What two pieces of unrelated pop culture are forever connected in your mind?
Aux Features Patrick Gomez
What, doesn’t everyone think of “Tubthumping” when they think of Bye Bye Birdie? Graphic: Rebecca Fassola
This week’s AVQ&A is inspired by reader Steve LeGrow’s question:
I have a suggestion, but I’m not entirely sure how to explain it without giving an example first. When I was 9 years old, I purchased The Blue Album by Weezer and would listen to it constantly while playing Super Mario Bros 2 on the NES. To this day (I’m 35 now) I can’t hear that album without thinking of that game, and vice versa. It’s a win-win for me, because I genuinely love both of them. I was wondering if anyone else links two entirely separate pieces of art together like that, for better or for worse.
So we’re asking:
What two pieces of otherwise unrelated pop culture are forever connected in your mind?
97 Comments
I paused this after a few seconds because I’ve not seen season 6 yet, but it made me laugh right away and is a perfect combination of cheese and awesomeness.
Pack it up, folks, we have a winner.
Quick question: what’s the piece of music that you would associate the least with Batman? Like, a piece of music that would, for most people, be the furthest thing from an encapsulation of pretty much any incarnation of the Caped Crusader, up to and including Adam West?If, like many people, you answered that question with “Why, Alan Silvestri’s theme to Forrest Gump, of course, what an odd question to ask.” then you are clearly not me circa the mid 1990s. For some inexplicable reason, my confused little mind as a wee’un decided that this:And this:Should be inexorably linked together.
Less confusingly, I also associate the album ABBA Gold with the Ps1 video game Driver, but that’s because I was obsessively listening to the former and playing the latter as part of a frantic attempt to maintain some level of sanity during my last year of high school.
“Life is like a box of chocolates. Dark chocolates. Like the night”
I love dark chocolate — sign me up!
The weirdest part of these two being together in your mind to me is that it doesn’t not work. You’d have to pick your scenes, but you could fit that scene to a Batman and make it work.
I must admit; having thought about it some more, the image that tended to come to mind with the music for some reason was Batman and Vicki Vale hanging off the cathedral at the end of ‘89 after the Joker had been defeated.(As an aside, I recently watched both Burton movies and something which I think tends to be overlooked in discussions of them is how Keaton really plays Bruce Wayne as incredibly socially awkward, lonely and lovelorn. In both movies he comes across as someone who seems to desperately want to make a romantic connection with the love interest but has no earthly idea of how to go about doing it. So now you mention it, maybe this music kind of ties into that somehow…)
Which music do I associate the least with Batman?
Is this a good answer?
The law requires that I answer “yes”.
Queen’s greatest hits 1 & 2 with Elfquest volumes 3 & 4. It’s been years since, with the exciting newfound freedom of a young teen, I randomly purchased the comicbooks as they were on sale, took them home, lay in a patch of sunshine on my bedroom floor and read through them as the CD’s i’d purloined from my brother played. This is why whenever I hear Who Wants To Live Forever my immediate thought is not of some French accented Scottish immortal weilding a katana, like a normal person, but of elves riding wolves chasing other elves riding birds.
For me I’d say Golden Eye / Smash Bros on N64 are forever linked to Rob Zombie’s Hellbilly Deluxe / Korn’s Follow The Leader.There were endless album repeats & stoned play hours w/ friends in the months that led up to my first big live concert experience, Korn & Rob Zombie’s Rock is Dead Tour in Madison, WI 1999.
Ah, the halcyon days of youth..
For me those games are associated with Queen’s Greatest Hits, The Wedding Singer soundtracks and The Beatles Anthology, all of which were on serious replay in my house in the late 90s/early 2000s.
Don’t know how “pop culture”-y these are, but when I first read the Eric Flint’s stories set in an out-of-the-way corner of David Drake’s Honorverse, Flint had created a group of Genetic Slaves-turned-Freedom Fighters known as “The Audobon Ballroom”. At the time I was first reading the stories about this group, for some reason VH-1 decided to try and make Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days” re-happen — so my brain connected the two!
Despite finding out that was where Malcolm X was killed (which is its significance to Flint), to this day whenever I read the “Torch” books (a planet settled by liberated Genetic Slaves and other ostracized peoples) and an action scene happens, my brain starts playing, “Take your baby by the hand….”
