The original songs from Spy and the Hannibal finale are better Bond themes than Sam Smith's actual Bond theme for Spectre

Léa Seydoux in Spectre

I'm more of a fan of the music of 007 than the actual 007 movies themselves (although I'm fond of From Russia with Love, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Living Daylights and the 2006 Casino Royale, and I like a lot of what Sam Mendes and Penny Dreadful showrunner John Logan--as well as regular Coen Brothers cinematographer Roger Deakins--brought to the table in Skyfall). It's a franchise that's committed more misses than hits in its 53-year history, artistically speaking, and I understand why Andrew Ti from Yo, Is This Racist? despises the 007 movies a lot more than I do. "He's like the literal personification of imperialism," grumbles Ti about a franchise that's either ridiculed and emasculated Asian men (Licence to Kill) or killed off the ones who, for a change, aren't villains like half-Pinoy ex-wrestler Dave Bautista's Spectre henchman character Mr. Hinx (A View to a Kill). I'm sure Ti would also be thrilled about the time Bond told a black sidekick to fetch him his shoes.

That's why--despite how well Daniel Craig plays Bond as a broken man and how interestingly the underrated Timothy Dalton similarly portrayed the Ian Fleming character as a damaged soul (particularly when he's seen still mourning his murdered wife Tracy in Licence to Kill)--I've never viewed this personification of imperialism as a hero I'd root for and completely identify with. I may ogle the Bond women and admire the artistry of some of the Bond action sequences, but I've never felt like these action movies were being made for me--in the same way that Justin Lin was making Fast Five and Furious 6 specifically for me and creating the first non-stereotypical, post-Sulu Asian American cinematic action hero in the form of Sung Kang's Han, a character Lin so regretted killing off in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift that he ballsily rewound the Fast and the Furious series timeline just so he could include Han in the action again.

I've seen all the 007 movies except Moonraker (Buffy once warned me against renting it), and the best and most fascinating thing about these movies that are still being run with a tight fist by the same family that started them (the story of the Broccoli family business, by the way, is another fascinating tale in itself) is often the score music. "It's mean stuff. It's not pretty or sanitised. It sounds tough. That's why [John Barry's] work has been sampled so much by hip-hop artists - those sinister horn stabs, especially," wrote superproducer Mark Ronson about the aural template that was established in the '60s by the late Barry and later recreated by Barry fan David Arnold in five consecutive 007 movies and regular Mendes composer Thomas Newman in Skyfall and now Spectre. Even when the movie's terrible, either Barry or Arnold would bring an unmistakable pulse to the original music. Unfortunately, that pulse is missing from "Writing's on the Wall," the newly released Spectre theme performed by British singer/songwriter Sam Smith and written by the blue-eyed soul artist (in what he claims to be only 20 minutes of songwriting) and Jimmy Napes, who both penned "Stay with Me," the 2014 Smith pop hit that bizarrely sounds like the love child of Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" and the theme from I'll Fly Away.

I'm not going to be like a lot of haters of the Spectre theme on social media and dismiss the theme with an extremist, Blaine and Antoine-style "Hated it!" (although some of those anti-"Writing's on the Wall" tweets are amusing, particularly one woman's description of the tune as "a drunk elephant tried to do karaoke to an Adele song whilst singing like James Blunt"), because the theme is actually an okay 007 ballad in the mold of Louis Armstrong's "We Have All the Time in the World" from On Her Majesty's Secret Service's dating montage and the Pretenders' "If There Was a Man" at the end of The Living Daylights, which were both produced by Barry. In fact, the best aspect of "Writing's on the Wall" is its Barry-style dramatic orchestrations, particularly before Smith's trademark falsetto comes in and warbles typical 007 song lyrics like "I'm prepared for this/I never shoot to miss." The first 15 seconds are classic 007 travelogue music.

But as an opening title theme for a 007 movie, "Writing's on the Wall" leans a little too adult contemporary for my tastes. "I wanted a touch of vulnerability from Bond, where you see into his heart a little bit," said Smith to NPR about lyrics like the rather adult contemporary-ish "How do I live, how do I breathe?/When you're not here I'm suffocating." RogerEbert.com writer Odie "Odienator" Henderson would complain on his blog about Adele's beloved and pitch-perfect "Skyfall" being too slow and putting him to sleep. Henderson doesn't understand that "Skyfall" is supposed to have a funereal tone because the song is actually about the death of M and is written from her point of view. That's why it would have been stupid to open Skyfall with a "View to a Kill"-style dance floor banger, whereas "Writing's on the Wall" is the kind of somnambulant tune Henderson misguidedly thought "Skyfall" was.

"Where's the intrigue? Where's the danger?," wonders Idolator in its pan of "Writing's on the Wall." After those terrific first 15 seconds, the song never really builds towards anything memorable or punchy. What particularly makes "Writing's on the Wall" disappointing is that it reteamed Smith and Napes with the U.K. garage act Disclosure, a.k.a. brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence, but it has little of the spark of earlier Smith/Napes/Disclosure tracks. I had no idea Disclosure had a hand in producing the Spectre theme until I saw several pop music blogs take note of Disclosure's involvement, right after I downloaded the "Writing's on the Wall" single from Amazon and then listened to it and thought I had teleported into the "Brian McKnight helps Martin propose to Gina in the park" episode of Martin instead of an action thriller.

"The reason we got involved afterwards was to try and add a bit of post production and they just wanted it to sound a little more spacey and add something behind it that wasn't just a straight-up orchestra," said the duo to the U.K.'s Capital FM radio network. While trying to lend a hand to something that they've said is "a lot more along the 'Goldfinger' lines," Disclosure, an act I enjoy for never being too saccharine in their music, sacrificed too much of what makes them great and took a turn towards the saccharine. k.d. lang and Garbage previously proved in Tomorrow Never Dies' Arnold-produced "Surrender" and the Arnold-produced opening title theme for The World Is Not Enough, respectively, that you can bring your own stamp to a traditional-sounding 007 tune and honor the 007 sound without sacrificing too much of your musical identity. I know I keep using the word "pulse" to refer to what "Writing's on the Wall" lacks, but that's the best word I can come up with to describe the thing that's absent from the Spectre theme and had permeated the previous Smith/Napes/Disclosure collabos "Latch" and "Together," which features some unknown nobody named Nile Rodgers.





