"Rich on personality": 11 songs by fictional musicians from movies and TV that are surprisingly not terrible

1. "This Is a Low" by Swipe (Tamara Drewe)
In High Fidelity director Stephen Frears' entertaining 2010 adaptation of Posy Simmonds' Far from the Madding Crowd-inspired comic strip-turned-graphic novel, childish drummer Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper) romances Gemma Arterton's title character, a London newspaper columnist and rock music journalist who, unlike most rock music journalists, looks smokin' in a red tanktop and a pair of Daisy Dukes. Ben may be what's known in the U.K. as a git, but the tunes by him and his Britpop band Swipe are pretty damn catchy, especially "This Is a Low," perhaps the catchiest song about a guy getting his ass kicked by his temperamental girlfriend ever written ("This is a call for a domestic dispute/She's got me by the collar and she's going to shoot"), which is why I've added it to the "Assorted Fistful" and "New Cue Revue" blocks on A Fistful of Soundtracks.

Not to be confused with the Blur tune of the same name, "This Is a Low" (stream it here) has an interesting pedigree. In the movie, the song is a source of tension between Swipe and the disgruntled Ben, who wrote "This Is a Low" and is steaming mad that the rest of the band doesn't give him enough credit for his work, but offscreen, it was actually written by Cooper's younger brother Nathan. (In another interesting tidbit, the female vocalist during "This Is a Low" is Sexy Beast star Ray Winstone's daughter Lois, who has a wordless bit part in Tamara Drewe as Ben's female bandmate and ex-girlfriend.)

Cooper's appearance as the younger version of Tony Stark's industrialist father Howard in Captain America: The First Avenger was an amusing bit of casting because in his Tamara Drewe emo garb, Cooper is a dead ringer for the effeminate partyman characters his cinematic son Robert Downey Jr. played in Weird Science and Back to School.

2. "Black Sheep" by The Clash at Demonhead (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World)
One of the best jokes in HBO's Flight of the Conchords TV series was that Bret and Jemaine were nothing like the Bret and Jemaine they imagined themselves to be in the show's fantasy sequences/musical numbers. In those sequences, Bret and Jemaine were expressive, self-confident and brimming with musical ability, while outside those sequences, Bret and Jemaine were inexpressive, socially awkward and sucky as musicians (they were always seen performing the same song, some terrible acoustic clone of Moby's "Bodyrock," and only one person liked their music, Kristen Schaal's child-like stalker Mel). That decision to make Bret and Jemaine untalented musicians that hardly anybody likes is what distinguishes Flight of the Conchords from other shows about fictional wannabe musicians that are filled with elaborate musical numbers but are worshipful of those characters, like The Monkees, Fame and Glee.

A similar joke recurs throughout Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim graphic novels and Edgar Wright's film version of Pilgrim: Scott (Michael Cera) may be someone we're supposed to root for, despite his dickishness, but the Toronto band he plays bass for, Sex Bob-omb, sounds mediocre (and their Mel is Knives Chau). One of the charms of the original music in Wright's film is the way that Beck, who wrote Sex Bob-omb's material (while Metric, an actual band from Toronto, represented Sex Bob-omb's rival, The Clash at Demonhead, whose wardrobes O'Malley patterned after Metric's), purposely downgraded the quality of his own sound to capture how an amateurish band in the Toronto indie scene would sound like (that is until the climax, when Sex Bob-omb starts to gel at about the same time as Scott gains the power of self-respect).

Scott and his Sex Bob-omb bandmates view the glitzy Clash at Demonhead--led by Scott's ex-girlfriend Envy Adams (Brie Larson)--to be evil corporate sellouts, but the ironic truth is The Clash at Demonhead don't sound as mediocre as Sex Bob-omb do, as we discover during "Black Sheep," sung quite nicely by Larson in the film (while sung by Metric frontwoman Emily Haines in the album version).

"I think that it probably is poking fun at pop music and a band that's just so completely commercialized," said Larson about "Black Sheep" to Collider, "but at the same time, you can't deny that the song is the most infectious song."

No wonder "Black Sheep" was the first tune off the Pilgrim song soundtrack that was introduced to the public (stream the Larson version here). And no wonder Heather Morris likes to do what I imagine are butt crunches to "Black Sheep" while she hears it on her iPod.

3. "Odyssey" by Andromeda (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, "Space Rockers")
If Buck Rogers in the 25th Century is as accurate about the 25th century as I expect it to be, then in the future, we'll all be dancing with some giant rubber band/hula hoop/glowstick thing wrapped around us like we're some cross between a raver and Tony Randall and Jack Klugman awkwardly doing the Maypole dance in Central Park in the opening credits of The Odd Couple.

(Photo source: Gary Dunaier)

The dancing during the Buck Rogers "Space Rockers" episode may be on the lame side, but the music isn't. Scottish composer Johnny Harris, whose other dope contribution to film and TV music is the funktastic score to the 1970 British psychological thriller Fragment of Fear, came up with the proto-Daft Punk synth-pop instrumental sound of Andromeda, the 25th century's most popular rock band.

