Question Of The Week: Remember Soundtracks? lol
An awesome song can’t control its fate. It could be marooned on a shitty album. It might be neutered by a lame artist or butchered by a hack producer. It may even be lost in a vault or hard drive somewhere. Tragic.
And think about it: It’s not a song’s fault that its creators/owners suck horribly. We can’t blame the jam for not fitting in with the rest of its album. And above all, no awesome song deserves our indifference cuz it was sold to a (gasp) big movie soundtrack. Shall we give them all their due in today’s MS QOTW? Great! We’ll go first :)
Fearless. Controversial. Half-baked. We give it to you straight every Friday afternoon. Straight to the no-man’s-land in our music collections the follows the Z section! Here’s this week’s question:
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Inspired by our affection for the bastard children of our music collections, we asked our staff the following:
What’s your favorite film soundtrack?
Read the MS Staff’s awesome answers and reply below!
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LEYLA FORD
The movie soundtrack had the biggest impact on my impressionable little mind is The Crow. Yep, there was a full year when I sat and watched that movie once a day. (I love vengeance movies — and this one had corpse paint!) As for its soundtrack — with songs by The Cure, Stone Temple Pilots, and My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult — it’s a mess of amazing, brilliant, and godawful teen music that still fills me with shame and joy whenever my iTunes spits them out on random. It was my introduction to industrial and gothic metal, which to this day I can’t quit. And I had the hugest crush on Brandon Lee.
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JUSTIN M. NORTON
The original Repo Man soundtrack. Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, Iggy Pop, Circle Jerks, Fear and that rad song “Pablo Picasso” by Burning Sensations. Mandatory.
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SAMMY O’HAGAR
I’m thankful that a shameless cash grab like soundtrack albums have fallen by the wayside ($17 for a few songs that promote a billion-dollar studio’s movie? Sure!). But I’ll be damned if I don’t throw on the Lost Highway OST every year. It’s got everything: excellent Trent Reznor/NIN one-offs, Marilyn Manson songs from back when that was a good thing, a solid Smashing Pumpkins number, an incredible Lou Reed track, some nifty little Angelo Badalamenti cues with movie dialogue, and two adorable (yet admirable) Rammstein songs. I mean, now the MP3 era allows a listener to cherry-pick the few good moments from a soundtrack; that doesn’t work for Lost Highway cuz it holds up well as an album. Though oddly enough, the one place most of the Lost Highway soundtrack doesn’t hold up is in the movie Lost Highway: Its of-the-moment industrial-metal doesn’t really gel in David Lynch’s realm of surrealistic timelessness. Almost as odd as casting Balthazar fucking Getty.
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ABYSMAL SHAWN
I just watched the Bill & Ted movies back-to-back. Like the movies, the soundtracks are mostly terrible, highly enjoyable, and so ’80s that it hurts. Plus, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey was my introduction to Megadeth.
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ANSO DF
Director Paul Verhoven is awesome, but in 1995, he cast the ugly bish from Saved By The Bell for a big-budget movie about the lives of feral strippers: Showgirls. I kept wondering about its target audience; sure, pre-release rumors hinted that Verhoven had packed its 131 minutes with porking and titties to surpass even his smash Basic Instinct, but somehow it all seemed grim and baffling. So imagine my pals’ complete flummoxification when we jokingly surveyed a copy of its soundtrack at the store only to find its tracklist to be almost exclusively dark jamz from heavy industrial acts — Young Gods, Siouxie & The Banshees, Prick, David Bowie, soundtrack habituées My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. It bore the only official song from Curve singer Toni Halliday’s short-lived Scylla (awesome!), a pre-fame No Doubt deep cut (Gwen Stefani = Geddy Lee), and Killing Joke‘s most irresistible, pummeling jam (BONERZ). When girls would spy its cover art peeking from my collection, I remember shrugging like “Go figure!”. Still doing that! lol
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GRIM KIM
Detroit Rock City. It’s one of my all-time favorite films and is stuffed with tracks from Thin Lizzy, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, The Ramones, Blue Oyster Cult, and The Nuge. It’s even got Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” — which is a bit bizarre, but totally rad — and, of course, plenty of cuts from the kings of rock ‘n’ roll commerce, KISS. “Not REO Speedwagon, not Journey, not The Bay City Rollers. KISS, man!” Disco blows dogs for quarters.
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SATAN ROSENBLOOM
Other than the dense jungle o’ tinny percussion, there’s nothing metal about my favorite soundtrack. It’s the music from Black Orpheus, the Oscar-, Golden Globe- and Cannes Palme d’Or-winning 1959 Brazilian re-telling of the Orpheus & Euridyce myth. The clattering samba jams that ebb and flow throughout destroy the tribal thumping from any mid-period Sepultura albums. But the heart of this album is bossa nova, which was introduced to the West pretty much solely by this soundtrack: There are classic songs from Antonio Carlos Jobim (“A Felicidade”) and Luiz Bonfa (the immortal “Manha de Carnaval”), and performances by Joao Gilberto, godfather of bossa nova guitar. This was ground zero for jazz’s appropriation of Brazilian music, and essential listening for anyone who cares about music at all.
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Holy shitballz, what is up with all these heavy industrial soundtracks from the ’90s? Weirdness. Okay MetalSucks readers, it’s your turn! What soundtrack lives in your heart? Don’t say Spiderman lol.
