in the film than Run-­ DMC would from their far more prominent role. Instead of Run-­DMC’s known-­quantity reputation being transmuted through a gauzy movieland filter, LL’s bang-­bang appearance knocking ’em dead in the span of less than a minute signaled something even more memorable: a wider introduction of an emerging artist who looked for all the world like a fully formed phenom. If nothing else, it ensured that even if his rap career would someday falter, he radiated enough tough-­and-­handsome charisma to ensure he’d always have a place in Hollywood. As of 2022, he’s entered his fourteenth season playing a main character in the CBS military-­police drama NCIS: Los Angeles. Still, in telling a story significantly more Hollywood and tangibly less fascinating than the actual Def Jam / Rush Productions world actually was, the potential to capture hip-­hop right at its pivotal verge of gaining a permanent mainstream popularity was repeatedly failed by the movie. Even if it was one of the rare opportunities for a film with a majority-­Black production team, director, screenwriter, and cast to put forth a vision that came from their under-­heard collective perspective, the artistic compromises and casting decisions kept it from fully realizing its historical importance. Blair Underwood was a thoroughly unconvincing lead, too infused with clean-­cut nice-­guy vibes to even approach the kind of portrayal that would fit even the most Hollywood-­sanitized version of Russell Simmons. Meanwhile, the obligatory romantic lead role went to Sheila E., incandescently charismatic and hitting peak fame at the time thanks to her work with Prince’s Minneapolis Sound brain trust. (Incidentally, the same company that put out her records, Warner Bros., was also the corporation in charge of distributing the film.) But while you can only do so much to make Sheila E. look uncool, the film putting the multitalented singer/drummer in the awkward position of trying to rap was a remarkable effort at doing just that. Apocryphal stories abound of New York moviegoing audiences mercilessly razzing her on-­screen efforts.6 And its ensemble-­cast approach suffered from constant tonal shifts that were the inevitable result of hit-­all-­demo-­quadrants micromanagement. It was endlessly disorienting. One moment, Russell not-­Simmons would be in the midst of a succession of dramatic conflicts that would put

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Krush Groove him at odds with Run-­DMC and in debt to a gangster-­adjacent financier, see his prized artists abandon their handshake contracts to jump ship to a manipulative major, and tangle up Russell and Joseph in a combative love triangle over Sheila E. that both brothers considered at odds with how they respected each other in real life. On the other hand, the film was paced in a way that made it seem as though that story wasn’t enough to sustain it, and a fateful decision was made to create a constantly distracting subplot. In a more serious-­minded movie, there could be any number of interesting, conflict-­building possibilities here. Just as an example: Kurtis Blow, a top-­of-­the-­marquee name in 1980 who was starting to look like the old guard by the middle of the decade, has a too-­minor role in the film where he comes across as an established star but still gets nudged toward the margins when his stage time’s done. A plot line where a veteran of the old school harbors some skepticism toward the next generation of stars, only to be won over by their energy, would seem like a classic Hollywood music-­movie gimme. But Schultz had another group in mind entirely as the show-­stealing stars, ones who would play an almost completely tangential and distracting role to a plot that was supposed to be centered around a smaller, more familial core. And so, for what felt like more than half the movie, Krush Groove would follow the efforts of the Fat Boys to break into the business. On the first two gold records that made their rep, their 1984 self-­titled debut and the following year’s The Fat Boys Are Back, the Fat Boys did a remarkable job of straddling the line between comedic novelty and bona fide talent. At their best, they came across more likably good-­natured than cartoonishly buffoonish, and made an invaluable contribution, thanks to the skills of Darren “Buff Love” Robinson, to popularizing the art of beatboxing. In the film, however, they’re depicted as high school class clowns who try roasting the fetal pigs they’re supposed to dissect in science class, and later get kicked out of the Times Square Sbarro pizza joint for abusing its “All You Can Eat” special in a gluttonous montage that even Homer Simpson would consider excessive. Simmons didn’t manage the Fat Boys or even seem all that high on them, and as a result Underwood’s Simmons-­stand-­in character doesn’t even share the screen with them until the film’s finale. But they’d already proven themselves on the album charts, and Schultz thought they would be the breakout stars of the movie—­so he kept expanding their role far

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“King of Rock” beyond what Simmons wanted. Two years later, Schultz would direct them in the Three Stooges homage Disorderlies, a hyperactive slapstick farce that is generally remembered fondly by people who saw it when they were kids and nobody else. By that point, the comedy-­rap schtick had consumed the Fat Boys whole, and many coming-­of-­age rap fans eventually abandoned them in the face of more grown-­up and uncompromising sounds that actual Def Jam artists like Public Enemy and Slick Rick had set into motion. In the end, Krush Groove is a particularly weird film to juxtapose against its actual subject matter: hip-­hop was a diverse genre even back then, but it thrived on a kind of bravado, image-­making, and self-­definition—­a realness, as was often stated and repeated with varying levels of irony. And this was a movement that a typical mainstream motion picture hadn’t quite figured out how to depict with much more than the minimum credibility. The music itself was undergoing some compelling growing pains, with the stars of the film representing so many different routes—­Run-­DMC as impending conquerors of MTV, the Beastie Boys as white America’s your-­kids-­could-­ be-­next nightmare, LL Cool J as teen heartthrob/badass mic commander in waiting, Kurtis Blow as veteran presence watching the wave about to replace him, even the Fat Boys as neo-­vaudevillian updaters of old showbiz tradition—­that the movie leaves hinted at but sadly underexplored. Yet Krush Groove did pull off the two things it was truly meant to do. In the film business’s terms, it had a burn-­fast-­burn-­bright moment where it made ridiculous amounts of money for its distribution level, grossing over $2 million in a limited nine-­city release that made over $10,000 a screen. And for Def Jam, the film made the label enough of a known quantity—­ fabulized details notwithstanding—­to earn the interest of Columbia Records, with whom Def Jam would score a crucial distribution deal that kept them more financially solvent than the film’s half-­assed loan shark intrigue ever would. As a movie, it was best left to the music. As a soundtrack, it had its high points, though newly minted hip-­hop initiates and veterans alike turned to other albums for their hip-­hop fix and left the Krush Groove collection languishing far beneath the Top 40 pop crossover enjoyed by most of the film’s actual rap stars. But as a showcase for Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin’s portfolios, it made its point successfully. The rest of hip-­hop history could then just keep on defining itself, no need for Hollywood’s blessing.

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Blue Velvet, “In Dreams” BLUE VELVET (1986, DIRECTED BY DAVID LYNCH) ROY ORBISON, “IN DREAMS” (1963, MONUMENT)

It’s not always true that you can’t go home again, but sometimes when you do, you find something horrifying that you never realized was there when you left. That’s the case for Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who’s returned home to the small town of Lumberton, North Carolina, after his father suffers a stroke. By happenstance, he finds a severed, rotting human ear covered in ants while walking through a trash-­strewn lot, and the experience both unnerves him and strikes his curiosity so deeply that he subsequently becomes entangled in the lives of people he was never meant to know. After Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), the daughter of a local police detective, gives Jeffrey a lead that points to the doings of a local lounge singer named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), Jeffrey starts to get in over his head, going so far as to pose as an exterminator and enter her apartment so he can swipe a spare key. He is soon caught by Dorothy while hiding in her closet, and the singer is fully prepared to take sexual advantage of Jeffrey when they’re interrupted by the arrival of another man—­a maniacal drug dealer named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). After Jeffrey sneaks back into the closet, undetected by Frank, he watches in horror as the emotionally volatile Frank violently beats and sexually assaults Dorothy. That only draws Jeffrey even deeper into this underworld, and he soon starts to have a sexual relationship with Dorothy—­even as he learns that the severed ear likely belongs to her husband Don, whom Frank abducted. Inevitably, Frank ambushes Jeffrey as he leaves Dorothy’s apartment, kidnaps the both of them, and brings them to a scummy, run-­down storefront

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“In Dreams” where both Don and their son Donnie are being held hostage. Frank has violent designs on Jeffrey, but first, he and his friends decide to give this young intrusive college kid a little show. Enter Ben (Dean Stockwell), a vaguely effeminate figure in decade-­out-­of-­date clothes, who lords over the place like the compere of a grotesque, decaying nightclub. Frank seems horrifically gleeful about the whole situation, the kind of giddily unnerving enthusiasm that keeps abruptly turning on a dime to some other, far more dangerous heightened emotion. And after Frank and Ben take turns smacking Jeffrey around a bit, Frank pops a pill, swigs a Pabst, and makes a demand of Ben: “The candy-­colored clown they call the Sandman.” As Dorothy’s whisked away to another room, ostensibly to visit the son who’s being held hostage, Jeffrey is subjected to an unusual form of psychological intimidation. Frank pops in a tape, and Ben, wielding a mechanic’s light as some sort of illuminating faux microphone, begins to lip-­sync Roy Orbison’s 1963 hit single “In Dreams.” The whole situation—­especially the stark, lit-­from-­below visage of Ben’s unnervingly passionate expressiveness—­is deeply disconcerting. But Frank’s litany of emotional responses to this performance, from fragile sadness to incandescent rage, are what makes it truly terrifying. Then, with an abrupt impulse that signals a sort of psychosexual mental break, Frank jabs at the tape deck to stop the music mid-­chorus, barks out a declaration to “hit the fuckin’ road,” and leaves with his friends to take Jeffrey and Dorothy on a “joyride.” Ben stays behind, but Frank brings the Roy Orbison tape along. Once they arrive at a local sawmill, Frank takes a massive hit of narcotics from a gas canister and starts sexually menacing Dorothy—­which provokes Jeffrey to punch Frank square in the face. Furious, Frank shrugs off the blow as his friends drag Jeffrey out of the car. As they begin to violently beat him, Frank takes another hit from the gas, applies Dorothy’s lipstick, kisses Jeffrey all over his face, and makes another demand for “candy-­ colored clown.” The song plays again—­starting from the beginning, not from where it was cut off during Ben’s performance—­and a woman along for the ride does a zombielike go-­go dance atop the roof of Frank’s car as the pure, yearning emotion of Roy Orbison accompanies Frank’s parting threat: “Don’t be a good neighbor to her. I’ll send you a love letter, straight from my heart, fucker! You know what a love letter is? It’s a bullet from a fuckin’ gun, fucker! You receive a love letter from me, you’re fucked forever! You understand, fuck? I’ll send you straight to hell, fucker!” Jeffrey

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Blue Velvet appears to nod in vague understanding, but Frank continues to threaten him—­paraphrasing in tandem with the chorus of the song, no less: “In dreams, I walk with you / In dreams I talk to you / In dreams, you’re mine all of the time / Forever in dreams.” Then Frank beats him within an inch of his life as Dorothy screams in horror, a nearly subliminal, ghostly strain of the song’s ending accompanying the moment where Jeffrey finally loses consciousness.

There’s a version of America that permeates the works of David Lynch, Blue Velvet not the least among them, that operates on a level of deeply felt anti-­nostalgia. This doesn’t necessarily mean a clear opposition to nostalgia in itself, or even the decades-­past times that the film both invokes and evokes, per se, but a sort of grown-­up inversion of it. If the traditional depiction of the nostalgic impulse involves looking back wistfully at one’s own idyllic childhood—­in the case of Reaganite America, a pre-­ countercultural version of the 1950s—­Blue Velvet hits like the facade of that idyll being knocked down, Santa Claus isn’t real–­style. The pleasurable aspects of those hazy memories are run through with a deeper, adult understanding of the reality of the time, including all the horrors that adults were perfectly capable of while the kids were busy playing cap-­gun cowboys. The world of Blue Velvet and its small-­town setting is one where technology and industrial design may have advanced here and there, but fashion and pop culture never really did, giving it all the surface feeling of an uncanny dreamland unbothered by anything that broke the spell of postwar America’s first ten years. And it is in this setting that Lynch shows us that you do not need the catalyst of a mass countercultural chic or a popular sexual revolution to encourage a certain moral rot in the world. People thought the hippies were scary, but you do not need to conjure the specter of a Beatles-­obsessed Charles Manson when there’s a Frank Booth around to wring violent psychosexual dopamine out of a Roy Orbison ballad. Lynch’s own personal politics seem hard to pigeonhole; he leans libertarian and claimed to find a sort of fascination in the avuncular Old Hollywood cowboyisms of Ronald Reagan, but also harbors a clear interest in social justice that led him to side with Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter. So it’s mostly down to the viewer of his films to extract their own take

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“In Dreams” on what this anti-­nostalgia means in a sociocultural or ideological sense. Is his exposure of unreal, disorienting horror beneath the picturesque Americana mythos a direct refutation of its very existence, a half-­fond / half-­disillusioned manifestation of its intrinsic strangeness, or a wistfully remembered and very real place where its purity provides the most intriguing setting for a neo-­noir? More important, did that matter? The mixed impressions Blue Velvet instilled among its viewers, not to mention its countless stylistic heirs and imitators, leaves that question wide open in a way that only makes the film that much more pervasively fascinating. Isabella Rossellini herself made the astute observation that Lynch’s films are “more of a sensation than a story”;1 and if you simply want to go along with it on a level of pure sensation, it still holds up every bit as well as a deeper critical reading does. It is, in popular parlance, a vibe, and as much as “Lynchian” has become another bit of vaguely associative popular parlance in itself, it was singular enough in its time to deeply disturb and discomfort just about everyone who encountered it. One of the most popular examples of the film’s divisiveness and its potential to disturb viewers came in the form of a one-­star pan by Roger Ebert, whose TV program with Gene Siskel had made him one of the most influential movie critics in America by 1986. Ebert was thoroughly repulsed by Blue Velvet’s apparent dichotomy of tone, which he saw as a sort of moral cognitive dissonance: “Everyday town life is depicted with a deadpan irony; characters use lines with corny double meanings and solemnly recite platitudes. Meanwhile, the darker story of sexual bondage is told absolutely on the level in cold-­blooded realism.”2 Ebert and the film’s other detractors often pointed out how much Blue Velvet felt like a grotesque collision between two popular postwar entertainment milieus, the lighthearted family sitcom and the gritty, brutal film noir, as though Kiss Me Deadly had swapped out Mike Hammer for Dobie Gillis. But in the right hands, that’s a powerful way to reassess what we consider kitsch, and what happens when we position those tropes smack dab in the middle of a brutal tableau that said kitsch is traditionally meant to soften or distract from. How can picket-­fence innocence really exist in the face of actual human degeneracy and cruelty? Besides that, what does the knowledge of this degeneracy and cruelty do to our understandings of more innocent-­seeming art and aesthetics—­the clothes, the music, the furniture—­that we’ve long associated with something we’ve gravely

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Blue Velvet mistook for a “simpler time”? Is there something deeper, stranger, more filled with potential for subversion and transcendence in the artifacts of those times? In short: is “In Dreams” a nice, pleasant pop song best left as an object of its era, or something far deeper and more complex that continues to haunt us for reasons not often attributed to pop music? In a series of interviews with Chris Rodley, collected in the book Lynch on Lynch, the filmmaker discussed the genesis of his choice to use “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet. It was perfectly simple and happenstance-­driven: he and Kyle MacLachlan were sharing a New York cab ride when Roy Orbison’s song “Crying” came on the radio, and it struck Lynch with such intensity that he urged an associate to get him a copy of an Orbison greatest-­ hits record so he could revisit the song. But he’d subsequently discover that “In Dreams” had an even bigger impact on him—­in his own words, it “explained to me so much of what the film was about.”3 (“Crying” would later appear in his 2001 feature Mulholland Drive, sung in a Spanish-­language a cappella version to stunning effect by Rebekah Del Rio.) How Roy Orbison was capable of causing such an epiphany, as well as how he found himself caught up in and subsequently reinvigorated by that epiphany, is key to understanding just what Blue Velvet as a film conveyed, both on the surface and in its deeper, often subjective readings. For one of the most iconic pop stars to peak in the post–­army Elvis, pre–­British Invasion era of rock ’n’ roll in flux, Roy Orbison may have had the strangest intersections of real-­life struggle and musical self-­expression to ever grace the Top 40. Orbison was a Texas native who spent his formative years in the town of Wink, an oil-­greased, arid, industrial-­desert, middle-­of-­nowhere environment; take one look at the place in photos and it’s easy to see why loneliness was such a motif in his songs. While Orbison was quick to find his talent as a singer as a youth, performing at medicine shows and county fairs, it took a while for him to find his stylistic footing. Initially, he took his inspiration from growing up with country music—­Lefty Frizzell chief among them, the standard setter who’d make honky-­tonk just smooth-­sounding enough for the masses—­and mixed in the epiphany of seeing Elvis on stage to develop a Texas-­rooted strain of rockabilly. Starting in 1956, he’d cut some excellent if largely underrated rockabilly singles with his group the Teen Kings for early rock and country epicenter Sun Records. Few of them charted high, but one of them, Dick Penner and

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“In Dreams” Wade Lee Moore’s giddy up-­tempo dance number “Ooby Dooby,” did well enough in Orbison’s hands to at least crack the Hot 100, peaking at #59 and carrying a long-­enough tail that Creedence Clearwater Revival would cut a faithful cover of it fourteen years later. But Sun soon proved stifling to Orbison for both financial and creative reasons, including Sun producer Jack Clement discouraging him from singing ballads after a session recording a song titled “The Clown” went nowhere. It wasn’t until he signed with Monument Records that he started to find his footing as a crossover pop star, with a “countrypolitan” blend of honky-­tonk roots and pop-­crooner opulence that felt as simpatico with Frizzell as it did with the string-­drenched country-­soul that Ray Charles would explore soon afterward. But there was a certain self-­consciousness about Orbison that would fatefully shape his image into a particularly unusual sort of iconography. His hair was so light people mistook him for having albinism, so he dyed it jet black. His astigmatism made him wear thick glasses, and when he forgot his primary pair on an airplane on tour he wound up having to swap in a pair of prescription Wayfarer sunglasses that he soon grew to prefer. When he performed onstage, he barely moved, a stage fright–­informed stoic in a world accustomed to energetic hip-­swivelers. And while his Sun Records labelmate and close friend Johnny Cash became famous as “The Man in Black” when he started dressing the part during the Vietnam War era, Orbison had a similar sartorial tendency that preceded Cash by a few years—­and, unlike Cash, he didn’t bother explaining in a song. “I wasn’t trying to be weird, you know?” he told Rolling Stone in 1988, the last interview he gave during his lifetime, chalking it up instead to personal taste that only seemed idiosyncratic from the outside. “I didn’t have a manager who told me how to dress or how to present myself or anything. But the image developed of a man of mystery and a quiet man in black and somewhat of a recluse, although I never was, really . . . I thought black was just a smart way to dress.”4 Nonetheless, the image persisted, and it was inextricably tied into his aesthetic when paired with the tendency for his biggest hits to focus on a certain teen-­relatable yet grown-­adult perspective on loneliness. “Only the Lonely (Know the Way I Feel)” was his first big hit in 1960—­#2 on the U.S. singles charts—­and rode off its intense blend of Nashville Sound richness, vocals-­at-­the-­front mixing, and Orbison’s voice itself, more vulnerable than just about any male pop singer of his generation. That approach

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Blue Velvet carried him through a slew of hits that were every bit as successful, in both commercial and artistic terms: the anxiety of being his lover’s other man in “Running Scared,” the homesick abandonment of a cherished place and the loved ones he knew there at the heart of “Blue Bayou,” the ache to make a theoretical, interior-­world love into the real thing in “Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream),” even the sheer desperation at the heart of the otherwise upbeat “Oh, Pretty Woman” (“Are you lonely, just like me?”)—­and, of course, the post-­breakup agony of “Crying,” the song that David Lynch heard in his fatefully inspiring cab ride. “In Dreams” is no different—­and yet it’s also clear why it stood out among all those other greatest hits that Lynch listened to during the creative process for Blue Velvet. Orbison’s music has often been called “operatic,” and maybe the “candy-­colored clown they call the Sandman” is Roy’s own inner-­voice Pagliacci, sprinkling dreams into his head that leave him deeply torn up when he awakes to find they’re not real. And as a performance, it’s absolutely devastating: here’s a Texas boy singing with a voice you’d swear was classically trained, and ignoring all the traditional songwriting structures to build and build and build off the momentum of an emotional journey, until it sounded for all the world like a symphony of dramatic teenage yearning put into motion by adults who never forgot how that felt. Orbison’s persona, both as a public figure and as a recording artist, left such a powerful impression that when he opened for the Beatles during a 1963 UK tour, he regularly threatened to eclipse the band that was already emerging as the single biggest phenomenon in rock ’n’ roll. During the first night, he notoriously wound up playing so many encores as the opening act that John Lennon and Paul McCartney had to restrain him physically from going out for what some accounts recall would have been a fifteenth encore. But as much as that kind of connection with an audience can feel indelible and permanent, there’s always the chance that it can also become unsustainable—­usually through no fault of the artists themselves, as given as they are to the vagaries of record company fickleness, shifts in which way the wind is blowing trend-­wise, and, more cruelly than anything, the hand of fate slapping them square in the face. All these developments converged almost simultaneously for Orbison in the mid-­1960s. When his contract with Monument ran out in 1965, his agent steered him toward the top-­dollar potential of MGM Records, in

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“In Dreams” part as a sort of insurance policy on his fame in the event that the harder-­ rocking, ensemble band–­driven dynamics of the emergent British Invasion guitar groups would put a dent in his popularity. In that sense, Orbison was being steered from being inspired by Elvis to befriending Elvis to becoming Elvis: if the music thing wanes, there’s always Hollywood to fall back on. Something in that seemed to appeal to Orbison on some level; he was in the habit of watching as many as three films a day when he wasn’t onstage or in the studio. (A movie buff to the end, that final Rolling Stone interview saw him describing the Wink, Texas, of his youth as like something out of the 1956 Rock Hudson / Elizabeth Taylor / James Dean oil-­family drama Giant.)5 But in 1966, just before he was set to start working on the music that would accompany his first feature film, his most intensely tumultuous relationship came to a tragic end. His wife Claudette (née Frady), whom he’d married in 1957, had been a loving partner who was nevertheless given to the occasional extramarital affair. But after a temporary divorce in 1964, Roy and Claudette came to a reconciliation on the understanding that it was her own loneliness that was the root of the problem, and they’d continue to thrive as a couple the more time they shared together—­on tour and off. The tragic irony of this renewed closeness came when Roy and Claudette, who’d shared a sort of gearhead enthusiasm for motorcycles, were riding home together on their own separate bikes on June 6, 1966. A truck unexpectedly pulled out in front of Claudette, and she struck the vehicle, killing her instantly. This left Roy completely shaken and, for a few weeks at least, unable to focus on his career. Unfortunately, MGM was pushing him to get to work on The Fastest Guitar Alive, which would start filming in September and require not just a bunch of new songs but his untested services as an actor as well. The premise was goofy, a sort of Elvis musical/Western/Bond flick: Orbison played a spy in the waning years of the Civil War, tasked with heisting a haul of gold to fund a desperate final salvo for the Confederate Army, who toted a combination guitar/rifle as his weapon of choice. If that seemed like a palatable premise to sell to the young filmgoers of 1967—­which, considering the pop-­cultural turn toward psychedelia, the momentum of the civil rights movement, and the first glimmers of a more serious and nuanced New Hollywood in Bonnie and Clyde, it clearly wasn’t—­the end result was still a kitschy faceplant with some decent songs

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Blue Velvet and not much else. When MGM realized too late that a singer famed for being practically immobile as a stage presence might not be the ideal leading man, the failure of the film both critically and commercially torpedoed the studio’s plans to make four other films with Orbison as the star. In the scheme of things, though, the movie’s failure was just a minor punchline amid a relentless string of tragedies: just a little over a year later, when he was on tour in England in September 1968, his house in Hendersonville, Tennessee, burned down and took the lives of his two oldest sons with it. Orbison would remarry before the decade was out; his second wife, Barbara (née Jakobs), would be with him to not only his end but her own as the person in charge of his posthumous legacy. But this aura, this aching sense of loss, haunted his image through increasingly fallow times. Despite his ability to still pack in crowds and sell records in Europe, Orbison hadn’t been interested in adapting to the heavier psychedelic rock sounds that were earning all the youth-­culture buzz in late ’60s America. This is when the switch flipped from pop star to nostalgia act—­not always the worst position to be in, but still enough to alter the outward perception of what kind of artist he was supposed to even be. His influence was everywhere, at least. Bruce Springsteen openly idolized him, and Orbison’s hits were covered by era-­defining acts ranging from country crossover queen Linda Ronstadt (1977’s “Blue Bayou”) to the hard rock maniacs in Van Halen (1982’s “Oh, Pretty Woman”). He’d still open for some of the biggest bands in the world; the Eagles brought him along on their ’76 tour as One of These Nights vaulted them into the rock stratosphere. Country fans still remembered him; his 1980 duet with Emmylou Harris’ “That Lovin’ You Feelin’ Again,” peaked at #6 on the Hot Country Charts and notched Roy his first-­ever Grammy (Best Country Performance Duo or Group). And he’d still have memorable moments in the public eye, filling the recently departed Elvis’s Sun-­alumni “Million Dollar Quartet” role alongside Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis as part of a 1977 Cash-­hosted TV Christmas special. But on the pop charts and in the contemporary zeitgeist, he might as well have been a living ghost, appreciated more for memories of who he’d been than an ongoing fascination over what he might do next. It’s not exaggerating to credit Lynch’s use of “In Dreams” with putting him back in the conversation. The timing certainly helped: this was during a stretch when college rock was rife with black-­clad, vulnerable

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“In Dreams” men singing about their emotional tumult. It’s not hard to imagine a sizeable cross-­section of goths, punks, art students, and other assorted young Blue Velvet enthusiasts dubbing Roy Orbison songs onto their favorite mixtapes between the latest cuts from the Smiths and the Cure. But there was also the question of what associations Orbison would get from that song’s prominent role in such a harrowing, divisive film, whether a song that felt like an artistic triumph in 1963 would, more than twenty years later, be stained with a morbid sort of irony. Lynch went through this exact experience firsthand with Orbison. Getting the recording into the film in the first place was an under-­the-­wire miracle, as the filmmaker got to use “In Dreams” right before Monument Records’ insolvency made the rights completely unattainable. Secondhand theorizing led to the urban legend that Blue Velvet incorporated “In Dreams” against Orbison’s wishes, but the reality was a bit more magnanimous. Lynch simply hadn’t discussed using the song with Orbison before he went ahead with it, and this caused the unsuspecting Orbison no small amount of alarm when he went to see Blue Velvet on the recommendation of some friends who knew his song had a prominent role in the film. As Lynch explained it, bluntly enough, “he did not like it, he didn’t like the way the song was used because it meant something, to him, completely different.”6 This, of course, is the intrinsic question of what happens when somebody with their own particular vision finds something in an artist’s work that the artist doesn’t necessarily recognize—­the potential root conflict behind every iconoclastic cover version, every recontextualized sample, and every outwardly jarring juxtaposition between a film’s narrative and the pop songs picked to drive it. Fortunately, Orbison was the kind of artist who was at least open enough to consider how another particularly distinct sensibility could take another angle on his work. Lynch recalls the same friend who took Orbison to see Blue Velvet in the first place telling the singer that it was worth giving another shot with a more open mind. And on a rewatch, Orbison was said to be a bit more understanding, appreciating that beneath all the drug-­dealer sex-­crime sordidness the film harbored this unusual state of unreality he found compelling. As he told journalist Nick Kent, “I really got to appreciate not only what David gave to the song and what the song in turn gave to the film, but how innovative the movie was, how it really achieved this otherworldly quality that added

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Blue Velvet a whole new dimension to ‘In Dreams.’ I find it hard to verbalize why, but Blue Velvet really succeeded in making my music contemporary again.”7 If it ended there, that would be a nice little anecdote, an interesting footnote to a 1986 that might have otherwise been more remembered for his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Springsteen’s speech, which ambushed Orbison with its reverence, pretty much nailed it: “He had the ability, like all the great rock ’n’ rollers, to sound like he’d dropped in from another planet and yet get the stuff which was right to the heart of what you were living today. That was how he opened up your vision.”)8 But Lynch has a way of haunting you long after you’ve watched one of his films, and Orbison’s career was no different. As the role of “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet coincided with Monument Records’ bankruptcy, the only way Orbison really had to capitalize on the potential for his classic hits’ new audience was an album full of remakes he’d recorded at the beginning of 1986. “He was going to sell them on late-­night TV,” Lynch observed in retrospect. “And in those days there were these ads, like at two in the morning—­blue screen, yellow block letters, play some music and buy this thing.”9 Virgin Records exec Jeff Ayeroff considered “As Seen on TV” status beneath Orbison, which led to the label picking up the rights to release the re-­recordings as In Dreams: The Greatest Hits. But before the collection was released by Virgin, Lynch had spoken with Ayeroff about his dissatisfaction with how the new versions sounded, especially compared to the original recording he’d used for the film. If that sounds like a strange way for a film director to wind up inside a recording studio, it was also an effective one: though the record was already in the can, Ayeroff brought in Lynch as a sort of proxy producer to supervise another shot at “In Dreams.” Only instead of tweaking knobs behind the boards he’d coach Orbison as a performer, just like he would for an actor: “T-­Bone Burnett was a producer and I was there to, y’know, do whatever. I would try to talk to Roy like an actor and pump him up for it, because it wasn’t quite happening. And he said, ‘David, in the old days there’d be a guy like you who’d do that job, and say [when] it wasn’t feeling right.’ So he was perfectly fine with that. We recorded it and it was pretty good, but not like as good as the original.”10 Then came the music video. Released in 1987 and directed by Leslie Libman, it’s an ethereal, gauzy sort of montage that starts not with a shot of Orbison himself, but of Dean Stockwell’s Blue Velvet pantomime. It proceeds with footage of Orbison, accompanied by the backing musicians,

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“In Dreams” fading in and out between wavy projections and distorted, dreamlike cut-­ ins of clips from the film: Frank Booth’s glower, Jeffrey Beaumont gazing at Dorothy Vallens, that deceptive white-­picket fence from the film’s establishing shot. It resembled so many other soundtrack-­driven music videos that incorporated clips of the film that the song scored, only this wasn’t the usual tie-­in with some written-­for-­the-­film theme song à la a contemporary video like Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” which was fused from the start with the rancid showroom-­dummy-­comes-­to-­life rom-­com Mannequin. This was an old song so thoroughly reclaimed by its presence in a film that it became one of the most definitive examples ever of a piece of repurposed music becoming permanently associated with a movie. Maybe that can work to a song’s detriment—­think of Orbison’s initially mortified impression of seeing the actors “talking about ‘the candy-­ coloured clown’ in relation to doing a dope deal.”11 But when a song so outwardly innocent or even nostalgic as “In Dreams” finds that new context, there’s also the opportunity to make it work to the song’s everlasting benefit, revealing the potential for depth and reinterpretation that can turn a piece of music from “just” a pop hit into something rife with interpretive possibility. And that’s one of the keys to its fascinating usage in Blue Velvet. What makes a song like “In Dreams” such a trigger for a character, a man, a collection of psychodramatic sexual terrors like Frank Booth? Is he tormented by the emotions dredged up by the song itself, by the pantomime of its lip-­ synching performance, or just by the moment he’s finding himself caught up in? And is it the song’s presence that agitates him, or the fact that it must end, leading him to demand its repetition over and over like some sort of sadomasochistic ritual? At the very least, it’s a fascinating case study when you look at it from the perspective of Jeffrey Beaumont: how in the hell will he ever hear that song again without flashing back to one of the most horrifying experiences of his life? Blue Velvet may not have singlehandedly revived Orbison’s career. Maybe Springsteen’s effusive Rock and Roll Hall of Fame speech would’ve been enough to spur renewed record industry interest, and maybe Orbison still would’ve joined the all-­star band the Traveling Wilburys with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne. But the Lynch/Orbison association cast a long shadow, leaving countless others to try and find that same disconcerting yet oddly beautiful and dreamlike feeling in pop music

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Blue Velvet for decades to come. When Orbison passed of a heart attack just two years after Blue Velvet changed his life, he was in the sort of position Elvis never got to experience: a half-­forgotten presence revived into a new version of his old self, as though he’d picked up where his early ’60s fame tapered off and was ready to notch chartbusters all over again. His posthumously released 1989 Virgin album Mystery Girl hit #5 on the Billboard 200 in the States and #2 in the UK, with similar Top 10 standings for the Jeff Lynne / Tom Petty cowrite “You Got It”. But when it came time to eulogize him in that most pop-­music showbiz manner—­the all-­star tribute concert—­it could only conclude one way. The May 1990 Roy Orbison Tribute Concert to Benefit the Homeless, a special recorded for cable network Showtime, featured a murderer’s row of veteran and up-­and-­comer musicians paying tribute to the man’s music. And it was riddled with highlight performances from k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, John Lee Hooker, B. B. King, and an impromptu partial reunion of the Byrds where they were joined by Orbison’s fellow Wilbury Bob Dylan for “Mr. Tambourine Man.” And yet when it came time to roll credits, there was Dean Stockwell, crediting his work with Lynch on Blue Velvet as the key moment of Orbison’s revival, before taking the stage to reproduce his horrifying pantomime in a context that felt much more wistful than it ever was in the film. As it turns out, what made for horror when Orbison first saw it could be translated, with unnerving ease, into a beautiful eulogy.

