"To Live And Die In L.A." Soundtrack

Wang Chung was a one-hit wonder from the 80s. Their lonely bigtime song - "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" - is not the sort of buried post-ironic retro gem awaiting magical rediscovery by a new generation - not like Night Ranger's "Sister Christian" (the backbone of one of the great scenes in modern movie history), or Europe's "The Final Countdown" (mercilessly parodied with abject adoration in "Arrested Development," sampled by Three Six Mafia and Chamillionaire, overrused by youtube auteurs everywhere), or The Outfield's "Your Love," which I like to imagine playing at weddings or funerals or the climactic race-against-time at the end of the movie when the guy is trying to tell the girl he loves her before she gets on that plane to Cleveland. "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" is, in point of fact, one of the worst songs ever recorded.

So there would be no point to ever bring up Wang Chung in intelligent company, if it weren't for William Friedkin, director of "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist." Friedkin has directed a mesmerizing amount of bad movies since he was the great studio director of the 1970s, but buried deep in his back catalogue is a genuine undiscovered classic - "To Live and Die in L.A." Starring a very pre-CSI William Petersen and Willem Dafoe in his earliest and most unnerving I-Am-Willem-Dafoe freak-weird performance, the movie tells a dirty little story about dirty cops and dirty vengeance, set in 80s neon LA.

The entire soundtrack is composed by Wang Chung. It is not especially great music, yet it works perfectly for the movie, perhaps because the band, knowingly or not, turned the soundtrack into a decadent, overcomposed, underconceived monument to everything excessive, indulgent, idiot, and wonderful about 80s music. If you turn the volume way down, you could imagine you were listening to Spandau Ballet, or Naked Eyes, or Bonnie Tyler, or Foreigner. It's like elevator music that kind of makes you nod your head in rhythm and makes you just a little bit disappointed when you get to your floor.