Interesting little factoid about yours truly, I’ve purchased more than a few soundtracks before I’d even seen the movie.  As I stated already in the previous post, I’m a big fan of dramatic music.  Which is why I have so many motion picture soundtracks in my CD collection.  Before I joined the Navy, I was into a lot of punk rock bands like Black Flag, The Circle Jerks, and Naked Raygun, or dark industrial electronica like Ministry or Skinny Puppy.  My brother told me about an album by Peter Gabriel, called Passion, which was the original motion picture soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ, a film by Martin Scorsese.  He was living in Los Angeles while I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia.  So naturally I ran right out to the local shopping mall and purchased the cassette tape right away.  Passion, by Peter Gabriel, whom I was not the biggest fan of at the time by the way, profoundly changed my musical tastes immediately and forevermore.   My first foreign country that I ever got to visit was Bahrain, and I was there for more than 2 weeks before I even saw my ship.  Uncle Sam put me up in a د.ب500BD per night Sheraton Hotel, which comes out to about $1,375 per night, of which I was in my own room for 10 days before they made me stay at the ASU (American Support Unit), but I digress…  I liked the music, because it was unlike anything I had ever heard before, sounding so primitively mysterious in its different tones and scales that people in that portion of the globe played.  However, I had only really heard it in the taxi cabs when I explored the city of Manama.  I ended up surprised when I went shopping and ended up buying all these bootlegs that supplied me with the entire Red Hot Chili Peppers discography on Thames.  Only for me to find out that Mother’s Milk (which was new at the time) and Uplift Mofo Party Plan were thus far the only halfway decent things they had recorded as of yet.  I was jet-lagged, so I would wake up at 0400 and would hear the call to prayer faintly over the city loudspeakers from behind my hotel window overlooking the dusty island city off the coast of Saudi Arabia.  To me, it was all so filled with an ominous mystique that I found more intriguing than foreboding.  But I was still musically immature at the time and hadn’t quite found that which would change my worldview yet.  After listening to this soundtrack, I listened to it exclusively on my Walkman for more than a month.  At first, I wasn’t at all interested in seeing The Last Temptation of Christ, being that at the time the last thing I wanted to see or hear anything about was Jesus.  Having grown up in Catholicism and Christianity, not to mention that once you get into the military you will be exposed to all sorts of Christian influence peddlers seeking to take advantage of ungrounded or spiritually ambivalent youngsters away from home for the first time, I simply wasn’t interested in such a film.  But once my brother, whom has always been a strong influence on me, told me that the Christians absolutely hated that film, I hopped on a bus and transferred to another bus to find a video store to rent that film and made my entire department watch the New York accented apostles and Jesus in a show that folks thought was sacrilegiously blasphemous.  However, I quite found Nikos Kazantzakis’ interpretation of Christ to be more than a little influential for me.  I believe that concept far more than I do just about anything some reprobate faith peddling huckster tries selling it.  At any rate, I hope you enjoy this playlist.  Thus far, this is the first actual “playlist” I’ve shared.  This is by far the best work that Peter Gabriel has done to this very day, and I would also highly recommend picking up this soundtrack,  Peter Gabriel’s Passion Soundtrack on Amazon.

If you enjoyed that, and have a deeper curiosity for learning more about his influence and what later became known as “world beat”, you might want to check out PASSION SOURCES, released by Real World.

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

In my extensive CD collection, I have numerous motion picture soundtracks because I happen to enjoy dramatic music.  I’ll be sharing several different motion picture soundtracks for you to get your hands on in the upcoming posts on this category.  John Barry (Dances With Wolves, Out of Africa), Maurice Jarre (Jacob’s Ladder, Witness), Trevor Jones (Last of the Mohicans, with Randy Edelman), Philip Glass (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi) and Ryuichi Sakamoto (The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky), are some of my favorite contemporary composers.  But Mrs S and I sometimes spend a lot of time just cruising YouTube to find some new music that we might not have otherwise checked out.  If you’ve not heard of him before, you may have heard his music if you enjoy anime.

Joe Hisaishi did the soundtracks to all of the iconic Studio Ghibli anime films, such as Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and My Neighbor Totoro, just to name a few.  He’s also known for doing the soundtracks to Kitano Takeshi’s (Beat Takeshi) motion pictures, like his 2000 film, Brother, starring Takeshi Kitano, Omar Epps, and Claud Maki.  We found this concert that highlighted the entire Studio Ghibli filmography, and I felt compelled to share this wonderful concert with you.  Enjoy.

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.