See my movie--check out my eclectic musical taste.

January 11, 2007 10:31 AM

Self conciously hip soundtracks-- how far back does this go?

Directors such as Jim Jarmush, Quentin Tarantino and Guy Richie like to show off their hip taste in music. How far back does this style go?

posted by zeraus to media & arts (27 comments total)

Hanri Mancini was a hipster too.

Together with Alex North, Elmer Bernstein, Leith Stevens and Johnny Mandel, Henry Mancini was one of the pioneers who introduced jazz music into the late romantic orchestral film and TV scores prevalent at the time.

Cherade was about as cool a movie as you could get at the time, and the soundtrack flaunted it.
posted by cowbellemoo at 10:40 AM on January 11, 2007

Charade* (sorry)
posted by cowbellemoo at 10:41 AM on January 11, 2007

Henri Mancini* (I'll stop now)
posted by cowbellemoo at 10:43 AM on January 11, 2007

Fellini
posted by SBMike at 10:48 AM on January 11, 2007

A Charlie Brown Christmas was considered rather avant garde as the creators pushed for jazz rather than the standard kids music. NPR ran a few blurbs about it, but I can't find any of them.
posted by unixrat at 11:05 AM on January 11, 2007

Rat Pack?
posted by lampoil at 11:06 AM on January 11, 2007

Quadrophenia (1979) fits the bill. Though it was a movie by The Who featuring music by The Who, it was still self-consciously hip.
posted by The Michael The at 11:10 AM on January 11, 2007

It depends. If you're talking about directors who incorporate "cool," pre-existing music, it's a more recent development. If you mean a score or music made for the movie, it's a much older thing.

I wouldn't really include Quadrophenia, Charlie Brown shows, or Mancini since that music was made for particular productions. I think what you're going for is the "look at my music collection" directors, which date back to at least the 1980s with John Hughes and Cameron Crowe. It existed before then, but I've been led to believe this is when it became more in-your-face.
posted by mikeh at 11:20 AM on January 11, 2007

I agree with mikeh that the self-consciousness and "collecting" of songs for a soundtrack definitely has a root with Hughes and Crowe. I'd also add that THEIR influences were probably films like The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy and Harold & Maude--the three films I think of when I think of collection-of-songwriters-on-soundtracks rather than composers-on-soundtracks.
posted by bcwinters at 11:27 AM on January 11, 2007

Don't forget Easy Rider on that list as well.
posted by arto at 11:29 AM on January 11, 2007

Would Martin Scorsese fall into this category?
posted by meta87 at 11:53 AM on January 11, 2007

Jonathan Demme's soundtracks are pretty groovy --Something Wild comes to mind, '86.
posted by thinkpiece at 11:58 AM on January 11, 2007

I was also thinking of Kenneth Anger as a possible forerunner. I assume that he's usually not thought of because he made Avant Garde/Underground films.
posted by zeraus at 12:00 PM on January 11, 2007

It's been going on for a very long time...
Casablanca had a very hip soundtrack for its time...
Especially with the inclusion of songs like "As Time Goes By", "It Had to Be You", "Knock on Wood" and "Shine"...
posted by MonkNoiz at 12:44 PM on January 11, 2007

I'm pretty sure we've got to mention Tarantino as the driving force for this.
posted by boo_radley at 12:45 PM on January 11, 2007

oh jesus oh god you put his name in the title and i did not see it oh shit undo ctrl-z shit shit
posted by boo_radley at 12:46 PM on January 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

The first ultra hip soundtrack was for "The Big Chill". This was the first time the soundtrack became a character in the movie for me.
posted by SMELLSLIKEFUN at 12:56 PM on January 11, 2007

Actually, you guys aren't going back far enough. A lot of the music in the old MGM films & whatnot feature songs that had originally been in hit Broadway productions in the 1920s-1930s. A lot of the songs that we now consider the Classic American Songbook... stuff by Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Gershwin, Rogers & Hart, etc... was all negotiated for use in movies in order to make the movies bigger hits by including a soundtrack comprised of a famous composer/lyricist's work. For example, Gershwin wrote "I Got Rhythm" in 1930 for the Broadway show "Girl Crazy." In 1951, Gene Kelly negotiated to get an all-Gershwin score for "An American In Paris" and sang "I got Rhythm" as well as other Gershwin songs he got permission to include.