Where's some of the sinewy garage sound that also distinguishes Disclosure's work with other acts like AlunaGeorge, as well as their work on their own (my personal favorite Disclosure banger, by the way, is "When a Fire Starts to Burn")?

Throwback Thursday: Spy (2015)

Every Throwback Thursday, I pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I didn't throw away, and then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS. Today, instead of drawing some random ticket, I'm intentionally pulling out the ticket that says "Spy," due to the Melissa McCarthy comedy's box-office success and the excitement over the beginning of the filming of McCarthy's Ghostbusters reboot. This will be the final post here on the AFOS blog before I take a two-or-three-week-long break from the blog in July. The blog--and that goes for the blog's year-long TBT series as well--will resume with new posts in the middle of July.

The least creative thing about writer/director Paul Feig's enjoyably foul-mouthed action comedy Spy is its title. Spy is also the title of a fairly recent Britcom about an MI5 agent and his 10-and-a-half-year-old son. The Feig movie's original title was Susan Cooper. By the end of the movie, Melissa McCarthy and Feig have created such a distinctive and likable new heroine--and managed to give her a satisfying dramatic arc in addition to her comedic antics--that you won't forget the name Susan Cooper, and her name deserves to be part of the branding of the super-spy franchise that will likely arise from Spy, much like how Austin Powers' name is part of the title of every movie of his and Jason Bourne's name is in the title of every Bourne movie, including ones he doesn't even bother to appear in.

But then again, Feig's the kind of director who seems to prefer movie titles that don't take up too much space on a marquee. I Am David, Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy and Ghostbusters are all titles that are easy work for marquee changers, especially ones who'd get an anxiety attack after finding out they have to put the letters up for Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies.

Mondo poster illustrated by The Dude Designs (Photo source: Birth.Movies.Death.)

So had Sky 1 not come out with a show called Spy, I'd be more enamored with the movie's title because it nicely conveys in just three letters that Susan was born to be one. But because Spy is a comedy, the transition from mission control support to CIA field agent for Susan, who's a winning mix of Midwestern politeness and the fearlessness of McCarthy's Boston cop character Shannon Mullins from The Heat, isn't exactly a smooth one. That transition is initially loaded with the usual slapstick McCarthy frequently excels at, as well as the honest and comically appalled reactions many Feig characters have to any kind of mayhem (think the bridesmaids' varied reactions to food poisoning in Bridesmaids or Sandra Bullock amusingly panicking over a knife shoved into her thigh and wanting so badly to break her vow to never curse in The Heat). Spy arose out of Feig's wish to make a spy movie like one of his favorite movies, the 2006 version of Casino Royale, but because these are Feig characters, not Bond movie characters who respond to everything in the most badass and suave (as well as PG-13-friendly and extremely--and implausibly--sanitized) ways, they puke from the sight of accidentally impaling someone they've killed or launch into a barrage of F-bombs when they don't get their way.

But once McCarthy's Bridesmaids co-star Rose Byrne enters the picture and Susan becomes more confident about her field work and is able to infiltrate the Byrne character's enemy organization, thanks to a very particular set of skills (like intuition) that Susan's overconfident colleague/work rival Rick Ford (Jason Statham) is too bullheaded and inept to possess, Spy takes an interesting turn as a spy comedy. It becomes a comedy about an underestimated spy who's good at her job instead of incompetent (Get Smart) or competent but immature (Archer), which also makes it an intriguing companion piece to the Marvel Studios show Agent Carter, another story of a frequently underestimated female spy. But where's the conflict when the central character's a competent spy? Isn't that a comedy killer? When McCarthy has such great--and often improvised--dialogue and trades insults with the consistently funny likes of a perfectly cast (and perfectly big-haired) Byrne as a villainous arms dealer and Statham in what has to be the funniest and greatest role of his career as the hilariously useless Ford, nobody has to worry about the disappearance of humor.

Before its license to thrill was revoked by Netflix again, Never Say Never Again was full of music so awful it would make Netflix viewers say "never again" to hearing it

(Photo source: New York Times)

Have you ever heard score music that's so terrible during a certain movie that its trailer music sounds like Beethoven by comparison? Michel Legrand, whose jazzy and very French score for the original Thomas Crown Affair is one of the highlights of that very '60s caper flick, clearly had an off day when he wrote the score to 1983's Never Say Never Again, the unofficial 007 movie that was the weird result of a legal dispute that allowed Thunderball to get remade with Sean Connery in the role of Bond again. (The messy circumstances that led to the production of the non-canonical Never Say Never Again--the last 007 movie to pit Bond against SPECTRE before next winter's canonical 007 movie Spectre--are like if the Indiana Jones franchise got embroiled in some sort of legal beef between Disney and George Lucas that would be too convoluted to imagine in detail here, and as part of the settlement, Harrison Ford got to star as Indy one last time in a rival Indy movie for another studio while Disney worked on its rumored reboot with Chris Pratt as Indy.)