Twelve years before actor/song-and-dance man Jerry Orbach took on his most famous and final role, Law & Order's Detective Lennie Briscoe (sort of a kinder, gentler version of his crooked cop character in Prince of the City), he was on the opposite side of the law as Andromeda's evil manager Lars Mangros, who plots to use the synth-pop trio's music as a form of mind control on its teen fans.

Besides its guest stars (in addition to Orbach, the episode also features a Landers sister and Bull Shannon, or as I prefer to remember Richard Moll because I'm a Batman: The Animated Series fan, Two-Face), "Space Rockers" is my favorite non-Princess Ardala Buck Rogers episode because of the catchy "Odyssey." The Harris instrumental experienced a bit of a resurgence in 2004 when it turned up on the playlist of the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas funk radio station Bounce FM.

"Odyssey" is surprisingly good synth-pop that's aged well. (The opposite of "Odyssey"--a.k.a. the worst synth-pop ever--has to be that wack "I Am America" song in Herman Cain's weird and creepy cigarette-smoking campaign ad, recorded by some right-wing version of Lady Gaga.) The instrumental is ideal popping-and-locking music. Speaking of which, the Andromeda footage in "Space Rockers" would be much more badass if the Jabbawockeez were on the dance floor instead of those whitebread-looking rubber band/hula hoop/glowstick ravers because the Jabbawockeez are what 25th-century dancing will look more like.

4. "I Would Die 4 U/Baby I'm a Star" by The Kid (Purple Rain)
Actually, every song by Prince's onscreen alter ego The Kid is not terrible. But the one-two punch of "I Would Die 4 U" and "Baby I'm a Star" (stream it here) has to be my favorite part of both the movie's performance footage and the Purple Rain album. As Jeremy Ohmes notes in PopMatters, "If 'I Would Die 4 U' was Purple Rain's spiritually anguished yin, then 'Baby I'm a Star' was its cocky, narcissistic yang... More than any other song on Purple Rain, 'Baby I'm a Star' documents the unbridled energy and graceful sleaziness that was Prince live."

5. "Let's Duet" by Dewey Cox and Darlene Madison (Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story)
Director Jake Kasdan's Walk Hard has forever ruined musician biopics for me. It points out how clichéd all musician biopics are by taking aim at every single cliché, from the Oscar-bait moments where the star portrays the subject's emotional meltdown (not since the Sexy Beast underwater heist sequence has a film done so much damage to bathroom sinks) to the dialogue that has all the subtlety of a jackhammer ("That was freaking transcendental, Paul McCartney. Don't you agree, John Lennon?").

What separates Walk Hard from the Epic Movies and Meet the Spartanses of the film parody genre are the intelligence that Kasdan and co-writer Judd Apatow poured into every gag in Walk Hard, whether highbrow or lowbrow, and the Walk Hard songwriters' ability to make Dewey Cox's fake songs, particularly the Johnny and June Carter Cash-inspired double-entendre-fest "Let's Duet," not just authentic and hilarious but also good songs outside the context of the movie. As The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin notes in his "My Year of Flops" entry on Walk Hard, "Like 'Let's Duet,' Walk Hard is blessed with a fundamental sweetness and a loving attention to detail." Walk Hard is so funny I convulse with laughter even when I'm reading dialogue from it on IMDb's Walk Hard quotes page.

6. "Something He Can Feel" by Sister and the Sisters (Sparkle)
Loosely based on the turbulent history of The Supremes, Sparkle, the story of the rise and fall of the fictional girl group Sister and the Sisters, is exactly the kind of overwrought and poorly written movie about troubled and drug-addicted musicians that Walk Hard rips apart mercilessly.

"[Sparkle singer character Delores] tells her mother that there's more to life than being a maid (which is true) but her speech is some White guy's idea of Black power. She says she's leaving because she's tired of taking the White man's shit. Fine, but where the fuck is she going when she leaves? It's 1958," wrote blogger Odienator in his funny 2008 takedown of the Joel Schumacher-scripted, currently-being-remade 1976 melodrama. "I have no fucking idea why Sparkle is beloved by us [African American viewers]. It's a terrible film, despite the acting and the soundtrack."

Yes, that Curtis Mayfield-produced soundtrack is--like all of the late Mayfield's other film music work--amazing and an example of how much of an outstanding and insightful lyricist Mayfield was. "Something He Can Feel" was a big 1976 hit for Aretha Franklin, who, with the Kitty Haywood Singers on backup, sung all the tracks on the Sparkle soundtrack album instead of Sparkle stars Lonette McKee, Irene Cara and Dwan Smith (many fans of the film feel that the actresses got gypped big-time when their vocals were ditched for Franklin's).



