Godzilla: The Album

One of the more distinctive cultural legacies left by Sony/Tristar’s 1998 Hollywood blockbuster incarnation of Godzilla is all the myriad ways the studio attempted to transform it into the apex example of a four quadrant multimedia hype machine. Not surprisingly, that’s also one of the major criticisms of it: that the marketing was just as important as the actual content of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s film, if not more so—the movie’s “Size Does Matter” tagline representing their ambitions to outdo the previous decade’s worth of summer crowd-pleasers in every respect. So, trailer campaigns, promotional tie-ins with places like Taco Bell, toys, and Saturday morning cartoons were not just there for a little extra dosh on the side, but a core part of the entire endeavour—and the general short-to-medium-term disinterest that audiences showed those tie-ins ultimately did more harm to a potential American-led Godzilla’s franchise potential than even the poisonous critical reception did. The movie being mostly hype was its downfall when it was the hype inevitably died down.

Among the products produced for the movie was, of course, the soundtrack of “inspired by” rock/pop tracks whose presence in the movie was mostly optional, although the singles and their tied-forever-to-the-movie music videos were key parts of the marketing campaign. Compared to the toys and other merch, Godzilla: The Album was actually fairly successful, a platinum seller in multiple countries with singles that charted on various Hot 100s. This was at a time when every major motion picture had a similar tie-in soundtrack, and most of them sold regardless of the general opinion of the movie—the only explanation is this was the peak CD era, and you had to actually put in the effort to not sell at least a million discs.

Godzilla: The Album did not have the high concept hook of previous soundtracks for summer disappointments like Spawn, which featured collabs between heavy metal and electronica musicians—closer in spirit to the soundtracks to the Joel Schumacher Batman films, it is instead a repository of mostly alternate rock and other popular genres of the late nineties, a clear attempt to make the music associated with Godzilla ’98 contemporary and “cool.” However, a more accurate description is that it’s a repository of the bloodless form of alternative rock that shambled on through our radios after the boom period in the first half of the nineties inevitably collapsed—it’s a real mishmash of veterans of the genre like Foo Fighters and Rage Against the Machine, mostly forgotten newcomers like Fuel and Fuzzbubble, as well as semi-associated artists like Ben Folds Five, just to give you the discombobulating experience of going from hard rock and rap to piano to whatever the heck Joey DeLuxe is supposed to be. The tracks themselves are a mix of written-for-the-soundtrack entries, established deep cuts (like Silverchair’s solid “Untitled”), and weird hybrids like Green Day’s “Brain Stew (The Godzilla Remix)”, where their insomniac anthem is interspersed with samples of Godizlla’s trademark roar. As you can tell, some of the contributors put more effort into this than others, and some put in effort that they eventually felt was not worth it—Foo Fighters were apparently excited to create a song for a Godzilla movie, right up until they actually saw the Godzilla movie they created a song for.

Lost in all of this pure 1998 marketing buzz is Godzilla…you know, the popular monster on which the film is supposedly based. One would assume that Godzilla would be a bit central to the whole project, especially since the aforementioned marketing push seemed to be based on the notion that the world’s most popular giant monster should be able to handily scale up every accomplishment of something like Jurassic Park. So, the state of alternative rock and pop music in 1998 is one thing, but the real question remains: what does any of this have to do with Godzilla? For a good chunk of the songs, the answer is often “nothing, really”, and that sometimes even applies to original songs produced specifically for this album. But surely there was some thought process behind the lead singles in particular, some inkling of what kind of song would be appropriate for the King of the Monsters. The only way to know for sure is to look at each of them and suss out their radioactive DNA.

The Man and the Monster (1958)

We return to the Golden Age of Mexican horror cinema in the 1950s and 60s, and to the work of producer-actor Abel Salazar, who we last saw in the bizarre brain-sucking Dracula-alike The Brainiac. As I said in that write-up, the defining features of this era of Mexican horror film is the influence the movies take specifically from the classic Universal horror cycle of the thirties and forties (and their imitators), with classically supernatural stories and moody black-and-white Gothic visuals. This is very evident in The Man and the Monster (El hombre y el monstruo), a film produced and starring Salazar and directed by the prolific director-actor Rafael Baledón—in particular, this takes cues from The Wolf Man, as well as the various film adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (of which Universal produced exactly zero), with a little bit of Faust for good measure. But this movie is more than the sum of its influences—and is a relatively more subdued affair than the off-the-wall Brainiac—learning all the right lessons to give this seemingly familiar story a unique sense of pathos and well-honed filmcraft that transcends any budgetary limitations it might have.