The much-maligned GoldenEye score by French composer and frequent Luc Besson collaborator Eric Serra--the only cue I really dig during Serra's score is the very first one, the 17-second gunbarrel music--isn't the worst score written for a Bond movie. Nope, the "worst Bond score" honors would have to go to Legrand's tin-eared score. I realized his weirdly chintzy-sounding and sometimes yacht rock-ish score is the worst after I rewatched Never Say Never Again on Netflix only a few hours before the streaming service lost the streaming rights to the movie once again and had to yank it from its library over the weekend. It's the first time I've watched Never Say Never Again in its entirety since the very first time I saw it--on VHS as a kid. I barely paid attention to Never Say Never Again that day because I was too busy playing with the Christmas present my parents gave to me right before they rented a VHS of Never Say Never Again, and that toy happened to be this:

(Photo source: ActionFigurePics)

(Photo source: Vintage Action Figures)

When you're a kid whose attentions are divided between play-acting battle strategy conversations inside a huge castle playset between He-Man and Mekaneck about how they're going to metaphorically skullfuck the forces of Skeletor and Trap Jaw and watching a VHS of an overlong and clunkily paced but lavish spy flick, it's a little difficult to pay attention to the spy flick. But the one thing I do remember from that Christmastime viewing of the VHS rental of Never Say Never Again is Connery getting stabbed right after the easy-listening sounds of former Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66 vocalist Lani Hall's Never Say Never Again theme song.

Thanks to cable network airings of Never Say Never Again that failed to lure me into rewatching it in its entirety and YouTube clips of the opening titles, I'm constantly reminded of how poorly Hall's ballad--which was composed by Legrand and produced by both Hall's husband Herb Alpert and Mendes himself--fits with the opening action sequence. It's not the worst tune, but "Never Say Never Again" is yacht rock-era Sergio Mendes and Herb Alpert, not "Mas Que Nada"-era Sergio Mendes and Herb Alpert.

Together with Hall and the rest of Brasil '66, "Mas Que Nada"-era Mendes and Alpert were responsible for one of the coolest covers of a Bond song, their remake of "The Look of Love," another tune from an unofficial Bond movie, the 1967 version of Casino Royale. The lackadaisical feel of this later Bond song from Hall, Mendes and Alpert robs Never Say Never Again's opening action sequence of any tension or suspense. Yacht rock and spy movies are a terrible combination. It's why I don't like the Rita Coolidge version of "All Time High" the late John Barry produced for Octopussy--a rare musical misstep by Barry--and I instead prefer the more dangerous-sounding (especially at 3:06) Pulp cover of "All Time High" David Arnold produced for 1997's Shaken and Stirred: The David Arnold James Bond Project, the cover album that landed Arnold the gig as Tomorrow Never Dies score composer.

The rest of Legrand's Never Say Never Again score is far worse than the opening theme and lacks the oomph, tunefulness, grandeur and sexuality of the best of Barry's work for the official Bond movies. Oomph, tunefulness, grandeur and sexuality are four reasons why, like recent "Uptown Funk" mastermind Mark Ronson once said in 2011, Barry's work has been sampled so much by hip-hop artists ("It's mean stuff. It's not pretty or sanitised. It sounds tough," wrote Ronson). Legrand's score is a good example of why French musicians shouldn't be scoring Bond movies. Unless they're Daft Punk. That's because I like those two helmeted motherfuckers and I like how the idea of Daft Punk scoring a Bond flick would make way-too-conservative Bond fanboys--the same fanboys who are way too intense about their hatred of French electronica artist Mirwais for producing Madonna's much-maligned Die Another Day theme--squirm.

The Never Say Never Again trailer music has more oomph than the actual music in the movie. Sure, the unknown composer who wrote the trailer music was clearly imitating Bill Conti's score from an official Bond movie, 1981's For Your Eyes Only, without using the Barry/Monty Norman Bond theme that Conti had the freedom to include and neither Never Say Never Again producer Jack Schwartzman (the late husband of Talia Shire, as well as the father of Jason Schwartzman) nor Warner Bros. had the rights to use for their rival Bond movie.

But the anonymous Conti wannabe's trailer music gives off sparks in ways that Legrand's score fails to do. Combined with both the way the trailer house pieced together footage of the movie and the baritone of Peter Cullen (a.k.a. Optimus Prime), the voice of so many trailers and TV spots for '80s Bond flicks, the trailer music makes Never Say Never Again appear to be a more exciting action movie than it actually is.

The best things about Never Say Never Again are the performances of Connery--who's more awake during Never Say Never Again than he was when he sleepwalked through You Only Live Twice because he was sick and tired of the Bond franchise at the time of You Only Live Twice's filming--and Barbara Carrera, who steals the movie as Fatima Blush (like Luciana Paluzzi did during Thunderball when she played the same villainous character, Fiona Volpe, in that version of the story, 18 years before). Carrera was even nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance as Fatima. Throughout my rewatch of the movie on Netflix, all I could think, especially when Carrera wasn't on screen, was "All that money that's up there on screen, and they couldn't get Raiders of the Lost Ark cinematographer Douglas Slocombe to light the locations with more panache, and they couldn't get Connery a more convincing toupee."

The mid-'80s were not exactly the greatest period for Bond movies, whether official or unofficial, although Octopussy has its moments, dumb Tarzan yell gag and questionable attitudes towards Indians aside. I don't know if the most underwhelming aspects of Never Say Never Again were because of cocaine or because of the Taliafilm production company's cluelessness about how to craft a Bond movie a la the Broccoli family, which runs the Bond movie franchise like a tight ship. But when you hire folks like Legrand, Slocombe, Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner and stuntpeople from Raiders of the Lost Ark and they're not putting in their best work (one minute, Kim Basinger's escaping from a castle on horseback, clad in just a slip, and then the next minute, her stunt double's leaping off the castle fully dressed, or maybe those aren't long sleeves and that's the stunt double's actual skin, which is far lighter than Basinger's), the blame for those underwhelming aspects has to be put on the badly distracted leadership of Schwartzman, who was reportedly too busy dealing with constant legal battles with the Broccoli family and Eon Productions to be present for the day-to-day shooting. His absence "left the actual supervision of production in the hands of barely-qualified subordinates," wrote You Only Blog Twice blogger Bryant Burnette.

