#SINGLES SOUNDTRACK 25TH ANNIVERSARY MOVIE#
In his groundbreaking book Show Sold Separately, Jonathan Gray includes many forms of movie merchandise among the examples of media paratexts he discusses.
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Scholars of movie marketing have largely been deaf to music as a form of movie merchandising. The Singles OST is not only an important album, though it is also a complex example of a type of movie merchandise-the soundtrack album-that has frequently been neglected in conversations about merchandise that have focused primarily on toys, videogames, and apparel.Īs this special issue attests, the existing literature on movie merchandising itself has been fairly sparse and limited in scope. Riding the crest of the Grunge rock explosion of the early 1990s, while also cheekily deriding it via Mudhoney’s ironic contribution, “Overblown,” the Singles soundtrack album was a cultural phenomenon in its own right-a defining release for Generation X. The album featured two new tracks from recently multi-platinum artist Pearl Jam, along with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Paul Westerberg (formerly of the Replacements), and a veritable who’s who of Seattle-area bands. If you were an alternative rock fan in September 1992, when Singles (Crowe, 1992) premiered in wide release across the United States, chances are you already owned, or had made a conscious decision not to own, the Singles Original Soundtrack (OST) album. The significance of the Singles OST album is demonstrated by the high-profile twenty-fifth anniversary re-release of the album, which traded on Gen X nostalgia. This essay uses Singles as a case study to demonstrate first that soundtrack albums, though often overlooked, are a key facet of movie merchandising, and second, that movie merchandising can, and in this case does, prove more profitable and culturally significant than the film to which it’s attached. The album successfully negotiated Gen X tensions-tensions that are also endemic to most fan cultures-between cultural consumption and anti-commodity attitudes.
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While it was not associated with a blockbuster film or a major children’s franchise, the Singles Original Soundtrack (OST) album was highly successful, in part because of the way it tapped into Generation X’s adoration of alternative rock.