"Whether or not it's true," the musicologist explains, the story reveals a form of value in which "the affective labor Tom Jones was hired to do goes beyond putting sounds on the record. It has to do with a performative action that cost him something – and we need to know that in order to value the song."
For the 2002 title song "Die Another Day," Madonna employed a different labor process, sampling, cutting and splicing that reflects "the way you make songs in the digital era," Kronengold says.
She doesn't rely on sampling techniques just because they make the song sound contemporary, he says, but because the resulting composition conveys "the breakings-down of the self, under something that is basically torture."
"Die Another Day" gives us a first glimpse into the themes that emerge in later movies like Skyfall, which are "starting to posit work almost as a traumatic symptom," he says.
Daub and Kronengold's research also explores a paradoxical challenge of the theme songs: to give a nod to the long tradition of the Bond sound while also reflecting "its own moment in some ways."
Bond songs, as the pair learned, have to appeal to the top-40 pop music market while also being audibly recognizable representations of the brand. In that regard, the Bond songs can't mask the fact that they are trying to accomplish a job.
Over five decades of dealing with that challenge, there have been some hits — and some duds.
The two scholars agree that Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die" is one of the best, despite (or maybe because of) its "overwrought" and "embarrassingly prolific musical arrangement," as Kronengold describes it.
The best ones, Daub said, are the ones that reflect on the fact that although it's a creative effort, it's also just a job. McCartney, he says, was able to accept those parameters and make the song work.
On the other end of the spectrum is "The Man with the Golden Gun," a song so bad that Daub says they "had to power through it." Like many of the songs they consider failures, however, the scholars find value in the flaws.
The Bond songs, Kronengold says, "want to have depth, want to be good, want to be interesting — but the fact that they fail makes them 10 times more interesting than if they actually succeeded at trying to be interesting."
Through good music and bad, both scholars want to share the idea that it's worthwhile to slow down and really listen, because "engaging with the stuff around you is a worthwhile venture," Kronengold says.
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