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Funk'n'Roll videos
Friday, December 31, 2010
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
"...let's make it a good one, without any fear!" -John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Women rock! Learn more at:
Funk'n'Roll videos
Women rock! Learn more at:
Funk'n'Roll videos
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Rock'n'Roll Christmas!
Barely in time for Christmas, here's a music player of Rockin' holiday tunes!
Six decades of hip-shaking goodness!
Merry Twist-mas to all!
Saturday, December 4, 2010
TWIN PEAKS: The Music And Its Inspirations!
"The music from Twin Peaks is dark, cloying, and obsessive -- and one of the best scores ever written for television." -Brian Mansfield, All Music Guide
"The sometimes overtly and sometimes subliminally creepy music Badalamenti created contributed immeasurably to the deeply unsettling textures of the series ." -Stephen Eddins, All Music Guide
Celebrating TWIN PEAKS' 20th birthday, here are five music players with songs from the show, the music that inspired it, and the music that it inspired!
(Note: this article will not spoil anything for people who haven't seen it yet.)
TWIN PEAKS completely changed television for the better. Along the way it had a massive influence on movies, music, video games, and coffee sales.
TWIN PEAKS debuted in April 8, 1990, created by auteur film director David Lynch. It was a summer replacement series, with a two hour pilot and seven episodes. It was so successful that a second season followed for a total of 29 episodes. Perceiving that the audience was dwindling, ABC cancelled it in 1991. Lynch responded with a theatrical prequel, TWIN PEAKS-FIRE WALK WITH ME (FWWM), in 1992.
TWIN PEAKS brought a sophistication to television that it wasn't ready for, but which time has borne out in the best shows since. It coerced TV away from overly glossy cartoons into a more edgy, more surreal, more manic, and more honest maturity. Detracted by dunces, with time its quality has made it a legend and an unassailable classic.
TWIN PEAKS -"Opening Credits" (1990)
This essay will first cover the direct impact of TWIN PEAKS on many areas of pop culture, and then give you five music players of TWIN PEAKS' musical influence.
"G*dd@mn, these people are confusing." -Carl, FIRE WALK WITH ME
If it was so great, why didn't it last?
TWIN PEAKS was a massive success in its first season. The summer series -from shocking pilot to season cliffhanger- riveted America with its adult tone, its cinematic panache, and kinky fun. Everyone couldn't wait till the Fall season to find out who killed the prom queen.
TWIN PEAKS's first season played like a murder mystery with soap sidelines and a balance of edge and burlesque. The FBI agent had a really surreal dream once, but nothing to indicate how much more that would mean. In fact, that exception was the heart of everything important to come, and what would drive the mainstream running back to standard pablum.
Rote shows like "Murder She Wrote" solved every crime in 45 minutes with snack breaks built in. This coloring book formula worked for a shocking twelve seasons and implied evil was a person, an action, and a quick penalty. It's no wonder this baby food didn't prepare anyone with how to digest Episode 8. The first ten minutes of this second season premiere were so surreal and ambiguous the show lost almost all of the viewing audience in one single swoop.
Which was stupid...because that's exactly when everything got deep and incredibly interesting. While many fawn for the light purity of the first season, it's actually #8 through #16 where all the greatness hits its shattering peak. Ya snoozed, ya losed, I said it, take the bruise.
In the blurt culture of now, every action you make has been snark-attacked on web forums before you've even thought of doing it. So when people casually blurt to you who the killer is...please know that they are actually wrong. That's the surface, and there is far more to it than one person and one act.
TWIN PEAKS does what robo-cop shows can't; it asks the real question, the hard question, of 'What is Evil, and where does it come from?' And it dares to actually sketch out an ambitious answer. This subtext is what most mainstream viewers missed entirely, and why their cheap blurt is actually as clueless as it is tonedeaf.
TWIN PEAKS also replaced the pantomime ciphers of normal shows with actual characters with tics, obsessions, contradictions, and mistakes. This got written off by media hacks with the timeworn term 'quirky'. When some flack uses 'quirky' or 'eccentric' or 'weird' (shudder) to describe interesting characters, kick them really hard with twenty years worth of spring action.
There's a great writer for Entertainment Weekly I really like but his opinion of TWIN PEAKS is lopsided, and the one endlessly parroted by others. 'TWIN PEAKS peaked early and fell apart as it went.' Untrue. It peaked in the middle, wandered a little, then peaked again with the most shocking ending ever televised. So act like you know and let's go already.