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Wayne’s World, “Bohemian Rhapsody” WAYNE’S WORLD (1992, DIRECTED BY PENELOPE SPHEERIS) QUEEN, “BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY” (1975, EMI)

Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers) is an uncomplicated man. He’s old enough to be part of the working world but young enough to resent the idea, and alongside his friend Garth Algar (Dana Carvey), he’s more or less content to maintain the post-­adolescent slacker lifestyle of hanging out with his friends, making goofy pop-­culture jokes, and listening to loud classic rock. What makes this lifestyle something of a sweet spot is the fact that Wayne and Garth host Wayne’s World, a cable access show broadcast from Wayne’s parents’ basement that has earned some local notoriety from their teenage and twenty-­something admirers. And after another successful episode—­one in which Garth’s poodle-­shag is memorably subjected to a local as-­seen-­on-­TV entrepreneur’s vacuum-­based haircutting contraption—­the hosts and their friends in the film crew decide to celebrate by going out on the town (the “town” being suburban Chicagoland satellite Aurora, Illinois). The cliché about the journey being almost as important as the destination seems to hold true for these guys: the moment they pile into Garth’s car, dubbed the Mirthmobile, they make the crucial decision to “go with a little ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ gentlemen,” and pop in a Queen tape cued about halfway through the British glam-­prog giants’ most outlandish hit. It’s the moment that catalyzes the whole sing-­along aspect of the song—­“I see a little silhouette-­o of a man,” sings Freddie Mercury with rock-­opera theatricality, Wayne’s voice harmonizing with it. It sounds a little awkward, but everyone else joins in on their own apparently predetermined interjections, including an everyone-­gets-­a-­“Galileo!” round, and they all join in

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Wayne’s World when Queen make with the harmonies. There’s a brief interlude to pick up another friend of theirs, Phil, who’s hunched over on a bus stop bench—­he could be drunk, high, or just vaguely “partied out,” but Wayne lets him tag along with the promise that Phil won’t get carsick—­and then it’s back to the ride. After another few lines of harmonizing along with the increasingly dramatic vocals of “Bohemian Rhapsody”—­which, with Phil’s queasy-­ sounding involvement, now sounds even more ridiculous—­the guys approach the moment of truth. They are so fully invested in their enjoyment of the song that the Mirthmobile might as well be a containment unit separating their pure joy from the outside world’s cynicism or self-­consciousness. And when they finally reach the crest of the song’s operatic movement—­ “Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for meeeee, for meeeeeeeee!”—­ the song’s transition into Brian May’s solar-­plexus-­clobbering guitar riff is met with a vigorous round of hair-­flailing, maniacally gurning headbanging. They all look preposterous, but their happiness is impossible to write off. And after another brief interruption—­Wayne makes Garth pull over next to a music store so he can swoon over a window display of a white ’64 Fender Stratocaster guitar—­their ride ends at a local donut shop to the wistful strains of Freddie Mercury in the outro: “Nothing really matters, anyone can see / Nothing really matters / Nothing really matters to me.” In the process, the song has somehow taken over from its initial diegetic car-­ ride soundtrack to become an actual part of the surroundings, no longer bound to the Mirthmobile as Wayne and Garth stride through the parking lot and wave to a carful of adoring fans. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Why not both?

There’s always been something of a divide when it comes to hard rock’s place in the wider musical culture. That seems especially true from a 2020s perspective, when you put its masc-­het fantasies, playin’-­the-­blooze cultural lifts, and emphasis on iconic, nearly unattainable virtuoso-­god status through a contemporary critical lens. Or an older one, even: music writers at the turn of the ’70s were already looking askance at the tight-­pantsed aspiring deities who were shifting rock ’n’ roll from clubs, dance halls, and theaters to sports arenas and repurposed auto racetracks. After years of being accustomed to finding artistic ambition and lyrical profundity at

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“Bohemian Rhapsody” the top of an albums chart dominated by the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, early-­wave rock critics saw the mega-­ blockbuster status of lumpen mid-­’70s heroes like Grand Funk Railroad, Peter Frampton, and Kiss as an excuse to abandon all pretense of speaking for the popular consensus. Young record buyers saw the big dollars and big crowds and big noise and big-­dick energy and thought “that’s what I wish I was”; but the critical establishment, often by dint of being just five or ten years older than the hard rock target audience, used it as their flashpoint for the idea that this is why punk had to happen. By the end of the ’80s, that divide had become an uncrossable rift, where serious, young, educated, middle-­class music fans stuck to “college rock” in part because they saw themselves as above such things as five-­ minute guitar solos and lyrics about wizards. If they wanted their own version of loudness and catharsis, they could get it in short, unpretentious doses from the lingering vestiges of hardcore’s stripped-­down straightforwardness; if they wanted to ruminate over heartbreak, they’d get it from awkward romantics whose own form of sadness had been fully divorced from the blues machismo that hard rockers emulated. To give into anything more commercial, more gauche, would be a betrayal. The flipside of Minutemen declaring “our band could be your life” was that their independent, do-­it-­yourself route was portrayed by indie rock cognoscenti as the only way to truly make that kind of band-­to-­audience connection. Imagine some pyro-­and-­theatrics arena rock act being your life! Couldn’t be me. It was a stark example of how a once across-­the-­board “low culture” phenomenon like rock music could still find its own hierarchies within itself, with its own low culture / high culture divides. When a college-­fave band like the Replacements wanted to annoy their audience, they’d just do an extremely sloppy Lynyrd Skynyrd / Black Sabbath / Led Zeppelin cover-­ version stretch of their setlist and bask in the hostility. Reclaiming this kind of hard rock from the cool kids’ punchline status seems like a pointless task on some level. These golden gods already won; they went multiplatinum and flew around in jet planes and lived in seventeenth-­century mansions. So who cares if some twerp in a cardigan thinks they’re tacky? And yet seeing this music in less of an adversarial context and more through the lens of sincere fandom becomes a way to appreciate it on a level that might not be entirely straight-­faced, but at least feels a bit more empathetic and even infectious. So how do you get there?

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Wayne’s World Through comedy. Because the funny thing is that if any film actually approached the idea of hard rock fandom as something both ludicrous and joyful, and nailed it from every angle, it was Wayne’s World. A broad teen (and teen-­adjacent) comedy on the surface, Wayne’s World was made to cash in on the watercooler-­dominating sketches that had become a highlight of early ’90s Saturday Night Live. But beneath the surface, it was an unexpected big-­time move from a director previously known for her documentary work chronicling both the punk and heavy metal scenes of 1980s Los Angeles—­for better and, maybe a bit heavy on the latter, the worse. In Penelope Spheeris’s 1981 doc The Decline of Western Civilization, we see the ritualistic violence and fury and alienation of a punk scene too outwardly threatening to become mainstream—­at least, not for another decade or so—­but with enough of a direct connection to the pure need to belong at the heart of fandom. This was all amplified and complicated by the fact that belonging and becoming part of the scene had a contradictory set of barriers in place just to make sure you really wanted to commit: not just deliberate rejections of the outside overculture, but internal conflicts and often violent poseur-­weeding rituals built to keep the wrong people out. You really like the Germs, huh? Prove it: burn yourself with this cigarette. Finally, here was something corporate rock meddlers couldn’t touch—­ something they didn’t even want to touch. You want to play dress-­up pretend? Go somewhere else, over there with all the other vultures trying to make “new wave” a thing. By deliberate contrast, its 1988 sequel, The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, looked at hard rock and heavy metal as the pitiable products of a star-­making, star-­destroying machine. It depicted a large, unwieldy segment of the rock biz where reaching the apex of your field inevitably resulted in alcohol-­soaked obliviousness, hideous misogyny, and a sort of sad self-­parody. And even if you succeeded, there was a volley of outrage waiting for you in the form of a Moral Majority–­fueled “think about the children” crusade. Though its release coincided with the rise of LA-­based hard rockers Guns N’ Roses (not featured in the film) as arguably the biggest American rock band of the late ’80s, the idiocy, hubris, misery, and overall tackiness displayed by the bands in The Metal Years is also seen as a catalyst for the downturn of “glam metal.” It’s not hard to imagine a younger fan of a big-­hair group like W.A.S.P. watching their

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“Bohemian Rhapsody” guitarist Chris Holmes floating in a swimming pool looking like the world’s most miserable drunk, and deciding right then and there to turn toward more college-­rock-­adjacent “grunge” bands like Soundgarden and Mother Love Bone, or the harder-­faster-­bloodier underground genres like thrash or black metal that gave us the likes of Slayer and Celtic Frost. Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar don’t seem like a part of those worlds—­or, more accurately, they seem like a part of a different world that pieces together all those ideas at once. They’ve got their own DIY operation, but instead of a punk zine or a college radio show, it’s a basic-­cable public access program dedicated to assorted goofball Gen X pop-­culture detritus and manned by heavy metal heshers of varying subcultural fidelity. (One longhaired crew member is seen at one point wearing a shirt featuring the unmistakable glowering-­creep artwork from Bad Music for Bad People, the decidedly not-­metal 1983 compilation from the camp-­indulging goth-­rockabilly group the Cramps. And why not? The Cramps fucking ruled.) Wayne likes to play guitar (or at least riff), and Garth is a drummer of secretly Neil Peart–­level intensity, but neither of them seem to belong to an actual band. What they are, clearly, is fans—­ones like the punk kids interviewed in the first Decline, but in thrall to the kinds of hard rock bands depicted in the second one. The origins of Wayne’s World as a comedy bit hint at the odd space these characters reside in—­one that, by 1992, seemed almost anachronistic and on the verge of disappearing beneath a rising tide of newer, angstier teenage culture. Like a lot of comedy bits that have some true-­to-­life verisimilitude beneath all the broad mugging and catchphrases, Mike Myers based Wayne off memories of his social circle in the suburbs of Toronto during his teen years in the late ’70s and early ’80s.1 And by the time he hit college age—­or at least the age he’d have gone to college if he hadn’t wound up joining Canada’s touring company of the Second City comedy troupe instead—­he’d had the Wayne character more or less fully formed. He would start showing up on Canadian TV as this partying-­and-­babes-­ enthused character in his early twenties, including recurring roles on Canada’s MTV equivalent MuchMusic and the short-­lived 1987 CBC comedy series It’s Only Rock & Roll. By the time Myers was twenty-­five, his prolific gigs working for comedy outlets in America, Canada, and the UK had led him to a goal he’d had

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Wayne’s World since he was an eleven-­year-­old staying up late to watch this weird new comedy show called Saturday Night Live. He debuted on the show in January 1989, and would participate in his first Wayne’s World sketch alongside Dana Carvey less than a month later. The premise—­two suburban friends host a cable-­access talk show, and interview the typical kinds of adult authority figures and youthful peers high schoolers must deal with—­caught on almost instantaneously. The secret to Wayne’s weirdo charm was Myers’s perceptive eye for characterization, mixed with his own model-­student bookishness, that fused his own personality with traits from his hard-­partying friends. Early Wayne’s World sketches could lean a little too far into the cruel and questionable aspects of dirtbag culture; the first sketch featured Wayne calling Garth’s dad an antigay slur and ended with him implying that it would be “excellent” for a caller to make out with his passed-­out girlfriend. But it was eventually honed into a brutally efficient lampooning / love letter to a certain type of burnout, wedged somewhere between high school and college years, who you know would succeed on nine-­to-­five rat-­race terms if he just applied himself—­and hadn’t rejected that world entirely. The end result was a slacker duo with little use for corporate climbing, but still with enough open-­minded curiosity and hidden depth to make for good comic foils, both for each other and the wider adult world. That wasn’t necessarily what made them huge; you could more easily credit their relentlessly manic energy and their uncanny ability to create catchphrases practically at will (“schwing!” for getting aroused; appending “. . . not!” to a sentence as a sarcastic riposte; turning “no way!” / “way!” into the purest two-­person exchange of disbelieving awe). But they still felt a bit more clever and crafty for a milieu usually defined by oblivious buffoons. Somewhere on the burnout-­comedy timeline between Cheech & Chong and Beavis & Butt-­Head, Wayne and Garth were there obsessing over more or less the same babes / partying / rock ’n’ roll pursuits, but on a level that felt more like thwarted ambition than just plain old adolescent idiocy. SNL had already established them as the kinds of guys who, after landing the unfathomable coup of getting Aerosmith to appear on their show, would unexpectedly ask them about the band’s take on the waning status of socialism in Eastern Europe. Alice Cooper, who has a memorable role in the movie waxing surprisingly erudite with a worshipful Wayne and Garth, observed in a March 1992 Rolling Stone article examining the making of the

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“Bohemian Rhapsody” just-­released film that their appeal was in the idea that “it’s cool to act stupid but not to be stupid.”2 But to depict the world that Myers and Carvey occupied, to take Wayne’s World from the confines of an SNL suburban-­basement set to the real(ish) world, would require something different than just making a broad-­if-­ accurate mockery of the rock milieu. (After Rob Reiner’s standard-­setting 1984 faux-­documentary comedy This Is Spinal Tap, it’d be a tough act to follow anyways.) It helped that there was already a strong base of characters to build on. Wayne and Garth’s ages might have fluctuated in the SNL sketches—­there were frequent early references to their social status in high school—­but by 1992, both Myers and Carvey were far closer to thirty than twenty. (Carvey, in fact, was closer to forty than thirty.) So they feel more like adults who hadn’t quite shed either their youthful enthusiasms or their teenage alienation. Then if they’re functioning adults, what do these guys even do with their lives when they’re not doing the TV show? “Nothing I’d call a career,” Wayne tells the camera with a hint of self-­conscious resignation. “Let me put it this way: I have an extensive collection of name tags and hairnets.” On top of that, he’s old enough to feel compelled to describe having to still live with his parents as “bogus and sad.” He’d probably come across a loser if he wasn’t so convincingly able to conceal any signs of loserdom beneath a constant barrage of unrestrained enthusiasm. He’s an underachiever, but when properly motivated—­for instance, by falling head over heels in love—­he can go so far as to attempt to learn Cantonese, or stage an elaborate plot to get his girlfriend’s band signed by a big record label, or even take control of the structure of the movie itself to guarantee a “mega-­ happy ending.” Garth is also revealed to be a certain outsider archetype, one that’s since engulfed popular culture in its general form but largely disappeared from it in his own variation. He’s clearly an archetypal geek, not just based off his dark horn-­rimmed glasses, but also his stammering, nervous energy, total romantic awkwardness, and oddball knack for tinkering with electronic contraptions. Still, he’s also the kind of geek who seems, almost out of self-­consciousness and a need for social acceptance, to have avoided the traditional gravitational pull of the comic shop for the dynamic, hedonistic excitement of the rock club. So instead of obsessing over Dungeons & Dragons or sci-­fi—­at least, beyond a normal level of secondhand TV-­casualty

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Wayne’s World Star Trek rerun knowledge—­he’s taken on the rock-­dork mantle. He’s still a geeky fanboy prone to bowing, “We’re not worthy!” hero worship, just for Alice Cooper and Aerosmith instead of Spider-­Man. In retrospect, it seems both understandable and a little weird that the director of the Decline films, not to mention other countercultural dramas like her 1984 punk rock outsider story Suburbia, was picked to help express this more frivolous version of music fandom. But there was always some level of comedy at work in these films—­sometimes dark, sometimes unintentional, but always with an air of irreverence and iconoclasm. In any case, Spheeris didn’t get the gig solely off her Decline films. Those documentaries had made her rep, but she’d been steeping in the comedy world for ages. She’d grown up with a father who ran a traveling carnival, which she credits with her sense of fascination and allegiance with societal outcasts. And after putting herself through film school at UCLA, her first work was a collaborative short with Richard Pryor, 1969’s now-­thought-­ lost Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales, that was made right as the legendary comedian was starting to find his footing as the art form’s most incisive cultural commentator. Her musical connections ran deep back then, too: in 1974, Spheeris established a company in Los Angeles, Rock ’N Reel, dedicated to exploring a then largely untapped concept known as the music video. In the first Decline, you can see all kinds of edits and filmic touches that feel like a rawer, lower-­budget precursor to the MTV tidal wave that would hit almost immediately afterward. But it was her working relationship with Lorne Michaels that sealed it. The two had been friends for a while when Michaels told Spheeris of his plan to move to New York and work on a live comedy show. And while Spheeris wasn’t willing to leave LA—­she had a young daughter to raise at the time—­she took on an overlooked role in shaping the early sensibility of the show that would become Saturday Night Live. Some of those early SNL bits that a preteen Myers stayed up late to watch included short films featuring Albert Brooks, which Lorne had hired Spheeris to direct in the hopes that her knowledge and experience in film would rub off on the comedian. It was a mixed blessing: Spheeris and Brooks taught each other a lot about their respective fields, but when it came time to give Brooks his first feature-­length film—­1979’s Real Life, a prescient goof on early documentarian reality TV—­having Brooks in the director’s chair while Spheeris was stuck in a coproducer role left her feeling like she was being shut out

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“Bohemian Rhapsody” of a deeply entrenched boys’ club. After that, getting the Wayne’s World gig from Lorne at least felt like something of a make-­good, and it at least temporarily relieved Spheeris from having to support herself with projects that were clearly beneath her. (She’d actually started the decade off helming the 1990 heavy metal–­meets–­female mud wrestling schlock-­doc Thunder and Mud, which she doesn’t recall being paid for after the fact.) In collaboration with Myers and the SNL writers’ room husband–­wife team of Bonnie and Terry Turner, Spheeris built Wayne’s titular world into another one of her examinations of youthful subcultural rebellion, but the benefit of a comedic emphasis finally gave her a chance to depict a rock fan culture as something not just fun but actually good-­natured and welcoming. The heart of it was its tongue-­in-­cheek examination of this basement-­ bound TV show as a DIY enterprise, albeit a fairly lowbrow one short on punk/indie cred, struggling with compromising themselves for corporate dollars. There are several scenes that lay bare some of the more cynical aspects of youth-­culture exploitation while also engaging in the tricky act of both mocking it and having to defer to it, with the most memorable shill-­ your-­pizza-­and-­eat-­it-­too example being a brief but preposterous meta-­ joke where Wayne and Garth both stridently declare themselves unable to be bought by any corporation while also really enjoying eating Pizza Hut and wearing Reebok gear. The very thought of it all gives Wayne a headache, but fortunately Garth’s there to provide the Nuprin. “Little. Yellow. Different,” Wayne says, repeating the commercial’s slogan in lieu of thanks. If becoming a corporate casualty seems like an inevitable trap for people of suburban consumer-­driven environs like Wayne and Garth, there’s at least some sympathy displayed by the film toward the fact that sometimes it’s lowbrow culture that gets us out of bed in the morning. Even the love interest at the center of the film is part of this world: Wayne falls head over heels for Cassandra, the bassist and singer for a bar band called Crucial Taunt, played with radiant charisma by Tia Carrere. Cassandra impresses Wayne not just by being “a babe,” but by also kicking ass on stage (covering the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Fire”) and off (going MMA on a dude for accidentally spilling beer on her during a bar fight). She is not merely sexy but cool, occupying this space between figure of desire and an actual peer in Wayne’s world of rock enthusiasm. But it’s still an accessible kind of cool, and in the context of featuring an Asian American female lead it’s an important detail that she’s depicted less as an exotic novelty and

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Wayne’s World more as just another person whose enthusiasms come from the same pop-­ culture-­addled world that Wayne belongs to. It’s romance through shared fandom. But that world was vanishing. Wayne and Garth seem to live like they’ve treated the 1980s as their own personal extended 1970s, mostly because they’re that uncomfortable living in a world that could produce anyone as creepy as Rob Lowe’s Machiavellian corporate climber Benjamin. Wayne’s World is a backlash film, but it’s an oddly progressive one, where the othering-­heavy white-­dude exceptionalism of the typical ’80s teen comedy recedes in favor of a championing of slacker culture over the yuppie ethos. They drive an uncool car (a battered AMC Pacer with an ironic set of hot-­rod flames painted on the sides), they hang out at an uncool diner (a donut shop branded with the name of Chicago Blackhawks hockey legend Stan Mikita), and they obsess over uncool TV reruns (culminating in an entirely unnecessary yet absolutely delightful homage to the opening credits of Laverne & Shirley because hey, they’re visiting Milwaukee, so why not?). And yet they have zero cares or doubts over whether this stuff is cool or not, because it’s theirs. And no behind-­the-­scenes struggle or on-­the-­screen moment embodies this like the whole situation around using Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in that car-­headbanging scene. Like Kiss and Grand Funk, Queen were one of those groups that captured the ’70s teenage imagination despite the widespread (albeit not entirely universal) derision of rock critics. This was especially true with the punk-­enthralled, bombast-­allergic cohort in the States, exemplified by a notorious February 1979 Dave Marsh review of their album Jazz in Rolling Stone that attempted to depict them as “the first truly fascist rock band.” Marsh’s justification: the idea that earlier hit “We Will Rock You” was “a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you,” implying mere months after the Jonestown mass suicide that Queen’s fans were similarly susceptible to the whims of a self-­destructive cult.3 That cold reception’s easy to forget now, but it’s also worth remembering that at the turn of the ’90s, Queen were in the midst of fading from public memory in America after their last big peak performing at Live Aid in 1985. Their old hits were still in heavy rotation on classic rock radio, the format established in the early ’80s to find a nostalgic home for rockers who were receding from the zeitgeist by dint of being dated (or, alternately,

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“Bohemian Rhapsody” deceased). But the band was struggling in the late ’80s, not just with creative flux but with the fact that their frontman, Freddie Mercury, had tested positive for HIV in 1987. AIDS was still a disease that, through its origins in and associations with the gay community, was considered more or less ignorable by an America still run by Moral Majority ghouls and their Thatcherite equivalent on Queen’s UK home turf. So Mercury, and the rest of the band, suffered in silence as they tried to put a brave face forward amid a more pop-­friendly reinvention. While their 1989 release The Miracle still did numbers in Europe, the album and its singles were comparatively moribund on American charts, and 1991’s follow-­up Innuendo didn’t fare much better. So Lorne took one look at the script for the Mirthmobile scene and decided what the movie really needed was Guns N’ Roses.4 This was where Myers put his foot down: in 1975, the same year Saturday Night debuted, he went on vacation in England with his family and heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” on the radio. This wasn’t the kind of happenstance brush with out-­of-­nowhere inspiration that usually drives the deepest passions, and Myers was far from alone in finding something transcendent about a song that hit #1 in the UK and sold over a million copies in the mid-­’70s. But the song became something of a talisman for Myers, his brother, and his friends, the object of sing-­alongs where the only real difference from how it played out in the movie was that their beater of choice was a Dodge Dart Swinger instead of a Pacer. On a July 2014 episode of the comedy-­world interview podcast WTF with Marc Maron, Myers admitted that he was on the verge of walking away from his first starring-­role film if “Bohemian Rhapsody” wasn’t the scene’s soundtrack.5 Michaels saw it, inexplicably, as an obstacle—­“You’ll forgive me if I want to make this movie a hit,” Myers recalls him scoffing—­and Spheeris thought it seemed a bit out-­of-­character, too. “I thought it was an odd choice because if you are headbangers that wouldn’t be your first choice to slam to in the car when you’re cruising,” she said, visions of Decline II’s Sunset Strip set presumably still lingering in her head.6 But Guns N’ Roses, even as the biggest hard rock band going at the time, weren’t much of a source of comedy. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was just funnier; and not only that, it was funny in a way that invited guilt-­free enthusiasm instead of mockery, laugh-­with instead of laugh-­at. It helped that several other cast members recall having similar experiences with the song,

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Wayne’s World or songs not unlike it, in their own shitty cars cruising through suburban landscapes. Imagine riding through such an outwardly mundane environment, contained in your own vehicular satellite with your friends, with the stereo cranked. And your soundtrack is the operatic preposterousness of Freddie Mercury’s billion-­octave singing performance and Brian May’s “top this, Wagner” guitar, spending six minutes evaporating each and every line between high and low art, irony and sincerity, the straight world’s expectations and the queer sensibility’s knowingness, until all that was left to say was “this fucking rocks.” It’s the kind of thing that can leave you lost for any words more profound than “excellent,” but that’s the only word you really need anyways. Not only did that song absolutely make the scene, the scene became permanently associated with the song. That’s the case for so many of these old pop hits reclaimed for film, but for Wayne’s World the whole comedy element made things feel a bit strange, to the extent that Myers was worried that this clearly adoring homage to the song would be taken as an insult. The presence of “Bohemian Rhapsody” on the album’s soundtrack had worked to its benefit in the chart sense, pushing the song to a new peak of #2—­seven slots higher than it charted in the States upon its original 1975 release, and only kept out of the #1 slot thanks to the unstoppable juggernaut of Kris Kross’s kid-­rap classic “Jump.” But the inevitable movie-­soundtrack music-­video splice job that accompanied it, juxtaposing Wayne and Garth’s goofiness with footage of Queen’s original 1975 video, had Myers worrying that they’d “pissed on a Picasso.”7 Thankfully, the band saw it as the loving tribute it was, and Brian May recalled Myers giving him a video of the prerelease footage of the scene as a way of hoping to secure the band’s blessing. By May’s account, he was able to show it to the ailing Freddie Mercury shortly before the singer passed away on November 24, 1991, less than three months before the film’s release: “Freddie loved it. He just laughed and thought it was great, this little video. The funny thing was, we always regarded the song as tongue in cheek ourselves. If it would come on the radio, we would all be headbanging when it came to the heavy bit as well, us as a group. It was very close to our sense of humor.”8 The timing of it all—­the film’s blockbuster success, the band’s Classic Queen–­selling revival, their frontman’s passing of an illness that demanded more serious attention—­seemed like an especially

