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Ever been dumped? Stings, don’t it? We know. Believe me, we at Popdose know. Last year, as Valentine’s Day approached, many of the Popdose staffers gathered to trade stories of being dumped. After our “boys and girls” Iron John weekend, we wrote our stories of heartache and woe, and like idiots we posted our pain for all to shake their collective heads at – my sob story can be read here and was penned when I went by the moniker “Py Korry.”
Yes, I know Valentine’s Day will be here in a matter of days, but sometimes you gotta be a contrarian and do a little something for those who have loved, lost and are still bitter they got dumped.
But never fear, dear readers: we here at Popdose won’t be pissing in the punchbowl on Valentine’s Day. We have something special planned where “the softer side” of the staff will be laid bare, shorn of any cynical edges.
Until then, however, let’s get on with the show!
“Love Stinks,” The J. Geils Band (download)
Peter Wolf and his ex-pals from the band must have sent Adam Sandler a big bag of blow in the shape of a heart after he used this song to great effect in The Wedding Singer. Indeed, there’s a kind of cultural divide between those who know this song from when it came out in 1980 (and during the early years of MTV) and those who know it from the movie. But it doesn’t matter when you heard it first, because 10 seconds into the song, you know you’re hearing a classic. And, to be frank, if I didn’t lead with a “top of the hour cooker” like “Love Stinks,” my claim to bluntness would have been hollow.
Sometimes, when you’re choosing the soundtrack for an adapted screenplay, the source material hands your songs right to you (such as in the novels High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis). And even though it’s about 2700 years old, Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey most likely did include its own soundtrack as a critical part of its performances in its original iterations. The Odyssey begins with the line “O Muse! Sing in me, and through me tell the story…” and consists of 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter, which probably lent itself very well to a musical form. In the Coen Brothers’ loose adaptation O Brother Where Art Thou, however, the original rhyme and meter of the text (which of course, was in Greek) and the music, if it was actually preserved, have been discarded to accommodate the vernacular and musical traditions of Depression-era Mississippi.