Me, I was in a slightly different position. Or at least, wasn’t considered much in terms of being a respectable performer. Sure, he had his better roles, but he was, not to be mean, kind of a joke. You see, they saw McConaughey as most people still saw McConaughey at this time: that guy that was in all of those stupid movies.
Most of my friends didn’t think twice of the show. It had the faces of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson all over it, an unusual pairing of actors to headline a police show to be sure.
Everything about it just seemed to have this air of mysterious unease. I had been seeing, for a while, promos for this new show, True Detective. I got myself sucked right up into the Game of Thrones hype train, and am still riding it to this day (Season 5 can’t get here fast enough. On January 4th, 2014, I was just a young man that loved TV, and had recently grown to love HBO. This shit is determined to blow your mind. With a self contained arc, I could talk about an entire story, an entire show essentially, from front to back in one simple review. Far and away the most recent thing that’s gotten recognition from this site, as of yet, and yet it just seemed like such an easy choice. Thus, we find ourselves at True Detective Season 1. How, though, could I possibly sum all of that up? So, in the end, I decided to simply pick something great, something that I loved, that would be moderately easy to write about. One of the biggest examples that kept coming to mind was Lost, just because of the presence it had in my life for all six years of its run. Was I just going to review an entire show? If so, did I pick one of the cartoons I watched growing up? Because anything less than that was beginning to seem impossible to sum up in a single review. For all of the other choices, I picked something that had a significant impact on me, particularly when I was young, or at the very least I had a good story about. He’s gonna be listening to some Captain Beefheart.” (In a perfect, fictionalized world such as this, perhaps.As the final category of Stuff to fill in, I struggled for a bit on deciding my choice. “Well, he’s not going to be listening to music about his truck, or music about how tight his jeans are, or music about how much beer he’s had to drink before he gets in the truck. “He’s alone in a room, and he’s looking at photographs of dead women - what kind of music is he listening to,” he said. That McConaughey’s character is a fan of avant-jazz-blues-rock iconoclast Beefheart makes me appreciate some of the detective’s more philosophical rants.ĭuring a recent interview with Mother Jones, Burnett explained the Beefheart choice. As the camera pulls out to catch the shot from overhead, the howl of Nick Cave’s band Grinderman erupts, blowing through “Honey Bee.” The placement of Captain Beefheart’s “Clear Spot” in another episode is equally inspired. (Find me a biker bar that has the Melvins and Sleep on the jukebox and I’m rethinking my lifestyle.)Įqually impressive is the blues dirge that closes one of this season’s most impressive feats - the six-minute tracking shot at the end of Episode 4.
MICROSOFT KEY VALIDATION CHECK FULL
When Rust enters a biker bar, the raw metal at full volume while roughnecks play pool is by the Melvins: “A History of Bad Men,” from the Los Angeles band’s album “A Senile Animal.” To take matters darker, the bar also plays one of the grand epics of modern-day metal, the stoner rock band Sleep’s “Holy Mountain,” from the album of the same name. RELATED: The Handsome Family scores ‘True Detective’ with death dirge
Louisiana bluesman Slim Harpo, one of the most soothing of the electric blues singers, scores a quiet scene between McConaughey’s character Rust and his partner’s wife in a diner. Over the six episodes so far, tracks from New York rappers Wu-Tang Clan and Boogie Down Productions have peppered scenes with counterpoint. Like “Far From Any Road,” they suggest a world filled with darkness that only reluctantly gives way to light.Įqually striking are the less twang-centered selections. Ditto the raw folk music from John Lee Hooker, Blind Uncle Gaspard and C.J. Given that the show, which stars Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as detectives searching for a ritualistic murderer, occurs in the south, it stands to reason that music from Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakum might find purchase within the grim tale. It shouldn’t be surprising that the man behind the choices is T Bone Burnett, whose tastes are as deep as they are ubiquitous. From the opening theme, the Handsome Family’s “Far From Any Road,” to the end of each episode, the selections dot the hour with melodic comments, augmenting the drama with new layers of grit. Amid all the talk of HBO’s drama “True Detective,” little has been written about the music, and the way it paints the Louisiana mystery a certain color of brown.