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“Bohemian Rhapsody” strange confluence of events, a bittersweet eulogy where laughter felt like the best form of mourning. And in retrospect, it wasn’t just a eulogy for Mercury. The success of Wayne’s World brought fond memories of Queen back with it, enough to give the soundtrack a two-­week run at the top of the Billboard albums chart in the spring of ’92, and Wayne and Garth would probably be honored to have that short reign dethroned by a record like Def Leppard’s Adrenalize. But all you have to do to see which way the record industry was headed that year is to look at the sheer dominance of two mainstream country crossover albums—­Garth Brooks’s Ropin’ the Wind and Billy Ray Cyrus’s Some Gave All—­as well as the late-­year emergence of The Bodyguard, which rode a slew of Whitney Houston pop-­R&B hits to an unfathomable forty-­five million sales, still an all-­time record for a soundtrack album. The suburban-­youth turn toward hip-­hop as another means of musical identification flipped the hard rock world upside-­down, too, and one band who dropped their debut album that year—­Rage Against the Machine—­ made it an integral component of a rap-­rock sound that would take over heavy mainstream music by the end of the decade. And when Nirvana’s Nevermind became a surprise recurring chart-­topper earlier in the year, the stage was set for the big-­haired hard-­rock milieu of Wayne and Garth to eventually be washed away in a wave of flannel and distortion. A year after Wayne’s World, making a movie depicting a youthful hard-­rocking party culture centered around characters who worshipped Aerosmith and Alice Cooper more or less required it to be a period piece—­like Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s American Graffiti–­esque take on teenage life in 1976. And that movie didn’t even find much of an audience until it hit home video. Sometimes it’s fine for an era to end when it’s on such a good-­natured high note. Wayne’s World feels like it hit right as generational divides and shifting musical tides turned the idea of the broadly popular guitar-­hero arena-­rocker into a thing of the past. Maybe it was one last fling with the zeitgeist before an otherwise comparatively carefree ’90s saw rock groups becoming more self-­serious and alienated and dark—­even if they all harbored a secret enthusiasm for the whole vibe that Wayne’s World embodied. Fittingly enough, as captured by Brett Morgen’s bio-­documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, Kurt precedes his famous performance with

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Wayne’s World Nirvana at the August ’92 Reading Festival with a turn to a backstage camera and a quip of “Party on, Wayne,” right before he’s pushed out onstage in a wheelchair to play one of the biggest gigs of the band’s entire existence. It’s like the first two Decline of Western Civilization movies had a really weird kid. After all, Kurt Cobain started out as another classic rocker living in the middle of nowhere, too; and even if he couldn’t connect to the heteropatriarchal machismo of Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith, he still knew the power of a good headbanging riff. And the fact that the famously queer-­ sympathetic Nirvana had their first big break almost concurrently with the revival of one of classic rock’s most important embodiments of that sensibility feels like some sort of rare moment where mainstream pop culture takes one long step toward permanent progress. Unfortunately, sequelitis has a way of ruining a good thing. After Myers’s disastrous early attempt to write Wayne’s World 2 as an homage to the 1949 British comedy Passport to Pimlico without actually securing the rights to the script—­a move that led Paramount studio boss Sherry Lansing to threaten the very existence of Myers’s newly minted Hollywood career (“We’ll sue you. We’ll take your fucking house. You won’t even own a fucking home”)9—­he was left scrambling to concoct a new plot for Wayne and Garth’s second big screen adventure. Wayne’s World 2 was initially meant to at least touch on the whole scenario of hard rock having to make way for grunge, to the extent that Nirvana were asked to appear in the film. By then they were big enough to feel empowered to turn the opportunity down, and eventually the final film inadvertently reflected on the potential irrelevance of a Wayne’s World version of rock fandom: it follows Wayne and Garth attempting to hold a music festival and struggling to find bands willing to play it. The fact that this festival was called “Waynestock” instead of a more contemporaneous spoof like “Wayneapalooza,” coupled with the film’s extensive parody of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film The Doors, made it feel almost as much of a nostalgia piece as Dazed and Confused was. The sequel didn’t fare nearly as well as the original, critically, commercially, or as a document of the times. And at least part of that can be blamed on the fact that Spheeris wasn’t brought back for the sequel, owing largely to her and the studio chafing so much during the shooting of the first movie. (Rumors persist that Myers didn’t get along with Spheeris and told Paramount to keep her out of the running, though Spheeris refuted those allegations in a 2022 retrospective

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“Bohemian Rhapsody” interview with the Hollywood Reporter.)10 This was just one of the things that soured Spheeris on mainstream Hollywood; but after the cumulative effect of being re-­typecast from verité documentarian and counterculture filmmaker to the kind of director who made big bucks with a crowd-­ pleasing comedy, she was left at the mercy of a fickle industry. She was given opportunities to make other TV adaptations (The Beverly Hillbillies; The Little Rascals), vehicles for Saturday Night Live stars (the Chris Farley–­ David Spade buddy comedy Black Sheep), and little else. She was able use the money she made from those compromise films to return to one more passion project—­a third Decline of Western Civilization in 1998 that focused on a new generation of homeless teenage street punks and inspired Spheeris to become a foster parent—­before her disillusionment with the Hollywood system led her into a not-­entirely-­voluntary retirement. One last concern: “Bohemian Rhapsody” is no longer the sole cinematic property of Mike Myers now that the 2018 Queen biopic of the same title exists. Bohemian Rhapsody is a modern distortion of fannishness bordering on a hagiography that winds up sinking it, its potential dragged down by the movie’s obsession with its own mythmaking—­as though we hadn’t already been convinced by a better, more absurdist movie that this band was great. We’re reminded of this thanks, once more, to Mike Myers: he appears briefly as a bewildered record exec, completely dumbfounded by this band’s recording of the very same song he fought so hard for in the real world. As if channeling Lorne Michaels’ own doubts from twenty-­seven years before, he haughtily declares, “We need a song teenagers can bang their heads to in a car. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is not that song.” That seems like a staggeringly obvious joke to make, the product of a contemporary pop overculture where the fourth-­wall-­destroying, constantly referential, obsessed-­fan mania of a kind that was revolutionary in Wayne’s World has gone from a subversive thrill to a tedious omnipresence. But if that’s the price of geeky pop-­culture obsession, then maybe it’s still worth it to have something big and silly and obvious to harmonize with. Especially when what you’re harmonizing with is the surprisingly freeing declaration that “nothing really matters to me.”

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Jackie Brown, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)?” JACKIE BROWN (1997, DIRECTED BY QUENTIN TARANTINO) THE DELFONICS, “DIDN’T I (BLOW YOUR MIND THIS TIME)?” (PHILLY GROOVE, 1970)

Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) is a middle-­aged flight attendant in a no-­win situation. She’s under the employ of Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson), a gunrunner who makes her use her position as cover to smuggle cash across the Mexican border, a job that soon gets her in hot water with the ATF. At this point, we’ve already seen what happens when one of Ordell’s associates is in danger of prison time and shows the possibility of turning informant: Ordell bailed out Beaumont (Chris Tucker), another courier of his, with the assistance of a bail bondsman named Max Cherry (Robert Forster), then killed Beaumont at the earliest opportunity, fearing he’d otherwise snitch and send up Ordell on multiple federal charges. With Jackie in a similar scenario—­the envelope full of cash she’d smuggled from Mexico also contained a bag of cocaine, unbeknownst to her—­it’s more than certain she’s about to face the same fate as Beaumont. But something funny happens when Max Cherry bails Jackie out. Initially, everything between them seems all business, even when it’s conducted in a red-­lit dive bar, as Max tells Jackie of Beaumont’s fate. Knowing she’s marked for death, Jackie swipes a handgun from the glovebox of Max’s car, and successfully uses it as leverage to get Robbie to back off and let her help him pull off a $550,000 smuggling job on his behalf. Then, when Max tracks her down to get his gun back, Jackie uses her knack for negotiating her way out of a tough situation to charm him—­something that the lonely, introspective Max is more than willing to allow. As they trade some initially awkward but increasingly friendly banter at Jackie’s apartment, Jackie takes a moment to put on a record, just for

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“Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind) This Time?” atmosphere’s sake: it’s an LP by the Delfonics, which opens on their silky-­ smooth, sweetly-­sung Top 10 pop/R&B hit “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time).” Max is immediately fascinated: “Pretty,” he remarks, though it’s not entirely clear whether it’s his ears on the music or his eyes on Jackie that drive this comment. Soon, the small talk gets a bit existentially personal: Jackie asks Max how he feels about getting old, a line of questioning he appears to brush off as something he never really considered, but he turns it back on her in a flattering way (“I’ll bet, besides maybe an Afro, you look exactly how you did at twenty-­nine”) and their rapport hints at the possibility of friendship, at the very least. Soon, the song becomes something of a leitmotif for Max. We see him go to a record store to buy a copy of the Delfonics’ Greatest Hits on cassette. A few scenes later, it’s the featured tape in his car stereo, the backdrop to his thought process as he considers his role in scamming Ordell out of the $550,000 alongside Jackie. As the film barrels toward its multi-­perspective climax, where every principal character converges on a shopping mall as part of an elaborate cash-­exchange operation—­one that ties in a multilevel betrayal, orchestrated by Jackie and Max, of both Robbie and the ATF sting operation—­we hear the Delfonics again briefly as Max pulls into the mall’s parking lot, on the verge of making the most fraught, important decision of his and Jackie’s lives. When Max finally pulls off his part of the job, walking out free and clear with a shopping bag full of cash, the Delfonics are back to greet him on the car stereo as he drives away. Finally, when Ordell catches on to Max’s role in the rip-­off, he commandeers Max’s car with Max riding shotgun, en route to Max’s office where Jackie’s waiting for the both of them. The music starts once again when Ordell pops in the tape, which has apparently never left the deck, and he seems waylaid. “I didn’t know you liked the Delfonics,” he mutters skeptically. “They’re pretty good,” Max replies, with a sort of world-­weary yet self-­ assured comfort at the idea this could be the last song he ever hears. And as we continue to cut back and forth to scenes of Jackie lying in wait in Max’s darkened office, Max and Ordell ride on wordlessly, the voice of William “Poogie” Hart keening intensely: “But this time, I really needed you, girl.”

As the battle for the hearts and minds of American cultural consumers raged between the midlife crisis–­confronting baby boomers and their

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Jackie Brown MTV-­revolutionized, multimedia-­native teenage Gen X offspring, one of the most dominant aesthetics was a sort of slapdash postmodern Americana. You could still get plenty of face-­value nostalgia under the post–­ Berlin Wall, pre-­9/11 interzone that was the 1990s—­meaning the decade as stylistic signifier, not just a chronological span—­but that stuff was clearly for the squares. If you had any savvy whatsoever for cutting-­edge entertainments, the ’90s demanded that your version of nostalgia was one that did its damnedest to evoke all the whimsy and frivolity of past eras, while simultaneously just barely concealing a sort of self-­conscious embarrassment over having lived through it. Haha! Remember back then? I can’t believe we looked like that, proclaimed people who had since wised up and realized that the cornball past just couldn’t stand up to the effortless cool of the present. Spy magazine, which had no small part in turning its NYC-­focused snark into a highly prized purveyor of this very attitude, devoted its March 1989 cover story on “The Irony Epidemic” to examining this phenomenon, which it found wanting in a sort of narcissism-­of-­nonexistent-­differences kind of way. The article was cowritten by Paul Rudnick and Kurt Anderson, who were gay and straight respectively, but still shared a mid-­’50s-­born perspective on the phenomenon they declared as “heterosexual camp, [or] Camp Lite.” Camp Lite was the elevation (or reduction) of things that signified the most preposterous trends of past decades into objects of unserious amusement, affectations that could be put on or taken off to acknowledge both the unforgettable impact and the hilarious obsolescence of certain once-­omnipresent mainstream trends from past decades. As a sidebar listed the artifacts of “Camp Lite Domestic Life”—­Jell-­O, bowling, lava lamps, “Levi’s jackets with Elvis or Marilyn hand-­painted on the back”—­the article itself depicted the young postwar consumer as someone weaned on a diet of pop culture where they’d learn to “bite the hands that overfed them.”1 What happened afterward, according to Spy, was a succession of movements that elevated the superficial to a sort of plaything for the middle-­ class set—­a mindset that absolutely refused to be seen as highbrow, but was still compelled to treat its pop-­cultural obsessions as objects of limitless academic and artistic deconstruction. Year Zero was cited as 1964, less than a year after the Scorpio Rising premiere, when pop art was at its peak and Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” took the once primarily gay

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“Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind) This Time?” phenomenon of “pop-­junk” appreciation and cracked its code for any aspiring media-­casualty philosophy student to see. This was framed by Spy, knowingly enough, as a mutation of surrender to a mundane overculture: “If you can’t prevent Miami Beach, you can learn to love it, sort of.” And the more this idea caught on—­cited by Spy via architect Robert Venturi’s fascination with the gaudiness of Las Vegas and the bang-­pow unseriousness of the 1966 Batman TV series—­the more that it became the lingua franca of the hip and cynical. As much as ’60s and ’70s youth culture is retroactively depicted as a countercultural groundswell, the activist seriousness, earnestness, and solidarity moves of its peak turned out to be a necessary but temporary stopgap. As the ’70s sputtered through its Nam-­fatigued, post-­Watergate reckoning with the fallibility of the postwar American empire, the violently dispersed and sorely disillusioned remnants of the movement transitioned from being a nearly uniform counterculture to a galaxy of subcultures—­ ones that made major inroads into the American mainstream but still valued the idea of mocking the squares. Who the squares were didn’t really matter. It could be country-­club suburbanites or tacky trailer-­park “white trash,” shambling washed-­up remnants of an old Hollywood or au courant fashionista disco scenesters. All that mattered was that the shared amusement was based less on politics and ideology than it was on a snarky/cool version of Good Taste. Meanwhile, these subcultures could still engage in some of these “square” activities like mini-­golf or tiki bars just so long as they knew they were in on some kind of confused joke based on the perception of one’s own supposed identity group. Low culture’s fun to slum in, as long as you know for sure that you’re laughing at it rather than with it. Tellingly, the matter of class—­as it usually is in America—­was largely elided in this analysis of Camp Lite. It wasn’t exactly true across the board, as Spy implied, that the TV kids of the ’50s didn’t face “war and economic cataclysm” because their passageway into adulthood saw them preoccupied with “signing petitions and taking drugs.” (Exhibit A: anyone who returned from Vietnam to their home in a deindustrializing inner city located in what was just starting to be called the Rust Belt.) It’s also borne out in recent years that this infatuation with pop culture irony would persist through good times and bad, whether it was the peak of the internet-­ bubble late ’90s, or the middle-­class-­annihilating Great Recession fallout that hit ten years later. Even the years following 9/11 and leading into

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Jackie Brown the Iraq War were overstuffed with snarky, irony-­soaked, endlessly referential “nothing is sacred” properties like Family Guy, Grand Theft Auto, and South Park. For the American creative class, this irony became one of the most endlessly lucrative cultural veins to tap. As long as trends keep cresting and receding, as long as history keeps moving forward, we’ll always have something to look back on and treat like the ridiculous relic of a dumber, tackier, less-­savvy civilization. Still, there are two ways to look at this still-­dominant cultural phenomenon that rescues the idea of Camp Lite from the dustbin of history. The first, and most necessary, is as an act of resistance against the pervasiveness of focus-­grouped, market-­tested, big-­dollar phenomena that, for all its ubiquity, nonetheless reeks of falsity. A show like the B movie–­mocking Mystery Science Theater 3000 or the teenage burnout sarcasm of Beavis and Butt-­Head’s music video segments might confront cheap, careless, these-­dumb-­kids-­will-­buy-­anything products of a mercenary corner of the entertainment world and scoff: If you expect me to rot my brain on your crap, it’ll be on my terms, not yours. It’s a good outlet for silly catharsis and smart-­ass ripostes directed toward objects of contempt, but it still doesn’t do much to address the possibility of another important means of resistance: to appreciate outmoded media with an open-­minded, sincere joy, one that doesn’t attempt to hide behind a self-­conscious series of postures. The other way is to be somebody like Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino grew up a media sponge and appears to be yet another product of American trash-­cult infatuation, but he runs on such a potent form of fanboyish enthusiasm that it’s difficult to consider it an ironic affectation in the first place. A high school dropout who grew up in the Los Angeles County city of Torrance, Tarantino became a movie buff before he was old enough to drive and would start writing screenplays as a teenager. (His first, Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit, is said to be a Hal Needham–­esque, Smokey and the Bandit–­inspired yarn about a serial pizza-­parlor robber and the woman who loved him.) Tarantino also benefited from being part of the first generation of young film buffs to have access to home video rentals, and spent five years working at Manhattan Beach store Video Archives. This store was an outlier in the burgeoning early ’80s rental market: whereas most chains focused on mainstream fare, Video Archives featured well-­curated sections dedicated to cult movies and foreign films. Tarantino became well-­known among the store’s customers for how fanatical

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“Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind) This Time?” and knowledgeable he was about everything in the store, from old Preston Sturges comedies to the filmography of Bruce Lee. If there was a hierarchy of taste standing between the more prestigious works of classic Hollywood and B movie exploitation flicks, Tarantino gleefully ignored it. His first feature film Reservoir Dogs—­funded in part from residuals he earned playing a cameo role as an Elvis impersonator on an episode of The Golden Girls—­made him an overnight sensation. As heist flicks went, its blend of self-­aware, pop-­culture-­steeped repartee and eclectic influence made it stand out in an independent-­film world still trying to figure out its own relationship to genre films. And if the plot was at least partially lifted from Ringo Lam’s 1987 Hong Kong actioner City on Fire and riddled with further nods to the techniques of Akira Kurosawa, Jean-­Luc Godard, and Stanley Kubrick, it was the kind of synthesis that spoke to a certain strain of enthusiast/consumer who would rather evangelize over their influences than posit themselves as fully-­formed visionaries. If nothing else, the film’s throughline of a radio station soundtracking the whole affair with incongruous and ironic-­seeming pop songs—­peaking with a torture sequence set to Stealers Wheel’s otherwise frivolous-­seeming Dylan-­alike “Stuck in the Middle with You”—­proved that Tarantino knew just how to make those juxtapositions feel vividly uncomfortable. That sense of using pop culture history as an absurd plaything saw even greater expression in Tarantino’s second film, Pulp Fiction, in which there’s a constant sense that the suave-­yet-­sardonic hired goons and hard-­ luck prizefighters that populate the story live in a state of ludicrous trash culture, where history has stagnated and the familiar signposts of earlier eras have been reduced to goofball novelty. When hitman Vincent Vega is tasked with showing his boss’s wife Mia a purely platonic night on the town, she suggests they hit Jack Rabbit Slim’s, a kitschy yet costly retro diner that centers around the same timeframe of American Graffiti. Vincent calls it “a wax museum with a pulse,” and he’s dead on: the booths are made out of repurposed old cars from the ’50s, the waitstaff are done up to resemble Marilyn Monroe and Buddy Holly, and there’s a pivotal dance scene in which Vincent and Mia participate in a Twist contest officiated by an Ed Sullivan impersonator. If Spy thought we were in an irony epidemic at the end of the ’80s, a scene like this must have come across like the point where it turned into a pandemic. It’s such an off-­putting environment that it heightens the nervous, quasi-­flirtatious tension between Vincent and

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Jackie Brown Mia before the dance competition—­soundtracked by Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell”—­finally puts them on the same page. Pulp Fiction proved how much command Tarantino had over his own particular nostalgia-­tweaking, film-­geek milieu. But inevitably the imitators rushed in and attempted to duplicate his success, with a wave of sardonic-­criminal yarns drenched in reflexive, shallow self-­awareness and scored by elbow-­nudging ironic pop-­song needle drops. The bandwagon films ranged from the stillborn direct-­to-­video likes of American Strays (1996) to wider-­release also-­rans like 2 Days in the Valley (1996) and Suicide Kings (1997), eventually culminating in the casual cruelty of films like Very Bad Things (1998) and The Boondock Saints (1999). And they picked all those aesthetic tricks dry without bothering to examine them any deeper than a surface-­level examination of nostalgic, pop-­culture-­obsessed edginess: Wouldn’t it be fuckin’ sick if . . . ? With Tarantino’s early films so openly and admittedly indebted to a sense of cinematic referentiality—­he told Empire magazine in a 1994 interview that “I steal from every movie ever made”2—­this left his first wave of imitators fumbling to make pastiches of a pastiche. It also left Tarantino boxed in: if this is what he’s wrought, what can he even do for a follow-­up to reestablish his own cinematic voice? As it turns out, Tarantino’s choice to adapt Elmore Leonard’s 1992 novel Rum Punch proved to be a necessary chance for him to step outside his own head, if just for a moment, and channel his sensibilities through another author’s story. And by picking one centered around middle-­aged protagonists facing turning points in their lives, Tarantino’s fascination with bygone pop culture took on a surprisingly striking and elegiac tone. Part of being a pop-­culture advocate at Tarantino’s level means being invested in things—­films, music, even actors—­that the mainstream left in the past as relics of outmoded fashion and trends. And when you work with that sense of impermanence, a suspicion that so much of the mass media we’ve dedicated ourselves to consuming during the postwar, pre-­internet epoch of limited access is more ephemeral and easy to forget than we thought, that can haunt your perspective on the past in ways that make the future look bleak. So Tarantino cast two faded stars as his leads: Blaxploitation and action-­ flick sex symbol Pam Grier, and B movie That Guy character actor Robert Forster. This was one of his most consequential acts of creating a sort of metacommentary in the film, and made the air of threatened obsolescence

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“Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind) This Time?” experienced by both Jackie Brown and Max Cherry feel that much more integral to the story. As Jackie, Grier is subject to interrogation in the film by an LAPD officer who observes, “You been in the service industry nineteen years and all you make is sixteen thousand plus benefits? You didn’t exactly set the world on fire, did you, Jackie?” Later, when Max stops by Jackie’s apartment to get his gun back, the conversation spurred by Jackie dropping the needle on a Delfonics album hints at both characters’ relationship to nostalgia: they’re living in the past because the present is out of reach and the future is unclear at best. “Never joined the CD revolution?” Max remarks when Jackie pulls out the LP. “You can’t get new stuff on records,” he adds—­this being the mid-­’90s, before the vinyl revival kicked off in earnest. “I don’t get new stuff that often,” Jackie replies. (That said, you could definitely buy the Pulp Fiction soundtrack on vinyl in 1994—­and Jackie Brown’s three years later.) It’s also worth noting that with the exception of the ’60s-­born Bridget Fonda, who plays Robbie’s surfer-­girl accomplice Melanie Ralston, every major role in the film is played by an actor born between 1941 and 1951—­ the first generation raised on TV, and a cohort of still-­dominant but soon-­ to-­wane cultural movers and shakers facing midlife crises and decreasing cultural sway. That might be the only commonality tying together the characters embodied by Grier, Forster, Jackson, Robert De Niro (playing hapless Robbie associate and hair-­trigger burnout Louis Gara), and Michael Keaton (as the faux-­amiable, mildly oafish ATF agent Ray Nicolette), but as they schlep their way through the less fashionable corners of ’90s Los Angeles with variable but largely minor success in keeping ahead of the world, Tarantino’s retro touches in their environments and on the soundtrack feel less like affectations and more like remnants of what the characters have left from unseen better, more hopeful times. Tarantino has a lot of fun with the referential bits, of course: the opening credits are a twofer, featuring Grier reenacting Dustin Hoffman’s moving-­sidewalk airport ride from The Graduate, but with Bobby Womack’s theme to early ’70s Blaxploitation/neo-­noir classic Across 110th Street swapped in to sub for Simon & Garfunkel. Later, when we see a brief scene of Jackie in jail, the music on the soundtrack is her—­as in Pam Grier—­ singing the prisoner’s lament “Long Time Woman” from the 1971 women-­ in-­prison exploitation flick The Big Doll House. And multiple instrumental passages from Roy Ayers’s soundtrack to the Grier-­starring 1973 film Coffy

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Jackie Brown are strewn through the film as an undisguised homage—­though even if you don’t know the source, the sound of seventies funk piercing a contemporary setting should at least register as a deliberate, almost jarring choice to place these characters in the context of a fading past. The majority of the soundtrack, like Tarantino’s previous films, is largely contemporaneous with the ’60s and ’70s—­the Meters (“Cissy Strut”), the Brothers Johnson (“Strawberry Letter 23”), and Bloodstone (“Natural High”) have key moments—­but in the just-­scraping-­by world of Jackie Brown, the tone of a long-­gone era overrides any cool-­hunter knowingness. It’s a tricky balance. Every so often, we see flashes of culture that could be considered embodiments of a post-­Reagan, post–­Cold War ’90s, peaking early with the Second Amendment T&A of the Chicks Who Love Guns tape that Robbie, Gara, and Ralston watch at the beginning of the film. If the concentrated dose of silicone-­enhanced Orange County bikini models firing assault rifles isn’t enough of a commentary on the detritus of a Schwarzenegger/Stallone action-­film milieu’s impact on ’90s pop culture, it’s driven home by Robbie’s ramblings about the correlation of his gun deals with the popularity of particular weapons’ popularity in movies and TV—­John Woo’s The Killer driving a demand for paired .45s, for instance. And in the scene where Max is at the record store buying his Delfonics tape, he looks for all the world like a man out of time as trendy hip-­hop star (and Pam Grier character namesake) Foxy Brown plays over the store’s sound system. That leaves Tarantino’s retro soundtrack touches—­and his nods to cult ’70s movies like Beast with a Gun and Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry, which Gara and Ralston watch during their bong-­hitting bonding sessions—­ feeling like simultaneous moments of remnant cool and aching loss. At some points you can recognize that these old pop-­culture remnants are sources of character dialogue, which gives the impression that the characters themselves internalized these sayings long ago but may not even remember where they came from. And since so much of it, especially the music, was widely considered “low” pop culture—­not potentially profound like the Beatles and Kubrick, or charged with subversion like the Sex Pistols and Godard, but “kitsch”—­it can leave the irony-­skeptical, postmodernism-­attuned viewer a little thrown. The place of the Delfonics in R&B history, along with many of their peers in the sweet or Philly soul milieu, had been a contentious one long

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“Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind) This Time?” before Tarantino picked them out. Siblings William and Wilbert Hart, original third member Randy Cain, and producer/arranger Thom Bell had struck a particular chord starting in 1966 with the release of their single “He Don’t Really Love You.” William’s falsetto lead, the frictionless group harmonies, and Bell’s opulent, borderline symphonic arrangements put forth a version of R&B that seemed almost diametrically opposed to the raw, gritty visions of soul that were emerging out of southern hotbeds like Memphis and Muscle Shoals. And when their single “La-­La (Means I Love You)” was released in January 1968, its crossover success (#2 R&B; #4 pop) announced the arrival of an aesthetic that would, by the dawn of the 1970s and the release of “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” become critically tied to a sort of upwardly mobile vision of Black culture in the post–­civil rights era. Critically and sociologically, this stylistic shift would often be considered a betrayal of soul’s roots in the Black church and the juke joint, and in the wake of the Black Panthers’ revolutionary leftism, a perceived retreat toward an aspirational Black capitalism as well. Still, their hitmaking reign was notably shorter than many of their Philly soul successors like the O’Jays and Teddy Pendergrass, and by 1972 the departure of both Bell and Cain left the Delfonics struggling to keep up. After 1974’s Alive & Kicking—­a please-remember-us album title if there ever were one—­the group split into two watered-­down and competing live-­circuit Delfonics spinoffs and faded from the mainstream public view. So who was advocating for the Delfonics in the late ’90s? From many indications, it wasn’t the rock-­crit establishment. In a review for the April 1998 issue of Uncut, Ian MacDonald—­best known for his analytical Beatles history book Revolution in the Head—­gave their compilation album La-­La Means I Love You: The Definitive Collection a withering assessment: “This was the sound of sweet/soft/sexy/symphonic soul, a penthouse idiom which confirmed the embourgeoisement of black music heralded in late ’60s Motown . . . today—­15 years after the punk rebellion of hip hop, and notwithstanding the all-­pervasive harsh robotic snap of swingbeat—­ black music owes less to James Brown, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin than it does to the simpering vocal floridity and chintzy harmonic bubble-­ bath created by the ‘sweet soul’ pioneers of 1968–­70. The Delfonics have a lot to answer for.” He was kind enough to “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)”—­it was a “heavenly” exception to the “growing monotony [of their] glutinous major-­key romance”—­but the whole sweet soul milieu

