This week was heading in a different direction; but the news on Thursday of the passing of the actor James Van Der Beek weirdly resonated. One of those actors whom millennials weirdly probably saw a huge bunch of his body of work: Varsity Blues, The Rules of Attraction, in later years Apartment 23, and of course, Dawson’s Creek.
Dawson’s Creek sits in a weird emotional space: I have seen less than half of it, yet the character of Dawson Leery resonated so definitively (Film school? Check. Spielberg obsession? Check. Inability to articulate actual feelings in any healthy way? Check check.) As a piece of television, it sits in a bracket that I wouldn’t knowingly let my own kids watch; but for this teenagers in the late 90, the actual characterisation, stylised as it was, tickled that love of smaltzy American comedy drama deeply.1
(I actually have a Spotify playlist called Joey, Through the Window.)2
Of course, a key element of these shows was always the soundtrack. I studied with someone who ended up being a music supervisor for TV later in life – talk about your dream job. And I realise now, skimming the Wikipedia pages for the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack albums, that this allows me to tangentially jump right into the great forgotten musical genre that kids today just don’t get – the homemade mix tape (or in our generation, CD).
I had a friend in school who was an enthusiastic purveyor of mix CDs – and they were dominated by this same sub-genre of 90s/00s American adult/contemporary/soft rock music. His compilations became a primary source of a whole host of tracks – not music that would ever bother the UK Top 40, but music that was nonetheless often familiar from TV, movies, and music television. A prime example – all of Five for Fighting’s America Town, but particularly the lead single Superman.3
The SFX of the music video have not dated well – but this is prime, ‘As heard on…’ music; no-one cares about the video.4 Moreover, John Ondrasik provided teenage me with ample ammunition for tiny subgenre of piano-led soft rock which, as a pianist first and foremost, was always welcome.5 I remember playing covers of this all over the place in my late teens.
Those mix CDs supplied all sorts of introductions – Dave Matthews Band, Goo Goo Dolls, Barenaked Ladies, Joan Osbourne, Avril Lavigne… basically a huge block of the contents of my Last.fm for the late 2000s. Perhaps we’ll unpack a few more here as the weeks go on.
- We’re going to come back to this, but for me this is an arc typified by the content of T4 on Sunday afternoons – your OC, your One Tree Hill – but also widens to include everything that I watched on Channel 4 in summer terms when we were on revision leave – Ed (that’ll be mentioned again), E.R., weirdly Without a Trace purely in terms of scheduling. Was Joan of Arcadia in that bracket too? The other big time block was RTÉ2 (then Network 2) on Monday nights, with a prime comedy slot including Scrubs, That 70s Show, Friends – so much incidental music. This emotional arc probably runs well into adulthood and at least as our last big box set start-finish watch, Friday Night Lights, a decade after everyone else. ↩︎
- The only feature-length screenplay I ever completed (outside of undergraduate work) was partly inspired by a moment in an episode of Dawson’s Creek. True story. Though it was otherwise mainly inspired by my attempt to profess my undying love for someone… via email. I found it on an old hard drive last year (the screenplay, not the email), re-read the first few pages, and died inside all over again. ↩︎
- Superman is on Vol.2 of Songs from Dawson’s Creek, along with Teenage Dirtbag: there’s an epochal life story involving that song coming much later in the year. ↩︎
- Wikipedia says it was featured In a key sequence on Smallville. Yep, that fits. ↩︎
- I know people love it – I do too – but you can only play A Thousand Miles so many times. Though you should watch Vanessa Carlton’s ‘The Story of…’ minidoc for Vice – a rough ride. ↩︎