It also appears in the final frames of two of the most haunting films I've ever seen, Gummo and Mulholland Drive. This is probably why I was so struck by the appearance of Orbison's ghost.
OK, technically Orbison didn't come back as a ghost. He starred in his own hologram tour last year, and his reappearance was simulated by a few beams of light refracted through a prism. Still, something about it seemed excessively eerie, partly because Roy Orbison's music has always seemed oddly holographic to me.
Roy Orbison's songs sound particularly holographic when used in film, where they tend to exist in stark contrast to the reality of what's actually happening onscreen. The late crooner's songs are the exact sort of dreamy 1950s-style ballads that frequently soundtrack films' violent, disorienting, and apocalyptic conclusions.
Roy Orbison - Cryingwww.youtube.com
No Roy Orbison song is featured more prominently in film than "Crying." The expansive ballad has appeared in dozens of movies, where it usually represents some kind of splintering, some sort of break from reality, or a faded dream that has long since decayed or never existed at all.
"Crying" appears in the final frames of Harmony Korine's Gummo, a gruesome documentary-style film that depicts what one might call the most stereotypical version of Trump's America. Gummo takes place in an Ohio town that has been ravaged by a tornado. Kids spend their days sniffing glue, beating each other up, and torturing animals; abuse is a constant, looming undertone, a cycle that perpetuates itself over and over again. It's a graphic portrayal of destruction and white American rage.
At the very end of the film, a silent boy wearing pink bunny ears (who has been the film's main symbol of ruined innocence) winds up in a pool with two versions of Chloe Sevigny (she plays twins). As the trio collapses towards each other, driven perhaps by some impulse of inevitable self-destruction, "Crying" begins to play. In the next frame, two young boys shoot the carcass of a cat in sync as rain pours down.
Gummo - Roy Orbison's "Crying"www.youtube.com
The song is so ethereal, with its eerie background vocals, perky violins, and general ghostliness, all of which stand in stark contrast to the desperation, sparseness, and distortion that define the film's characters. The song gives voice to their grief, released to soak everything like the rain, flooding a world where everyone is too numb to care for themselves or each other.
In David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, "Crying" represents the preservation and pursuit of another type of dream—the dream of Hollywood and all it promises. That film tells the story of a woman named Betty who moves to LA to become an actress, only to slowly lose touch with herself. Early on in the film, Betty meets a woman named Rita who has lost her memory, and together, they try to find the key to Rita's past.
Llorando - Clip from Mulholland Driveyoutu.be
Eventually, they make their way into a theatre. There, a woman walks onto the stage. There is no band, says a voice in Spanish. The woman begins to sing a cappella, performing a Spanish version of "Crying" that's so devastatingly moving that it brings Betty and Rita to tears. Suddenly, the singer collapses, but the song keeps playing, and slowly we realize: It's been a recording all along. There was never any band, never any real relationship between the singer and the audience. The singer was, basically, a hologram, playing out and preserving the artifice of reality while operating on a completely digitized and robotic level.
At this moment, at last, the split between reality and fantasy becomes visible. The center can't hold. The artifice of it all—of Hollywood's illusions, perhaps of identity and the characters' conceptions of reality—opens our eyes.
In all of these instances, "Crying" seems to emphasize the washed-out emptiness of the characters who, up until the moment it plays, have been denying the delusion in which they've been living, denying the sadness and decay that lurks at the edge of the brightly lit theaters they've been hiding in.
"Crying" also features in an episode of The Walking Dead, and Orbison's duet with k. d. Lang won a Grammy after it was featured in the film Hiding Out. Another one of Orbison's best songs, "In Dreams," appears in a different Lynch film, Blue Velvet, also in a scene where the singer is lip-syncing. This is why the fact that Roy Orbison starred in his own hologram tour seems so appropriate, and so ironic. Will a Roy Orbison holograph appear on the edge of my bed one of these nights, smiling ghoulishly? At this rate, it truly cannot be ruled out.
CRYING (Music Video) Roy Orbison, K D Langwww.youtube.com
I've been thinking about this for a while—the kind of vintage, faux-cheery music that films choose to play during their most violent scenes. I've decided that Roy Orbison's songs belong to a canon of movie soundtrack music that, for lack of a better term, I'll call "apocalypsecore." It's the kind of dreamy, spaced-out music that usually appears to contrast scenes of particular violence, and so it always feels doubly ominous and completely doomed. Like hologram performers, it seems to exist in a state of dissociative denial, always in contrast to reality.
Apocalypsecore music even featured in Titanic as the musicians continued to play their instruments while the liner sank. It played at the end of Dr. Strangelove in the form of Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again," which rang out in contrast to the sight of an atom bomb exploding. It played in the ballroom scene in The Shining, as ghosts danced to Al Bowlly and Ray Noble's impeccably ominous jazz number, "Midnight, The Stars and You." In one very creepy art installation I saw at the Oakland Museum, it played on a transistor radio over an installation that depicted an apocalyptic junkyard.
