Audio Watchdog By Douglas E. Winter
By Douglas E. Winter Olympian
Last night, I watched the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, Danny Boyle’s barmy Britpalooza with the Bard, Beckham, Branagh, a Bond, Mr. Bean, a Beatle—and even, God save her, the Queen. Less than 24 hours later, courtesy of iTunes and with a heads-up from
underworldlive.com, I downloaded its offi- cial soundtrack, ISLES OF WONDER: MUSIC FOR THE OPENING CEREMONY OF THE LONDON 2012 OLYMPIC GAMES ($19.95, two virtual discs, 36 tracks, 150m 2s). The speedy arrival of this music was bittersweet. Video may have killed the radio star, but digital pulled the trigger on the vinyl LP, the tape cassette, the compact disc and, perhaps most important, the record store— subduing and subverting, for too many new-gen- eration listeners, the rebellious individualism of finding one’s own rock-and-roll.
With thousands of independent record stores shuttered in the past decade, the major chains (Tower, Virgin, Sam Goody) dissipated, and megastores like Wal-Mart and Target shelving only cherry-picked commercial releases, the young have been denied the pleasure of discovering music on their own. (For more on this truth, check out Aaron Leitko’s “How Can You Be a Rebel If You Use Mom’s iTunes Account?” at
washingtonpost.com, July 13, 2012).
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That said, the Opening Ceremony offered a refreshing riposte to the dark side of digital, blending music for the masses from Britpop stal- warts with artists unknown and unheard outside the UK club and indie scenes. The aesthetic is due to the choice of Rick Smith—with Karl Hyde, Underworld—as Music Director. (For a more stateside perspective, imagine the US Olympic Committee approving Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips—it would never happen.) China may have had 2008 drummers, but only Britain has Underworld: electronica masterminds, mixologists, soundtrack artists (best known for their work with Boyle), and the first band named for a Clive Barker project, now in its 30th year (counting its early 1980s incarnation as Freur). ISLES OF WONDER collects the Opening Ceremony’s central music, leaving out the mass- market standards (including Pink Floyd’s “Eclipse,” used to great effect in the lighting of the Olympic cauldron) and Sir Paul McCartney’s live finale. Af- ter the bouncy pop prelude of Frank Turner’s “I Still Believe,” the disc, like the Ceremony, opens with a boy soprano solo, soon expanded to a children’s choir, of “Jerusalem”—evoking the irony of that anthem’s comparable place in Peter Watkins’ dystopian PRIVILEGE (1967), accompa- nying the “largest staging of nationalism in the history of Great Britain”... prior to these Olympics. Patriotics swiftly splintered into a surreal history lesson-cum-spectacle driven by an ultimate mix tape. As belching smokestacks—Blake’s “dark satanic mills”—rose to celebrate(?) the Industrial
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