My first exposure to "Something He Can Feel" wasn't through Sparkle or Aretha. It was through En Vogue's sultry video for "Giving Him Something He Can Feel," one of two cover versions of Sparkle numbers that the girl group recorded for their hit 1992 album Funky Divas. The video features cameos by Sparkle cast member Dorian Harewood, Johnny Gill and El DeBarge and an appearance by a pre-Oz-and-Lost Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. Harewood, Gill, DeBarge and Akinnuoye-Agbaje are among the nightclub audience members in the video who are enthralled (or in some cases, reduced to a sweaty and trembly mess) by Cindy, Dawn, Terry and Maxine in their slinky red dresses. The video dropped when I was in my teens, so the way Cindy, Dawn, Terry and Maxine looked during "Giving Him Something He Can Feel" had a similar effect on me: that video was probably the one that made my voice turn from falsetto to baritone.

7. "I Can Dream About You" by The Sorels (Streets of Fire)
Walter Hill's rock n' roll musical tanked big-time in the summer of 1984, but the movie's R&B number "I Can Dream About You" was a smash, and it's not hard to see why. I hate the word "transcendent" because it's so pompous-sounding and James Lipton-y, but that's the best adjective that could describe the late Dan Hartman's slice of blue-eyed soul.

Both versions of "I Can Dream About You" are terrific. Hartman performed the single version, while the film version was sung by the late Winston Ford (and lip-synched by a moonwalking Stoney Jackson) and was the version that MCA Records used in the "I Can Dream About You" video that aired frequently on MTV in the summer of 1984. The latter version is particularly noteworthy because two of the members of the film's fake doo-wop group The Sorels (pronounced "SIR-ells"--thanks, Rocklopedia Fakebandica!) are a pre-Hollywood Shuffle Robert Townsend and a pre-Forrest Gump Mykelti Williamson.

8. "Find It" by The Kelly Affair (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls)
Was '70s Battlestar Galactica composer Stu Phillips aware that he came up with an early version of punk when he composed "Find It" for Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert's 1970 comedic masterpiece?



9. "Say No More (Mon Amour)" by Rex Manning (Empire Records)
We've all had a "Say No More (Mon Amour)" in our lives: a dumb and overplayed pop song we refuse to admit liking, even though we might dig its rhythm section or choice of samples, whether it's "Rump Shaker" by Wreckx-N-Effect, "I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)" by Pitbull or any song by The Fratellis. One of the best and most dead-on touches in the otherwise inconsistently and sloppily written Empire Records (besides how brilliant a parody of vapid late '80s/early '90s pop music "Say No More" is) is how the title store's employees continually diss Adam Ant-esque, puffy shirt-clad pop star Rex Manning (Maxwell Caulfield) and view him as a toolish sellout but are utterly powerless when exposed to the sounds of Rex's biggest and cheesiest hit and can't help but dance to it.

Aspiring graphic designer A.J. (Johnny Whitworth) is an emo dumbass who refers to the very Japanese Mr. Miyagi as "the Chinese guy from The Karate Kid" and is someone we'd wish would slip off the Empire Records rooftop and fall to his death whenever we have to hear him attempt to tell his co-worker Corey (Liv Tyler) he loves her. But A.J. has one likable moment where he tries to cheer up the suicidal Deb (Robin Tunney in shaven-headed riot grrrl mode) by dancing like an idiot to "Say No More" and getting her to join him (everyone else in the store who's not Anthony LaPaglia ends up joining A.J. and Deb in their dance too). Aside from the The The "This Is the Day" dance (stutter-lanche!) on the rooftop in the film's finale, it's the happiest we see A.J. or Deb look in the film.



10. "I'm Just a Human" by New Human Formantics (Fear of a Black Hat)
Influenced by This Is Spinal Tap, star/director Rusty Cundieff's 1993 mockumentary poked fun at the excesses of gangsta rap and even imbued the members of N.W.H. (Niggaz with Hats) with a Spinal Tap-like trait: a tendency to try on and then quickly discard musical trends as if those trends were groupies. At one point, an N.W.H. member dabbles in pseudo-political, C&C Music Factory-style dance pop with "Come Pet the P.U.S.S.Y." (the acronym stands for "Political Unrest Stabilizes Society, Yes").

But the funniest of Fear of a Black Hat's fake tunes has to be ex-N.W.H. member Tone Def's solo effort "I'm Just a Human," a parody of the New Age rap duo P.M. Dawn's 1991 hit "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" (that's Mark Christopher Lawrence, a.k.a. Big Mike from Chuck, as Tone Def, espousing his Stephen Colbert-style "I don't see color" philosophy to the documentarian character played by future Talk to Me director Kasi Lemmons). A plea for racial tolerance ("You are just like me/I'm just a human") morphs into one of the most delightfully disgusting songs ever written ("'Cause black, white, yellow, red, brown or gold/Our shit all comes from the same little hole"). And as a bonus, the album version of "I'm Just a Human" gets even more delightfully disgusting ("Sometimes I smell the lint from my belly button/How could something so small make a stench so rotten?").



