So a couple of weeks ago I found myself watching the new Philip K. Dick-inspired movie, The Adjustment Bureau a charming little sci-fi love story designed to feed both the romantic and the paranoiac in you. As it is classified in some quarters as a thriller, I’m not giving too much away by saying that there is a chase scene, albeit one without cars flying all over the place and colliding and exploding like some obscene anthropomorphic Pixar orgy. Instead, it involves mysterious men in coats and hats running through secret doors in a sprawling city, while the Adam Freeland extended mix of Fever as performed by Sarah Vaughan thumps through the theater sound system.
It’s a nifty little scene, actually, and it reminded me that there is a right soundtrack for practically everything in movies and, especially these days, almost everything in life. For example, last February, my editor asked me to whip up a foolproof make-out playlist, for various reasons:
1) to soundtrack the wild and frequent makeout parties held during “overtime” here at the Young Star offices (to which I am not invited, but they let me watch the footage afterwards in lieu of paying me for this column);
2) for the benefit of my faithful readers, who needed background music to accompany the sound of the sobs wracking their bodies as they stayed home dateless on Valentine’s; and
3) his own nefarious purposes, which may or may not involve livestock and Vaseline, and will not be detailed here.
To be honest, I’ve been thinking in terms of soundtracks almost since birth. My childhood meanderings are set to Vince Guaraldi jazz, à la Peanuts cartoons, as well as the Highlander soundtrack by Queen (I often nurtured grandiose revenge fantasies involving the spectacular decapitation of people I disliked). My high school years have mopey, Melody Maker-approved British bands playing in the background, with the occasional Rickroll or burst of movie-based hip-hop. In college, the Sundays and the Spinanes and Prefab Sprout and XTC accompanied my rampant pointlessness and hilarious attempts at connection. And in the working world, I would have everything from the Decemberists to Daft Punk (and, on some early mornings, Slayer) playing over my commutes and too-early mornings in the office.
There are a lot more, of course: different soundtracks for different days, even different hours in the same day. Last March 8, I attended the launch of award-winning, bestselling writer (and writing coach) Tweet Sering’s second book, a nonfiction opus called Astigirl (“A Grown Girl Living On Her Own Terms”). At the launch, Tweet had six women a Jungian psychotherapist, a yoga teacher, the founder of Leyende (an organic beauty product company), the founder of Center for Possibilities (a non-profit organization for children with special needs and their families), a safe sex advocate and educator, and the founder of Messy Bessy (a non-toxic line of cleaning products) do short talks, to share some of their ideas and hard-won wisdom.
It was the kind of inspiring event that, were I to music-video it in my head, would be soundtracked by Le Tigre, or the Pretenders, or just-before-disbanding Narda, or certain songs by Aimee Mann or Garbage or Drip. But really, there’s no shortage of possible soundtracks; a search for “female empowerment anthem” turns up 46,000 results on Google. (The book is honest and funny and beautifully made, by the way; read more at astigirl.blogspot.com).
Sometimes soundtracks insinuate themselves unbidden; I’m reading Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock now, and I somehow cannot keep that Morrissey song that name-checks the characters (“Dallow, Spicer, Pinkie Cubitt”) out of my head. And then there are times in life, as in movies that the best background is an absence of music, as when I took a recent midnight ride to Baguio on a thankfully darkened and silent bus and ideas rushed by like signposts and my MP3 player sat in my lap unactivated.
Personal music devices have made it possible for us to literally have a soundtrack for our lives, and in many cases that’s a good thing it helps boring hours fly by faster, it aids our exercising, it gives us a little extra swagger when we need it as long as we remember that our lives aren’t music videos, and that very few things, whether you’re talking about love, life decisions or livestock, can be wrapped up in the running time of a song.