Skins - Skins Music Appreciation #2: Because Hometown Glory made us cry along with Cassie!

Dacrown · 07-12-2014, 09:48 AM

Series 1 Music Guide

Series 2 Music Guide

Series 3 Music Guide

{Music Fans:}
1. *~Sophia~*
2. GracesAngel
3. say something
4. Conspiracy
5. Sassy_Silhouette
6. xSophiiax
7. MiMi_90210
8. MTG11687
9. CONDEMNED666
10. Jon_Robb66

Finnegan · 07-12-2014, 09:09 PM

Incontestably, the best use of music in SKINS is at the show's best moment: the conspicuously surreal use of Cat Stevens' "Wild World" at the end of series 1, the climax of Generation One, to underscore that the bus that has just hit Tony is not physical but a metaphor for love, and hence that Gen 1 is essentially moral in a way developed chiefly by surreal symbolism. That's a great moment in television, a moment in which the normally disctint symbolic level of a two-level drama volently breaks into its naive level to demand our attention. Tony's singing "you're breaking my heart, girl" while bleeding on the pavement deliciously underscores the surreal symbolism that conveys Gen 1's core message about the nature of love and why "nobody loves anyone properly."

The second-best is surely the use of Bach's Tocatta and Fuge in D Minor at the start of the opening scene of series 2, just before Maxxie leaps from a church altar to help Tony begin the process of coping with the painful trauma of moral rebirth, of redemption by love - of being "hit by a bus." Any use of a Bach fugue to open a teen drama series demands attention. And it, like the church setting, underscores that Tony's injury and healing are spiritual, emotional - not physical - and hence that Gen 1 is essential moral and surreally symbolic. Not surprisingly, Bach in the church immediately follows "Wild World;" they're two back-to-back uses of music on two sides of the series 1/2 break to do exactly the same thing.

Those are, I would argue, objective facts, not subjective preferences.

My subjectively favorite uses of music in the SKINS soundtrack are of:

-- "Walcott" by Vampire Weekend in series 2, episode 6; and

-- "Charlie Darwin" by The Low Anthem in series 4, episode 7.

I'm indebted to those soundtrack uses for introducing me to both songs, and both groups. Both are very brainy groups from New England / New York. And both songs are no less cerebral than SKINS.

Series 2, episode 6, in which Tony, after falling asleep to Effy's reading of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, dreams of going to a school to learn how to love well, culminates Tony's redemption. It is also the most surreal and symbolic episode in SKINS, the favorite episode of its writer, Jamie Brittain, and my favorite episode. "Walcott" plays when Tony enters that school where he will learn how to love well. And "Walcott" is no less symbolic, ironic, and traditionally moralistic than Generation One of SKINS. Formally, the song is half soft rock, half classical counterpoint. Substantively, it is a warning to flee contemporary hedonism and to create some modernly viable adaptation of tradition morality -- to "get out of Cape Cod" and recall that "the Holy Roman Empire roots for you." That is, substantively, exactly the moral message of Generation One of SKINS, which seeks to redeem viewers, by redeeming Tony, from the amoral hedonism depicted in series 1, episode 1, and to teach us why we don't love better than we do, and how we might.

Series 4, episode 7, is the climactic episode of SKINS Generation Two, in which Effy's lover is bludgeoned to death because she fails to understand, until too late, that love is real and more than sex, that the bus that hit Tony was real although not physical. Her love dies because she despairs of love - it's tautologically necessary. "Charlie Dawin" plays as she's in a mental hospital wrestling with the traumatic reality of love - Tony's being "hit by a bus." The song voices rejection of what are commonly taken to be the spiritual implications of Darwinism, and, more broadly, of the modern pseudo-scientific reductionism that denies scope for free will, for endogenous redemption, for love being more than something material and physical. It urges us to flee that, abord a new Mayflower, to a new world in which science serves only to explain, not to prescribe. And that's exactly what Generations One and Two of SKINS urge us to do, too. The core message is that we can't love well if we think love isn't real, if we think our emotions are just programmed responses to external stimulae - if we think that Tony's bus must be either physical or unreal. The scene of Generation One in which Tony explains how he finds relief in subatomic indeterminacy from the modern mechanistic world-view is critical, because that world-view is why Effy (always) and Tony (at the start) fail to love - they don't believe love is real, the don't believe emotions are more than billiard-ball-like material phenomena that are fully determined and not subject to free will or choice. What drives Effy insane and kills Freddie is what "Charlie Darwin" and SKINS are urging us to reject -- what Tony does reject when he choses to love, even though that's a slow, painful process that requires a lot of willpower to change accustomed patterns of throught and behavior.

In Gens 1 and 2, SKINS' soundtrack music often is chosen to underscore the drama's main moral message, which deliberately is developed chiefly by means other than verbal dialogue. In sum, SKINS' soundtrack music is often part of its pervasive symbolism.