If “billiards” can count as pop culture, so can this
For some even more obscure SF – I was reading CL Moore’s “Shambleau” for the first time when Bette Davis Eyes came on the radio. They both feature mysterious and strangely entrancing women, so that’s stuck forever.
Yeah, I can see that, Jamoche….
I actually finally finished Homestuck (and the epilogues) just a few weeks ago. I was reading it when it started, and I’ve made several aborted attempts to get through it since, but this was the first time I made it all the way through. I’m old now, though, so I mostly read it on the bus to and from work. It…took a while.
I would be starting up Live’s Throwing Copper at the same time I was logging on to my local BBS. So those first quiet notes of The Dam At Otter Creek always bring me back to preparing to take my daily turns in Legend of the Red Dragon.
God, what a spellbinding opening.
It’s not my favorite song, but it might be my favorite opening to an album ever. Spellbinding is exactly right.
Replaying Fallout 3, I did some unmarked quests, and was looking at some YouTube vids to help me with some, when I stumbled across this video. Now I’ll think of the Austin Powers theme when I explore the Capital Wasteland.
The Austin Powers theme somehow combines timelessness with the idiotic.
“Timelessness with the idiotic”-The A.V. Club
Diddy Kong Racing and Macy Gray. Mostly because I tried to beat Wizpig and I’d choke, tried to speed away and I’d stumble.
That game was unbelievably, surpringly difficult in the late game.
Which makes it a fun if slightly painful speedrun watch.
I used to read novels while listening to unrelated movies soundtracks. Sometimes, a scene of the book and a track from the album would match so well that the book would be simply getting an official soundtrack.For me, Morricone’s “Beggar’s March” describes a few dwarves and a couple hobbits strolling through hills and forest for ages.
When I first read Harry Potter in late 2001 I only had a small selection of movie soundtracks to put on in the background and so went for the one with the most connections to the supernatural and dark arts. And that’s why the sounds of The Exorcist will forever be tied to Hogwarts for me.
I played the DOOM reboot through twice to Tegan and Sara. Good times.
Similar to the example give, one of my key ones is The Streets’ Original Pirate Material and GTA 3. I liked listening to music when I played games, and GTA was good for that because if you weren’t doing the story mission for the first time, you didn’t particularly need to listen to the game itself. The PES series of games got a lot more play than they might because I could have music on at the same time. The opening bars of Turn The Page (for my money the best opening track on a debut album that I can think of) still makes me think about trying to protect Cueball with my sniper rifle.Another couple are from the days I used to commute to work (remember that?). I liked to read on the bus and train, and I would choose music that complemented reading, so nothing lyrically dense like Hip Hop or anything that would get me singing along, even internally, and distract from the writing. The strongest associations I have are Warpaint for Crime and Punishment, and Mogwai’s soundtrack for The Returned (Les Revenants) for Annihilation
That Streets album is good though.
For some reason when I hear the opening of Low’s “Murderer”: I’m often reminded of the “Silencio” scene from Mulholland Drive, particularly the moment when Naomi Watts and Laura Harring are embracing and looking fearful as the blue tint takes over:
Oh, also, the first Aliens vs Predator PC game would always play whichever CD you’ve forgotten in your drive.So, where people just have the gloomy “look alive private” intro with the empty corridors until the first xenomorph encounter, I often had this in the background :
It stuck.
I had a paper route in the mid-90s, and I’d always skim the gossip/sports/entertainment blurbs before setting off with my headphones into the neighborhood. The summer when Mike Tyson bit Holyfield’s ear, “Secret Garden” with the Jerry Maguire clips was on every single morning. I can’t separate that movie from Mike Tyson/Holyfield to this day.They…complete me.
For me, the strongest and yet weirdest one is probably Florence and the Machine’s song You’ve Got The Love and the defunct MMO City of Heroes. I have really strong memories of listening to an online radio station in 2006, and while I heard a lot of music there, it was the ‘big’ notes of You’ve Got The Love that really had an impact and led me to associate it very strongly with the experience of playing a swordswoman with super speed.Now, some of you might read that and go ‘well that’s not right, Florence’s You’ve Got the Love came out in 2009′. And I would agree with you. Some of you still might think that I must be remembering the 1986 original. And I would disagree with you, because it sounded nothing like the original, it was definitely the cover.The only explanation I have is a time warp, I don’t know how else to explain it.
