Tag Archives: Mad Men

Drop The Needle, Then The Mic


The Royal Tenenbaums, left, and Baby Driver, needle drop classics

What do you do for living?

Not, “What do you do for a living?” The question is more precise. What is the thing you do most often in a day? Stare down a monitor? Type? Talk to strangers? Swing at golf balls? Watch TV?

I’d like to lie with something noble or dashing, like write or read or change minds or woo beauties. But the truth is, I listen to music more than any activity.

If I’m writing, music plays (I Got A Line on You by Spirit right now). If I’m driving, music plays. Same with showering, dressing, brushing my teeth, walking the dogs or pushing a vacuum. If I am still, I like my head spinning.

So I’m a sucker for a needle drop. Even if a movie is lousy, it rises to mediocre fare with the right needle drop (use of commercial music in a film or show).

Witness, Patch Adams. Awful by every metric, the Robin Williams film found a place in my heart with the deftly-placed CSN&Y tune Carry On/Questions. And what would Star Trek: Beyond be without the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage? God knows Battleship’s lone watchable scene needed AC/DC’s Thunderstruck to stay afloat. Baby Driver is a silly-ass movie, but its needle drops are so on the money it’s nearly a musical.

Still, it’s one thing to create lyrical art. Quite another to be a lyrical artist. Here, then, are the most deft needle droppers in Hollywood:

Paul Thomas Anderson

The Stanley Kubrick wannabe (and he almost is him) had Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood score There Will Be Blood. The sublime Aimee Mann — his girlfriend at the time — wrote the tunes that waft Magnolia. But his finest needle drops came in Boogie Nights, particularly.

Wes Anderson

The Texas filmmaker dots all of his films — Moonrise Kingdom, Rushmore, Bottle Rocket — with tunes as eclectic as his wardrobes (he has all shirts and jackets tailored a half inch short to give the appearance of awkwardness). His crescendo performance was The Royal Tenenbaums.

Cameron Crowe

Crowe began his career as a rock and roll journalist, working for Rolling Stone magazine. He carries that rebel aesthetic to movies such as Singles and Vanilla Sky. His Stairway to Heaven, though, was Almost Famous, where he played, fittingly, homage to Led.

https://youtu.be/QIEzRZFPaHY


Richard Linklater

He may portray slackers and lost souls, but Linklater works as hard as a rocker with a used guitar. He captures youth’s devotion to music in movies like School of Rock, Slacker and Boyhood. But nowhere does his Freaks & Geeks flag fly higher than in Dazed and Confused.

David O Russell

When he’s not screaming at actresses, Russell is perhaps the best needle dropper in the movie business. American Hustle, Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees were notable not only for their sardonic looks at the United States of Commerce, but their FM deejay vibes. None, though, can touch The Fighter, with its needle drops from the Stones to The Heavy to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Martin Scorsese

When all the other directors/show runners were just fitting into their big boy pants, Scorsese was dropping needles. While he favors jazz and classical music in movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, he’s at his MC zenith in The Departed. He may overuse the Stones, but come on. It’s the Stones.

Zack Snyder

Snyder is known for occasionally making better soundtracks than movies. There are worse offenses in Hollywood. He peppers his superhero flicks with a lot of grunge, particularly Chris Cornell. If Watchman is too long for you — and it is long — having it on in the background is a little like asking Alexa to play music, but to smoke weed first.

Matthew Wiener

Wiener may be the master of needle drops in Hollywood, full stop. He was executive producer of The Sopranos, which, from theme song to final scene, is a lyrical odyssey of Homeric scale. THEN he topped it with Mad Men. Both are two of the greatest shows ever made. Mad Men, which spans the 1960’s, seems to have the key hit tunes from every year of that decade. It is a master class in Needle Droppage 101.

Brava! Encore!

Deja Viewed: Mad Men


Ask Google ”What are the greatest television shows of all time?”, and she’ll promptly display a horizontal bank of names, with corresponding photos. There’s no number to designate rank, but if one were to read left to right, the first ten would look as follows:

The Sopranos; The Wire; Breaking Bad; Fargo; Oz; Mad Men; The Shield; Deadwood; True Detective; and Better Call Saul.

Two things stand out on the list. One, Vince Gilligan created two of them, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Two, they all have crime and death at the core of their story lines.

Except Mad Men.

If anything, the story line of Mad Men should barely constitute a daytime soap opera, let alone a prime-time drama: A New York advertising executive in the 1960’s struggles with alcohol, womanizing and a spiraling All-American family life, in that order.

The show, which turns 15 this year, would offer no murder plot, no gang syndicate, no crime, really, to speak of besides the white collar variety. The only significant death happened before the show’s first episode. These Mad Men were racist, sexist, and as poetically merciless as The Sopranos or The Wire in their worldview of America as fading corporate sellout.

That Mad Men managed the transcendent feat bloodlessly makes the show arguably the highest TV achievement ever.

Embodying that malaise is adman Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a creative arts director who doesn’t buy the American Dream because he sells it on TV and magazines. Well.

If Tony Soprano is the Washington on the Rushmore of Hollywood’s iconic TV anti-heroes, Don Draper is its Lincoln. Creator Matthew Weiner, who served as a producer on Sopranos, created his greatest anti-hero since, well, Tony Soprano. Instead of a Mafia don, we get a Madison Don.

But make no mistake: a sharp suit does not soften the ugly edges of the character draped in it. This anti-hero is as much anti as hero, maybe more. Tony and Don both depart the series smiling, but at least you knew Tony was smiling at the image of his family. The frustrating beauty of Mad Men is you can never really tell if a character is being honest — or selling an image they honestly want to be.

One way to measure a show’s IQ is to count how many times a character has a facial reaction NOT seen by the other characters in the scene, particularly dramas. Mad Men specialized in the unshared epiphany.

What may ultimately set Mad Men apart among TV historians is its sense of history. Set from 1959 to 1970, Mad Men feigns being a show about the 60’s. But it really chronicles the birth — and death — of the Baby Boomer generation. We watch with Don & Partners as events such as the Kennedy and King assassinations and the Civil Rights movement leave our heroes crippled and dog paddling in a rising corporate tide. But like Breaking Bad, it’s all black comedy, many times laugh out loud. Even the final scene is so droll you won’t know if you’ve been won over or flim-flammed.

Which is Mad Men’s ultimate point. Are you loved and happy, or playing someone who is? Is there a difference?

Seasons 1, 5 and 7 are the show’s best, in that order. The First for its novelty; Fifth for its Conradian Hero’s Arc, and the Seventh for Hero’s Return. Lady Lazarus, the 8th episode of season 5, may be Mad Men’s best episode, period. Written by Weiner, Lazarus is the show at its narrative and artistic zenith — with a stunning final two minutes that rival any two final minutes. Period.

Combine the show’s needle drops (from the Beatles to the Stones to Frank and Nancy Sinatra) with its meticulous attention to historical detail, and you have, essentially, Ken Burns with dramatic flair.

Sold.