Generic Heavy Metal music in 80s movies (and after)

Cafe Society
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1

I’m watching “Donnie Darko” for the first time, it’s on TV, and I’m not impressed. The film is boring and paints a picture of mental illness that’s totally askance, but that doesn’t matter for this thread, because the only thing I like about the movie is the music. There’s Bunny And The Echomen right at the start, and later there’s a party scene where both the Church and Joy Division are played. But this particular scene starts with a snippet of a song which instantly triggered the “yeah, that’s what 80s Hollywood people thought is rebellious music, so let’s plug it into every scene that involves debauchery.” bone in me. You know, the one always with a high-pitched screaming guitar solo.I hope you get what I mean, it was maybe even more frequent in TV shows. I think in the “Donnie Darko” scene it even was an original song by Judas Priest (which of course is the most cliché metal band you can imagine), but often I suspected that this certain metal score got played by studio musicians or second-tier bands making a buck by scoring a second rate Hollywood movie or TV show.

So, do you have other examples? I remember there were numerous, especially in action flicks.

2

Well, I looked it up on imdb, and obviously it was Pantera. But this doesn’t matter, because Pantera are probably the second most cliché metal band after Judas Priest)

3

I was enough of a cliche by 1989 that it was made fun of in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

4

Just the other day we were researching the topic “What do Hair Band musicians do 30 years later after alopecia sets in?” (Answer: the headwraps expand), and noticed that whenever movies and TV needed an anodyne Metal riff, it was always Glam.

metal can be anodized, but Metal should never be anodyne.