Day 19 - "Music from the Motion Picture 'Valentine'" - Various Artists (2001)

I'm back from my holidays, and excited to be back to writing my daily blog posts again.  And today's album is an exceptionally strange one.

Yes, unbelievably, it's on Spotify.  Listen to me here.

Soundtrack albums have always been somewhat of a curio of the music industry, it seems. Occasionally, they're a carefully curated set of songs from a films director which are intended to feed directly into the plot of the movie (think this year's Baby Driver soundtrack), or they're a blast of nostalgia intended to ground a movie in a specific era (like the soundtrack to American Hustle), or evoke a certain certain emotional tone (as demonstrated exceptionally by the two Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack volumes).  

But sometimes, and especially in the case of substandard thrillers, they are a time capsule of what marketing executives think 18-25 year-olds are into at the time, and boy howdy is this that. Released in "Fuck You, It's January" of 2001, its hard to imagine how a film fronted by the acting powerhouses which are David Boreanaz and Denise Richards could get dumped out in the post-Oscar's trash flood. I was a big fan of Buffy and Angel, and even I didn't go and see this film.  I did buy the soundtrack though. 

I've been trying to unpick how it came to be in my collection all afternoon while listening to it.  I can see several elements which I know contributed when I look at the track listing, and I think I've narrowed it down now, enough so that I am going to commit to what I'm about to say being as close to the truth as I can get it without messaging people I know some very strange and specific questions.

While the advent of social media has made the trend of liking bands ironically (or pretending to like bands ironically to preserve credibility while actually liking them unironically) fairly popular, it's certainly not a new invention.  Back in the day my friends and I would amuse ourselves by becoming unreasonably fixated on stupid musical goofs between us, song-driven memes with a target audience of about 20 people at most; the stupidest of inside jokes.  Before Rick-rolling was a thing, me and D would exchange CD-R's of mp3s downloaded from KaZaa and Limewire, but where some portion of the songs were actually mp3s of Joan Osbourne's "One of Us" renamed.  I deliberately learned how to modify the library text on mp3's when D started getting wise to a simple renaming, just to keep the bit going.  Whenever I made a mix CD for Alex, I always put the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' "Aeroplane" on there, and never included it in the track listing.  This was because I'd accidentally put it on the first two CD's I made for him, he mentioned it, and instead of being rational about it and going "oh, what a dumb mistake", I leaned into it and ended up including Aeroplane on about 15 different CDs over the course of 4-5 years.

We would also amuse ourselves, and each other, by unreasonably fixating on bands with very little reason.  I'm very fond of an East Coast Hip Hop group called "Hyenas In The Desert" because while out CD shopping one day, me and D saw their EP for sale and thought the band had the dumbest name in history.  We never saw the EP on sale again anywhere else, but that didn't stop me from declaring them to be a fantastic band and even eventually tracking the EP down.  Its not on Spotify, but its pretty good 1996 gangsta rap, if you like that sort of thing.  Somewhere I own (or perhaps, used to own since I can't see it in The Pile) an album by The Driven, an American Rock Bluegrass band because I saw them at midday, opening a tiny festival stage, and a crowd of 30 or so people were watching them with limited to no interest.  Our little group decided on a whim to rush the front of the stage and dance like crazy to every song, despite never having heard them before.  They were also pretty good.  So I bought their album, just because.

You're probably wondering where this is all leading, and it's leading in the direction of a band called Snake River Conspiracy, who contributed track number 13 to the "Valentine" soundtrack.

When 4 of your 5 most popular songs have an average of 3000 plays each, it's possible Spotify is not the platform for you

Snake River Conspiracy, or SRC to their fans, were a blip in the nu-metal landscape of the early 2000's.  They were also a band which both me and D enjoyed ironically, again for a fairly dumb confluence of reasons.  

Now it's here where the memories get hazy, but I think this is close to some version of the truth. Initially, me and D had seen a video for "Vulcan" on MTV in one of our late-night, stay-up-till-2am-playing-card-games-and-watching-MTV nights.  We'd both fixated on it for the same stupid reason, which is that it samples, very specifically, the main view screen noise from Original Series Star Trek, which we're both fans of.  After maybe one or two viewings, we didn't see it again, and the band seemed to be a figment of our imaginations.  What we didn't know was that there was a record released in 2000 by the band, after we would have seen the "Vulcan" video (which was from the 1999 EP).  They remained lost to us until, when looking at the back of this CD because it contained a track by Filter which (as previously covered) I was a fan of, I saw finally evidence of a new track by this band which had passed somehow into legend for us.

Shortly after this discover, D ordered a copy of their album, "Sonic Jihad", and the Snake River Conspiracy was solved for us.  Also as a result of listening to this soundtrack album, I ended up being exposed to Static-X for the first time, who also became an weird running joke between me and D based purely on the majesty of Wayne Static's hair.

Wayne sadly died at the age of 48.

So, while conceptually this album was definitely a terrible marketing ploy, and on relistening it's like being submerged up to your eyes in whatever the year 2001 was composed of, strangely the 'Valentine' soundtrack ended up being a gateway into a bunch of music I might never have listened to otherwise.  It's dated as hell, and I wouldn't recommend it even as a collection of 2000's nu-metal (it's a combination of album offcuts from bigger bands like Linkin Park and Marilyn Manson and tracks by small time bands like SRC who would go on to do nothing at all after 2000), but it's earned it's place amongst the pile, even though I'll be happy to never listen to it again.