11. B-Rabbit's freestyle against Papa Doc, the top battle rapper in Detroit (8 Mile)
Troubled and unconfident Detroit battle rapper B-Rabbit (Eminem) is ashamed of his white-trashiness. But at the end of 8 Mile, B-Rabbit gains the power of self-respect like another fictional musician, the aforementioned Scott Pilgrim, and learns to wear his trailer-park background with pride--with the help of the instrumental version of Mobb Deep's tough-as-nails, Quincy Jones Dollars soundtrack-sampling "Shook Ones (Part II)"--in one of the greatest using-your-weakness-as-a-strength moments on film since, I don't know, John Cusack skied on one ski in Better Off Dead.



Okay, on second thought, that was more awesome than the Cusack-skiing-on-one-ski scene in Better Off Dead.

"If I wanted Chekhov, I'd have worn my polo neck": The best existing songs that are theme music for shows you've probably never heard of

1. "Somebody Start a Fight or Something" by TISM (The Green Room with Paul Provenza)
This rousing 2004 track by the Aussie alt-rock band TISM delivers a message of "Drop your pretentious airs and start keeping it real" ("Listen, motherfucker, let me make this clear/I've had your fucking poetry up to here... If I wanted Chekhov, I'd have worn my polo neck"), so it's the perfect theme music for a frank and uncensored Showtime stand-up comic panel show that's the anti-Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen.

In other words, the stand-ups are required to have an actual conversation with each other, instead of pretending they're having a conversation when what they're really doing is just reciting their routines. Moderator Paul Provenza's anti-Comics Unleashed format has resulted in lively and thought-provoking discussions like the one Provenza, Bill Burr, Lizz Winstead, Russell Peters, Colin Quinn, Caroline Rhea and Tony Clifton (!) had about Tracy Morgan's apologies for his homophobic jokes during a recent episode that took place at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival. (Also in that same episode, Peters, an Indian Canadian comic, gives the funniest description of what porn flicks are like in a country where its movie stars can't even kiss onscreen. I can't do Peters' Indian porn joke any justice if I attempt to repeat it, so I won't attempt to.)

During an interview to promote The Green Room, Provenza said one of the purposes of his show is to get stand-ups who are always "on" to leave behind their one-liner comfort zones or stage personas and just be themselves. The frequent archness of the present-day stand-up world is a trend he dislikes:

Many comedians these days "take on characters. It's a lot of winking and nodding. Some comedians almost even apologize for the fact that they're working in the form of comedy, and they make fun of the form as they're doing it. That's the overriding trend. So what you get is people who are not actually talking from the heart. They're always putting some layer of detachment from their real, you know, emotional and intellectual passions."

In other words, he wants them to pull no punches, whether it's onstage or on The Green Room. Somebody start a fight or something.



2. "Yalili Ya Aini" by Jah Wobble's Invaders of the Heart (The Smartest Man in the World)
I first heard this hypnotic 1994 track by former Public Image Ltd bassist Jah Wobble, his band Invaders of the Heart and singer Natacha Atlas (Allmusic calls it "one of the best bits of sexy, North African lurch that Wobble and [guitarist Justin] Adams have ever set to tape") while tuning in to SomaFM's Secret Agent, which has it on constant rotation. So when it wound up as the theme music for comedian Greg Proops' stream-of-consciousness podcast The Smartest Man in the World, I thought, "Sweet! It's that Arabian-sounding chillout joint from Secret Agent with the title that always escapes me."

"Yalili Ya Aini" perfectly establishes the nocturnal and international feel of The Smartest Man, which is recorded in front of a live audience, either at The Smartest Man's homebase, West Hollywood's Bar Lubitsch, or whatever venue Proops is performing at that night, whether it's in his old home turf of San Francisco or Melbourne. Unlike most comedy podcasts, The Smartest Man doesn't follow an interview format.

"I knew I didn't want to do that [interview format] because other people were doing it and doing better. Marc [Maron] and Jimmy [Pardo] and everybody just murdering it," said Proops to Laughspin.

What listeners are getting in each Proopcast is essentially an extra 60-to-70-minute stand-up set by Proops. But instead of joke-after-joke-after-joke, Proops delivers not-always-jokey but always interesting ruminations on current events, music, film history, baseball history (he's particularly fond of the San Francisco Giants and the achievements of the Negro Leagues, so he's joked that no Proopcast is complete without him mentioning Satchel Paige) and politics (he's progressive, so President Obama, who has been to progressives what the Green Lantern movie is to nerds, irks him as much as the Tea Party does).

The Smartest Man is where I got my first exposure to British punk poet John Cooper Clarke's "Evidently Chickentown," which Proops once recited to thunderous applause. I've become a new fan of "Evidently Chickentown"--and I don't even like spoken word (here's how much I understand the appeal of spoken word: whenever there's a slam poet on TV, I'm like, "Okay, when's the DJ gonna show up and drop the beat?").

Basically, The Smartest Man is like Craig Ferguson's freewheeling monologue but much more political and not as Scottish. And a little trancey, thanks to "Yalili Ya Aini."



