How To Make An Indy Movie Soundtrack

The reason most people remember indy movies is because many of them have great soundtracks, no matter how awful the actual movie is (I.E. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, even Kate Dennings supple chested pederast appeal couldn’t help this hipster quagmire despite Michael Cera’s stunning performance as a Woody Allen blow up doll with a slow leak)

1. The Underrated Older Mass Appeal Song - This is your most important song, your hook. You need a popular song from an old school band that still has indy cred, The Cure, The Smiths, The Pixies, Echo and The Bunny Men, New Order, Joy Division. This is essential as it’s what convinces people to listen to your soundtrack and probably watch your bad movie. It’s important the song is melancholy so people know your movie is” deep” and that if people don’t like it they just don’t “get” it.

2. The Fringe Popular Songs - Get a couple popular bands that haven’t really broken into the mainstream so they still seem cool to everyone but the most ironic of hipsters (who still love them secretly and not ironically). Wilco, Morningwood, and The Strokes are all good examples. You have to show the audience that “yeah we get you, we think you’re cool, and we’re cool to let’s be cool together and sit in a coffee shop sipping lattes pretending to be important on our laptops. Maybe we’ll grow soul patches and hit the urban outfitters later.” These are the non-threatening bands that are just catchy and obscure enough to get people to buy the album.

3. The Cover Song Done By Someone You’ve Never Heard Of - Now you need a cover song done by a relatively unknown artist. This will seal the deal. Take an older hit song and get a band to cover it. If it’s a fast song make it slow and acoustic, if it’s a slow song make it fast and electric. Take a Doris Day song and have a suicidal junky sing it, maybe do an electro-pop version of Frank Sinatra’s “What A Wonderful World”. The only real rule here is do not make sad songs happy and no hardcore, thrash, metal etc.. Also avoid long obnoxious techno and anything that can be associated with non-white people. You don’t want to scare them off.

4. Foreign Language Song - Either take a previously popular song and have someone perform it in either French, Italian, or Spanish or use a song that’s already in one of those languages. As long as it’s slow and acoustic no one will mind. The importance of this song is to appeal to people who want to pretend they are worldly and culturally educated and sensitive. The illusion that this film has made you and expert on foreign affairs because you’ve heard the Spanish version of “Our Lips Are Sealed”.

5. A Background Score Track - Package some background music in from whomever did your movie score. It’s filler but you can also use it to fleece the composer by promising them a percentage of the soundtrack sales instead of paying them outright.

6. Movie Dialogue Tracks - Two tracks with movie dialogue so they don’t forget it’s from your movie. After listening to the soundtrack enough people will forget how bad the movie was and go see it again either by renting or purchasing the DVD.

7. Some Shitty Song By Someone Related To The Movie – I could a song by the Production Assistant’s band or the Director’s half retarded nephew, the key is that it’s cheap, pleases someone at the study, and has never been heard outside a pot smoke filled basement full of the deadbeats producing it. This will show the hipsters you’re one of them, one of them worthless assholes who will still be a clerk at the record store 20 years from now.

8. The Sad Moral Struggle Song – I know its redundant mentioning this song as it’s usually covered by half the album already. A token depressing song that is almost always a sad “why did I screw up” love song. There is usually 3 or 4 of these on the soundtrack already in some form or another.

9. The Token “Let’s Have Fun/Party/Everything Will Be Alright” Song – This song is the upbeat one that says “hey a bunch of stuff happened but it’s all cool now so let’s all party”. So they spend all movie making you sad and confused but it’s all cool, no hard feelings, everything turned out pointless let’s party! After all you’ve become close to the characters, you care what happens to them now no matter how un-hip and un-cool it is to care about things that weren’t from childhood cartoons.

10. The Bonus Track – This can be any piece of crap you find, as long as it’s either goofy or sung by cast members, most likely both. It could be sassy and campy to highlight a totally unnecessary involving ancillary homosexual characters who were forced into the plot for diversity reasons in which they dance and sing into hairbrushes (as it is a common fact that all gay men dance and sing into hairbrushes, it’s just nature at work). Either way it’s going to be awful and not worth listening to unless it’s by either Wesley Willis or Daniel Johnston.

