Soundtrack of Your Life: Remakes

 Soundtrack of Your Life is an occasional feature in which we mark the songs of our relative youth as played over public muzak systems.

Date: February 22, 2025, 9 a.m. hour

Place: Chuze Fitness in Uptown Albuquerque

Song:  "Beds Are Burning"

Artist: Awolnation ft. Tim McIlrath

Song:  "We Didn't Start the Fire"

Artist: Fall Out Boy

Irony Matrix: 1.9 out of 10

Comment: I was on the elliptical at the gym and heard "Beds Are Burning" come on, and it just didn't seem right; it didn't have the oomph that I was used to. That's because it wasn't the 1987 original -- by Midnight Oil -- but instead a cover from a couple of years ago by Awolnation. I don't know what exactly is lacking in the new version, but it never achieves lift-off. Is it merely that the vocals are not by Peter Garrett, the frontman for Midnight Oil? Was there something about the urgency of the Reagan era that doesn't translate to the Trump era? Do I remember the video and a fonder time from my (relative) youth? Is it just a crappier version? The new version has a techno feel to it (and, for some reason, a "Munsters" groove line). There's just no snap to it, however. And the vocals (by Tim McIlrath of Rise Against) feel shouted; so, props to Garrett as the O.G. in this one. Here is the original.

 

And then there is the infamous 2023 sequel to Billy Joel's much-ribbed 1989 original of "We Didn't Start the Fire." Let's call the original the beginning of the end of the MTV era. It was a list song, churning through Joel's 40 years on earth (he was born in 1949) and hopscotching along the global highlights of the second half of the 20th century, a "This Is Your Life" to all Boomers still stuck on JFK's assassination and the arrival of the Beatles and biding their time until Fox News would come along in the mid '90s. 

Joel's song actually reached No. 1 on the charts (he had only three in his career, and the other two are just as forgettable). I didn't have anything against the song -- it's clever in spots -- and I'm a pretty big Billy Joel fan; I just was more interested in Nine Inch Nails at the time. Anyway, Fall Out Boy (!) thought it would be a good idea to carry the torch and draft a whole new version, updating the years from 1989 to 2023. From a simple Google search, I learned that the band has been savagely roasted over it. I'm sure it's not much worse than the original (I haven't listened to it closely), but it's certainly not essential listening. And maybe the point here is that Joel made a lot of things look easy; I'd put him in the songwriting category a notch below the ones at the top -- Paul Simon, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Lennon-McCartney and Robert Pollard. In his prime he was brilliant. I haven't heard anyone say that about Fall Out Boy, but then I'm a little out of touch with the emo kids.

It did remind me that I've been working on a joke forever about taking my own stab at updating "We Didn't Start the Fire." It goes like this. "I see Fall Out Boy did an update of Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire' by writing new lyrics that touch on all the crucial people and world-shattering events that have rocked the globe since his song was released, right up to the present day. I worked really hard on it. I think it encapsulates every key moment that led us to where we are at this moment. Like the original, you have to sing it really fast, listing things rapid-fire. And I had to memorize the whole thing. I think I can't do it for you now. (Long pause.) Here goes:

"Kim Kardashian

Donald Trump.

"Thank you."

That's the bit. No need to embed a video of either version, right? 

Life Is Short: Hey, Bobby Dylan, I Wrote You a Review

 

Everyone was warned. In my recap of 2024 ("How Does It Feel?"), I contemplated the idea of going to see "A Complete Unknown," the biopic covering Bob Dylan's fertile period between his arrival of New York City around 1961 and his plugged-in spectacle at the Newport Folk Festival in summer 1965.

 

I made it through an hour of the movie at a sold-out matinee at the Guild Cinema before I walked out. The main problem with the film is that it barely qualifies as a movie; it's a wafer-thin narrative stitched together with extensive song performances -- meticulous reproductions earnestly rendered by Timothee Chalamet, who might have needed sinus surgery after his faithful parroting of Dylan's signature Midwest nasal twang. It's not much more than a karaoke festival, as Monica Barbaro jumps in to portray Joan Baez and also does her own singing. But while anyone can mimic Dylan, no one should ever try to re-create Baez's ethereal voice (or suffer comparison to her luminescent presence). I felt bad for Barbaro, who sings perfectly well, just not in another dimension; there's nothing special about her.

