Beta Testing

154. BOBBY WOMACK & PEACE, "Across 110th Street"
Written by J. J. Johnson & Bobby Womack
United Artists 196 1973 Billboard # 56

The release of Watchmen is reminding me about the pros and cons of soundtrack sampling--not just featuring music on a soundtrack, but using music on a soundtrack that's already been recorded for a different purpose.

Seriously, I don't mean to scapegoat Watchmen. (Not yet. I haven't seen it yet. I've only heard similarly comic-versed friends see it and shriek in horror.) But I have listened to the soundtrack album, which struck me as fairly unimaginative. Each song, as in "Forrest Gump," simply cues the audience via nostalgic association for a specific reaction to a scene.

If you're going to reuse music that's been recorded elsewhere and do it right, it needs to provide counterpoint, not double the melody. The most famous US pop example of this may be Martin Scorsese's use of "Layla" over the montage of mafia hits in Goodfellas. "But it's an elegy," the director disingenuously insisted. Still, you have to admit that playing an elegy for lost love over a sequence of dead bodies of criminals provides an interesting disjunction.

Which brings us, finally, to "Across 110th Street." To begin with, it's as beautiful a title song as blaxploitation cinema produced in the 1970s, so much so that I'm surprised that Marsh missed it in his original accounting of the period. But what brings me to address it here is Quentin Tarantino's reuse of the song in Jackie Brown (1997).

Yes, the film is an homage to blaxploitation cinema, right down to the casting of Pam Grier, the queen of blaxploitation, as the title character. The truth is, though, that Tarantino has never gotten credit for this, this best film, even down to the genius of this specific repurposing of a song.

Yes, this song was played over the credits of another film, almost a quarter of a century before--but the passage of time is very much the point here. The "day-to-day fight" Womack sings of has been going on for Grier's character for almost 25 years, and it shows. That magnifies the song, makes it bigger, extends its implications. Reusing the song in this specific case doesn't just tie the film to earlier blaxpolitation films. It legitimately asks what would have happened to the characters who had the wits to survive those earlier works. Okay, they survived that environment. Would they have thrived? By taking it down to the middle ages of the characters, the song isn't just reified--it's complicated.

Time Meant Nothin', Never Would Again

254. RICHARD O'BRIEN et al., "Time Warp"
Produced by Richard Hartley; written by Richard O'Brien
1975 Did not make pop charts

As you may have guessed by this point, I frequently measure musical history as being B.R. and A.R.--Before the Ramones and After the Ramones. If I were just speaking culturally, I could use The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a similar watershed, since I believe it marks an important milestone for a sizable segment of my own generation.

But Rocky Horror is only a cultural milestone. It is not a musical milestone. The whole point of Rocky Horror, both on stage and on screen, was its references back to an earlier mode of pop. Like the original stage version of Grease (but not Randall Kleiser's eventual film adaptation), Rocky Horror was part of a general deconstruction of the 1950s that went on in the 1970s. Like the original Grease, The Lords of Flatbush, The Wanderers, etc., Rocky Horror was about uncovering the simmering sexual conflicts that were under the mainstream culture of the postwar era.

But the key to this particular deconstruction (much of it innocuously filed under the greater heading of "rock and roll revival") was that it was innately conservative. The music had to sound like the music of twenty years before so that the sexual undercurrents of that earlier era could be uncovered. From a purely musical standpoint, the only odd touch in a track like "Time Warp" are the theraminlike harmony vocals on the choruses. Those seem like a bit of an overstatement.

At least for this particular song, I think the sound of Rocky Horror was much less transgressive than its image. Listen to the soundtrack recording of this song, and it's just a lovely little dancetrack. But do you see how those people are dressed? If Brad and Janet just stepped out of a 1950s movie, the music wouldn't necessarily unsettle them but the thriftstore aesthetic of the guests' outfits would. Hippies popularized thrift stores, but punks and proto-punks turned them into essential supply depots for subcultural style. Call it postmodernism, call it bricolage, but the youths of the Sex Pistols' generation went into a thrift store to find familiar clothes that they could reassemble into an unfamiliar, slightly offputting ensemble.

Greil Marcus and others later called this detournage. During the 1970s, that's what Rocky Horror did visually to the 1950s and the Ramones did aurally to the early 1960s. They pioneered the mashup in a pre-digital world. Eventually, the technology caught up with them,