(#268: 24 July1982, 2 weeks; joint number one with The Lexicon Of Love in its first week)
The soundtrack was released on August 25, 2009. It features a blend of American standards and new pieces, written specifically for the movie. Included from the original film are the piano ballad 'Out Here on My Own' and the title theme 'Fame' (both sung by Irene Cara for the 1980 original film). To get full access to the site e.g. Deposit funds, download files you have to create an account. You will get 2 track for free after confirming your account!
Track listing:Fame/Out Here On My Own/Hot Lunch Jam/Dogs In The Yard/Red Light/Is It OK If ICall You Mine?/Never Alone/Ralph And Monty (Dressing Room Piano)/I Sing TheBody Electric
While figuring out what to say about Fame, I tried to remember what Alan Parker was actually doing inthe summer of 1982, and then it hit me; it was Pink Floyd – The Wall, an interesting if doomed attempt (in tandemwith Gerald Scarfe) to film the unfilmable, mostly shot in and around BatterseaPower Station with lots of shots of a morose and mute Bob Geldof staring at atelevision screen. Then I remembered the film’s fifties school sequence andrealised that the film, like Fame,was a fairly unyielding meditation on how an education system can fuck you up.
Back in 1980, Parker had wanted to use the actual NewYork High School of Performing Arts for location filming, but the New YorkBoard of Education were having none of it; remembering that this film wascoming off the back of Midnight Express,the Board objected that Parker might view the school as he had done Turkishprisons. And perhaps the director’s greatest feat here was to make a performingarts school akin to being in a Turkish prison.
But MGM, who signed both the project and Parker up, hadnot released a profitable musical in years, and the skilful remoulding of theold Garland/Rooney let’s-do-the-show-right-here ethos, as well as thethen-recent memory of Parker’s work on BugsyMalone, may have persuaded them to take Fameon.
Wishing his audience to believe that they were watchingreal students rather than actors, Parker enlisted a group of relatively unknownplayers with slightly better-known actors to play the teaching roles; musicdepartment head Professor Shorofsky was played by old-time Broadway composerAlbert Hague (“Young And Foolish,” TheGrinch Who Stole Christmas), but the director was unaware of thedistinguished career of Anne Meara, who played English head Mrs Sherwood (shewas half of the highly successful comedy double act Stiller and Meara with herhusband Jerry Stiller; Ben and Amy are their children).
The film was not immediately successful in the States (nostars, an R rating – there is an explicit scene of sexual abuse towards thefilm’s end) and made its returns gradually; Irene Cara’s (eventually Oscar-winning)title song went top five as a single on Billboard,and the film eventually prospered on overseas screenings and cable and homevideo rentals.
When shuddering at the me-first projections of most ofthe songs used on the soundtrack, it is instructive to remember that most ofthe hopeful students in the film do not exactly have the best of times, or theluckiest of lives. Yet the concluding impression of Fame is that, despite its worthy attempts to address issues ofrace, class, literacy and sexuality, the film finally turns away from thoseimplications in favour of an uncritical extolment of fame as an end in itself,or even an entitled right. Instead, it becomes an extended soap opera, muchlike 1973’s The Paper Chase but withHarvard Law School being replaced by singing and dancing (and the befuddled andgrouchy Hague is not the John Houseman figure this film so badly needed); the studentsaudition, progress and graduate, and in the end nothing is really questioned orattacked. So few blacks still manage to get a dancing career by accident. Sofew people from the projects get a chance to escape Brooklyn or the Bronx atall.
The central setpiece of the film depicts the variouswould-be performers seemingly spontaneously and telepathically breaking out oftheir classrooms and studios, dancing, singing and cartwheeling into thedowntrodden Lower East Side streets, jumping on and off car bonnets, and soforth. While this was doubtless intended to portray the unquenchable enthusiasmof youth, what it actually presages is the unstenchable impatience of youtheager to grab every superficial thing the eighties had to offer. 'Youain't seen the best of me yet,' says the title song, unintentionallyparaphrasing Al Jolson, but the truth of fear rather than love being theprincipal spur reveals itself in the subsequent line 'Give me time, I'llmake you forget the rest.' Is that the rest of 'me' or the restof humanity?
No, this is not genuine liberation; the students do not “occupy”the streets of the city, and we know as we watch it that we are witnessing alie – such “demonstrations” and “outbursts” get almost immediately quenched bysirens, handcuffs and shootings. The theme song is all hyperactivity andpetulant ambition: 'Don't you know who I am?' 'People will seeme and cry' (though that 'cry' could just as well be'die'). 'I'm gonna live forever.' 'Baby I'll betough/Too much is not enough...NO!' 'I'm gonna make it toheaven/Light up the sky like a flame' - presumably in the manner of SlimPickens rodeo-riding the bomb at the climax of Dr Strangelove.