3. "Elysian Fields" by Minus 8 (Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence)
Elvis Mitchell had the suavest opening titles of any interview show. On a loungy-looking NEP Studios set decorated with dangling lightbulbs, Mitchell walked out dressed to the nines, to the tune of the swanky 2000 downtempo track "Elysian Fields" by Minus 8, a.k.a. Swiss DJ/producer Robert Jan Meyer. This wasn't Conan in a suit gawkily riding his bicycle through Manhattan in the opening credits, that's for damn sure.

Under the Influence, in which the host of KCRW's The Treatment would chat with actors and directors about movies and movie stars they admire, was produced for only one season on TCM in 2008, but TCM still airs it from time to time. The Bill Murray episode is worth DVRing (the Laurence Fishburne ep is pretty good too). Mitchell was able to get Murray, who's notoriously guarded (except when he's on Letterman), to open up during his show and give candid discussions about movie acting and comediennes he either enjoyed watching ("Elaine May is like the most attractive woman in the world... If I had come up when Elaine May was coming up, I would have chained her to a typewriter and made love to her like every four hours just to keep her going. She's the funniest.") or couldn't understand the appeal of ("[Lucille Ball] never really made me laugh for some reason. I don't know why. Lucy was never my girl.").

"Elysian Fields" was a great choice to open and close a TCM interview show because of Minus 8's samples of dialogue from old movies (in the original version of "Elysian Fields," the samples are from the first Bogart/Bacall scene in one of my favorite movies, The Big Sleep, but the 2007 version that was used during Under the Influence replaced the Big Sleep audio with dialogue from some old movie I've never seen and is most likely not as awesome as The Big Sleep). I wonder how the Under the Influence intro would have looked with "Yakety Sax" instead of "Elysian Fields." Alex, I think I'll go with "What is not-as-suave?"



4. "Reckoner" by Radiohead (Vanguard)
Any investigative journalism series that would open with Radiohead is tops in my book. For those who weren't aware of Current TV before Keith Olbermann joined the channel, it was best known for the compelling and sometimes difficult-to-watch documentary series Vanguard. Correspondents like Laura Ling, Mariana van Zeller and Adam Yamaguchi often put their lives at risk for the sake of the story. One such story, human trafficking in North Korea, brought international attention to Vanguard in 2009 when the North Korean government arrested Ling and her footage editor Euna Lee for trespassing while they were doing research for their piece. Ling and Lee were sentenced to a labor camp for 12 years--until Bill and Hillary Clinton intervened and ex-President Clinton successfully negotiated with Kim Jong Il for their release.

Though Vanguard no longer uses Radiohead's enigmatic and contemplative 2008 track "Reckoner," it's still an incredible program. The recent Vanguard installment "Sex, Lies & Cigarettes" is an intriguing examination of the tobacco industry's insidious marketing tactics in Third World countries like the Smoking Baby's home turf of Indonesia, although there's an angle that Vanguard overlooked: the connection between the tobacco industry's tactics and environmental racism.



Gnarls Barkley's equally terrific live cover of "Reckoner":



5. "Pheromone" by Prince (Video LP)
I remember coming home from school and turning on The Avengers on A&E and flipping over to BET's music video/interview program Video LP whenever Steed and Peel were interrupted by a commercial break. I went back and forth between enjoying young Diana Rigg's catsuited body and judo chops and enjoying Video LP host Madelyne Woods' legs, as well as the way she maintained her resolve in the face of inarticulate rappers and new jack musicians whom I realized I never wanted to hear speak in interviews.

I know some rappers fare well in an interview setting, but most of them don't, and as someone who digs their music, it's torturous to watch or hear. If you want to hear their opinions, just listen to their lyrics. Don't drag them to do a lengthy interview. They're lost without a breakbeat or a beatbox (or a bong). It's like when HBO tries to interview boxers after their fights. What do they expect them to say after 12 rounds? "The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain"? What's more likely to come out of their mouths is "Myeyzcudopngrb."

Back to Woods and Video LP. Woods left BET a long time ago but is still a reporter (and is actually on Twitter), and Video LP is largely forgotten, aside from a few YouTube clips and A Tribe Called Quest's "Electric Relaxation," in which Phife Dawg--one of those MCs who thrives in an interview setting--name-checked Woods ("Hon, you got the goods, like Madelyne Woods").

Video LP also bears the distinction of being the only TV show that contained theme music by Prince (he contributed to Video LP an instrumental version of "Pheromone," a song that later surfaced on his 1994 album Come). I bet Prince frowns upon scripted TV (even though he once made a guest appearance on Muppets Tonight), but I wish he'd contribute another TV theme because he's such a musical genius. It would probably sound like this (FF to 3:29):

Jamie Foxx covers the Brady Bunch theme as Babyface, Luther Vandross and Prince

Thanks, Sherwood Schwartz, for making sitcoms that were so often devoid of logic that they led to many fun hours of dissection during tipsy or stoned conversations ("If Mike's supposed to be an architect, then why would he build a house for nine people that has only two bathrooms?"). The tuneful and surreal Schwartzverse in The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island has also served as fodder for countless stand-up routines--mostly bad, some good.

