Book reviews

Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s

Published in The Literary Review


Pop and rock music are now such potent markets that films often seem to be promoting soundtrack albums, and the modern record company can have a near-directorial influence on a film's final cut. The modern soundtrack can turn a movie into ersatz MTV or be as crammed with period nostalgia as a vintage Wurlitzer. You don't remember that song from the movie? Come on, there was at least a two-second burst in the drive-by scene. Celluloid Jukebox, however, is far more than mere discography, and its collection of essays shows every angle of the relationship between film and pop music. 'Essays' evokes the demon of critical theory too strongly; there are fans here as well as academics and, best of all, the two combined.
Romney's and Wootton's introduction drops the coins into the slot and Mark Kermode makes the first selection, his overview locating the soundtrack as a vital establisher of mood or period. Thus, whether it's Fonda and Hopper burning the highway in Easy Rider to Born to be Wild or De Niro's Johnny Boy swanking into a bar to Jumpin' Jack Flash in Scorsese's Mean Streets, something strongly auratic is being invoked. We know where we are because we know where we were. British producer Steve Woolley is cited with approval, describing soundtrack pop as 'the cheapest form of period scenery'.
Ben Thompson is an excellent music journalist whose short piece on pop stars as actors breezes by like the perfect three-minute pop single. NME house doodlers Chuck Death and Colin B Morton reinvent the films of Cliff Richard as one of their familiar, text-heavy cartoons. Andy Medhurst waxes nostalgic for those British beat curios where some surrogate Cliff always seems to stand on the espresso bar table and say, hey, let's do the show right here! Kodwo Eshun plots the genre mutation of the Seventies blaxploitation movie into latter-day rapsplotation. As for the rock biopic, Michael Atkinson considers the good, the bad and the hagiography, while those readers who thought that underground cinema began and ended with Kenneth Anger are led further into the labyrinth by Jane Giles.
David Toop sifts knowledgeably through the musicians who would be film composers, and the editors combine to assess the thorny problem of the rock documentary or, if you will, rockumetary. Just as the reader thinks all bases are covered, Mark Sinker's final essay turns the question around and assesses pop music as film, as filmic. This runs from the kitsch, three-minute narrative melodramas of the Shangri-Las to the album as soundtrack to imaginary movie as practised by Brian Eno and Barry Adamson. Finally, there is relevant filmography and a sequence of interviews with luminaries of both converging art forms.
Celluloid Jukebox is a delight. Alternately academic and bubblegum, it both reveres and ridicules where appropriate. It is also a schoolroom of wonderful apocrypha. Did John Barry really have a career choice when his mother was a concert pianist and his father ran a chain of cinemas? In keeping with its commentary on the twin cultures of pop music and film, the book is crammed with stills and photos.
Fittingly, Celluloid Jukebox's short preface is written by Scorsese, who has done as much as anyone to empower the current symbiotic affiliation between movies and pop music. Pop music 'has the power to bring entire sequences to life,' he writes. So today Tarantino hints at a director's working relationship with pop music which liberates it from the role of mere ornamental marginalia. 'I'd hear music', says the wunderkind, 'and I would imagine a scene for it.'