The Sound and the Fury

Music. Much like paintings, a single song can conjure up different emotions and images for a vast amount of people.

I'm laughing at clouds.
So dark up above
The sun's in my heart
And I'm ready for love.

For instance, my mom associates the classic song Singin' in the Rain with Gene Kelly, cheerfully tap dancing his way through a rainy cobblestone street, partnering with lampposts and creating sunshine with his voice. For me, the mere mention of the song title Singing in the Rain invokes the unwelcome mental image of Malcolm McDowell in plague mask and freakishly oversized codpiece prancing around the living room of a house he's just broken into, snipping anatomically select holes in the red jumpsuit of the home owner's wife as he merrily belts out his tune. And then rapes the holy shit out of her while her husband is forced to watch. Yeah, I can't hear Singin' in the Rain anymore without feeling all of the caustic fluids in my gastrointestinal tract start to churn sourly, worming their way up my alimentary canal, threatening to hurl themselves projectile from my body in a hot jet of half digested microwave burritos and Cosmic Brownies unless I turn the radio/TV off ASAP.

There's something infinitely awful about songs of innocence and wonder, written by happy-go-lucky lads and lassies in chipper moods, and then used as a backdrop for something ugly and devastating. It forever alters the song for me, and I can no longer hear it without making that unpleasant association.

It's not too hard to figure out, you see it every day
And those that were the farthest out have gone the other way
You see them on the freeway, it don't look like a lot of fun
But don't you try to fight it, an idea whose time has come
Don't tell me that I'm crazy.

Like Huey Lewis's bouncy, quirky little ditty Hip to be Square. It's a silly, stupid little slice of pop cheese, but harmless enough, self deprecating enough to make even the most cynical goth crack a ghost of a smile.  I was never a huge Huey fan, but the song never annoyed me to the point of wanting to stick the author's face deep into a vat of french fry medium. (However, Steve Miller is still on my shit list for The Joker, a song that rubs against my nerve endings like cat claws down a chalkboard.)

But then here come an unnervingly Tom Cruise-esque Christian Bale, with his frisky little white boy dance in his sleek, see-through rain coat and chrome axe so flawlessly shiny and pretty that he could almost drive it to work. And suddenly, Hip to be Square becomes a vicious, meat-cleaving, arterial slicing, high-pitched murder screaming anthem for fastidious serial killers everywhere. Whenever I go over to a guys place, and I see a single Huey Lewis CD on their rack, I'm the fuck out, date over.

Yes, I'm stuck in the middle with you,
And I'm wondering what it is I should do
It's so hard to keep this smile from my face,
Losing control, and I'm all over the place

Some songs just float quietly through the years and decades, familiar as an old flannel shirt in the back of the closet. You don't own the album and probably wouldn't be able to name the band for 50 points on trivia night, but when it comes on the radio you can sing along with it and know the tune by heart. The 70s were stuffed full of songs like that, one hit throwaway wonders by bands that broke up 30 years ago and were never heard from again. I mean, how many people would know who the fuck I was talking about if I said Stealer's Wheel? *crickets* Yeah, now what if I said "Remember that song that Michael Madsen was dancing around to when he cut off that cop's ear in Reservoir Dogs?"

Histories of ages past
Hung in light and shadows cast
Down through all eternity
The crying of humanity

Or hey, how about Donovan? Remember him? Groovy, delicate featured Scotsman with love in his eyes and flowers in his hair? Wrote a sweet little song about a magical man spreading love and enlightenment through the land. It's a hypnotic, psychedelic little kaleidoscope of a song with a pinch of Hindu spice, weaving stars and flowers out of midair. It also makes a great soundtrack for a slo-mo murder in David Fincher's Zodiac. The Hurdy Gurdy Man of the song's title, originally intended as a wise and loving yogi, is now the Boogeyman, pumping bullets into a parked car and watching as flesh shears away, arteries explode and blood droplets careen through the air to impact upon the interior like thick tears, all in hyper vivid slow motion so you don't miss a single thing. Happiness and peace and the innocence of the 60s suddenly becomes dark and sinister, and you will never again hear Hurdy Gurdy Man without thinking of shadows, muzzle flashes and death.

Oh, won't you come with me
And take my hand?
Oh, won't you come with me
And walk this land?
Please take my hand.

Speaking of the groovy sixties, remember Iron Butterfly? They were the precursor to Led Zeppelin, heavy and funky and trippy, and acid rock anthem about love and lands of milk and honey which nevertheless would appeal to a serious group of headbangers. Their one hit song In A Gadda Da Vida is a straightforward love song, but its bottom heavy thump makes it a dark and serious dirge, a profession of love sung perhaps by a disturbed man who is considering taking up stalking. It just needs the slightest push to send it over the edge from Rockin' Love Ballad to Head Slamming Serious Heavy Metal Threat, and that push comes in the form of Francis Dollarhyde, aka Tom Noonan, aka The Red Dragon killer of the film Manhunter, an 80s neo Noir thriller about an obsessed cop, a manboy maniac and a dragon tattoo that is not on a girl. Francis, the films killer, descends into his final abyss of insanity to the tune of In A Gadda Da Vida, and you just know that the survivors of his last rampage will always associate that particular song with Hell Itself.

Came the last night of sadness
And it was clear she couldn't go on...

And hey, nothing says "This is your last night on Earth, and soon you will die at the hands of a crazed maniac" like a song entitled "Don't Fear the Reaper", a bleak and nihilistic 70s epic which chronicles the inevitability of death, which has no regard for age or innocence. So when Jamie Lee Curtis climbs into Nancy Loomis' (Kyes) aircraft carrier sized car about half an hour into the film, and pot is smoked as the daylight wanes, and the news that someone has broken into a hardware store and stolen ropes and knives sails right over their marijuana soaked skulls, and Blue Oyster Cult's biggest hit "Don't Fear the Reaper" plays endlessly on the car radio between them...yeah, they're fucked. May as well have T-shirts made up for the two of them which read "Victim #1" and "Final Girl." That's how fucked they are.

(and no, I'm not commenting on fevers or cowbells - deal with it)

No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue
I could not foresee this thing happening to you.

And last but not least, that one goddamned song that dances around your head for days and flits away before you can fully identify it. It's like a fruit fly in the soupiest heat of July: buzzing right in your face, refusing to be waved away, divebombing you every five fucking seconds and you just know the goddamned thing is laughing at you mockingly at a sound level just out of range of your pathetic human ears. You never really see it - maybe a blackish blurry dot dancing at the edge of your vision. You slap at the air and curse loudly and everyone looks at you like maybe you've lost the last speck of your sanity and you're about to flip all the way the fuck out and go totally postal. Yeah, there are songs like that - snatches of lyric, familiar riffs that loop in your subconscious, and if you don't remember what the fuck the name of that goddamned song is pretty fucking soon, you are going to kill everyone within a five mile radius.

In Kevin Bacon's case, it's The Rolling Stones Paint It Black, a song about untimely death and the grief that accompanies it. It's a perfect choice for Stir Of Echoes, a movie which got lost in the shadow of the vastly more popular but seriously inferior ghost flick The Sixth Sense. The name of the song and its connection to the ghost of a murdered girl elude Bacon, and it's a dilemma we can identify with, with or without the murdered ghost girl part.