Because the Brady Bunch and Gilligan creator died earlier this week, here are the four best versions of the Schwartz-penned Brady Bunch theme ever, all performed in 2002 by Jamie Foxx (who, by the way, is very funny in this summer's Horrible Bosses, as a "murder consultant" who doesn't quite live up to his intimidating-looking appearance):



Because I watched a lot of Comedy Central during the '90s, I was subjected to tons of hacky stand-up clips from the '80s and early '90s. The hackiest ones always involved either of the following topics: "Asians talk funny," airline food, "White people drive like this, while bruthas drive like this," the differences between men and women and "Here's what the Brady Bunch theme would sound like if a rapper did it." Foxx's R&B-ified Brady Bunch is funnier--and much more accurate about the musicians he's imitating--than those '80s routines that basically said, "Hey everybody, watch me do the Brady Bunch intro as I demonstrate that I've listened to only one rap song in my life, that one by Aerosmith and Rum-DMZ."

The dopest part of DJ Jazzy Jeff and Mick Boogie's Summertime 2 mixtape: The unexpected appearance of Stevie Wonder's "Love Light in Flight"

(Photo source: Tommer G)

Thanks to the High Fidelity scene in which Jack Black disses the sappy and overplayed Woman in Red theme "I Just Called to Say I Love You," Stevie Wonder's Woman in Red soundtrack has become a punchline, much like Prince's Batman song soundtrack, which was the subject of a similar gag in Shaun of the Dead. Another thing that both those '80s song soundtracks have in common is that though those albums aren't exactly career highlights for either artist, they aren't exactly awful either. They're redeemed by two or three underappreciated tracks.

"Love Light in Flight" is one of those tracks, and it's a song I hadn't heard since 1984 or 1985--until I recently stumbled into it during DJ Jazzy Jeff and Mick Boogie's Summertime 2 mixtape and instantly smiled, which is why I just added "Love Light in Flight" to A Fistful of Soundtracks' '80s block "Soda and Pie" (Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at noon).

"Drums, please!"

"Oh man," I thought to myself while bumping Summertime 2, "I remember 'Love Light in Flight.' It so takes me back to when I was a Ghostbusters-loving kid in '84!" It's such a damn smooth track--plus it's full of aviation imagery, which would have made it perfect for the flight-themed "Up, Up and Away" episode of the terrestrial radio incarnation of A Fistful of Soundtracks that I aired on July 22, 2001.

Suddenly, Gene Wilder is faced with a crippling decision: Kelly LeBrock or the sheep that's waiting for him at home?

"Love Light in Flight" is the one hit song from The Woman in Red that's neither overplayed nor preachy (that would be the well-meaning but clunkily written "Don't Drive Drunk"). Camille Paglia may be a pretentious, Sarah Palin-loving weirdo (her Salon Oscar telecast recaps were always worthy of an Onion parody), but she's right that "Love Light in Flight" is a sublime tune.

Let's have some asses wigglin': AFOS August 2009 segment playlists

Starting today at 3pm, these August '09 playlists (intro'd by yours truly, of course) will air Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm, and Saturdays and Sundays at 7am, 9am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm all through August on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel.

This summer marks several anniversaries related to some of my favorite movies or soundtracks: the 25th anniversary of both Ghostbusters and Purple Rain (an example of a movie being outshined by its soundtrack, although I always find myself keeping the channel on Purple Rain whenever it airs on TV) and the 20th anniversary of both Batman (a movie I liked more as a kid than I do now) and Do the Right Thing. So four of this month's segment playlists contain music from those four movies.

"Purify Yourself in the Waters of Lake Minnetonka":
1. Prince and the Revolution, "Computer Blue," Purple Rain, Warner Bros.
2. Prince and the Revolution, "Take Me with U," Purple Rain, Warner Bros.
3. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, "Take Me with U," Purplish Rain, SPIN Media LLC

"Imitation Spaghetti":
4. Lalo Schifrin, "Quick Draw Kelly," Kelly's Heroes, Film Score Monthly
5. Seatbelts, "Go Go Cactus Man," Cowboy Bebop: Blue, Victor
6. Alan Silvestri, "The Mexican--End Credits Medley," The Mexican, Decca/UMG Soundtracks
7. J.G. Thirlwell, "Spag," The Venture Bros.: The Music of JG Thirlwell, Williams Street


"Five Definitive Star Trek Cues":
8. Gerald Fried, "The Ritual/Ancient Battle/2nd Kroykah" (from the episode "Amok Time"), Star Trek Volume Two, GNP/Crescendo
9. Sol Kaplan, "Kirk Does It Again" (from the episode "The Doomsday Machine"), Star Trek Volume Two, GNP/Crescendo
10. Jerry Goldsmith, "Spock Walk," Star Trek: The Motion Picture: 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition, Columbia/Legacy
11. James Horner, "Battle in the Mutara Nebula," Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, GNP/Crescendo
12. Michael Giacchino, "Enterprising Young Men," Star Trek, Varèse Sarabande

