This month, I’m looking back at movies and tv shows to rediscover songs that graced the screen. The scenes and the music are inseparable. They’re engrained in our heads and our hearts. And they’re proof that the best music we have doesn’t exist in isolation. It attaches itself to a moment or an experience. #SceneSongs
Movie: The Karate Kid
Bananarama may not be the most exceptional singers in the world. Their voices were rather pedestrian. The trio would often forgo harmonies, opting instead to sing the same exact notes. Which begs the question, why did they need three singers? Well, the reason was because the three of them – Siobhan Fahey, Sarah Dallin and Keren Woodward – looked so damn cool in videos and on stage with their long, new wave-frizzed locks and 80’s fashion cues. They were fun. They were entertaining. And they were highly successful, locking in their spots on Band Aid, garnering countless hits in the UK, and even a couple of Top Ten showings in the U.S., including this song “Cruel Summer”.
Songs in the opening and closing scenes of movies tend to be the most memorable ones – and “Cruel Summer” was the opening number in The Karate Kid, the soundtrack for that first day of school for Daniel LaRusso, Ali Mills, Johnny Lawrence and the rest of the town. It was perfect for the scene. Bananarama sings the song intentionally with a monotonous dread. It sorta works, but it’s the instrumentation that gives the song its edge. Synth hooks and guitar riffs that were textbook new wave musicality. Question is, who composed those hooks and who plays them on the record? Seemed like either no one cares to know, or maybe some people cared too much that those musicians would somehow detract from the power of the female trio.
“IT'S TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT. THIS HEAT HAS GOT RIGHT OUT OF HAND.”