Nothing to do today but smile
Garden State is a difficult movie, one of those that seems to force a cataloging of emotional pains you may have. Maybe I shouldn't say "you". It was tough, sometimes in something of a forced way, but good, and I'm going to pretend that I can't hear you saying that I'm about 8 months late to the conversation on this movie. Actually, I'm not that good at pretending, so I won't talk about the movie.
What I will talk about is the fact that this one movie features both one of the best as well as one of the worst Uses Of Music In A Crucial Scene. Pulling out "The Only Living Boy In New York" for the primal scream scene was shear song choice perfection, with the bittersweet melody being the perfect tune for the beautiful climax. But I refuse to believe that the person or people behind that song choice could have also been behind using the truly rotten "Let Go" as the movie went into the fade to black. I thought we had all agreed that trip-hop died when everyone realized that no one could do it better than Portishead and that Massive Attack were added big guitars. No, that's not entirely fair. There's been other good music that's gotten called trip-hop before and it's still a good musical theory, but that's beside the point with such a fake vocal track and affected disaffected lyrics like "There's beauty in breakdown." Ending such an emotional movie with such a painful lack of genuine musical emotion is something I can only accept if I one day find out that it was intended to be painful.
Or maybe I'm just trying to ignore other things.
2 comments:
Admittedly, I'm a total square, but I really like the Frou Frou album. But it's not trip-hop to me, it's just pop music. If it had been recorded in 1999 it might have been trip-hop, but the state of pop music has evolved. It's kinda like when 'Ray of Light' came out and everybody groused about how Madonna was jumping on the bandwagon and doing electronica, but what had really happened was that electronica had itself become so mainstream that 'Ray of Light' was simply a beautiful pop album; Madonna was just surfing the zeitgeist. I don't mean to put the Frou Frou record on the same level as 'Ray of Light' - Madonna's masterpiece (if you'll allow me) was leagues ahead, to be sure - but when I take it at face value I do think it's a pretty enjoyable album. Like I said, I'm a total square.
Well, Madonna WAS jumping on the bandwagon. But she did it well and, like with all her other moves, she did it just a little bit before anyone in mainstream pop. I don't think that the sorts of beats and music she was using had necessarily become mainstream by that point. Her success was in that she was able to take forms of music that make her sound fresh (and even innovative to people who hadn't been keeping up) while still staying catchy and easily accessible. That's something she's always done well.
But the "trip-hop" sound was one that, after the success of Portishead, was grabbed by lots of wannabes who saw it as a form of music that they could produce easily and that they thought would make them sound weird and edgy. Which is what that Frou Frou song sounds like to me: not Pop and certainly not genuine, but rather some people who are desperately trying to be hip, but who are about 8 years off he mark. Hell, if they had waited another five or six years, they could have been retro.
Mostly, I just thought it was a terrible choice for that crucial scene in the movie, and I ended the movie with the feeling that I hadn't liked it when I actually had.
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