Fluxblog
August 2nd, 2004 4:06pm


monday mourning soundtrack

I’m in no mood to be hip or oblique, to make interesting choices of song, or even to even write well. A friend of mine has just been killed, so indulge me some schoolboy-style literalism, because I’m sure Josh wouldn’t — indeed, he’d probably tell me I was a sentimental wanker, but fuck it.

It’s appropriate that my songs of mourning have all appeared in film soundtracks. To those who are alarmed that Hollywood films are turning into big music videos, we must reply, “so fucking what?”. The overpowering prominence of pop songs in film is often great, my favourite example in recent memory being the use of Tears for Fears’ “Head Over Heels” in Donnie Darko’s slo-mo school corridor scene — what Katy Stevens has described as “diegetic choreography”. And right now I feel like some diegetic choreography, some collusive sense that there’s some meaning in the world, that its seemingly random movements, including mine, can be given some kind of context, some kind of dance.

Sam Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come” — That this was left off the soundtrack album of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X is inexplicable, because for me, Cooke’s song is the most affecting thing about the film, its elegiac tone perfectly harnessed. The strange thing is, I don’t even remember if Lee used this version of the song. The manifest lyrical content — about the weary optimism of the struggle against racism in America — was given an extra mournful context when the song became a hit immediately after Cooke’s death, and as Malcolm drives toward his death in Malcolm X, this becomes heartbreakingly eerie, full of sweetness, ambivalence, doom and hope.

Oasis, “Stay Young” — This song got me up in the morning for years, and I need it now. As the B-side to “D’you Know What I Mean?”, it marks the period that even most fans acknowledge as Oasis’ slide into shiteness, but for me it’s proof that there was still some defiantly earnest pop-rawk left in mid-period Oasis. “Stay Young” was also the end credits song for that fantastic B-movie The Faculty, and Celine Dion’s legacy notwithstanding, the moment when the credits roll can provide a rich context to an entire film. Stay young and invincible. Cos we know just what we are.

Cyndi Lauper, “I Want a Mom That Will Last Forever” — This song appeared on the Rugrats in Paris soundtrack (oh yes). I posted it on my blog recently, but it’s getting a second outing because I think it’s one of the most heartbreaking songs ever written. Like Brian Wilson, Lauper has grasped that the most insanely simple and heartfelt stuff need not be bathetic. Sometimes creepy, perhaps, but not something to be dismissed. And it is a bit creepy, like much Beach Boys material is utterly lovable, but still a bit “wrong”: it’s seemingly so unadorned and plaintive that one can’t help reading the lyrics somewhat literally, hearing them turn into strange, insatiable demands for an indestructible android mother, with supertoys that last all summer long to match. I can imagine the robot boy from Spielberg’s (fascinatingly “wrong”) A.I. singing it, with that same obsessive yearning, overflowing from such a small body. And an overflow of yearning is something in which Cyndi Lauper specialises — listen for the stunning moment at the end (3:25) when her voice almost cracks into a sob. And yet, androids aside, “I Want a Mom” not an irony free zone. The most inescapable irony is that as far as I can tell, Cyndi Lauper, who was 47 when she recorded the song, is singing the part of a two-year-old boy, and strange, structural resonances abound. To equate irony solely with tone, and thus with sarcasm, is to utterly misunderstand it, and so my love of this song is a plea for resonance over rhetoric.

It’s all bitter and sweet. And I’m tired. Goodbye Josh. This is Ben from (Anti)popper, signing off.

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