(Photo source: Lewis Wayne Gallery)

(Photo source: You Only Blog Twice)

Legrand's tepid-sounding Never Say Never Again score cues have been frequently excised from the movie by Bond fanboys in fan edits of Never Say Never Again they've posted on YouTube or outside YouTube. I think they should try inserting into their Never Say Never Again re-edits the theme songs from Bond video games like the Quantum of Solace video game and Blood Stone, which are more enjoyable tunes than most of the opening themes from the '80s and '90s Bond movies themselves.

The Legrand cues are, of course, not part of "AFOS Incognito," the new espionage genre music block at midnight on AFOS. Only the best original music from spy movies or shows is streamed during "AFOS Incognito," like Barry's On Her Majesty's Secret Service cues "This Never Happened to the Other Feller" and "Main Theme." Barry, show 'em how it's done.

Benji B's "Movie Soundtrack Special" is from last year, but where else can you hear Jon Brion and RZA in the same hour (other than AFOS, of course)?

One of my favorite hour-long mixes last year made me take notice of BBC Radio 1's Benji B, who, in January 2013, spun tracks by the likes of Flying Lotus, Kanye West and Raphael Saadiq while a 16-piece string ensemble led by conductor Grant Windsor played along. FlyLo's "Do the Astral Plane" and Drake's "Headlines" sound incredible with a full string section. I still can't get enough of the Benji B string ensemble mix.

Plus there are some really lovely-looking female violinists in the ensemble.

Later in the year, Benji B put together a two-hour movie soundtrack special that I first stumbled into earlier this week. The show was part of Radio 1's July 2013 "Movie Week," which had Daniel Radcliffe dropping by the BBC for a live interview and film score music nut Edgar Wright doing a stint as a guest DJ. Benji B's mix combines classic original score cues like Jon Brion's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind themes with existing songs that were prominently featured in films, like Kanye and Rick Ross' "Devil in a New Dress," which turns up in Kanye's 2010 short film Runaway, and Ryuichi Sakamoto's 1995 instrumental "Bibo no Aozora," which was used in 2006's Babel.

I have a feeling that Jay Electronica heard Benji B play the Eternal Sunshine cues, which Jay sampled in 2007's Act I: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge), back-to-back with "Bibo no Aozora," and that must be where he got the idea to drop verses over "Bibo no Aozora" for his recent single "Better in Tune with the Infinite." But whatever the actual reasons were for him picking "Bibo no Aozora," Jay has great taste in soundtrack albums.

I like how Benji B opens with John Barry's lesser-known secondary theme for 007 instead of the much more famous "James Bond Theme," which an uncredited Barry rearranged from material composed by Monty Norman. I also like the inclusion of both Barry's Goldfinger score cue "Golden Girl," which beatheads are familiar with from the Sneaker Pimps' "6 Underground," and Herbie Hancock's Blow-Up tune "Bring Down the Birds," which beatheads are also familiar with because Deee-Lite looped it in "Groove Is in the Heart."

Many of the rest of the cuts in Benji B's mix are tracks that can be currently heard on AFOS or were formerly in rotation on AFOS, like the instrumental "Polaroid Girl," from Massive Attack's original score to the 2005 Jet Li/Morgan Freeman/Bob Hoskins flick Unleashed (better known as Danny the Dog outside America). The inclusion of "Polaroid Girl," one of my favorite Massive Attack joints, makes me want to retrieve my copy of the Danny the Dog soundtrack, which I stupidly misplaced, and go put "Polaroid Girl" back into AFOS rotation.

R.I.P. Bob Hoskins.

The mix also contains the 1976 Rocky instrumental "Reflections," Bill Conti's ripoff of "Summer Madness," the Kool & the Gang tune that Rocky director John G. Avildsen clearly temp-tracked for Rocky's first scene in his apartment. Benji B erroneously ID'd "Reflections" as a Rocky III instrumental, one of a few mistakes he made while backannouncing. He also ID'd and listed the Blow-Up track as "The Naked Camera" instead of "Bring Down the Birds" and mistook For a Few Dollars More's pocket watch theme for a theme from A Fistful of Dollars, the installment that preceded For a Few Dollars More in the Man with No Name trilogy. Despite his errors, Benji B's movie soundtrack special is a worthwhile film music mix that's on a par with Paul Nice's classic Do You Pick Your Feet in Poughkeepsie? mixtape, and I wish I had heard it sooner.