I miss City of Heroes. And I feel guilty for leaving it for WoW.
Some sick f*** suggested to combine the air crash scene in Flight at 2x speed and no sound with the Benny Hill theme. It was glorious.
Back in the 90s I usually played videogames with a random newish album playing on the cd (and some of the games I played lacked music) and hence I associate Björk singing “Unravel” with Link going through the forest in the SNES Zelda (used zsnes) and Can singing “Last Night Sleep” with clearing up the dungeons in Eye of the Beholder 2.Nowadays I have that risk in the gym. I associate “El Barberillo de Lavapiés” (a zarzuela, kind of operetta) with using the rowing machine.
And Watchmen with DJ Shadow’s “Endtroducing”
Another video game + unintended soundtrack for me: Playing The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker while múm’s Finally We Are No One was seemingly on repeat in the spring of 2003. I can’t think of one without the other, in part because and the sounds from that album (especially the first half) could’ve comprised the actual soundtrack.
In college, I got big into Pink Floyd (and yet, I never smoked pot). In my obsession, I got into the Dark Side Of The Rainbow sync. In fact, I got so into the sync that I learned about other syncs, like Willy Wonka and Rush’s 2112. Anyway, I read on a website that Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album syncs up with Blade Runner. I tried it, but it wasn’t a great sync, more of an atmospheric one. But, to this day, I can’t really separate the album and the movie. Also, whenever I see the last part of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I think of the Pink Floyd song “Echoes.”
Intellivision Baseball and Pink Floyds Animals.
When I was a kid and would go to rent NES games or (as I got a bit older) Super NES/Genesis games, I would also spend time going by the shelves at the video store, studying all the boxes of films, especially fascinated by some that seemed to be there forever and seemed old even then (those often had the huge plastic cases that probably could have killed someone in the wrong hands). So something like the first Final Fantasy (or a good while later, Final Fantasy 2), or Deja Vu or Gilligan’s Island (the game) is meshed in my mind with memories of the likes of American Anthem, Stay Tuned, the “black vs white” Emmanuelle film and the one with Sylvia Kristel or whoever in the wicker chair, Angel (NOT a religious film…), She’s Out of Control (that awful Tony Danza movie), etc.
The classic Tomb Raider from 1996, a game I didn’t get to play until 1997, when I also bought The Colour and the Shape. Exploring puzzles and Foo Fighters are forever linked in my mind.
Mine is the Brentford novels by Robert Rankin and Prefab Sprout. I don’t know why, they just seem to fit. I was a fan of Prefab Sprout for over a decade before I discovered Rankin, so it’s not one of those coincidental operant conditioning situations like most of the examples on this list.That billiards story reminds me of a lovely night when, between my friends and I and the drunks at the bar, we played Dean Martin’s version of Volare seven times while playing pool. There was a table of young guys who were so annoyed with us, which somehow made it even better.
Rankin’s books include The Sprouts of Wrath and Sprout Mask Replica, so he may have been planting the connection himself.
Funny I never thought of that, despite Barry the Time Sprout. And Sprout Mask Replica is my favorite of his books.
Samurai Jack, Persona 4, Half-Life, Pokemon Emerald. I guess I have a lot in common with these AV club folks. Though trying to play that Ravenholm level, especially trying to get that “no guns” achievement, while listening to music instead of the sound effects, seems way too difficult to me.
Anyway, my pair is “Breaking Bad” and “Star Trek: DS9″ because they are both shows that revel in shades of gray morality, revolve around drug addiction as a plot point, pick up in violence as they go along, have wonderful supporting casts, and the protagonist/show get way more interesting when the lead (Sisko, Walt, even Jessie!) shaves his head and grows a goatee. Just need Klingons smashing up the New Mexico cartel scene and Walter cooking up some Ketracel white!
When I was a young woman, I read the first Hunger Games book in one day, pausing only to go see the Watchmen movie with my then-boyfriend. To this day I can’t think of one without the other.
