Conversations Kill: Nostalgia, Anniversaries, and The Crow Soundtrack

You could say the summer of 1994—or hell, the entire year, really, if I were to think about it—was an incredibly formative time in my young life. It was the year Kurt Cobain died. It was the year songs like “Regulate” by Warren G and Nate Dogg, and “Stay” by Lisa Loeb came out—those songs are twenty years old now, which is a lot for me to take in for some reason. Maybe it’s also worth noting that both of those songs also originally found success after being used in movies—Reality Bites and Above The Rim, respectively.

It was the summer I bought Last Splash by The Breeders and Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star by Sonic Youth on cassette.  It was the summer of Woodstock ’94, an event broadcast in all of its muddy glory on MTV.

It was the summer of OJ Simpson’s slow speed chase down the freeway, in a white Ford Bronco.

t was the year I turned 11. It was the year I found out my parents were splitting up. It was the year my grandfather passed away.

1994, specifically the summer of ’94, was the year of The Crow.

As a movie, The Crow has not aged well. Maybe it was never very good at all, but maybe I was too young to care. My wife and I watched it probably seven years ago, and we were both surprised at just how flat out bad it is. But with all of the tragedy and mystique that surrounded the filming of it, the fact that it was based on a comic book graphic novel, and the fact that it had an INCREDIBLE soundtrack—maybe I was just willing to look beyond how awful the movie is as a pre-teen.

Much like the movie itself, the soundtrack is a total product of its time—primarily collecting artists of the time, and placing them in one convenient compact disc. In looking at the tracklisting now, there are a lot of these songs I don’t remember, or can recall skipping over, but the sequencing of “Big Empty,” “Dead Souls,” and “Darkness” still seems pretty flawless to me—but also what a “1994” thing to happen—putting a Stone Temple Pilots song, a Nine Inch Nails song, and a Rage Against The Machine song, right in a row like that.

In a sense, you could say that The Crow’s soundtrack served as a bit of a promotional tool for many of the artists featured on it—of course “Big Empty” would go on to be featured on Stone Temple Pilot’s second LP Purple, released later that summer; the same goes for “Milktoast” by Helmet—a song pulled from the band’s much underrated Betty. Then there are popular acts like Rollins Band, Pantera, and Nine Inch Nails—all of whom were hitting their stride with mainstream success at the time. In looking back The Crow’s soundtrack really set the bar for what soundtrack to movies like The Hunger Games, et al. do today—you cash on what’s hot, when it’s hot.

Like many soundtracks or compilations, The Crow, as a soundtrack, is frontloaded with all of the best material—opening with the lengthy “Burn,” a song written for the film by The Cure—an act that huge influence on The Crow’s creator James O’Barr—you really need only look at the similarities between Robert Smith’s trademark makeup, and the original character design from O’Barr’s comic books. “Burn,” much like pretty much every latter-day Cure song in their canon, attempts to bring a little bit of edge and drama to their standard 1980s dream pop sound.

After the somewhat generic, industrial slither of “Golgotha Tenement Blues” by Machines of Loving Grace, the soundtrack hits its stride with that aforementioned triple shot—say what you will about Stone Temple Pilots, but damn, 20 years later, “Big Empty” is still an incredibly powerful song—the way it moves from the very raw sounding, restrained verses into the huge, crunch post-grunge refrain hasn’t aged well, and it hasn’t aged poorly either. I stop short of saying that it’s timeless, but I look at a song like “Big Empty” as being so iconic that it somehow is able to transcended judgment.

Stone Temple Pilots- "Big Empty"

Unfortunately not as timeless would be the other two pieces of that triple shot. Nine Inch Nails’ take on “Dead Souls” hasn’t aged terribly, though Trent Reznor is nearly synonymous with the mid-1990s, so the early industrial landscape he treads here dates itself slightly. The song itself is a relatively faithful cover of the Joy Division original—the tempo comes of as more even here in comparison, with Reznor’s dramatic whispers and unhinged screams filling in for Ian Curtis’s deadpan, haunted, hollow vocals.

Originally a b-side, “Darkness,” by Rage Against The Machine, captures the band at a time early on in their development, and possibly still unsure how to combine their political agenda with the highly original style of music they were crafting. Here, the verses take a bit of a detour with a very free-form jazzy sounding backdrop, while everything else gets nice and heavy with that early-Rage crunch. Zach De La Rocha sounds so young here, and yes, 20 years down the line, “Yes yes ya’ll, and you don’t stop, shedding light on the darkness of greed,” is a little cringe worthy.

As a track found relatively early in sequencing on Betty, Helmet’s underrated 1994 effort, “Milktoast” is one of the standouts. Here, found rather late in the game, past the halfway point, it ends up lost in the hard rock shuffle, found sandwiched in between the Rollins Band’s somewhat tolerable cover of Suicide’s “Ghost Rider,” and Pantera’s unintelligible “The Badge.” And then, after this, it’s all kind of downhill, closing things up with a very miscast remix of Medicine’s “Time Baby II,” here, titled “Time Baby III,” taking pretty much all the abrasive pop bite found on the original out, replacing it with some watered-down, flanged acoustic guitar warbling.

Jane Siberry’s maudlin “It Can’t Rain All The Time” closes the soundtrack. “It’s like she’s not even trying to hit the notes,” my wife said the other day when I subjected her to revisiting this soundtrack as we drove around the suburbs of Minneapolis. And she’s right. Siberry’s voice is truly an acquired taste here, on some post-Kate Bush level mystic-pop shit, and the song serves as the ballad for the movie, pulling the song’s title from a line of a song by Brandon Lee’s character’s fictional band. It also just sticks out like a sore thumb when compared to the other thirteen industrial and/or hard rock tracks that arrive before it.

Like so many things that we deem nostalgic, revisiting them so many years later on can be detrimental. The Crow was a movie I loved as a pre-teen—I had the VHS copy, and watched it countless times. When re-watching it as a mid-20-something, it no longer spoke to me; and in writing that just now, I have to wonder why a violent, revenge fantasy film with stiff acting and a poorly written scrip ever really spoke to me at this age. I mean, I went as The Crow for Halloween in 1994—the last Halloween I ever trick or treated, mind you. Imagine being 11 and trying to explain what your costume is to all the old people that live in your middle class neighborhood.

I didn’t expect this soundtrack to have aged particularly well, but it also wasn’t as painful of a listen as one may imagine. Listening to the soundtrack and looking at the very plain white cover art that is now a JPEG associated with the files I downloaded, and is no longer a four-panel fold out booklet—it does take me back to that summer of 1994, listening to this on my CD boombox in my childhood bedroom. It’s an artifact of a time that I don’t think about that often; however, it was an important time in my life.

The danger with nostalgia or revisiting something after, you know, nearly twenty years of being away from it is that you can do a lot of damage to your memories. I apparently loved the shit out of the soundtrack to The Crow, and as a 30 year old, I can’t see why. My “refined palate” of today, if you will, is scoffing at the 11 year old who saved up his allowance or whatever and bought this from the Media Play book, record, and movie "big box store" in Rockford IL. But I shouldn’t scoff is the thing. I should just take this for what it is, not be embarrassed by what I liked as a kid, and move on.