It\u2019s been a banner year for Hollywood needle drops: \u201cWhole Lotta Love\u201d in F1; \u201cForever Young,\u201d \u201cEverybody Wants to Rule the World,\u201d \u201cI Have the Touch,\u201d and \u201cThe Order of Death\u201d in Marty Supreme; \u201cBeware of Darkness\u201d in Weapons; \u201cDirty Work\u201d in One Battle After Another; \u201cIn Spite of Ourselves\u201d in Die My Love; \u201cCome On Up to the House\u201d in Wake Up Dead Man. Google \u201cbest movie needle drops 2025\u201d and the consensus on almost all of these songs is unanimously positive. And don\u2019t get me wrong, I dig them all, but the needle drop that\u2019s stuck with me most has yet to make its way onto a single list this winter. I blame Katy Perry for the wide-scale omission.<\/p>\n
Well, it\u2019s not actually Perry\u2019s fault that the use of her song \u201cFirework\u201d in Eddington<\/a>, Ari Aster\u2019s pandemic-era neo-western, has gotten a great deal of attention from list-makers this season. And, like, I get it. At a masked-up backyard fundraiser event in a listless New Mexico town, Joe the sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) confronts the local mayor, Ted (Pedro Pascal). Joe asks Ted to turn the music down, so Ted turns \u201cFirework\u201d up. Their macho-wacho charade turns into a skirmish while that perfect Teenage Dream hit perks and pops over the violence. Aster, a patriarch of the perverse, once used \u201cAlways Be My Baby\u201d to soundtrack Beau is Afraid\u2019s Oedipal sexual climax. Music in his stories is powerful, uncomfortable. When Joe\u2019s cyst of willful ignorance begins to harden in Eddington, it\u2019s a slap from Ted that tears open the blister. Hearing \u201cFirework\u201d echoing through the sheriff\u2019s nadir and escalating lunacy is a neat trick, one that\u2019s impossible to forget.<\/p>\n But much earlier in Eddington\u2014in the film\u2019s uneasy, bad-omen, CDC-mandated beginning\u2014an even greater song appears: TOPS\u2019 \u201cI Feel Alive,\u201d a mostly-forgotten relic of COVID-19\u2019s death knell on spring 2020 indie releases. I Feel Alive came out in April of that year, and its titular lead single dropped three months prior, just two days after the first lab-confirmed case of COVID-19 in the United States. Not all records got diluted by the monotony of lockdown; Fiona Apple\u2019s Fetch the Bolt Cutters came out two weeks after I Feel Alive and swept most year-end lists come December. But I Feel Alive, this particularly sophisticated, spanky dosage of straightforwardly rapturous music, fell by the wayside after amassing respectable marks from critics across the board. The title track, bright and megawatt as it may be, just wasn\u2019t wistful enough to shake away the quarantine scaries\u2014and it got culturally binned for five years until Aster resurrected it in Eddington.<\/p>\n The small town of Eddington itself feels is straight out of a Bogdanovich flick, which makes the feel-good, metro-pop revivalism of TOPS even more displaced, the torched vitality of \u201cI Feel Alive\u201d contrasting sharply with the movie\u2019s sleepy, tumbleweed pastoral. The scene in question is perfectly laughable, if not a bit uncanny\u2014engulfed as it is in slant dialogue and the horrific vibes of early-COVID precautions. Ted doesn\u2019t want to lower his mask to talk to an asthmatic Joe, despite a barfront window separating them. The scene is lit with elegance; a curtain of beer lamps decorates Joe\u2019s reflection. An unmasked and incoherent vagrant, Lodge (Eddington\u2019s living, coughing embodiment of COVID and the political separations it fostered), bangs and kicks at the bar\u2019s locked door while an unauthorized council meeting about \u201cinfrastructure for a real future\u201d takes place inside. When Lodge finally breaks his way in, the pop song spilling out of the corner jukebox bursts. A struggle between Joe and Lodge ensues, and Lodge retches onto Joe\u2019s face while \u201cwhen I\u2019m in your arms, I can finally surrender\u201d melts into him and us. Every character falls silent. Jane Penny\u2019s voice fills up the picture. It\u2019s all so miserably perfect. And, if you look elsewhere for just 30 seconds, it\u2019ll all be gone.