I’m not sure how much this counts, but for me it’s The Simpsons and any pop culture it homaged or mocked or referenced. In many cases, I can’t help but remember the version or usage from The Simpsons when I watch or listen to the original. What’s interesting to me is how uneven that association is – I don’t tend to think of The Simpsons when I re-watch Clockwork Orange, 2001, Jurassic Park, The Prisoner or Terminator 2 (or any Hitchcock movie.) But A Streetcar Named Desire or the movie version of The Fugitive? It’s definitely not Harrison Ford fleeing from Tommy Lee Jones I think of, but Milhouse leaping off a dam.
Another association – from my teenage Warhammer and Dungeons & Dragons days when my very nerdy friends and I would burn to CD ‘soundtracks’ for our sessions – is the various JPRG and anime soundtracks, James Horner scores, or famous pieces by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Holst and Wagner with almost any table-top or role-playing game.
Finally, I remember watching in the same day at a film festival Control and I’m Not There. Although I was a far bigger fan of Joy Division at the time, the former film was so boringly formulaic, while the latter so fascinatingly strange (which is not what I was expecting going in) that I can’t think of one without thinking of other.
Or Planet of the Apes. Either Troy McClure or Deep Space Homer.
Carmageddon was a game about driving over people who screamed a lot and, well, that got pretty annoying after a while.R.E.M.’s Out of Time was in my CD player next to the computer. For whatever reason, I just had that going on loop while playing Carmageddon.I drove over so many shiny happy people.
Tool’s AEnima and Mario Kart 64 became inextricably linked for me sophomore year of high school. Trying to listen to that album any time after that would just conjure up Wario’s cackling taunts.
Reading the Barrow Downs chapter in The Lord of the Rings and listening to Section 43 by Country Joe and the Fish ( on Electric Music for the Mind & Body). Maybe because of the San Francisco fog?
When I was in High School I got mono and was stuck in my room for almost two weeks. I had recently bought the double LP (yes, I’m old) set called “Time of the Zombies” containing almost all their studio work. I had also inherited a nice collection of Silver Age Marvel comics and set about reading them for the first time during my convalescence, while listening to that album over and over. To this day I can’t see Gwen Stacy without hearing the song “Changes” from Odyssey and Oracle in my head. And I have a lifelong love of both comics and the Zombies stemming from that week.
I was just thinking about this very thing the other day… Back in like 2005, I would spend HOURS at my computer playing Snood, which was already a pretty old game by then, all the while listening to Alligator by the National. I still can’t hear “The Geese of Beverly Road” without being reminded of the feeling of that old trackball mouse i used to play Snood for hundreds of hours.I suspect a lot of these answers would be video game related. I also played a lot of Excite Truck on the Wii, and you could load your own music, I think, and I thought it was hilarious to play Excite Truck to Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day.” Now those two are also forever linked.
How about Dark Souls X My Hero Academia?
The Young Jeezy/R. Kelly song “Go Getta” and the Cartoon Network original film “Wakko’s Wish.” You can do a Wizard of Oz/Pink Floyd thing with them.
Watching Killing Eve while playing Darkest Dungeon. Beautiful and brutal.
I developed a pop-culturally relevant theory back in the 80s, when one of the properties involved was still only available as a text, but it intertwines the two IPs inextricably in my mind, to wit;The Cotton Club is to the Godfather saga, as the Hobbit is to the Lord of the Rings.
The Pogues’ Rum Sodomy and the Lash and The Big Lebowski. For the simple reason thatI had a college roommate whose routine most weekends was to get drunk, listen to a Pogues playlist (the whole aforementioned album plus various songs he’d gotten off Napster) and watch The Big Lebowski. It took me years to have any appreciation for either because both were just overexposed to me. I’ve never consumed both right after each other since – it kinda feels like if I listened to The Pogues, drank a can of natural ice, and watched The Big Lebowski, I’d suddenly be transported to early 2000s western Massachusetts.
Funnily enough, this little nugget surfaced in my memory just the other day. As a very young child in the early 80s, I must have watched the disaster clunker “When Time Ran Out” on one of the cable channels. If you don’t know it, and why should you, it features an extended sequence of characters attempting to cross a river of lava on a rickety wooden bridge that continually falls apart. Traumatizing for tiny me. And somehow, when I heard the song “Bridge Over Troubled Water” I connected it to that movie, because what’s more troubled than red hot lava? Even today, when I hear that song, a panicked Paul Newman arises in my mind, carrying two kids across that bridge like a tightrope walker.
