cooltunes

I’ve been re-reading Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho on my train ride to work, and to liven things up (not that the book needs anything additional to entertain me) I decided to keep tabs on the music Bateman listens to and is exposed to in the book. So far, aside from the obvious artists Bateman spends full chapters expressing his opinions of (Genesis, Huey Lewis and the News, Whitney Huston), he also listens to the Talking Heads, Stephen Bishop, and Christopher Cross, and is also exposed at various times to several other 80’s artists: The Crystals, The Ronettes, The Shirelles, INXS, and Belinda Carlisle, to name a few. Some of them I have never heard of, but I guess that’s not surprising.

A couple of other music-related experiences I’ve had related to the book - first, I happened listening to The Axis of Perdition during one of the more gruesome parts while reading the book for the first time. The song contained a sample from the horror movie Event Horizon, and I felt that the sample along with the violent nature of the music was a pretty good complement for the book. More recently, I was reading it while listening to random Melt-Banana songs, which was an awesome experience.. the frenetic, bizarre music and Yasuko’s chipmunk-on-speed vocals went well with the book’s dark humor and Bateman’s occaisional hallucinations. It is kind of hard to concentrate for very long when listening to them though.