Song Of The Day 2/21/2016: Joe Strummer – “Love Kills”

Next Best Original Songs – I'm not sure why they still give out an Oscar for Best Original Song. The award feels like a holdover from when music and movies were much more intertwined than they are now. You could justify the award deep into the '80s when soundtrack albums were as precisely arranged as regular albums, and a chart hit could still sum up and advertise the movie in question. That schemata doesn't really exist anymore now that many Hollywood movies are constructed, built and in many cases acted by large machinery, like Michael Bay.

There's also my personal opinion that the nominations almost never contain songs that I like, or songs that the mass populace are even passively familiar with. There are recent exceptions, like that song from Frozen I'll not name, but a lot of Oscar-nominated songs vaporize the moment the award's been given. Some of the actual winners haven't withstood the test of time. When did you last hum "We May Never Love Like This Again" from The Towering Inferno to yourself? Were you in an actual burning building? If so, why weren't you humming the Ohio Players' "Fire"?

Anyway, seeing as how the Oscars are coming up next weekend, I thought I'd present some of my personal favorite movie songs that weren't nominated for an Oscar. They were completely skipped over. The first one is from Alex Cox's 1986 punk biopic Sid & Nancy, about a bass player with a Nazi fetish and his somewhat high-strung and strung-out American girlfriend. You could say it's a cautionary tale. Joe Strummer of the Clash did the theme song, "Love Kills." It's an interesting lyric, combining a sort of paranoid retelling of the Sex Pistols invading America ("On the Rio Grande they'll tie you to a tree/And you can't call the lawyers 'cause the whorehouse is asleep") and brief images of, well, what the heck went wrong between Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. But really, in the end, it's all about the guitar riff, which is goddamn massive.