Hot lava is certainly troubled, but it’s not water. The version of you as a young child should reconsider that.
Sneaker Pimps Becoming X the album and especially the title track with The Torn arc of Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men run. Back then I was still picking up monthly comics and would re-read a whole arc when I got the last issue, and the storyline of White Queen flipping out and attacking the team lined up perfectly with the sexy, dark sounds of Sneaker Pimps.random nature documentary on TV, the album Fun with Knives by Velvet Acid Christ, and actual acid- seeing a cheetah chase down its prey seemingly in time with the nightmarish techno-industrial music while tripping was intense, man.Repo Man and Southland Tales. I watched Repo Man for the first time ever in my mid-twenties and felt like this 20+ year old movie had been made just for me. The next night I watched then-recently released on DVD Southland Tales for the first time. I would have probably enjoyed it more than most people because I have a soft-spot for overly ambitious weird failures, but the synchronicity of watching two surreal, sprawling LA stories overflowing with characters and ideas that both end with glowing automobiles floating into the sky cemented it in my brain.
I have so very many memories of riding around with my mom in the car when I was a tyke. She always had the AM radio on and while it was typically great girl groups and Motown I somehow always hear this in my mind:Recorded when she was SIXTEEN. I don’t get terribly invested in pop music (and all music is pop music, really) but god how I miss Kirsty.
Opera was pop music, but now it isn’t.
Tubthumper might also be the first CD I owned… but I still haven’t seen Bye Bye Birdie (or Tristan & Isolde, which Monsieur IOZ liked to mash that up with).
Playing the original Prince Of Persia and “Wrong” by Nomeansno; I had bought the cassette the same day my friend lent me the game, and I was in my room for days playing it and listening to Wrong on my walkman.
No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. Literally no one remembers which is which.
i’ll forever connect GTA: San Andreas and almost dying because i almost died the week that it came out and my brother very helpfully picked up my preorder for me while i was in the hospital that’s about as close as i’m going to get to being able to answer the questionalso, fuck your slideshow
I did the same with with Ben Fold Five’s first album and Resident Evil: the Director’s Cut. It was a weird connection and listening to Jackson Cannery still kinda give me the heebie jeebies.
Shadows of the Empire and the soundtrack for Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.I would listen to the one while playing the other on my N64.
Final Fantasy VII and Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of IcarusI had been playing FF7 when the painting was shown in an English class I was taking. The painting’s landmasses and the water reminded me of the game’s world map. I had not yet gotten to the part where Aeris is dropped in the water.
I can’t stand these stupid slideshows
Doom 2 and “Believe” by Cher. I just have a random memory of playing Doom 2 while listening to the radio in 1998, and to this day I can’t think of one without the other. I have a few strong song/game associations, mostly from the 90s and early aughts, but for some utterly inexplicable reason, that’s the one that stuck with me the hardest.
I think we have now reached Peak Random Question.
Even though I *know* that the Toadies’ “Possum Kingdom” was never used on the X-Files or a related soundtrack, it seems so appropriate for an one of their rural episodes that my mind puts them together.
Ok, I did my sincere, play-by-the-rules post, but Wham! – Wake Me Up will forever be linked to pumping gas into my car…Orange Mocha Frappuccino!
I can’t believe I’m admitting to this, but I did a lot of embarrassing stoner nonsense in my late teens, including putting on an album at the same time as a movie and trying a little too hard to be blown away by how well they matched up, dude.Even worse than that, I used to put on an album and mute the TV and flip through the channels to “make my own music video.” And I didn’t even do drugs.
I prob was getting into the Beatles as a kid jus when I was obsessed with John Bellairs (and The Curse of the Blue Figurine was my favourite).
In 11th grade I was in my high school’s production of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown (I played Charlie Brown, humblebrag), and around the same time there was a cover of the Bill Withers song “Lean On Me,” that became our unofficial cast anthem. We had a pianist playing the songs, and a kid with a synth for the sound effects (like the “wah-wah” for the teacher, and various airplane sounds during the Red Baron scene), and they would play the song together during intermission.The cover eventually led me to the superior original, but I still have a soft spot for this version.
