There are many things I liked about The Social Network but one of the best is the oh-so-perfect use of The Beatles' Baby, You're a Rich Man over the final credits. I don't think I've been so blissed-out by a credit track since Wes Anderson slapped the Faces When I Was Younger on the end of Rushmore. Ian McDonald is a little down on Baby You're a Rich Man, finding a "stoned sloppiness" to it. "The song arrives, dwells unchanged for a while before our ears, and departs - much like a modern dance record." I've long wondered when somebody was going to take advantage of this fact. It's the Beatles but sounds more like Beck. Or, to put it another way, it's a Beck track with John Lennon doing the vocals.
“The people must grant a hearing to the best poets they have, else they
will never have better.” — Harriet Monroe
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“I started in early with Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, with Dickens and
Thackeray; and always the book-lined library gave me a friendly assurance
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Totally. And Reznor and Ross's score was great, too, laying an anxious, almost angry hum just below the proceedings, as when Eisenberg was running across campus in that perfect long opening sequence...
ReplyDeleteI agree about the Reznor and Ross score, terrific throughout, and it gives that opening scene a hum of low-level portent, as if something big is already underway and we're just getting up to speed with it
ReplyDeleteCoincidentally, I just finished reading Ian McDonald's Revolution in the Head yesterday. Unfortunately, my family was never one for buying Beatles’ albums, only singles, so many of the songs he writes about – including Baby, You're a Rich Man – don't mean that much to me.
ReplyDeleteDid you lift the image of the single from the Web or is that your own copy?
No that's not my copy. It's from the web. The Ian McDonald book is brilliant, I think. One of the best books ever written about a pop group.
ReplyDelete