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Jackie Brown it belonged to was summarily dismissed with a condescending shrug: “Is this album worth owning? As an ambivalent milestone in black pop (and for its two or three genuine classics), possibly. But watch out it don’t rot your teeth.” The role of the still-­recent Jackie Brown in repopularizing the band’s music went unmentioned. But Tarantino had to get his inspiration somewhere. As Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted for Pitchfork in a 2016 article, Tarantino’s cultural-­magpie consumption and its successive manifestation in his ’90s films lined up neatly with the output of Los Angeles–­based reissue curators Rhino. The label had taken full advantage of the CD box set boom, the nostalgia cycles of the ’80s and ’90s, and a savvy, hip marketing and brand identity to bring significant attention to semi-­forgotten pop hits, often selling them with a half-­kitschy packaging that belied a serious eye for historical detail. And, as Erlewine noted, “Reservoir Dogs’ K-­Billy Super Sounds of the ’70s—­the fictional radio station pumping out a steady stream of ’70s oldies throughout the film—­lines up with Have a Nice Day; almost all of Pulp Fiction’s surf songs can be found on Rhino’s 1994 set Rock Instrumental Classics, Vol. 5: Surf; and Jackie Brown’s soundtrack is rooted in Soul Hits of the ’70s—­Didn’t It Blow Your Mind, whose first volume arrived in stores in 1991.”3 There’s also another major cultural influence of the time that did more to rehabilitate and recontextualize old soul hits of the past, one that Tarantino would find a certain kinship with over time. By the late ’90s, hip-­hop had spent decades mining music of the ’60s and ’70s, much of it directly lifted by producers from parents’ record collections and childhood memories, as a continuation of both personal experience and communal, intergenerational Black expression. And one of its key figures was Wu-­Tang Clan producer and avowed cinephile the RZA, who would go on to create film scores for the likes of Jim Jarmusch (2000’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai) and eventually collaborate with Tarantino himself for the soundtrack to the Kill Bill films. A year before Jackie Brown, he’d produced the first solo album for Wu-­Tang member Ghostface Killah, 1996’s Ironman. True to his production style, RZA incorporated a litany of classic soul tracks in his samples—­Al Green on “Iron Maiden” and “260,” Teddy Pendergrass on “Camay,” the Jackson 5 on “Box in Hand” and “All That I Got Is You”—­that pulled impact, pathos, and depth from both the southern/raw and Philly/sweet strains of soul. And on top of that, the William Hart–­led

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“Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind) This Time?” version of the Delfonics, featuring Major Harris and Frank Washington, appeared on the album to lace the hook of “After the Smoke Is Clear.” Tarantino’s selections might have been inspired by other sources with at least some precedent in hipster cachet, but his creative process was still driven by a direct line between the music and his vision. A 1998 Q&A session with The Guardian lay out his approach to picking out soundtrack choices: A good majority of them I come up with beforehand. More or less the way my method works is you have got to find the opening credit sequence first. That starts it off [for] me. . . . If there is going to be no modern music in the movie, then that becomes the personality of the piece, but if there is, it is the rhythm that I want the movie to play at; it is the rhythm of the film. Once I know I want to do something, then it is a simple matter of me diving into my record collection and finding the songs that give me the rhythm of my movie. I find the personality of the piece through the music that is going to be in it.4

And this is where Tarantino’s odd, fannish, yet sometimes askew vision of Black pop culture comes in. The late ’80s vision of Camp Lite that Spy’s “irony epidemic” article pointed out still appeared to be a largely white phenomenon, based not just off its practitioners, but off the hip-­to-­be-­ square WASP-­kitsch focus that it seemed infatuated with. The fascination with Black culture of the previous generation informing Tarantino’s films works counter to that, and while it’s a logical extension of the filmmaker’s small-­world eclecticism—­right there alongside his beloved contemporaneous bullets-­and-­blood Grand Guignol crime flicks from Hong Kong, Japan, and Europe—­it’s also territory he’s often stumbled through with a sort of graceless obliviousness to larger societal issues of representation and portrayal. Director Spike Lee—­who, it should be noted, used a particularly choice needle drop of the Delfonics’ “La-­La (Means I Love You)” for a great little gag about a bad singer in his ’70s period piece Crooklyn (1994)—­called Tarantino out for this shortly after Jackie Brown came out. As reported in the December 16, 1997, issue of Variety, the prevalence of the n-­word in Samuel L. Jackson’s dialogue—­and how often it was used in Tarantino’s previous films—­didn’t sit well with Lee: “I’m not against the word, and I use it, but not excessively. And some people speak that way. But Quentin is

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Jackie Brown infatuated with that word. What does he want to be made—­an honorary Black man?”5 Jackson would subsequently come to Tarantino’s defense in the March 9, 1998, issue of Jet: “Black artists think they are the only ones allowed to use the word. Well, that’s bull . . . if I say the word, it’s cool, but because Quentin wrote it, it ain’t? Come on!”6 That caused a rift between the actor and Lee that left the two former collaborators estranged for over ten years. Still, there’s always the need for a conversation over who gets to represent Black culture and how much agency both actors and directors have over how that representation is perceived—­especially in the wake of later Tarantino films like Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight that drastically escalated the stakes of his racial portrayals and the dehumanizing language and imagery that went with them. Yet seeing Jackie Brown through that lens is also revelatory in another way. Black culture of the 1960s and ’70s—­whether it’s upscale and urbane or raw and working-­class, aimed primarily at the Black community or made with crossover intent—­is frequently in an odd position when it comes time to figure out what part of the past is kitsch and what part of it is cool. When the nostalgia cycle meant that ’70s iconography began seeping into retro culture, it was often at the expense of signifiers that were part of the era’s Black culture. Big Afros, wide collars, bellbottoms, “pimpmobiles,” wah-­wah guitars, and similar iconography were often invoked as a goof among hip ’90s whites, escaping from the comparatively savvy orbit of Beastie Boys Grand Royal retro-­chic to become another caricaturized costume for snarky Gen Xers to try on. But Jackie Brown doesn’t fall prey to this—­not when it has every opportunity to goof on Blaxploitation tropes, but spends so much time finding the human heart inside them instead. Much of the dialogue between Max and Ordell centers around how Max navigates his way through the working relationships with his Black clients and coworkers. Early on, Ordell notices the prominent placement of a photo featuring Max and his Black associate Winston—­played by the great big-­man character actor Tommy “Tiny” Lister Jr.—­and needles Max about how front-­and-­center it is. (“Y’all tight?” “Yeah.” “But you his boss, though, right?” “Yeah.” “Bet it was your idea to take that picture too, wasn’t it?”) When they meet in Max’s office again shortly afterward to bail Jackie out of jail, Max snaps back at Ordell’s spiel about Jackie’s predicament with a pointed retort: “Is white guilt supposed to make me forget I’m running a business?” And yet when Max

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“Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind) This Time?” finally meets Jackie and gets to know her, his facade softens, and he goes from skeptical to curious to fascinated to sympathetic with Jackie’s whole situation—­and with Jackie herself. The Delfonics are there in his tape deck because they remind him of her, and yet he holds himself back from fully committing to anything much more than a small cut of her heist and a lingering first-­and-­final kiss before she drives off in the Mercedes that the now-­dead Ordell no longer has use for, lipstick smeared and “Across 110th Street” making a film-­closing reprise. This clicks because the film itself treats Pam Grier with a particular reverence. It’s the kind that acknowledges her sex-­symbol past yet pines for the chance to show her as something more sophisticated than that, an opportunity that she’d been robbed of when age, typecasting, and shifting trends got in the way. Jackie Brown is a love letter to Grier as someone who’s channeled her Blaxploitation, femme fatale past into something more abstractly cool and alluring than the T&A appeal of the ’70s. She’s a figure of pure, intense resilience, a crafty survivor whose energy is contained in not just her lingering beauty but her I-refuse-to-be-played attitude, the charm of experience and knowledge added to an already formidable personality. Tarantino treats her like Max treats the Delfonics: as an icon who was seemingly limited to a cordoned-­off corner of popular culture—­kitsch-­ coded ’70s Blackness—­but has a far more immediate appeal than those categories may have previously limited her to. The catch with camp is that over the last few decades, with the rise of the internet and countless competing avenues of media consumption, the monoculture has been fracturing faster than consensus can keep up with it. The “lifestyle” marketing movement emerged in the late 1970s as a way to siphon individuals into target-­demographic groups based around certain cultural affinities, and ironic permutations of those groups arose in response. Taste became a deeply subjective phenomenon wrapped up in the midst of an especially American conflict between individualistic expression and collective enthusiasm. And somewhere along the way this led to the phenomenon of the irony-­to-­sincerity pipeline, where picking up on a cultural artifact for its more askew tendencies eventually creates, through constant immersion, a relationship between the consumer and the artifact that sloughs off its comedic aspect and reveals an actual value that stirs genuine enthusiasm. So we come to the inherent contradiction of nostalgia and its relation to

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Jackie Brown Camp Lite: Do we appreciate old things because they stir up happy memories, or because we want to figure out what these works mean to us now? Do we want to reminisce, or do we want to discover? Is there such a thing as corrective nostalgia, where the idea that a work has fallen out of fashion requires an attempt, not to justify why it’s dated, but why it mattered in the first place? Jackie Brown isn’t necessarily about those feelings, but it’s infused with them, and in a way that’s more grounded and human than any of Tarantino’s other films. It may have been a catalyst that led to further things for the Delfonics, too—­they’d continue to be a go-­to reference on Ghostface Killah tracks (sampled on 2004’s “Holla” and 2006’s “R.A.G.U.,” with William Hart himself providing the hook to 2013’s “Enemies All around Me”), and retro-­analog producer-­arranger Adrian Younge would helm a collaborative comeback album with them in 2013. But Tarantino’s retro-­culture pastiche is also an admission that the world that’s shaped us is far bigger than the present moment can fully explain. And when it’s a world that leaves us in the lurch, threatening us with constant signs of obsolescence and disposability, there’s a more important reaction to it than irony. It means internalizing the idea that you can always bring some little piece of the past back with you, something to remind yourself where we’ve come from. In 1958, Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History stated that “our age is involved in irony because so many dreams of our nation have been so cruelly refuted by history.”7 If that’s all the defense this strain of pop culture can offer, it might not be enough—­ but it’s at least more sincere, and more fulfilling, than most people give it credit for.

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Belly, “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” BELLY (1998, DIRECTED BY HYPE WILLIAMS) SOUL II SOUL, “BACK TO LIFE (HOWEVER DO YOU WANT ME)” (1989, VIRGIN)

Someone takes a draw off a lit blunt. He exits a car, accompanied by a friend, and steps on the blunt to extinguish it before the two men stride into a nightclub. Topless dancers gyrate on platforms as the packed crowd, mostly young and Black, revels in the scene. We see intercut shots of money stacks, of suit-­wearing bigshots elsewhere in the club. Back to the two men: they’re in the club’s bathroom—­a unisex one, apparently, as one of the men opens a stall door to be greeted by a woman sitting on the toilet casually smoking a cigarette. She leaves, and both men enter separate stalls to retrieve the guns they’ve hidden behind the toilet tanks. They screw silencers onto the pistols. They head back onto the dance floor. And then, abruptly, the men start shooting. One linebacker-­sized security goon blocking a stairway gets a couple bullets pumped into his chest, then is thrown over the railing. The two men barrel up the stairs, masked accomplices in tow, and burst into the upstairs office where the bigshots have been hanging out with their money stacks. More bullets fly. One woman takes a bullet and flies through the plate glass window overlooking the dance floor. The crowd scatters as the crew bags up the cash and flees the club, piling back into the car and driving off. “It was the best time of our lives,” states one of the men in narration. “Gettin’ money was all we ever did.” It’s one of the most archetypal sequences of events one would expect from a crime movie—­not just ordinary, yet enigmatically blank. What is this place? Why are they robbing it? Who are these people they’re shooting? It takes place during the title sequence, so it might not be that important to

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Belly ask in the first place—­in fact, it turns out to be less of a plot beat and more of a mood-­setter. But it still feels a little disorienting purely in a narrative sense, like we’ve been dropped into an in medias res situation that’s important enough to set the film’s tone but not important enough to sustain the plot much further than early in the first act. But this doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because the men exit the car from a top-­down perspective. The blunt is crushed underfoot as if the image were shot from the upward-­facing perspective of the sidewalk itself. The club they enter is hypersaturated in blue light, and when we see a shot of the men glancing around the club their eyes are lit up like ultraviolet, glowing with stalking-­lion brightness. The dancers are the only exception to the overwhelmingly blue color palette, as they twist and sway bathed in deep reds and street-­light greens. There is a strobe light in the bathroom. We don’t even get any ambient sound until the shot of one man sliding a clip into a pistol—­ka-­clack. Up until the first shot is fired, everything moves in fluid, smooth, dreamlike slow motion. And this whole time, the soundtrack has been playing the vocals from British R&B group Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me),” which became a big transatlantic club hit when its mixture of lovers’ rock reggae, disco-­house string stabs, and funky breakbeats signaled the burgeoning of a hip-­hop-­influenced club sound for the soon-­to-­arrive ’90s. But that was the single—­this is the a cappella version, with Caron Wheeler’s alternately soaring and punchy hooks (“However do you want me / However do you need me”) the only music heard during this entire scene. At least, it is until the robbery crew scoops up the money and the club erupts in chaos. Then the drums come in. It looks for all the world like a music video, because that’s exactly what it is.

The impact of MTV on the music industry in the 1980s is an often-­told story. Five years after the music video network’s establishment in 1981, the importance of theatrical, intricately edited video clips in establishing a musical act’s image took precedence over just about every other traditional marketing outlet, even rivaling the kingmaker clout of terrestrial Top 40 radio. As greater impact led to bigger budgets, that brought on bigger headaches. Music video directors in the mid-­1980s would get overworked and

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“Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” underpaid, often while having to wrangle rock stars into finishing a shoot in two or three days. Many directors wound up cranking out upwards of a hundred videos across the span of a decade or so—­without getting paid royalties or receiving on-­screen credits. And the pitfalls for the musicians themselves were everywhere. Simon Le Bon, frontman of ur-­MTV poster boys Duran Duran, once recollected all-­day video shoots where the tedium and toil only accelerated some band members’ substance abuse problems. (“You can see which Duran Duran members were getting too high. They’re usually covered up with sunglasses.”)1 If it seemed like an unsustainable business model, it’s only because you knew what was going on behind the scenes—­to the casual viewer, it just looked like a piece of stylized magic, closer to the innovations of cinema than the drudgery of ordinary TV. It would be inevitable, then, that a number of innovators would act to take tighter control of the process, throw their creative weight around, and parlay their experience in music video production into an even more lucrative Hollywood payday. In 1986, when a music video director could be expected to take home just over $100,000 a year in earnings, producers Steve Golin and Sigurjón “Joni” Sighvatsson assembled a small crew of directors and put together a production company they cheekily named Propaganda Films. Their goal was to take on the fields of music videos and television commercials—­then both considered inherently inferior forms of media—­ and treat their work like that of a higher art form, taking full creative advantage of the untapped potential in both forms of media. The initial group counted four directors among its ranks: Greg Gold, Nigel Dick, Dominic Sena, and David Fincher. By 1990, their efforts had paid off spectacularly. In the film and television worlds, they found a willing partner in David Lynch, and Propaganda Films had a hand in bringing to fruition both his Palme d’Or–­winning feature film Wild at Heart and his cult hit–­turned–­modern classic TV series Twin Peaks. An October 15, 1990, New York Times profile outlined their approach: To the surprise of many in the movie establishment, the financial base for Propaganda’s sudden rise has been rock music videos, a realm that most of Hollywood scorns as a low rent district suitable only for those of limited imagination and talent. But from the start, Mr. Golin and Mr. Sighvatsson viewed videos as a profit center that would grant them financial independence, intro-

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Belly duce them to talented newcomers and eventually enable them to make movies and television programs as they saw fit.2

TV commercials and music videos brought in the money; the money brought in the prestige projects. What’s more, they were good fields to experiment with and give to untested creatives: “It’s a great training ground for new talent,” said Sighvatsson. “Music video takes only three days and costs maybe $150,000, so how big a disaster can it really be, even if you put somebody really inexperienced in there? We use video as a training ground, and if the people are good, then we move them into larger projects.”3 With one in every three music videos at the turn of the ’90s being a Propaganda Films release, the directors had countless opportunities to show what they could do. And if Propaganda was something of an farm team for up-­and-­coming filmmakers, David Fincher was their breakout prospect. He had already put in work on two of the biggest films of the early ’80s as part of George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, contributing technical and visual-­effects work to both Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. With that generous foot in the door, he moved on to high-­concept commercials, with one memorably disconcerting 1984 spot for the American Cancer Society depicted the dangers of smoking while pregnant by depicting a fetus in utero taking a drag off a cigarette. From there, he would find his way into music videos via a gig shooting a clip for Rick Springfield’s “Bop ’til You Drop.” The song itself initially appeared as part of a Springfield cinematic vehicle, the 1984 cheeseball rom-­com flop Hard to Hold, but Fincher shot the video as a sci-­fi-­tinged, vaguely postapocalyptic narrative that appeared to take place in a quasi–­Star Wars hard-­labor space prison. It had zero resemblance or connection to the film it actually soundtracked, but it worked well enough. Springfield later remarked, “He was making videos, but his sights were on getting into movies, and it shows.”4 By 1990, Fincher had made it clear how beneficial it could be to direct music videos with a Hollywood level of attention and style, whether it was for revitalized boomer rocker Steve Winwood, transatlantic post-­ Wham! breakout star George Michael, or the provocative and innovative Queen of MTV, Madonna. (Fincher’s 1989 video for her hit “Express Yourself,” a provocatively BDSM-­tinged homage to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with

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“Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” a $5 million budget, was the most expensive ever shot at the time, and remains the third-­biggest budget ever for a music video.) It was that same year that Fincher helmed the third film in the sci-­fi-­horror franchise Alien; and while it was something of a second-­choice move (he was brought in to replace initial director/screenwriter Vincent Ward) and resulted in the critically and commercially underwhelming Alien 3 (1992), there was still enough visually striking filmmaking buried beneath all the studio meddling and the tossed-­together screenplay to keep Fincher in Hollywood’s good graces. Fincher, meanwhile, was so upset with the end product that he went back to directing music videos for another few years, though he’d return to motion pictures after being inspired by reading the original screenplay for Seven. That film—­which memorably opened with a grimy, weathered title sequence set to a remix of Nine Inch Nails’ 1994 industrial crossover hit “Closer”—­effectively proved the potential of an emerging music video–­ to–­Hollywood pipeline. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, a string of directors who cut their teeth on music videos would go on to create some of the era’s most visually and creatively offbeat motion pictures. Alex Proyas graduated from a late ’80s who’s who of rock-­video royalty—­INXS, Yes, Crowded House—­to create the industrial-­grunge milieu of 1994’s comic-­ book adaptation The Crow and 1998’s surreal sci-­fi neo-­noir Dark City. Antoine Fuqua, who specialized in R&B and hip-­hop videos for stars like Toni Braxton, Mint Condition, and Prince in the early to mid-­’90s, would collaborate with legendary Hong Kong action auteur John Woo for The Replacement Killers (1998) and mint a crime classic on the strength of a diabolical Denzel Washington performance in Training Day (2001). Jonathan Glazer transitioned seamlessly from the visual surrealism of Jamiroquai’s 1996 sliding-­room dance number for “Virtual Insanity” and the stark nighttime car-­versus-­runner chase of Radiohead’s 1997 “Karma Police” to the borderline hallucinatory British gangster yarn Sexy Beast (2000). And the brilliant visual absurdists Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry would later become so synonymous with the music video–­to–­movie career path that even in retrospect it’s hard to single out which field they excelled in more. Then there was Hype. Born Harold Williams in 1970, the Queens native was tied into hip-­hop pretty much from the moment it reached his borough, and would earn his alias at a young age by choosing it for his graffiti tag. Like many Krylon artists of the era, he was fascinated by the

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Belly graf-­as-­modern-­artwork of Keith Haring and Jean-­Michel Basquiat, but eventually his priorities shifted to film, which he studied at Adelphi University. Not long after, Ralph McDaniels and Lionel Martin, who’d established the WNYC-­TV-­based program Video Music Box in 1983 and used it to air some of the first music videos ever shot for hip-­hop artists, brought Williams into the fold at McDaniels’ production company Classic Concepts. And after paying dues running production assistant duties and arranging the scenery for videos by Biz Markie, Public Enemy, and TLC, Williams finally got his big break directing the video for “We Want Money” by the group BWP (or Bytches with Problems). It doesn’t look like the kind of video you’d expect from a director who’d create the definitive aesthetic of hip-­hop videos later that decade, but it’s still dynamic in its own way: lots of whip pans, quick cuts, and its principal MCs shot from just the right low angle to make them look seven feet tall. Before his twenty-­first birthday, Williams would notch another crucial credit directing the video for “Just Hangin’ Out,” the 1991 single by revered Queens-­based hip-­hop group Main Source. It’s not the most out-­there concept for a video—­it’s pretty much everything implied by the track’s title, assorted vignettes of casual socializing with the occasional switch from black-­and-­white to color for contrast—­but there are still some juxtapositions of verité on-­the-­street scenes set to stylized camera movement that give things a subtle sense of heightened reality. Over the years, Williams would go from strength to strength, establishing a fast-­moving and high-­contrast visual language by 1993 that could be effective whether it was rap for the streets (M.O.P.’s “How about Some Hardcore”) or the conscious heads (Poor Righteous Teachers’ “Nobody Move”). By ’94 he was helming videos for breakthrough singles by some of the most important figures to emerge in hip-­hop and R&B at the time: ethereally sepia-­toned and slo-­mo for Wu-­Tang Clan’s “Can It Be All So Simple,” high-­contrast black-­and-­white minimalist for Craig Mack’s star-­studded “Flava in Ya Ear” remix, and somewhere in between for the quasi-­industrial dance party in Usher’s “Think of You.” Before long, Williams was one of the most prolific directors to work in the R&B and hip-­hop fields, notching over seventy video direction credits between 1995 and 1997 that read like a popular music Hall of Fame class: Brandy, 2Pac, Boyz II Men, OutKast, Mary J. Blige, LL Cool J, Busta Rhymes, Jay-­Z, A Tribe Called Quest, Missy Elliott, Ma$e, Scarface, and

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“Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” Nas all wound up getting the Hype Williams treatment. Crucially, Hype shot some of the most memorable videos for Notorious B.I.G., to the point where he could be credited with coauthoring Biggie’s opulent-­hustler persona with the Sean “Puffy” Combs champagne-­and-­hot-­tubs celebration “Big Poppa” and the lavishly furnished crime drama “Warning.” And Williams’s movie-­buff references—­evident in that latter video’s nods to Brian De Palma’s perennial hip-­hop reference point Scarface (1983)—­would soon make his Hollywood ambitions clear. If he could pay credible homage to scenes from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with 2Pac and Dr. Dre (“California Love”), Casino with Nas (“Street Dreams”), and Coming to America with Busta Rhymes (“Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See”), then making the jump to actual motion pictures seemed inevitable. Beyond that, Williams’s own aesthetic was honed by the rhythms of the music he cut to, and amplified by the almost preposterous levels of exaggeration and stylized, manic energy he would bring to artists who were already embodying innovative new musical techniques. And they were bolstered by such over-­the-­top displays of opulence that they bordered on the absurd, infused with a hyperstylized glossiness that made things feel exclusive not just because they were expensive, but because they were unreal. For the artists whose personae hinged on money and status—­the likes of Puffy, Ma$e, and Jay-­Z—­it was as though they’d bypassed traditional wealth and had gained exclusive access to clothes and environs beamed in from five years in the future. And for the performers who traded on their iconic strangeness, technique, and hypercreativity—­your Missy Elliotts, your Busta Rhymeses—­Hype shot them in hyperactive fast-­forward with super-­kinetic dance choreography, leaning into fisheye lenses with manic, colorful strangeness and costuming that mixed Afrofuturism with cutting-­ edge, avant-­garde fashion. By the end of 1997, Williams had almost singlehandedly defined the video aesthetic for modern Black music, and his was easily the most visually striking programming you could see on cable television without leaving the realm of live action for animation. The mind reeled to speculate what he would be capable of on a real Hollywood budget. There was just one catch. “The thing with Hype was that he’d go over budget on everything,” McDaniels mentioned in a conversation with podcaster and YouTube personality Math Hoffa. “I’d be like, ‘Yo Hype, you can’t do that, bro, other people have to eat, man . . .’ He was like ‘No, y’know, I’m

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Belly just being creative, man!’”5 And that was in the early ’90s, when most of his videos were just crowds of people milling around a burning barrel or an empty warehouse. Hollywood would prove a bit more chaotic. Williams’s full-­length motion picture debut would take up most of his time in 1998: it was officially announced in Variety in late January of that year (“Musicvid helmer Hype Williams is in talks to direct Live Entertainment’s urban drama ‘Belly,’ the first feature film the company has greenlit since its buyout by a Bain Capital–­led consortium last year”),6 and hit theaters just over nine months later, in the first week of November. Its initial reported budget was about $7 million. This was less than twice the combined budget of Williams’ two biggest-­budget videos, which he shot the following year—­ the $2 million clips for Missy Elliott’s Busby Berkeley–­in–­2050 trip “She’s a Bitch,” and the $2.4 million Busta Rhymes / Janet Jackson liquid-­humanoid surrealism of “What’s It Gonna Be?!” Imagine trying to stretch just a couple million more than what Williams spent for less than nine minutes of music video footage for a ninety-­plus-­minute feature film. Now keep in mind that the opening credit sequence for Belly, which was shot at the legendary NYC club the Tunnel and is the most visually arresting sequence of the film, is said to have taken up a sizeable portion of that already tight budget.7 That was the least of the film’s problems. Belly is a beautiful disaster, the kind of movie you’d expect from a director with an exquisite visual sense and a number of unwanted outside limitations. To paraphrase what Roger Ebert said of Fincher’s Alien 3, it’s one of the best-­looking bad movies you’ll ever see. And there’s no obvious culprit: the budget, the performances, the shooting schedule, the script, and nearly every aspect of logistics involved in making the movie were subject to death by a thousand cuts. In August 2008, King magazine published an extensive oral history of the film’s making that revealed a fledgling production company clashing with a first-­time director, who clashed with the unionized crew and a largely inexperienced cast of actors. If there were any real shape to the problem, it came from the scenario of a director at the top of his field being treated like a rank amateur in this new one, and not being able to adjust to it. But it’s understandable to have a hard time adjusting to a harsh reality when you feel like you’re at the cusp of culminating a longtime dream. Williams had been eager to direct a feature film since his Main Source days, and in 1992 he greeted a lifelong friend recovering in the hospital from a car accident with the promise that “once you get out of here, we’re going

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“Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” to start making movies.”8 That friend was Anthony Bodden, who would begin writing the script to Belly the following year and kept it at hand in case Hype was ever in a position to shoot it. When that opportunity finally came, it was through Artisan Entertainment—­which, in the production company’s previous incarnation as live Entertainment, had cofinanced Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in 1992. That was one of their few unqualified successes in a decade marked by constant debt, failed mergers, and private equity firm bailouts. So when New York–­based Artisan reentered the film production business, they had to partner with another production company, Shooting Gallery, that had better Hollywood connections. Those money men made sure to keep their fists tight, the shooting schedule short, and the bottom line a bigger priority than the artistic vision. That latter fact of on-­the-­cheap moviemaking is one of the reasons Belly feels so disorienting and only marginally coherent. The script was meant to be a sprawling crime epic hinging on the dynamic between two longtime criminal associates: Tommy “Buns” Bundy (played by rapper DMX), a reckless and amoral loose cannon, and the mononymed Sincere (played by Nas), who tempers his increasingly reluctant, go-­along-­to-­get-­along criminality with a studious self-­knowledge and a moral drive to better himself for the sake of his family. The plot would center around the two taking advantage of a new, dangerous form of heroin to ally with a Jamaican drug kingpin and set up a criminal enterprise in the unlikely locale of Omaha, Nebraska. This would lead to a string of consequences, particularly for the embattled and betrayal-­vulnerable Buns, that eventually culminate in his being coerced by a mysterious power broker to assassinate the same Black political activist, Rev. Saviour, who has inspired Sincere’s conscious turn. When Buns has him at gunpoint, Saviour regales him with a lengthy monologue urging him to change his ways. Buns decides not to go through with the killing, Sincere abandons the drug trade and moves with his wife and infant daughter to Africa, and both men find their moral footing and subsequently escape the violent fate faced by all their other associates. Somewhere in a better world there’s a version of Belly that runs two hours instead of ninety-­two minutes and has the resonant substance to go with its astounding style. But a thirty-­day shooting schedule, a cash-­ hemorrhaging budget, and a director too ambitious to compromise his vision for either of those realities meant that sacrifices had to be made.

