"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Pulp, "Like a Friend"

On Monday, I began a series of weekday posts about each of the existing songs that are streamed during the "Rock Box" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks (4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays). Each post will provide info on a different track from the "Rock Box" playlist and point out the movie or TV series moment where the track is so effectively used. Sometimes, the post will be brief, and sometimes, it'll be long. Today, it's a long one.

Song: "Like a Friend" by Pulp
Released: 1998
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: This awesome track--written by Pulp and composer Patrick Doyle for the 1998 Great Expectations remake that Doyle also scored--showed up in The Venture Bros.' recent fourth-season finale "Operation P.R.O.M."
Which moment in "Operation P.R.O.M." does it appear?: It was the most effective use of an existing song on TV in 2010. I'm referring to the finale's closing montage, where the wildly funny animated series briefly hits pause on the comedy to deepen the character of badass SPHINX operative and former Venture family bodyguard Brock Samson, with the help of "Like a Friend." In less than four minutes, the sequence brings closure to both Brock's love/hate relationship with love interest and nemesis Molotov Cocktease and the season-long thread about Brock's self-imposed separation from the Ventures.

Artwork by Annie Wu (Photo source: Wu)

Alan Sepinwall, the biggest championer of NBC's cult show Chuck, once said he found The Venture Bros. to be unfunny (huh?) and unappealing. Of the two pop culture reference-heavy action comedies, which are both about losers who are trying to make sense of a crazy universe full of comic book supervillain-style adversaries who constantly want them dead, The Venture Bros. is clearly the more consistent and superior show. It's more willing to shake things up in its universe, like keeping Brock separated from the Ventures for most of the fourth season or having The Monarch's meek and flabby underling 21 gradually morph into a more capable, assertive and muscled henchman, yet still retain a bit of his previously buffoonish self when he continues to talk to his dead best friend 24 as if he's still alive. (As someone who often finds the Buy More hijinks on Chuck to be less entertaining than the spyjinks and thinks the Morgan character is better utilized in the latter because of Josh Gomez's chemistry with Adam Baldwin, I was hoping the destruction of the store at the end of last season would mean no more stories at that limited and increasingly tiresome setting. But that was not to be when the CIA rebuilt the Buy More this season.) Team Venture is also far less reliant on music montages than Chuck. Like The Wire, the animated series is aware that music montages have more of an impact when they're used sparingly.

Storytelling drawbacks aside, there's a lot to like about Chuck, but the more flawed and screwy characters in The Venture Bros. make Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer's creation a more interesting show. Chuck is ultimately about triumphing over cowardice and self-doubt to win both the girl of your dreams and the respect of the U.S. government (or the respect of the Buy More). It's a nerd's fantasy that presents how nerds would like to see themselves. That's not a bad thing, but it can also make for formulaic viewing (Chuck's current season has been an uneven one where I've found my attention wandering, despite whatever Yvonne Strahovski's almost wearing that week and the presence of Timothy Dalton, who has to be the show's greatest casting coup so far). Meanwhile, The Venture Bros. isn't concerned with triumph. It's about failure, the inability to impress or satisfy women and the difficulty of overcoming inner demons like cowardice, self-denial or unhealthy sexual appetites--in other words, it shows the ugly reality of how most nerds really are.

Okay, now I see why Sepinwall doesn't like The Venture Bros.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Run-DMC, "Rock Box"

Song: "Rock Box" by Run-DMC
Released: 1984
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: The tune that gave the AFOS non-score music block its new name--and remains one of the most effective examples of rap experimenting with hard-rock guitar licks--clearly left an impact on young Chris Rock. (It also happens to include his last name in the title. I wonder why he digs it so much.) The comedian and Prince Paul sampled "Rock Box" in their 1997 Diddy parody "Champagne"--which was where I was first exposed to "Rock Box"--and then Rock and Everybody Hates Chris showrunner Ali LeRoi later got both Rock's younger self (Tyler James Williams) and special guest star Jason Alexander to lip-synch and quasi-air-guitar to the Run-DMC classic in a highlight of the 2007 "Everybody Hates Snow Day" episode of Chris. Most gamers may know "Rock Box" best from its appearance during Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

Hear why Calvin Klein's no friend of Run's.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: The Crystal Method, "Starting Over"

This is the first in a series of weekday posts about each of the existing songs that are streamed during AFOS' "F Zone" block, which is starting over today with a new name, "Rock Box" (4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays). Each post will provide info on a different track from the "Rock Box" playlist and point out the movie or TV series moment where the track is so effectively used. The series of posts will end when I run out of "Rock Box" songs to write about.

