Reader Involvement Soundtracks: bob dylan bruce springsteen smokey robinson and the miracles tom waits velvet underground
by Matthew
9 comments
Toad 2.0
Soundtracks #5 – Art Without Context Loses Most of its Meaning
[Welcome back to our soundtracks series. This time it's the turn of my little brother, sound designer for the Boston Ballet, who has previously written this excellent post about recording quality in rock music for the site, which went down very well indeed. Here he tackles the problem of soundtracks and their context - either they are removed from it or imported music can bring too much baggage. But I'll let him explain all that...]
The single largest problem with soundtracks, to my mind, is quite simply you are either taking art and removing it from its context, or you are inserting it into a context where it doesn’t belong. Quite simply, in most cases soundtracks, if they do not have the emotional context of the film behind them fall rather flat. This can go the other way, in which case you have a moment in a film, and in a clumsy attempt to insert a recognized song, a song that seems out of context and strange.
Let us address the latter problem first. The two most glaring examples of this are when music exists firstly as a soundtrack piece, but also as a marketing tool. The most successful example of this that I can think of is Titanic. Celine Dion released her dreadful song months before the film, and in building hype for the film the song gets played. After it’s been played, it gets over-played. Now let us really suspend disbelief (and I don’t mean buying that Kate Winslet has a tattoo, or would pose naked for a man she barely knew, or married Billy Zane in the first place or…) and imagine that you actually got caught up in the love story. Leo and Kate are parading themselves in full view of the entire ship (sorry, at it again aren’t I…) and falling in love. At the climactic moment as they release themselves from the shackles of their class and feel the freeing wind in their hair the strains of an orchestra swell behind them and the entire audience at once says to the loved one they are sharing the moment with “Oh, that’s that Celine Dion song isn’t it?”. And the moment (or what there ever was of it) is lost.
The same applies, and more so, for the movie Armageddon. Only there in our climactic love moment (and you’d have to be really struggling to get caught up in this one) they weren’t even bothered to take out Steven Tyler’s voice. The audience is removed from the movie long enough to think, “Hey, that’s Aerosmith” or possibly “Hang on, that’s her Dad singing, while she’s shagging Ben Affleck. Oh God, this is wrong, this is all wrong. I need to get out of here. No no. All wrong”. These are clumsy examples but, this is not isolated. Think of every time you have been watching a movie and “I’m Walking on Sunshine” comes on. First thought: “Huh, they always use this”.
It also works the other way around. The studio that brought you “Four Weddings in Notting Hill Actually” are masters of putting songs where they don’t quite belong. The song ‘Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone’ implies that the lady in question is coming back. Hugh Grant is facing life with Julia Roberts for ever (can’t imagine why he’s actually upset, but what do I know…) and hence it just doesn’t work. Quentin Tarentino does it as well. The song ‘Street Life’ sings about a person growing up in a poor neighborhood fighting for survival, it does not refer to stewardesses fighting to get themselves out of sticky a situation, largely of their own making. Still, they are both about black people, so Quentin probably thought that made them ‘street’, and therefore appropriate. Sorry, I’ll move on to my home ground before I get myself into trouble.
Now let’s we address classical and custom writing music used in film. This I always feel works better. For a start classical music is by its very nature more abstract. No feelings are specified, and what you feel is largely between you, the conductor and the composer (if my boss reads that last sentence I’ll never work again, so don’t quote me…). However, because of this it tends to be more malleable. The scene in Battle of Britain when you see the Luftwaffe appear en masse: with mighty sinister strings it’s terrifying. The scene in Lord of the Rings where the trees (alright, Ents) walk to invade the evil kingdom, knowing they’re going to die (they don’t die, but Peter Jackson doesn’t let that ruin the pre-fight moment), the build in the music is fantastic. Now listen to those pieces out of context. Not bad and all but, they don’t really do it. The problem is that a piece of music needs to build, the themes, tone mood, strains need to be established, need to be layered, the listener given time to submit himself and be lead to his climactic moment.
