Bambu (left) and Prometheus Brown (right) are The Bar. (Photo source: Prometheus Brown)
As the National Film Society reminds us below this graf, October is Filipino American Heritage Month, so I've compiled my favorite tracks on Spotify by great Filipino American artists like DJ QBert, Prometheus Brown, a.k.a. Geo, and half-Pinoy soulman Joe Bataan. Also included are some new cuts by L.A. rapper/activist Bambu, whose latest album ... one rifle per family. dropped earlier this month.
Bambu's best track, the Jackson 5-sampling "Misused" from 2008's … exact change…, is addressed to his son (who was two years old at the time Bambu was interviewed here), and it boldly decries the Catholic Church--the church of choice for most Filipinos who weren't born here in America--for its Eurocentricism. He teamed up with the Seattle-based Geo to form The Bar in last year's outstanding Prometheus Brown & Bambu Walk Into a Bar. So many conscious rappers tend to be humorless, which can be a chore to listen to, but the pairing of Bambu and Geo proves not all of them are humorless, especially during "Rashida Jones," The Bar's ode to the lovely Parks and Rec star and now Celeste and Jesse Forever screenwriter.
The Pixies' "Vamos" is full of delightfully batshit crazy guitar work by Joey Santiago. On the instrumental side, I wish Spotify contained "The Role Traversal" by the now-defunct post-rock band From Monument to Masses. I'd love to use "The Role Traversal" at the end of a film if I ever direct one someday. In that track's place is From Monument to Masses' Noam Chomsky-sampling "Sharpshooter."
I'm not a fan of Bruno Mars or the power ballad sound that he and other Pinoy performers like current Journey lead singer Arnel Pineda and several female American Idol contestants are known for, but Mars' new single "Locked Out of Heaven" doesn't sound too bad and appears to be a slight shift from the power ballad sound. Also, I'm glad that this week, the half-Pinoy writer of Cee Lo Green's "Fuck You" will be the first Pinoy guest host in SNL history (interestingly, this will take place a week after SNL performed yet another cringeworthy sketch that brings to light a problem that's plagued this show long before I started watching it in the late '80s: the lack of diversity in the cast, even though this iPhone 5 sketch, in which mistreated and snarky Chinese Foxconn laborers were played by non-Chinese actors, sided with the Chinese characters instead of making them the butt of the joke). Mars' SNL milestone happens to occur during Filipino American Heritage Month, which is funny because we Filipinos aren't usually known for our impeccable timing.
1. "This Is a Low" by Swipe (Tamara Drewe)
In High Fidelity director Stephen Frears' entertaining 2010 adaptation of Posy Simmonds' Far from the Madding Crowd-inspired comic strip-turned-graphic novel, childish drummer Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper) romances Gemma Arterton's title character, a London newspaper columnist and rock music journalist who, unlike most rock music journalists, looks smokin' in a red tanktop and a pair of Daisy Dukes. Ben may be what's known in the U.K. as a git, but the tunes by him and his Britpop band Swipe are pretty damn catchy, especially "This Is a Low," perhaps the catchiest song about a guy getting his ass kicked by his temperamental girlfriend ever written ("This is a call for a domestic dispute/She's got me by the collar and she's going to shoot"), which is why I've added it to the "Assorted Fistful" and "New Cue Revue" blocks on A Fistful of Soundtracks.
Not to be confused with the Blur tune of the same name, "This Is a Low" has an interesting pedigree. In the movie, the song is a source of tension between Swipe and the disgruntled Ben, who wrote "This Is a Low" and is steaming mad that the rest of the band doesn't give him enough credit for his work, but offscreen, it was actually written by Cooper's younger brother Nathan. (In another interesting tidbit, the female vocalist during "This Is a Low" is Sexy Beast star Ray Winstone's daughter Lois, who has a wordless bit part in Tamara Drewe as Ben's female bandmate and ex-girlfriend.)
Cooper's appearance as the younger version of Tony Stark's industrialist father Howard in Captain America: The First Avenger was an amusing bit of casting because in his Tamara Drewe emo garb, Cooper is a dead ringer for the effeminate partyman characters his cinematic son Robert Downey Jr. played in Weird Science and Back to School.
2. "Black Sheep" by The Clash at Demonhead (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World)
One of the best jokes in HBO's Flight of the Conchords TV series was that Bret and Jemaine were nothing like the Bret and Jemaine they imagined themselves to be in the show's fantasy sequences/musical numbers. In those sequences, Bret and Jemaine were expressive, self-confident and brimming with musical ability, while outside those sequences, Bret and Jemaine were inexpressive, socially awkward and sucky as musicians (they were always seen performing the same song, some terrible acoustic clone of Moby's "Bodyrock," and only one person liked their music, Kristen Schaal's child-like stalker Mel). That decision to make Bret and Jemaine untalented musicians that hardly anybody likes is what distinguishes Flight of the Conchords from other shows about fictional wannabe musicians that are filled with elaborate musical numbers but are worshipful of those characters, like The Monkees, Fame and Glee.
