Over the Dredge
HarveyCanal
"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
Went to a screening of Over the Edge last night. It's a film about teen rebellion from 1979 starring Matt Dillon. Since I first saw it like 20 times on early cable tv as a kid, it's easily been one of my favorite movies of all-time.
Anyway, before the movie started in the theater last night, the twenty-something host of the evening got up and said a few words about the film. One thing he pinpointed as amazing in it is how much spirit the characters in the film are able to build surrounding the music of "Styx, Cheap Trick, and Journey". I mean, dude vigorously thought that kids actually jamming said rock music back in the day was some sort of window's peek into a lost netherworld.
Well, first of all, there are no songs by either Styx or Journey in the movie. There's plenty of Cheap Trick, plus a little Van Halen and the Cars.
Secondly, who is cultivating this evidently widespread negative opinion towards late-70's rock music? Yeah, I get that by the mid-80's the same genre got so cheesy that something had to give. But to heap that same derision on earlier times, like a wet blanket no less, just doesn't make any good sense.
As dude said his thing, a few people in the crowd heckled him by saying things like "fuck yeah, that music is good". Okay, that was me saying that. But anyway, what gives?
Anyway, before the movie started in the theater last night, the twenty-something host of the evening got up and said a few words about the film. One thing he pinpointed as amazing in it is how much spirit the characters in the film are able to build surrounding the music of "Styx, Cheap Trick, and Journey". I mean, dude vigorously thought that kids actually jamming said rock music back in the day was some sort of window's peek into a lost netherworld.
Well, first of all, there are no songs by either Styx or Journey in the movie. There's plenty of Cheap Trick, plus a little Van Halen and the Cars.
Secondly, who is cultivating this evidently widespread negative opinion towards late-70's rock music? Yeah, I get that by the mid-80's the same genre got so cheesy that something had to give. But to heap that same derision on earlier times, like a wet blanket no less, just doesn't make any good sense.
As dude said his thing, a few people in the crowd heckled him by saying things like "fuck yeah, that music is good". Okay, that was me saying that. But anyway, what gives?
Comments
Boys, how dare you like this music...
b/w
dude probably likes Skrillex
The fake curator/ speaker sounds like their lumping together the Donny and Marie show and Van Halen's first joint.
Questionable shit.
In my private mind garden the film dudes did their homework and tried to include what was hot in '78 amongst suburban teenagers.
Is the inclusion of Styx and Journey just some plain ole ingnorance or is that speaker making an umbrella statement on all late 70s/ early 80s Rock.
One of my fav scenes is when they put on his moms Jimi Hendrix cassette. She seemed like a "cool" moms who would listen to that shit and raise a stoner/rebel teen with that reference.
Ooh Child is my shit.
To me its precursor to the MTV music + imagery steez emerging in the game. I want the score, especially when dude gets beat the fuck up in the playground at night.
And to this day what the fuck was the mute kid watching on tv when he was talking to Carl.???. Some fucked up Atari looking late night shit.
Van Halen and Cheap Trick were exactly what the kids in the flick would have been listening to, if they existed in real life. What was he expecting, that they'd be listening to the Sex Pistols or something?
The typical Jimi Hendrix fan, if they were raising kids in the late seventies, those children would have still been toddlers. So that would be an interesting choice of music for the mother of a person born in 1964-65.
Exactly. This is what happens when popular culture undergoes this sort of "ironic" revisionist transformation, and a bunch of kids who weren't there at the time (through no fault of their own, as if it needed saying) start imagining what things must have been like and decide to rewrite history accordingly. You see it in things like Adrien Brody's punkrocker in Summer Of Sam too - teetering peroxide mohawks in 1977? GTFOOHWTBS. Two years later, maybe. Something like Over The Edge (and, in a different kind of way, Dazed And Confused too) comes much closer to how the world actually was, even in the UK.
It reminds me of when a friend of mine was asked by her teenage nephew about how the media of the time reacted to Ian Curtis' suicide (short answer: they didn't). Again, through no fault of their own, there's now a generation that imagines these things to have been major events at the time, and views the past through that prism. The reailty was that whatever significance these things had often didn't become apparent until later. Things like punk caused a stir, certainly, but for most of the world it was easy to ignore, and ignore it they did. But by the same token, people forget that the first albums by Boston and the Ramones came out at more or less the same time. There was a period in 1976 where many kids of my age were digging both, and if you wanted irony, you listened to Steely Dan. It's not like there was a vast Stalinist refutation of everything that had gone before the needle first dropped on Blitzkrieg Bop. People didn't immediately start making bonfires out of all their Yes and Genesis albums. Fucking hell, in the UK Yes and Genesis started getting hit singles when punk came along, so that should tell you all you need to know about punk's true impact.
1. The scenes of Carl grappling with his parental situation give me friggin chills of intense familiarity. And the way he uses his headphones as an escape...YES!
In fact, this Cheap Trick song from the Heavy Metal soundtrack was to me exactly for that purpose...
2. When Carl gets jumped, he fights back like a champ, knocking each of the attacking dudes down off of him in the course of collecting his beating. Sensitive, yes...but tough, yes too.
3. Johnny can't talk, but does he get to hang just like anyone else? Of course he can.
4. Hey, where are your parents anyway? RENOOOO!
5. The first day I ever met him he said: "Hi, I'm Ritchie White. I'm on probation."