Taped Together

Tracks on Teevee #2: In Which Movie Magic Makes an Old Song New

Welcome to the second installment of TRACKS ON TEEVEE, an occasional Tracks on Tracks series that looks closely at special moments of song in movies, on TV shows, and across the vast video expanses of the World Wide Web. TRACKS ON TEEVEE is here to share these moments and ask what makes them tick.

Back in December, for the first installment, I looked at the time Elliot Smith went on daytime TV and made everyone show their human faces for a minute.

Today, we’re watching a (fictional) Japanese man and his niece share a moment, with big assists from Van Morrison, cassette tape technology, and a crummy van stereo.

TRACKS ON TEEVEE is a bonus feature for paid subscribers as a token of my appreciation. Paid subscriptions are what buys me time to work on the site. In addition to bonus articles like this one, paid subscribers get access to TRACKS ON TAP, a playlist (available for Apple Music and Spotify) that features almost every song ever mentioned in a Tracks essay. They also get the knowledge that they’re directly supporting the existence of writing they enjoy.

And now, without further ado …

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Taped Together

If a great song is not just great but also sufficiently catchy (and inoffensive), and if a zillion other factors align, that great song starts showing up everywhere: backyard parties, school dances, bar mitzvahs, sporting events, bat mitzvahs, weddings, karaoke nights, on the radio, in movies—until its ubiquity makes it hard, if not impossible, to hear the greatness anymore.

But sometimes, by the right magic, we get to hear the old songs anew. One path I’ve found is listening to music with my kids, for whom nothing is yet familiar. They haven’t heard “Y.M.C.A.” twelve thousand times. All they know about “Y.M.C.A.” is that it goes hard: extremely, extremely hard. Living inside that truth with them, dancing together around the living room, I get the privilege of seeing that they’re right.

Another path to reacquaintance: movies. Most of the time, the big-screen actually just makes a played-out song feel more played-out than ever.  But there are exceptions, and I was recently delighted to find one in the new Wim Wenders film Perfect Days, which tells the story of a man named Hirayama who works as a cleaner of public toilets in the Shibuya neighborhood of Tokyo. Music is a big part of the plot: Hirayama has a prized collection of cassette tapes—Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Nina Simone, the Rolling Stones, Otis Redding—and he plays one in his van every morning as he sets out on his rounds. This is just one of the many routines that structure his life, giving it a comforting rhythm that involves not just fulfilling his work responsibilities and getting his laundry done but also engaging (a lot!) with beauty: music, literature, the play of light through leaves. The tapes also establish Hirayama as someone stuck in time: nothing he plays was released later than 1980, and it’s clear that he doesn’t have any CDs, let alone any streaming accounts.