Beware of the Blog

I have a certain music and film professor to thank (you know who you are) for successfully getting “The Blob” stuck in my head, with no prospect of leaving in the foreseeable future.

In case you’re not privy:

This was introduced as an example of musical atrocity in film, along with the bicycle scene (“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head”) from Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” (the latter included superfluously, I am told, into the 1962 film Hatari–suffice it to say that the song title leaves very little to be said about the scene in which it appears). Now, one of these things is not like the other, as only later did I learn that Burt Bacharach also composed the aforementioned novelty gem seen above. I don’t mind a fair amount of proseletizing about bad music or bad films, much less from a professor of both (the tendency exists at the near-molecular level here), but let’s at least be fair about terminology. Opposition to the use of certain types of music in film is fine, but there is a point where a pathological opposition exclusively to the use of Burt Bacharach in film should–and by all means, should be allowed to–be advertised as such. I mean, I would get behind that 100% (or, at least, the right to have it–please…it’s Bacharach).

Advertisement