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Belly And since Belly was perceived to be something of a “hood film” by its financiers, where flashy glitz, bullet-­spraying action, and the marketability of its hip-­hop cachet would take precedence over auteurism, the biggest changes came at the expense of the script. Some of them arose from logistic problems when Williams’s specific casting hopes fell through: one subplot was supposed to involve a woman who would eventually wind up beheaded, and the whole character had to be written out because Williams’s choice for the role—­No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani—­backed out. But more of the script cuts were bottom-­line budgetary ones: don’t spend too much time in Jamaica, it’s not affordable to shoot in Africa, lose these scenes that make Buns’s change of heart a more natural character progression. Bodden’s story was ruined: “I think that with all the gunplay, the big-­butt shaking and the floss and the gloss, that some of the message was a little bit lost and twisted. We kind of looked like we were bigging up the evils. I think it came across that way.”9 This led to Williams feeling like he was being denied the creative control he was used to exercising in music video shoots. Christian Epps, a gaffer for the film, reflected on the reality of the situation: On paper, Belly was budgeted at [reportedly] $7 million. Thirty-­day union shoot in New York: You can do the math, and it becomes painfully obvious that that’s impossible for a director with Hype’s talent and eye. I think it was genuinely known in the production office before the first shoot date that the budget and the creative taste didn’t line up. How did the studio settle it? They never did.10

Williams was still able to finish the movie with a few guerilla-­filmmaker tactics—­at one point, he’d sneak in a shot in a mansion location that was in the process of being shut down for the day—­but the film’s pacing and plot were destroyed by the need to throw away pages upon pages of script that were increasingly unfeasible to film. In the most egregious example, the closing moments of the film, Sincere narrates his wonder and amazement at finally making it to Africa—­“I felt like I’d never really seen clouds before! I felt like the skies were a different color blue, the trees a different color green, and the people, too—­the people were beautiful”—­over footage not of Africa, but of a confetti-­strewn Times Square during a New Year’s Eve celebration. Hearing someone describing a vivid, beautiful scene you can’t actually see is about as far away as you can get from Hype Williams’s

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“Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” whole visual sensibility. Not even Nas, one of the most talented MCs and gifted storytellers in hip-­hop history, could make it sound convincing. Which brings us to another issue with Belly: almost all its primary cast members are musical artists, most of whom had experience being charismatically photogenic performers in Williams’s videos but were a mixed bag at best when it came to being actors. Supporting roles varied from Wu-­ Tang star Method Man radiating cocky, sardonic charisma as the turncoat street soldier Shameek to dancehall star Louie Rankin as the Jamaican kingpin Ox, who spoke in a patois so heavy that most home viewers would have to reach for the subtitle button on their DVD players. Tionne “T-­Boz” Watkins, who was one of the biggest R&B stars in the world at the time as one-­third of the group TLC, and singer-­actress Taral Hicks, best known for her role in the Robert De Niro–­directed 1993 cult classic A Bronx Tale, played the respective wives of Sincere and Buns, and got to show some fiery intensity in their otherwise underdeveloped roles. But a film’s only as good as its leads. DMX was an inspired casting as Buns: as a furious, intensely emotional MC with a powerful sense of blunt-­ force lyrical provocation and an even more powerful Rottweiler growl of a voice, he had all the 2Pac-­heir-­apparent charisma to carry a film like this. (And that was even before he’d spend 1998 absolutely dominating the rap game on the charts, becoming the first rapper since Pac to have two albums—­It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot and Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood—­enter the charts at #1 in the same year.) But Nas, who was given input and writing opportunities on the script and seemed cast in the Sincere role to reflect the thoughtful-­gangsta persona he’d mastered in his music, turned out to be a monotone-­mumbling and low-­energy foil to DMX. Nearly everybody who worked on the film regarded Nas’s acting as detrimental, though Method Man just figured that low-­intensity near-­ deadpan was how Nas really was. (“I think his level of emotion could’ve been a bit higher, but that’s Nas . . . I think if Nas did get shot in the leg, he would’ve came in the house and said it just like he said it.”) Not even AZ, a rapper who had a small role in the film and was one of Nas’s closest friends and collaborators, felt compelled to be diplomatic about it: “Terrible. His acting was terrible.”11 Williams’s decision to populate the most important roles in his film with artists he’d previously directed in music videos does lend Belly many of its B movie qualities; it is hard not to see Method Man or T-­Boz on the

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Belly screen without thinking, thanks to years of precedent, that you are seeing Method Man and T-­Boz rather than the characters they’re playing. But if you view it through the lens of music—­if you really do consider it a feature-­length music video—­it takes on some more fascinating qualities. Sometimes there are nods to and echoes of the artists’ actual music: one scene in particular, where Sincere has a worrying conversation with a preteen “twelve going on twenty” future hustler, is a direct reference to the one he has with a similar youth in the third verse of his ’94 Illmatic highlight “One Love.” And at some points it even feels like an extension of the era’s debates over the differences between conscious rap and its hardcore street counterpart—­of course it’d be Nas and DMX arguing over whether it’s more important to have knowledge (“Ever wonder what the fuck your purpose is out here? . . . I’m reading this new book, man, this shit is so deep, yo”) or money (“We born to fucking die, man. In the meantime, get money. . . . What you need to start thinking about is your motherfucking seed, man, ’cause shorty can’t eat no books”). The problem inherent in the casting—­that DMX is significantly more charismatic in his role than Nas is in his—­makes the dynamic between the two completely uneven, so that the amoral Buns seems more appealing and cool to viewers than the philosophical Sincere. And maybe that makes Belly something more crucial than just a good-­ looking but creatively compromised crime movie. The 1990s were marked by a constant controversy over the moral character and messaging of hip-­ hop music, ranging from the anti-­authoritarian gangsta-­rap dominance of N.W.A at the start of the decade to the contentious, eventually fatal Coast Wars that claimed the lives of 2Pac and Notorious B.I.G. and still lingered in recent memory when Belly was filmed. That placed the movie square in the midst of a long-­running controversy over hip-­hop’s contributions to negative portrayals of Black culture—­a debate that led to the Magic Johnson Theatres franchise refusing to screen the film, citing its “overwhelmingly negative and violent depictions of African Americans, as well as its potential to create disruptive situations.”12 Belly isn’t necessarily more violent than any other gangster film that preceded it—­compared to Scorsese’s GoodFellas or De Palma’s Scarface, the body count and the blood-­and-­guts are relatively subdued—­but seeing it depicted with the same kind of slick stylization as a performance in a music video may have made its violence seem too unserious, even glamorous. It’s another case of the substance

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“Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” being overwhelmed by the style, with Williams’s aesthetic connections to hip-­hop being used as a convenient signifier and scapegoat for a lax amorality that the film’s original intended vision didn’t believe in. Still, Belly did feel like a music-­centric film first and foremost, not just by dint of its casting and its director but because of its marketing. Malik Hassan Sayeed, the film’s director of photography, observed that when it came down to prioritizing certain aspects of the finished product, the plot and the message suffered because the producers “were so concentrated on their other agendas, [like doing] a soundtrack.”13 And the film really does feel at its most alive when there’s a piece of music that Williams can set a vibrant pivotal scene to. D’Angelo’s just-­released single “Devil’s Pie” rumbles excitingly as the heart beneath a get-­money montage signaling the heroin trade’s success. And the moment where Ox’s enemies plan revenge against him for orchestrating the assassination of a rival is scored to Sister Nancy’s 1982 dancehall classic “Bam Bam,” the sweetness of the song undercut by the portents of doom that accompany it—­fading out with a dub-­ style echo on a memorable shot of the statuesque woman, Chiquita, who will eventually slit Ox’s throat. So go back to that opening sequence, the one set to that Soul II Soul song that has nothing to do with violence or crime or practically anything else the film’s narrative has to say—­but it just sounds right in that scene somehow. There can be a bit of context collapse involved in hip-­hop when a well-­known song gets lifted for its familiar hook but ends up part of a song concerning a different subject entirely. Williams even directed the video for one of the era’s most flagrant examples, Notorious B.I.G.’s “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems,” which rides off a sample of Diana Ross’s gay-­community anthem “I’m Coming Out” despite Biggie, Puff Daddy, and Ma$e all rapping in the role of ladies’ men focused entirely on their financial status. The Tunnel-­raiding gunmen of Belly’s title sequence aren’t coming back to reality, they’re swaggering through a world that looks unreal. The song’s placement in the scene is there just because it’s a familiar tune with a history of being a big club hit, but the juxtaposition works on a purely sensory level, where the smooth glide of Caron Wheeler’s voice is less a piece of messaging than a sensation as direct as any camera move or piece of lighting. Just as Francois Truffaut stated that “every film about war ends up being pro-­war,”14 Belly and its inimitable focus on stylized cool went above and beyond in giving the impression that every film about crime ends up

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Belly glamorizing crime—­no matter what happens to its perpetrators in the third act. And Williams’s over-­the-­top style, his eye for futurism and trend-­ spotting, his ear for music, all those things took an already unreal-­feeling film and gave it a sense of relentless, gorgeous artificiality, where everybody’s skin glistens with baby oil and they live in houses that seem more like movie sets. It’s the look of money without history or context, where nearly every appearance of a real-­world piece of media feels like a jarring interruption. That holds whether it’s a decade-­old R&B song on the soundtrack, or Harmony Korine’s squalor-­filled 1997 art film Gummo screening on a massive TV in Buns’s Kubrickian, white-­monochrome, modernist mansion. It gets to the point where it’s easy to wonder if it’s really a movie about crime, or a movie about being characters in a crime film. So Belly is pop art, and it’s wholly entertaining on those terms whether it’s technically a “bad movie” or not. It also stands as a massive what-­if: Williams would never direct another feature film, though he would go back to the music video world and more or less pick up right where he left off, continuing to shoot his characteristically bombastic and surreal Afrofuturist mini-­movies to stunning effect. His creative freedom would continue for a decent stretch afterward, but the travails of the music business, besieged by internet piracy, would start to limit his budgets and his ambitions just as sure as his Hollywood stint did. Williams would remain in demand throughout the 2000s and 2010s, even as his outlets dried up and his canvases shrank from MTV widescreen to pocket-­sized smartphones. But it’s hard not to wonder what he could’ve done if he’d been able to make Belly entirely on his own terms, if he would’ve come away from the experience still enthused about the potential to make more films with that same level of visual distinction. But when pop-­music commerce is at stake, even the brightest-­burning artists are dragged back to reality.

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The Royal Tenenbaums, “Needle in the Hay” THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001, DIRECTED BY WES ANDERSON) ELLIOTT SMITH, “NEEDLE IN THE HAY” (1995, KILL ROCK STARS)

The Tenenbaum children have grown up all wrong. They were prodigies early on—­by their teens, Margot was an acclaimed playwright, Chas was a financial wizard, and Richie had a preternatural talent for tennis—­ but sometime between the divorce of their parents Royal (Gene Hackman) and Etheline (Anjelica Huston) and the film’s present moment, they’d lost their way and their lives have all grown dissatisfying for myriad reasons. Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) has found it difficult to maintain a relationship, Chas (Ben Stiller) has lost his wife in a plane crash, and a notorious on-­ court mental breakdown has ended the tennis career of Richie (Luke Wilson). When the three children reunite with their parents under the pretext that Royal is dying—­a ruse he concocted to engender sympathy from his estranged family—­they’re forced to confront their feelings for one another in person for the first time in decades. Richie’s feelings might be the most complicated of all. He has grown to harbor mutual romantic feelings for Margot—­who, being adopted, is his sister only in name and familial upbringing—­and it is later revealed that his emotional collapse mid–­tennis match was the result of her attendance as a newlywed with her neurologist husband Raleigh (Bill Murray). When Richie and Raleigh find out that Margot has also been having an affair with longtime neighborhood friend Eli Cash (Owen Wilson), they consult a private investigator to find out what other infidelities she might have been hiding. The emotional fallout from all this devastates Richie so severely that he soon makes the decision to attempt suicide.

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The Royal Tenenbaums The scene where he does so is a harrowing depiction of his own self-­ negation. As Raleigh and a youth named Dudley he’s been doing neurological studies on sit unsuspecting in the living room, we see Richie ritualistically shed the visual identity he’s carried with him through the film—­removing his headband and sunglasses, cutting off his long hair, and shaving off his beard, nothing left to hide his face. And then—­intercut with a quick-­flashing montage of shots of his childhood memories (and some glimpses of grown-­up Margot)—­he slashes his wrists with a razor, collapsing in the stark, coldly blue-­lit white room, his red blood and the matching collar of his Fila polo shirt the only sources of vivid color in the frame. The soundtrack to this moment is provided by just one voice and one guitar, both belonging to Elliott Smith, the Portland singer–­songwriter whose music had become some of indie rock’s most haunted expressions of loneliness and alienation. The moment Dudley enters the bathroom to discover the wounded Richie, the music stops—­every sound vanishes—­ only for the guitar to return in the subsequent shot, where Richie’s rushed on a gurney to the emergency room and the rest of the Tenenbaum family hurry to the hospital to see him.

In descriptive terms, indie rock is a form of music—­partially, though in many cases distantly, derived from punk and its offshoots—­that tends to value creative independence, personal relatability, small-­venue intimacy, and anti-­commercial impulses over the more traditional fame-­and-­ fortune excesses of the rock stars that preceded them. In more popular, outwardly-­imposed, half-­assed pop-­cultural terms, “indie” is a subcultural affectation—­later mutated into its more decadent, more irreverent stereotype, the hipster—­that involves dressing yourself up in vintage clothes and valorizing the purity of the obscure and outmoded. To figure out how we got from the descriptive “indie” of the underground music’s origins to the stereotypical “indie” of reductive popular perception, it helps to note the intermittent but distinct wave of films that touched on this aesthetic. For the better part of a decade, you couldn’t go a month without the release of some new millennial-­audience dramedy fixated on young aesthetes and the quarter-­life crises that their immaculate record collections just can’t solve.

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“Needle in the Hay” It can be pretty tempting—­and easy—­to dismiss a lot of these films as navel-­gazing celebrations of callow cultural smugness, peaking as they did during a decade where the internet and the ascendance of new generational aesthetics were ruthlessly atomizing pop culture even further than it already was. Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 film Ghost World, an adaptation of the Daniel Clowes comic series that ran through the mid-­1990s, felt like an early reckoning with this trend, centering around two sardonic teenage outsiders who gradually begin to realize that their cynical behavior can’t sustain their lives. But where Ghost World was at least self-­aware and steeped in a world its director made feel as emotionally repellent as it was aesthetically exciting, later entries in the indie-­but-­not-­necessarily-­independent filmography coasted on stylized quirkiness that just barely papered over superficial melodrama populated by directionless, ennui-­flattened, awkward young men who trade snarky, convoluted dialogue with the Manic Pixie Dream Girls who love them. The most egregious example of indie-­as-­signifier might be the scene in the Zach Braff–­helmed 2004 film Garden State where Braff’s protagonist learns from a love interest (Natalie Portman) that while antidepressants might have stifled his true feelings, what he really needs is to “hear this one song, it’ll change your life, I swear.” (Cue the Shins’ jangly 2001 bummer of a song “New Slang”—­which had previously been used in a McDonald’s commercial two years earlier.) The trend would hit critical mass by the end of the 2000s, fatefully timed to converge with the Great Recession, which gave young people something to really be sad about. But in films like Juno (dir. Jason Reitman, 2007), Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (dir. Peter Sollett, 2008), Away We Go (dir. Sam Mendes, 2009), and (500) Days of Summer (dir. Marc Webb, 2009), the whimsical travails of quasi-­naïfs who react to coming-­of-­age problems with flailing idiosyncrasy would be wedded to painstakingly curated indie-­rock soundtracks that seemed like they were concocted to impress college radio programmers more than moviegoers. Whatever qualities these films might have had as actual narratives, it was hard not to see them as aspirational pieces of lifestyle marketing for young viewers looking to find some sense of style at a time when there were more identities to choose from than ever. But no director was singled out for those foibles quite as relentlessly as Wes Anderson. After emerging with the underseen yet critically lauded

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The Royal Tenenbaums shaggy-­dog crime caper comedy Bottle Rocket in 1996, Anderson’s second feature Rushmore (1998) was a visually striking film that tackled themes of class struggle, social alienation, and the difficult ambitions of youth. Yet it presented these concepts through characters that seemed like distortions of familiar archetypes, built their environs with an extremely specific eye for unusually baroque details, and gave everything a sense of colorful, alternate-­reality staginess largely detached from contemporary aesthetics. Most memorably, it leaned on a soundtrack crammed with songs almost entirely drawn from the milieu of the ’60s British Invasion—­not just big hitters like the Kinks (“Nothin’ in the World Can Stop Me Worryin’ ’bout That Girl”) and the Who (“A Quick One, while He’s Away”), but bands like the Creation (“Making Time”) and Unit 4 + 2 (“Concrete and Clay”) that would be total obscurities to all but the most dedicated Anglophiles. From a director who was born in Houston at the end of the 1960s, it all seemed culturally unlikely, and subsequently a bit confusing. The adjective “quirky” would soon become almost inseparably attached to Anderson’s work, as though it were the easiest shorthand to get at the tone of his films—­which, in essence, was that of a precocious child who was fascinated by the world as it existed just before he did, and tended to escape to it when adulthood proved too disappointing. The Royal Tenenbaums embodied this feeling more than any of Anderson’s other films before or since. As a story centering around a trio of child prodigies turned adult mediocrities attempting to reconcile with one another and the rest of their family, it nails a particular melancholy that’s grown popular among the “gifted kid” version of the millennial generation’s perspective. “We held so much promise when we were young, now we can barely function because the adult world keeps beating us down” is a sentiment that’s animated so much of popular culture in the last twenty years that it’s become as much of a generational trope as “we just want to be free to do our own thing” was in the ’60s and “my identity is not beholden to some corporation” was in the ’90s. Anderson was just better than most of his indie-­aesthetic peers at expressing this feeling in a way that gave its melancholy a sort of stylized panache, leaning just as heavily on the things that give us respite from the misery—­or provide artistically expressive, era-­agnostic ways to embody and address it—­as he did on the emotional inner lives of his characters. The music that became a part of these films would reflect that more than anything, selections that seemed

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“Needle in the Hay” like odd personal choices yet hit with the familiar, welcome impact of old favorites. The soundtrack to The Royal Tenenbaums is a little more eclectic in its source material than Anderson’s previous or subsequent films, in part because the story itself, with all its fraught interpersonal dynamics and wildly varying family neuroses, calls for it. But it’s all still of a piece, largely relying on songs in the ’60s and ’70s singer–­songwriter tradition, whether it’s from mainstream figures like Bob Dylan (“Wigwam”), Paul Simon (“Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”), and John Lennon (“Look at Me”), or cult-­hero artists like Nick Drake (“Fly”), Emitt Rhodes (“Lullaby”), and Nico (“These Days,” which is one of the more effective needle drops in the film simply by accompanying a radiantly ambiguous Margot Tenenbaum disembarking a bus and approaching her brother-­by-­adoption Richie in languid slow motion). There are a couple punk classics by the Clash and Ramones for contrast—­the best being the latter group’s “Judy Is a Punk,” which provides the manic, rapid-­fire energy for a montage featuring Margot’s assorted phases and flings throughout her life—­but while they seem like tonal outliers, they also fit the film’s strange vision of cloistered lives in a version of New York that looks like the subject of a foreign country’s travelogue from 1976. It’s not “vintage chic”—­though it looks cool enough to be—­as much as it is just immersed in a half-­remembered time that seemed fascinating just by personal association. Aside from the original score provided by Devo cofounder–­turned–­ modern pop-­classical media composer Mark Mothersbaugh, there’s only one song that postdates the early 1980s and could be considered relatively contemporaneous with the film’s actual release date. That song is “Needle in the Hay,” and the fact that it accompanies the film’s most emotionally harrowing moment makes for a fascinating point of contrast. By 2001, the man who wrote and performed that song with such unvarnished, open-­ book, right-­there-­in-­the-­same-­room emotional intimacy had become disillusioned, compromised, unsure of himself, and in the midst of a substance abuse problem that would eventually consume him whole. And it was his attempts to reckon with Hollywood’s attention that many friends claim was the start of his undoing. Elliott Smith, like Anderson, was born in 1969 and grew up in Texas—­ though in far different circumstances than the director, who enjoyed a stable, upper-­middle-­class home life. Smith was a child of divorce and

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The Royal Tenenbaums only saw his father about one week every year; he later claimed in interviews that it was his father’s record collection that got him interested in the Beatles.1 On his mother’s side, most musical influences came from the church, and when Smith and a friend first started to attempt learning finger-­picking acoustic guitar they’d started with devotional songs before trying their hand at meat-­and-­potatoes classic rock. (“It’s funny talking to people, a lot of my friends are in bands and it’s hilarious to find out what were the first songs you learnt to play. ‘Oh erm, you know, erm ‘Smoke On The Water,’ some Kansas song, you know.’”)2 A move to Portland, Oregon, at age fourteen came around the same time as Smith expanded his musical interests to the usual art-­rock and punk touchstones beloved of indie rockers: Elvis Costello in particular, but also the likes of the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop, all three of whom would also find their way onto Anderson’s soundtracks. When Smith finally made the decision to form a band, his parents refused to humor him. His mother’s side of the family had a history of performing professionally in groups, but to little reward or acclaim. Smith paraphrased the objections he received: “See what happens when you try and do that, you end up with no money, no health insurance and a drinking problem.” In the early ’90s he joined a band with some friends—­an alt-­rock outfit called Heatmiser—­that felt socially fulfilling if musically dissatisfying, and stuck with it only because he didn’t want to “sweep the carpet out from under them” by quitting.3 Smith’s reputation took a fateful turn once he began making his own solo recordings in an effort to find the creative voice that he couldn’t in Heatmiser, with his solo debut originating from a spare one-­man-­and-­his-­guitar demo tape that he cut in a basement on a four-­track recorder. By the time his 1995 self-­titled sophomore release dropped on the fittingly named Olympia, Washington–­based label Kill Rock Stars—­an album that positioned the quietly devastating “Needle in the Hay” in the leadoff spot—­it had become clear that this was where he belonged. One curious thing about “Needle in the Hay” is that it’s outwardly a heroin song, one that was written years before he was known to even start using the narcotic. (It’s still unflinching, though: “Down downstairs to the man / He’s gonna make it all okay / I can’t be myself / I can’t be myself and I don’t want to talk / I’m taking the cure so I can be quiet wherever I want / So leave me alone.”) But in these lyrics, the allusions to substance abuse were deployed as a metaphor for something else, something more emotionally

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“Needle in the Hay” complex, at least if you take Smith at his word. In a 1996 interview with the Mississippi-­based zine Spongey Monkey, upon being asked if he considered Elliott Smith “darker or moodier” than the debut, he anticipated the “all these songs are about drugs” line of inquiry with a preemptive rebuttal: I just wasn’t in as bright of a mood when I was making it up. The first one was more about people, that was the angle of it. The second one wasn’t hanging out with people as much. Sometimes people are like, “oh, the second one is all about drugs and stuff,” and it’s not about drugs. It’s a different angle or topical way about talking about things. Like dependency and mixed feelings about your attraction or your attachment. It’s good for you on the one hand, and on the other hand it’s not really what you need.4

Heatmiser would eventually break up around a year after the release of Elliott Smith—­a blessing, as it turned out, since the other band members would land on their feet in new groups and allay Smith’s fears of sabotaging their careers. But his level of contentment with his own career—­an indie-­rock level of sustainable cult renown, and the freedom to write and experiment entirely on his own terms—­would soon meet an entirely unexpected development. Gus Van Sant was an independent filmmaker who frequently worked with queer subject matter and had a deep connection to the frank yet empathetic depictions of subcultural figures caught up in self-­destructive situations. 1989’s addiction drama Drugstore Cowboy and 1991’s gay street-­hustler road movie My Own Private Idaho put the Portland-­ based filmmaker on the map; and after the dark, Nicole Kidman–­starring comedy of 1995’s Columbia Pictures feature To Die For gave him his first bona fide success under a major studio, Van Sant found himself becoming one of Smith’s highest-­profile fans. “We just kind of became friends,” Smith recalled in a 2003 interview with Under the Radar. “I’m not so sure I knew much about him at the time. I knew he made movies and that they were considered sort of indie. Initially we hit it off because he also records. We would talk about microphones and sing the praises of [Shure SM]57s—­ really underrated mics.”5 Smith would release Either/Or in 1997, an album that took his isolated yet intimate-­sounding solo-­performer melancholy to a level that earned him widespread indie-­world acclaim—­even as Smith himself recalled the recording process being torturous enough to push him to the verge

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The Royal Tenenbaums of a nervous breakdown. (“I was never good enough. That was my train of thought. I just lost my confidence completely and totally to the point where right before it came out, I decided that it wasn’t [good]. Until some people were like, ‘Just let it go.’ I really didn’t think I liked it. Then, about a year later, I didn’t think it was so bad anymore. Now I remember mostly the good parts of it, which is that I recorded it myself and there was no pressure.”)6 When Van Sant set about adapting the Ben Affleck / Matt Damon-­ written screenplay for Good Will Hunting for his next movie, the director loaded the soundtrack with Smith’s songs, including one from ’94 debut Roman Candle (“No Name #3”) and several others from Either/Or (“Say Yes”; an orchestral rendition of “Between the Bars”; and future fan-­favorite “Angeles”—­the latter being a love–­hate reckoning with the possibilities of fame). At the last minute, Smith decided to write another song—­“I did it because Gus thought it would be nice if there was a song specifically for the movie”7—­and as Good Will Hunting proved to be a massive success, Miramax made a push to get this new song, “Miss Misery,” nominated for an Academy Award. This is how Smith, already struggling with the prospect of becoming the kind of rock star his indie scene had set out to kill, would come to appear on the 1998 Oscar telecast. He was reluctant to even show up for the ceremony, and only agreed to perform when he was informed that the Academy would find someone else to do it for him. “So for all the songwriters who don’t want to perform their songs, they’d get someone like Richard Marx to do it. I think when they said that they had done their homework on me a little bit,” Smith quipped. “Or maybe Richard Marx is a universal scare tactic.”8 Duly warned of such a humiliating treatment, Smith wound up appearing at the seventieth Academy Awards ceremony performing an abbreviated, orchestra-­accompanied version of “Miss Misery” as part of a medley between performances by country star Trisha Yearwood (nominated for a song from the bombastic action flick Con Air) and eventual winner Celine Dion (for her omnipresent Titanic theme “My Heart Will Go On”). Smith looked so out of place—­wearing a rumpled white suit that he jokingly referred to as a good-­luck charm (“I always have a great time when I wear my white suit”)9 but was actually a loaner from Prada—­that the starkly subdued performance would come to haunt his reputation: “It got personal with people saying how fragile I looked on stage . . . people

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“Needle in the Hay” were saying all this stuff simply because I didn’t come out and command the stage like Celine Dion does.”10 Before his Tenenbaums placement Smith would release two more albums—­1998’s XO and 2000’s Figure 8—­on DreamWorks Records. The move to a major label concerned some fans, accompanied as it was by increased ambitiousness that would trade in Smith’s four-­track intimacy for big-­budget studio time, though for Smith it was a prime opportunity to get at least a few steps closer to the energy and craft of those Beatles albums he’d loved his whole life. The fuller arrangements, featuring such unprecedented touches as horns, string sections, and drum loops, all felt very Los Angeles—­even as Smith, who’d moved there in 1999, attempted to maintain a scaled-­down version of the stardom that had since exploded far beyond the parameters of his earlier indie renown. Journalists and interviewers would remember him around this time as someone increasingly prone to chafing against outside evaluations of his persona through the lens of his work, even though he had started to show clear signs of personal turmoil; his objections to the tortured-­artist reputation he’d been saddled with clashed with the fact that, by the early 2000s, he really was in obvious pain. A February 2004 Spin profile laid it bare. “For all his shyness, Smith made people want to enter his orbit,” wrote RJ Smith. “His melancholy resonated, drew people close. Then they’d get close enough to see how he was living and how he was damaging himself—­with heroin in Portland, then booze when he moved to New York, and then heroin and other drugs when he moved to Los Angeles. Friends would try to get him to stop destroying himself, and that’s when he’d cut some of them out of his life. It was really that simple.”11 Smith had been subject to at least two major interventions in his life—­the first being in 1997, months before Good Will Hunting boosted his star profile—­that clearly took an emotional toll on him and informed his album XO. “A lot of the songs on this record had to do with being really amazed at how quickly people will totally invade your space just because you’re not like them and you don’t deal with things just like they do,” Smith told the Spin reporter as the album was being promoted. “They think that you drink too much . . . they just don’t like how you live or something. It kind of blows my mind, the nerve people have to go parading around as if they know what somebody else ought to do with themselves. To the point where they’ll confront you and tell you what you ought to

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The Royal Tenenbaums do.”12 That struggle for autonomy and self-­direction would take a horrible toll on Smith, as years of addiction and additional attempts at intervention tangled with an emotional life too fraught to focus on the creative process. In 2001, as Wes Anderson and his music supervisor Randall Poster were attempting to put together the soundtrack for The Royal Tenenbaums, Smith had started and then abandoned work on his third DreamWorks album and had begun to show signs of mistrust with the label that bordered on paranoia. Both Poster and Anderson recalled the difficulty of working with Smith at the time, a situation that had arisen in part because of another attempt to invoke the singer–­songwriter’s affection for the Beatles. Poster’s thwarted efforts to license both “Hey Jude” for the opening sequence of the film and an alternate version of “I’m Looking Through You” for the end had been tripped up by the surviving Beatles’ inability to agree to terms: “The Beatles have a very complicated business arrangement among themselves and we worked it every way we could, but unfortunately, George Harrison was very sick during that time and it was just not going to happen, we weren’t going to be able to get approval.”13 Initially, Anderson and Poster decided to turn to Smith to record his own version of “Hey Jude” as a substitute, but it wasn’t possible at the time, which Anderson attributed to Smith’s struggles: “He wasn’t in a great mental or physical space at the time and it just was not a successful recording session. It was kind of a mess. . . . He wasn’t comfortable with the whole situation it seems.”14 While they were still able to secure the rights for “Needle in the Hay” for Richie’s attempted suicide scene, it’s generally agreed on, albeit in terms never elaborated on, that Smith was unhappy with the song’s actual use in the film. William Todd Schultz’s otherwise exhaustive biography Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith only makes a vague reference to Smith’s “displeasure” with the scene,15 and Poster wasn’t much more forthcoming. “Elliott was a terribly tragic character, and he just couldn’t keep out of his own way. He couldn’t enjoy the association, really. He was just so . . . disturbed.”16 It must have seemed like just another example of outside imposition on Smith’s own work, even when that was caused by an aesthete who clearly shared Smith’s musical enthusiasms and melancholy themes. And that’s perfectly fair. Smith’s songs might have worked so well and spoke to so many different conditions—­whether to the individual listener or a piece of mass-­culture media—­because they felt extremely personal

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“Needle in the Hay” and confessional while still leaving enough room for outside interpretation. In interviews, Smith spent significantly more time discussing his musical influences than the emotions that drove his songs. When interviewers did delve into questions of authorship as autobiography, as to whether he really was as unhappy as his songs intimated, he’d shrug off any distinct personal connections or experiences in his lyrics. “I think they’re about, they’re usually about the aftermath of some sort of decision, they’re usually characters in them that are not exactly me, but are sort of,” he told Melody Maker journalist Neil Mason in an unpublished 1998 interview. “They’re about as much me as someone’s dreams are them. There’s a theory that everyone in your dream is really you. How do you know? I usually just describe things. If I have any plan at all when I’m writing words it’s usually just a picture that I imagined or remembered, I’m sort of describing a picture.”17 That seems more like the work of a screenwriter than someone working in the confessional singer–­songwriter model—­an impression compounded by his acknowledgment of a habit of writing songs while watching TV with the sound off. (“I made up two songs during an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess. I was pretty into that show for a while for some reason, I don’t know why. I probably had a crush on Xena or something, but I wouldn’t admit it.”)18 Still, it was open for debate just how mutable or adaptable his songs actually were. And when Smith was found dead on October 21, 2003, of multiple stab wounds to the chest—­a presumed suicide, though the coroner’s office never conclusively determined if it was—­having one of his songs accompany an on-­screen movie character’s own attempt at taking his own life only added an additional level of complicated associations to both the scene and the artist who unhappily soundtracked it. Meanwhile, Anderson’s reputation for being a stylized, “quirky” eccentric steeped in the indie aesthetic left him more open to criticism for his carefully curated soundtrack work than any of his peers, and multiple reviews of The Royal Tenenbaums jabbed at this tendency shortly after the film’s wide release. Kenneth Turan’s pan for the Los Angeles Times was generally across-­the-­board wary about how “hermetic” the film appeared to him, condemning the movie’s aesthetic as an impenetrable work of insidery scenesterism: “The difficulty is that it is hard to find any connection points with such an insular, forbidding style, hard to find the handholds that make the climb inside possible.”19 If that wasn’t enough, the New York

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The Royal Tenenbaums Times critic A. O. Scott basically pointed and scoffed “look at this fucking hipster”: Here, the tracks by Nico, the Rolling Stones and other artists old and new place quotation marks around emotions rather than underlining them. Like the songs and the reiterated portrait-­style shots, the witty costumes and gorgeous interiors become suffocating, and the whole enterprise begins to feel more arch than artful, a gilded lily that spoils its perfection by insisting on it.20

Critics weren’t alone in finding a superficial record-­collector showiness in Anderson’s soundtracks, Tenenbaums or otherwise. Singer-­songwriter Will Oldham, whose brooding indie-­folk stylings as Bonnie “Prince” Billy made him a renowned contemporary of Smith’s with a loosely simpatico style, once spent part of an A.V. Club Q&A scoffing at Anderson: “His completely cancerous approach to using music is basically, ‘Here’s my iPod on shuffle, and here’s my movie.’” This was, tellingly, part of a bigger complaint on his part: that preexisting songs shouldn’t be used in movies at all. “How can you have a song with someone singing lyrics under spoken dialogue and consider that mood-­music, or supportive of the storyline? As somebody who likes music, when that happens, I tend to listen to the lyrics, which have nothing to do with the movie. And then I’m lost in the storyline.”21 So there you have the struggle: a distinct piece of music somebody put their own specific identity into, subsequently chosen and laid out just so to add additional context to somebody else’s work. Anderson’s meticulous visual arrangements and hyperemphasis on visually distinct fashions and design choices might have highlighted those potential contradictions and dissonances more than any other filmmaker who’d deigned to slip in a pop-­song needle drop into a pivotal scene. And that’s where one of the biggest arguments over indie (or “hipster”) culture lies: how much of an aesthetic sensibility-­driven work, such as The Royal Tenenbaums, is concerned with “authentic” emotions and lived experiences beneath its outwardly twee tastemaker facade. In that sense, the “Needle in the Hay” scene is hard to dismiss. Like the bulk of the music Anderson and Poster pick for Anderson’s films, it’s there out of a sense of actual affection and enthusiasm for the music—­no hipster irony, no winking-­and-­nudging nostalgic kitsch, just a song that

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“Needle in the Hay” sounds right and holds an emotional resonance that fits the moment. It helps if you don’t overanalyze Anderson’s aesthetic choices—­if you just accept them as they are, they feel like components of a visual language that make his characters’ bluntly direct, almost childlike feelings and experiences seem like a confluence of decades-­long, lived-­in identity crises. Maybe style is all you have left to keep you going when everything else in your life is falling away underneath you—­and what even is style besides the accumulation of fascinating, often vanishing aspects of experiences from your formative years? The world of The Royal Tenenbaums and the people who populate it revolves around that certain saudade, clinging to old artifacts and supposedly lost or secret fictionalized corners of a family’s lives and the city they reside in. It’s a visual mishmash of distinct chronological eras and trends clashing: Ben Stiller done up in a tracksuit like an early ’80s b-­boy, Margot’s old-­NYC art-­kid vintage chic, Richie’s late ’70s Björn Borg tennis wear, or the urban cowboy affectations of Owen Wilson’s quasi–­Cormac McCarthy writer and Tenenbaum family friend Eli Cash. Nobody looks like they belong in Giuliani’s NYC circa 2001, because it’s not Giuliani’s NYC in the film—­it’s some other version, one pieced together from decades-­old films like Annie Hall and back issues of the New Yorker. It’s the idealized dream instead of the crueler yet more prosaic reality—­and even as a dream, the intrusions of tragedy and heartbreak are never far away. Anderson’s auteurism obscures, but doesn’t entirely hide, the fact that his true medium is melancholy—­a self-­conscious dissatisfaction with a half-­earned privilege that never fully manifested in the first place, soaked in an ennui driven by threats of obsolescence and falling behind and losing a sense of who you are. In twenty-­first-­century America, a widespread strain of that feeling has led to a lot of grotesque backlash politics and revanchist conservatism, which might be why some critics are suspicious of Anderson’s approach. But since Anderson turns those feelings inward instead of seeking out scapegoats, all while emphasizing the fashionable, novelistic unreality of the characters’ world instead of aiming for populist relatability, he makes it seem more wistful than resentful. It’s the work of someone who already knows they’re outside of the ordinary modern world and is still searching for ways to build something to protect themselves from its worst impulses. In that way, music has proven to be the clearest way Anderson’s films

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The Royal Tenenbaums convey this. The “Needle in the Hay” scene puts the lie to the idea that Anderson picks his songs out of a sense of trendy revivalism. It’s there because it sounds like heartbreak, and because there’s something in that heartbreak that sounds raw and direct and from a place that still wants to find a way to express it that’s more welcoming than alienating. Sometimes being known is a curse; Elliott Smith seemed to live and create and perform in a way that struggled with that sense of recognition and the subsequent loss of control over his own image. And sometimes you can define your own artistic sensibility in such a distinctly singular sort of way that, like Anderson, you leave yourself vulnerable to a simplistic reduction of your own identity, no matter how carefully you assemble it. Being widely seen without being truly known is the kind of existential fear that can haunt a creative artist throughout their entire life. But when the relationship between these two elements, the song and the scene, reveals a shared struggle in ways that the musician and the filmmaker never entirely made clear to each other in person, maybe that’s how you find a way to be yourself—­ even when you feel like you can’t.

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Drive, “A Real Hero” DRIVE (2011, DIRECTED BY NICOLAS WINDING REFN) COLLEGE FEATURING ELECTRIC YOUTH, “A REAL HERO” (2009, FLEXX)

A stuntman (Ryan Gosling), whose name we never learn, supplements his day job by doing getaway-­car wheelman gigs for criminals on the side. His manager and friend Shannon (Bryan Cranston) wants to help the driver invest in a race car, so he turns to his own underworld connection—­Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks)—­to supply the money. In the meantime, the Driver has met a new neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and her young son Benicio (Kaden Leos), and the three soon become good friends. While Irene is married—­her husband, Standard, is in prison—­there are still romantic undercurrents between her and the Driver, which we see during a bucolic montage of the Driver, Irene, and Benicio going for a ride through the iconic, frequently filmed concrete viaducts of the Los Angeles River in the Driver’s souped-­up ’73 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu. The viaduct ends in a small, wooded installation, a restoration of a small parcel of nature amid the sprawling, car-­choked city, and the three of them relax there a while before driving home. The soundtrack to this moment is a gleaming, mid-­tempo synthpop song, featuring the romantically awed voice of a woman—­Electric Youth singer Bronwyn Griffin—­singing about an archetypal man of valor: “A real human being / And a real hero.” But while we initially get to bask in the idea of the Driver’s humanity, it’s his heroism—­or at least his street-­justice efforts at it—­that will eventually obscure and negate it. When Standard (Oscar Isaac) returns from prison, the Driver shifts into something of a different role in the family: Standard has been threatened by Chris, a gangster he owes money to, and is railroaded into a job robbing a pawn shop to make up for the debt. Believing

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Drive that this has put not just Standard’s life in danger, but Irene’s and Benicio’s lives as well, the Driver offers to join the job as its wheelman. Since this is a neo-­noir, everything goes wrong: Standard is killed by the shop owner, the Driver finds out he was going to be cut out of the deal, and in his effort to avenge Standard he finds out that the pawn shop robbery was orchestrated by Bernie’s partner Nino (Ron Perlman). When the Driver winds up on the wrong side of Bernie’s desperate scramble to eliminate everyone with a knowledge of the robbery, he’s forced to sever all ties with Irene. He seals this, much to her horror, when the two of them find themselves alone in her apartment building’s elevator with a hitman, and the Driver literally stomps the hitman’s head into a pulp. Soon, with the Driver’s only close friend Shannon dead at Bernie’s razor-­ wielding hand, the Driver kills Nino, then makes one last effort to secure Irene and Benicio’s safety. He offers Bernie the money he’d saved from the heist in exchange for Bernie’s promise that Irene will not be harmed, only for Bernie to stab the Driver in the gut after the exchange. The Driver retaliates by procuring his own knife and stabbing Bernie to death; after appearing to bleed out through his stylish satin jacket, the Driver abruptly snaps back to life after a long, silent minute in the driver’s seat of his Malibu and drives off into the evening. His fate seems uncertain—­we never find out if he survives, much less if he ever sees Irene again—­but we get something at least approaching closure, as that song from earlier pulses through the speakers one more time. The first time, we saw the real human being; as we exit, we watch the real hero drive off into the unknown.

Somehow, the 1980s refuse to die. That’s understandable from a utilitarian perspective. It’s the decade where home video and cable TV exponentially increased the demand for media content, thus allowing the average viewer to consume significantly more media than they’d ever had access to—­and subsequently form personal lived memories of the era that were almost impossible to separate from pop culture. This decade might not have been the peak of this phenomenon, but it has proven to be the most enduring retro-­stylized touchstone. It’s one of the few things that seems to unite otherwise adversarial generations: this is work originally created largely by boomers, first consumed largely by young Gen Xers, and lingering as the formative early experience of the millennials born during the

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“A Real Hero” decade, who subsequently turned it into a fashionable cross-­platform aesthetic that continues to be bought into by Gen Z. It’s synthpop and 808 drums and big-­hair guitar solos, it’s checkerboards and pastels and wavy glowing neon, it’s 8-­bit Nintendo graphics and airbrushed horror-­movie posters and VHS tracking lines, it’s rad and awesome and always, infinitely bursting with the invincible coolness of rebellious youth. Is that how the decade really felt? Of course not—­not even to someone who was a kid back then—­but it can be revised, over and over, into something that feels like it, to be repackaged and resold in perpetuity until it stops feeling like nostalgia at all. Nostalgia relies on the feeling that something has been lost with time, but that gets hollowed out when it perpetuates a culture where none of those things ever seem to go away. What happens in contexts like this is a sort of curious revisionism that, in making these nostalgic signifiers contemporaneously popular, then perpetuates a new version of this aesthetic that can largely get away with passing itself off as contemporary in itself. Looking at music’s place in this phenomenon can be instructive. Nostalgia for the ’60s in the 1980s didn’t just sustain the careers of aging rock stars, but created new variants on their music, like the “Paisley Underground” of neo-­psychedelia that emerged on the West Coast. The same held true for the emergence of retro ’70s styles seeping into the subcultures of the ’90s; think the Black Sabbath–­indebted “stoner metal” movement, the disco reclamations happening throughout house music, and hip-­ hop’s perpetual conversations with the classic funk and soul it had initially been built upon. The music of the 1980s would prove an especially pungent sort of reference point by the time the era’s signifiers started to sneak back into pop—­most of it having been originally filtered through a succession of MTV-­fueled trends that were, through repetition and omnipresence, quickly reduced to broadly cliched caricatures even before the passage of time had worn away their initial novelty. At least, that’s if you went into it with a wink and a shrug. The catch with ’80s nostalgia—­and the nostalgia for successive decades—­is that it emerged when the pitfalls of nostalgia were already obvious. By the turn of the millennium, culture had gone through a protracted period where the more au courant mode of nostalgia had shifted from the sincerity of pining for a lost age of innocence to a more cynical and ironic self-­consciousness. But eventually, concurrent with the ’80s turn through the cultural recycling

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Drive bin and the emergence of fanboyish, ain’t-­it-­cool geek culture, a new twist would emerge: an elevation of the broadly obvious, most immediate and even cliche signifiers of the era to an almost worshipful totemic status. The products of this attitude sounded and looked for all the world like ironic nostalgia, but its intentions lie almost entirely in a borderline-­naive enthusiast sincerity and a demand to be considered not merely a throwback but a distinct part of the here and now. When French house music duo Daft Punk recorded Discovery in 2001, the end-­of-­the-­’70s sounds on the album—­joyously unapologetic in a fandom for their source material, and entirely heart-­on-­sleeve with their emotions—­came from a very particular place that has since become a significant motivator for much of twenty-­first-­century pop culture. Thomas Bangalter, one half of the group, stated that the album was inspired by a childlike perspective: When you’re a child you don’t judge or analyze music. You just like it because you like it. You’re not concerned with whether it’s cool or not. . . . [This album is] about the idea of looking at something with an open mind and not asking too many questions. It’s about the true, simple, and honest relationship you have with music when you’re open to your own feelings.1

Maybe that’s why Discovery worked so well: it was cool without trying to be cool, presenting itself for what it was and refusing to obfuscate any of its emotional directness or communal joy beneath scenesterism or gatekeeping or posturing. Tellingly, Daft Punk also had cinematic visions in mind: “We wanted to make something that sounded like Queen’s music for Flash Gordon or like what you hear when you’re watching an old science-­fiction cartoon like Wizards.”2 Two years later, they’d release Interstella 5555, a full-­length animated movie based around the album, with a visual design supervised by old-­school manga and anime icon Leiji Matsumoto: “At around the age of 5 years old, we would watch Captain Harlock . . . so we are finally working with a big source of our inspiration. The music we have been making must have been influenced at some point by the shows we were watching when we were little kids.”3 Trading on a childlike wonder of the thoroughly fantastical became a major element of millennial-­targeted pop culture, a default escape route

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“A Real Hero” from the uncertain future of a post-­9/11 world wracked with fears of terrorism and climate change and collapsing democracies. In the context of nostalgic throwbacks, that retreat would often be justified as an emotionally justifiable trauma response—­a cocoon of an idealized Then to help protect yourself from an uncertain Now and an unnerving Tomorrow. If this meant reducing the class inequities and nuclear anxieties of the tumultuous and often cruel 1980s into the background noise of an idealized childhood idyll, well, that’s just nostalgia doing what it does. But putting the revisionism of nostalgia through the lens of youth, whether it’s the formative years of a world-­discovering eight-­year-­old or the rebellious thrill of teenage angst, would prove hard to sustain for a mass cultural movement that had any desire to engage with a grown-­ adult reality. Maybe that was by design—­the main appeal for an audience who had decided, through experience or otherwise, that “adulting” was a burden. But the reconciliation between the idealized form of retreat-­to-­ childhood memories and a more mature and nuanced reflection of that nostalgia would start to cohere into something . . . not exactly new, but strange enough in its affectations to at least seem at odds with the ordinary world. Eighties-­vintage synthpop had found itself in something of a revival in the late ’90s and early ’00s, with the emergence of acts like Ladytron, Peaches, Stereo Total, and Chicks on Speed providing an early (and crucially female-­focused) reconfiguration of synth-­heavy new wave. The latter group in particular was also at the leading edge of a scene brewing in Munich under the aegis of DJ Hell’s International DeeJay Gigolo Records, and in 1998 the label’s release of a 12″ by the French duo Miss Kittin & the Hacker proved to be a breakout hit. The A side was “1982,” a referential pastiche that was nearly as ham-­fisted in its references—­the lyrics namedrop songs by synthpop icons Depeche Mode, New Order, Kraftwerk, and Soft Cell—­as it was infectious in its near-­affectless, minimalist hookiness. The B side, an ode to brainless decadence titled “Frank Sinatra,” took the status-­obsessed rich-­kid pipe dreams so prevalent in late ’90s pop and rendered them bluntly, mischievously vulgar: “To be famous is so nice / Suck my dick, kiss my ass / In limousines we have sex / Every night with my famous friends.” Welcome to the world of electroclash. By 2001, the subgenre was hitting its stride. That October, New York held the first Electroclash Festival, with the responsibility of officially

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Drive coining the name falling on promoter Larry Tee. Born in 1959 and thus old enough to remember the initial impact of Giorgio Moroder’s pioneering all-­synth production for Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” Tee figured “electroclash” was a term better suited to the current wave of music than just “electro,” which he’d already associated with the performers’ ’80s precursors like Afrika Bambaataa and Arthur Baker. The lineage was still obvious, however: the Hacker proclaimed in a Los Angeles Times profile that “all the artists that are involved in electroclash are all nearly 30, and we are just trying to mix techno music and ’80s stuff—­the first music we ever heard.”4 Like most nascent scenes, the genre label wound up being foisted upon a number of bands who resented being attached to somebody else’s buzzword. An enterprising vandal slapped stickers on Festival posters reading “don’t let buzzwords and marketing exploit and destroy the music you love,”5 and some bands that had played the Festival—­ like Detroit-­based adult., who were more abrasive and punk/industrial-­ leaning than the sexually decadent and performative likes of Peaches and Fischerspooner—­resented the association with a scene that seemed steeped in semi-­ironic frivolity. “We had been working at that point for people to take electronic music seriously,” Nicola Kuperus told XLR8R in 2013, “but then we were getting paired up with somebody who just puts the soundtrack to Flashdance on and pours buckets of water all over themselves. Then [we thought], ‘What am I doing here?’ [We’re] not like a fucking dog-­and-­pony show. This is our music, and it’s very personal to us. To just feel like it’s all a spectacle was very irritating.”6 Still, one report from the NME was ridiculously effusive in its praise of the Electroclash Festival and the scene as a whole, declaring the music nothing short of New York’s biggest new musical revolution since punk: We are no longer satisfied with MTV providing pretty people making heavy pop songs. We are no longer satisfied with British technophiles providing us with beats we’ve never heard before. . . . We want a tumultuous clash of the most daring fashion, the most mind-­blowing stage shows, cutting edge choreography, hot, pretentious and sexy people with a sense of humour and we want the music to be a futuristic, irresistible and accessible fucking party. . . . At its best [the Festival] was more culturally relevant than Woodstock and rawer than CBGB.7

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“A Real Hero” The byline on the article: Gavin McInnes, cofounder of Brooklyn-­via-­ Montreal tastemaker fashion/music zine Vice—­and future figurehead of the right-­wing extremist street gang the Proud Boys. Electroclash turned out not to be the 2000s answer to Woodstock or CBGB—­not by a long shot. And by 2002, many of the late ’90s originators had begun to reject the scene entirely. Dutch producer I-­f, one of the scene’s unwitting architects thanks to his watershed 1998 banger “Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass,” circulated a now-­vanished “Anti-­ Electroclash-­Manifest” on the internet, while the Munich-­based label he was signed to, Disko B, splashed a big “fuck electroclash” banner on its website.8 The anxiety of spending years creating a sound, finding a place for it, and then seeing that place overrun by coke-­hoovering fashionistas with superficial-­at-­best interest in the actual music would send countless artists into reinventive retreat. And by the middle of the decade it turned out that more people wanted to flock to the less-­decadent, more indie rock–­friendly sounds of dance-­punk label DFA and their marquee acts like LCD Soundsystem and the Rapture. Still, ’80s dance and pop music were still significant components of that scene and the 2000s indie zeitgeist in general, and the reverberations would be felt throughout the rest of the decade—­even if no subgenre name could effectively contain it just yet. A transitional, nascent sort of dance music scene would subsequently begin forming, splintering, reforming, and coalescing around a new-­but-­ familiar-­sounding set of influences, and it all came to a head in 2007. Daft Punk had rebounded from the initial bafflement that greeted their uncharacteristically aggressive-­sounding 2005 album Human After All with an astonishing live tour in which they fused and mashed up all their greatest hits into a kaleidoscopic groove—­all from the perch of a psychedelic LED pyramid flashing primitive computer graphics and flanked by strobing triangular light structures. Their countrymen at Paris-­based Ed Banger Records, which had been formed in 2003, were hitting paydirt with a similar strain of electro-­infused house music that would become known as French Touch. The duo Justice would epitomize the label’s mixture of post-­ electroclash decadence and Daft Punk–­style pop-­friendly eclecticism with their 2007 hit debut—­known as Cross, after the album cover’s crucifix imagery they’d adopted as a sort of personal-­Jesus logo. And Kavinsky, another Parisian electro-­house upstart who turned heads with his debut EP

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Drive Teddy Boy in 2005, took advantage of his opening slot on the Daft Punk Alive 2007 tour alongside Ed Banger signee SebastiAn to showcase a conceptual set of worldbuilding songs he’d been assembling. They detailed the story of a musician who, after dying in a Ferrari Testarossa crash in 1986 (très Miami Vice), reappeared ten years later as an undead pop star. Both Teddy Boy and 2007’s 1986 presented a litany of nervy-­sounding synthpop/house jams created with heavy input from the 1980s’ favorite synthesizer, the Yamaha DX7. Meanwhile, the electroclash hangover in America had found a surprising usurper—­not in former epicenter Brooklyn, but on the opposite end of the country in Portland, Oregon. Italians Do It Better was founded in 2006 by Mike Simonetti and Johnny Jewel (né John David Padgett), two producers who were deeply fascinated not just by ’80s synthpop but Italo-­disco and ambient music. (They still wore some obvious influences on their sleeve, or between someone else’s: the label’s name was lifted from a phrase printed on a T-­shirt Madonna wore in her 1986 video for “Papa Don’t Preach.”) The label’s first releases emerged the following year and made an immediate impact: albums by two bands Jewel performed in and produced, Chromatics (Night Drive) and Glass Candy (b/e/a/t/b/o/x), as well as the label compilation After Dark, would all receive rave reviews from Pitchfork. In the latter writeup, which doubled as a snapshot of where post-­electroclash electronic indie pop stood in 2007, Marc Hogan would refer to the label’s aesthetic as “stark, retro-­futurist noir electro”—­tellingly using a cinematic term, noir, to place the music in the context of the dark and brooding fatalism of crime cinema’s most morally ambiguous strain. On top of all that, another movement had come to a head around 2007 that, for all its dated-­sounding origins, became a surprisingly resilient starting point for the last fifteen years’ worth of pop-­leaning dance music. “Blog house” was the name given to a loosely defined but wide range of styles that encompassed the aforementioned French house, neo-­disco, and post-­electroclash scenes that had endured throughout a decade that felt wide open with DIY potential. The name originated from the music’s popularity in and championing by assorted online blogs and zines, many of which had picked up on aspiring artists and localized scenes that the social media site MySpace had become especially useful for promoting. One of those scenes would, to the suspicion of nobody, provide the song that would beat at the heart of one of the 2010s’ biggest cult films. David

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“A Real Hero” Grellier, a musician who’d emerged in the mid-­2000s as part of a group of electroclash latecomers called Sexy Sushi, had begun to branch off and cut his own demos. And when he teamed up with his friend Pierre de la Touche to perform a one-­off double bill, the name of the event—­simply called “College”—­would soon be adopted by Grellier as a new nom de synth. By 2007, Grellier, de la Touche, and a veritable army of friends in the French house scene would become known as the Valerie Collective, a group that would coalesce into a full-­fledged label a year later. Like Italians Do It Better, Valerie would vibe off a nostalgic yet in-­the-­ present take on ’80s-­sourced synthpop and electro, steeping themselves in the aesthetics not only of the music of the era but the films. The Alexander Burkart–­designed cover to College’s first full-­length, 2008’s Secret Diary, even looks like an ’80s neo-­noir movie poster, with a Ray-­Bans-­sporting woman peering through a set of Venetian blinds. “All the tracks reflect my memories from the ’80s, so there are some ideas based on a short theme from a TV soap or movie,” Grellier told the blog Vehlinggo in a 2018 retrospective. “There are a lot of references—­of course, Tangerine Dream and John Carpenter [influenced the album]—­but also all the TV series I watched.”9 That influence of old, loosely remembered childhood experiences watching programming not even remotely meant for children looms large in music like College’s—­“naive and instinctive,” in his words, like kids glimpsing an adult world they weren’t supposed to see. The Valerie Collective were a big hit in the blog house scene, especially on Aleks Seltenreich’s German-­based site Discodust, which had grown from a modest MP3 blog upon its November 2006 introduction into a burgeoning scene-­report powerhouse within months. While College’s debut EP Teenage Color wouldn’t be released until 2008—­and only initially then as a five-­pack of MP3s—­the title track found an early champion in Discodust in August 2007. “a few weeks ago, i first came across college on myspace and immediately fell in love with his beautiful dreamy french house compositions,” Seltenreich wrote in casual-­voiced all-­lowercase.10 Discodust would also offer “Teenage Color” as a free download, packaged with remixes by fellow Valerie members Anoraak and Russ Chimes; while there’s no way to really track how many people downloaded them, at least two listeners had their lives changed by the experience. Austin Garrick and Bronwyn Griffin were friends and partners who’d been boyfriend and girlfriend since junior high but hadn’t yet made any

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Drive plans to turn their shared enthusiasm for music into anything major. While Griffin was studying at college, Garrick had worked here and there contributing writing and production credits for make-­work gigs. He stumbled across the Discodust post promoting College when he was in the midst of a creative crisis, and was inspired by the realization that a relatively obscure up-­and-­comer all the way across the Atlantic could find an international audience with the help of a tight-­knit, globe-­shrinking online community. It helped that Grellier’s music was such a potent mixture of melodic simplicity and emotional impact. “Not since discovering Kraftwerk as a kid had I come across music that evoked such a strong emotionality in me with such minimal production,” Garrick told Vehlinggo.11 Electric Youth would make their official debut a little over a year later after that Discodust post, with a feature spot on Secret Diary track “She Never Came Back” that fittingly paired College’s anxious-­sounding up-­tempo drive with Griffin’s youthfully energetic yet haunted vocals and Garrick’s alienated, impressionistic lyrics (“Segments came in a daydream / Wondering if it’s what it seems / What if there’s no other one out there / No other feelings untrue”). That was the first collaboration between College and Electric Youth. The second would be the breakthrough. “A Real Hero” at its core sounds a lot like a more downtempo take on the hypnotic arpeggiated synth-­bass ruminations that permeated Secret Diary, with Grellier’s cinematic inspiration striking once more: as he told Vulture in October 2011, “I wanted to give a homage to that lonely hero that we see in movies like Mad Max . . . people who make their own choice and try to save lives.”12 And while the first verse is enigmatic and general enough to describe the post-­apocalyptic figure of Grellier’s imagination (“Back against the wall and odds  / With the strength of a will and a cause / Your pursuits are called outstanding / You’re emotionally complex / Against the grain of dystopic claims / Not the thoughts your actions entertain”), the second verse of Garrick’s lyrics were rooted in a completely different kind of heroism: the January 15, 2009, rescue of US Airways Flight 1549 at the hands of pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who guided the Airbus A320 into a zero-­casualty water landing on the Hudson River after a flock of birds struck the plane and killed all power to the engines. In the same Vulture Q&A, he mentioned that “I had this conversation with my grandfather, and he had been really moved by Captain Sully Sullenberger. . . . He was the one who came to me talking about ‘a real human being and a real hero.’”13 A song that sounded so much like

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“A Real Hero” a cinematic throwback had an emotional pull steeped in a much more recent and real-­world event, modern homage barely concealed inside a retro coating. As for how “A Real Hero” found its way to Hollywood, you can credit the open ears of Nicolas Winding Refn—­and the man who’d contributed music to the film that gave Refn a career breakthrough. In 2008, the Dutch director’s criminal biopic Bronson laced its soundtrack with a mixture of classical opera and synthpop hits—­including one effectively stark moment where a group of patients at a mental institution dance around Tom Hardy’s catatonic protagonist to the strains of the Pet Shop Boys’ Catholic-­guilt anthem “It’s a Sin”—­and made his enthusiasm for synthpop’s contemporary revivalists known by incorporating Glass Candy’s “Digital Versicolor” as a recurring theme. In its most effective usage, we hear Jewel’s slash-­and-­ stab arpeggios and Ida No’s hushed shattered-­rainbow refractions of color as Hardy’s Bronson bare-­knuckle fights people—­and dogs—­in surreally lit dark rooms that look like criminal underworld music video sets. The song earned such an indelible role in its three appearances in the film that Jewel has been retroactively credited with “scoring” the movie. After taking a break from modern settings to shoot 2009’s Valhalla Rising, a supernatural story about a twelfth-­century Viking partially inspired by the work of Kenneth Anger, Refn was singled out by actor Ryan Gosling as the director he wanted to work with for a script that had recently come his way. Drive had been adapted from a 2005 novel of the same name by James Sallis about a stuntman who moonlit as a criminal getaway driver, an idea that appealed to Gosling in that he’d been looking for an opportunity to do an action film with character depth. And Gosling’s request was a package deal: he didn’t just want Refn, he wanted Jewel. Both the actor and the director showed up to one of Jewel’s gigs in Los Angeles to ask the musician directly, who gladly accepted, and the three went about discussing the sort of musical vibe they wanted to bring to the film. “We had a big long conceptual conversation about John Carpenter and Claudio Simonetti and all this stuff, synth-­based scores, you know?” Jewel told BoxOffice.com in 2011, respectively namedropping both the American horror/sci-­fi/action auteur who scored his own films with sparse, sinister electronic music, and the keyboardist from the Italian prog group Goblin who were joined at the hip with the giallo and horror film genres in Italy.14 Jewel picked out four songs that were rooted deep in the synthpop

