Cargill Hang the DJ

An alternative book of music lists
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30717-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten

'Entertaining and addictive' (Metro) Hang the DJ is the must-read book of music lists, for all true music fans. In the hearts of all music lovers there are lists - from the best break-up songs, to the best drinking songs; the perfect mix-tape to the dream set-list; Dylan's dirtiest songs, to Tom Waits' saddest. Hang the DJ compiles the sort of thing you might once have scribbled in the back of your school book: musical loves and hates, dreams and nightmares. With contributions from novelists (Ali Smith, David Peace, Jonathan Lethem, Michel Faber), musicians (Kathryn Williams, Willy Vlautin, Jeb Loy Nichols, Tom McRae) and music writers (Nick Kent, Laura Barton, Simon Reynolds, Jon Savage) this is a collection that will inspire and provoke and send you back to your music collection, to old favourites and guilty pleasures alike.

Angus Cargill works in publishing and loves music lists. As a teenager, he learned to play the guitar so that he could join his friends in Sticky Weed, a band so inept they struggled with their Beastie Boys and AC/DC covers. He lives in London, and continues to play the guitar badly.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cargill, Angus

Leseproben

Teenage Flicks, So Hard to Beat: Ten Songs from Eighties Teen Movies

SAM DELANEY

Those nostalgia shows tell us that the eighties were all about Thatcher, AIDS, Roland Rat and Smiths Square Crisps. But for those of us who grew up in dreary suburbs where seeing a yuppie riding to work on a Sinclair C5 while barking down a 14-stone mobile phone was about as likely as seeing a cat playing the harpsichord, the decade was quite different. It wasn’t naff or grim or corny. It was fast paced and cool and sunkissed and fun. That was because we imbibed our sense of time and place through Friday-night video marathons involving movies about cool American kids who had much better lives than our own. They had rich parents, flawless skin and a swimming pool out back. Even the fifteen-year-olds drove to school in Porsches and the worst thing that ever happened to them was getting flicked with a wet towel by jocks in the locker room. Never mind that, back in England we were being mugged at knifepoint for our limited-edition Boba Fett figures at the school gates, then having to get three buses home in the pouring rain. We were living vicariously through those movies. We’d shuffle down to the local corner shop and survey their minuscule selection of dusty VHS tapes, picking out anything that featured Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald or Judd Nelson. Then we’d scuttle home and watch in awe as these supposedly angst-ridden American youths played out an impossibly glamorous high-school love affair to an exhilarating soundtrack of power pop and feelgood rock. Ah, those soundtracks. This was the birth of the MTV era, when Hollywood studios wanted their movies to be like elongated music videos. Often, they were little more than ninety-minute montages in which kids would drive to school wearing Ray Ban Wayfarers, visit the mall, arrange a secret keg party while their folks were away, create a beautiful woman on their home computer or travel through time in a DeLorean sports car. The fast-cut sequences would all be set to music rich in lengthy sax breaks, ostentatious guitar licks, electro drum solos and indulgent use of the ‘keytar’. The writers and directors might have thought they were making poignant meditations on adolescent frustration and insecurity but that kind of gloomy subtext was usually drowned out by the merry warbling of Kenny Loggins or Huey Lewis, who made teenage life seem so much easier to cope with. Mum and Dad don’t understand you? Cheerleaders don’t know you exist? Brother turning into a vampire? Who cares! Hire a hooker! Learn karate! Take some tanning pills and pretend to be black in order to get into Harvard! This is the eighties! It’s hip to be square! Woo-hoo! Anyway, here are the cinematic musical moments that, back then, briefly helped me believe that I was in on the whole sexy world of teen misadventure in the suburbs of Illinois. Not stuck in Hammersmith waiting for the microwave to finish warming my Findus Crispy Pancakes.

10 ‘Oh Yeah’ – Yello (from )

Ferris Bueller is faking stomach cramps to get the day off school. It works, his parents leave for work and his day of freedom begins. You know it’s going to be the most exciting day of his life because ‘Oh Yeah’ by Swiss electro-popsters Yello is creeping into your ears while Ferris delivers his opening monologue. This song contains every single noise you associate with eighties music – a heady concoction of bleeps, zings and squelches that sound like Metal Mickey puking all over a Yamaha Portasound. During the mid-eighties, it was as if the Directors Guild of America had enforced the use of this track on any movie of a jocular nature, with and also making use of its era-defining sound.

9 ‘Weird Science’ – Oingo Boingo (from )

When new wavers Oingo Boingo were hired by John Hughes to provide the title track for his 1985 film about two nerds who create a gorgeous girlfriend on their home computer, they took the literal route. ‘She’s alive!’ it opens, over a pop-funk mix of meandering bass line and blasting horns. During the course of the opening credits, the song’s lyrics almost blow the film’s entire plot ‘Plastic tubes and pots and pans / Bits and pieces and magic from the hand’, snarls singer Danny Elfman, outlining the girlfriend-creation process. ‘Not what teacher said to do / Living tissue, warm flesh’. All right already! We get the picture!