Another sad saw is 'the failure of TWIN PEAKS', which argues the ratings went down as a valid response to an implied quality decline. The show had some interior flaws to work out in its latter days, but the actual failure is in the general audience to pay attention, and in the media to notice that distinction.
TWIN PEAKS parted the curtain to bring maturity, ambiguity, surrealism, absurdism, and the subjective to the mass television audience. Much of that has has been explored in network and cable shows ever since. In that sense, where it matters, TWIN PEAKS is one of the most successful shows of all time.
"That Gum You Like Is Coming Back In Style…" -The Man From Another Place
TWIN PEAKS had roots in myriad soils: soaps like "Peyton Place"; indie nihilism like "Rivers Edge"; the empathic FBI agents of Harris' "Red Dragon" and "Silence Of The Lambs"; and a hell of a lot of late 50's and early 60's pop culture. It added up to a timeless and unique vision unlike anything ever seen. Created by filmmaker David Lynch with writer Mark Frost, it blended many of their obsessions into a new world that felt comfortingly right and dangerously wrong. Like a combination of ice cream parlor and funeral parlor.
While it flamed brief, it became a wildfire igniting other media to this day.
-Actually TWIN PEAKS was being homaged before it even debuted! The series "Wiseguy" (1987-90) had a bizarre storyline in a small Washington state log town. The writers were also working on the first season of PEAKS so the events in 'Lynchboro' (s.3/ep.60-64) took on a strangely esper edge. Weeks later Lynch and Frost's pilot debuted.
-TWIN PEAKS was fun and scary. If you cut it in half you got "Northern Exposure" (1990) and "The X-Files" (1993). Which the networks did. "NE" was even filmed 15 minutes away from Snoqualmie, Washington, where PEAKS was filmed, and they winked at this deeply on "Russian Flu" (s.1/ep.5). And "X-F" took David Duchovny himself and the paranormal FBI slant straight from the show. (And so did "Fringe" and "Warehouse 13", by extension.)
-Variedly successful attempts to expand on its innovations were "Picket Fences" (1992), "American Gothic" (1995), and the miniseries "Wild Palms"(1993) produced by Oliver Stone.
ON THE AIR (excerpt, 1992)
-Lynch tried again with ABC in his comedy series "On the Air" (1992). This show about a 50's live TV program going consistently awry took the more slapstick side of PEAKs to amazing extremes. ABC only televised three of the seven episodes before canceling it. A criminal shame, as the glorious unshown finale plays like a jawdropping collision of Salvador Dali and Busby Berkeley!
-It's a matter of record that Lynch's film acumen and unflinching realism opened the door for a wave of film directors to advance television*. George Lucas' "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" (1992) made some of the most potent anti-war statements ever televised with episodes like "Verdun"; ABC, during the conservative wave of the Gulf War, then moved it all over the schedule and finally canceled it, the same strategy they had used on PEAKS. Barry Levinson midwived the stark unflinching drama "Homicide" (1993) which elevated the maturity and depth of all cop shows, and led to its supreme progression "The Wire" (2002). Stephen King created the original mini-series "Golden Years" for TV in this fertile climate. PEAKS was known for its particularly erotic soap edge and was reflected in filmmaker Zalman King's HBO series "Red Shoe Diaries" (1992), which featured David Duchovny and secret passions unleashed in the wake of tragedy.
*(I could have footnotes and quotes, but this is long enough as it is!)
-ABC recast their abandonment of PEAKS with the spin that it was a noble failure. This attitude hampered development and support of sophisticated shows from the major networks in the years following. Progressive creatives solved this finally by going to cable networks. By 2000 a renaissance of adult shows with cinematic production, complex stories, gritty edge, actual character, unusual settings, and strong writing emerged. The promise of TWIN PEAKS was fulfilled by shows like "The Sopranos", "24", "Alias", "The Shield", "Firefly", "LOST", "ReGenesis", "Life On Mars" (UK), "Californication", "Queer As Folk", "Breaking Bad", "The L Word", "Sons Of Anarchy", "Misfits" (UK), "Boardwalk Empire", "Sherlock" (UK), and "Madmen". They also solved the 'wobble' in PEAKS' latter season by doing shorter 13 episode seasons with fully-planned story arcs, one of the best advancements in TV quality ever made.