Song: "Starting Over" by The Crystal Method
Released: 2004
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's in the original CSI's 2004 "Dead Ringer" episode. The rousing track also turns up in Alias and Blade: Trinity.
Which moment in "Dead Ringer" does it appear?: It's in the pre-credits teaser at a nighttime relay race for cops where the CSIs are participating as runners, beautifully shot in the desert at night by cinematographer Nathan Hope.

The opening shot of runners and police escort vehicles emerging from the horizon, accompanied by the perfectly chosen opening electric piano riff of "Starting Over," is the ultimate example of Alan Sepinwall's description of CSI as "a snazzy-looking series, particularly in the way it picked up the baton from The X-Files in showing how much can be done with scenes set at night." A fan review of the episode at TV.com noted how the opening shot is "as stunning a bit of visual imagery as anything I've seen on network series TV. While you can always count on Jerry Bruckheimer's works to include plenty of nicely done location shots -- usually from the vantage point of a helicopter -- this night shot of the marathon runners was just amazing."

This is literally my "Rock Box"

I like to use shoeboxes to store the complete runs of three of my favorite comic book series--Y: The Last Man, Gotham Central and the Vertigo version of Human Target (Y ran for 60 issues, Gotham Central lasted for 40 and Human Target had 21, so the complete run of each title can easily fit in a shoebox). I also sometimes use shoeboxes as portable filing cabinets for CDs that have to be utilized for AFOS. One of these boxes contains the CDs that carry all the non-score music tracks (a.k.a. existing songs) I have to presently re-edit and re-upload to my Live365.com music library without the old AFOS "F Zone" sweepers they used to open with--all in time for the "F Zone" programming block's name change to "Rock Box" on January 3.

The time slots for "Rock Box" on AFOS are 4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays.

"Always funky fresh, could never be stale"--Run, "Rock Box"

New Year's Day means changes to AFOS programming

I'm renaming one of the AFOS programming blocks. Starting January 3, "The F Zone," which focuses on "needle drops" (non-original songs during films like High Fidelity and the Harold & Kumar series and shows like Breaking Bad and Community), becomes "Rock Box." The time slots for "Rock Box" are 4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays.

In November, I created a block called "New Cue Revue," which streams selections from new releases (or albums that aren't exactly new but are new to the "Assorted Fistful" playlist). It moves to Wednesdays at 10-11am and 4-5pm and Fridays at 11am-noon.

A new block called "The Street" will focus on my favorite kind of film or TV score album: the funky-sounding kind, the kind that gets frequently sampled by beatmakers. Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, David Holmes and newcomer Adrian Younge will get tons of airplay here. "The Street" airs on Mondays at 6-9am and noon-3pm, Tuesdays through Thursdays at 6-9am and 1-4pm and Fridays at 7-9am and 1-3pm.

The listeners who evaluate my playlists' tracks on Live365.com tend to give low star ratings to the funkier or more soulful-sounding ones. Live365 has listeners rate tracks because the site thinks this helps its station programmers decide which tracks to keep and which ones to get rid of. Well, it doesn't help this station programmer because I don't care about those listeners' ratings anyway. Every time someone on Live365 gives a track one and a half stars, it makes me want to find ways to stream it more often.

Whenever I upload a new track to one of my playlists, I always have to block my eyes from the ratings to keep myself from getting pissed off at a negative one. What the hell are those listeners doing hanging around AFOS anyway? I bet they want another StreamingSoundtracks or another Permanent Waves. AFOS is a little different from them. It streams certain subgenres of film or TV score music that those stations tend to ignore.

"The Street" is my three-hour middle finger to those people who give one and a half stars to classic tracks like "Pusherman." On Fridays, the block is two hours because my middle finger will get tired by the end of the week.