Songs of Bond

Songs of Bond May 20, 2015

Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold examine the James Bond Songs in a forthcoming book. It doesn’t seem an especially promising subject; it’s not the kind of thing you expect from the venerable Oxford University Press. But Daub and Kronengold show that the music is revealing in more ways that the obvious one (to state the obvious: silhouettes of naked women dancing during the opening credits).

Daub and Kronengold suggest that the music keeps the Bond films tied to their historic origins in the 50s and 60s. Gadgets and girls get updated, but the music “remained resolutely stuck in time.” At the same time, the Bond songs also make use of contemporary artists and hits. It’s the clash of times that creates the special character of a Bond song: Big band instrumentation, sexy caustic brass, with a dash of pop celebrity.

Fundamentally, Bond songs and the visual sequences that go with them pull back the curtain on the real purpose of the movies: The songs tell us that whatever else the movies purport to be about—guns, subs, nukes, launch codes—they are really all about sex. If you’ve ever seen a Bond-film that won’t come as a shock to you, but it is nevertheless remarkable that the songs are the only place (beyond the Bond girls’ salacious names) where the films ever flat-out admit this fact. The song was where the movies abandoned the wink-wink nudge-nudge ethos of double entendre and hoary pun, it’s where from the beginning they left behind the sexual mores of the years when James Bond was President Kennedy’s Cape Cod beach reading, and said flat out what was what.”

At the same time, the songs subvert the machismo of the films. Most of them are sung by women: “female voices are as ubiquitous in the Bond-songs as they are absent from the Bond-films.” And in the songs, the “the film’s sexual politics were turned on their head: ‘the news is that I am in control,’ k.d. lang intones in her song for Tomorrow Never Dies.


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