The Shining Ballscene 1080pwww.youtube.com
Always, apocalypsecore music is happy and upbeat, outlined with brilliant strings played so loudly that they don't sound so different from screams. It's usually vaguely faded and garbled, and always about an idealized romance. They feel like worn-out carnival rides surging to life again in the darkness, lights twinkling through layers of dust.
Much of this music that was made during the 1950s and early 60s—during the Baby Boomer generation's childhoods (and of course, the boomers are the ones who planted the seeds for the lethal neoliberal capitalism that's currently devouring us all). It's music that comes from the Stepford Wives and tract house segment of the 1950s, the one where capitalism seemed to promise a beautiful future for, of course, only the mostly white middle class. It's music that comes from the burning core of the American dream, which is also the Hollywood dream, the capitalist dream, the dream of beauty and imagined glory.
This was also the time period when Roy Orbison began his successful career. His image was akin to James Dean's cool masculinity, with his slicked-back hair and dark sunglasses; he was an evolved cowboy, and his three-octave voice sounded almost alien. Could that Orbison have imagined that he would reappear as a hologram?
Regardless of his desires, without his agreement, it happened. He (or a semblance of him) was reanimated. His son claimed the hologram tour was intended to grant people who had never seen Orbison the chance to see him live. But as these tours have grown in prominence, with Whitney Houston, Tupac, and Frank Zappa joining the ranks of 3D simulated performers, many people have started to call bullsh*t on the capitalist impulse behind these tours.
An episode of Black Mirror featured a holographic version of Ashley O (Miley Cyrus), a pop star who was nearly euthanized when she began to deviate from her manager's expectations. Black Mirror, perhaps more clearly than any other show ever has, outlines the ways technology is becoming more real than reality. It features another song that contains elements of apocalypsecore—"Right Where It Belongs," a Nine Inch Nails song that I vividly remember listening to on the bus while in eighth grade. This made hearing Ashley O (the real one) play it on the piano, then watching her hologram sing another Nine Inch Nails song with rewritten lyrics, extra surreal. But it was also unsurprising; I long ago realized that I'm far from the only one convinced that the world isn't quite as it seems.
Ashley O - Right Where I Belong | Official Music Videowww.youtube.com
One of the most popular videos on YouTube for "Right Where It Belongs" juxtaposes the quiet song against blurry clips of wartime violence, mostly explosions. Maybe nuclear war is the final stage of the experiment human beings began when we created the earliest technology—agriculture—so long ago, and started our project of accumulating more than we needed at the expense of the world around us. If so, perhaps social media and its algorithms are the beginning of technology's form of nuclear warfare, the final proof that our technology has grown more powerful than we are.
Nine Inch Nails - Right Where It Belongswww.youtube.com
Or maybe we were never that powerful at all. After all, tornadoes have always had the power to destroy us, to rip our homes up like blades of grass, climate change is a visceral reality, and the illusion of man's dominion over all things was always a doomed endeavor.
There is no band. And if or when the world ends, if the floods come for Brooklyn, you know I'll be blasting "Crying" until the final moment.
Roy Orbison in Concert - Cryingwww.youtube.com
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Cult Leader, Mass Murderer, Alt-Right Hero, Folk Singer: Charles Manson and His Failed Music Career
On the 50th anniversary of the Manson Murders, a look back in time at the sonic inspirations and frustrated desire for glory that inspired Manson's killing spree.
Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is preparing to take modern-day Hollywood by storm.
The film's release is timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the infamous Manson Family murders, when Charles Manson and his coterie of villains gruesomely took the lives of Sharon Tate and eight others.
Manson's legacy has persisted for half a decade, and Tarantino's movie reestablishes another gruesome truth: Hollywood can't get enough of its supervillains, especially when their mythologies involve young women, movie stars, and ambition that crashed and burned and left bloodlust in its wake.
All this recognition raises the question: When is it acceptable to revisit the legacy—and, in this case, the music—of a serial killer?
Hollywood Hallucinations
Before he became a cult leader, Manson actually wanted to be a folk musician.
From 1966-67, Manson recorded his compositions onto a mixtape called Lie: The Love and Terror Cult. Because Manson is a white supremacist and serial killer, we don't actually encourage you to waste the time or energy to listen to his album. Instead, according to other sources, the album's fourteen songs belie a troubled spirit with a (possibly subconscious) awareness of his own true nature—particularly on "People Say I'm No Good" and "Garbage Dump." Apparently, his music is also laden with counterculture tropes, from a hatred of cops to a bevy of lines about birds.
However, Manson's guiding mantras were in no way aligned with the starry-eyed, peace-and-love ethos of the average counter-culture hippie. Manson was motivated by racist ideas that led him towards the belief that an ensuing, super-apocalyptic race war was on its way, meant to annihilate both blacks and whites, thereby creating space for Manson and his (maybe "disturbed") 'Family' to take over the world.
Though his music never broke into the mainstream on its own, Manson did make some promising industry connections before initiating his final rampage. In 1968, two of Manson's female followers—Patricia Krenwinkel and Ella Jo Bailey—were hitchhiking when they were picked up by the Beach Boys' drummer, Dennis Wilson. Once he learned about this, Manson leapt on the connection, eventually ingratiating himself into the Beach Boys' social circle. He and some of his Family moved into the Beach Boys' mansion that summer, where they dropped acid and participated in group sex.
