Music From the Motion Picture Trainspotting
And now that Trainspotting is also a movie and a record, it’s ironic that one of his favorites is “Take My Breath Away,” the love theme from Top Gun. In the summer of 1986 “Take My Breath Away” topped the singles charts in the United States and the UK, spurred by heavy play of the video, which was nothing more than a Top Gun trailer (and which begged the question, Was the film much more than a long-form music video?). The sound-track album also reached number one, and stayed in the Top 40 for the rest of the year. The artistically forgettable Top Gun combo was the year’s most successful example of what the entertainment industry likes to call synergy–it ruled by force.
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But Trainspotting is intended to be a more important entertainment than, say, Top Gun–it’s supposed to provide an unflinching glimpse of another lost generation. Easy Rider and Saturday Night Fever both triggered aboveground explosions of a youth/music/drug subculture, showing a mass audience where it’s at (or, postexplosion, where it was at). Trainspotting–especially given its preordained and well-enforced hipness–could have been their contemporary equivalent, postulating and popularizing the feel and sound of today’s young and aimless. But it won’t be.
The summoning of these punk godfathers connects Trainspotting to a larger legacy that more or less begins with this unholy trinity and carries on through subsequent generations informed by their cool. It also plugs Trainspotting into another tradition of films that, for lack of a better term, can be categorized as “post-delinquent,” a type best exemplified by last summer’s Kids (also brought to you by Miramax) and Sid & Nancy, the 1986 biopic about Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. These films are far removed from the straightforward romanticism of Easy Rider and Saturday Night Fever, and even from present-day hip-hop melodrama, a traditionalist incarnation of the “delinquent” genre. They take pains to undercut their predecessors’ unavoidable message–that dead-end kids are ultimately done in by their own anger and hopelessness, which the kids absorb and express in destructive pathologies, blah blah tell it to the judge–by employing distancing techniques derived from the punk aesthetic, which itself magnifies archetypes of delinquency.
