Immanence

“Juno” soundtrack

OVERVIEW

“Juno” is essentially a movie around a soundtrack, and in accord with the overwhelmingly positive attitude of the film, there isn’t a single dark note in this acoustic guitar-based collection of Barry Polisar’s attempt to be Belle and Sebastian, peppered with the lighter, acoustic guitar-based pieces by the likes of The Kinks, Belle and Sebastian itself and Sonic Youth. Yes, they manage to find or get them to produce a Polyanna-spirited Sonic Youth song. The only non-acoustic guitar-based moment is a brass solo during the Belle and Sebastian tune. No, really. And the B&S song is the only song with a nice strum pattern and a nice chord progression to it. (And they could’ve just used “Lazy line painter Jane”, whose lyrics already fit!) The rest is just plain, even the Sonic Youth tune!

Juno is all about this girl who gets pregnant by accident and decides to go with the baby-making process in order to give it to adoption to this cool family who really wants a baby. You can’t write a spoiler for it — the publicity material gives away the movie and frankly there’s nothing to give away at all. There is no drama, no conflict, no nothing. It would almost be an experimental movie if it wasn’t for the glossy Sundance-like production.

AS WALKING MUSIC

This is good music to listen to in heavy traffic or while walking/standing next to heavy traffic if you have a pair of good insulating headphones (like the Sennheiser PX-200, which I can’t recommend enough). If it’s quiet and/or sunny outside you plain don’t want this — the sun will achieve the intent of this soundtrack better. It’s been around there for billions of years so it accumulated some experience, you see.

It even managed to keep me cool about my iPod paranoia. (You see, I just got the iPod, a 160gb Classic, and living in Rio, there’s the fear of getting mugged and losing this thing that costed me half my salary. So I hide it in a place I’m not gonna tell you about and I’m not telling you where I walk with it.

AS WRITING MUSIC

Maybe it’s good music to write some Polyanna-spirited novels or self-help book about how everything turns okay if everyone just loves each other a lot. It’s not good for writing real self-help books (are there any besides Mille Plateaux by Deleuze and Guattari?) about the fluidity of human spirit, how the Matrix can’t tell you who you are and you should be a free individual and not just go around loving everybody.

It is bad music for writing darker or more intense stuff, let alone a rhizomatic account of the ins and outs of bipolar disorder. Which not only means this is useless for writing my book but useless for anyone telling a mystery-based book or just a book about strong things.

I don’t do ratings. I mostly want to write album reviews around those categories.

Breadcrumb trails:

Acoustic Guitar, Barry Polisar, Belle, Belle And Sebastian, Bipolar Disorder, Brass Solo, Chord Progression, Cool Family, Good Music, Headphones, Heavy Traffic, Jane, Juno, Kinks, Lazy Line Painter Jane, Line Painter, Paranoia, Polisar, Positive Attitude, Publicity Material, reviews, S Song, Sebastian, Sennheiser Px 200, Sonic, Sonic Youth, Walking Music

© 2008 μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math ↵.