Weird things happen when the music industry and the movie industry collide. Sometimes through contractual obligation, simple oversight, or sheer negligence, a movie is paired with a song that just isn’t appropriate.
This is about a brief six-year trend of weird end-credits songs – songs that just don’t read the room.
Thematically, the list could be neater. Like, if the songs were all from Batman movies. Or all from live-action movies. Or all from 90s movies.
At least all of the films are pretty good; within their subgenres, they’re all pretty great.
But thematic unity is not what this post is about. This is about how incongruous the songs are.
For one thing, these aren’t power ballads. They’re nothing like ‘Everything I Do,’ ‘All for One’ or ‘Take My Breath Away.’ This is not the kind of soaring music that will embolden you to ask Angela to slow dance at the school disco.
No, these are smoochy ballads: unabashedly romantic, adult-contemporary lurve songs. And they’ve been paired with movies aimed primarily at 13-year-old boys.
Those boys probably never noticed these songs. By the time the music started, they were already making a beeline for the cinema toilets, or sifting through a stack of VHS tapes for the next bank holiday distraction.
But they should listen now.
And also draw the curtains, because things don’t rate as PG for very long.
Scandalous by Prince – Batman (1989)
Batman gazes over Gotham as church bells ring out triumphantly. Cut to black. Roll end-credits. It’s a tidy conclusion to one of the great comic-book movies.
But after a minute-long reprise of Danny Elfman’s majestic Bat-theme, we segue into something very hot and heavy: ‘Scandalous’.
Of the five songs that made an appearance in Batman, ‘Scandalous’ makes the least sense – both in Prince’s musical universe and in the movie proper.
I maintain that Prince’s storied Batman soundtrack is at least a partial artistic success.
A couple of songs were used prominently and effectively in the movie. The album is, if a little dated and chintzy, nevertheless both fun and coherent.
What helps the project along is how much Prince commits to the bit. He even goes so far as to attribute different sets of lyrics to Bruce Wayne, Batman, the Joker and Vicki Vale.
But of the five songs that made an appearance in the movie, ‘Scandalous’ makes the least sense – both in Prince’s Batman musical universe and in the movie proper.
It’s the kind of insanely torrid ballad only Prince could get away with, a distant cousin of ‘The Beautiful Ones’ from Purple Rain. Even the album version ends with a round of orgasmic cooing apparently offered up by Vicki Vale herself, Kim Basinger.
It was later released as an epic three-part 19-minute ‘Scandalous Sex Suite’, for those listeners who (unlike Kim) weren’t yet satisfied.
‘Scandalous’ was one of several existing tracks repurposed for the Batman project, but the attempt to yoke it to the Dark Knight feels completely arbitrary.
The notion of the Joker belting out ‘Electric Chair’ works.
But imagining Batman as the tumescent lothario singing ‘Scandalous’ feels as absurd as oceanic repellent bat spray.
I Never Even Told You by Tia Carrere – Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm begins with ominous and operatic choral music, as the camera glides through a CGI Gotham. The end credits offer something much more romantic.
It’s Tia Carrere, making her second major soundtrack contribution in two years.
(If researching this post achieved anything, it made me realise I’ve been mispronouncing Tia Carrere’s surname for 30 years.)
Unlike ‘Scandalous,’ this Bat-ballad boasts a respectable thematic link to the movie. It could plausibly be sung from the perspective of Andrea Beamount, Bruce Wayne’s love interest in the movie – a Mysterious Character from Bruce’s past who is Burdened by A Dark Secret.
But that doesn’t stop it sounding even more out of place at the conclusion of the movie, lurching in with a prominent saxophone motif and following up with whispery adult contemporary lyrics about ‘lovers’ indiscretions’.
Get a room, Tia!
The Experience of Love by Éric Serra – Goldeneye (1995)
Goldeneye rescued Bond from the jaws of irrelevance in the mid-1990s and the movie’s reputation has only improved in the years since.
This is in spite of, not because of, Éric Serra’s score, which has been lamented both by critics and the film’s director.
I can attest that Serra’s score already sounded dated on release. The playful robo-tune of the opening car race to Monte Carlo might have been more appropriate at the dawn of the Dalton era.
Even during its stronger moments, Serra’s synthesiser-heavy orchestration sounds more like the soundtrack to a video game (which was kind of prophetic given the future of the Goldeneye brand).
And then, there’s the end-credits ballad.
After 007 has saved the world (or at least, the UK banking system), Serra makes the ill-advised choice to add his own vocals to his already underwhelming score.
If one were being charitable, one could observe that this soporific ballad might have worked if twinned with a contrasting, ambivalent vocal – something with the slightly sinister character of late-period Leonard Cohen.
Looking for other reasons to be positive: there is also a gesture at tying the dreamy lyrics into the movie narrative. One line briefly echoes Natalya’s warning to Bond about how his ruthlessness will ‘keep him alone’.
But otherwise the abiding impression is the same one I had when George Michael chose to perform his new single during the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. A venerable brand being entrusted to a musician who sees it as fair game for a moment of overreaching self-indulgence.
Now, sometimes an iconoclastic choice can briefly put the spotlight on something weird and wonderful.
But in this case what we have is the tepid background music of a beachside bar during mid-afternoon, as the season comes to a close – the kind of location that can get the best of even Bond himself.