A similar joke recurs throughout Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim graphic novels and Edgar Wright's film version of Pilgrim: Scott (Michael Cera) may be someone we're supposed to root for, despite his dickishness, but the Toronto band he plays bass for, Sex Bob-omb, sounds mediocre (and their Mel is Knives Chau). One of the charms of the original music in Wright's film is the way that Beck, who wrote Sex Bob-omb's material (while Metric, an actual band from Toronto, represented Sex Bob-omb's rival, The Clash at Demonhead, whose wardrobes O'Malley patterned after Metric's), purposely downgraded the quality of his own sound to capture how an amateurish band in the Toronto indie scene would sound like (that is until the climax, when Sex Bob-omb starts to gel at about the same time as Scott gains the power of self-respect).
Scott and his Sex Bob-omb bandmates view the glitzy Clash at Demonhead--led by Scott's ex-girlfriend Envy Adams (Brie Larson)--to be evil corporate sellouts, but the ironic truth is The Clash at Demonhead don't sound as mediocre as Sex Bob-omb do, as we discover during "Black Sheep," sung quite nicely by Larson in the film (while sung by Metric frontwoman Emily Haines in the album version).
"I think that it probably is poking fun at pop music and a band that's just so completely commercialized," said Larson about "Black Sheep" to Collider, "but at the same time, you can't deny that the song is the most infectious song."
No wonder "Black Sheep" was the first tune off the Pilgrim song soundtrack that was introduced to the public. And no wonder Heather Morris likes to do what I imagine are butt crunches to "Black Sheep" while she hears it on her iPod.
3. "Odyssey" by Andromeda (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, "Space Rockers")
If Buck Rogers in the 25th Century is as accurate about the 25th century as I expect it to be, then in the future, we'll all be dancing with some giant rubber band/hula hoop/glowstick thing wrapped around us like we're some cross between a raver and Tony Randall and Jack Klugman awkwardly doing the Maypole dance in Central Park in the opening credits of The Odd Couple.
The dancing during the Buck Rogers "Space Rockers" episode may be on the lame side, but the music isn't. Scottish composer Johnny Harris, whose other dope contribution to film and TV music is the funktastic score to the 1970 British psychological thriller Fragment of Fear, came up with the proto-Daft Punk synth-pop instrumental sound of Andromeda, the 25th century's most popular rock band.
Twelve years before actor/song-and-dance man Jerry Orbach took on his most famous and final role, Law & Order's Detective Lennie Briscoe (sort of a kinder, gentler version of his crooked cop character in Prince of the City), he was on the opposite side of the law as Andromeda's evil manager Lars Mangros, who plots to use the synth-pop trio's music as a form of mind control on its teen fans.
Besides its guest stars (in addition to Orbach, the episode also features a Landers sister and Bull Shannon, or as I prefer to remember Richard Moll because I'm a Batman: The Animated Series fan, Two-Face), "Space Rockers" is my favorite non-Princess Ardala Buck Rogers episode because of the catchy "Odyssey." The Harris instrumental experienced a bit of a resurgence in 2004 when it appeared on the playlist of the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas funk radio station Bounce FM.
"Odyssey" is surprisingly good synth-pop that's aged well. (The opposite of "Odyssey"--a.k.a. the worst synth-pop ever--has to be that wack "I Am America" song in Herman Cain's weird and creepy cigarette-smoking campaign ad, recorded by some right-wing version of Lady Gaga.) The instrumental is ideal popping-and-locking music. Speaking of which, the Andromeda footage in "Space Rockers" would be much more badass if the Jabbawockeez were on the dance floor instead of those whitebread-looking rubber band/hula hoop/glowstick ravers because the Jabbawockeez are what 25th-century dancing will look more like.
4. "I Would Die 4 U/Baby I'm a Star" by The Kid (Purple Rain)
Actually, every song by Prince's onscreen alter ego The Kid is not terrible. But the one-two punch of "I Would Die 4 U" and "Baby I'm a Star" has to be my favorite part of both the movie's performance footage and the Purple Rain album. As Jeremy Ohmes notes in PopMatters, "If 'I Would Die 4 U' was Purple Rain's spiritually anguished yin, then 'Baby I'm a Star' was its cocky, narcissistic yang... More than any other song on Purple Rain, 'Baby I'm a Star' documents the unbridled energy and graceful sleaziness that was Prince live."
During the week Record Store Day 2010 took place, I live-tweeted Empire Records, which is set at a record store and seems to resurface on cable at least once every week. The movie is at its best when it pokes fun at washed-up soap stars/pop singers and sticks to being a relaxed comedy about working at a record store. At its worst, Empire Records is like a lousy and overdramatic Canadian teen soap that wouldn't look out of place on TeenNick.
