Today, for Wondering Sound, I speak with Paul Thomas Anderson about the music in his new film Inherent Vice, and in all of his other films. I'm pretty happy with the piece and was happier still to speak with Anderson, who's all kinds of smart and engaging and also, in my estimation, a great filmmaker. And Inherent Vice is, for this film critic, the movie of the year.
In the opening of my piece, I state that Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets "arguably pioneered" the song-based soundtrack in Hollywood-affiliated narrative film. Useful word, "arguably." My piece hadn't been up ten minutes when a friend reminded me on Twitter that The Graduate, Easy Rider, and American Graffiti all preceded Mean Streets. And indeed they did. And while I can be legitimately pegged as a Scorsese partisan, I will still stand by my assertion while admitting that leapfrogging over Easy Rider was something of a snub.
Here is my reasoning: The Graduate's music soundtrack is largely song-based, but it's all the work of one composer, Paul Simon. And, as the speeding-to-the-church scene testifies, Simon repurposes the "Mrs. Robinson" motif for riffing that actually resembles a traditional score. Easy Rider uses rock and roll songs as both score and background music; American Graffiti takes advantage of the fact that all its cruising chracters are tuned in to the same radio station (the studio and deejay Wolfman Jack actively figure in the storyline, too) to make a score out of its nostalgia-inducing stream of '50s and early '60s songs. Graffiti only preceded Mean Streets by a couple of months in 1973, and it was a much bigger hit. But I'd still argue that Mean Streets was ultimately more influential in terms of making the song-based "score" a convention (wellspringing, among other things, the still wild-and-wooly subindustry of song licensing for motion pictures and television) than any of the other films. With Graffiti, you have the pretext of diegetic happenstance, and I think that obtains to a certain extent with Easy Rider as well. Easy Rider being a film about the counterculture from within the counterculture, highlighting that culture's music made sense. Not to second-guess myself too much, but I probably don't give Dennis Hopper as much credit as I should in terms of orchestrating sound and image; by the same token, "Born To Be Wild" IS a song about riding a motorcycle, so it's not as if he was a kind of aesthetic Vasco De Gama for pairing it with a montage of motorcycle-riding. My assertion stems from my belief that it was in the distinctive way—related, again, to the Michael Powell idea of "composed film," which like Scorpio Rising was a key influence on Scorsese—the director matched music to movie that really gave traction to the concept, and turned a practice that had until that point been isolated and occasional into something more standard.
In any event, hope you dig the piece.
The earliest film I'm aware of with what might be called rock as background music is Nothing but a Man (1964), with Motown songs by Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Mary Wells, Martha and the Vandellas, and the Marvelettes. It predates Mean Streets with its use of "Mickey's Monkey."
Posted by: Michael Adams | December 12, 2014 at 01:44 PM
Funny - everyone (understandably) thinks "Born to Be Wild" when you mention EASY RIDER, but for me, I always think of "Wasn't Born To Follow."
Posted by: Matt Blankman | December 13, 2014 at 12:13 AM
OK, Glenn, so we know your #1. I assume you're hard at work on the rest of the list. Looking forward to it.
Posted by: Clayton Sutherland | December 13, 2014 at 04:54 PM
That's something I should have remembered, Mike. Thanks for pointing it out.
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | December 14, 2014 at 02:35 PM
My gosh, I was listening to Ege Bamyasi on Grooveshark when I opened up that Wondering Sound interview. Somethings shit is just weird....
Posted by: unkle rusty | December 15, 2014 at 01:05 PM
"Into the Mystic" is effective in Dusty and Sweets McGee.
Posted by: Shawn Stone | December 24, 2014 at 02:19 PM
So yeah, as you can see, having just seen VICE I'm now reading everything you wrote about it...
I had always thought "Vitamin C" was specifically about a bad trip. I don't know if there's any real biological basis for this, but experienced heads used to assure me that you had to drink lots of orange juice in the back half of an acid trip, or else you'll get freaked-out and paranoid. Making it an appropriate song for a movie about paranoid come-down.
Posted by: That Fuzzy Bastard | January 27, 2015 at 01:11 PM
My favorite IMDb post about INHERENT VICE (estimated age of poster: 14) and a reminder of why I never join the discussions at IMDb:
"And if the book is anything like it, it's the reason I don't read books. It's just a bunch of wasted, piled on words, to fill some quota of pages for something that can be summed up in about 3 paragraphs. I don't waste my time with some blowhards convoluted thought process, who deep down, really has nothing interesting to say. Just because a dumbass can write their thoughts down, doesn't make it any better than the ramblings of some homeless nut on the street."
Bravo, "The NSA"!
Posted by: george | February 01, 2015 at 08:03 PM