High School Girls Who Love Old Music
The best thing about being Ryan Murphy, creator of Glee, is he gets to foist his musical taste on the world. Any song he liked growing up he can just put in the mouth of one of his characters and the next day it's climbing the charts. He's hardly alone, though. He's just got the perfect operation for it. But it's pretty common to see writers give their characters the same musical taste they've got. If they're high school girls, so much the better.
Same thing with Diablo Cody. In Juno, she has the title character, born around 1990, insist the best year for music was 1977 No question, it was a great year for punk, but I find it easier to believe this is Diablo Cody's opinion, not Ellen Page's.
Then there's Enid in Ghost World, born in the 1980s. She buys a used album at a garage sale. It's old music, and she particularly fixates on Skip James' "Devil Got My Woman." A great song, and it probably fits Enid's self-conscious, alienated character. But I'm pretty sure if it weren't for writer-director Terry Zwigoff, who goes for this kind of music, Enid would end up liking something else. (Or maybe nothing. The whole Seymour-the-record-collector plot, central to the movie, is not found in the original Daniel Clowes comic.)
posted by LAGuy @ 12:11 AM
8 Comments:
A friend of mine who's in her early 20s insists that Led Zeppelin era metal is the only music worth listening to. It takes all kinds, I guess.
Do you think John Cusack stipulates in his contract that his favorite music be part of the soundtrack, or do you think he chooses projects with people who share his taste?
"The best thing about being Ryan Murphy, creator of GLEE, is he gets to foist his musical taste on the world...."
...without having to worry about writing compelling stories to link the songs together.
I think LA Guy has mentioned this before in years gone by but in the 1995 hero-teacher-in-the ghetto movie, Dangerous Minds starring tough broad Michele Pfeiffer, the persons responsible changed the music that the teacher employed to get the kids more interested in learning from rap to Bob Dylan.
Of course, maybe this was more a commercial decision than an issue of personal preference as I'm guessing more tickets for this film were sold to inspired Dylan fans than to rap listeners
Dangerous Minds was a surprise hit. Some wondered if it hadn't been for "Gangsta's Paradise," which became the biggest single of the year, if the film would have been a hit at all.
It's not a bad song, and at least it may have led some people to Stevie Wonder.
I had never heard of Freaks & Geeks until a couple months ago. I watched the entire series last month and loved it.
While I agree with you that Juno loving old music is gratuitous, F&G struck me as completely realistic about the music, with very few exceptions. It was set during the exact same time I was in high school, and I certainly found all the longhair (this was before the neologism "classic rock" was invented) reverence for music to be exactly as I remembered it -- Zeppelin, the (bizarre) worship of Neil Peart, the hatred of disco, the delight one took in mocking someone who thought the song was named "Teenage Wasteland", the mocking of punk styles and haircuts (while paying no attention to their music), and so forth.
(I wasn't totally sure about their use of Van Halen. VH were from Pasadena, and while they were ubiquitous at my high school I don't know whether they were as well known in Michigan.)
But the Grateful Dead plot in the finale made me wonder. I never met any deadheads my age in high school or college. I have the impression that the original deadheads were all baby boomers (I'm part of the forgotten generation between the baby boom and GenX), and there weren't a lot of new deadheads recruited in the late 70s or 80s. The Dead became cool again in the 1990s, leading the explosion of jam bands. (And if I wanted to be really picky I would point out that Lindsey spent two weeks following the dead immediately after school ended in June 1981, which is impossible because the Dead took a brief break from touring between 5/22/81 and 7/2/81.)
But I still don't buy that Feig put this in because he liked the music. He was too dedicated to making the characters realistic. He put it in because it was the next step that Lindsey would logically go through in her life.
That episode is set in June 1981, and the Dead were
Van Halen was huge in Michigan. It was just the kind of music they'd go for.
Certainly Deadheads were in full swing by the early 80s. (I have a journalist friend who wrote an anti-Deadhead column around that time and there were nasty letters about that for months.) I'm not sure if they got big support from high schools, but certainly plenty of college students around then were into the band.
Interesting. In LA, the band loved by the eccentric stoners was always the Doors. A number of people I knew in high school were convinced that Jim Morrison was alive. One of them even briefly convinced himself that John Doe of X was really Jim Morrison, because he was always blurry in the band photos and Ray Manzarek was working with X.
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