I’ve got dozens of weird unrelated references that stick in my head. If you want an entire article on this random crap, I’m your guy.One of those references is similar to the original question. The song ‘Stan – Eminem’ reminds me of the game Dead or Alive on Dreamcast. My bestfriend (who is still my bestfriend 20+ years later) and I spent hours everyday playing games in his room while his parents blasted music from downstairs. We were 11 or 12 at the time. They went through an Eminem kick right around his initial breakthrough into mainstream. His parents loved the song. I heard it dozens of times at his house, but for some reason, it stuck with me all these years as a weird Dead or Alive reference. Despite it never appearing in the game series AFAIK.I can’t hear that song without picturing an extremely clear image of my buddy and I playing that game. Side note, sticking with the gaming theme, Basket Case – Green Day and Serious Sam 1 will stick with me forever and Ave Maria will forever remind me of GTA3 because it was featured in the original trailer.
I remember joining the forums on Rotten Tomatoes in 2001 specifically to discuss Mulholland Drive, and 20 years on, apart from all its other wonderful qualities, it now has an added air of nostalgia for the relative naivety of the pre-Facebook internet. I remember playing a cassette copy of Peter Gabriel’s So so often that it got worn to the point where, if you jacked up the volume during the silence between songs, you could hear the other side of the tape playing, all backwards and ghostly. Ergo, the version of Sledgehammer that has been burned into my brain ends with a crossfade into a backwards version of Mercy Street.
Hate to be this guy, but U2’s drummer is Larry Mullen, Jr., not Larry Mullins, Jr.
The Dark Phoenix Saga and the Legend of Zelda theme song (particularly the cartoon’s arrangement).The sweeping music felt particularly appropriate during Jean Grey’s transformation into Dark Phoenix and battle with the X-Men above Central Park.I can never read that run without hearing those strings when the story focuses on Jean’s emotional turmoil.
Gone Girl and Tallahassee. Maybe not unlikely given they’re both about deeply fucked up relationships in the south but I read the book while going through a massive Mountain Goats obsession and the two are inextricably linked in my brain. David Fincher is a total chump for not using No Children on the soundtrack imo.
Back in the day, Quake came on CD-ROM. But once you installed it, it would use the CD as a backing track (thank you Nine Inch Nails)
Of
course, when I realised ANY CD could go in there, Queen’s Greatest Hits
II became the sountrack to my monster-fragging adventures. The opening
seconds to One Vision was actually scarily appropriate…
What two pieces of otherwise unrelated pop culture are forever connected in your mind?
that’s easy.
1. The vacation slideshows people used to put on for friends in the 70s, and
2. my high school AV Club of the 80s.
Besides the few weird music/movie mash-ups I have in my head, my answer is Dead Rising 2: Off the Record and the Patton Oswalt routine about flying (from My Weakness is Strong). I had to listen to something while grinding for the “Kill 100,000 zombies” trophy, so I listened to Patton Oswalt albums, and that routine stuck the most.
Sort of related to the lead-in question: I would play fresh and awesome Final Fantasy VII on the Playstation while listening to fresh and awesome Pinkerton by Weezer. I don’t play the game at all anymore, but whenever I hear that album it brings me back to Cloud and his ridiculously big sword. Similarly, Rogue Squadron on N64 and Hepcat albums are connected the same way. That one has the added bonus of brining in memories of a frigid Winter as well.
My very first Amazon purchase was the Deftones self-titled album on CD and the James Bond film Die Another Day on DVD. I was in college and the prospect of saving $5 or whatever on shipping by having them ship together was enticing. What I didn’t realize is that Bond didn’t come out on DVD for two or three weeks after Deftones, so I had to wait for it to release for them both to ship.
Dating myself here, but it was an Amiga game by Psygnosis called ‘Leander’ and the Pixies album ‘Bossanova’…got both for Christmas in 1990 and played them pretty much the entire winter break. Now I think of Leander every time I hear a song from that album (which is still one of my favorites).
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A very excellent AV Q&A would be which artists/actors who died early would have been the most impactful today. Personal vote for Jeff Buckley, but you do you, AV Club.