-Lynch himself broke the ice with ABC by doing a new pilot for a series in 1998. They reached an impasse that killed it before it could start, and David eventually brainstormed the footage into the comeback film "Mulholland Drive" (2001). (The scene of the suit meeting where the executive (Angelo Badalamenti) can't drink the slightest thing without throwing it up is open to interpretation.)
-PEAKS' impact is especially obvious on the dark HBO series "Carnivale" (2003), featuring PEAKS vet Michael Anderson.
-"The Simpsons" poked fun at TWIN PEAKS in a Red Room sequence with Chief Wiggum and Lisa Simpson (s.6,ep.21; 1995). And again when Homer watches TWIN PEAKS and says, "Brilliant! I have absolutely no idea what's going on." (s.9,ep.3; 1997).
-Flip quips by entertainment writers about the series are one thing, but more considered voices have plenty more to say in PEAKS' defense. An entire magazine dedicated to the series called WRAPPED IN PLASTIC published 75 issues from 1992 to 2005, with voluminous essays on its meaning and interviews with the unsung writers and directors who crafted it. Deeper still is an academic book of essays called "Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks" by David Lavery, which grew out of the issue of 'Literature/ Film Quarterly' examining FIRE WALK WITH ME.
SESAME STREET, "Twin Beaks"
-The Lynch perspective laces through many of the adult Vertigo Comics of the early 90's, but particularly in "Enigma", with its rustic setting, strange characters, and hallucinatory aspects. Another Vertigo series, "Shadows Fall", deals with inner demons in an expressionist cinema style Lynch would appreciate. Alan Moore's acclaimed graphic epic "Promethea" (1999), about how reality is constructed from creative dreaming, featured The Man From Another Place on its "Sgt. Pepper" tribute cover (#10). And the graphic novel "Nobody" (2009) by Jeff Lemire has been oft compared as 'the Invisible Man goes to Twin Peaks'.
-The graphic novel "Black Hole" (2005) by Charles Burns comes from the same dark wilderness as PEAKS, literally: a layered and nonlinear story of fevered dreams, teen love trysts, and murder in the black Washington woods. Hailed by Time magazine as "the best graphic novel of the year", and "a masterpiece" by the New York Times. David Lynch could make an excellent animated film of the book, and it could retain the chilling hard line style of Burns, as roadtested in this short cartoon.
-Films by Christopher Nolan like "Memento", "Insomnia", and "Inception" owe a huge nod to Lynch and his dream factory, as do Tim Burton, David Fincher, the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky, Todd Holland, Bryan Fuller, Francis Lawrence, and Jennifer Lynch. For a similar taste in Lynchian expressionism, the Jeunet and Caro films "Delicatessen" (1991) and "City Of Lost Children" (1995). For raiding Lynch actors and themes, "Red Rock West" (1993). For Lynch not by Lynch, the Coen Brothers' "Barton Fink" (1991). For vibe and scope, the "Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" trilogy of books and films. TWIN PEAKS' spiritual wilderness is especially acute in "The Blair Witch Project" (1999), Eli Roth's "Cabin Fever" (2002), and the American version of "The Ring" (2002); its two-faced town in Oliver Stone's "U-Turn" (1997); and its edge and mystery in "Donnie Darko" (2001), Christopher Nolan's remake of "Insomnia" (2002), Greg Marcks' "11:14" (2003), "Spider Forest" (Korea, 2004), "The X-Files 2: I Want to Believe" (2008), and Jennifer Lynch's underappreciated "Boxing Helena" (1993) and "Surveillance" (2008).
WONDERFALLS -"Lick The Light Switch" (2004)
-After David Lynch, the best directors on TWIN PEAKS were Todd Holland and Lesli Linka Glatter. A master of surrealistic farce ("Malcolm In The Middle"), Holland then directed much of the excellent and deeply underrated series "Wonderfalls" (2004). This show does as much to capture the twisted humor and odd surprises of PEAKS as any nameable. FOX only showed 4 of the 13 episodes, and out of order, before cancelling it. (Luckily the entire series is now on DVD.) Co-creator Bryan Fuller then did two seasons of "Pushing Daisies" (2007), about a pie-loving diner and the paranormal which crossed that askew humor of PEAKS with the romantic fable style of "Amelie". ABC cancelled it, too. (DC Comics promises a 'third season' comic series to wrap it up properly.)
