Various Artists-- Godzilla The Album

(Sony / Epic 69338)

You Couldn't Find a more prescient example of what's wrong with today's popular culture than this corporate- alternative inventory statement.

Godzilla The Album (as opposed, I suppose, to Godzilla The Soft Drink Commercial or Godzilla The Hair Care Product For Men) is a particularly egregious product-tie-in for the latest overexposed summer blockbuster, yet another retread cartoon of a retread cartoon. Half the songs on this album are barely heard in the flick, and the ones that are ( i.e. Jimmy Page helping Puffy Combs desecrate "Kashmir, the Wallflowers performing an embalming job on Bowie / Eno ) are among the worst dreck

to be served up-- barely rewarmed-- in a long long time.

It's meltdown time when corporos synergize. Mega-ConGloms are fond of tossing together James Brown's "I Feel Good" with an oldies radio playlist and serving it up as demographic pablum for their heinously overhyped bi-product machine, but Hollywood also regularly offers up a cross-section of "today's contemporary artists" performing many of those same baby boomer classics and-- voila!--it's a "soundtrack" that the BUZZ Radios of the world just can't ignore.

The songs on this particular "soundtrack" convey NO SENSE of what they are serving as background for. Godzilla The Album could just as well be the music to the latest Beethoven the dog movie.

And There's no Blue Oyster Cult! The one time when an "oldie" might actually infuse the cinematic environment with a dose of humor, irony and-- yes!-- crunch. Zilch. Instead, this set is so loaded with everyone's favorite marketable trendy music styles that the marketing department of Sony might as well have sequenced it while they designed the trade ads (that would explain why the opening theme is second-to-last cut on the disc).

Many of today's top artists are marketed like summer blockbusters anyway-- they are made to open big on their first weekend and crash and burn by the next cycle. Still, couldn't someone have TRIED!! The light pop of Michael Penn, Jamiroquai and Ben Folds Five (the best stuff here, actually) doesn't exactly conjure up evocative visions of 10-story carnivores devouring schoolhouses and old folks homes; alas, those artists are probably there (memo from Marketing again) to balance the "scary" cuts by Rage Against the Machine, Silverchair and the Green Day remix of "Brain Stem." Those are-- oooh-- really frightening.

Vile. Truly vile.

--- Moulty Mufflin