Benji B BBC Radio 1 (Movie Soundtrack Special) (18.07.13) by Benji B on Mixcloud

Blade Runner

Correct tracklist
1. John Williams, Alfred Newman's 20th Century Fox studio logo music
2. John Barry, "007 Takes the Lektor" (from From Russia with Love)
3. David Shire, "End Title" (from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three)
4. Alain Goraguer, "Maquillage de Tiwa" (from La Planète Sauvage)
5. Bernard Herrmann, "Diary of a Taxi Driver" (from Taxi Driver)
6. Lalo Schifrin, "Scorpio's View" (from Dirty Harry)
7. John Barry, "Golden Girl" (from Goldfinger)
8. Roy Budd, "The Diamond Fortress" (from Diamonds)
9. Nino Nardini, "Tropicola" (needle-dropped in Black Dynamite)
10. Geinoh Yamashirogumi, "Kaneda" (from Akira)
11. Vangelis, "End Titles" (from Blade Runner)
12. Giorgio Moroder, "Chase" (from Midnight Express)
13. HAL 9000 soundbites from 2001: A Space Odyssey
14. Chromatics, "Tick of the Clock" (needle-dropped in Drive)
15. Angelo Badalamenti, "Laura Palmer's Theme (Instrumental)" (from Twin Peaks)
16. Massive Attack, "Polaroid Girl" (from Danny the Dog)
17. Forest Whitaker, "Samurai Quote 5" (from Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai)
18. Cliff Martinez, "Don't Blow It" (from Solaris)
19. Barry Forgie, "Mindbender" (from the album Mindbender)
20. Bill Conti, "Reflections" (from Rocky)
21. Roy Ayers, "Coffy Is the Color" (from Coffy)
22. Herbie Hancock, "Bring Down the Birds" (from Blow-Up)
23. Grand Wizard Theodore, "Military Cut" (from Wild Style; opening soundbite only)
24. Curtis Mayfield, "Little Child Running Wild" (from Superfly)
25. Jon Brion, "Phone Call" (from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
26. Jon Brion, "Collecting Things" (from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
27. Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jaques Morelenbaum & Yuichiro Gotoh, "Bibo no Aozora" (needle-dropped in Babel)
28. Ry Cooder, "Paris, Texas" (from Paris, Texas)
29. Ennio Morricone, "Carillon" (from For a Few Dollars More)
30. The Complexions, "I Only Have Eyes for You" (from A Bronx Tale)/The Flamingos, "I Only Have Eyes for You" (needle-dropped in A Bronx Tale)
31. Kanye West feat. Rick Ross, "Devil in a New Dress" (needle-dropped in Runaway)
32. D'Angelo, "She's Always in My Hair" (needle-dropped in Scream 2)
33. RZA, "Samurai Showdown" (from Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai)
34. Crooklyn Dodgers '95, "Return of the Crooklyn Dodgers" (from Clockers)
35. Dr. Dre, "Keep Their Heads Ringin'" (from Friday)
36. The Fearless Four, "Rockin' It" (needle-dropped in Style Wars)
37. Fab 5 Freddy, "Down by Law" (from Wild Style)
38. Public Enemy, "Fight the Power" (from Do the Right Thing)
39. Method Man & Redman, "Da Rockwilder" (needle-dropped in How High)

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

From the home office in Wahoo, Nebraska, it's "Top 10 reasons why the soon-to-retire David Letterman's 4am episode remains one of my favorite Late Show eps"

10. The Top 10 List for May 14, 2004 was read by people working the graveyard shift.

9. I was too young to stay up and watch NBC's Late Night with David Letterman when it first aired. But I grew up watching the soon-to-retire Letterman's CBS show (if the words "Happy Da Birthday Ve" or "Dave and Steve's Gay Vacation" don't make you smile, you're clearly a Leno fan), and the May 14, '04 episode with Amy Sedaris and musical guest Modest Mouse, which Letterman taped earlier that morning at 4am in front of an amazingly awake (but not really amazing to most of New York) Ed Sullivan Theater studio audience, was the closest Late Show has gotten to recapturing the weirdness of Letterman's Late Night years.

8. Unless I'm mistaken, Late Show remains the only late-night talk show that ever taped an episode at 4am. "We thought it would be cool, just something different to try... The city is always interesting, but particularly interesting at 4am," said Late Show executive producer Rob Burnett to USA Today in '04 about the show's one-time decision to switch from Letterman's usual late-afternoon recording time to an ungodly hour.

7. Letterman made one of his grandest entrances by riding on horseback to the Ed, to the tune of Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra's rendition of John Barry's Midnight Cowboy instrumental theme. An underrated John Barry movie theme as walk-on music on a late-night talk show! Shaffer's walk-on music choices have occasionally been questionable (he once soundtracked black SNL cast member Ellen Cleghorne's entrance with "Jimmy Crack Corn," a song about a black slave, and then claimed it was because "Cleghorne" sounded to him like "Crack Corn"--I'm not making this up), but otherwise, they've always been clever, and I'm going to miss that part of the show, as well as Letterman's wit and snarkiness.

6. I stopped liking Sedaris ever since Angry Asian Man wrote in 2009 about her history of doing this, but the 4am show was worthwhile also because it featured the frequent Late Show guest, who wasn't accustomed to being in front of a camera at 4am, at her loopiest.

5. Shaffer soundtracked the porno video store part of Sedaris' 4am walking tour of her Greenwich Village neighborhood with the Vince Guaraldi Trio classic "Cast Your Fate to the Wind."

4. There was a segment about catching rats in Manhattan.

3. The rat expert's reply to Letterman's question about why he studied rats was "Because I hate them."

(Photo source: National Geographic Creative)

2. Everyone in the studio audience received an Egg McMuffin. I don't care for Mickey D's, but the only worthwhile part of the Mickey D's menu is its breakfast items. Want to scare away a hipster? Hurl Egg McMuffins at him.

1. Fucking Midnight Cowboy theme, y'all!

Speaking of John Barry, his score cues from The Knack... And How to Get It, The Persuaders, From Russia with Love, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and The Living Daylights can be heard during "AFOS Prime," from 4pm to 9pm Pacific and 11pm to 7am Pacific, Monday-Wednesday on AFOS.

7 Days 'Til 007: "Skyfall"

Each weekday since November 1, I've posted a few grafs about an exemplary vocal theme or instrumental piece from the official 007 movies to count down to today's release of Skyfall in America. The series of posts concludes today with the newest 007 opening title theme, Adele's "Skyfall."

Alright, so it's not the greatest Bond theme, but it's the latest. It's also a solid addition to the Bond music catalog and a good Adele song outside the context of Bond ("Skyfall" has already been covered on YouTube by singers like Willow Smith, who doesn't whip her hair back and forth in her version, but she does a decent job covering it).

Sure, as Julian Sancton wrote in a fascinating Movieline piece where he dissected the Adele theme musicologically and pointed out how it upholds John Barry's classic sound, "Skyfall" isn't as hummable as "Rolling in the Deep." But it's classic Bond music, from the first Barry-style horn blast to Adele's last phrasing of the song title, which echoes what Tina Turner did at the conclusion of "GoldenEye" and what Tom Jones did at the conclusion of "Thunderball." Except Adele didn't pass out like Jones did in the recording booth after hitting a final note that's Tom Jones-ese for "Hand over the panties, honey, because no other bloke can hit a note as high as this."