-Many TV shows have the fun or the edge of PEAKS very directly in their DNA. The creepy hospital in "The Kingdom" (UK, 1993); "The Prisoner"-meets-Lynch vein of "Nowhere Man" (1996); the funereal tone of "Millennium" (1996); the early 60's style and spooky undercurrent of "Dark Skies" (1996); the hip whimsy and loopy town of "Gilmore Girls" (2000); the rainy town mystery of "The Dead Zone" (2002); the 'X-orcist Files' of "Miracles" (2003); the oddly deductive FBI agent of "Touching Evil" (UK or US, 2004); the funky characters and bent farce of "Deadwood" (2004); the black humor of "Six Feet Under" (2001), "Dead Like Me" (2003), and "Dexter" (2006); the schizoid smalltown of early "Smallville" (2001), as well as "Invasion" (2005), "Supernatural" (2005), "Eureka" (2006), "True Blood" (2008), and now "Haven" (2010); the non-sequitur zen farce of "John From Cincinnati" (2007); the interwoven guilt and brutal grit of the "Red Riding Trilogy" (UK, 2009); and the modernist fetishism and corroded undertone of "Mad Men" (2007).
"Alan Wake"
-"Silent Hill", the video game (1999) and film (2006), are a deliberate homage with easter eggs everywhere. "The Legend Of Zelda: Link's Awakening" (1993) was admitted by its creators as being heavily influenced by the "suspicious types" approach to its characters. And the new video games "Deadly Premonition" (2010) and "Alan Wake" (2010) are deeply influenced in their entire story set-ups.
-The 70's ambient synth work of David Bowie and Brian Eno had much impact on TWIN PEAKS' soundtrack. Eno did some music for Lynch's "Dune". Bowie himself has a brief role in FIRE WALK WITH ME. Soon afterward he made a concept album with Eno called "Outside" (1995); a future-noir mystery about the ritual death of the young woman Baby Grace Blue, the diary of the odd agent pursuing the case, and the edgy suspects. This was intended as a trilogy counting down to the millennium, but the project was abandoned with the mystery still unsolved.
MELISSA AUF dER MAUR -"Out Of Our Minds" (2010)
link
-In other music, Stars Of The Lid did the pieces "Music For Twin Peaks Episode #30, parts 1 and 2", which imagines a score for the deeply longed-for and yet unmade 30th episode. Amanda Palmer (The Dresden Dolls) had a solo album called, "Who Killed Amanda Palmer?" The recent Melissa Auf der Maur video for "Out Of Our Minds" (2010) has a decided Lynch bent any TWIN PEAKS fan would appreciate. And Mt. Eerie have an entire new album inspired by TWIN PEAKS called "Wind's Poem", which sounds like Sonic Youth doing the Badalamenti score.
-The "C.S.I." clone shows (2000, ad infinitum) are just the robot cops of "Dragnet" co-opting "The Silence Of The Lambs" tone. Go look at those autopsy scenes from the PEAKS series and film again and know where the swipe devolved from.
-"Push, Nevada" (2002), created by Ben Affleck, was almost outrageously outright in its similarities. ABC killed it after 7 episodes.
-"LOST" (2004) is the successful revenge of TWIN PEAKS, without ABC knowing it. It hooked its huge audience with careful character while phasing in the odd in doses for six seasons. Still controversial, still a winner forever. Quality wins!
-"Fringe" (2008), based on the idea of an FBI squad investigating paranormal cases, wouldn't exist without FWWM. On TWIN PEAKS' 20th birthday in April this year they did the episode "Northwest Passage" {the first working title of PEAKS, (s.2/ep.21)}, with references to Snoqualmie and the show galore. This episode presaged the show's grand break into its 'Two Worlds' duality arc, an unlikely coincidence. Ultimately, "Fringe" bracketed this storyline with another PEAKS-esque episode, "Marionette" (s.3,ep.9), featuring a blond teenage girl who died in April, a weeping Mom with mantlepiece photos, and Peggy's malt shop (the diner owner on PEAKS was played by Peggy Lipton.). And still more references again on this one.
-Also on April's 20th anniversary, "Happy Town" (2010) debuted, bringing a young woman "from Snoqualmie" into a wooded town's murderous secrets. What could have been a PEAKS also-ran instead had plenty going for itself. So naturally ABC killed it after eight episodes. Yes, the suits who run things will always run good things into the ditch.
