Movie Soundtracks Used to Rule.

Sofia Coppola makes a good soundtrack but

(I wrote this on my phone on my way to Japan in December 2019 and it’s kinda boring but worth it if you get about halfway through.)

Sofia Coppola has good taste in music but it’s making my brain hurt.

I’m watching a white girl seated ahead of me on my flight to Japan, watching Lost in Translation. The guy she’s with next to her said, “what! You haven’t seen it yet? Oh you GOTTA watch it now.” He repeated his incredulous order a few times.

Ok ok fine.

I forgot how much it hurt to see the movie get acclaim the first time around when it came out, but to see it in this secondary anthropological context was surreal. I remember just from looking at her, that the soundtrack on that stupid movie is good.

I used to think Unchained Melody was an awful song, and that might have been because at the time that I first heard it, I had a Janet Jackson shaped heart and caucasian Smokey Robinson didn’t interest me. When I finally saw the movie Ghost I fell in love with the Righteous Brothers like everyone else. Soundtracks are weird that way.

It was when I sang “The Air That I Breathe” (also used in a Sofia Coppola movie) at karaoke that I realized what a dumb song that is on the outside.

Dario gleefully lets me wash his butthole, but freaks TF out whenever I attempt to clear his nostrils. My taste in songs is the same. Different songs feel special to me in different ways.

Paris and Oslo are pop songscapes in my head. Paris was accordions till it was The à la Menthe and Norway was techno until it was Mt. Eerie. Seattle was the movie soundtrack to Singles until it was Death Cab For Cutie (which is to say I still don’t know Seattle very well I guess. Someone give me a better indicator). There’s no real rhyme or reason to the direction of pop music.

—

The person who knows a little is worse than the person who knows nothing. That is my struggle with colonialism. The other day I heard a +2 generation Asian woman tell her entire immigration story to the -1 generation Asian cashier at a pho restaurant, and I could not tell whether the cashier was impressed, bored or annoyed. She uses such a different body language than I am familiar with.

My phone keeps defaulting to french auto-correct and whenever I type “man,” it suggests an emoji of the darkest smiling black face in the emoji lexicon, which is so awkward. And so I’ve made up a story about the previous owner of my refurbished phone being a Senegalese kora player who left his phone in a recording studio remastering something for a movie soundtrack.

I hate Sofia Coppola for doing this to my brain.