New blank document.

One of the best ways to continue procrastinating on finishing any creative effort is to go through and organize all of your unfinished ideas. Apparently in early 2013 I'd jotted down, "modern retelling of The Snow Queen." About six months later, Frozen came out, and today, I still write press releases for a living.

Anyway, I found the following text in a Word file titled "new blank document." I have no idea where I was going with it, but I like it, so I'm slapping it up here. 

 

*** 

 

About three times per year I have a dream about committing murder, or to be more specific, getting away with murder. The victim—my victim—does not have much meaning to me in the dream. It’s just someone who got in my way. I killed her (is it usually a female? yes, an older female, let's not psychoanalyze that), and she has been hidden effectively, buying time. I have gone over the scene carefully, wiped off all my prints. The police are on the way, and I am running. I will not be discovered, not at that moment. The sense of relief at having gotten away with the crime gives way to a dawning realization that now I am a new person, a murderer who has gotten away with it, and that even if I am never caught, I will know. I will know and it will eat away at me for the rest of my life.

 

That is what you get for reading Poe early in life.

 

I read once somewhere that there are an “infinite number of stories waiting to be written.” That isn’t true. What you realize, if you think about it even for a moment, is that the number of stories you will experience in a lifetime is finite, just like the number of sunsets, orgasms, and teeth cleanings. Of those stories, about half of them have already been written. Of the rest, you are suited to write perhaps only forty percent. And of those, you will perhaps write half of them well, if you are a writer at all.

 

I work for a small company that makes documentaries and television segments for British television, which is based in a small house in the suburbs. The owner, Nick, is a pleasant, addled man in his late 30s with a lovely young wife and a burbling baby upstairs. He agreed to take me on as an intern five years ago. Now there are three of us: me, associate producer; and the new intern.

 

“You’re giving away all the best parts of the show!” Nick was crying into the phone when I got in. It was a cool day smattered with rain and pink petals from the cherry blossom trees, but already in the basement office it was close and smelled eggy.

 

“Why don’t I just not give you the video then? How about that?” He was fighting again with our channel’s website people. “Well, are you contractually obligated to take every bloody bit of suspense out of my show?”

 

He hung up and pursed his lips at me.

 

“I told them only to use the bit with the cows and then the buggies on the road and then the interview with the boy. I told them.”

 

Nick just shook his head. I went silently over to my desk. Either way, no one was going to convince him that you really can’t ruin the suspense of a documentary about Amish country by putting the wrong clips online. It’s kind of something you’re going to watch, or you’re not.

 

The baby wailed upstairs. Nick sighed. The rain pattered on the window.

 

Prince on the 'Stranger Things' Finale

As a Prince fan, it would be churlish to object to the use of two Purple Rain tracks in the season 5 finale of Stranger Things. I mean, I get why the Duffer brothers did it. You can't get more '80s iconic than "When Doves Cry" and "Purple Rain," and even just seeing that beautiful 33" on the turntable sparked a flutter in my heart.

Ross Duffer makes an excellent point on this permissions win: “What is also very exciting about it is it just has not been used. [Prince’s] estate does not generally allow that song to be licensed outside the Purple Rain movie.” 

So that's a coup for the Duffers and a blessing for any poor soul who has not been exposed to this album and is being educated for the first time.

I get that our heroes were playing one side of the album, and so the show's scenes corresponded with the first and the last tracks of side 2, and that's how we arrived at "Doves" playing over the final cruise out of the Upside Down and "Purple" playing over the final farewell between El and Mike. I get it. 

Still.

I just...

"When Doves Cry" is just a weird choice for that final cruise out of the Upside Down. It's too disconnected—to cool and aloof to work for a scene about beauty mixed with destruction. "Purple Rain" is a slightly better fit with its scene, but I wasn't prepared for how that particular flavor of dramatic stacked on top of the a-bit-too-much melodramatic El-and-Mike montage somehow would add up to less than the sum of its parts. Really, can anyone besides Prince himself appear on a screen and visually match the psychotic auditory greatness of Prince?

If I could have picked the music for that first scene, I would have picked "Cities in Dust" by Siouxie and the Banshees. There's no way to make this work with the story setup unless there is some way they could have made a mix tape cassette trigger explosives. "Cities" is the last track on that album, not the first. 

Not my problem. My problem is needing to rewrite in my mind the soundtrack of those scenes. Keep in mind also that the music would need to have been released around mid-1987 or earlier to work with the storyline.

I guess for the goodbye scene between El and Mike, I halfheartedly pick "Don't Dream It's Over," by Crowded House. Admittedly, this might be too uninspired. I'm open to other suggestions that fit within my little fantasy of becoming a music supervisor and having sway over the finale's music myself. But in that scenario, can I really lie to myself and say I wouldn't have taken the inaugural opportunity to license Prince recordings for a hugely anticipated show finale? 

I cannot.

In that case, the question becomes whether any other Prince music released before 1987 could have stood in for side 2 of Purple Rain. Fellow fans, I submit to you side 2 of Parade, with "Mountains" as the exit-from-Upside-Down track and "Sometimes It Snows in April" as the goodbye track. 

Right? 

It's not "iconic" in that hit-'80s-album sense. Neither of those songs got much, if any, radio play. They're just better audio companions to what's onscreen.

On second thought, though, "Sometimes" is just crushingly sad. Like, too sad for a show like Stranger Things. And it wouldn't really have fit with that final bit where El disappears.

I guess I should just concede defeat and accept that the Duffer brothers have managed to use Purple Rain the album in another context besides Purple Rain the movie, and I'm discomfited, because I am old.