-Most ambitious of all is the light paranormal show "Psych" (2006) doing a grand reunion of seven PEAKS actors in a lavish homage called "Dual Spires" (s.5/ep.12) to celebrate the 20th anniversary of TWIN PEAKS.
UPDATE: Add the series THE KILLING (2011), based on the Danish series FORBRYDELSEN. This is essentially TWIN PEAKS as a straight murder investigation, in all the best ways. There are myriad parallels to PEAKS in locations, events, characters, mood, and even music for fans to pick up on; but above all, the show has enough singular strength on its own merits to reward any viewer.
And Agent Cooper's bold love for coffee seemed charmingly retro at the time. But soon Starbucks owned all of your storefronts and wallets quick enough, from the area the show was filmed, no less.
But what about the music, you're saying?
1. The Sounds Of TWIN PEAKS And FIRE WALK WITH ME,
By Angelo Badalamenti
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TWIN PEAKS is as powerful as it is thanks to the inestimable soundtrack by Lynch's collaborator, Angelo Badalamenti. Much as Lynch and Frost synthesized ingredients from all over the place for their concoction, Angelo simmered it to perfection with his varied score. As much as the show's startling visuals and style, people remember and revere its sound.
FIRE WALK WITH ME soundtrack
His Series recital is a zig-zag dream of Girl Group sighs, cold synth German tones, Duane Eddy vibrato, snapping Lounge Jazz, galloping Rockabilly, sleazy Sax-strumentals, a pinch of piano Boogie, soda suds and Prom Pop, and the ethereal siren called Julee Cruise. (#1-26 on the player.)
His Film score is a swerving nightmare of addict Cool Jazz, rough Link Wray chords, paranoid Tom Waits rants, chiming Penderecki chorales, and the androgyne vocals of Little Jimmy Scott. (#27-33 on the player.)
2. The Songs That Inspired The Sound Of The TWIN PEAKS Series
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But where does it all come from?
In every way, TWIN PEAKS is a temporal nexus, in style, tone, fashion, culture references, and narrative. That blending of the past with the present reflects in the music. Here’s an alternate jukebox for the town, with songs that inspired its favorite tunes.
-The echo twang guitar comes from Duane Eddy, its 50’s inventor.
-The dark tonal synths come out of electronics pioneers and 'Krautrock' expirementers from the 70’s (Faust, Neu!), as well as tonal composers like Phillip Glass. Brian Eno expanded this with Davids Bowie and Byrne, and coined the term “ambient” music. (see also, BLADE RUNNER)
-Jazz got its currency in films and TV with Henry Mancini’s crucial score for the 1958 detective series, “Peter Gunn”; his hipster lounge cool is what grooves Audrey’s and The Man From Another Place’s shoes.
-Early R’n’B was fueled by raunchy sax solos, like in the standard “Harlem Nocturne”, bringing torrid jazz licks to pop kids.
-The dream pop of the Everlys, Roy Orbison, and The Shangri-La’s possess Julee Cruise.
-Ricky Nelson pouts that rockabilly style and stance later seen in Chet, Dale, and James.
-In the early 50’s, visionary couple Les Paul & Mary Ford invented the echo guitar and angel pop most of this was built on.
-Lush and dark scores for classic Noir films like “LAURA” and “VERTIGO” (about Ferguson’s obsessive love for a twin named Madeleine) haunt a new Laura.
-Later in the 60's and 70's, Ennio Morricone channeled unsettling arias through his muse, the eerie soprano Edda Dell’Orso; he also used dissonate strings, seductive jazz, angelic chorales, and reverb guitar to stunning effect.
The song playlist is structured to mirror the arc of the series; from the intro, to finding the body, to the characters and the impact on them, where they go and what they find, and on to a culmination at the train car and within the Lodges, with a prayer for a redemptive end.
TWIN PEAKS-FIRE WALK WITH ME
"It is happening again. It is happening again." -The Giant
If TWIN PEAKS felt like a gay party with an undertaste of alcoholism, then TWIN PEAKS-FIRE WALK WITH ME felt like a heroin binge on the wrong side of complete ruin.
The first shot in the film is of a television being smashed to pieces by a sledgehammer. That says it all, for better and worse.
