Music for the Opening Credits of an Early ’90s Movie About Los Angeles

I have a song I listen to when I’m driving through Los Angeles around sunset (though not necessarily around Sunset), and I remember for a second that these streets I dread are also the streets I’d seen a thousand times in the movies and TV shows I grew up watching. Ask me if I want to drive near Hollywood Boulevard around rush hour, and I’d reflexively say, “Oh, God. Fuck. Christ. No.” But were I to actually find myself there, stuck in traffic either as a result of my own poor planning or someone else’s, I might take a moment and say, “Holy hell, I actually live here,” and bask in that for a moment, traffic be damned. People willingly come here on vacation, just to see this junky stuff that I take for granted and go out of my way to avoid. That’s worth remembering.

Anyway, this one song is the instrumental version of a Giorgio Moroder collaboration with Human League frontman Philip Oakey. I only heard it for the first time recently, but when I did, it immediately reminded me of so many movies from the late ’80s or early ’90s where L.A. streets, soaked with sun but slammed with cars, are used to set a scene. I always think of it as opening credits, but it could just as easily be closing credits or some montage from the middle.

The Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial kickoff to summer, seemed like as sensible as any day to post. Here, have a listen.

The footage you see comes from this YouTube clip titled “Los Angeles in the ’80s.” There’s also a version of the song with lyrics and vocals by Oakey, but it’s the instrumental version that makes me think of the movie score to some halfway forgotten VHS rental where characters go to fancy Hollywood parties, take in the lights as if they’re seeing them for the first time, and finally learn a lesson about life and living.

Is it just that it sounds like that one song from the Pretty Woman soundtrack? Which itself always reminded me of the Gracie Films logo? Which itself is something I associate very strongly with the Simpsons episodes of the late ’80s and early ’90s?

I Myself Was Once President of Algeria

Lately, Giorgio Moroder has been getting me through my workday and making me feel nostalgic for a time and a place that I never actually knew, at least from first-hand experience.

Previously, I only was only familiar with him as the guy who scored the Cat People remake, and who with David Bowie wrote that movie’s theme song. It’s better known by its subtitle, “Putting Out Fire,” and, at that, it’s know probably best known as Shoshanna’s “battle paint” song from Inglourious Basterds. But Moroder had gotten his little synthetic wonderments into a lot of movies — everything from Neverending Story to Scarface, though that range indicates how much work he is now doing in mainstream movies. Just yesterday I stumbled across the chase theme from Midnight Express, which I didn’t notice sounding like such a dance party when I watched the movie. (Subject matter probably had something to do with it.) Listen for yourself:

True, it sounds like the incongruously upbeat disco tracks from the Italian horror movies I like so much — in particular, it reminds me of the opening theme to Tenebre, which got remade by Justice, which the Midnight Express track sounds like anyway. But the best connection I can make here goes back to The Simpsons and the curious tendency for that show to have taught me about pop-cultural works that I wouldn’t actually experience until much later. In the second “Treehouse of Horror,” the Simpsons travel to Morocco, where Homer is briefly apprehended by Moroccan authorities. The scene, I realize now, parodies Midnight Express, and the synthy soundtrack that appears in that scene is a riff on Moroder’s score. Hear it for yourself, at about 54 seconds in:

That’s totally it. And I basically had all the pieces this whole time, just took this long to put them together.

— “You must pay a fine of two American dollars!”
— “… Okay.”

Ha.