"#followvarèse":
13. Elmer Bernstein, "Library & Title," Ghostbusters: Original Motion Picture Score, Varèse Sarabande
14. Patrick Doyle, "Overture" (from Much Ado About Nothing), Varèse Sarabande: A 25th Anniversary Celebration Volume Two, Varèse Sarabande
15. Royal Scottish National Orchestra, "Trailer" (from Judge Dredd), Hollywood '95, Varèse Sarabande
16. Jerry Goldsmith, "End Titles" (from The 'Burbs), Varèse Sarabande: A 25th Anniversary Celebration Volume Two, Varèse Sarabande
17. Shawn Davey, "Harry Pendel: The Tailor of Panama" (from The Tailor of Panama), Varèse Sarabande: A 25th Anniversary Celebration Volume Two, Varèse Sarabande

"Unstreamed Ghostbusters":
18. Elmer Bernstein, "We Got One!," Ghostbusters: Original Motion Picture Score, Varèse Sarabande
19. Elmer Bernstein, "We Got One! (Alternate)," Ghostbusters: Original Motion Picture Score, Varèse Sarabande

"Always Bet on Brown":
20. Billy Preston, "Slaughter" (from Slaughter), Ultimate Collection: Billy Preston, Hip-O
21. Danny Elfman, "Art's Demise/Chase/Punch Out/Viva Las Vegas," Mars Attacks!, La-La Land
22. Danny Elfman, "Final Address," Mars Attacks!, La-La Land

"Omnia Illa Et Ante Fiebant":
23. Bear McCreary, "Grand Old Lady" (from the episode "Islanded in a Stream of Stars"), Battlestar Galactica: Season 4, La-La Land
24. Bear McCreary featuring Raya Yarbrough, "Assault on the Colony" (from the episode "Daybreak"), Battlestar Galactica: Season 4, La-La Land

"1989, a Number, Another Summer":
25. Danny Elfman, "Batman to the Rescue," Batman: Original Motion Picture Score, Warner Bros.
26. Bill Lee, "Wake Up Suite," Do the Right Thing: Original Score, Columbia

Bonus track:
27. Bear McCreary, "Kara's Coordinates," Battlestar Galactica: Season 4, La-La Land

Rattle and hurm: My Watchmen movie soundtrack (if I got to pick out the songs)

Even though the Watchmen feature film doesn't hit DVD and Blu-ray until July, I want to look at one of my quibbles with the much-discussed box-office dud: its not-very-imaginative soundtrack.

It's rare to see a comic book that comes with its own soundtrack. Lalo Schifrin composed some themes for his son Ryan's Devil's Due comic Spooks, Rob Schrab picked out several songs or themes from movies like The Empire Strikes Back to accompany pages of Scud: The Disposable Assassin, and of course, eight years before Schrab introduced the indie rock-and-John Williams-scored Scud, Alan Moore's groundbreaking Watchmen quoted from "All Along the Watchtower," "Neighborhood Threat" by Iggy Pop, "You're My Thrill" by Billie Holliday, "Sanities" by John Cale and "The Comedians" by Declan McManus, international art thief. Moore made diegetic use of "Neighborhood Threat" (Dan Dreiberg's lonely walk back to his apartment) and "You're My Thrill" (the Owl Ship tenement rescue sequence).


(A complete list of the tunes that Moore's Watchmen referenced was posted by Shawn from thus spake drake, who notes that "The chapter and title uses [in which lyrics by the likes of Cale and Bob Dylan were quoted], while they work lyrically with the story, don't necessarily correspond musically with the tone of the comic, so they're best as a reference and not a literal backing track.")

The British comics author's song references captured quite well the anxiety and sadness of the paranoid times Moore's screwed-up superheroes lived in. So what does Zack Snyder--who said he wanted to be as faithful to the DC miniseries as possible, save for a few exceptions like the omission of the big-ass squid, which pissed off the most hardcore Watchmen fanboys while I had no problems at all with the squidless climax--do with the song soundtrack for his adaptation? He keeps key songs like "All Along the Watchtower" and "You're My Thrill" but omits other tunes from the comic and sprinkles the soundtrack with tired and overused existing songs like Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sounds of Silence."

"Ride of the Valkyries" was a clever choice for Apocalypse Now's copter attack sequence. But thanks to countless movies and shows with Wagner-scored Vietnam War sequences like Watchmen, I now wish I could hop into a time machine to 1978 and kill Francis Ford Coppola so that he never puts "Valkyries" on his Apocalypse Now soundtrack.