Now that my indy movie soundtrack is complete it’s time to go find retro things and ironically make them popular with hipsters again. Hey hipsters, aids was really popular during the 80’s maybe you should all get aids ironically! Come on it’ll make you even more pale and thin and unhealthy than going vegan and you can look like heroin addicts with none of the fun and incite that comes with doing heroin! Hooray for aids!

How Avatar Would Actually Happen

Avatar. Wow, what a movie. So visually stimulating, especially in imax. Hooray humanity looses in the end! Boo humanity! Yay big blue hippies!

Alright now that I’m finished pandering to James Cameron and patronizing the special effects crowd (the effects were amazing by the way) it’s time to analyze how things would actually happen. It is slightly insulting to assume that humanity with our exceedingly enormous capacity for war and destruction would lose a fight to a bunch of naked horse riding blue hippies. In fact if there is only one thing humanity excels at it’s our capacity to destroy the environment and native cultures that respect the environment. We would never go in and make our intentions direct and clear, we learned that with the American Indians in the Black Mountains. No we’d do what we do best, infect their culture with the worst of humanity without warning and ease them into lethargic complacency.

Step 1: The Peace Offering

This is the cornerstone of any successful campaign to destroy a culture without having to fight them at full strength. Start with a friendly gift or dinner under the guise of “cultural exchange” now small pox blankets or a Rosie O’Donnel comedy CD is simply too vile to begin with, plus smallpox may not effect them the same way as it does us as they are genetically different from us. Let’s start with a disease that we’re sure can spread to all cultures causing obesity, heart disease, hamburglary, and general lethargy. I’m speaking of the scourge of the sesame seed bun McDonald’s. Every culture McDonald’s has infiltrated has seen exponential rises in obesity, heart disease, and rises in the criminal act of hamburgarly (a felony in some countries). Japan once a proud fish eating nation is now battling national obesity for the first time ever, soon Japanese pornography with the skinny little prepubescent girl pooping on your chest in a subway train will be gone forever replaced with a portly saggy woman offering to “make your break today” for a vagina full of french fries. Simply introduce the bluebodies to some to McDonald’s as “the delicacy of Earth”. They may be disgusted at first (as they should be) but eventually they’ll be eating it every meal.

After we open up a McDonald’s it’s time to introduce them to alcohol. The good old firewater has fucked up more cultures than Jay Leno has fucked up good jokes (alright that’s hyperbole, there aren’t enough ravaged cultures to compare to Leno’s concentration camp of comedy.). Give booze to even the noblest native leader and weeks later they’re wearing the sacred headdress on their ass, pawning ancient pottery, and trading the great moon spirit for moonshine and American spirits.

2: Introduce Drugs

Look most of them already seem to be on ecstasy and they’re all about “being one with nature” and altered consciousness and other things humans excel at. Simply spread the Navi equivalent of crack around their deciduous commorancies and watch those green eyes turn red. Within weeks they’ll be digging up the great tree and pulling up unobtainium with their bare hands. If there’s any protest bring in the Navi equivalent of pot to ensure they’ll be too damn lazy to create a competent resistance (like what happened to the hippies, who were mostly useless middle class kids anyway) and make it illegal too, so if any of them get motivated enough to get up and stop laughing at that rock that looks like a “bloob” we can arrest them for it! Also if you factor in their biological neural network chances are all you have to do is get one of them high and the whole race will be in a deodate kef worthy of Rip Torn.

3. False Empowerment

Alright so there is bound to be a handful dissenters, ones that realize that humans have all the power (and the crack). Sway them by offering them minor roles with a false sense of power, appoint them to intermediary positions, hell even let them hold their own elections (secretly rig these elections of course, unless the candidates are all spineless or moronic). Now humanity has a go to guy, thrust all blame/responsibility on him, see the wonderful transient nature of democracy is so that specific blame can be passed between parties with no consequence and will always eventually land on those democracy is supposed to benefit.

