Spring has sung, and the birds are back. And not just the songbirds either, but naughty little fuckbirds1 too. Black-Capped-Fuckadees that go fuck-a-dee-dee-dee2. Songless Woodfuckers3 who can only drum out their love. Bluefucks and yellow-tailed whippoorfucks. Perhaps they are speaking the divine dirty ‘language of the birds’. Or just letting their harmonic throats do the [...]
Archive of posts tagged bad movies
Never Jam After Midnight
Once in an eternity, a mogwai comes along with a voice of silver and a heart of gold. Most of his kind are shady Chinese spirits, who suffer midnightly cravings, and a bad case of aquaphilia. They certainly can’t whistle Dixie and play little keyboards in key. Fully acculturated, Gizmo sings a C# Major folk [...]
Goonie Tunes
Sadly, there are no Cyndi Lauper widgets to be found here, although her syncopated breath and synth-drums carried many scenes of The Goonies (1985). Nor will David Grusin’s film score be featured, other then his false notation for One-Eyed Willie’s bone organ. No, this here has little to do with traditional music, for the most [...]
Mystic’s Chord
Jim Henson’s 1982 puppet epic The Dark Crystal features a race of gentle beings known as Mystics. Central to the lives of the Mystics are a series of musical rituals, the dissonance of which, seriously belies the gentle nature of these fraggle-faced hunchbacks. Behold the Mystic’s Chord! What a chord! It’s like three chords in [...]
The Billy Dee Wilhelm Scream
The “Wilhelm Scream” is a popular Hollywood stock sound. Originally recorded for Warner Bros. Westerns, the scream achieved cult status with its appearance in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies and continues to be used extensively today. Below is the Wilhelm 4―the most classic of the Wilhelms. There is a lesser known sister satellite [...]
Adult Sing-Alongs in Contemporary Film
Dead, dead; dead. The American sing-along is dead. Once upon a time, there was a baby Steinway in every household, and American families sang together in perfect nuclear harmony. Pa was an operatic baritone, and little Timmy had chosen to forgo puberty to carry on the castrati legacy. The sing-along was the musical hearth of [...]
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
There’s a kind of swelling of guitars, like violins joyously weeping. Some of them, are possibly reversed. Who can tell? They cyclone around the protagonist’s sorrow, wrapping up the episode’s final moment, when the TV composer twists it all around and drops a heavy Twin Peaks chord on the Stringboard, if only to launch the [...]