Who did they hire to be the music supervisor on Watchmen? The narrator of The Wonder Years? Steve West from Radio Nigel or the music supervisor from BBC's Ashes to Ashes would have been a better music supervisor. Snyder's existing song choices in the Dawn of the Dead remake, my favorite Snyder movie, were far less hackneyed (Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around," Richard Cheese's cover of Disturbed's "Down with the Sickness"). I'm an Elvis Costello fan, so I'm bummed that Snyder's Watchmen omitted "The Comedians," even though it comes from what Costello considers the worst album of his career, Goodbye Cruel World. However, "The Times They Are A-Changin'," which was referenced in the comic's fake Adrian Veidt cologne magazine ad, was perfect for Watchmen's main title sequence, my favorite title sequence in a 2009 movie so far.

I was listening to Prince's "Sign O' the Times" on my iPod earlier today, and I thought, "Man, I would have put that tune on the Watchmen movie soundtrack and swapped selections like 'The Sounds of Silence,' '99 Luftballons' and 'I'm Your Boogie Man' for some lesser-known '80s tunes," so here's the track listing for my alternate Watchmen soundtrack:

1. Nat King Cole, "Unforgettable"
2. Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'"
3. Prince, "Sign O' the Times"

Sure, "Sign O' the Times" is from 1987, not 1985, the year when most of Watchmen is set, but in the story's alternate universe, I'd like to think Prince came out with Sign O' the Times right after Purple Rain instead of Around the World in a Day.

4. Iggy Pop, "Neighborhood Threat"
5. Philip Glass, "Pruit Igoe & Prophecies"
6. Killing Joke, "Eighties"
7. Elvis Costello & the Attractions, "The Comedians"
8. The Clash, "White Riot"

A reviewer at Wired's Underwire blog says he would have preferred a tune by the L.A. punk band the Minutemen--also the original name of the Watchmen characters' team--instead of "I'm Your Boogie Man" for the '70s protest sequence. I'm not familiar with the Minutemen, so I'd go with "White Riot," which is often mistaken for being a skinhead anthem. ego trip's Big Book of Racism wryly describes it as the song in which "Class of '77 punk's finest are sick of colored folks hogging all the revolution."

9. The Police, "Walking on the Moon"

I would have used "Walking on the Moon," which is sung in the comic by a nervous soldier who sees Dr. Manhattan teleport himself away, or "You're My Thrill" instead of "99 Luftballons" for the Dan/Laurie diner scene.

10. Billie Holliday, "You're My Thrill"
11. Devo, "Jocko Homo"
12. The Rolling Stones, "Worried About You"(*) (instead of Leonard Cohen's ubiquitous "Hallelujah" during the movie's much-maligned--but not by me--sex scene)
13. Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Happy House" (for the prison sequence)
14. XTC, "All Along the Watchtower"

Jimi Hendrix's cover of "Watchtower" will always be my favorite version of the Dylan song, but let's face it, the Hendrix version is overused these days. Because of Watchmen's '80s setting, I would have picked XTC's 1978 version.

15. Time Zone featuring John Lydon & Afrika Bambaataa, "World Destruction"
16. John Cale, "Sanities"
17. Bob Dylan, "Desolation Row"
18. Leonard Cohen, "First We Take Manhattan" (the IMAX version, which was the version I saw, cut this song from the end credits and ran a sped-up version of the credits because the movie was already too long for IMAX exhibition)

And I would have shown way less schlonggage from Nuclear Smurf and I would have adapted Watchmen into a miniseries for HBO or FX instead of a feature film that's both too long as a film in the theater and too short as an adaptation of such a dense and literate piece of comics writing, but those are discussions for another post.

(*) Self-pimpin' time: "Worried About You" and "World Destruction" can be heard during A Fistful of Soundtracks' "F Zone" block of existing songs that have been used in films and shows. "The F Zone" airs Mondays at 4am, 9am and 3pm, Wednesdays at noon and Fridays at 5am, 9am and 3pm on AFOS.

Alphabet St.

Hey, those letters are trying to say "cougars." I didn't know Prince likes him some Roscoe's Chicken and Wattles.

I'm recording a bunch of new segments for the Fistful of Soundtracks channel that I'll begin streaming this Tuesday. They'll be put on a loop for the rest of April.

During these segments, I'll be introing 26 film or TV score tracks, and each one will represent a different letter in the alphabet. It'll be like A Fistful of Soundtracks-meets-Children's Television Workshop. (I don't care that it's now called Sesame Workshop. It's always going to be CTW to me, just like how I always called it Candlestick Park, even when it was renamed 3Com Park and then Monster Park before wisely reverting to its original name.)

Also, in remembrance of Maurice Jarre(*), I'll be introing a couple of Jarre tracks that aren't "Lara's Theme" or the Lawrence of Arabia theme--the Zhivago and LOA themes are both classic but a bit overplayed.

(*) The beyond, deux blog has given my brief post about Jarre a nice mention. Thanks, beyond, deux!

There won't be any more new episodes of A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series. I'm eschewing the episodic format for something more Scion Radio-like. You'll still be able to hear past eps of AFOS: The Series Wednesdays at 10am and 3pm Pacific, starting this Hump Day.