motd.co
Tunnel Songs
We watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower yesterday, and I’m not sure there are many of you out there to whom I can adequately explain how heartbreaking it was that (a) there was no use of Ride’s “Vapour Trail” in the film, at all, and (b) that “Landslide” was replaced with David Bowie’s “Heroes” as the “tunnel song”. This morning I was doing some internet searches trying to figure out why (b) happened (I’m assuming that the former point is sufficiently unimportant enough to pretty much everyone else that it will never be publicly addressed) and while I eventually found my answer I also came across a number of Tumblr posts by people for whom the movie was the first (and only?) experience of Perks and for them “Heroes” is now the "tunnel song" and for a lot of them that’s the ONLY context they have for the song, which is mind boggling but also kind of awesome! Because believe it or not but that is how I feel about “Landslide”!
Ultimately it reminds me of summer camp, because I went to this one summer camp for basically my entire childhood and graduated out of it and was even a camp counselor for a year and at some point when I was in high school things started changing and everyone flipped their shit and we were forced to recognize (although some refused, and probably still have a horribly angry Facebook group protesting all of the changes that oh god what if they even post in it still, ten years later) that because we were on our way out, it was okay that traditions might change as long as there were traditions to be had— ours not important, new ones just as likely to be considered good because they’d be meaningful.
Plus, y’know, it’s not like “Heroes” is a bad song by any means. I’m just not young anymore.