Monster Multimedia: “Abominable Snowman in the Market”

Every year I return to yetis, and every year I wind up with another sympathetic portrayal of yetis. It’s not like there isn’t anything out there that features yetis (or sasquatches…what is sasquatch plural? Should I go with Bigfeet?) as figures of pure menace, but how many of those are at all interesting? The fact is, from the day the idea of hairy wild men roaming around somewhere (be it on the tallest mountains in Asia or in the untouched woodlands of North America) in the wilderness became mainstream, there came a sense of camaraderie with these hypothetical great apes, living free out in the last remote parts of the world. As I said in my Urban Yeti! post, regular people seem to find them inherently amusing, maybe because they have incredibly non-threatening nicknames like “Bigfoot” and “Abominable Snowman”, and maybe because they recognize that there is something human about them, thinking of them as our distant cousins rather than some unknown wild animal. Maybe they are even a sort of aspirational figure, something that exists outside the urban malaise, roaming untethered. We want to like the yeti, whether they are real or not, and the art inspired by it reflects that.

The song “Abominable Snowman in the Market” hails from Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ titular debut album, released in 1976, which is not the debut album of either Jonathan Richman or the Modern Lovers. Richman is known for his highly idiosyncratic sensibilities and manner of singing, his stripped down stylings crafted from the early days of rock and roll (as well from his early obsession with the Velvet Underground), and the humorous streak that runs through many of his songs, including the cult favourite “Pablo Picasso.” Considering his unique vocals, which intentionally waver and place bizarre word emphasis throughout chorus and verses, he seems particularly suited to songs with off-beat subject matter, which can range from observational odes to the mundanities of modern life (like shopping centres or financial districts) or borderline child-like fantasies. Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers (the album) is particularly rich in both, so a two-and-half minute tale of a yeti wandering into the most quotidian symbols of suburban normalcy fits in rather well, especially when it’s sequenced alongside equally whimsical songs like “Little Insect” and “Here Come the Martian Martians.” Richman’s lyrics are fully ensconced in the modern world, but he demonstrates that there can be just as much a place of imagination as anywhere else.

Monster Multimedia: Tarkus

Part and parcel of all prog rock, but especially prog rock during its seventies heyday, are bombastic, often borderline surreal album covers—some might say they’re almost as important to the music’s legacy as the music itself. Could you imagine listening to In The Court of the Crimson King without Barry Godber’s artwork sitting there at the back of your mind? It just wouldn’t be the same experience. Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, as one of the most influential prog rock groups in terms of style and propensity for excess, managed to have a few of their iconic images stick in the public consciousness (such as the HR Giger-illustrated cover for 1973’s Brain Salad Surgery, which is yet another creature connection for those keeping score), but the one that stands out in particular is the starkly colourful William Neal painting for 1971’s Tarkus, which shares its name with the twenty-minute opus on the album’s first side, one of ELP’s most well-known pieces. What is there not to like about this vaguely sinister-looking armadillo tank, looming over a flatland coloured like a television test pattern, its gigantic turret aimed almost square at us? It’s the kind of outlandish concept that fits into the general tone of ELP’s music, but it’s also just striking on its own—who would think that an animal as innocuous as the armadillo could be transmogrified into that? Certainly it ranks up there as probably the most well-known fantasy creatures invented for a rock album cover.

But the story of Tarkus—the album, the song, and the armadillo artillery that also bears the name—goes beyond just an evocative abstract painting, encompassing a tale illustrated in the gatefold through a series of wordless panels, which is innately connected to the music itself. This is doubly interesting in that, though “Tarkus”, the song, has lyrics, they seem more or less unrelated to the image of the thing itself. This is one of the few cases of a creature story that exists almost through inference.

Monster Multimedia: Maggots: The Record

Time to be honest: I’m only familiar with the bizarre career of punk/metal vocalist Wendy O. Williams because her name is referenced in the Mario series (thank you, late eighties American localizers and your random pop culture pulls.) In general, I don’t go out of my to check out the kind of high-octane guitar + screaming music that Williams specialized in, but there is something sort of liberating about being that loud, angry, and abrasive. Music so unadorned and designed to rattle your brain into submission can be pretty fun, and it can also get a point across pretty plainly—when there is a point, at least (with shock rock, it’s never a guarantee that it means anything other than “Look at me! Look at me!”) Williams and her band the Plasmatics’ 1987 release Maggots: The Record (so we don’t confuse it with any of the other maggot-based entertainment that was all over the place at the time) does seem to have a point—an extremely bleak point—when it’s not just going out of its way to be gross.

Monster Multimedia: “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”

Of course, anyone who has ever listened to rock radio for the past forty years knows Warren Zevon mainly from a horror-themed song, “Werewolves of London”, as ubiquitous as he ever got from five decades of output in the music industry. One could easily mistake it for a novelty song, except I think the cleverness and dark humour that permeates much of Zevon’s music is still very present, even after hearing it for the millionth time. Still, it’s difficult to heap that much praise on “Werewolves,” because not only is it far from the best song on 1978’s Excitable Boy, it’s not even the best Halloween-friendly song on the album. That designation is hard-earned by “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”, one of Zevon’s trademark ballads and an interesting case of some of his recurring themes coming together to create a modern ghost story.