Listen Up! Giorgio Moroder and Electric Dreams
Column
Listen Up! Giorgio Moroder and Electric Dreams
Column
BY
Mina Tavakoli
This is the first entry in Metrograph’s new Listen Up! column, in which we revisit movie scores and soundtracks of note. We start with a look at the history (and larky serendipity) of “Together in Electric Dreams.”
Electric Dreams plays 7 Ludlow beginning on Friday, February 16.
Five-foot-nine and typically tan as a coconut, Giovanni “Hansjörg” Giorgio Moroder has had the privilege of looking like a pampered heartthrob cruising into the dock of a private island for nearly all his life. This gift must have been a helpful ingredient, one imagines, in the Italian electronic producer’s ascent into godhood for an especially glamorous class of ’80s listener (the spandexed, the sequinned, the European, the gay, etc.); just as valuable, one also might imagine, in inclining music writers to suggest the pleasures of cocaine or heaven as often as possible when describing his work. If there is a secret key to the song-maker’s appeal, this pulchritude—this huge, unironic, Reagan-era charm—has to be the energy-center of his person, which seems to radiate from his face and move directly into his synthesizer. Moroder, now in his 84th year, hosted a discussion not long ago to share his happy legacy with a lecture hall of young fans. “Nobody had a mustache like me,” he opened, beaming with a smile—cartoonish, billboard-surreal, appealingly cheesy—that surely felt just like his music sounded.
In 1968, “poptimism” was the default ideology, because the music’s practitioners were—at least for the time being—bullish on its future. Song structures still mandated that the genre had to be stabbed onto a hook, a chorus, and a verse, but the dawn of the computer processor made room for textural lunacies that could warp a track enough to reconfigure what dimension it seemed to be coming from. Adding the blarge of digital guitar to a bridge, tucking stabs of synth noise behind a sheet of lyrics—tech changed the construction of a song from pattern to vessel, making them now fillable with space, time, noises both exotic and not yet thought of.
Moroder, the erstwhile church-boy raised in the northerly bit of Italy where German and Italian were spoken almost interchangeably, fell in love with the alien bleeping and blooping of an album by Wendy Carlos called Switched-On Bach—a classical rendering of Bach’s music but only played on the just-invented modular Moog synthesizer—impelling him quickly into a career of tape-machine-tinkering and session musicianship. To get nearer to his beloved gizmos and the sounds they made, he moved to Germany’s capital, rented a small studio space, and spent much of his time staring at his side of the Wall from a tiny window above his keyboards as he waited for inspiration to seize him.
Success felt like a foregone but hard-won conclusion. His first hit, “Looky Looky,” a chewy piece of pop nougat written in 1969, sat in the No. 1 position in Germany, Spain, and South Africa for a few weeks. He engineered a dippy disco album, or at least a version of the genre avant la lettre, entirely out of synthesizers in 1972—marking his first song (the beautiful, tautological, eponymous title track) to crack the American Top 40. Auspicious, but Moroder was grafting his ambition on an evolutionary curve: he wanted to make music with more muscle than the strain of easy, earwormy work he’d been making, but with a little less brain activity than the esoteric ‘motortik’—the astral, ‘endless straight drumbeat’ music made big by bands like Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk—that was seeping into German consciousness in the mid-’70s. He wanted something that could marry the computer’s spirit with human flesh: sensuous, synthetic, but supernatural all at once.
His answer came in the shape of a minxy young American theater singer named Donna Summer. Together, they built the world’s best 17-minute, 22-orgasmed track. But with his pulse-quickening Moog and her pulse-quickening moans, it was their next hit, “I Feel Love”—a sine-wavy, sex-spelt-in-synthesizer, orgiastic minisymphony—that became the tectonic plate-shifting breakthrough, convincing Earth’s audience that sequencers, drum machines, and hi-tech gadgetry weren’t just for novelty commercial records or avant-garde freakouts—they were the secret to pop from here to infinity. The blend of desire and the machine, he understood, “made the music hot.”
