(Breathes deep and summons forth the reedy, nasally voice that is the most frustrating part of his being, given his love of singing)
AND IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII WILL ALWAYS LOOOOOVE YOUUUUUUU
Gather ’round, young children of the apocalypse, and listen to a story from the long long ago, the before-time. There was no internet (or, at the least, there was no internet in Preston County, West Virginia) and no cable TV. There were roughly ten radio stations: six of them played country music, two played Top 40 pop, one was Christian contemporary, and one played classic rock. If you wanted to hear something that did not fit into the categories above, you had to find it in your parents’ vinyl collection, on an eight-track, or on a cassette. Cassettes were novel because, in spite of the worst aural quality of any musical storage device, they were hella small and easy to carry in a pants pocket. They also required manual winding and were a pain when wanting to play a specific song (leading to track 1 of Side A and track 1 of Side B being desirable spots to place your hits).
BUT WHAT STRANGE DEVILRY IS THIS, in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and ninety-three? A disc, much like vinyl, but smaller and made out of hard plastic. It requires a new playing device, one that spins the disc at great, noisy speeds and which will skip at the slightest footfall or applause. It is compact, it is a disc, and it is the future (… for about a decade. –Ed.).
My first CDs arrived at Christmas of 1993 and were:
- Billy Joel, River of Dreams
- Billy Joel, Greatest Hits, Volumes I and II
- Whitney Houston, The Bodyguard Soundtrack
My first CD player was black, about the size of a shoebox for boots, had two speakers, a tape deck, and an FM radio, and the CD player was ravenous. Every disc that I owned was scratched to bits in that thing. I swear that it was made out of sandpaper. But boy, what a dazzling piece of technology for a sixth grader. I was soon to fall into the predatory traps of BMG and Columbia House, but that was later on. For now, I had three CDs, and they were good ones.
And most prized of the three was the soundtrack that accompanied the Kevin Costner film The Bodyguard.
I like an array of music. I’m no stranger to concert films or musicals, and a well-curated pop music soundtrack can elevate a movie (or conversely, sink it). The Bodyguard is an odd movie because it features a fictionalized version of Whitney as a pop star within the movie, but this character performs multiples songs from the soundtrack, many in their entirety. So the movie threads a line between being a concert film and being a thriller, and it doesn’t really succeed at either. The plot is threadbare: a pop star is being stalked, so she hires a new bodyguard to protect her, and they fall in love for a bit and he saves her from the murderous stalker. They should have leaned more on the concert parts, in my opinion, with a lighter dusting of narrative nonsense (like Prince’s Sign o’ the Times (1987)). The Cos and Whitney have pretty good chemistry, or at least preteen Matt thought so, as I watched the movie almost as many times as I listened to the soundtrack.
My chief memories of the film proper are: Costner wore a WVU sweatshirt (see the Silence of the Lambs entry for why this mattered to me); Whitney fled to a remote country house rather than somewhere secure with a doorman; and this was director Mick Jackson’s follow-up film after one of my all-time favorites, LA Story (1991). So there isn’t a lot outside the music that stuck with me all these decades later.
DOES NOT MATTER, BECAUSE THE FIRST HALF OF THE SOUNDTRACK SLAPS.
“I Have Nothing” is a great torch song, like “I Will Always Love You.” “Run to You” was nominated for an Academy Award, where it lost to Aladdin’s “A Whole New World” (an all-time-great earworm). There are also some other randos on the soundtrack, such as a cover of “I’m Every Woman” and Alan Silvestri’s theme for the film, of which, gun to my head, I couldn’t hum a single bar. The back half of the CD meant nothing to me: it was all about Whitney, baby.
I don’t know when I got rid of that disc. People who know me are well aware of my penchant for compulsively shedding possessions, so it could have been at any point between the mid-90s and when I moved to Ohio in 2006. CDs were obsoleted pretty quickly, and I was an early adopter in the Napster days of digital music files, although I still bought CDs up until I had a means of connecting my iPod to my car stereo.
In 2021, apps like Spotify make it absurdly easy to find most songs (even as they pay almost nothing to the actual artists). BandCamp is a means of artists maintaining more control of their art, more of their profits, and allows artists to find audiences without the need for their music to be translated through the corporate record system. But, to me, music mostly existing as digital content means that something is lost. Album art, liner notes, and the cultivation of an album are stripped from the process, and songs just become part of a larger tapestry of music in playlists on Spotify or Pandora or XM Radio. This is less important for a compilation like The Bodyguard soundtrack, but I’m old enough that physical media (books especially, but also blu rays and vinyl) are worth the inconvenience of needing lots of storage space.
In the words of Whitney’s character Rachel Marron, I have nothing, nothing, nothing, if I don’t have [physical media].
Other 1992 candidates: Aladdin; Lethal Weapon 3; Batman Returns; Sister Act; Bram Stoker’s Dracula; Wayne’s World (we’re not worthy!); Unforgiven; My Cousin Vinny; The Crying Game; Once Upon a Crime; Noises Off; Shadows and Fog; White Men Can’t Jump; Encino Man; Alien3; Far and Away; The Last of the Mohicans; Captain Ron
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.