Soon enough, it seemed like Manson might've made a powerful connection with the Beach Boys, as Dennis Wilson eventually took Manson to a studio to record. However, everything came crashing down when Manson pulled a knife on Wilson's producers after a disagreement, and from there, things spiraled out of control.
That fall, the Beach Boys recorded a poppier version of Manson's original song, the forebodingly named "Cease to Exist," renamed "Never Learn Not to Love," with Brian Wilson credited as the sole songwriter. Afterwards, Manson presented Dennis Wilson with a single bullet, and said, "It's important to keep your children safe." This was the final straw; Wilson beat him up and sent him home.
Until he drowned off the coast of Marina del Rey in 1983, Dennis Wilson refused to talk about his relationship with the Manson Family. It is known that the Mansons wrecked the Wilson's car, blew $100,000 in cash, passed along STDs, and trashed his home. According to fellow Beach Boys member Mike Love, Wilson saw Manson shoot someone and throw him down a well. The psychological impact of a visit from the Manson family certainly did nothing to help with Dennis Wilson's battle with addiction, which would continue for the remainder of his life.
That was Charles Manson for you, though. He was a man whose fetid, twisted nature found a shell in the hectic abandon of the late 1960s counterculture movement, and whose ability to cast a spell over others enabled him to pull many innocent people into his twisted influence. As it turned out, the drug-addled, guru-worshiping, love-is-all-you-need ethos of the hippie age was the perfect guise under which to hide murderous impulses.
Interestingly, Manson's actions were partly inspired by some of the most famous music of the era. He claimed that the Beatles' White Album was the reason he committed all of his murders in the first place; specifically, he believed that several songs on the White Album foreshadowed a forthcoming race war. He believed that the song "Helter Skelter" referred to the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and that "Revolution 9" and "Piggies" predicted the vanquishment of the white man.
Chillingly, during one of the Manson murders, one of the killers wrote "Helter Skelter" in blood on a door in Sharon Tate's house.
Posthumous Glory
Since Manson's conviction, his music has gained controversial levels of recognition. The Lemonheads covered Manson's "Home is What Makes You Happy" in 1988, and Guns N' Roses put their spin on "Look at Your Game Girl," released as a secret bonus track at the end of their covers album The Spaghetti Incident?
Most famously, the boundary-pushing goth rocker Marilyn Manson created his name by smashing together "Charles Manson" and "Marilyn Monroe" to form a moniker that combines two of the most glorified objects of Hollywood tragedy. Marilyn Manson even covered Charles'"Sick City," and Nine Inch Nails recorded their 1992 EP, Broken, at the house where Sharon Tate was murdered.
All this posthumous recognition raises the question of when, and if, it's appropriate to recognize and interpret the art of a serial killer and white supremacist. This is the more extreme angle to a very common question—can we separate the art from the artist?
While contemporary "cancel culture" can sometimes go too far, in Manson's case, there is no separating his work from who he was as a person. Every consideration of what art we morally should or should not listen to needs to happen on a case-by-case basis, wherein we weigh the extremity of the person's offenses with the time period and extenuating circumstances surrounding their actions; and Manson can never be extricated from who he was as a person or from the lives he stole.
Things get especially hairy when examining the tremendous amount of art and pop cultural products inspired by Manson's legacy. From Joan Didion to Marilyn Manson, Mad Men to the Ramones, Manson has been a constant muse for everyone from punk rockers to political commentators. Sometimes, these products can be genuinely thoughtful—for example, Emma Cline's The Girls explored the brainwashing inherent in 60s California mythology and the effect of patriarchal aggression on the adolescent female psyche; and other outlets like Psychic TV have used Manson's story to explore the connection between cults and fanbases.
Still, other interpretations have been less nuanced, to say the least. Buried within the countercultural forces that motivated Manson was a stunning super-individualism, a belief that he was totally enlightened and free, to the point of total liberation from any form of consequence. It was a patriarchal, white supremacist, pack-mentality-created hatred that is very much alive today. (There are obvious parallels between the central ideas that fueled Charles Manson and fuel the alt-right today, and Manson is a frequent object of idealization on alt-right forums). In a way, attention—be it positive or negative—is exactly what Charles Manson wanted. The fact that he transitioned from an aspiring musician to drug-addled guru to murderous cult leader reveals that his number one love was not music, nor adoration. It was power and attention of any kind.
Therefore, Manson's music and life deserves no glory and no idealization. The only positive consequences of exploring his story and legacy are a potentially deeper understanding of the forces that created someone like him, if only to locate and address those forces when they reappear.
Tellingly, after Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor recorded in Sharon Tate's old home, he happened to run into her sister.
According to Reznor, "She said,'Are you exploiting my sister's my sister's death by living in her house?' For the first time, the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said: 'No, it's just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I'm in this place where a weird part of history occurred.' I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don't want to support. When she was talking to me, I realised for the first time: 'What if it was my sister?' I thought: 'Fuck Charlie Manson.' I don't want to be looked at as a guy who supports serial-killer bullshit."
ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD - Official Trailer (HD)www.youtube.com