Moroder became a crippling addict of the new sonic cocktail he’d invented, and engineered a murderer’s row of songs (Berlin’s “Take my Breath Away,” Blondie’s “Call Me,” Sparks’ “Tryouts for the Human Race”), shelved six gold and platinum albums, nine No. 1 Billboard dance hits, and further, yet hornier, pieces of art from Summer. He trailed her back to America, bought a white mansion in LA he named the Ice Castle, and allegedly had her teach him English. If the latter fact is true, he seemed to instinctively understand four words in the language already, even if one of them was an acronym: “I want my MTV.”
Money For Nothing (1985)
Even for those allergic to the idea of hyperbole, “Money For Nothing”—a bluesy, swaggery Dire Straits song about two employees loudly complaining at an electronic appliance store—is, without question, the de-facto theme song of MTV’s early years. Most hospitably, it’s known for its staggeringly weird music video, which is not only a standalone gobsmacking piece of digital art, but a signal of the experimental beginning of the loosely defined but earnestly felt “music video-era.” Rendered using magnificently primitive, then-state-of-the-art CGI animation—created by the same 3D-graphics machines that only industries like IBM were using at the time—the four-minute portrait of a pair of cuboid union men shaking their heads at the prissy rockstars they watch on MTV is a very ’80s po-mo joke: they’re made up of the same pixels, colors, and electric building blocks as the televisions they denounce.
The video’s director, a young British camera assistant named Steve Barron, had to convince the Straits that their song could withstand the level of outré surrealism that he wanted to pull off. After Barron persuaded the band to see the song through in his vision—which was “really by ignorance as much as anything,” he says—his meta-movie about the network would go on to swallow the channel and become metonymic for MTV’s paradigm-shifting powers. The network’s tagline, which became the first few seconds of the song—Sting wails “I waaaannt my MTV” in a wraith-like falsetto—now enjoyed near-constant airplay between the run of the video and the channel’s own commercials. Barron’s work shot the song to No. 1 for weeks.
Like all good advertising jingles, “I want my MTV” telegraphed that the product it sold was an object worthy of getting addicted to. In 1981, the dawn of the channel gave way to an entire artform and its own attendant marketplace. Now, pop artists were incentivized to pay someone to convert their music into three-to-six-minute motion-graphic-phantasms to earn airtime. Lurching into the opportunity, Barron—still just a camera operator—was right-timed, right-placed (late ’70s, London), and applied a fantasy-driven mind to the short promotional films for bands that he found himself increasingly commissioned to mount. “And this was in a time when they weren’t even called music videos,” he recounts. “It was sort of like coming out of the silent films and into the talkies.” He conquered and monopolized the new format, blending his yen for VFX camera operation (arch, high-involvement work that usually involved flourishy tricks, as with 1978’s Superman, or for Jim Henson), with the new demand coming from his friends in the music world, and authored mini-movies for The Jam, McCartney, Tears for Fears, Toto, A Flock of Seagulls, and an especially memorable one for a beguiling singer from Gary, Indiana with a song called “Billie Jean.”
Pop’s gleam always seems to make the world smaller and more hungry for novelty. It feels like an inevitability that Moroder and Barron, both heavyweights in their own arenas, both settlers of their own terra, both Midases of new tech and mass appeal—would form a nuclear-strength partnership in a medium that combined and was greater than their respective trades. Moroder, though already operating in his own cybernetically revolutionary lane, hadn’t yet earned a bonafide breakthrough on the channel, but was hunting for a way in. It was 1983 when he joined Jerry Bruckheimer to provide a soundtrack for the glorified music-video-turned-movie Flashdance. His title track, “Flashdance... What a Feeling,” started running on MTV at an attractively manic clip. That same year, two producers, impressed with Barron’s video work on a confounding song, asked him to direct a movie with a juicy love triangle at its center: man, woman, computer. When Moroder was tapped for the score—a man Barron had never worked with, who’d reached Grammydom with Flashdance, and who seemed to be composing, per Roger Ebert, “the scores for half the films in Hollywood these days”—he may as well have materialized out of a circuit board.