Bitter with ABC and unrestrained by anything, David Lynch channeled his fury through this obtuse and brutal film. While the edge was magnified, the fun side of the series was lost in transition. And fans dying for a resolution for certain outstanding storypoints were frustrated with a prequel that played as an odd parallel to "The Secret Diary Of Laura Palmer", the excellent flashback companion book written by Jennifer Lynch. Adding to this was trying to compress five hours worth of film into half that time, leading to a dense cut that was difficult to parse without multiple viewings. But the film has earned its own hardcore following over the years on the merits of those perceived faults, making it a cult classic, and an essential piece in understanding the total picture of TWIN PEAKS.
*****The prequel is meant to be seen LAST. Please feel free to wrap that last word around your head like a comfy scarf.
The film knows you've seen the series, and then upends or reinvents events based on that experience. Literalists who try to watch it first are only defeating the proper intended perspective.
OF TWIN PEAKS
3. The Songs That Inspired The Sounds of FIRE WALK WITH ME
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-The harsh abrasive tremolo, heard in "The Pink Room" and "Blue Frank", comes from Link Wray.
-The uptown underground snapped to the bleary, worldly Cool Jazz of Miles Davis, Kenny Burrell, and Chet Baker with moody meditations on the midnight of the spirit; this soul-searching style, between revelation and destitution, moans through FWWM.
-The confessional falsettos of The Flamingos and The Platters (with a member named David Lynch!) likewise animated Jimmy Scott's ”Sycamore Trees”.
-The Thought Gang’s songs ("A Real Indication", "Black Dog Runs At Night"), were a contemplation of Tom Waits, whose heady mix of evil blues, seedy cabaret, and corrupt jazz scorches the timid.
-The moody dream pop of Julee Cruise was also in the spirit of concurrent bands lumped into the 'shoegazing' movement like Cocteau Twins, Jesus And Mary Chain, and My Bloody Valentine.
-Classical piano and string quartet swells ripple through Angelo’s synth keys. Here pianist Vladimir Horowitz testifies to that elegaic beauty.
-The chiming angelic chorales recall similar work by Krzysztof Penderecki and Ennio Morricone.
-As always, the twang bar guitar sound is straight out of Duane Eddy.
The song playlist is structured like the arc of the film: the world of Laura, her wild restlessness, the dangers that encroach, and the finale of brutality and transcendent grace.
4. The Songs Inspired By TWIN PEAKS And FIRE WALK WITH ME
(*=sample)
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TWIN PEAKS was a musical sensation, selling boatloads of the first soundtrack and Julee Cruise albums. Its rich smorgasbord of sounds appealed to every hip angle, so it's not surprising that so many artists from so many genres have homaged it every year since it came out.
This music player includes dance, hip hop, goth metal, trip hop, doom metal, retro lounge, indie rock, ambient, and postpunk. And artists as divergent as Moby, Anthrax, The Wedding Present, Marilyn Manson, Superdrag, DJ Shadow, Fantomas, Unkle, Camper Van Beethoven, Sinead O'Connor, and Interpol.
-Listen for Stars Of the Lid doing "Music For Twin Peaks Episode #30", and Mt. Eerie homaging "Falling".
These are all songs written directly about or featuring audio samples (*) from TWIN PEAKS, in order from 1991 to 2010.
-The Log Lady, FWWM.
5. Songs In The Spirit Of TWIN PEAKS, 1955-2010.
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TWIN PEAKS pulled together many classic sounds of the past, while reflecting growing movements of the time, and setting the trend for many revivals that followed.
This music player is about songs before, during, and after the series that reflect the sounds in the show and film.
TWIN PEAKS was meant to be in the middle of nowhere, but the Seattle area where it was filmed was turning into the big bang of the musical decade. The series was thematically prophetic of its time, on the faultline between smooth skin and roaring heart. It swayed in an early 60's soda shop dream indoors. But outside the harsh wilderness, gloomy pall, and enveloping nights clawed on the sanity. Seattle soon upended the music industry with a raw rebuke of the previous decade's gloss with Grunge and the Riot Grrrrl movements. An early signal of it was the character Rusty (Ted Raimi) in the latter half of the series.
But as a tonic, music fans began exploring the smooth cool of vintage Lounge jazz, Free Jazz, and “acid jazz”, dark ambient electronica, chill out moodscapes, 60’s Italian film scores, swing music, and retro rock like surf, rockabilly, and orchestral pop. Since the 90's, bands have made songs that paralleled the series' sounds in using these different pallettes.