A lot of the favorite jazz standards in American music became solidified into pop culture not when they first appeared on Broadway (a lot of people never got to Broadway to see the shows) but from when people started recording them & then threw them repeatedly into movies.
posted by miss lynnster at 1:07 PM on January 11, 2007

miss lynnster, most of those songs were contemporary to the period, though, correct? Tarantino and company are infamous for showing off their back catalog knowledge by putting music that's not necessarily contemporary or period-appropriate.

Which, now that I think about it, means I should mostly rescind my former examples since they used contemporary music for the time.
posted by mikeh at 1:49 PM on January 11, 2007

Cameron Crowe has already been mentioned, but specifically with Singles, I remember a lot of eye-rolling around the fact that the soundtrack was released several months ahead of the movie, and I read somewhere that the movie seemed to exist to justify the soundtrack. I liked it, though!
posted by peep at 2:13 PM on January 11, 2007

Any John Hughes movie soundtrack.
posted by punkfloyd at 2:56 PM on January 11, 2007

Well, a lot of the songs weren't necessarily contemporary to the period, many were very, very outdated if you heard the original versions. Just like we do now, they had a tendency to modernize the songs to go along with the current styles & find a larger audience. For example, the whole flapper, Al Jolson delivery of the 20s was definitely not popular in the 40s when big bands were taking over. The thing is, those songs were so well written that many can hold their own when converted to just about any style or tempo... which is why people can still sing them & make them sound fresh even today.

Here is an example of what I'm talking about... since there's no video of old Broadway shows, I'll use two movies. Here's a 1929 version of the Jerome Kern song Look for the Silver Lining (YES -- it was in a tv commercial once too) and now here's it reinterpreted for Judy Garland in 1946. Same song, updated storyline, music style & overall approach.
I've studied jazz vocalists for years so I can go on about this stuff...
posted by miss lynnster at 3:45 PM on January 11, 2007

Warner Brothers launched both Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies to promote their musical catalog.
posted by kirkaracha at 3:59 PM on January 11, 2007

BTW peep, I still have the Singles, Reality Bites & Pulp Fiction soundtracks on itunes somewhere. I'll confess, I liked them too. Soundtracks are powerful... those John Hughes movies totally influenced what we listened to in high school. If a band got a song into one of his movies, it was a golden ticket to the 80s teen audience. I still remember what songs played to what scenes in Valley Girl & Fast Times.
Jesus, I'm dating myself. But then again, I was just talking about music of the 1920s a second ago...
posted by miss lynnster at 4:02 PM on January 11, 2007

Part of the problem, I think, is that it took a certain amount of time for recording history to hit critical mass.

It's really easy to forget how new records still were in the 50s or 60s. A movie like Ghost World, where the soundtrack includes recordings dating back eighty years or more, simply would not have been possible. Even going back thirty or forty years, you would have run into an enormous reduction in the range and quality of what was available.

Now, mainstream Hollywood movies go back forty years for their soundtracks without blinking an eye, and can get all the songs they need without even scratching the surface of the catalog. It's only with that sort of insane variety that the connoiseur — the guy with the patience, taste and knowledge to pick out one gem from a million deservedly forgotten tracks — becomes an important figure.

Anyway, until recent decades, recordings were just less important than live shows — and certainly less cool as far as most people were concerned. The widespread existence of people who would rather be in a great used record store than at a great concert is a pretty new thing.

(There's more I could talk about. Indie rock and the weird veneration of obscurity for its own sake. The rise of DJs and sampling. Mix tapes. But you get the idea.)

So suites of old songs? Yes, all the way back to the first movies. But collections of obscure recordings, and the mystique surrounding them? Not until pretty recently.
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:55 PM on January 11, 2007

Well, radio and music were what brought music across the country, so the songs of the 20s & 30s were the first American music that was national. Prior to that many music styles and songs tended to be somewhat regional due to lack of exposure. Up until the late 40s or so, the majority of music the average American heard was live or on the radio (not everyone had a phonograph or bought records, but people had pianos in their living rooms as more than paperweights). Basically, repackaging songs within the plots of movies was their version of the soundtracks we have today.
posted by miss lynnster at 5:32 PM on January 11, 2007

2001: A Space Odyssey is a forerunner here. Kubrick abandoned a completed score by Alex North and used existing classical pieces, an early example of a director raiding his record collection and strutting his musical taste.
posted by barjo at 7:56 PM on January 11, 2007