Beverly Hills Cop: Soundtrack

Faltermeyer is a king but i am v torn between Vanity 6, Pointer Sisters & Patti LaBelle rn

going to pick Axel F because I learned how to play it on piano and I thought I was so cool

I would watch a documentary about Moroder/Faltermeyer/Keith Forsey and the '80s soundtrack era. Hard call between "New Attitude" and "Axel F."

Speaking of Faltermeyer/Forsey, "The Heat Is On" is charmingly dumb.

Heat Is On is very good and yes, quite dumb

Stir It Up is a total bop, I love it so much

also shoutout songwriter Danny Sembello, brother of Michael Sembello ie Flashdance “Maniac” & others. Talented family

Junior has a song?!

Gonna rep Pointer Sisters here. HS pep band ‘Neutron Dance’ really revved crowd and team up for some strange reason.

The correct answer is Axel F just for sheer magnitude - but both Patti LaBelle tunes are 100 emoji - and if we are talking immensity The Heat Is On is no small tune

But my nerd write-in vote goes to absolutely banging Faltermeyer b-side Shoot Out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwEySsfNdtg

The first time I heard Axel F as an adult I was struck by how monotonous and repetitive it is.
(as a kid though, that was break-dancing gold)

It is a beautiful recording, I just find myself digging the sonics of it

One of the all time great band-watching-the-film-in-the-cinema videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-jdhorGtQI

Because I love it

The third essential Faltermeyer deep cut b-side (from the Shalamar single)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsThlsaIHFA

I think he re-recorded all this stuff but an OG incidental music release would be golden

TS: Harold Faltermeyer vs Jan Hammer - ? MIDI kings both, I can't call it

Did we ever, in the musical mimicry thread, note the similarities between "The Heat Is On" and VH's "Panama?"

Damn, I hadn't heard "Neutron Dance" in years. That one's really a banger and a half, isn't it?

"how can i not pick Ax..... NEUTRON DANCE!!!@!!@!!!!!!!!"

Axel F because it was just everywhere at the time and even kids like me who hadn't seen the movie were trying to play it. it's not the best song here but it's the one that makes me the happiest to think about

Wow, that Junior song drains every particle that made him cool in 1981.

xp cosign. Neutron Dance my second place pick for the way it's used in the movie.

for your Shalamar viewing enjoyment, live on TOTP performing “Don’t Get Stopped in Beverly Hills”

the opening wide shot feels quite cruel, like cmon pull in this just looks sad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqfLynSgNAo

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Axel f
Those voting for heat is on will be arrested on sight

for jaywalking (thrown from a moving car)

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Who voted for Glenn

"Axel F" is like "Rockit"'s cooler sibling. Faltermeyer then ripped on his own song for the Fletch soundtrack.

not surprised by the lack of votes for it, but I really love "Stir It Up"

I think I forgot to vote. Oh well

Happy that “Nasty Girl” placed. That’s the one song I love from this, but all in all it’s a booming soundtrack that blew me away the first time I heard it, which was the first night the movie opened in 1984

i have the "axel f"/"new attitude" double a-side 12-inch :)

Who voted for Glenn

― calstars, Saturday, June 22, 2024

Seriously. I called the FBI.

The snitch is on

neutron dance is an all time classic

Stir It Up is a fucking jam
i cannot believe i was the only one who voted for it

"Neutron Dance" robbed. "Axel F" is ... really, really bad

1/3 of the Frey votes here. If his goal was to write a catchy, memorable movie track, he did it. This one suits the movie’s vibe as well as You Belong to the City, Danger Zone, Ghostbusters, and Footloose fit their films. Good summer radio tune, too.

"He" didn't write it, that was Faltermeyer and our boy Keith Forsey (who followed up the next year by cajoling Simple Minds into recording a lil tune he wrote for the Breakfast Club).

Frey played the guitar solo and added the smug.

Y'all understand that as a Miamian I've loathed "The Heat is On" since a certain basketball team made it an unofficial anthem eight centuries ago.

It's a pretty annoying song! But I'm kinda fascinated by Forsey, this guy who goes from krautrock to disco, hooks up with Moroder, and finds this niche as Billy Idol whisperer and lite-New-Wave soundtrack specialist.