Electric Dreams (1984)
Electric Dreams, released in 1984—the year Orwell decided was the future—owes much of its narrative to a 1952 short story by Kurt Vonnegut called “EPICAC,” in which a programming genius compels his computer to write a 256-page-long poem for his wife. The computer, developed to solve “complex, worldly problems,” gains the even more complicated issue of sentience, and summarily falls in love with his master’s bride. In the manner of optimistic speculative fiction, the computer, after understanding the hopelessness of ever falling in love, sensibly resigns itself to a digital suicide.
Barron’s first feature film is kin in big, sweeping ways: Virginia Madsen, composed of about 30% eyes and 70% princessy hair, is our designated dreamgirl, here named Madeline because our first look at her is unforgettable per Proust’s encounter with a cookie. Lenny Von Dohlen is main man Miles, a meek geek in his tortoise glasses and knit vests in the ’80s-does-’50s manner (not far off from Kyle MacLachlan’s appeal in any of his appearances in the David Lynchiverse). The fumbly-bumbly love story unspools when Miles’s new computer—bought in the hopes of adding structure to his lonely, busy life—begins an artificially-intelligent inquiry into the nature of love. Miles’s character is largely a gormless idiot, Madeline’s is an angel, and as the computer gains something like a human conscience, human love, as it were, triumphs.
The film has a candy-bar sort of feel to it: naive, a little treacly, un-intricate, kids love it—and as a delicious slice of Reaganite cinema, it is both sincerely cornball and brilliantly, crucially, rosy. Miles and Madeline form a white-collar dyad of high-achievers, gifted in their own niche, yuppie ways—he the architect, she the philharmonic cellist, two careers we feel ill-equipped to know in the micro, can respect in the macro—and the beauty of their hard-working lives, salaried but soulful, comes across as resplendently colored and animatedly as a Saturday morning cartoon’s. Prefiguring San Francisco’s tech boom and distaste for poverty in his hyperdigitally-fixated portrait of the Golden City, Miles and Madeline’s world has it all: glass bricks, corner offices, Memphis design, camera surveillance, state-of-the-art beepers, and dizzy-making, gorgeous views of Alcatraz.
Barron’s knack as an avant-gardist couldn’t resist a tour-de-force. If excess and experimental too-muchness were at the heart of his music video work, his touch is at home here, in the language of surreal movement. Scenes slide into one another with an almost Jacques Tati-degree of visual slapstick: the hyper-sleek sublimity of seeing, say, Miles’s face framed as through office elevator cameras, then, in the following scene, still blinking in a computer screen’s proto-webcam, has the effect of making the film as coquettish and hypnotizing as a puppet show. The cocoon of the bustling city, the meet-cute between Miles and Madeline, the benedictory light of the electronics they’re baffled by, and the vast, giddy interweave they all make—Barron’s glittery technocratic fantasy finds its double in Moroder, whose soundtrack and title song operate on the level of high-watt hysteria.
Film scoring oft calls into question the way that sound inspires an audience to dispense fear, or rage, or agony alongside—or in contrast with—scenes in a movie. Hans Zimmer, who used Moroder to score his prison-break-gone-bad film, Midnight Express (1978), was aware that Moroder’s voltaic touch could offer a different texture. “If you put electronic sounds up against scary images it gets 10 times scarier, because with live musicians you can instinctively tell when the tension in the music is going to break,” he said. “With Giorgio’s synthesizers, it’s this inevitable stream of notes coming at you. The viewer never knows when something is going to alleviate the tension.”
