It’s just wrong, folks.
I love John Williams as much as anybody, but I can’t get behind this new theme he’s written for Sunday Night Football on NBC. I just can’t do it. The music itself is OK — listen to it — but hearing that, I think of droid armies on the march against the Jedi or a Nazi convoy trundling along a desert valley while Indiana Jones tries to overcome them on horseback. I don’t think of football.
Now, this isn’t Williams’s fault, of course, and I don’t think any composer could cause my brain to associate some new piece of music with football. I don’t make too many strong connections between music and something in the concrete world, but this is one of my few such associations: this music is football. Not John Williams, not Jerry Goldsmith, not anything else. (Well, maybe Hank Williams Jr. But that’s it.)
Are you ready…!
I do like the new music, but you’re right: it’s just not football!
(Have I ever mentioned that I really dislike change??)
–bella
I haven’t heard the new music yet, but I was never terribly partial to the Hank theme. In fact, I usually listened to the game summary, then lowered or muted the volume during the “song”, and returned to normal listening volume when normal coverage had returned.
And I have used the mute button during many a Madden broadcast of any sort.
Fox, CBS, NFL films, and other networks have already used classical music (or horrible period music), so I guess I associate a variety of music with football anyway. NCAA 2006 for PS2 includes snippets of songs like these, for instance:
[something by Lush]
Pixies, “Debaser”
Superchunk, “Hyper Enough”
Guided By Voices, “Teenage FBI”
Mother Love Bone, “This is Shangri-La”
…and the Madden 06 jukebox included some of these:
[something by Godsmack]
All-American Rejects, “Night Drive”
Nine Black Alps, “Cosmopolitan”
And I love some of those songs, but if they have looped around enough times to stick in my head (especially “Debaser”), it’s a clear indication that I’ve been spending too much time with the PS2.
mark72