The Soundtrack Album

Listening to Media

Paul N. Reinsch, Laurel Westrup, Paul N. Reinsch, Laurel Westrup

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429833830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The Soundtrack Album: Listening to Media offers the first sustained exploration of the soundtrack album as a distinctive form of media.

Soundtrack albums have been part of our media and musical landscape for decades, enduring across formats from vinyl and 8-tracks to streaming playlists. This book makes the case that soundtrack albums are more than promotional tools for films, television shows, or video games— they are complex media texts that reward a detailed analysis. The collection's contributors explore a diverse range of soundtrack albums, from Super Fly to Stranger Things, revealing how these albums change our understanding of the music and film industries and the audio-visual relationships that drive them.

An excellent resource for students of Music, Media Studies, and Film/Screen Media courses, The Soundtrack Album offers interdisciplinary perspectives and opens new areas for exploration in music and media studies.

Part 1

Case Studies

1

The Soundtrack in Transition

The Many Objects of Paul Simon’s One-Trick Pony

Landon Palmer

By 1980, the motion picture soundtrack album was a material manifestation of the growing connections between entertainment and media industries, a distillation of the increasingly prominent logics of media synergy and corporate conglomeration. The soundtrack albums for Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978) were not only lucrative examples of Hollywood’s deep ties to popular music; they established producer Robert Stigwood’s cross-promotional reach tying music, theater, dance, and film into a new standard for multi-tiered success, transforming movie music into a cultural phenomenon in the process.¹ At the same time, at the end of the 1970s, cable television ran through fewer than 25 percent of American homes,² the Music Television (MTV) network had yet to launch, the Reagan administration’s muscular deregulation of media and communication industries was still on the horizon, and home video formats went to war for a place in the household. Thus, the technological changes, policies, and facets of cross-industrial media convergence that would ground the most prominent productions of film-music synergy in the 1980s—from Flashdance (1983) to Batman (1989)—had yet to become standardized. As a means for fostering cross-industrial connections and as a consumer product, the soundtrack album was hardly a fixed object during this period.

One-Trick Pony (1980), the only feature film for which Paul Simon served as writer and star, would seem to be a footnote in the history of the motion picture soundtrack album in this context. After all, the film and corresponding album drew only a fraction of the revenue of the titles listed above, and could hardly be considered a success by the standards of other rock-themed movies or even Paul Simon albums. Yet a project like One-Trick Pony can illuminate the minor events that help constitute more prominent uses and functions of the soundtrack album, revealing the scaffolding that helped bridge media practices. In this chapter, I argue that One-Trick Pony should be viewed as a “transitional text” created at a fulcrum of evolving production and promotion efforts by motion picture and popular music industries. Through promotional efforts that produced both an album and a book across multiple formats that display variant relations to the film, One-Trick Pony demonstrates how the intertextual functions of motion picture soundtrack albums—particularly the texts that lie beyond the canon of successful examples of synergy—can speak to transitional histories of commercial media production, especially when examined as material objects.

Transition has, in recent years, frequently been adopted as a lens into, and a subject of, film and media history. As part of the archival turn in film and media studies, scholars have demonstrated continued interest in exploring how micro-histories of individuals, technologies, and practices complicate a macro understanding of film history and the periods that divide it.³ Transition, conceptualized in these terms, is not necessarily an indication of progress toward a stable set of industrial, technological, and/or cultural elements that constitute a period. Instead, it is an ever-present process made up of varying events, practices, and circumstances that indicate—to borrow from Debora L. Spar—“cycle[s] of innovation and experimentation, commercialization and diffusion, creative anarchy and institutionalization.”⁴ As William Uricchio argues, the rise of media history in particular has “shaken” the “familiar reference points” and “long-held assumptions” that had informed film history: “Film’s own history and developmental trajectory, and its assumed agency with regard to ‘derivative’ media such as television, have been recast in the light of an array of precedent technologies, practices, and notions of mediation.”⁵ Going a step further, an autonomous notion of film history has not only been challenged by these “precedent” elements, but contemporaneous “derivative” media further highlight that film’s history cannot be considered in isolation from other media practices. As a prominent example of derivative media, the motion picture soundtrack album speaks to the fact that film history is hardly isolated to film. Rather, film’s history both points to and is constituted by other histories in other media.

One-Trick Pony exemplifies how a soundtrack album’s history can reveal the minor, in-between moments that lie behind larger histories. Made in the wake of the compilation scoring of the 1960s and 1970s but before the synergistic practices that defined the 1980s stabilized the industrial logic of film-music production, One-Trick Pony marks key transitions in rock and roll culture, audio formatting, film/soundtrack promotion, and the biography of its maker. Employing archival records, discursive material, and textual analysis, I examine One-Trick Pony as a project that manifested numerous consumer objects rather than one authoritative text. In so doing, this chapter offers a methodological model that shows how a soundtrack album, by virtue of its textual instability, can provide multiple pathways to further understand the intersecting industrial, production, and promotional practices that constitute film and music history.