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Drive revival scene. Two were from his own production work—­the Chromatics’ taut-­wire tension of “Tick of the Clock,” and the buzzy, Blondie-­esque new wave of Desire’s “Under Your Spell”—­while two others came from collaborations with French artists. One was Kavinsky’s 2010 single “Nightcall,” a skulking, brooding entry in his undead-­Ferrari-­driver mythos, featuring a robot-­monster-­voiced Kavinsky trading “I’m no longer the man you thought I was” warnings with a disquieted/fascinated Lovefoxxx, the female singer from Brazilian electro group CSS (“There’s something inside you / It’s hard to explain / They’re talking about you, boy / But you’re still the same”). That track—­which, being coproduced by Daft Punk’s Guy-­ Manuel de Homem-­Christo and mixed by SebastiAn, made it something of a French Touch all-­star jam—­rolled beneath the film’s opening credits, a stunning mood-­setter after the tense “Tick of the Clock”–­scored opening scenes. “A Real Hero” was the other, and its placement in the film—­ first as a romantic montage, then as the denouement after the Driver vanishes into the night (and, debatably, the afterlife)—­gives it a special thematic resonance, as though being a real human being and being a real hero were two drastically different sides of the same man that, in the end, just couldn’t be reconciled. But Jewel’s role wasn’t just to pick out the songs—­he had, in fact, initially been signed on to compose the rest of the film’s original score. “Drive was my first feature,” he told Variety for a tenth-­anniversary retrospective in 2021. “I didn’t really understand how it was supposed to work in a formal Hollywood type of way. I was making songs not really understanding the back and forth aspect of it and notes from a bunch of different people that aren’t necessarily the director. I was focusing on the creative side of things. I didn’t have a proper contract.”15 And things were complicated further by a series of communication mishaps, studio demands, and some machinations that Jewel never really learned the source of. “Somehow the signals got crossed where Nicolas’ camp thought I was unavailable because of touring. By that point, this was in February [2011], and they’d already shot it and cut the movie. So Nic flew to Montreal and we rented a movie theater and he and I watched the movie twice in a row, back-­to-­ back. We talked about every single scene and all the music. So then from there, I had a month to finish the score. . . . I did the whole score in New York where they were finalizing the movie, doing color correction and all

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“A Real Hero” of that stuff. . . . But they weren’t able to use any of it because there were so many different people involved.”16 Jewel’s score would eventually be replaced by an equally apropos electronic score by Cliff Martinez, who concocted a blend of synthpop and ambient music that perfectly captured the film’s neo-­noir tension. “At the time, the song choices were controversial, a little too eccentric,” Martinez told Variety. “Oftentimes, a song compilation score is too eclectic for a composer to follow in its stylistic footsteps. But four of those songs could be the same band and two of them were [Jewel], so it felt stylistically unified. I can acknowledge that with the score, and [Refn], in so many words, told me to do that.”17 And despite the fiasco of having his score rejected, Jewel still had nothing but good things to say about Refn’s audiovisual insights afterward: “He’s not a musician, but he really understands the visual aspect of music. I always tell people I’m not really a musician. I’m more a graphic designer but I use sound. And he responds to that, which is why he likes my music because it’s more tonal, and it keeps you hooked but it doesn’t dominate the picture.”18 Jewel’s score would eventually be repurposed for another side project, Symmetry, though it was never made clear just how much of the music for 2012’s Themes for an Imaginary Film originated from the three hours’ worth of music Jewel had brainstormed while creating that now-­lost Drive score. Jewel’s tendency to contextualize his music in visual terms would continue to serve him well in future film-­score projects, including Gosling’s 2015 directorial debut Lost River. But the legacy of Drive’s aesthetic would extend far beyond any specific musician or director. While the score leaned heavily on the inspiration of revivalist synthpop, Refn’s visuals also had a vivid connection to a certain retro sensibility, too. To cinephiles and fans of classic crime–­action cinema, Drive felt like a distinct series of nods to two other films. One was Walter Hill’s 1978 car chase / heist thriller The Driver, which also featured a nameless wheelman as the protagonist—­played by Ryan O’Neal, arguably the Gosling of the ’70s. The other was the directorial debut of Michael Mann, 1981’s Thief, which drenched the story of safecracker James Caan’s reckoning with a tyrant crime boss in stunning, glowing nighttime cinematography and an electronic score by German synth pioneers Tangerine Dream. Throw in an additional nod to Kenneth Anger—­Gosling’s Driver wears an iconic satin jacket with a scorpion emblazoned on the back, an

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Drive homage to Scorpio Rising—­and Refn kept his film’s lineage obvious while still making it resonate in a 2011 setting. There was just one problem: Drive had put all its aesthetic cards on the table after more than a decade of popular culture steeped in ’80s revivalism. Whether it was the electro revival and its fashionista-­hijacked offshoots, or Hollywood’s history of mining the ’80s for comedic period pieces ranging from 1998’s Adam Sandler vehicle The Wedding Singer to 2010’s ensemble bro-­comedy Hot Tub Time Machine, you couldn’t walk five steps without tripping over a cocaine-­dusted Members Only jacket with a set of DeLorean keys and a Rubik’s Cube tucked inside its pocket. Just by dint of having a loosely retro-­noir atmosphere, one particularly heightened by its soundtrack, Drive got lumped into a throwback aesthetic that would be picked clean for parts over the next few years. In one particularly brazen move, the Liam Neeson revenge-­thriller sequel Taken 2, released just over a year after Drive, poached both “A Real Hero” and “Tick of the Clock” for its own soundtrack. The returns would diminish from there. When it was in the service of totally rad ’80s-­kid fanboy kitsch overload, like the internet sensation short film Kung Fury—­ featuring a theme sung by Knight Rider star/retro-­camp icon David Hasselhoff!—­it could get exhausting enough in its sugar-­buzzed, teen-­brained edginess to make you wish the ’70s never ended. When the aesthetic was put to more sincere use—­like in the supernatural Netflix period piece series Stranger Things, which scored its Stephen King–­meets–­Steven Spielberg suburban-­kid horror adventure with quasi-­Carpenter synthwave and the occasional Kate Bush classic—­it would hinge on such a deep well of referential nostalgia that felt like the entire point of the show itself. But the aesthetic found an even longer shelf life in internet subcultures and video game fandoms. A 2012 game titled Hotline Miami lifted Drive’s mixture of highly stylized neon cool and intense violence, paired it with a lurid pixel-­art style that merged Miami Vice glitz and slasher-­film menace, and made it an explicit period piece, set in 1989. Most crucial of all, it all rode off a soundtrack of now-­archetypal synthesized music that drew from the same influences—­Carpenter, Tangerine Dream, Goblin—­ that Jewel and Refn nodded to, only with further refinements that gave it a constant edge of frenetic momentum and sinister tension. This music and the scene that surrounded it would become omnipresent throughout the 2010s as “synthwave,” a subculture that was planted so specifically in

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“A Real Hero” a computerized ’80s culture of vintage synths, gamer nostalgia, and Testarossa chic that it was alternately named “outrun” after the 1986 Sega racing arcade game. Throw in the retro-­futurist noir touches that were almost singlehandedly codified by Ridley Scott’s Vangelis-­scored 1982 cyberpunk classic Blade Runner—­which notched a much-­belated, Gosling-­starring sequel, Blade Runner 2049, in 2017—­and you had all you needed to perpetuate a Reagan-­era vision of the cool-­dystopia aesthetic in perpetuity. When a 2019 documentary was made about the scene, The Rise of the Synths, it bridged its musician interviews and scene-­history overviews with the narrative construct of the time-­traveling ’80s evangelist “Synth Rider,” who drove the requisite iconic DeLorean à la Back to the Future and was clearly modeled in part on Gosling’s Driver. Dig deep enough through the neon schmaltz, and you could find some gems. Synthwave-­bound artists like Perturbator and Carpenter Brut struck gold with an aggressive, almost industrial take on the music, though they sounded more intent on creating synthesized takes on heavy metal than anything rooted in electro’s danceable roots. Indie electro-­pop crossovers like Chvrches and M83 have tapped into synthpop as a way of expressing to-­the-­rafters emotional expression that seems dead-­set on filling stadiums with anthemic communal connections. It’s even infected pop megastars like R&B/pop hitmaker the Weeknd, whose 2020 album After Hours rode a production-­by-­committee mélange of synthpop mutations all the way to the halftime show of Super Bowl LV. Even John Carpenter, who’d only directed one film since 2001—­2010’s limited-­release flop The Ward—­ became in demand again, not as a filmmaker but as a live performer, playing his synthesized soundtracks across dozens of live gigs from 2016 to 2018. But the foundational artists at the heart of Drive proved to be a bit shakier. After a succession of increasingly similar-­sounding albums that strip-­ mined his cinematic retro vision until it was entirely spent, Grellier told Vehlinggo that he had burned himself out on the College project—­“It’s not my story nowadays”19—­and had stepped back to experiment with new ideas. Italians Do It Better promised a string of albums in the mid-­2010s—­ the Chromatics’ Dear Tommy, Glass Candy’s Body Work, and Symmetry’s Still Life—­that, as of summer 2023, still haven’t emerged. This was exacerbated by the departure from the label of Simonetti, citing creative and financial conflicts with Jewel. Jewel, meanwhile, had subsequently immersed

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Drive himself even deeper into film-­score work as Glass Candy receded and the Chromatics broke up. Kavinsky remained relevant, but even his most recent work—­like the 2022 album Reborn, coproduced with Justice’s Gaspard Augé—­does little to reinvent the chromed-­out Ferrari wheel. That’s the catch with evoking a crowd-­pleasingly retro but personally specific vision of a sound steeped in the 1980s: you can get away with putting out that aesthetic no matter what decade it is, so long as you can still evoke that certain ineffable sense of semi-­nostalgic cool. “They’re listening to you boy / But you’re still the same.” But it wasn’t a nostalgic dream for everyone. Electric Youth in particular were still battling back against that perception when they were profiled in Rolling Stone three years after Drive. “Our interest in the pursuit of [the] timeless is not about nostalgia, it’s about longevity,” Garrick stated. “The thought of recreating the past with music is not interesting to us, it’s probably been the biggest misconception of our music and what we’re about thus far. The reality is, we’re much more interested in creating things for the future than things from the past. We are nostalgic people, not in the sense that we long for a different time, because we love the present, but how could we not be reminded of the past when every day, we see the person we had a crush on since seventh grade?”20 They’d go on to score a movie, too—­2021’s Come True, a sci-­fi horror film about the subconscious unreality of the dreaming mind. The title of its leadoff cut: “Modern Fears.”

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Outro TWENTY-­F OUR MORE GREAT NEEDLE DROPS

Considering just how many renowned and effective deployments of the needle drop filmgoers have experienced over the past several decades at the movies, it was difficult to narrow my initial focus down to sixteen films, even by focusing primarily on ones that had a noticeable historical impact on the parallel world of pop music. But with many of the most exciting intersections of music and film being just as well appreciated as self-­contained moments and odd juxtapositions as they are as extended conversations about the shape of musical history, it also necessitates at least a nod to the broader phenomenon. At two dozen entries, this bonus section is a tip-­of-­the-­iceberg glimpse at other more notable ways motion pictures deployed preexisting music—­ironically, sincerely, with esoteric intent or obvious, as reveries in the familiar or total subversions.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller, “Winter Lady” DIRECTED BY ROBERT ALTMAN, 1971 LEONARD COHEN, 1967 (COLUMBIA)

Frontier music for a New Hollywood Western, poet/singer Leonard Cohen’s modern-­day perspective on one-­night stands feels so starkly anachronistic yet deeply resonant in Altman’s depiction of a 1902 settlement town’s social disorder that it stands out as the most revolutionary aspect of an already iconoclastic “anti-­Western” of a film. “Winter Lady” in particular is devastatingly placed, recurring as a leitmotif for the relationship between the titular drifting gambler (Warren Beatty) and the madam (Julie Christie) he partners with to run a brothel; its appearance at the concluding

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Outro moments of the film, where one party lies dying in a blizzard and the other is trapped inside an opium stupor, takes one of the most tragic endings in ’70s cinema and makes the knife twist that much deeper.

Master of the Flying Guillotine, “Super” DIRECTED BY JIMMY WANG YU, 1976 NEU!, 1973 (BRAIN)

Düsseldorf rock duo Neu! released three great albums in their prime, then disbanded in 1975, right when the world was finally ready for them. But as they were becoming big influences on the Sex Pistols and Berlin-­era David Bowie, their impact was felt in a far different context—­all thanks to some idiosyncratic decision-­making behind the scenes of surreal wǔxiá classic Master of the Flying Guillotine to score the entire film with kosmische German groups like Neu!, Tangerine Dream, and Kraftwerk. Neu!’s monomaniacal proto-­punk single “Super” gets special treatment as the theme that plays under a manic montage of the title sequence, featuring glimpses of scenes later in the movie that, like the song itself, start out feeling bewildering and disorienting as a clean-­slate experience until it clicks just how enduring all these elements have become—­glimpses of future Street Fighter II combatants, Wu-­Tang Clan references, and Kill Bill tropes in prototype, just as “Super” opened the door for decades of music to follow.

Radio On, “Radioactivity” DIRECTED BY CHRISTOPHER PETIT, 1979 KRAFTWERK, 1975 (CAPITOL)

Shot in stark black-­and-­white right as the bleak, austere aesthetic of postpunk was looming over Britain’s subcultural music scene, Christopher Petit’s road film is one of those obscure but unforgettable films that links the sensations of musical rumination, memento mori, and foreboding travelogue. The plot is classic existential-­journey stuff, but run through with the unreality of an Anglo-­German techno-­industrial alienation: protagonist Robert (David Beames), who works at a snack factory as the in-­ house public-­address DJ, discovers that the brother who’s been sending him mixtapes has died under mysterious circumstances. And while his trip from London to Bristol produces few real definitive answers—­and only reinforces the vibe of end-­of-­the-­seventies, early-­Thatcher “no such thing as society” Britain that things are collapsing in on themselves—­there’s a

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Twenty-Four More Great Needle Drops compelling presence of fragile humanity in the tapes he listens to, including the recurring echoes of one of Kraftwerk’s eeriest odes to a form of modern science that, in the looming 1980s, would feel like a catalyst of the apocalypse.

Stranger Than Paradise, “I Put a Spell on You” DIRECTED BY JIM JARMUSCH, 1984 SCREAMIN’ JAY HAWKINS, 1956 (OKEH)

Willie (John Lurie), the New York lowlife, can’t stand the sounds emanating from the portable tape deck perched on his kitchen table, and presses the stop button with a grumbled proclamation that “I really hate that kinda music.” Eva (Eszter Balint), his cousin from Hungary, has been playing that tape since she arrived in town, and doesn’t take that slight lightly: “It’s Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and he’s a wild man, so bug off.” Jim Jarmusch’s best films tend to examine the strange fascinations people from other nations have with American pop culture, including the uncanny aspects of early folk, rock, and rhythm and blues that Greil Marcus gathered under the surreal national mythos of “The Old Weird America.” And Hawkins’s legendarily deranged and utterly wonderful ode to supernaturally deathless desire and the ways it makes you lose your mind makes for the perfect harbinger of a shaggy-­dog travelogue that reveals a much weirder America than Willie or Eva ever expected to make their way through.

Pee-­wee’s Big Adventure, “Tequila” DIRECTED BY TIM BURTON, 1985 THE CHAMPS, 1958 (CHALLENGE)

Paul Reubens’s character Pee-­wee Herman was a fantastically bizarre anomaly of full-­fledged creative uninhibitedness during the corporate, ultra-­straight 1980s, a reckoning with the manic ’50s childhood TV-­ casualty experiences of the baby boomer generation in the guise of a gawky, charming, eternally-­young weirdo that the boomers’ kids would also get a real kick out of. This is a character who, when he accidentally runs afoul of a biker gang, decides to get in their good graces by borrowing the clubhouse cook’s platform shoes, plunking a coin in the jukebox, and doing one of the most preposterously wigged-­out Fred Astaire–­as–­ dork dance routines ever captured in a comedy film—­all to the strains of the Champs’ quasi-­Latin proto-­surf instrumental “Tequila.” The bikers are

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Outro so impressed by this display that they go from wanting to stomp him, tattoo him, hang him, and kill him (in that order) to making him an honorary member of the gang and gifting him a motorcycle of his own—­which Pee-­ wee promptly crashes through a billboard because, after all, he’s a gangly, ninety-­eight-­pound goofball. You can try to parse how much of this scene works because of camp, or nostalgia, or kitsch, or any of that—­but beyond the pure, shameless joy of the whole scene, everything else is secondary.

Manhunter, “In-­A-­Gadda-­Da-­Vida” DIRECTED BY MICHAEL MANN, 1986 IRON BUTTERFLY, 1968 (ATCO)

The only thing more Grand Guignol bombastic than using Iron Butterfly’s psychedelic proto-­metal anthem as your soundtrack for terrorizing a victim is to interrupt that mayhem by charging headlong through a bay window—­right as the tension of the song’s extended organ solo erupts into squealing guitar mayhem and that fucking riff. It’s one of those moments that’s so over-­the-­top that it’s easy to forget the music is diegetic—­ hulking maniac serial killer Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan) having his own little acid rock party preparing to kill a blind woman (Joan Allen), only to have it turned on him by the violent intervention of FBI profiler Will Graham (William Petersen). And the ensuing chaos of the shootout that follows breathes new, horrifying life into an old hippie jam that reenvisions its gauche, florid machismo into a tense, visceral, late-­night death drive. In a filmography that reinvented neo-­noir for a post-­MTV sensibility, Mann’s needle drop here is maybe his most grotesquely effective—­especially in its waning moments, Graham finally rousing himself from a stomach-­turning gunfight to confront Dollarhyde’s bleeding-­out corpse to the accompaniment of the now-­ironically-­morbid lyrics: “Oh won’t you come with me / And walk this land / Please take my hand.”

GoodFellas, “Jump Into the Fire” DIRECTED BY MARTIN SCORSESE, 1990 HARRY NILSSON, 1971 (RCA VICTOR)

In the two decades preceding his appearance in the coke-­panic climax of one of Scorsese’s greatest films, Harry Nilsson already had a remarkable track record in Hollywood—­from writing “Daddy’s Song” for the soundtrack to

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Twenty-Four More Great Needle Drops the Monkees’ 1968 postmodern surrealist comedy classic Head to his version of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” becoming the theme to Midnight Cowboy a year later; from his original soundtrack to animated kids’ movie fable The Point! (1971) to composing the music for Altman’s ill-­fated but cult-­beloved musical adaptation of Popeye (1980). (Not to mention Skidoo and Son of Dracula—­though not to watch, either.) But this cut from Nilsson’s career-­best LP Nilsson Schmilsson found such a delirious new context in the midst of Henry Hill’s May 11, 1980, reckoning that you could call this Nilsson’s best moment in film—­and one of Marty’s best with music, period. It’s that bassline, that guitar, that cowbell, that voice, echoing over and over, the music pumping with the same rebel spirit you might get from the Stones of the same vintage, but fronted by someone far more impassioned and manic and shook than Mick Jagger could ever sound. Since this sequence is driven by a musical montage, we do get some interim Mick via his Performance soundtrack gem “Memo from Turner”—­and from there into a mélange of the Who (“Magic Bus”), more Stones (“Monkey Man”), Muddy Waters (“Mannish Boy”), and George Harrison (“What Is Life”), all coursing through the fate-­unspooling sequence with a sense of high-­ impact timing and tension that would rival the best DJ set. But Nilsson’s voice, whether it’s keening wordlessly or hitting the same hyperventilating lyrical tics over and over (“we can make each other happy”), is even harder to shake than the mysterious helicopter that Henry can’t stop looking for during his day of frenzied, coke-­addled errands. And his paranoia’s justified when that copter turns out to be the harbinger of a long-­brewing bust, the last vestiges of the rhythm of “Jump Into the Fire” flashing through his head right before a federal agent aims a gun at it through the driver’s window of his car: “You can climb a mountain / You can swim the sea / You can jump into the fire / But you’ll never be free.”

Mo’ Better Blues, “Part 1—­Acknowledgement” DIRECTED BY SPIKE LEE, 1990 JOHN COLTRANE, 1965 (IMPULSE!)

Spike Lee’s turn to jazz as a subject for a film was inspired, in part, by his attuned sense of frustration over injustice—­in this case, that the likes of Clint Eastwood (1988’s Charlie Parker biopic Bird) and Bertrand Tavernier (1986’s Dexter Gordon–­starring period piece Round Midnight) were making

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Outro films about the music from white perspectives attached to eras gone by. The contemporaneously set, morally complex, and deeply character-­ driven Mo’ Better Blues was his answer, and John Coltrane its guiding spirit. The film was even initially called Love Supreme before Lee failed to get the blessing of Alice Coltrane to use the slightly paraphrased title of her husband’s composition as the name of the movie. But that was the closest there was to a compromise in a film that still drew heavily from Coltrane as a philosophical and artistic inspiration—­a love that transcended mere romance to encompass a sort of spiritual enlightenment. And after we see the rise and fall of Denzel Washington’s creatively embattled and romantically rootless trumpet-­playing protagonist Bleek Gilliam, we hear a passage from A Love Supreme itself, glowing like a sunrise, as a montage unfolds. It’s the culmination of Gilliam’s efforts to find a better, more stable life for himself and his new family finally, euphorically falling into place. More than any other needle drop in Lee’s filmography—­and more than any other musical moment in his films, period, short of Do the Right Thing’s legendary Public Enemy “Fight the Power” title sequence—­this reveals the director’s ability to connect the joy in music to the joys in life, a progression of scenes so full of beauty and sincerity that it’s as close as a filmmaker’s ever come to actually depicting the sort of spiritual fulfillment Coltrane’s music could capture.

Silence of the Lambs, “Goodbye Horses” DIRECTED BY JONATHAN DEMME, 1991 Q LAZZARUS, 1988 (MON AMIE)

It’s beyond cliché at this point to say that the out-­of-­nowhere success of Q Lazzarus is the sort of thing that usually only happens in movies. But maybe director Jonathan Demme might’ve just wanted to see if the cliché could work in real life. The story goes that Q—­born Diane Luckey, and working as a taxi driver in NYC between making music—­played Demme her demo tape when he was a passenger in her cab, and he was so impressed he decided to include her music in four of his films. Along with a cover of Talking Heads classic “Heaven” for 1993’s Philadelphia, Demme found inspiration in two Q Lazzarus originals: “Candle Goes Away,” which he included on the soundtrack to 1986’s Something Wild, and most fatefully, “Goodbye Horses” in two consecutive (and drastically different)

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Twenty-Four More Great Needle Drops films, 1988’s crime comedy farce Married to the Mob and 1991’s thriller Silence of the Lambs. It’s the latter movie, and the scene it soundtracks, that’s left the biggest mark on the song: as the dark wave–­adjacent synthpop cut pulses in the background, with Q’s androgynous vocals arguing against the impermanence of existence, we see serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) engage in a morbid dance of narcissistic cruelty (“Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me”) as a woman he’s victimized cries in the background. It’s one of those music-­in-­film associations that’s become so inextricable that the subsequent disappearance of Q Lazzarus from the public eye in the mid-­ ’90s—­presumably having retired from music completely—­only deepened its haunting afterlife.

Chungking Express, “California Dreamin’” DIRECTED BY WONG KAR-­WAI, 1994 THE MAMAS AND THE PAPAS, 1965 (RCA VICTOR)

Chungking Express, the film that made Hong Kong director Wong Kar-­wai an international sensation, owes more to the French New Wave than the wǔxiá and action films that had made his home turf’s cinema so buzzworthy. And there’s a post-­MTV sensibility in his usage of recurring soundtrack motifs—­a pair of stories that have no connection to each other, rely more on style than plot, and use visual and musical cues as much if not more than actual character beats to express its mood. “California Dreamin’” is the thread that signals the transition from the film’s first half to its second, and its attachment to one particular character—­a snack bar attendant played by actress/singer Faye Wong—­frequently acts as a stand-­in for the complicated, often communication-­avoiding interest she has in the lovesick Cop 663 (Tony Leung). It’s a song from another place and time about an idealized Somewhere Else, and she plays it incessantly—­“the louder the better, stops me from thinking”—­but her musical obsession is only met in reality as another means of escape. When 663 finally discovers that Faye has been surreptitiously tidying up his apartment in an effort to cheer him up, he’s so taken by this boldly romantic act that he asks her out on a date—­to a restaurant named California, of course—­only to learn the night of the dinner that Faye’s actually skipped town for the namesake state. But things work out in the end, or at least appear to have the potential to, if only because you can’t have the same dream every night.

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Outro Trainspotting, “Born Slippy .NUXX” DIRECTED BY DANNY BOYLE, 1996 UNDERWORLD, 1995 (JUNIOR BOY’S OWN)

Trainspotting puts its viewers through hell—­a group of Edinburgh friends who struggle with heroin face the difficulty that comes with addiction and withdrawal, from petty crime all the way to a baby’s death from neglect—­ before offering them something of a happy ending, or at least as close as a crime drama centered around struggling junkies can offer. In the process, Boyle’s inclusion of Underworld’s slow-­burn techno anthem “Born Slippy .NUXX” during the nearly five-­minute conclusion of the film—­ where Ewan MacGregor’s embattled protagonist Renton makes the fateful decision to steal the proceeds of a heroin sale in order to start his life over—­was a watershed moment in mainstreaming electronic dance music to an audience that might not have otherwise experienced it through the rave culture that swept the globe in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Using the intense propulsion of techno in this context took a moment of tense psychological decision-­making and, through the power of body-­first music, gave it the physicality that made every heart palpitation deeply felt. Mainstream movies, especially pumped-­up crime and action films, would latch on to the “electronica” boom of the late ’90s to stay trendy and capitalize on what was seen as an easy and exciting musical way to raise the dramatic stakes, but it would already peak here.

Boogie Nights, “Sister Christian” DIRECTED BY PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON, 1997 NIGHT RANGER, 1983 (MCA)

The ludicrous, the profound, and the tragic all get tangled up in Paul Thomas Anderson’s breakthrough second film, 1997’s nostalgia-­tweaking porn-­star rise-­and-­fall epic Boogie Nights. After a tumultuous, star-­crossed superstar ’70s makes Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) one of the biggest names in skin flicks, his waning, coke-­damaged ’80s give the film’s third act its most desperate depths, culminating in a doomed effort to rip off a loose-­cannon drug dealer. The scene where Diggler and his friends attempt to schmooze with the coked-­out, gun-­toting, Russian roulette–­playing pusher (Alfred Molina) is the tensest moment in the film, soundtracked to a succession of songs starting with Night Ranger’s bombastic 1983 power ballad

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Twenty-Four More Great Needle Drops “Sister Christian.” Here, the flashy, almost pompous flourishes of an over-­ orchestrated hard rock song, from the escalating build to the song’s “motorin’!” chorus to the tension-­building heights of its guitar solo, is fused with Molina’s reckless abandon as the song seemingly fuels his manic unpredictability—­only for his “Awesome Mixtape #6” to cut it off early, as though he’d lost track of how much space he had left on that side when he made the mix in the first place. Then the stereo’s auto-­reverse flips the tape over, a brief and clunky interruption that feels like a fourth-­wall break metacommentary on soundtracks to both movies and life.

The Virgin Suicides, “Magic Man” DIRECTED BY SOFIA COPPOLA, 1999 HEART, 1975 (MUSHROOM)

Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut is a meditation on memory, death, loss, and suburban ennui reflected in the refracted perspectives of a fractured and faded collection of adolescent experiences. That it concerns the mysterious appeal and eventual suicides of the Fontaine sisters, repressed by their religious parents, is strengthened by the way the film blurs lines between the narrative fixation of the local boys who were in love with the sisters, and the director’s sympathetic eye for the sisters’ own perspectives. And in a film where attention to late ’70s period detail can border on overwhelming, the ability to tease out the idealized past with a well-­placed music cue is almost as key as the way that cue is subverted. The introduction of high school heartthrob Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett)—­emphasized by Heart’s psychedelic 1975 hard rock single “Magic Man”—­is underscored in a way that adds an additional layer of unreality and revised memory. And it’s strikingly broken with an amazing trick: in the last scene of the “Magic Man” montage, where Trip finally stumbles into a classroom by stoned happenstance and finds himself face-­to-­face with the obsessed-­over Lux Fontaine (Kirsten Dunst), we get a glimpse of Lux’s radiant smile and an almost cartoonish glint in her eye, right as the song’s guitar solo breaks and we get a split-­second moment of what next anticipation. If you know the song, you know that mid-­solo false finish is just a prelude to more, the lead-­in to an intensely harmonized choral/guitar/Minimoog instrumental break that ranks as one of the most transcendently, beautifully weird moments to ever grace a classic rock warhorse of the ’70s. But in the film, the song just drops out before any of that can go down, and the moment the

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Outro music stops we cut away from the halcyon ’70s to Trip Fontaine in the present day: a lonely rehab patient (Michael Paré) accompanied by nothing but the memories of what was lost.