<\/p>\n Checking my Apple Music Replay from 2020, \u201cI Feel Alive\u201d is one of a handful of songs that I\u2019ve kept in rotation throughout the half-decade since (if A24 ever decides to sync anything from Vundabar\u2019s Either Light in one of its movies, that will ruin me). It\u2019s one of those \u201clast ticket out of hell\u201d-type songs\u2014an aching but sincere reminder of bad times that hadn\u2019t yet calcified into total awfulness. Maybe it\u2019s TOPS\u2019 ceaseless brand of optimism, which pokes through even when Penny and her bandmates harmonize about the nightmares of lifeless casual sex, infidelity, or surrendering to new, strange shades of nostalgia. Maybe it\u2019s Eddington\u2019s presentation of the torturous early stages of madness before it crosses the threshold of no-return, which is made exceptionally frightening in Joe and Ted\u2019s inaugural standoff. Maybe it\u2019s both. Is \u201cI Feel Alive\u201d meant to be commentary, juxtaposition, comedic relief\u2014all of the above? Or perhaps those blurred lines are themselves the point: when those two tones of impotence switch on in the bar quarrel of Aster\u2019s spaghetti-less nightmare, what\u2019s left to soothe us is the full tilt of TOPS\u2019 splashy, retro vibrance.<\/p>\n I waited to watch Eddington until it came to streaming, because movie theaters get more and more difficult to reach the sicker and older I become. Sometimes I do regret not seeing a film on the big screen (Sorry, Baby this year, especially), but I didn\u2019t feel that way with Eddington\u2014because when \u201cI Feel Alive\u201d came within earshot for the first time, I howled so loud the dog-walkers on Hillhurst could hear me. Aster\u2019s perversions, found homoerotically in Eddington\u2019s subtext, go full blast when Joe furiously ogles at a cocksure Ted from outside the bar window. \u201cI can\u2019t understand you,\u201d he tells Ted, referring to the mayor\u2019s white N-95. \u201cI feel alive, looking in your eyes,\u201d Jane Penny sings right after. It\u2019s a needle drop that deserves all the love showered upon its Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another\u00a0peers.<\/p>\n TOPS is a great band, one of the best Canadian exports still around (even though the band is scattered across multiple countries now). As far as my personal streaming numbers are concerned, Penny, David Carriere, Riley Fleck, and Marta Cikojevic (who performs solo as Marci) all have their jerseys hanging in the rafters. They put out a very fun album this year<\/a>, but I Feel Alive is the banger I keep coming back to\u2014danceable sadness touted by Penny\u2019s hot-dime pop snarl. I suppose that, at the time, COVID-19-era music needed fangs in order to still land once the masks came off. \u201cI Feel Alive\u201d is adultery set to glassy guitar moves and white disco pomp, but never does it go numb. So, what gives? Aster thinks \u201cwe haven\u2019t metabolized what happened in 2020,\u201d that \u201cwe\u2019re still living it,\u201d even though we\u2019re out of lockdown: \u201cBut whatever process began there, we\u2019re still in it.\u201d If he\u2019s right, then maybe \u201cI Feel Alive\u201d hasn\u2019t been forgotten just yet. Maybe Eddington\u2018s vacuum of existential terror is the conduit for us to cherish the song once our processing is complete, if it ever can be. I hope so, because that chorus still sounds humungous in 2025. Penny\u2019s expressions remain satisfying, timbral exorcisms.<\/p>\n Matt Mitchell is Paste\u2018s editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s been a banner year for Hollywood needle drops: \u201cWhole Lotta Love\u201d in F1; \u201cForever Young,\u201d \u201cEverybody Wants…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":401398,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":{"0":"post-401397","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}