8 ‘You’re the Best’ – Joe Esposito (from )

Director John G. Avildsen defined the sports-movie montage scene when he made . Here, he twinned inspirational rock music with scenes of athletic violence to similar effect, as Daniel LeRusso kicks and chops his way to the final of the All Valley Karate Tournament. ‘Try to be the best / ’Cause you’re only a man / And a man’s gotta learn to take it’, growls Esposito. I would play these lyrics through my mind prior to every PE lesson. Didn’t make me any better at football, mind.

7 ‘People Are Strange’ – Echo and the Bunnymen (from )

There’s not much room for subtlety and nuance in an eighties teen movie. Usually, they like to explain the premise within about the first thirty seconds and the right choice of song can play a crucial role in this. As the Emerson family (played by eighties cinema royalty Dianne Wiest, Jason Patric and Corey Haim) arrive in Santa Carla, Echo and the Bunnymen’s spooky cover of the Doors’ ‘People Are Strange’ plays over imagery of missing-person posters, teens wearing black lipstick and a suspiciously vampire-like Kiefer Sutherland skulking about in a fairground. Something tells you this film might be a bit edgier than .

6 ‘Soul Man’ – Sam and Dave (from )

C. Thomas Howell has pretended to be black in order to win a scholarship to Harvard. It’s all going swimmingly until he tries out for the basketball team. He’s rubbish! He keeps falling over and getting the ball in his face! This can’t be right, he’s black … aren’t all black people good at … oh, hang on, this entire film is a bit racist, isn’t it? Why didn’t I realise this when I was eleven? Because Sam and Dave were distracting me with this sublime title track, that’s why. This was just one example of how eighties film soundtracks reintroduced a post-punk generation to vintage soul (see also ). Oh, and in case the basketball scene isn’t quite rife enough with racial stereotypes for you, check out the movie’s tagline: ‘He didn’t give up. He got down.’

5 ‘St Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)’ – John Parr (from )

The definitive Brat Pack movie: 110 minutes of Estevez, Nelson, Sheedy, Moore, Lowe and McCarthy running around in sunglasses, smoking fags, dancing and shouting while this pumping soft-rock anthem bellows almost incessantly in the background. What the hell is going on? It’s impossible to tell and John Parr’s lyrics don’t help much either: phrases like ‘You’re just a prisoner’, ‘Sometime if you feel the pain’ and ‘I’ll be where the eagle’s flyin’’ lead you to suspect it was written by a special ‘Random 1980s Rock Lyric Generator’. In fact, Parr wrote the track in tribute to a paralysed Canadian athlete called Rick Hansen.

4 ‘Old Time rock ’n’ roll’ – Bob Seger (from )

Tom Cruise’s Joel Goodsen is a high-school student who’s been left alone in his palatial family home for the week. Endless possibilities stretch out before him. How does he embrace this thrilling opportunity? He gets a little bit drunk on his own and dances around the living room in his pants to some dad-rock. Yes, in retrospect he was a loser. But through my adolescent eyes, Cruise was the very definition of maverick cool. Even in those ill-advised white socks. Like every other teenager in the world, I made a ham-fisted attempt at imitating the scene the first time I was left home alone. It didn’t quite feel the same with my mum’s Elkie Brooks LP providing the soundtrack though.

3 ‘Never’ – Moving Picture (from )

However, I can’t say I ever tried to mimic Kevin Bacon’s seminal ‘angry barn dance’ in . That was way beyond my athletic abilities. Frustrated by the blanket ban on rock music imposed by his hometown elders, Bacon’s Ren McCormack takes refuge in a moodily lit barn. As the opening notes of Moving Picture’s ‘Never’ begin pounding in the background, he angrily throws his beer bottle against the wall with almost balletic poise. Before you know it, the melodramatic power ballad is in full swing and Bacon has stripped down to his vest, pulling off all sorts of rage-infused somersaults and star jumps around the barn. It’s spectacular. When a girl turns up applauding his performance, he acts all shy and says, ‘What are you doing here? I thought I was alone?’ Yeah, course you did, Bacon. That’s how everyone dances when they think no one’s looking. You big fat weird liar!

2 ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ – Simple Minds (from )

It might be the most renowned movie of the genre but in many ways is an atypical teen flick. It succeeded in mustering the sort of pathos and poignancy that is drowned out by pranks and pop music in most other films of the era. Five high-school stereotypes form unlikely bonds during the course of a day-long detention. My...