Today is Record Store Day 2011, so I'm reposting my tweets about Empire Records.
(If you're not reading this on Record Store Day, this live-tweet recap can function as textual commentary that you can refer to while Empire Records is playing on TV. Sometimes, a certain movie I like will resurface on TV, and I want to see what someone else wrote about the movie, so I'll open an article or Wikipedia entry or IMDb trivia page about the movie that I had saved onto my laptop.)
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Frigging Rex Manning Day. In a few minutes, I'm live-tweeting the #EmpireRecords: Remix! Special Fan Edition DVD, which came out in 2003.
12:05 PM
I'm a few minutes late. I'm on SuperStation TBS time.
12:06 PM
The Warner logo means the #EmpireRecords: Remix! Special Fan Edition live-tweet starts now. Why live-tweet a DVD that dropped 7 years ago?
12:09 PM
#EmpireRecords has things in it I like (particularly some of the songs and the fake Rex Manning music) and things I can't stand.
12:10 PM
The things I can't stand during #EmpireRecords (or as I like to call the film, Car Wash for alt-rockers) make it worthy of a live-tweet.
12:10 PM
When I started writing the webcomic The Palace, which is set at an indie theater, I told myself I must avoid the cliches of #EmpireRecords.
12:11 PM
The movie is an example of fun premise/sloppy execution (all that shit happens to the staffers in one day?).
12:11 PM
The movie flings dramatic crises at you with all the precision of a chimp flinging his poop at zoo-goers.
12:11 PM
This is the kind of movie where dunking a teen's head in the sink will make her diet pill addiction magically disappear.
12:13 PM
You know how the Star Trek feature film DVDs come with text commentary by Trek trivia king and Next Generation graphic designer Michael Okuda? Think of these tweets from my Twitter page on April 14 (a few days before Independent Record Store Day on April 17) as the text commentary that should have been part of the Empire Records DVD.
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Frigging Rex Manning Day. In a few minutes, I'm live-tweeting the #EmpireRecords: Remix! Special Fan Edition DVD, which came out in 2003. 12:05 PM Apr 14th via web
I'm a few minutes late. I'm on SuperStation TBS time. 12:06 PM Apr 14th via web
The Warner logo means the #EmpireRecords: Remix! Special Fan Edition live-tweet starts now. Why live-tweet a DVD that dropped 7 years ago? 12:09 PM Apr 14th via web
#EmpireRecords has things in it I like (particularly some of the songs and the fake Rex Manning music) and things I can't stand. 12:10 PM Apr 14th via web
The things I can't stand during #EmpireRecords (or as I like to call the film, Car Wash for alt-rockers) make it worthy of a live-tweet. 12:10 PM Apr 14th via web
When I started writing the webcomic The Palace, which is set at an indie theater, I told myself I must avoid the cliches of #EmpireRecords. 12:11 PM Apr 14th via web
The movie is an example of fun premise/sloppy execution (all that shit happens to the staffers in one day?). 12:11 PM Apr 14th via web
The movie flings dramatic crises at you with all the precision of a chimp flinging his poop at zoo-goers. 12:11 PM Apr 14th via web
This is the kind of movie where dunking a teen's head in the sink will make her diet pill addiction magically disappear. 12:13 PM Apr 14th via web
I've always wanted to either live-tweet or RiffTrax director Allan Moyle's 1995 film about record store clerks who attempt to save their store from the clutches of a strict, Blockbuster Music-like chain. Empire Records constantly airs on cable and has become a cult favorite, but in 1995, the movie was overshadowed by its hit soundtrack album (I remember borrowing the Empire Records cassette tape from a university friend because I dug "A Girl Like You" by Edwyn Collins and "Liar" by Donald Glover's favorite band), and it was barely released by Warner Bros., which must have been dissatisfied with the final cut. At times, the movie appears to have been edited together with glue and Popsicle sticks, so it's not hard to see why the studio quietly dumped it into theaters.
But what I don't understand is the cult status of this movie, which stars Anthony LaPaglia, Liv Tyler and a pre-Jerry Maguire Renee Zellweger. Empire Records is neither an offbeat but genuinely good flick that was buried and poorly received during its initial release like The Big Lebowski (or Office Space) nor a so-ineptly-made-it's-entertaining curio like Dolemite. It's just bland studio product that at its worst, takes the most overwrought parts of John Hughes' writing in The Breakfast Club and amps them up to 11.
So either join me on Twitter next Wednesday, April 14, in the afternoon as I snark on the extended "Remix! Special Fan Edition" of Empire Records (the DVD doesn't have a commentary track, so this live-tweet would be like the commentrak the DVD should have had), or check out the live-tweet recap I'll post on this blog afterward.
