The Music of Counterculture Cinema: A Critical Study of 1960s and 1970s SoundtracksMathew J.Bartkowiak and YuyaKiuchi. McFarland, 2015.

Abstract

The Music of Counterculture Cinema: A Critical Study of 1960s and 1970s Soundtracks Mathew J. Bartkowiak and Yuya Kiuchi. McFarland, 2015.With The Music of the Counterculture Cinema, Mathew Bartkowiak and Yuya Kiuchi offer twelve essays on films with countercultural themes and two insightful interviews, one with Country Joe MacDonald, musician and Woodstock legend, and the other with Robert Greenwald, best known as the director of Steal This Movie (2000). While I could quibble with the selection of films-why, for instance, is Barbarella included and Zappa's 200 Motels excluded?-the authors do not aim create a definitive list. Instead, their noteworthy objective is focus on the intersection of music and film and the potency of that intersection create, maintain, or confirm what may be considered a countercultural perspective, ideology, and legacy. They mostly succeed.The volume features essays on the usual suspects -Monterey Pop, Gimme Shelter, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, and Clockwork Orange, for example -and some surprising choices, particularly Deep Throat and Gas-s-s-s. However, as the authors explain, these latter two films demonstrate the pervasive influence of the counterculture on films and culture. Deep Throat draws on the free love movement make pornography chic, while using music that, instead of complementing, clashes with the action on the screen, and Roger Corman's Gas-s-s-s, an inane film in which everyone over twenty-five is poisoned, tries appeal the counterculture audience for, as Country Joe says, to cash in on the youth culture (175). 'Other especially strong essays include those on Head, Harold and Maude, and Gimme Shelter. The cynical and politically alive Head, often considered the Monkees' quest for countercultural legitimacy, breaks narrative conventions and, in the process, breaks audience expectations of the group, which was created for prime-time television and live outside the social and political turmoil of the 1960s. The result is a film that has come be a historical text, capable of measuring the authenticity of the movement itself (42). The essay on Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude considers how music constructs narrative and mediates onscreen imagery and action for audiences in need of some guidance. For example, the film's music leitmotif, If You Want Sing Out, Sing Out by Cat Stevens, serves several functions: develop characterization, establish tone, inspire audience investment in the film, and push for audience acceptance of the twenty year-old and eighty year-old's romantic relationship.While the chapter on Monterey Pop is superficial, the provocative essay on Gimme Shelter argues that the film reveals the impotency of countercultural music. …