Stir It Up is a fucking jam
i cannot believe i was the only one who voted for it

― werewolves of laudanum (VegemiteGrrl), Sunday, 23 June 2024 19:31 (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

wtf I voted for Stir It Up too, steward's enquiry!

“Gratitude” is absolutely the highlight. What a massive song. Elfman/The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo appeared in Martin Brest’s AFI thesis feature, the excellent Hot Tomorrows (1977), and Midnight Run (1988) was one of Elfman’s first major film scores

listening to the CASSETTE of this on my WALKMAN during morning commute

feel that two things make The Heat is On better than it should be A) the synth bass giving a touch of boogie bounce to this near-stodgy rock plod also B) the very cool thing the guitarist does in the first half of the chorus that briefly makes the song sound far more complex and interesting than it actually is

also yeah Stir It Up getting one vote is probably a travesty

but there sure is a lot of competition for your ilx vote dollar on this album

Now do Cop II. “Shakedown”! “I Want Your Sex”!

Besides those two singles...none of these ring a bell:

1 Shakedown - Bob Seger
2 Be There - Pointer Sisters
3 In Deep - Charlie Sexton
4 Hold On - Corey Hart
5 I Want Your Sex - George Michael
6 Better Way - James Ingram
7 Love/Hate - Pebbles
8 Cross My Broken Heart - The Jets
9 36 Lovers - Ready For The World
10 I Can't Stand It - Sue Ann
11 All Revved Up - Jermaine Jackson

shakedown....... takedown.....YA BUSTED!

^^^

Seger's only #1 Pop hit!

There should be an oral history of “axel f” that is just piano teachers circa 1987 complaining about having to teach 8 year olds kids how to play it. Song ruuuuuuuules.

fucking love Shakedown, it goes very hard for me

it is a crime that Old Time Rock N Roll got to have cultural staying power over this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYi381lJoeQ

Besides those two singles...none of these ring a bell:

1 Shakedown - Bob Seger
2 Be There - Pointer Sisters
3 In Deep - Charlie Sexton
4 Hold On - Corey Hart
5 I Want Your Sex - George Michael

"I Want Your Sex" doesn't ring a bell?

DING DONG

it's a natural, fun song

I meant besides the two singles "I Want Your Sex" and "Shakedown", the rest aren't familiar...

not everybody's heard it but everybody should

"I Want Your Sex" won the Razzie award for worst song in a movie that year. And was so controversial that George had to film an intro to the video emphatically stating that "This song is NOT about casual sex." Weird times the 80s were.

“Cross My Broken Heart” is a jam

So many of those Jets jams have disappeared from radio.

Confusingly, a hilariously bad James Glickenhaus-directed film called Shakedown was also released in 1987, but does not feature Seger’s song

lame

"There should be an oral history of “axel f” that is just piano teachers circa 1987 complaining about having to teach 8 year olds kids how to play it. Song ruuuuuuuules."

I grew up in that period, listening to three-channel sound chip music on my ZX Spectrum, and the thing that struck me about "Axel F", "Crockett's Theme" - and the Kraftwerk riff in "Planet Rock", and Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" - is how they felt like a musical equivalent of the Pompidou Centre. In the sense that the melody and chords weren't hidden at all, they were on the surface. Listening to those songs was like looking at the exterior of the Pompidou Centre.

Which is why they were so easy to learn, because you could play the bassline with your left index finger and the melody with your right index finger and you had a whole tune. Except that you couldn't do that with "Crockett's Theme" because it has actual chords. And if there was one thing I learned back then it's the power of production, because even if you play the rights notes, it doesn't sound nearly as good as the right notes fed through a recording studio.

It was the same with video game music, which generally had a bassline, a melody line, and drums, and perhaps some sound effects, e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiXTDZy2Hyg

The thing that's always irritated me about "Axel F" is the last two notes in the melody. They sound wrong. I have no formal musical training at all, but instinctively the melody in of that song makes sense - I think the correct terminology is that it resolves. e.g. the tune sounds like a complete sentence. But you'd think that each repetition of the melody would be slightly different, or that one of the repeats would introduce a comma and a continuation of the sentence, but no. Instinctively it sounds like someone delivering the same sentence over and over again.

We had one of those Casio sampling keyboards. An SK-1. I think we managed to get it to say "bollock chin", because one of the teachers had a big cleft in his chin. They were simpler times back then. All lost now, like tears in rain.