How Streaming Ruined End Credits
+ the lost art of the plot song
In this issue: no movies you have to watch but plenty of video clips for which I highly, highly recommend sucking it up and turning your sound on.
Mourn, O Venuses and Cupids, over the death of the TV theme song, because there’s only one cinematic music tradition I care about: the decline of the original end credits song. I am not talking about pop song tie-ins, your Anastasia (1997) “At the Beginning-ses” your Prince of Egypt (1998) “When You Believe-ses.” Those are sparkly, serious, award-bait numbers devised to close out a bestselling soundtrack.
I am talking about the end credits song written explicitly for, and about the events of, the movie. It’s the walk-out song, the inverse of baseball’s walk-up song, if you will, and what I’ve taken to calling, simply: the plot song. It’s the song that plays over the end credits, summarizing the events of the film from a first person perspective as the audience leaves the theater, still basking in the glow of cinema.
Will Smith did many of these. Jimmy Buffet did one for Arachnophobia (1990) from the perspective of the spider.1 But the ur-example for me will always be the RZA song that soundtracks the end of Blade Trinity (2004):
The Blade movies are amazing, and I include the much-maligned third one in this assertion, but even if they were terrible this song would make the entire trilogy worth it. I had assumed the song was about Blade, the vampire-fighting-vampire himself, but listening again reveals it’s actually from the perspective of the film’s primary villain, a souped-up Count Dracula: “I strike back with a vengeance, the father of descendants/And I can't be deflected, by your silver cross pendants.”
My other top choice is from the J. Geils Band, best known for the unlistenable 1981 pop hit “Centerfold” and best loved (by me) for the promotional single they wrote for Fright Night (1985), also called “Fright Night.” Fright Night is about a horror-obsessed teen who suspects his neighbor is a malevolent vampire, or as the good folks at the J. Geils Band put it: “People say I'm crazy and I make no sense/But they don't understand the man's got influence/He's a gigolo, a liar, a man of many faces/So don't be fooled by what you think you see/He's gonna make his move on you and me.”
These songs exist in a meta space in between the film’s universe and our own, an alternative telling of the story, an American corrido, if you will. The song can’t exist in the movie’s universe, of course, but it also can’t really exist in our digital space. It lingers only in the paraphernalia of the movie, like physical soundtracks where there will be two different versions and the longer version will be intercut with movie dialogue. But that type of tie-in marketing no longer exists, replaced by 11 minute GQ interviews on YouTube and promoted Twitter threads. Streaming has wiped out the DVD and the once-ubiquitous movie soundtrack, and with it, the promotional single.
It’s not quite the same as the theme from Ghostbusters (1984), which feels like it could exist in-universe as a jingle for the Ghostbusters themselves. Nor is it like Kenny Loggin’s “Footloose” or John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion),” which despite lyrically referencing their respective movies, don’t actually align with the story or its characters. And while the music of 70s Blackploitation is probably the best movie music of all time per capita, songs like Superfly’s (1971) “Superfly” or Shaft’s (1971) “Theme from Shaft” are more about the identities of their respective characters than their specific filmed exploits. These are also both in an omniscient third person, rather than from the perspective of someone with a personal relationship to the characters or the events of the movie.
The tradition of the James Bond theme is probably one of the last remaining places to get close to what I’m describing. While those are again thematic, not narrative, and are about setting a (generally humorless) tone during the opening credits, they’re at least often in the first person.
Until I get the 2022 metatexual first-person plot song of my dreams, I leave you with the music video made for the DVD release of a Re-Animator sequel, Beyond Re-Animator (2003), where a very Eurotrashy house musician called Dr. Reanimator inaccurately explains the themes of the movies. This is what streaming has taken from you.
LL Cool J’s “Deepest Bluest” for Deep Blue Sea comes close to dethroning “Fatal”