Sancton's analysis of "Skyfall" is so good I want to plagiarize it. This post should just be nothing but excerpts from his essay. The best part is his swipe at Sheena Easton and Bill Conti's "For Your Eyes Only," a tune I don't hate (who can resist a hot Scottish chick singing a Bond song and singing it well?), although it lacks the swagger of "Diamonds Are Forever" and "A View to a Kill" and the brash lyrics that make The Spy Who Loved Me's "Nobody Does It Better" an enjoyable ballad. Sancton compares the Easton ballad to an '80s sitcom theme song, which is funny because its lyrics were written by Michael Leeson, the co-creator of The Cosby Show, I Married Dora and The Bill Engvall Show.

"Imagine it playing over Three's Company-style opening credits, with scenes of Bond walking into MI6's office and throwing his hat onto the coat rack while Ms. Moneypenny rolls her eyes and smiles," wrote Sancton.

But in "Skyfall," which Adele wrote with her regular producer Paul Epworth after they got to read the film's script, we're far from the world of Jack, Chrissy and Mr. Furley. The lyrics are apocalyptic ("Let the sky fall/When it crumbles") and the tone is suitably moody (but not slash-your-wrists moody) because the song accompanies a grim opening where, according to an early TotalFilm review, "James is shot... plunging from the roof of a moving train into Daniel Kleinman-designed titles filled with skulls, tombstones and other totems of death."

I haven't seen Skyfall yet, but I'm dying to, and that's partly because of the Adele song, which the singer recorded with a 77-piece orchestra at London's Abbey Road Studios ("When we recorded the strings, it was one of the proudest moments of my life," said Adele in a press release). We know a new Bond song is good when it whets our appetite for the new Bond film like "Skyfall" did. One of the ways that Epworth whetted our appetite was when he dove into Bond's musical arsenal and pulled out a crucial element that Madonna's much-maligned "Die Another Day" completely ignored.

"Peppered throughout the song are echoes of the original instrumental theme John Barry wrote for Dr. No, including the unmistakable four-note riff here played by the electric guitar 1 minute 50 seconds in," wrote Sancton.

Yep, Bond is back.

Previously:
002. "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" by John Barry (1969)
003. "A View to a Kill" by Duran Duran (1985)
004. "Diamonds Are Forever" by Shirley Bassey (1971)
005. "Surrender" from Tomorrow Never Dies by k.d. lang (1997)
006. "Capsule in Space" from You Only Live Twice by John Barry (1967)
007. "007" from From Russia with Love by John Barry (1963)

(Photo source: Wikipedia)

7 Days 'Til 007: "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"

A spectacular week that saw huge victories for the first African American president, several female Democratic Senate candidates (including the first Asian American woman elected to the Senate and a Missouri Senate candidate who actually understands female anatomy) and the movements to legalize weed and same-sex marriage concludes with something equally eagerly awaited, this time from the world of entertainment. It's the arrival of the well-received new 007 film Skyfall, which drops in the States tomorrow. This is the penultimate post in a seven-part series about standout vocal themes or instrumental pieces from the official 007 films.

It's hard to listen to John Barry's rousing instrumental opening title theme from On Her Majesty's Secret Service without going up to a mirror and pretending to aim a gun while kneeling, just like OHMSS star George Lazenby did in the film's gunbarrel sequence (the only Bond who kneeled in his gunbarrel). It's also hard to add lyrics to it that don't suck ass.

Try making up your own lyrics to the OHMSS main title theme sometime. Of course you're going to include the movie's cumbersome title in your made-up lyrics, but it won't sound right, even when you prolong the "Maj" in "Majesty's" to get the title to match Barry's nine-note brass melody. Just give up like Barry and his songwriter most likely did.

The theme was originally supposed to contain lyrics, but I guess Barry and the songwriter couldn't come up with anything that worked or would have been up to par with the chart hit Barry and his crew made out of "Goldfinger" and the solid Bond songs they crafted with "Thunderball" and "You Only Live Twice." So OHMSS became the first Bond movie since From Russia with Love to kick off with an instrumental during the opening titles (it remains the only post-From Russia with Love installment to do so). I like how the film opens that way. It adds to the whole "this isn't a typical Bond film" vibe of OHMSS, the last Bond film that treated the audience like grown-ups (until the series went back to basics in For Your Eyes Only after years of cartoonishness and juvenile antics).

The switch from Sean Connery to Lazenby must have inspired Barry to change up the Bond sound and use synths for the first time in the series. "That [synthy sound] and the single-mindedness of Barry's instrumental main title makes it one of the most revered of all the 007 scores among Bond aficionados," wrote Jeff Bond (no relation) in the liner notes for the 2002 expanded reissue of the OHMSS score.

Sixteen years after OHMSS, Barry made an interesting musical choice when he resurrected the OHMSS main title theme's synth riffs in his View to a Kill score, perhaps as both a shout-out to the OHMSS ski chase sequences that featured his main title theme (A View to a Kill was the first Bond film with a skiing sequence that Barry scored since OHMSS) and a nod to the 1985 film's Silicon Valley-related plot. The OHMSS and View to a Kill scores are two of my favorite scores in the series, and that's mostly due to the presence of this excellent OHMSS theme, the tune that can't be lyricized, no matter how hard you try.

7 Days 'Til 007: "A View to a Kill"

Each weekday until November 9, enjoy a post about a standout vocal theme or instrumental piece from the official Bond movies.

Duran Duran reportedly landed the gig of recording the View to a Kill theme song because of an encounter between then-Bond movie producer Albert Broccoli and Duran Duran bassist John Taylor, a fan of the Bond movies. He ran into Broccoli at a party and bluntly asked him, "When are you going to get someone decent to do one of your theme songs?"

John Taylor is awesome.