Beau Travail, “Rhythm of the Night” DIRECTED BY CLAIRE DENIS, 1999 CORONA, 1993 (DWA)

Viewed entirely in isolation, there’s an unexplainable intensity to the cathartic dance that disgraced former French Foreign Legion Adjudant-­Chef Galoup (Denis Lavant) performs amid an otherwise empty Djibouti nightclub in the final scene of Beau Travail. The film is an adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, about Galoup’s intense envy over the handsome, heroic, and thoroughly unattainable soldier Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin) and how that envy destroys them both. And in the greater scheme of things, at least concerning the straightforward nature of the plot, the dance is a total surprise, an almost complete non sequitur. But consider everything that’s led up to the moment: this film has been driven primarily by Galoup’s slowly simmering frustration at his own combination of desire, denial, self-­loathing, and disciplinarian need for control, and the “real” culmination of the story is an ambiguous depiction of him alone in what appears to be a small apartment—­or cell—­in Marseille, holding a pistol with no clear intent on where he plans to aim it. That’s merely the external world, and it’s inside his own head—­back in the Djibouti club as it only exists in his memories, with himself as the dance floor’s sole occupant—­ where we find out just how his emotions are playing out, to a furious bird-­ of-­paradise display scored by an unabashed slab of Eurodance unsubtlety.

High Fidelity, “Dry the Rain” DIRECTED BY STEPHEN FREARS, 2000 THE BETA BAND, 1997 (REGAL)

At some point in recent but distant-­feeling history, recommending music to people was something actual human beings could do for a living. This was a mixed bag: sometimes this meant having to go into a record store and put yourself at the mercy of somebody who not only knew more about music than you, but thought that this particular personality trait gave them actual power—­and the license to be smug about it. The feature film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel plays with this stereotype a lot, especially in

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Twenty-Four More Great Needle Drops the ways it infects the music-­fandom brain of record store proprietor Rob (John Cusack) when it comes to figuring out his relationships with women. His store Championship Vinyl is a sort of haven for a kind of fanatical, even evangelical level of enthusiasm that can border on the oppressive; early in this scene we see overzealous store employee Barry (Jack Black) pityingly harangue a customer who doesn’t own a widely beloved Bob Dylan album (“that is perverse, don’t tell anybody you don’t own fucking Blonde on Blonde”) with the tone of an evangelical stumbling across an atheist. Clearly sometimes it’s just better to shut up and let the customers come to the music. So Rob tells his other coworker Dick (Todd Louiso) that “I will now sell five copies of The Three E.P.’s by the Beta Band,” cues it up on the store’s sound system, and watches with an authoritative folded-­arm confidence as the customers pick up on this unfamiliar but weirdly engrossing indie-­pop song. Of course, a true music nerd would recognize that Rob puts the song on in medias res, about two-­thirds of the way through—­a move that benefits the scene’s pacing but dilutes the unfolding slow-­build escalation of “Dry the Rain” itself. But who’s going to argue with him, or with the fact that the Beta Band’s label Astralwerks reported a significant uptick in the actual sales of the album in real life thanks to the name-­drop? Five copies was a lowball.

American Psycho, “Hip to Be Square” DIRECTED BY MARY HARRON, 2000 HUEY LEWIS, 1986 (CHRYSALIS)

Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho used its protagonist Patrick Bateman as a cipher to express a host of different psychoses around consumerist culture and the void at the center of it. Director Mary Harron took the supposedly “unfilmable” novel and elaborated on it, maintaining its unsettling combination of capitalist satire and grotesque, sociopathic violence and turning one of its non sequitur passages into a deeply memorable scene. What’s an extended, narrative-­breaking monologue to nobody on the page becomes an integral exhibition of Bateman’s derangement on film, his emptily plaudit-­strewn but ultimately meaningless amateur rock-­ critic take on Huey Lewis’s “Hip to Be Square” a prelude to his murder of a coworker as the song blares on his expensive stereo. The combination of a lightweight pop-­rock song, an overearnest critique that sounds more like marketing than analysis, and the looming violence to follow is a key

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Outro example of showing how easily people can consume pop culture and attempt to use it as a substitute for their inner lives.

8 Mile, “Shook Ones, Pt. II” DIRECTED BY CURTIS HANSON, 2002 MOBB DEEP, 1995 (LOUD)

The Hollywood version of Eminem’s pre-­fame mid-­nineties, scrapping and battling in hip-­hop ciphers, feels weirdly out of step with a lot of what came before and afterward in the rapper’s career—­the invincible, controversy-­ fueled mid-­American nightmare of a white rapper taking a moment to look nuanced and human in his vulnerability for once. Whether or not he makes for a more fascinating underdog in real life than he does a default choice in every millennial’s Greatest Rapper Alive rankings, the Rocky–­via–­ Saturday Night Fever–­via–­Juice version of Marshall Mathers in the quasi-­ autobiographical 8 Mile gave us an Oscar winner in “Lose Yourself” but an even more potent form of hip-­hop-­steeped tension and struggle in its choice to score its most heightened scenes with “Shook Ones, Pt. II.” Between Havoc’s Herbie Hancock / Quincy Jones–­sourced cinema-­jazz-­as-­ suspense-­thriller beat and some of the most quotably vicious lyrics both he (“For every rhyme I write it’s twenty-­five to life”) and Prodigy (“Rock you in your face, stab your brain with your nose bone”) ever put to tape, you can tell exactly how and why a secretly petrified Rabbit is psyching himself up to it during the opening credits: it’s armor. And when that beat comes back in the end for the last battle, he wears it like it’s bulletproof.

A Serious Man, “Somebody to Love” DIRECTED BY JOEL AND ETHAN COEN, 2009 JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, 1967 (RCA VICTOR)

The rise of album-­driven, artistic-­minded rock in the mid-­1960s led to a boom time for critical studies of popular music, which might be one of the great cosmic jokes played on Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), the alienated Jewish Minnesotan college professor in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man. Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” is merely a song we hear on his son’s confiscated transistor radio at first—­the kind of nod to period-­piece timestamping that lesser directors would simply drop for a brief jot of recognition and little else. But after Gopnik’s travails and tribulations lead him to seek out the counsel of a wise and enigmatic rabbi in a

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Twenty-Four More Great Needle Drops desperate effort to find some sort of meaning to all the disasters that have befallen him in his personal life, the rabbi merely paraphrases the opening lines of “Somebody to Love” to Gopnik’s son (“When the truth is found to be lies / And all the hope within you dies . . . then what?”)—­a culmination of the film’s themes of Jewish wisdom and experience being passed on in ways that raise more questions than answers.

Jackass 3D, “You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd” DIRECTED BY JEFF TREMAINE, 2010 ROGER MILLER, 1965 (SMASH)

If all that Jackass did was capitalize on the backyard-­stunt lunacy of the bored suburban teenage boy milieu, it might be remembered fondly mostly by the same people who enjoy skateboard bail videos and deathmatch wrestling—­it is funny when people get hurt but also badass to see them work through the pain. That can be entertaining in itself, but elevating that form of real-­world physical mayhem from guilty pleasure to brilliance means working out a particular style and sensibility, one that transcends mere man-­fall-­down yuks to get conceptually ridiculous on a level both Buster Keaton and John Waters would get a kick out of. The stunts in Jackass are typically set to well-­selected, un-­self-­consciously cool and/or irreverent songs that sometimes comment ironically on whatever grievous bodily injury or moment of comedic humiliation the cast is about to endure, but this one’s just perfect in its directness and simplicity: Johnny Knoxville carries himself like the kind of Americana-­tough but still accessibly dorky guy who finds genuine joy in the lighthearted honky-­tonk absurdity of Roger Miller, and he expresses this by deciding to test the theory posed in this particular song. After a few moments of a skates-­wearing, pink cardigan–­clad Knoxville doing some of the silliest dances ever performed by an imminently doomed man, a bunch of bison charge directly at him and fling him ass-­over-­teakettle. QED.

Guardians of the Galaxy, “Come and Get Your Love” DIRECTED BY JAMES GUNN, 2014 REDBONE, 1973 (EPIC)

Fantasy and sci-­fi can feel insular and alienating when there’s not at least a little real-­world familiarity to help the non-­fanboy viewer ground themselves. And while the Marvel model of carpet-­bombing, all-­quadrants

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Outro omnipresence is a bit exhausting—­built as it is to compel you to take it all in en masse—­the fact that the MCU still allows for at least a few moments of bombast-­deflating irreverence and idiosyncrasy at least helps mitigate the whole “have you viewed your compulsory entertainment yet, citizen” grasp it’s had on the last decade-­plus of pop culture. There’s something compelling about an intergalactic action hero, one who literally calls himself Star Lord (Chris Pratt), turning out to be a more-­or-­less ordinary schlub named Peter who likes to listen to mixtapes of classic ’70s pop hits while he undergoes his fantastical adventures. That’s one of the best subversive moves the film pulls during its credit sequence: we see a crumbling alien world, and we follow a mysterious helmeted figure using all kinds of hi-­tech gizmos to navigate his way through it, as the most portentous and awe-­demanding orchestral score sweeps across the soundtrack—­only for the helmet to come off, the orchestra to go silent, and the ’80s Walkman headphones to come on, because Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love” is a lot easier to dance to (and deflate bombast to). Even if there’s a big heartstring-­pull at the source of it all—­the mixtape represents the memories of the dead mother who made it for him as a kid, and the planet Earth he had to leave behind—­it’s a much-­needed dose of the ordinary that pierces the fantastical surroundings and makes all its elaborate space-­hero mythos feel like the background noise of a much more grounded and fun kind of ensemble comedy.

20th Century Women, “Nervous Breakdown” and “The Big Country” DIRECTED BY MIKE MILLS, 2016 BLACK FLAG, 1978 (SST) AND TALKING HEADS, 1978 (SIRE)

The idea of a parent being confronted with the weird, noisy music their kid enjoys is an old trope. But Mike Mills’s semi-­autobiographical film 20th Century Women, set in 1979, makes a deeper (and funnier) statement about generation gaps, mothers and sons, and the things that keep these supposedly disparate lives connected. The mother in this case is Southern California single mom Dorothea Fields (Annette Bening), a Greatest Generation member and progressive-­leaning woman in search of role models to help her raise her teenage son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann). In one scene, after the family VW Beetle is tagged with the epithets “black flag / art fag,” Jamie explains that he got on the bad side of another teenager loyal to the

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Twenty-Four More Great Needle Drops hardcore punk scene who belittled Jamie’s fandom of New York art-­rock contemporaries Talking Heads. Later in the film, Dorothea and a platonic friend, carpenter / mechanic / former hippie commune resident William (Billy Crudup), attempt to get to the bottom of the conflict by playing Black Flag’s “Nervous Breakdown” back-­to-­back with Talking Heads’ “The Big Country.” As a character study and bit of comedy, it’s priceless: while both Dorothea and William are put off by Black Flag’s shouty, frustrated energy, the more bucolic and relaxed tone of the Talking Heads song clicks more readily with them, the soundtrack switching from the diegetic sounds of Jamie’s portable stereo to the forefront as they dance in noodly slow motion. As a moment of intergenerational connection disguised as music criticism, albeit one without Jamie actually present, it’s a funny glimpse at how supposedly age-­specific styles of music can both repel and attract listeners outside that group.

American Honey, “We Found Love” DIRECTED BY ANDREA ARNOLD, 2016 RIHANNA (FEATURING CALVIN HARRIS), 2011 (DEF JAM)

Mass-­market pop music has grown increasingly pervasive, even as the idea of a mass market has become splintered by logarithmic specialization and the stratification of social media niches. In the streaming era, that often means only the most omnipresent songs can make a noticeable imprint, and when they do, it can be inescapable, permanently tied to the idea of fandom as consumerist lifestyle. But one scene in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey transcends the commercial machinery behind pop music to lay out the actual effect of the music itself, and tweaks the consumer landscape in the process: early in the film, protagonist Star (Sasha Lane) takes the risk of skipping town with a crew of young strangers after seeing one of them, Jake (Shia LaBeouf), amusing her and causing a scene by dancing to Rihanna’s hit “We Found Love” when it plays over the PA of a Kmart. Having a song with so much energy played over a moribund discount chain’s speakers, only to have security called on a group of youths when they decide to actually dance to it, is a sharp if familiar take on the idea of pop music’s reduction to commerce, and listeners’ efforts to try and reclaim it as something more alive.

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Outro Uncut Gems, “The Morning” DIRECTED BY JOSH AND BENNY SAFDIE, 2019 THE WEEKND, 2011 (XO)

Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) is a jewelry store owner and compulsive gambling addict whose repeated impulsive risks during the spring of 2012 endanger the lives of everyone around him. When the people he owes money start putting the screws to him, the stress involved sends him into a manic downward spiral, leaving him desperate to leverage what little he has left on a series of escalating long shots. He hinges everything he has on the money he plans on getting from selling a rare opal at a jewelry auction, and arranges to meet both his coworker girlfriend Julia and one of his celebrity liaisons, Demany, in an attempt to get this convoluted scheme sorted out. Needless to say, not only do things not get sorted out, but the venue of the meeting only adds to the tension: they’re at a nightclub hosting a special performance by R&B star the Weeknd, playing an up-­and-­ coming (and worst-­behavior) version of himself. He starts off by throwing a minor shit-­fit about not performing until the club turns the blacklight on—­which they do, to Belly-­esque effect—­and this appears to only twist Howard’s nerves just a bit further. Then things go really sour: not only has Demany failed to get the opal back from NBA star Kevin Garnett, who’d borrowed it from Howard to use as a good-­luck charm during his playoff run, but Demany seems far more interested in enjoying the show than allaying Howard’s overheated temper. After that, Howard appears to watch the Weeknd with the supreme, tooth-­grinding loathing of someone who is completely unable to find joy in a situation the entire rest of the club is feeling. A few minutes after the performance, Howard discovers the Weeknd sharing cocaine in a bathroom with Julia, and the humiliating fight he gets into with the singer is just the release valve for an impetuous, almost self-­ destructive resentment that never fully dissipates.

Small Axe: Lovers Rock, “Silly Games” and “Kunta Kinte” DIRECTED BY STEVE MCQUEEN, 2020 JANET KAY, 1979 (ARAWAK) AND THE REVOLUTIONARIES, 1976 (CHANNEL 1)

The greatest house party ever captured on film is of a very specific milieu—­1980 West London and its Afro-­Caribbean descendants of the Windrush Generation—­that refuses to either compromise the reality of its

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Twenty-Four More Great Needle Drops history or obscure the direct universal connections it can make to people outside that world. Released to streaming right as the initial peak of the Covid-­19 pandemic was making the entire world ache for social contact, the Lovers Rock installation of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe feature anthology series is a masterfully intricate look at the social bonds and relationships bubbling under the surface of a community get-­together. And it’s pierced by two wildly different yet integral needle drops from the world of reggae that escalate musical enjoyment to its most intense expressions. The titular lovers’ rock comes first—­Janet Kay’s feather-­light, rock-­steady voice from UK #2 hit “Silly Games” wafting through the cozy bass of the Mercury Sound DJ soundsystem crew’s speakers, drawing in couples so close and tight that they, too, start to sing—­at which point the DJ mutes the music and leaves the crowd to perform the song a cappella, en masse, for over two uninterrupted minutes, falsetto chorus and all. This would be a singularly powerful moment in any other film; in this one it’s actually rivaled in its depiction of raw communal love, emotion, and intensity by the bit later on when the DJ drops the Revolutionaries’ atom-­bomb instrumental dubplate “Kunta Kinte” and every man within earshot goes absolutely ballistic with energy, rewind after rewind heightening this cathartic version of joy that comes with being young, Black, and utterly confident in your ability to defeat anyone who’d ever want to stop you no matter how besieged you are.

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Acknowledgments

First off, if I acknowledged you in my previous book, Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-­Hop, rest assured that my appreciation carries over; it’s no intentional slight if you’re not name-­dropped here. For this book, I primarily want to acknowledge the people who helped me through the fraught and stressful pandemic-­wracked times that this book was created under, whether they know it or not: Hanif Abdurraqib, Josh Bloom, Donna Brown, Cecile Cloutier, Anthony Cohan-­Miccio, Aaron Cohen, Raymond Cummings, Michael Daddino, Geeta Dayal, Melody and Stephen Deusner, Chris DeVille, Martin Douglas, Mike Duquette, Phil Dyess-­Nugent, Steacy Easton, Chuck Eddy, Ali Elabaddy, Dan Epstein, Chris Estey, Tom Ewing, Kathy Fennessy, Reed Fischer, Larry Fitzmaurice, Phil Freeman, Jay  W. Friedman, Jeff Gage, Meaghan Garvey, Michael Gonzales, Noah Goodbaum, David Grossman, Jack Hamilton, A. S. Hamrah, Keith Harris, Jess Harvell, Ronald Hart, Eric Harvey, Jai Henry, Marc Hogan, Jessica Hopper, Kaleb Horton, Steve Huey, Charles Hughes, Thomas Inskeep, Kate Izquierdo, Craig Jenkins, Lucas Jensen, Maura Johnston, Mike Joseph, Susan Keiser, Nicole Kessler, Kate Koliha, Josh Kortbein, Jody Beth LaFosse, Scott Lapatine, Nate LeBlanc, Catherine Lewis, Miles Marshall Lewis, Zachary Lipez, David Ma, Brian MacDonald, Erin MacLeod, Sean Maloney, Marc Masters, Ian Mathers, Michelangelo Matos, Joseph McCombs, Mike McGonigal, Evan Minsker, Chris Molanphy, Marcus J. Moore, John Morrison, Frank Nieto, Chris O’Leary, Sach Orenstein, Pat Padua, Jill Passmore, Sheldon Pearce, Dan Perry, Lisa Jane Persky, Ann Powers, Ned Raggett, Ian Rans, David Raposa, Mosi Reeves, Morgan Rhodes, Mark Richardson, Jody Rosen,

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Acknowledgments David Roth, Pete Scholtes, Dave Segal, Scott Seward, Jeff Shaw, Philip Sherburne, Brad Shoup, Mark Sinker, Jes Skolnik, Nadine Smith, Jay Smooth, Laura Snapes, Alfred Soto, Katherine St. Asaph, Andy Sturdevant, Jessica Suarez, Joe Tangari, Paul Thompson, Scott Tobias, Scott Von Doviak, Oliver Wang, Jeff Weiss, Carl Wilson, Douglas Wolk, Caleb Wright, Mark Yarm, Annie Zaleski, Andy Zax, and Lindsay Zoladz. And, of course, much love to my family—­Paulette Myers-­Rich and David Rich, Damian Patrin, and all my extended relatives—­for cultivating the kind of curiosity and breadth in me that helped make this book possible in the first place. Many thanks in particular to Charles Burnett, who graciously allowed me some of his time to discuss his life and his work. Additional thanks to my editors Erik Anderson, Nicholas Taylor, and Kristian Tvedten at the University of Minnesota Press, along with my agent Philip Turner.

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Notes

Scorpio Rising, “He’s a Rebel”

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Moats, “Scorpio Rising.” Sayre, “Screen.” Carr, “Scorpio Rising.” Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 21. Grady, “Look Back with Anger.” Moats, “Scorpio Rising.” Bardach, “Hollywood Bohemia.”

The Graduate, “The Sounds of Silence”

1. Eliot, Paul Simon, 65. 2. Fear, “Mike Nichols on The Graduate.” 3. Landau, “Paul Simon.” 4. Doidge, “Pop Innovations of a 50-­Year-­Old Soundtrack.” 5. Doidge.

Easy Rider, “The Pusher”

1. MacIntosh, “John Kay of Steppenwolf.” 2. Welch, “Steppenwolf.” 3. Atlas, “Steppenwolf.” 4. Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage. 5. Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 72. 6. Swoger and Geleff, “Steppenwolf Frontman John Kay.” 7. Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage. 8. On the Trail of Easy Rider.

The Harder They Come, “Many Rivers to Cross”

1. Goldman, “Jimmy Cliff.” 2. Gillett, “Jimmy Cliff.”

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Notes

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Goldman, “Jimmy Cliff.” Reel, “Jimmy Cliff.” Weiler, “Screen.” Ebert, review of The Harder They Come. Christgau, “Reggae Be the Rage?” Robins, “Why Reggae Won’t Be the Next Big Thing.”

American Graffiti, “Do You Want to Dance”

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Klemesrud, “‘Graffiti’ Is the Story of His Life.” Scanlon and Rogers, “Force behind George Lucas.” Howard, “‘Graffiti’ Survived Studios’ Rejection.” Hall, “Rodin Favors Current Composers for Movies.” Willis, “Into the Seventies.” Maslin, “‘More American Graffiti.’”

Saturday Night Fever, “Disco Inferno” 1. Brewster, “Interview.” 2. Aletti, Disco Files, 256. 3. Aletti, 256. 4. Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 283. 5. Cohn, “Disco’s Homeboy Turns Hitman.” 6. Burke, “Struttin’ His Stuff.” 7. Kashner, “Fever Pitch.” 8. Aletti, Disco Files, 283, 291, 331. 9. Van Evra, “Saturday Night Fever at 40.” 10. “Make It Funky,” episode 9 of Rock & Roll.

Killer of Sheep, “This Bitter Earth”

1. Wali, “Life Drawings.” 2. Arnaud and Lardau, “Artisan of Daily Life.” 3. Cieutat and Ciment, “Interview with Charles Burnett.” 4. Arnaud and Lardau, “Artisan of Daily Life.” 5. Burnett, interview by Patrin. 6. Burnett. 7. Burnett.

Apocalypse Now, “The End”

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Stickney, “Four Doors to the Future.” Youngblood, “Doors Can Provide Instant Enlightenment through Sex.” “Apocalypse Now—­Interview with John Milius.” Maslin, “Review/Film.” Siskel, “Touch That Transcends Violence and Death.” Crosariol, “Talking Wine with Francis Ford Coppola.”

212

Notes

7. Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 336. 8. Music of Apocalypse Now. 9. Music of Apocalypse Now. 10. Heidmann, “Francis Ford Coppola.” 11. Music of Apocalypse Now. 12. Travers, Coppola’s Monster Film, 150. 13. Densmore, Riders on the Storm, 167. 14. Horowitz, “Morrison Mirage.” 15. Horowitz. 16. Breslin, Hopkins, and Williams, “Jim Morrison Lives.” 17. Babitz, “Roll Over, Elvis.” 18. Braudy, “Francis Ford Coppola.” 19. Horowitz, “Morrison Mirage.”

Repo Man, “When the Shit Hits the Fan”

1. Goldstein, “Violence Sneaks into Punk Scene.” 2. Simmons, “Circle Jerks.” 3. Clerk, “Circle Jerks.” 4. Mullen and Spitz, We Got the Neutron Bomb, 267. 5. Morris, My Damage, 134. 6. Morris, 141. 7. Cox, “Repo Man.” 8. Cox, “Missing Scenes.” 9. Mullen and Spitz, We Got the Neutron Bomb, 280.

Krush Groove, “King of Rock”

1. Cox, “If a Big Beat Zaps.” 2. George, “Rappin’ with Russell Simmons.” 3. George. 4. Maslin, “Screen.” 5. Hilburn, “Beastie Boys.” 6. Gagnepain, “Krush Groove.”

Blue Velvet, “In Dreams”

1. Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, 126. 2. Ebert, review of Blue Velvet. 3. Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, 128. 4. Pond, “Roy Orbison’s Triumphs and Tragedies.” 5. Pond. 6. “David Lynch on Working with Roy Orbison.” 7. Kent, Dark Stuff, 292. 8. Harrington, “Springsteen’s Debt to Orbison.” 9. “David Lynch on Working with Roy Orbison.”

213

Notes 10. “David Lynch on Working with Roy Orbison.” 11. Kent, Dark Stuff, 292.

Wayne’s World, “Bohemian Rhapsody” 1. Siegel, “Comedy in the ’90s.” 2. Yoffe, “Wayne’s World.” 3. Marsh, “Jazz.” 4. Peisner, “Oral History.” 5. Jacobs, “Mike Myers Almost Walked.” 6. Peisner, “Oral History.” 7. Peisner. 8. Peisner. 9. Galloway, Leading Lady, 193. 10. Parker, “‘Wayne’s World’ Parties on at 30.”

Jackie Brown, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)”

1. Andersen and Rudnick, “Isn’t It Ironic?” 2. Dawson, Quentin Tarantino, 91. 3. Erlewine, “Why the Death of Greatest Hits Albums.” 4. Wooton, “Quentin Tarantino Interview.” 5. Archerd, “Lee Has Choice Words for Tarantino.” 6. “Samuel L. Jackson Blasts Spike Lee.” 7. Niebuhr, Irony of American History, 2.

Belly, “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)”

1. Tannenbaum and Marks, I Want My MTV, 257. 2. Rohter “For 2 Producers.” 3. Rohter. 4. Tannenbaum and Marks, I Want My MTV, 257. 5. “Hype Williams Going over Budget??” 6. Hindes and Carver, “Williams ‘Belly’ up for Live.” 7. Golianopoulos and Hope, “Belly Oral History.” 8. Golianopoulos and Hope. 9. Golianopoulos and Hope. 10. Golianopoulos and Hope. 11. Golianopoulos and Hope. 12. D’Arcy “Belly Stirs Debate.” 13. Golianopoulos and Hope, “Belly Oral History.” 14. Siskel, “Touch That Transcends Violence and Death.”

The Royal Tenenbaums, “Needle in the Hay”

1. Mason, “Elliott Smith.” 2. Mason.

214

Notes

3. Mason. 4. Joy and Kelly E., “Elliott Smith.” 5. Kagler and Redfern, “Better Off Than Dead.” 6. Kagler and Redfern. 7. Mason, “Elliott Smith.” 8. Kagler and Redfern, “Better Off Than Dead.” 9. Hellweg, “White Suit, Blue Collar.” 10. Kagler and Redfern, “Better Off Than Dead.” 11. Smith, “Elliott Smith.” 12. Smith. 13. Perez, “SXSW.” 14. Perez, “Interview.” 15. Schultz, Torment Saint, 182. 16. Wise, “Knowing the Score.” 17. Mason, “Elliott Smith.” 18. Mason. 19. Turan, “Their Particular Brand of Dysfunction.” 20. Scott, “Film Festival Review.” 21. Murray, “Will Oldham.”

Drive, “A Real Hero”

1. Gill, “Robopop.” 2. Gill. 3. “Interview with Daft Punk.” 4. Carpenter, “New Songs, Old Beats.” 5. Matos, Underground Is Massive, 301. 6. Opperman, “Rewind.” 7. McInnes, “Electroclash Festival.” 8. Hartmann, “Great Gigolo Swindle.” 9. Vehling, “Valerie Stories.” 10. “College.” 11. Vehling, “Valerie Stories.” 12. Dobbins, “College and Electric Youth Explain.” 13. Dobbins. 14. Gilchrist, “Johnny Jewel.” 15. Moayeri, “As ‘Drive’ Turns 10.” 16. Gilchrist, “Johnny Jewel.” 17. Moayeri, “As ‘Drive’ Turns 10.” 18. Gilchrist, “Johnny Jewel.” 19. Vehling, “Valerie Stories.” 20. “10 New Artists You Need to Know.”

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References

Filmography American Graffiti. Directed by George Lucas. Lucasfilm Ltd. / The Coppola Company, 1973. American Honey. Directed by Andrea Arnold. Parts and Labor  / Pulse Films  / Film4 Productions, 2016. American Psycho. Directed by Mary Harron. Muse Productions, 2000. Apocalypse Now. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Omni Zoetrope, 1979. Beau Travail. Directed by Claire Denis. Patrick Grandperret, 1999. Belly. Directed by Hype Williams. Big Dog Films, 1998. Blue Velvet. Directed by David Lynch. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group / Blue Velvet Productions, 1986. Boogie Nights. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Lawrence Gordon Productions  / Ghoulardi Film Company, 1997. Chungking Express. Directed by Wong Kar-­wai. Jet Tone Production, 1994. Drive. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Marc Platt Productions / Bold Films / Oddlot Entertainment, 2011. Easy Rider. Directed by Dennis Hopper. Pando Company Inc. / Raybert Productions, 1969. Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage. Directed by Charles Kiselyak. Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1999. 8 Mile. Directed by Curtis Hanson. Universal Pictures / Imagine Entertainment, 2002. Goodfellas. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Warner Bros.  / Irwin Winkler Productions, 1990. The Graduate. Directed by Mike Nichols. Lawrence Turman Inc., 1967. Guardians of the Galaxy. Directed by James Gunn. Marvel Studios, 2014. The Harder They Come. Directed by Perry Henzell. International Films Inc., 1972. High Fidelity. Directed by Stephen Frears. Working Title Films / Touchstone Pictures / Dogstar Films, 2000.

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NATE PATRIN is a longtime music critic. His writing has been published in Pitchfork, Stereogum, Spin, Bandcamp Daily, Red Bull Music Academy, The Shfl, and his hometown Twin Cities’ alt-­weekly City Pages. His first book, Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-­Hop, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2020.