It’s been too long since I’ve done anything truly stupid. Wait, not true. The other day I bought that handheld Guitar Hero game out of morbid curiosity. Yeah. That was mildly amusing for about four minutes. But it has been too long since I’ve done anything truly stupid in relation to this site. I set out to fix that.

Everybody knows that Pink Floyd’s album Dark Side of the Moon syncs up with the classic movie Wizard of Oz. I’ve tried it once and it really works. The whole concept made me realize how we don’t see any other movie/music pairings like this. That got me thinking…

If such a great movie syncs up so well with such a great album, then surely the best superhero movie would HAVE to sync up with the best album ever. That’s right. I decided to watch Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker while listening to Beck’s Odelay.

Keep in mind, this is the good version of the movie, with all the torture and violence.

Hey, worst case scenario: I waste 50 minutes of my time listening to good music while watching most of a kickass movie.

For the first half of this, nothing was really working. There were a couple good bits in there, like Terry and his girlfriend going onto the dance floor and getting down while Beck instructed them to “Do the hotdog dance!” Or that scene where Bruce Wayne beheads a Two-Face statue with a batarang, all while the lyrics of Lord Only Knows mention, “Throwing your two-bit cares down the drain.”

I thought I had something when Joker was eating candy and about to kill Bonk, but it turns out the correct lyric was, “Throwing troubles at the dying embers,” and not, “Throwing truffles at the dying members.” Damn.

There were a couple more parts that almost, sort of worked, but nothing neat enough to repeat.

Then about 25 minutes in, it totally picks up. The song Jackass gets to the point at the end where Beck keeps repeating, “Staying alive” over and over again, all while Bruce Wayne is trying to elude the Joker within the Batcave and not succumb to the Joker gas. Where It’s At starts playing and right when I hear, “Move through the womb like ambulance drivers,” we suddenly see Terry’s girl being taken off in an ambulance.

The same song features a random sound clip of someone saying, “That’s beautiful, dad!” I couldn’t help but giggle as that was the exact instant where Terry finds the Batcave destroyed, covered in bloody “HA HA!”s and Bruce is near death.

Then Bruce points to where the anti-toxin is to a confused Terry as we hear Beck yell, “Where it’s at!”

It all kicks into gear right as the present day flashback begins. The fast-tempo Minus begins playing as we see Tim Drake Robin excitedly jumping from rooftop to rooftop. The music slows down abruptly as he sees a mugging going on in an alley and stops what he’s doing. Soon after he is kidnapped, leading to Batman and Batgirl frantically searching the underworld as the music itself goes back to being frantic. The line, “Throwing imbeciles on the window sills,” comes right around the time we see Batman toss a goon through a window. Then the song breaks apart towards the end and we hear loud, chaotic twanging, while at the same time, Batman and Batgirl are dealing with a giant jack-in-the-box.

Sissyneck makes a good soundtrack for the next bit and there’s a part towards the end of the song where Tim Drake as Joker Jr. shoves away the distraught Batgirl and runs off while Beck sings, “Don’t talk to me when you’re looking for somebody to cry on.” The whole torture sequence is shown off during the song Readymade, which is slow, scratchy and bass. As the scene transitions into Batman going from horrified to pissed off in a near-homicidal state as he goes on a Joker-punching rampage, we get a beautiful transition from the end of Readymade to the beginning of the pumped-up rap track High Five.

“Aw, yeah! I like that shit!”

At the end of the first verse and its refrain, the music abruptly becomes an ominous orchestral piece as Joker hands his gun to Joker Jr. with intent on killing off Batman.

The flashback ends and we see Terry in perfect lip-sync with the sudden exclamation from the CD, “Turn that shit off, man! What’s wrong with you?!”

The final track, Ramshackle, plays mainly during the scene where Terry first confronts the middle-aged Tim Drake, who wants little to do with him. Let’s just look at the lyrics here.

”You’ve been so long
Your blind eyes are gone
Your old bones are on their own

So take off your coat
Put a song in your throat
Let the dead-beats pound all around

We will go
Nowhere we know
We don’t have to talk at all
Hand me downs
Flypaper towns
Stuck together
One and all”

That’s as good a way to have ended it as any, I suppose. Good God, what was I thinking with this? Unfortunately, odds are I’m going to try this again by mixing Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs with Batman Begins.

Oh, well. I’ll have a real article up tomorrow. Really.

Similar Posts:

• And You May Tell Yourself: My God! What Have I Done?!
• The Roots: How I Got Over
• Weapons of Mass Destruction
• Music, 2012: Zola Jesus, “Conatus”
• if you want me, you should find me [Pill x Suzanne Vega]

Posted in comic books by Gavok |