Illustration by Andreas Hykade. Courtesy of Chris Robinson.

In general, music today is a piece of shit as r its anoiac listeners. The Top 40 has always been a stinking pile of fumosities, but there was a time when you could find The Kinks, The Who, Big Joe Turner and other semi-legitimate musicians. Today, it's a combination of blatantly manufactured boy/girl groups or a sad series of minstrels disguised as genuine reps of black urban experience. Bull cud, all of it.

Naturally (naturally because corporations have horizontal integration now --owning film studios, music labels, television stations), music in film, and specifically animation, reflects the cud quality of the Top 40. In fact, music has become the canned laughter of movies today. Movie music has always been pretty bad except when used properly as either diagetic material (part of the mise-en-scene) or as an integral component of the film that set a tone or mood without overdoing it (e.g. Warner Bros., UPA or John Hubley). Today, music is in a sense the motherboard of most movies. It doesn't just suggest a tone or mood; it pinpoints EXACTLY how you should be responding to a scene. Hey maybe U enjoy this. Not me. When I go to a movie I would like to have the option of figuring it for myself. I don't need to be told when I should laugh, cry, hurt, shit and sigh. It's bad enough that I have to endure this canned laughter nonsense on television. "Umm...just in case you forget, we're hoping you'll laugh right about here." It drives me INSANE. Needless to say (but I will), the music produced in film is the sort of bad noise (there is GOOD noise) you're gonna be listening to in the 7th circle of hell alongside that toe-tapping Riverdance asshole.

But hey forget about me; think about yourselves. Movie music is the BIGGEST slap in YOUR mug. Soundtracks are not only telling you that you are stupid, but they are also controlling your reaction to their product. There's a long line of suckers who, moved to tears by a Stink song in Emperor's New Groove, rush out to the nearest mall and pick up the soundtrack in order to recreate that plastic feeling they thought they felt in the theatre.