When I was younger, I sought out movies but music would find me.
I was a Matrix kid. My head throbbed walking out of Toronto’s Rainbow Market Square theatre in 1999. It was instantly my favourite movie, and at 13, I was too young and ill-equipped to know why. It was a rare moment when I could weirdly feel the puberty happening in real time: the movie hit me, and like a drug I hadn’t tried yet, my brain lit up and electricity ran through pathways that hadn’t yet been used.
I was an empty hard drive, no taste in film, music, or clothing. But after being cleaved open by this movie, I had more space to fill. I saw The Talented Mr. Ripley in theatres with my parents and similarly gobbled the whole thing up before realizing what I’d ingested. My dad wondered why I loved a film about a troubled man who steals and lies, has homosexual leanings and kills those who find out that he’s nobody rather than somebody. That he wondered made it cooler to like.
I was wide open. What else could I take? How dark did movies go?
My deep dive into music happened later when I was 15. I loved music and had a solid variety in my foundation thanks to my parents: Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, R&B, Motown – but I hadn’t on my own discovered new music as it was happening.
Vanilla Sky got me into Radiohead.
Of course I knew “Paranoid Android” and “Karma Police” and “Just” and “Creep” but there wasn’t yet an inroad for me, and I was 11 when OK Computer was released. Vanilla Sky seemed like the kind of movie I liked by then: psychological, maybe supernatural. This was how I was going to identify with music, by continuing down the rabbit hole of movies. Before anyone argued that Cameron Crowe was heavy-handed with his soundtrack choices, I was floored when I heard “Everything in it’s Right Place” in the film’s early dream sequence.
Like how The Matrix introduced me to Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake Up,” Penelope Cruz’s refrain of “Open your eyes” opens Vanilla Sky and precedes Kid A‘s first track.
As hard as it is to associate Tom Cruise and Radiohead, the title “Everything in its Right Place” syncs up with his character’s utopian and opulent apartment. But the initial effect is sort of a let down as the super serious song is paired with a rich dude putting his pants on in the morning. Maybe the song is a reverberation of a dream he’s had, the type that feels strange and important but you can’t remember why. That’s why it’s still playing as he leaves his driveway to discover he’s the only living boy in New York. A dream, with a song that includes the lyric “Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon.”
I bought Kid A while on a date, which should be a sign you’re on a bad date. I was with the friend of the girl I actually liked and she did not care about The Matrix. On our way to see Phone Booth with Colin Farrell, I stopped into Sunrise Records to get my hands on this new album I’d heard of with creepy, white mountains and a dark sky on the cover. The rest of the night was a wash.
I listened the next day to the album on my boombox and shitty Discman headphones. What did I know? It wasn’t until a year or so later when I bought Kid A on vinyl that I heard the faint pulse of a drumbeat behind the entire song. I was shocked. Then again, when your perspective expands wider, it’s hard to remember much from before.
by @JoePack
Tune Spotting 
Leave a comment