4. Introduce BET (Blue Entertainment Television) and other distracting unintelligible media.

With a sense of false empowerment now in place it’s time to introduce specified mindless entertainment. Use slogans like “for us by us” and capitalize on dumbed down degraded versions of culturally significant people and trends. Take music and ideas that once came out of deep thought and yearning and make them into something in a thong that pays for $3,000 gold collars for their starving Toruk’s (the flying dinosaurs). Next play exploitive mind numbingly idiotic programming ad nauseum , be sure to include blatantly ignorant sounding catch phrases and make intellectualism and self improvement appear unappealing. Once these things become popular utilize them to advertise a meaningless lifestyle of excess that the average Navi could never afford without going into debt or at the very least without sacrificing much more important and empowering things like land and most anything granting limited independence from the human machine. Then to captivate dissenting but still naïve subcommunities advertise secondary brands of these products as “rebellious” and “edgy”.

5. Raise the bar

Some of these will begin to get disillusioned with the current state of their culture and their lack of advancement in life. Simply give them a goal like say “college” and then add varying degrees. Each degree should be associated with a social status or wealth status and should be very expensive. Now every time a Navi completes jumping through one hoop tell them they need to jump through a higher hoop. This often keeps the more intelligent Navi busy and even conforms some to human thinking.

6. MTD’s (Merger Transmitted Diseases)

So by this point some of the Navi have probably figured out Earth’s oldest profession and I’m sure with all the grand glory that is the sex industry there is a niche of deviants dedicated to Navi porn. Horny human tourist will travel to Pandora and be able to pick up a giant blue hooker check out her sweet bloobs and maybe get a sloppy blue-job (especially Jim Norton).

Which is all fine, it’s free consensual natural sex we’re after. If we make natural free pleasures more dangerous and deadly then more time will be sought seeking artificial pleasures which cost money which requires they work for us! Simply develop a disease that is horrific and transmitted sexually then claim some sick Navi banged one of those horse things.

So at this point humanity has avoided an actual war and managed to decimate and enslave a whole new world but chances are conflicts will arise between humans and these bluens (a derogatory term for Navi’s). Luckily the Navi’s arms are terribly genetically inefficient creatures on their planet. Horse things that need 8 holes to breathe? A big jaguar thing that lets a pathetic new comer to the world escape alive when on the same scale a common house cat would have torn him apart? Bright orange predators that don’t blend in anywhere and can be heard wherever they go scaring away all potential prey? Even the Navi have to tether themselves to nearly everything they use making all these creatures weaknesses their own! It’s would be like a human making it so a human in a tank experiences pain every time the tank gets shot at!

In fact the only thing with more contempt for nature than humans is the humans who designed Avatar, between disregard for physics (Really floating mountains? The sort of magnetic field required for that most likely really screw up the animals around it and it is extremely unlikely something like that could remain stable) and ignorance of the fact that life’s only real common thread is that of will to survive and adaptation to better survive there are some very “Avatarded” concepts.

Eagerly awaiting bandwidth of some sweet bare “bloobs” - Dr. Intoxicated

Happy? New Year?

With 2009 mostly behind us it's time to look towards 2010. I really haven't done much on this blog, between many of my private projects and freelance writing it's been a battle over content. In fact the major reason I haven't been posting a lot of stuff here is that I have a mass of articles, photoshops. animations, in the works and frankly this platform is too small. I'm working on coding and css and learning more and more interactive design methods. Possibly in 2010 I'll be good enough at the technical aspects to support the looming monster of creativity that vows to eat me if I do not produce fast enough. Hopefully I'll find or develop said platform and there are chances I may start pitching the rebirth of the "Daily American" (but probably under a new name to reflect that it is and was the first tabloid satire site ever created.). Some big changes this coming year, but none of you care. Some things to look forward to "How the internet works: a guide for old people" "Pokemon rewritten by evangelical christians" and "What is the best object to stuff my pants with?""The answer to economic stimulus: more cigarettes" are all on my dashboard along with a dead hooker and a preschool worth of injured physically challenged children from the school up the street. Well baby new year is here, 2009 forgot to wear a condom and it's too late for a back alley time stream abortion so happy goddamn New Year!