You want to know an oddly comforting record I sometimes listen to on Sundays? Don’t judge. Okay, eee! I’m a little afraid I’m about to be judged, but here goes. The Pretty in Pink soundtrack. Seriously, but let me explain. First, I no longer like the movie that much. Sure, I liked it as a preteen, teen and relatively young adult, but I stopped liking it years ago. Sure, I’ll watch it whenever I catch it on television and keep it on like background noise and I’ll never stop loving Annie Potts as Iona, but overall Blaine, Andy, and Duckie bug. All that to say, the soundtrack still hits. Yes, perhaps, it’s a little bit nostalgia. It was that soundtrack which I have now owned on cassette, CD, and lp that introduced me to The Psychedelic Furs, the Smiths, Suzanne Vega, and Echo and the Bunnymen when I was ten years old. For real, ten. Sure, OMD’s “If You Leave” is the song everyone knows and unfortunately it’s associated with the prom dress that still confuses me. Why is it shapeless? There were darts in the 80s, right? (If you don’t know what a dart is, look it up. Clearly you weren’t raised by someone who insisted on sewing your clothes). Anyway, that is totally beside the point. So, yeah, we all know that song, but Suzanne Vega’s “Left of Center” turned me on to the rest of her work. I don’t even know where the song sits in the movie. I just know I love it on its own.
The other one, for me, is the title song “Pretty in Pink” by The Psychedelic Furs. I don’t know why and I suppose I should look it up, but the version that streams now is not the version that was in the movie or on the original LPs and cassettes. So grateful to my Uncle Louie and his love of garage sales for finding me the original LP. Gracias, tio! Of course, the song is completely taken out of context to fit the movie, but that doesn’t matter. It introduced me to one of the bands I continue to grow to love.
The Smiths “Please, Please, Please let me Get What I Want” is another song I can’t place in the movie and I don’t want to go back to find out. All I know is Morrissey’s voice and the way he pleads in the most whining kind of way spoke to me as a tween (not a word in the 1980s, but, whatever). I wanted to whine like that. I still want to whine like that. I just don’t because I’m not an entitled, racist Brit, but again, whatevs.
I suppose what I’m trying to say about the record is it exists pretty well on its own apart from the movie. And as a young person with emo tendencies growing up in the Texas Panhandle in the late 1900s, it’s the only way I was going to find something outside of what played on Z93 Rock or KISS 107.9 or 1310 AM (yes, AM radio is a thing, but I only heard that on cleaning Saturdays). IFYKYK.
So yeah, props. Now, I’m going to listen to The Psychedelic Furs while I mop and finish doing my laundry.
Patricia Marie Perea 