Rogueish

I LOLed when this orchestrated version of “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” came on at the end of Spring Breakers, although I’ve only now realised that it sounds like when something sad happens on NCIS and they have to use a sombre version of their Hi-NRG theme tune. Despite that, the film’s soundtrack is pretty great, and it did give me a new appreciation of just how great the original version of this track is, with its switchbacks between the melodic-floaty and the crunchy-ugly. In this, it’s interestingly different from an earlier form of dumb provincial dance music, happy hardcore; where brostep jumps between the high and the low in a kind of explosive dialectical leap, happy hardcore combines both at the same time into a melancholy tension. I’m not sure which is better (my Nietzschean-critical-theory knee-jerk is that tension is better), but the brostep move is certainly scarier.