In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Nate Patrin’s book The Needle and the Lens is a fascinating exploration of the convergence of film and modern music from one of our most talented critics.
Michaelangelo Matos wrote of the book:
“Music writing and film writing are seldom as accessible and as rigorous as they are in Nate Patrin’s The Needle and the Lens—never mind in the same package and carrying the same weight. As he persuasively argues from first example to last, cinema after rock has often used existing recordings to ends that transform both, in terms cinematic and real-world alike. This sharp, humane book’s gift is in never losing sight, or focus, of either.”
Earlier this year during Oscar season, Ann Powers came up with the proposal an award category I wholeheartedly support: Best Adapted Song. This is a subject I’ve been fascinated with for a long time, dating at least back to a perfectly-timed viewing of Pulp Fiction as a formative experience with potential cinephilia during my senior year of high school — one that just so happened to intersect with my teenage music-obsessive mode. So thanks to the films of Quentin Tarantino — and Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, and Martin Scorsese — I wound up spending my formative late teens and early twenties finding a lot of revelations through their soundtracks. They led me to discover a lot of music that wasn’t on Top 40 or classic rock radio, hear songs I’d already been familiar with in new ways, and start forming these bonds with films that felt almost inextricable from what excited me about music. It’s such a strong symbiotic relationship that it almost seems obvious in a lot of ways, but beyond that it’s pretty wild how many odd juxtapositions and unlikely intersections a well-timed needle drop can create.
Nilsson, “Jump Into the Fire”
Martin Scorsese doesn’t have a dedicated chapter in my book, but he’s sort of the patron saint of this whole exercise because he’s one of the best to ever do it in terms of needle drops. Goodfellas is where he peaked in those terms, and though it’s been picked apart a lot already, I’m still perpetually amazed at the way that the May 11, 1980 sequence was put together because Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker put together something that was the closest any movie’s suite of adapted songs ever got to feeling like a really good DJ set. The whole sequence cuts and mixes and transitions and doubles back for maximum impact, instead of just letting the songs play out and putting some breathing room between them. So yeah, there’s a lot of people out there who will hear that Herbie Flowers bassline and not only immediately imagine Ray Liotta watching out for helicopters, but also hold the connection between the Nilsson song and Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy” and the Who’s “Magic Bus” and George Harrison’s “What Is Life.” The classic rock radio I listened to and the Rolling Stone guides I read as a kid in the ’80s tried to tell me that all this stuff recorded before I was born was important, but this was one surefire way to actually make it feel alive.
The Trammps, “Disco Inferno”
The funny thing about the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever becoming the biggest-selling disco album of all time is that it was already kind of dated by the end of 1977. The Bee Gees songs were classics, but the rest of the music in the film feels more like disco’s past than its future. By the time it came out, Donna Summer’s Giorgio Moroder-produced synthpop/techno prototype “I Feel Love” and Chic’s fashionable, chops-heavy debut LP were already shifting the tides, so all the reliance on circa-’75-’76 hits by KC & the Sunshine Band and Kool & the Gang made it feel just slightly behind the curve. Still, that just makes it a strong document of disco’s transitional phase from nightclub phenomenon to (briefly) world-conquering lifestyle juggernaut, and I like to think that putting two big Philly Soul classics in there — especially “Disco Inferno,” which sounds like a familiar set of genre signifiers after 30 seconds and the divine holy truth by the six-minute mark — the folks at RSO knew well enough to acknowledge the roots. And since Earl Young pretty much invented the style of drumming that would keep dance clubs moving for the next 50 years, he and his MFSB cohort deserved as many residuals as they could get.
Run-D.M.C., “King of Rock”
Krush Groove is kind of a frustrating film because I wanted it to be a fun glimpse into the moment where hip-hop finally transitioned from the disco-rap old-school era into wider mainstream success — especially since the group that made rap a platinum-album genre was central to it. But aside from the musical sequences, the plot is kind of corny and unfocused; it’s sort of a mild low-stakes crime drama in some scenes and a wacky Fat Boys comedy vehicle in others, and the two sides don’t entirely click. I think what bugged me about it the most, though, was how its Hollywood version just failed to jibe with the real world, and that stuck out the most to me in the opening scene. “King of Rock” is presented as the co-production of the film’s Russell Simmons-in-all-but-name protagonist alongside Rick Rubin as himself, which kind of grates if you know how important Larry Smith’s rock-crossover ideas were for the group and how underheralded he’s been as an influence on hip-hop in general. And at the risk of wandering into CinemaSins-ish pedantry, it’s just a bit jarring to hear “King of Rock” positioned in a film as the song that might get these struggling young artists their big break when you know they’d actually performed it a few months earlier in front of tens of thousands of people at Live Aid. Still, anything that makes me long for a deeper look into the origins and the working process of such a crucial group like Run-D.M.C. has a value in itself, and from the perspective of 1985, getting otherwise unwary moviegoers to realize how great this music actually was made it worthwhile in the end.
The Crystals, “He’s A Rebel”
One of the trickiest things about writing this book was trying to find a place to start — films had already started using adapted pop songs for a while (i.e. “Rock Around the Clock” in Blackboard Jungle) before I landed on an instance where it seemed transcendent enough to put some attention towards. But Scorpio Rising is really one of those works that broke open all the possibilities: its soundtrack is the only audio in the entire film, which makes the whole thing feel like an advanced form of music video released back when even Scopitones hadn’t fully caught on in the States yet. And juxtaposing all these post-Elvis/pre-Beatles songs from a moment where the best pop music sounded like it was driven by the desire of young women with this intensely butch homoerotic gaze and this mystical, almost morbid delve into sin and subversion still holds an incredible charge — not just as a potentially ironic counterpoint, but in a way that actually captures and parallels the sense of desire in the music. Plus it’s pretty funny to imagine “He’s A Rebel” being about Jesus Christ — no wonder it blew Scorsese’s mind when he was a film student.
College ft. Electric Youth, “A Real Hero”
There’s something simultaneously compelling and irritating about ’80s nostalgia for me. It’s a time I remember hazily from an often-unhappy childhood, and while I love a lot of the aesthetics of some of the pop culture of the time — I lived in Minneapolis during peak Prince/Jam-Lewis, for one thing — I still feel a disconnect when media tries to depict any moment in time as being a lot cooler and happier and more innocent than I actually experienced it. But if we’re going to be stuck with ’80s nostalgia for a while — it feels like it’s been a thing for twice the length of the decade itself at this point — at least it’s worth looking into what can actually make it resonate. And in examining the effect that Drive had on the whole synthwave movement and aesthetic I wound up working my way through a lineage of music, from electroclash to French Touch to synthwave, that felt a lot more eclectic and strange than the teal-and-pink-neon-palm-tree cliches it’s often subjected to. Maybe it’s the difference between trying to Sound Like the ’80s and using ’80s technology and songwriting tropes to create something more transcendent, and “A Real Hero” falls in that latter category for me just because it actually feels more like an abstraction of the era’s vibe than a desperate, reference-choked hey, remember this???-driven attempt to recreate it.
Steppenwolf, “The Pusher”
The thing that trips me up about what a huge success Easy Rider was in paving the road for New Hollywood in the ’70s is that it hit right as the state of the counterculture was starting to look pretty fraught. A lot of kids who went hippie in the ’67 Summer of Love were becoming junkies two years later, Nixon’s law-and-order right-wing backlash played off older generations’ fears that their kids were losing their minds, and within a year of the movie’s release anti-war protestors would be shot and killed on the Kent State campus and beaten in the streets of New York by construction workers. (And that’s before you even get into the whole Manson Family situation.) Maybe that’s why I feel like “The Pusher” is a better Steppenwolf song to represent this film than “Born to Be Wild,” and not just because the latter song has been sadly reduced to a Wild Hogs midlife-crisis cliche thanks to every mediocre comedy (and one truly great one, Lost in America) using it for a needle drop punchline. It’s because “The Pusher” feels bleak in a way that evokes the approaching comedown of the ’70s more than the fading idealism of the ’60s, the moment where you could see all these people you care about — whether you personally knew them or not — all finding out that their dreams of an uninhibited freedom have disintegrated into a horrifying trap.
Jimmy Cliff, “Many Rivers to Cross”
I must have heard the soundtrack to The Harder They Come about 200 times before actually seeing the movie itself. And when I did, I was struck with one of the strangest instances of subtle fourth-wall wobbling I’ve ever seen in a film. Pre-existing examples of Jimmy Cliff’s music run all throughout this film as non-diegetic commentary, but Jimmy Cliff plays a fictional character who just so happens to look and sing exactly like Jimmy Cliff. So we go on to watch Ivan sing and record a new Jimmy Cliff song — the one that gives the film its title — and then, as he becomes an outlaw participating in the marijuana trade, we witness a moment where Jimmy Cliff-as-Ivan is doing business while Jimmy Cliff-as-Jimmy Cliff song “You Can Get It If You Really Want” plays on the radio. We don’t see Cliff-as-Ivan recording this song sung in his literal actual voice — it’s introduced in the film before Ivan even steps foot in a recording studio — so where does it come from? And it doesn’t just feel like a funny little paradox: “Many Rivers to Cross” was inspired by Cliff’s experiences with racism and alienation during his time trying to break through as a singer in England, but in the film it soundtracks a different struggle, a naive youth from the Jamaican countryside finding it difficult to adapt to a city life in Kingston where cash and connections prove to be even bigger barriers than prejudice. So a song with deep autobiographical and emotional resonance for the man who wrote and sang it hits different when it seems like it’s soundtracking a version of himself he didn’t become — but, in unluckier circumstances, just might have.
Roy Orbison, “In Dreams”
Of all the things you could say about the way Dean Stockwell absolutely repossesses this song in Blue Velvet (with a crucial assist from Dennis Hopper), I think one of the most powerful things it accomplishes is recalibrating what a supposedly urbane and savvy audience might consider “schmaltz.” I don’t exactly remember what my opinion of Orbison’s music was before I saw Blue Velvet, but I probably would’ve considered it kind of corny or old-timey in the usual teenage-dumbass way I regarded anything that didn’t rock out or kick ass or whatever. Then David Lynch found a way to make his music sound more ominous than Black Sabbath, and it all clicked into place — oh, this is emotional young-love pop opera and it’s astounding. It’s also pretty fascinating how Orbison was absolutely repelled by the way the film used it at first, only to come around and realize how effective it was just because he was something of a movie buff. Then Lynch wound up helping revive his career — not just for the soundtrack placement, but out of his efforts to get his music preserved — and while I’m not sure how directly responsible Blue Velvet might have been for the existence of the Traveling Wilburys, it’s a pretty strange connection to consider.
The Doors, “The End”
I like to think of the Doors as the coolest uncool band there is — most people my age and younger think they’re somewhere between kind of silly and contemptibly pretentious, but their first two albums are great, L.A. Woman has some jams, and they were weird in risky, messy ways that get kind of overlooked because their successors in goth and punk were just a bit weirder and more critically revered. I’m almost positive they’re the first rock band to ever get called “gothic,” too, in a Williams College News newspaper headline in 1967, so I feel like they’ll always have at least a little cachet there. But it’s funny how all these moments converged in the late ’70s and early ’80s to make The Doors trendy again after Jim Morrison had been dead nearly a decade — the posthumous An American Prayer semi-reunion LP dropped in ’78, and the platinum-selling Greatest Hits, the bio No One Here Gets Out Alive, and Ray Manzarek’s gig producing X’s Los Angeles in 1980 all feel inextricably tied in to the way Apocalypse Now used their music. Francis Ford Coppola hung out with them in the mid ’60s when they were still film students, so in some ways it’s pretty fascinating that he found out the ideal opening for his notoriously embattled production-fiasco epic just by regrouping and listening to this song his old college buddies recorded. It’s a pretty great gag on his part — “what if I opened a film with a song titled ‘The End'” — but it also gave us one of the most disquieting opening sequences in the entire New Hollywood filmography and soundtracked one of its most harrowing climaxes. Not bad for a band led by what Lester Bangs called a Bozo Dionysus.
Dinah Washington, “This Bitter Earth”
Killer of Sheep is one of my favorite films, period, but especially in terms of music, because its soundtrack speaks to a kind of intergenerational, almost familial bond that cares less about where it fits in this point in time, and more about how much weight a piece of music can hold when you’ve lived with it for so long. It’s a film that was shot and takes place in the ’70s, but there’s only one real recognizably Seventies song in the film, Earth Wind and Fire’s “Reasons,” and the character who’s listening to it and singing along to it is a little girl. Most of the rest of the soundtrack comes from the ’50s and ’60s, the kind of music that the film’s protagonist in his early thirties likely remembers from a childhood that continues to haunt him. And it’s also a strange case where a rights issue inadvertently seems to change the tenor of a film: in the original version of Killer of Sheep, we only hear “This Bitter Earth” ones, soundtracking the scene where the protagonist Stan — who works in a slaughterhouse and has a tough time not just making ends meet but keeping his spirits — attempts to fight off his sense of ennui by slow dancing with his wife, but just leaves her feeling heartbroken afterwards because of how distant he seems. But since they couldn’t secure the rights to “Unforgettable,” the original Dinah Washington song used for the closing scene, every restoration of the film uses “This Bitter Earth” as a reprise as we watch Stan at work leading sheep to the slaughter and still clearly carrying the weight of his unhappiness. It’s a juxtaposition that didn’t exist before, all because the people who held the rights to Irving Gordon’s songwriting catalogue didn’t want to play ball.
Nate Patrin is a longtime music critic whose writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including Pitchfork, Stereogum, Spin, Bandcamp Daily, Red Bull Music Academy, and his hometown Twin Cities’ late alt-weekly City Pages. His first book, Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop (Minnesota, 2020), was named a Best Music Book of 2020 by Kirkus and Rolling Stone.