Taylor's dissatisfaction with what I assume was Rita Coolidge's tepid and yacht-rock-y Octopussy theme "All Time High" resulted in my favorite vocal Bond theme and the only Bond theme that became a #1 Billboard Hot 100 hit in America. Chris Cornell and David Arnold's "You Know My Name" from Casino Royale is badass and adrenaline-pumping but not exactly sexy. Duran Duran and John Barry's "A View to a Kill" is badass, adrenaline-pumping and sexy as hell.

Taylor's pulsating bass work during "A View to a Kill" is reminiscent of the bass riffs throughout Barry's scores for On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever. If it seemed like Barry was sleepwalking through the Coolidge recording of "All Time High," he was reinvigorated by the collabo with Duran Duran, and that's evident during their song and throughout the View to a Kill score, which incorporates the song quite beautifully. Producer Mark Ronson, who almost recorded the Quantum of Solace theme with the late Amy Winehouse but had to let the project go because of Winehouse's drug problems at the time, gets a kick out of the score's use of the Duran Duran song as well.

"My favourite of [Barry's] film scores? I'd say View to a Kill--but not Duran Duran's version," wrote Ronson in NME. "I mean the original orchestral arrangement, which is just the most gorgeous thing."

7 Days 'Til 007: "Diamonds Are Forever"

Each weekday until November 9, enjoy a post about a standout vocal theme or instrumental piece from the official Bond movies.

I like Shirley Bassey's "Goldfinger" as much as the next feller, but I was always more fond of "Diamonds Are Forever," the other great original song Bassey belted out for the 007 series (and a tune that re-emerged in the public eye in 2005 when Kanye West sampled it in "Diamonds from Sierra Leone," his track about conflict diamonds). My attachment to Bassey's "Diamonds Are Forever" is due to the 1971 movie of the same name having been one of the first 007 movies I ever watched, back when ABC and HBO were the only places on the dial where viewers could find them (I remember so fondly the ABC intros to 007 movies that were read by the network's longtime announcer Ernie Anderson, a.k.a. Paul Thomas Anderson's dad, and it's both dope to be able to revisit those ABC intros on YouTube and kind of cringe-inducing because they show how horrible and faded the Bond movie prints looked on network TV about a couple of decades before those flicks were remastered for DVD and Blu-ray).

In fact, I was introduced to Diamonds Are Forever eight years before seeing Goldfinger. Seven-year-old me thought Diamonds was okay, but it was no Spy Who Loved Me. Today, [AGE REDACTED]-old me doesn't care for Diamonds because the series' nosedive from witty and subdued spy movie humor ("Red wine with fish. That should have told me something") to hacky comic relief characters and slipshod slapstick straight out of the Herbie the Love Bug sequels began not with the Roger Moore era, but with this final Sean Connery installment (hey everybody, it's Crispin Glover's dad and jazz bassist Putter Smith--don't quit your day job, Putter!--both Jar Jar-ing it up as a pair of gay lovers/henchmen who must have been one of the reasons why GLAAD was formed!).

However, like the lamest of Moore's films, Diamonds is elevated by the music of John Barry. Diamonds is a shitty Bond film with a terrific Barry score that begins to amaze right when Bassey's theme tune opens with keyboard notes that literally glisten like bling. The '70s rhythm section should have badly dated the song, but instead, as superproducer Mark Ronson wrote for NME at the time of Barry's death, the rhythm section in "Diamonds" and much of Barry's work is "mean stuff. It's not pretty or sanitised. It sounds tough. That's why his work has been sampled so much by hip-hop artists." Like the best funk tracks, the rhythm section in "Diamonds" has aged nicely and given the theme much of its seductive power, with the help of Bassey's vocals.

No wonder new Bond girl Bérénice Marlohe played Bassey's renditions of "Diamonds" and "Goldfinger" in her trailer to get into character during the filming of Skyfall. "I always felt connected with the music on Bond movies," said Marlohe to an interviewer from WENN. "I used a lot of music too, like Shirley Bassey, who, for me, is the ultimate Bond girl. She has such a huge presence and powerful voice, so sexy and beautiful so I listened to her a lot on the set."

Filled with randy lyrics by songwriter Don Black ("Touch it, stroke it and undress it"), this song is sex on a stick, which was why Bond series co-producer Harry Saltzman hated it, and Barry responded to Saltzman with a kindly "What the fuck do you know about songwriting?"

7 Days 'Til 007: "Capsule in Space"

Each weekday until November 9, enjoy a post about a standout vocal theme or instrumental piece from the official Bond movies.

"Capsule in Space" introduces the best thing to come out of the mediocre You Only Live Twice other than Mie Hama in a white Ursula Andress-style bikini: "Space March," John Barry's majestic and entrancing motif for the film's spacecraft sequences.

Barry wrote "Capsule in Space" for the pre-title "spacecraft eater" sequence, which Pauline Kael found to be a more effective and intense moment about the dangers of space than any of the astronaut sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that bored Kael. But unlike Douglas Trumbull's terrific effects work in 2001, the effects in that You Only Live Twice space sequence haven't aged well. As the writer of the "My Year of Bonds" recap series said about You Only Live Twice's pre-title space sequence, "the whole sequence looks about as terrible as you might expect. Did it look better at the time? Probably. Do I care? Not really. Oh, and a supposed American says, 'Hello, Hoo-ston?' Come on, guys. Try a little harder."

But Barry's music for the sequence is far from terrible. Nothing says "Hoo-ston, we have a problem" like the brass getting all super-intense at the end of "Capsule in Space."



On Monday: A Bond song written from the point of view of one of Bond's most insidious villains. Which villain? If you guessed chlamydia, close, but no cigar.

7 Days 'Til 007: "007"

You know his name. You know his steez. Now get to know his jams. It's time to kick off a countdown to the American release of Skyfall, the latest official Bond installment (it's also a movie that had some trouble getting off the ground, which led to Stephen Colbert posting the following funny tweet: "The latest Bond movie has been put on hold for financial troubles. If only they had a shoe that turned into $30 million"). Each weekday until November 9, enjoy a post about a standout vocal theme or instrumental piece from the official Bond movies.