-From the 50's we have the dreamy pop of The Everly Brothers, raw Rock'n'roll of Screaming Jay Hawkins, otherworldly instrumentals of Santo And Johnny, and angelic tones of The Flamingos.
-From the 60's come the twang guitar of Duane Eddy, cocktail jazz of Les Baxter and Esquivel, girl gods the Caravelles, cool jazz of Miles Davis, heroin rock of Velvet Underground, jolting abrasion of Captain Beefheart, and fluxus delirium of Ennio Morricone.
-From the 70's strides the synth-abilly of Suicide, ambient waves of Kraftwerk and Brian Eno, and rockabilly redux of Robert Gordon and Link Wray.
-From the 80's slides in angled jazz with The Lounge Lizards, dream pop of Cocteau Twins and Kate Bush and The Dream Academy, and guitar edge of Jesus And Mary Chain and The Pixies.
-From the 90's come bands lumped as 'shoegazing' like My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Curve, Miranda Sex Garden, and Slowdive, whose lush darkness and often ethereal vocals oddly paralleled Julee Cruise's work. As well as the noize rock of Slug (think "Pink Room"), retro-Orbison of Chris Isaak, moody dreams of Mazzy Star and Morphine and Jeff Buckley, and the cinematic nightscapes of 'trip hop' bands like Portishead, Tricky, Hooverphonic, Mono, Morcheeba, and Massive Attack. Angelo Badalamenti also scored Marianne Faithfull's "A Secret Life" album, and recorded with James' frontman Tim Booth as Booth And The Bad Angel.
-From the 00's we round up unusual suspects like Fantomas, the biker fuzz of The Raveonettes, and border crossings of Calexico. There's a special extended section of ethereal songbirds in the spirit of Julee Cruise with Kyra Lynn Cain, To Kill A Pretty Bourgeoisie, 8mm, Amber Asylum, Martina Topley-Bird, Cranes, and His Name Is Alive (#127 to 145). Plus rough stuff in the Tom Waits rustyards, and finally songs by David Lynch himself!
Julee Cruise
Jocelyn Montgomery
BlueBob
Ariana Delawari
Related music produced by David Lynch.
The TWIN PEAKS Experience
So you can't wait to watch TWIN PEAKS now, right? You can watch it all on the complete box set, TWIN PEAKS-The Definitive Gold Box Collection.
This box has everything and more. The previous Season One and Season Two DVD box sets lacked the crucial two-hour pilot for legal issues, and the online reruns lack the pilot as well. It's impossible to watch the series right without the stunning stagesetter. So watch the true series from start to finish here only.
But if you want the real full experience, I'll hip you to the best of all possible ways to enjoy the true depth of it all. Trust me.
As the show progressed, cool supplementals were released to enhance the backstory: an audiotape of Agent Cooper's trademark dictations, plus a book each about Laura and Cooper. "The Secret Diary Of Laura Palmer" by Jennifer Lynch is especially brilliant, and has a cult following all its own! Listening to and reading these at certain times between watching the episodes magnifies the intensity of the TWIN PEAKS experience.
Can you just watch the show and movie and be okay? Sure. But I'm telling you now...
(Look for good deals on the tape and two books online. They're around and absolutely worth it.)
-The Pilot*
-Episodes 1 through 7 (Season 1)
-listen to "Diane: The Twin Peaks Tapes Of Agent Cooper"
-read "The Secret Diary Of Laura Palmer" by Jennifer Lynch
-Episodes 8 through 16 (Season 2)
-read "The Autobiography Of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes" by Scott Frost
-Episodes 17 through 29
-watch TWIN PEAKS- FIRE WALK WITH ME last
-read the bootleg script of FWWM, with all the extra scripted scenes which were cut out
*(An alternative ending was added to make the pilot a feature film overseas. Skip that option and watch the original.)
RESOURCES:
Dugpa, TWIN PEAKS resource site
"Wrapped In Plastic" magazine
FIRE WALK WITH ME Deleted Scenes Edition petition
FIRE WALK WITH ME Deleted Scenes FaceBook
FIRE WALK WITH ME Deleted Scenes MySpace
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The magician longs to see
One chants out between two worlds
Fire walk with me."
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