Extract
Simon Reynolds
Sonic Fiction
I can remember my memory clearly – the original memory, the false one. My favourite scene in Star Wars is the shady bar, known to buffs as Cantina, in the ‘pirate city’ of Mos Eisley. Entering this den of intergalactic lowlife, Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi meet and hire Han Solo and Chewbacca to fly them off the planet Tatooine. I saw the movie as a 13-year-old when it first came out in 1977 and was captivated by the bar band of dome-headed, insect-eyed aliens who played freaky-sounding music on futuristic-looking instruments.
Catching the movie again on television as a grown-up some years ago (but prior to its reconfiguration as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) I was gobsmacked to realise that the music I’d remembered as so out-there was in fact positively musty with old-timey quaintness. No longer an impressionable teen but an adult with learned ears, I instantly recognised the alien music as pre-World War II jazz – Star Wars composer John Williams doubtless aiming to play upon our received associations of the Prohibition-era speakeasy as depicted in countless Hollywood gangster movies. As for the ‘weird’ instruments, they turned out on close inspection to be just superficially snazzed-up and plasticised versions of the saxophone, trumpet and clarinet.
Conceiving the piece, which he titled ‘Mad About Me’, Williams imagined ‘several creatures in a future century finding some 30s Benny Goodman swing band music . . . and how they might attempt to interpret it’. Watching the scene yet again for this article, I noticed that the music isn’t a completely retro reproduction antique. There’s a steel drum, of all things, bubbling in there as rhythm-pulse, and the bass line appears to be played on a synthesiser. But the essence of the tune is totally of a piece with the music you’d hear in a Woody Allen movie or indeed the gangster-spoofing nostalgia musical Bugsy Malone, released a year before Star Wars in 1976. It sounds archetypal to the point of seeming déjà entendu, plagiarised from something famous you can’t quite place. Williams’s lame attempt at futurising it imparts a fusion-tinged gloss which has the unfortunate effect of double-dating the music to the ’70s as well as the ’30s. It sounds like something Weather Report might have done at their absolute creative nadir . . . or worse, like Manhattan Transfer.
– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.
Catching the movie again on television as a grown-up some years ago (but prior to its reconfiguration as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) I was gobsmacked to realise that the music I’d remembered as so out-there was in fact positively musty with old-timey quaintness. No longer an impressionable teen but an adult with learned ears, I instantly recognised the alien music as pre-World War II jazz – Star Wars composer John Williams doubtless aiming to play upon our received associations of the Prohibition-era speakeasy as depicted in countless Hollywood gangster movies. As for the ‘weird’ instruments, they turned out on close inspection to be just superficially snazzed-up and plasticised versions of the saxophone, trumpet and clarinet.
Conceiving the piece, which he titled ‘Mad About Me’, Williams imagined ‘several creatures in a future century finding some 30s Benny Goodman swing band music . . . and how they might attempt to interpret it’. Watching the scene yet again for this article, I noticed that the music isn’t a completely retro reproduction antique. There’s a steel drum, of all things, bubbling in there as rhythm-pulse, and the bass line appears to be played on a synthesiser. But the essence of the tune is totally of a piece with the music you’d hear in a Woody Allen movie or indeed the gangster-spoofing nostalgia musical Bugsy Malone, released a year before Star Wars in 1976. It sounds archetypal to the point of seeming déjà entendu, plagiarised from something famous you can’t quite place. Williams’s lame attempt at futurising it imparts a fusion-tinged gloss which has the unfortunate effect of double-dating the music to the ’70s as well as the ’30s. It sounds like something Weather Report might have done at their absolute creative nadir . . . or worse, like Manhattan Transfer.
– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.