I love how John Barry's secondary theme for the Bond character--not the theme by Monty Norman that producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman hired Barry to tweak and arrange, and what a disaster that tune turned out to be--opens with seven drum beats as a nod to Bond's double-oh section number and then repeats those notes until the end. "007" first appeared in From Russia with Love (it accompanied the gypsy camp gunfight sequence and Bond's theft of the Lektor device) and was featured in four other Bond movies (thanks for the scene details, Wikipedia and 007 wikis!).

Thunderball: "007" accompanied the parade chase scene and the sluggish-as-hell underwater battle between buttloads of agents (on the film's expanded soundtrack album, the underwater mayhem cue is part of Track 17, and you can hear Track 17 during "AFOS Prime" on A Fistful of Soundtracks).
You Only Live Twice: The theme resurfaced when Bond piloted the mini-copter known as "Little Nellie."
Diamonds Are Forever: Check out the theme when the Sean Connery-era Bond takes on Blofeld one last time on an oil rig off the coast of Baja California.
Moonraker: After an eight-year absence, "007" resurfaced during the Amazon river chase. The theme was never again used in the series.

Not even David Arnold, a huge fan of Barry's music, re-used "007" in his Barry-influenced scores for the later Bond installments. Instead, he opted for Barry's "James Bond Is Back" fanfare from the From Russia with Love main titles and of course, "The James Bond Theme." Tor Books blog contributor Ryan Britt wonders why "007," one of his favorite tunes in the series, hasn't been used since Moonraker. He says, "It’s more heroic than 'The James Bond Theme,' and when it’s used in subsequent [post-From Russia with Love] movies, I get chills."

"007" is '60s action scoring at its classiest. The composition suggests what North by Northwest--a major influence on From Russia with Love--would have sounded like if Barry scored that film and brought his jazzy flair to the chase scenes.

Hold your breath and count to 10 as Skyfall covers "AFOS Prime"

Beginning today, A Fistful of Soundtracks is streaming selections from Thomas Newman's score to the new Bond movie Skyfall--as well as the Skyfall theme song performed by Adele and produced by her "Rolling in the Deep" collaborator Paul Epworth--during the "AFOS Prime" and "New Cue Revue" blocks. The score album doesn't drop until November 6. The film doesn't come out until November 9 here in America (England, of course, gets dibs on the film this Friday before we do--those limey bastards).

I'm more of a fan of the 007 music than the movies themselves, although I love the more grounded and gritty direction the series has taken ever since Daniel Craig's Bond had that messy, nearly Dan-vs.-the-Captain-like fight with his first kill in the men's room. As someone who digs that John Barry/David Arnold Bond sound, I knew Adele's "Skyfall" would be a good Bond song right when I started hearing a guitarist strum the first four notes of the Monty Norman-penned (and Barry-arranged) "James Bond Theme" at exactly one minute into Adele's single. That's something that's hugely lacking from Madonna's "Die Another Day" (or a much worse track, Rita Coolidge's yacht-rock-y "All Time High" from Octopussy, not exactly one of Barry's finest musical moments) but is present in Adele's tune: an appreciation for the Bond series' storied musical past.

As for the score by Newman, who has regularly worked with Skyfall director Sam Mendes since American Beauty (except for Away We Go) and isn't the first person who comes to mind when I think "action movie composer," it's exactly how I imagined a 007 score by Newman to be: not as flashy-sounding as Arnold's 007 scores and more heavy on percussion than brass, which Arnold's scores were awash in. Newman came up with clever ways to work in bits and pieces of Norman's "James Bond Theme" throughout his score. "She's Mine," one of the Skyfall tracks I've added to rotation, expands upon the old Norman melody with stunning results.

Meanwhile, I'm hard at work on upgrading AFOS from mono to stereo after 10 years of the station being in mono, a format I chose over stereo in order to be able to carry more than 50 hours of music. Since October 1, I've been going through the AFOS music library and re-converting five station playlist tracks per day, this time into stereo mp3s instead of into mono mp3s. The slightly bigger file sizes will mean less music in the library, but far better sound quality. It's time for an upgrade. I've penciled in January 1 as the date of the station's conversion from mono to stereo because by then, I'll have enough tracks to fill several hours, but I wish the upgrade would begin tomorrow, so that tunes like "Skyfall" don't have to sound kind of tinny anymore.

March Madness March of the Day: "Space March" from You Only Live Twice by John Barry

"Space March," which perfectly captures both the mystique and danger of space and is introduced in the You Only Live Twice score cue "Capsule in Space," is one of the best themes written by the late John Barry for the 007 films. Too bad "Space March" originated from a 007 installment that's full of nonsensical plot holes and is often as listless as the constantly bored look on the face of Sean Connery as the least convincing white-guy-disguised-as-a-Japanese-guy ever. Connery became increasingly tired of the Bond franchise and the media circus surrounding it, and his misery is evident on his face during You Only Live Twice, which was loosely adapted from Ian Fleming's novel of the same name by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author Roald Dahl, but you wouldn't have been able to tell Dahl worked on it because of the formulaic and lazily (re?-)written end result.

Later 007 installments like The Living Daylights and the 2006 Casino Royale make You Only Live Twice look as exciting as a bingo game. These 007 films got less interesting the further they drifted from their spy thriller roots and became more about spectacle (although that volcano lair, invaded by a ninja army in the film's most badass shot, is vintage Bond set design at its most imaginative).

But as usual, Barry's gorgeous score is a saving grace, particularly during "Space March" and the love theme "Mountains and Sunsets" (Barry captured Japanese sounds--or as most white soundtrack album reviewers prefer to say because their descriptions of us Asian people or Asian things are frozen in 1962, "Oriental sounds"--more skillfully than most non-Japanese film and TV composers). The score helps keep You Only Live Twice from dying on-screen.