Sunday, January 07, 2007

Music with movies.

12 Computers

This site was recently featured on Pitchfork for its "find" of a Grizzly Bear and City of Lost Children sync up.

My roommate talked recently about the Pink Floyd and Wizard of Oz sync up. And it's not that I'm skeptical that albums and movies line up with often suprisingly good accuracy, strangely related themes, and "Exit Music (for a film)" starting to play right when the credits appear. My concern is when people swear this was an intentional effort from the artist.

How would someone make sure the album syncs up with the rest of the movie, after the CD has to repeat two times (not to mention when Dark Side of the Moon was on vinyl and had to be repeated manually)? That would take some massive planning, forethought, and altering by the artist and producer to make sure everything lined up nicely. And even if done, those moves would definitely compromise the artistic quality of the music (unless, of course, the artist makes it clear the album is only intended to be listened to while watching the proper movie).

Notice the following remark about the Dr. Strangelove/Yorke example:

"(Info on tracks 8 and 9 not included in this guide, nothing too special worth mentioning)"

You can't just push off 2 of nine tracks with "nothing special worth mentioning" -- that's evidence against your theory...


Anyway, yeah, millions of CDs and millions of movies, and some series of "coincidences." But notice another line from our 12 computers website:

"This is a bad ass movie and a bad ass cd. So when you mix the two you get 200% badassness!"

Are you sure that when you mix these you don't just get someone really hoping for two of their favorite things to fit together in some weird freak occurence?

*Starts listening to 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot' and watching 'The Big Lebowski'...*

3 comments:

  1. I was going to say... you need to start working on an album that purposely synches with The Big Lebowski.

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  2. I believe that the Pink Floyd guys are brainy (and perhaps high) enough to have figured it out. It doesn't make it any less valid if they just never told anybody, and wrote the songs to fit the movie.

    I can't believe I'm defending Pink Floyd.

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  3. Anyway, the bottom line is whether or not it's entertaining, whether it works in some way. Marcel Duchamp said a urinal was art, and it was. I'm sure whoever built that urinal didn't think so.

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