Sunday, October 31, 2010

Reality Bites Soundtrack

The Reality Bites soundtrack was the accompanying collection of mostly shit songs that provided a musical sound-scape to a mostly shit movie. You remember the one- Ben Stiller is a pussy, Winona Rider is a flaky slut, Janeane Garofalo is an even bigger slut, Ethan Hawke is a greasy douchebag, Steve Zhan makes you wonder how the fuck he even got casted...its painfully obvious now that the word "Reality" was included in the title for a reason. To paraphrase, slacker meets girl, girl meets go-getter, slut has Aids scare, gay friend wrestles with coming out, slacker humps and dumps, go-getter marginalizes and commercializes girl's art, blah, blah, blah. Its has its moments in a Dave Pirner cameo (he was banging Winona at the time, can you believe it?) and David Spade/Andy Dick appearances as well. I think there was this sort of novelty at the time that allowed these really trite caricatures to be manufactured, packaged and sold right back to the people they were meant to resemble. It became especially formulaic for romantic drama's with culturally relevant soundtracks a la "Singles" and such to start popping up. In retrospect, they're complete dreck and only exaggerate the whole "angsty-slacker-grunge-greasy hair-flannel-combat boot-coffee shop-jaded dickhole" mythos.....but I digress.

In Hollywood's great tradition of "only getting it half-right", this soundtrack was no exception. The record runs the gambit from "pretty alright" (Dinosaur Jr and New Order) to plain fucking awful (Big Mountain and Ethan Hawke's laughable performance). Yeah, Yeah, we all know Lisa Loeb's "Stay" and that insufferable "My Sharona" song, but folks, there's a special place in hell for a host of musical villainy that collectively called itself Big Mountain. For those of you that follow this blog (all three of you....I see your names when I sign in, you sad fucking creatures) I reserve an unprecedented amount of hatred and abhorrence for what is known as "dumb white guy reggae". Sublime and 311 are capital offenders, but it doesn't get any whiter or dumber than Big White Dumb Fucking Mountain. You know what, wasting the time to type three pages of analysis on why these drug-rug adorned dong-huffers were worse than the Nazis probably can't come close to the evidence exhibited in the video below. I know I went kinda off the rails here on this one, but take a look for yourself as these buffoons shit all over that bombaclot Peter Frampton. May Jah have mercy on your souls.



Unfortunately, this is all Youtube will let me post. Apparently, The Knack are super concerned about copyright violations....

-Phillip