After spending an entire month looking back at the 80’s, I realized one thing. I need more. Luckily, a couple of fellow music fans on Twitter came up with the brilliant idea to highlight #30DaysOf80sMovieSongs during the month of April. I couldn’t resist at the opportunity to keep going, to keep listening, and to keep celebrating the decade that has meant more to me than any other from a musical standpoint. Each day I’m playing a different soundtrack favorite on the Mental Jukebox.
Movie: The Lost Boys
The Lost Boys soundtrack might be most well known for the Echo & The Bunnymen cover of the The Doors classic “People Are Strange”. It plays over the end credits, a slot which always seems to give the songs placed there an extra gravitas. But there’s another song on the soundtrack that can never be overshadowed: “Walk This Way”. Gracing the esteemed soundtrack, it’s a difficult song to ignore given how ambitious it was as one of the most iconic examples of rap rock.
“Walk This Way” is a mash-up of east coast rap and east coast hard rock. It was a double-dose of music royalty. The thing is, you didn’t have to be a Run-D.M.C. fan or an Aerosmith fan to like it. In fact, if you weren’t a fan of either of those artists, you may have actually been more swept up by the swagger of this track. What did it? It was the way the two genres blended so effortlessly together. The rap and the rock were so closely intertwined, it was hard to tell them apart. It’s as good an example of rap rock as the best Beastie Boys tracks ever recorded. At the end of the day, I think this ingenious blend makes it stronger than the Aerosmith original.
“Cause she knew what was she was doin when she told me how to walk this way.”