Elsewhere, "A Complete Unknown" suffers from the same limitations that drive me away from Hollywood biopics, particularly movies about artists I've admired as their careers unfold in real time along with mine. I'm no Dylanologist, but I dove deeply into his music for about 25 years at the end of the last century, and this movie had nothing to offer me after the magic of early-'60s Greenwich Village (derivative of a "Mad Men" episode) quickly wore off. 

Chalamet's performance of early Dylan songs was fun at first, but it eventually got stale. Plus, the love triangle -- Dylan falls for Suze Rotolo (here named Sylvie) and then beds Baez while Sylvie is studying art in Italy -- was building toward a histrionic showdown in which two smart, beautiful women put up with and perhaps fight over an immature jerk. (It's inadvertently comical when Baez drifts into a club at the sound of Dylan's voice, watches rapturously as he performs "Masters of War" at the height of U.S.-Soviet nuclear panic, and instantly drops her panties for him.)

Once Dylan received a royalty check for $10,000 from his second album and struck up a fanboy pen-pal relationship with Johnny Cash (the women behind me swooned as Cash's voiceover praised Dylan), I headed to the exit. All that lay ahead, I feared, were more movie-star impressions. A bland Edward Norton tries way too hard to capture Pete Seeger's earthy goodness; and I cowered at the prospect of someone named Boyd Holbrook -- surely named with this silver-screen moment in mind -- pretending to be a bad-ass Cash (who probably at the time was interested in Dylan's stash of amphetamines more than anything).

In fact, most of the performances are remarkably flat -- perhaps the result of deciding to cast actors based on historical resemblence (manager Albert Grossman, for example) -- including the talented Elle Fanning, who brings very little to the role of Sylvie beyond being a plot device as the woman who made Dylan woke in the era of civil rights and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It all felt like a clear-out for Chalamet, with the cast bowing to his transformation into a Boomer icon. If Chalamet's performance were anything more than passable -- and if the dialogue (some of which he swallows) had any snap to it -- that might have been acceptable. (Also, perhaps most mystifying of all, Chalamet is somehow not as pretty as the 21-year-old Dylan.) Director James Mangold, penning the screenplay with Jay Cocks and Elijah Wald, gives us repeated ham-handed winks to Dylan's penchant for fabricating his biography at the time but does nothing to dig deeper below the surface of that. (The movie suggests it's a mystery; but is there more to it than Robert Zimmerman was bored or embarrassed by his suburban upbringing and would do anything to be a rock star?)

Finally, I feared the coming melodramatic, too-faithful re-enactment of the (in)famous day in July 1965 when Dylan set the old folkies' hair on fire when he went electric, shredding "Maggie's Farm" with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, days after the release of his single "Like a Rolling Stone," which would alter the landscape of American popular rock 'n' roll. This is by-the-numbers storytelling; Boomer culture porn. 

A month ago I noted that Dylan himself "is the ultimate work of fiction" and wondered if there is a point in "fictionalizing fiction -- or worse, trying to faithfully replicate it." I asked before if there was "a need to see America's puppy do a karaoke imitation" of Dylan. I have my answers: There is no point, and I don't need to watch it. If you want to know what the man was like back then, go watch "Don't Look Back" instead, or go deep into this exhaustive, fascinating fact-check of the movie from Variety.

Title: A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

Running Time: 141 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  60 MIN

Portion Watched: 43%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 62 YRS, 3 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Went home and listened to early Dylan ("Freewheelin'" and "Another Side") and watched the first half of Martin Scorsese's doc "No Direction Home," and started writing this review.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 3-1 (I might check out the ending someday out of curiosity.)

 

BONUS TRACKS

A moment in time that we shouldn't try to recapture or re-create -- "Like a Rolling Stone" at Newport (a version of which I presume runs over the closing credits): 

 

 

The transcendent slam poetry of "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie," April 1963: