Tuesday, February 10, 2009

TALK HARD. STEAL THE AIR.



Pump Up The Volume was one of my favorite movies of the early 90s, and played an important role in the development of my adolescent music taste/attitude(/sexuality). Christian Slater plays a giant nerd/secret-DJ who operates a pirate radio station from his parent's basement. He ends up getting chased by the FCC for rousing the suburban-teenage rabble: by loading the transmitter into a Jeep and driving around the city 'Hard Harry' evades the detection vans, broadcasting his earnest, subversive, anti-establishment messages the whole time. There's a lot of teen angst, mix tapes, 90s style, a meaningful soundtrack and a significant scene where Samantha Mathis shows her boobs. 

If you think about it, pirate radio stations were like proto-blogs of the early 90s, before Internet really "caught on." Imagine the movies they're going to make in the early 2k10s about mnstrm basketball players/secret-Internet celebrities who write music blogs on their macbooks (in their parent's basement), wagging the dog of the Internet meme-osphere and being chased by copyright lawyers. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This + Heathers would be a good double feature.