My Music Journal 2025: April 15, 2025

 

Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Time: 4:22 PM
Song: Everybody Knows
Artist: Leonard Cohen
Mode of Consumption: Playing on the trailer for trailer for 1990 movie “Pump Up the Volume.”

Link to Song: https://open.spotify.com/track/60s0QWaOZ2UTzqdIHBCt3x?si=452658c0de1449a7

I complete a task at work and decide to pull up YouTube before diving into the next venture. For some reason, one of the suggestions is the trailer for the 1990 movie, “Pump Up the Volume.”

So, I remember seeing this movie. I doubt it was 1990, as I would have been eight, but it must have been shortly thereafter. Let’s say I saw this movie by 1992. Perhaps my sister convinced my parents to rent it. Christian Slater was a pretty big star in that era.

When this song starts playing, I instantly recognize it. Not that it’s a song I know, but I know I heard this song in that movie. It’s distinctive. It’s dark. I think it likely fits the motif of the movie. That’s the point, right.

I also remember the movie because I believe there is a scene where the female lead bares her breasts, and I am thinking that this was probably one of the first times I was exposed to such a scene. Look, I was a boy, and most boys remember such things.

As I watch the trailer, I am reminded more of the plot. Slater is a shy high school boy who happens to run some sort of pirate radio show at night anonymously. I feel like he gets shut down in the end, perhaps there is a death in there, too. The ending doesn’t stick out in my mind as much as the boobs.

If memory serves, Slater plays the shy loner in another film with Marrisa Tomei. In that one, he falls for Tomei, playing a waitress, I believe, but he has some sort of heart defect and dies. Otherwise, I remember Slater for playing the part of Kevin Costner’s half-brother in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” and that he was in a movie called “Broken Arrow” that I remember my mother rented twice (unintentionally), but that now I don’t remember anything about.

Considering I might watch one or maybe two movies a month now, it’s amazing to think about all the movies I watched as a kid. It wasn’t unusual for us to rent two on a Saturday night and watch both. Then there were likely Friday night movies also. That continued pretty much through high school.

It’s something that I remember these bits and pieces of these movies I haven’t seen in thirty years.