The template was now decided; mere talent was no longerenough (as though it ever were), and success depended on how loudly youscreamed or stamped your feet, or how acridly you stamped on the feet ofothers. The consequences of that reverberate still through everything from The X-Factor to Iraq; no more boringsocialist consensus, it's a jungle (for the flipside of the 'dream,'see 'The Message,' a top ten hit in the UK not long after “Fame”’success), the market rules, failures will not be tolerated. 'Fame' –as Elliott Randall’s panicking guitar solo attests - sets a chilling precedent.
The rest of the soundtrack album really does not offerany improvement. Michael Gore, brother of screenwriter Christopher Gore, washired to write (most of) the music; you may know their sister, Lesley Gore, whowrote the lyric to “Out Here On My Own” and some of the lyric to “Hot LunchJam.” The former is actually about the most coherent song on the record; aballad which does its best to be “When Two Worlds Drift Apart” but misses byseveral hundred miles (Cara’s shrill vocals do the song no favour). “Hot LunchJam” – the film was originally named HotLunch, until somebody pointed out to Parker that a pornographic movie ofthat name was doing the rounds at the time – does its feeble best to be DonnaSummer’s “Bad Girls” with a “I Can’t Help Myself” string line and a “free form”ending which is embarrassing.
“Dogs In The Yard,” sung by Paul McCrane (who plays dramastudent Montgomery MacNeil) and written by Bugatti and Musker, the duoresponsible for Paul Nicholas’ monody of mid-seventies hits (and featuring ayoung Marcus Miller on bass), is weedy in the REO Speedwagon sense (“I want togo crazy, like the dogs in the yard”) with requisite horrendous corporate “rock”guitar lines. “Red Light” is perhaps the dullest “disco” record ever made;nearly six-and-a-quarter minutes of Linda Clifford (who had no otherinvolvement with the film) gamely trying to be Edwin Starr but losing – and withlyrics of the calibre of “I’m raging out of control” (as the song pooters alonglike a reluctant Reliant Robin) and “Lord have mercy” – I harboured similarthoughts when I saw there was still a minute and a half of the song to go – it ishardly any surprise. Lena says that this song is like being taught disco movesin PE class at school, and I won’t be arguing with that.
“Is It OK If I Call You Mine?,” just McCrane and hisacoustic guitar, ranks with the worst things I have heard in the course ofdoing TPL; a seriously out-of-tunevocal and a song and performance so drippy that they make Bread seem like PereUbu. “Never Alone” at least tries to inject some life into the proceedings,being an energetic and enterprising gospel choir workout to which I will almostcertainly never listen again.
The thin gruel heard thus far, however, is far outweighedin badness by the closing “I Sing The Body Electric.” As though it were notpresumptuous enough to try to invoke Walt Whitman (who wouldn’t have lastedfive minutes at a school like this), the song then becomes a very frighteningspectre indeed. And I am not talking of the sub-War Of The Worlds guitar soloing throughout, but the gradual andhorrific realisation that this song is celebrating naked ambition with no roomfor self-reflection or even self-awareness. It rolls up slowly anddeterminedly, like a Panzer tank, and if you were wondering exactly whose nameIrene Cara was demanding that you remember in the title song, then think of “Fame”as the name (just as the protagonist of “I Write The Songs” is “Music”), asthis overpowering but avidly-desired monster.
Then watch as the monster slowly takes these people overand turns them into a dead-eyed mass, worshipping the idea of fame as virtue initself, not something you achieve as a result of any talent or ability you mighthave; it is as if, by virtue of being famous, you will end up going to heaven.Listen to these words: “I celebrate the me yet to come,” “Creating my owntomorrow/When I shall embody the Earth” (“Tomorrow Belongs To Me”?), “I’ll burnwith the fire of ten million stars,” and, perhaps worst of all, “We are the emperorsnow/And we are the Czars” - Leni Riefenstahl could have directed the video –and it is clear that this is where this tale takes the wrong turning; if youcan see the tsunami of Reagan coming over the horizon in the course of “Fame,”then here is embodied the Thatcher/Reagan creed of “individualism” (even as thesingers are turned into a single machine) cast within what is a veryold-fashioned view of showbusiness and “progress”; as the song crashes down ina mess of Zarathustra and William Tell orchestral chords, we can see thenightmare to come, of Nuremberg pop songs called things like “Rule The World,” “Burn,”“Champion” and “Roar,” of music that will brook no question, doubt ordissension. As if that was all that people really wanted. They stared The Lexicon Of Love in the face and,being fatally safety-first, turned away from it, back towards the known. “WE WILLALL BE STARS” the song and record conclude – is that a literal, atomised threatof a promise? Or maybe Parker intended Pink’s “Waiting For The Worms” to bethis song’s belated and inevitable sequel (“You cannot reach me now”).
And if you are wondering why this album was number one,and the title song a number one single, in Britain fully two years after theywere released; like The Paper Chase,the film of Fame turned out to beessentially a pilot for a television series, the latter of which was beingbroadcast here in the summer of 1982. The tragedy is that this story willcontinue, or persist, into the next entry.