But in a film this process of emotional foreplay takes place on the screen, or at least bits of it do. If you feel scared when the Luftwaffe show up it because you’ve seen them training, you’ve seen the citizens of London digging holes, you seen the RAF trying to find their feet, and then, when the planes show up the music puts you over the edge. Same goes for the March of the Shrubbery from Lord of the Rings. The wrenching process of watching the Council of Ferns decide whether to go to war or not, and knowing that time is running out, brings you to the point where the choral crescendo is appropriate. Robbed of the back story, and the visuals, it’s just you listening to a warbling Celtic woman in your living room. This is no disrespect to the writers of these pieces. I’m sure they have more than enough ability to write a piece that reduces me to tears and that manipulates my emotions all over the place, but that isn’t what they are doing. They are writing a piece that complements a scene that manipulates ones emotions. The upshot of this is that I almost never buy soundtracks because, robbed of the film, they are intolerably uninteresting.
This is the problem with soundtracks. It takes a very specific set of circumstances for them to work as both stand alone pieces and complements to the movie. Bull Durham springs to mind, as does the Big Chill and (thank you Toad for getting this in early) Dead Man Walking. In all of these cases music you listen to is used, and played, just as though the characters themselves were listening to it. Therefore, given your characters are people of some taste it stands to reason the songs they listen to would be good; hence you just have a mix tape compiled by a fictional character. Excellent.
All this might lead you to believe that I think soundtracks shouldn’t be released, or that they are largely rubbish. Of course that is not what I’m saying. It’s music, and good music by and large, but should be appreciated for what it is, and understood as such. Both from the listener who buys a CD, and can’t figure out why it’s not that powerful in his living room, and by music exec’s who can’t figure out why the excellent song they chose doesn’t quite fit in the film they are making.
Smokey Robinson & the Miracles – Tracks of my Tears FromThe Big Chill
Tom Waits – Walk Away Dead Man Walking
Bruce Springsteen – Dead Man Walkin’
Ben didn’t mention High Fidelity but, mediocre as the film was (and the book is fucking awful) I thought they used the soundtrack pretty well, so here’s a couple of songs from that:
The Velvet Underground – Oh Sweet Nuthin’
Bob Dylan – Most of the Time
Posts in this series:
- Crash Calloway from Pretending Life is Like a Song writes about The Commitments.
- Nate, who plays viola in The Young Republic explains why some terrible films have excellent scores.
- My dearest darling Mrs. Toad sings the praises of the High School Movie.
- DC, presenter of The Waiting Room, goes on a truly interminable ramble about the great Tom Waits and One From the Heart.
- Brother of Toad talks about how the context of music can interfere with its use in a movie.
- John sums up Natural Born Killers in three sentences.
- I have a go myself by writing about the art of referencing films in your song lyrics and what it lets you do.
- Tim from The Daily Growl digs away at the sensual texture of In the Mood For Love.
- Matt from Draped in Velvet might never forgive the false start of the world of rap-rock.
- Ian from Broken Records delivers the rant that started this all off: why soundtracks just don’t work!
This post makes me think of Peter Gabriel’s “Passion,” the score/soundtrack to “The Last Temptation of Christ.” I seem to recall, Matthew, that “world music” makes you think of greasy, aging hippies trying to insinuate their crabbed organs into the supple flesh of impressionable co-eds. I am generally inclined to agree, but I make an exception for this score. The piece of music that accompanies Scorsese’s slow-mo image of the beaten, exhausted Christ carrying the cross through the streets of Jerusalem, being mocked and taunted by the crowd as he slouches toward his death, is just skin-crawlingly evocative. That part of the score works very powerfully as an adjunct to the film, but also works tremendously well as a stand-alone piece of music, as does the score in general. It’s been more than 20 years now since this piece of music was written, but I still go back to it every few months. Yet I haven’t seen the film since it was in theaters. Has anyone?
I’m listening to it right now. Ah. That’s the stuff. Good ol’ Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Hmmm. Any co-eds about?
I have used the soundtrack from Amelie for similar luring-of-innocents purposes actually. I think most of that sound track works as a stand alone piece. The tail end of it comes across as a bit, well, flat. Should have included it in the post but, I used it in the last one.
Come on, The High Fidelity Soundtrack is great (So is the movie, jerk!). “I will now sell five copies of the Beta Band’s 3 EPs”
I think a soundtrack is most successful when the movie acknowleges it’s existence in the context of the movie itself. High Fidelity, Once and maybe Rocket Science all do this (off the top of my head), and their soundtracks are all fucking brilliant.
Well if you want to sell a whole album of a soundtrack it has to be a good collection of stand-alone music. For that much overtly good music to be in a film I can’t imagine how it wouldn’t overwhelm the actual movie unless it was an integral part of the actual message of the film – High Fidelity, The Piano, The Blues Brothers, The Big Chill and so on.
It is very, very hard to make a soundtrack album with more than one or two decent songs if the music isn’t one of the central themes of the film.
One that does spring to mind is A Life Less Ordinary, which was so stylised that the intrusive music really suited it. Normally it would have been too insistently interrupted, but in a movie like that it went quite well.
The High Fidelity soundtrack was a great collection of some cool tracks; but the very premise of the story allowed Hornby in the first instance, then the film-makers, to refer to any old music without worrying too much about context.
The reason we’re so ready to discuss High Fidelity on this particular website is simply that both that particular book/movie and this site share the same artistic media their basis of reference: classic, “cool”, original, often-slightly-left-of-field rock and pop.
Without changing the storyline of High Fidelity much, you could change the setting to a video-game store or an ice-cream parlour, and it’s unlikely we’d be discussing it here. In fact, change the setting to a video rental store, and you wouldn’t be far away from Kevin Smith’s Clerks.
I think this is kinda what Matthew was going for in his last post on this thread. Although I disagree that The Piano was a good stand-alone listening experience outside the context of the movie. Other than the signature theme of the movie; The Heart Asks Pleasure First, which, to me, is breathtakingly majestic, haunting and utterly lovely, the rest of the soundtrack really needs to be hung upon the visuals to work effectively.
To finally arrive at my point, I think it is possible to use familiar music on a soundtrack without it diverting your attention or removing you from the movie.
An example of this would be that other John Cusack vehicle that keeps music close to its heart: Grosse Pointe Blank. There are a number of scenes where classic 1980s songs are used to tie up the film’s plot with its nostalgic mood. However, one particular scene springs to mind; during the reunion party when Cusack’s character, Martin Blank, has bumped into an old schoolfriend and her newborn baby, and Blank is asked to hold the child. The scene is accompanied by Queen & Bowie’s Under Pressure, and Blank appears to have something of an epiphany staring into the baby’s eyes while the music swells to a climax. No doubt the scene symbolises something to do with recognising the value of life and, as the song goes, love daring you to care for people.
Yes, it is a bit schmaltzy, but it’s a pivotal moment for the character, and I feel the choice of music helps drag the viewer into the scene and not the opposite. That may of course be helped by the fact that the scene suggests the characters can hear the music too (The song seems to be being played during school reuinion dance), nevertheless it’s a key moment in a movie which, for me, succesfully absorbs its soundrack of pre-exiisting songs into the fabric of the film itself.
You’re right Grosse Pointe Blank does very well with it’s soundtrack by easing it in to the film. When you hear a song, there is almost never a reason it wouldn’t be playing anyway, be it the car radio, the reunion DJ, the bar. It’s quite ingenious. That’s where High Fidelity actually succeeds as well (in a soundtrack only). Bull Durham is the only one where music is not normally part of the plot where is dropped in and still works.
I know there are more examples but my brain is steadfastly refusing to call them to mind.
nice series this, toad.
I loved the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack too, particularly how it worked in the context of the film itself.
Harry, I’m sorry to say it but High Fidelity was not my favourite film:
John Cusack: “Why do people hate me? Why do people not like me? Why do none of my relationships work out?”
Answer: “‘Cause you’re a whinging bastard and you never stop fucking moaning about yourself!”
Cusack’s Bird: “You might be a tedious, self-regarding, moaning cunt, but even though I’m remarkably fit I don’t think I can do any better so you’ll have to do.”
John Cusack: “Why is someone so lovely with me? Why am I so lucky? When is it all going to go wrong? I don’t deserve this.”
Toad: *Loads shotgun*
Cheers Shane, I am really pleased with how it’s worked out actually. There’ll be an accompanying Toadcast on the weekend too. Exciting exciting!
*Rushes off to hide from Harry’s retaliation!*
I’m finding this whole Soundtrack Series very interesting. I have soundtracks from movies I’ve never seen because I just love the music.
I’ve thought it was very odd that today, some artists write and record songs specifically for movie soundtracks and those artists are known ONLY for that one particular song for that one movie. It’s so odd to me.
Also, it annoys me to some extent that artists become popular overnight due to a song or two in a movie (The Shins on the Garden State album comes to mind). I loved The Shins long before they were on the soundtrack and hated going to a show after the album came out and having kids sing along to the two songs from the movie. Poseurs.
Just a personal beef of mine.