Jupiter drops (some further context).
Bunk has suffered through Gram Parson’s “Streets of Baltimore” on a hillbilly bar’s juke, just as Herc has been forced to police West Baltimore amid the throbbing bass lines of what passes for rap these days. Which is the point, perhaps.
“In real life you don’t get to punch the button on the song that you want to be playing when you get into the bar fight, when you’re in a car chase,” said Simon.
And so we have these buttons being punched on The Wire: 1972’s “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” by Looking Glass, played on a beat-up radio in the stevedore’s pierside shack when Frank Sobotka was worried about a can of contraband languishing on the docks; the Tokens singing that ridiculous, everything-that-Bob-Dylan-is-not folk song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as Jimmy McNulty and sons follow Stringer Bell through a city market; prosecutor Rhonda Pearlman, stuck at home doing paperwork, listening to the plaintive poetry of Lucinda Williams.
Yet one rule is strictly observed: All of the music has to be ambient, meaning it has to be justified by a source in the scene, either a boom box or a stereo or a car radio or a band belting it out in a bar that doesn’t even have a stage.
—George Pelecanos, “The Music of The Wire”
Might as well go with the flow of it. Jim puts on his “Supertragic Symphony,” a concoction of his own made up of the four saddest movements of symphonic music that he knows of. He’s recorded them in the sequence he thinks most effective. First comes the funeral march from Beethoven’s Third Symphony, grand and stirring in its resistance to fate, full of active grief as an opening movement should be. Second movement is the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the stately solemn tune that Bruno Walter discovered could be made into a dirge, if you ignored Beethoven’s instruction to play it allegretto and went to adagio. Heavy, solemn, moody, rhythmic.
The third movement is the third movement from Brahms’s Third Symphony, sweet and melancholy, the essence of October, all the sadness of all the autumns of all time wrapped up in a tuneful tristesse that owes its melodic structure to the previous movement from Beethoven’s Seventh. Jim likes this fact, which he discovered on his own; it makes it look like the “Supertragic Symphony” was meant to be.
Then the finale is the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique, no fooling around here, all the stops pulled, time to just bawl your guts out! Despair, sorrow, grief, all of czarist Russia’s racking misery, Tchaikovsky’s personal troubles, all condensed into one final awful moan. The ultimate bummer.
What a symphony! Of course there’s a problem with the shifting key signatures, but Jim doesn’t give a damn about key signatures. Ignore them and he can gather up all of his downer feelings and sing them out, conduct them too, wandering around the ap trying feebly to clean up a bit, collapsing in chairs, crawling blackly over the floors as he waves an imaginary baton, getting lower and lower. Man, he’s low. He’s so low he’s getting high off it! And when it’s all over he feels drained. Catharsis has taken place. Everything’s a lot better.
—Kim Stanley Robinson, The Gold Coast
