In order to spurn me on when I need writing inspiration, and as its own form of procrastination, I created a Spotify playlist of all the songs I remember listening to while while in France during my dissertation research. Now I’ve learned that you can embed Spotify playlists into WordPress posts, so you’re all in luck and can play along at home:
Part of my interest in movie scores, as a few of you will know, is that I think of ethnographic writing, or composition, in terms of movie soundtracks… an insight that only starts the conversation, in that there are so many ways to score a film.
In light of the recent hullabaloo over the use of music in the new The Watchmen movie, and of my own re-discovery of both Wicker Park soundtracks, I’ve been thinking about the ways soundtracks can be sometimes overly dissonant with the movies themselves: there can be bad movies with good soundtracks, bad soundtracks for good movies, and instances where music and movie just don’t “fit”.
Maybe we can use this “bad” examples to think about the ethnographic composition. So I guess I’m asking: what would be on your top 10 list of “dissonant” movie soundtracks, and why? What, if anything, can we learn from this “dissonance”?
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