One-Trick Pony began as a transitional project in its creator’s career. In 1978, Paul Simon signed with Warner Bros. Records. This deal marked a departure from fifteen years with his previous major label, Columbia, under which he had released the albums that made him famous with his on-and-off artistic partner, Art Garfunkel, as well as his first solo works. Both Simon’s switch to a new record label and the legal issues that accompanied it spoke to his potential profitability as a recording artist, even though his popularity as a musician had wavered over the years following his 1970 breakup with Garfunkel. CBS (Columbia’s parent company) engaged in a legal dispute with Simon over the departure, arguing that he still owed the company another studio album under their contract. The New York State Supreme Court ruled that Simon could record for Warner “as long as he paid 1.5 million to CBS in lieu of a final album.”⁶ According to a 1980 article in Rolling Stone, Simon’s resulting contract with Warner “guarantee[d] Simon substantial wealth: for his next three albums, he will reportedly make somewhere between $10 million and $15 million, with complete artistic freedom.”⁷ Such “complete artistic freedom” extended to the production of a feature film for Warner Bros. bearing the same name as his first album for Warner Bros. Records.

By the time Simon’s multi-tier One-Trick Pony project reached audiences’ eyes and ears, it had been five years since his last studio album, Still Crazy After All These Years (1975). During this period, Simon ventured into new film and television endeavors including composing the score for Shampoo (1975), acting in his first narrative film role as record executive Tony Lacey in Annie Hall (1977), and performing a version of himself in NBC’s Lorne Michaels-produced Paul Simon Special (1977). Unlike many of his contemporaries in the world of 1960s and 1970s popular music, Simon did not perform in any narrative feature films prior to 1977. Simon & Garfunkel had helped to mobilize the compilation soundtrack period of New Hollywood by lending their music to The Graduate (1967). But only Garfunkel took further advantage of such burgeoning ties between song and screen by reuniting with director Mike Nichols for Catch-22 (1970) and Carnal Knowledge (1971)—as well as starring in Bad Timing (1980) under Nicolas Roeg, who had previously directed popular musicians in their first dramatic film roles. Unlike Garfunkel and other musicians who sought film stardom beyond their musical fame, Simon pursued a feature film as an extension of his creative authorship as a singer and songwriter. As Simon stated,

I wanted to do something other than just record an album. I felt my choices were either to write a Broadway show or a movie. I chose the movie because I thought it would be closer to the process of recording.⁸

This reasoning indicates that Simon’s intentions were a combination of ambition and pragmatism: the former in pursuit of an artistic vision that expands beyond the record, and the latter in extending creative work to another medium that ostensibly resembled the production practices of the recording industry.

As indicated by One-Trick Pony’s production history, change—and the question of what to do in the face of it—was a driving concern for numerous parties involved in the making of this project. These concerns are evident in the hybrid studio/soundtrack album, in which Simon continued to incorporate new collaborations with backup singers and instrumentalists. Simon’s work during this period increasingly featured backing vocals, duets, and other collaborations with African American musicians. In further establishing his solo voice under a new corporate logo, Simon reunited with Phoebe Austin, a vocalist on Still Crazy, for the One-Trick Pony track “Long, Long Day” and worked with bassist Anthony Jackson, guitarist Eric Gale, pianist Richard Tee, and Trinbagonian-American percussionist Ralph Macdonald throughout the album (Gale and Tee appear in the film as part of Simon’s character’s backing band). Simon’s integration of African American and pan-African popular music here presaged his popular yet controversial adoption of South African and Afro-Brazilian music with Graceland (1986) and The Rhythm of the Saints (1990), respectively. One-Trick Pony employs electric piano and electric guitar-driven blues to support expressions of melancholy, longing, and uncertainty across Simon’s lyrics. The first two tracks, “Late in the Evening” (by far the album’s most upbeat song) and “That’s Why God Made the Movies,” present bittersweet, seemingly autobiographical memories of youthful experiences with music and movies, while tracks like “Nobody” and “Long, Long Day” project forward, exploring the question of one’s legacy and place in an uncertain world. Tying closer to the film’s narrative, tracks like “One-Trick Pony,” “God Bless the Absentee,” and “Jonah” both critique and honor a life of functional but thankless musicianship. Alongside “Oh, Marion,” the above songs serve to illustrate the inner and outer life of the film’s protagonist, even featuring the names of key characters. However, the th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Foreword
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Listening to Media
• PART 1: Case Studies
• PART 2: Brands
• PART 3: Formats
• PART 4: New Directions
• Contributors
• Index