Friday, July 28, 2006

Just Who The Hell Are Nonpoint, And More To The Point, Just Who The Hell Do Nonpoint Think They Are Anyway


Miami Vice, the year's most anticipated Jamie Foxx movie, opens this weekend and no doubt you've been lucky enough to catch some of the pre-launch marketing hype. After all, Miami Vice is far and away the summer's biggest movie (well, at least since Superman Returns. No, wait, since Dead Man's Chest. Wait, I meant since X3. Sorry, I keep forgetting which movie I don't want to miss the most this summer).

In your perusal of this upcoming summer blockbuster's promotional material you've probably already noticed that someone has covered the original Miami Vice and Michelob - The Movie classic "In The Air Tonight" by perennial divorce-by-fax king Phil Collins. This stunning bit of ironic re-interpretation has been carried out by none other than Nonpoint, a self-described "Rock/Metal/Funk" band whose MySpace page allows you to enjoy their new cover version as often as your browser will play it before crashing.

The band, featuring ecstatic face-pulling bass player "Bastard" (pictured upper left, whose real name "Ken" can be gleaned from a quick glance at the image's file name) have turned a seminal slice of pudgy, bald British synth-and-drums pop into a milieu of faux-grunge guitars and spittle-inflected vocals worthy of a prime slot in nearly any post-9/11 big-budget action film's end credits suite. Still, I can't help but shed a tear at the bastardization of a landmark of the cross-platform music-video-as-marketing-tool era. If the original song did anything right, it succeeded in being atmospheric; the only atmosphere Nonpoint's version creates is "INTERIOR: FRAT PARTY - NIGHT".

I realize that Nonpoint may have been waiting for this moment all of their life, oh Lord, but why couldn't they have been enlisted to cover Collins' "Take Me Home" for a relaunching of the ill-fated mid-to-late-80s CBS newsmagazine West 57th instead?

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home