Courtney E. Smith is the author of
Record Collecting for Girls: Unleashing Your Inner Music Nerd, One Album at a Time.
From her Q & A with Jordan Foster at
Publishers Weekly:
You talk about feeling strangely annoyed when a band that you loved—the Shins—hit it big in the film Garden State. Will this ring true for casual music fans?
It's different for everyone. That's the beautiful part about the way you relate to music. Some people want to stay really small. When I was in college, I interned on a radio show that was the "alternative to alternative." People would call in and berate my friend Josh for playing their favorite bands on the radio because they didn't want other people to know about them. He'd let them talk and then explain that your favorite band didn't get into music to not be heard. They want to be successful, and you should want that for them if you're really a fan. And there are plenty of other people who, before Garden State, would have never heard of the Shins, and that movie was their introduction. So there was nothing for them to get mad about. Those were the people that the Shins might be the most out-there album in their record collections.
In terms of cool soundtracks to own for your generation, did Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet kick off the craze?
It's the one I remember. Clueless came before that, but it wasn't cool to own. There wasn't that congruency to it, and I don't know if it had a music supervisor in the same way Romeo + Juliet did. I was surprised when I was researching this section how many of the cool artists who are on the Twilight soundtracks referenced the Romeo + Juliet one. It kept coming up. I felt the cultural impact when it came out because I owned it, all the girls in my dorm owned it, and it seemed like "the thing." But...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue