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: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
It takes guts to cover a Smiths song, because if you dare to you sure as hell better not f##k it up. Well, The Dream Academy succeeded. They produced a version that seemed to have its own identity and pay homage to the great Manchester act at the same time. The song appears in the museum scene of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Ferris, Sloane and Cameron are playing hooky and end up at the Art Institute of Chicago. In a twist, the scene doesn’t provide comic relief. Rather, it provides relief from the comedy. And there’s no song better to create the mood than “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want”.
The Dream Academy version is less morose, more euphoric. I mentioned in a previous post on Mental Jukebox that The Dream Academy occupied a rare space in music during their time where their songs seemed to resemble dreamlike states. As the band name suggests, we go to The Dream Academy to learn how to dream and imagine again. Listening to their Smiths cover, it’s easy to get swept away and lost in the music, whereas in the original version it was easy to get self-absorbed. It’s like that Art Institute scene where Cameron is squinting intensely at the pointillism of a Seurat painting. He realizes there’s so much more when you look closer and deeper, beyond ourselves and into the art of life.
“SO, FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE, LET ME GET WHAT I WANT. LORD KNOWS IT WOULD BE THE FIRST TIME.”