![\"volare\"](\"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/volare.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I don’t care who you are or what music you typically like, if Step Brothers<\/a> doesn’t make you fall in love with the song Por Ti Volar\u00e9 by Andrea Bocelli, there’s something wrong with you.<\/em><\/p>\n Aside from being a huge film buff, I\u2019m a huge music buff. Hell, I\u2019m just plain buff<\/i>. (25\/m\/nyc\/d&d free ;-* ). Basically though, there ain\u2019t a genre of movies or music where there ain\u2019t at least some stuff I dig. And that\u2019s the way things should<\/i> be. Who are these people who, for instance, \u2018don\u2019t like rap\u2019 or \u2018don\u2019t like horror\u2019 or whatever? How can anyone be so lazy? There\u2019s tons of different types of horror movies, tons of different types of rap. To write off an entire genre is just lame. It\u2019s 2013, people\u2014if you don\u2019t have eclectic taste, get the fuck outta here.<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n However, I can understand people not liking something if they don\u2019t have any context for it. If you\u2019ve never heard, for instance, reggae, hearing it for the first time will be a love it or hate it experience\u2014it either speaks to you or it doesn\u2019t. Its context is either hardwired inside you, a sleeping giant in your brain waiting to be woken by the right tones, or the context must be instilled. And to instill said context takes volition<\/i>\u2014it may necessitate listening to lots of different reggae artists, and various styles of reggae, and reading up on the history of the genre, until something clicks in your brain. Or, you could just fucking watch The Harder They Come<\/a>. Movies are basically the best goddamn way to fall in love with music. Hearing a song in the context of a film gives it weight. It doesn\u2019t even matter what song. Watch Spring Breakers<\/a> and tell me you don\u2019t fall in love with the Britney Spears song \u2018Everytime\u2019. I don\u2019t care if you\u2019re the toughest tough guy who ever toughed, if you enjoy the movie, you will enjoy\u00a0 the song. Contrast this with the fact that if you merely heard it randomly in your daily life and weren\u2019t a fan of that type of music, it\u2019d probably mean nothing to you. But surrounded by Harmony Korine\u2019s enchanting colors, and the context of a twisted story, it\u2019s the fucking shit.<\/i><\/p>\n All the best big name directors understand this phenomenon. Tarantino, Scorsese, Lynch, Gallo, Wes Anderson, P.T. Anderson, the list goes on. They choose the songs in their films very carefully from a wide array of genres, and utilize them in unexpected-yet-perfect ways which hugely enhance the experience. They\u2019re like DJ\u2019s in that way, carefully crafting the perfect order of songs, and constantly on the hunt for great overlooked gems that they can be the first to turn people on to (especially since the rights to deep cuts, and output by lesser-known artists, is often not as expensive).<\/p>\n Though Dick Dale\u2019s\u00a0Misirlou is now ubiquitous, before Pulp Fiction<\/a>, nobody really cared about it except fans of surf rock. Tarantino recognized its potential though, and knew that with the right context, it could be transcendent. He was right. Haters often accuse him of being a collage artist who \u2018merely\u2019 grabs from other art to make his own, but I see him more as a much-needed tastemaker.<\/p>\n The pop music industry is always focused on \u2018what\u2019s new\u2019, and focused on it in a very literal sense\u2014\u2019new\u2019 meaning \u2018hot off the presses\u2019. But nowadays, entertainment from all genres and decades is readily available on a scale that is unprecedented. What\u2019s hot off the presses is a lot less interesting when there\u2019s tons of undiscovered brilliance from times past that has yet to experience its due. In fact, the only people these days who care solely about music that is literally new are adolescents (because to them, anything \u2018old\u2019 is, by definition, lame). Everyone else, i.e., people with half a brain and an internet connection, would rather time travel.<\/p>\n Without guidance though, time traveling through the annals of art can be daunting. We need people like Tarantino to point us in the right direction. It\u2019s no surprise to me that he used to be a video store clerk. I was one myself many years ago, and a lot of that job really is just steering people towards their new favorite movie that they never would\u2019ve stumbled onto on their own. And though video stores have gone the way of the dodo, that service can still be found\u2014in fact, that\u2019s essentially what we do here at Smug Film.<\/p>\n This service will also forever be provided by film itself. Movies will always be able to turn us on to what\u2019s hot by way of referencing earlier ones through homage, or, through the aforementioned way of cleverly peppering in songs that either clearly or inexplicably gel with the story and the visuals, a powerful synthesis that brainwashes you into adoring anything, from the thrash metal band Powermad (Wild at Heart<\/a>) to singer Nico\u2019s grating-as-fuck voice (The Royal Tenenbaums<\/a>). <\/b>Art itself is the greatest and most powerful tastemaker of all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t care who you are or what music you typically like, if Step Brothers<\/a> doesn’t make you fall in love with the song Por Ti Volar\u00e9 by Andrea Bocelli, there’s something wrong with you.<\/em><\/p>\n Aside from being a huge film buff, I\u2019m a huge music buff. Hell, I\u2019m just plain buff<\/i>. (25\/m\/nyc\/d&d free ;-* ). Basically though, there ain\u2019t a genre of movies or music where there ain\u2019t at least some stuff I dig. And that\u2019s the way things should<\/i> be. Who are these people who, for instance, \u2018don\u2019t like rap\u2019 or \u2018don\u2019t like horror\u2019 or whatever? How can anyone be so lazy? There\u2019s tons of different types of horror movies, tons of different types of rap. To write off an entire genre is just lame. It\u2019s 2013, people\u2014if you don\u2019t have eclectic taste, get the fuck outta here.<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n However, I can understand people not liking something if they don\u2019t have any context for it. If you\u2019ve never heard, for instance, reggae, hearing it for the first time will be a love it or hate it experience\u2014it either speaks to you or it doesn\u2019t. Its context is either hardwired inside you, a sleeping giant in your brain waiting to be woken by the right tones, or the context must be instilled. And to instill said context takes volition<\/i>\u2014it may necessitate listening to lots of different reggae artists, and various styles of reggae, and reading up on the history of the genre, until something clicks in your brain. Or, you could just fucking watch The Harder They Come<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,18],"tags":[2983,2987,2986,32,586,1633,564,1632,2990,60,2984,2989,327,383,104,185,2353,2988,2982,2985,2483,137,2480,2693],"class_list":["post-3561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-codysessays","tag-andrea-bocelli","tag-britney-spears","tag-britney-spears-everytime","tag-cody-clarke","tag-david-lynch","tag-dick-dale","tag-martin-scorsese","tag-misirlou","tag-nico","tag-paul-thomas-anderson","tag-por-ti-volare","tag-powermad","tag-pulp-fiction","tag-quentin-tarantino","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm","tag-spring-breakers","tag-spring-breakers-britney-spears","tag-step-brothers","tag-the-harder-they-come","tag-the-royal-tenenbaums","tag-vincent-gallo","tag-wes-anderson","tag-wild-at-heart"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3561"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3568,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3561\/revisions\/3568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nI don\u2019t know how anyone can watch that movie and not come away with a love for reggae. The locations, the cinematography, the lighting, the editing, the acting, the vibe\u2014all these facets and more come together into a perfect crash course of \u2018this is what this music is all about\u2019. You may never set a foot in Jamaica in your entire life (and definitely not 1970\u2019s Jamaica, specifically) but after watching that movie, you will have memories as though you did. It will become a part of your past, as vivid in your mind as events you actually lived. (Ain\u2019t art great?!)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n