Electric Dreams (1984)
The question of tension-breaking seems to’ve never been broached in Electric Dreams. The idea of a push-and-pull union between the sound of the film and the film’s plot proper is not exactly the idea at play; here, the film is treated generously as a secondary vehicle to platform the soundtrack’s songs, which play lushly, loudly, and for longer than necessary. Scenes linger ridiculously to let the score—here, a sample platter of the sophisticated, disco-inflected strudel dominating the charts—play out in full. When children noodle with newfangled toys (the RC cars, the Speak & Spells), we get all of Heaven 17’s “Chase Runner.” When Miles’s computer writes him a song for Madeline, it’s “Love is Love” by the Culture Club, which goes on unabridged while we watch Miles tool around his apartment, stare thoughtfully into his bathroom mirror, and swivel on his desk chair. When Madeline enters into a cello duel with the computer, she plays Minuet in G major, BWV Anh. 114 from Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach in its four-minute-entirety, which Moroder refixed into a comely synth tunelet (a tribute to his darling Switched on Bach).
The crown jewel of the soundtrack—the title track, Moroder’s shiny, authorial kiss—was written, allegedly, in 10 minutes. It is a sturdy specimen of Moroder’s way with a song: drafted with “with some temporary lyrics sung by someone who sounded like a cheesy version of Neil Diamond,” as Barron recalled, they were replaced with vox by Phil Oakley of the Human League (author of “Don’t You Want Me?”, one of the pettiest songs committed to synthesizer, and one of the prettiest videos in Barron’s oeuvre). With some new lyrics written “on the back of a fag packet on the way to the recording studio,” the song had a new, attractive schmaltz, but standbys of Moroder’s hand sent the sentimental to the superlunary. The slaloming synth, the glacial Moog, the disembodied and Muppety panel of backup singers, the clean, clear, soaring lyrics (which are in first-person perspective from the computer’s point of view: “Time to go away,” Oakley croons)—Moroder transmogrified a chintzy poem into a big fat earworm, easily scoring Top 10s in countries across every sea.
The final scene of the film—a spliced-together supercut—ratchets the volume for audiences to hear it, for the first and last time, in blazing high-fidelity. The computer, realizing that mating with Madeline would be impossible, has written Moroder’s ballad as part of his own suicide note. Jerry rigging it onto the airwaves through an FM station servicing greater San Francisco (Moroder cameos in the movie as the angry studio manager), “Together in Electric Dreams” blares unchecked across the tenderloin, and the city surrenders to it in toto. Women in leg warmers Jazzercise to it sexily. Fishermen adjust their waterproof radio dials. Beachgoers squeeze sunscreen on one another in time to its four-on-the-floor. A fabulous yacht, sailing gently on the Pacific, jets all four of its geysers into the atmosphere in solidarity with the ecstasy around it, yielding a fat rainbow above in a chromesthestic mix of sound and lightwaves, cheese and bliss, supremacy over the machine and sweet, requited human love.
The bewildering quality of the movie—the characters, its plotline, its relationship to the music it plays—is its rare gift, and should feel like a referendum on Barron’s and Moroder’s myths. The dreamers-turned-monarchs, the idealism and sweeping sense of melodic drama that both of them seem to traffic exclusively in, their freedom to play around within and succeed off their new, digitally-assisted art: Electric Dreams may as well be the title of their biographies.
It would be a little blockheaded to suggest that Moroder—who, at this hour, has now developed a cognac, co-architected a pyramid in Dubai, designed a limited-edition sports car with a team at Lamborghini—authored the aubade to the ’80s with “Together in Electric Dreams.” Everything he seemingly touched did that job. But the indispensable ingredient in this fantasia is his breed of willfully earnest tenderness, a breed of optimism now culturally non-existent. In the ecstatic pumpft-pumpfting of the song—not a cautionary tale about tech, but a warm paean to the way it can be tamed in its infancy -- huddling together the foreverness of digital information and the fleetingness of man; dreams analog, electric, and always fulfilled—in one charmingly hammy piece of art, Moroder swept up Barron’s luck, the magic of the machine, and the facile humanism that suggested that man’s dominion over it would be eternally triumphant. In the dimension in which this is true, we too would be just as blissed-out, cartoonish and surreal, happy to sail off into the uncharted horizon together, forever.
Mina Tavakoli is a writer from Virginia. She’s written for the Paris Review, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Bookforum, various others.
Electric Dreams (1984)
