The Life of a Song

An Essay by Gavin Aubrey Tiemeyer

You may remember Melanie’s folk/pop classic Brand New Key from P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights. You know? It’s playing during that sultry scene between Mark Wahlberg and Heather Graham; Dirk Diggler is auditioning for his part as the new porn king maestro with Roller girl. Roller girl rips off a one piece, and jumps onto Dirk, “Don’t come inside me,” she says. Depending on taste, and comfort level, the moviegoer will either find this scene uncomfortable, humorous, or sexy; all things true here.

No surprises really. After all, the movie is a comical meditation on the golden age of porn in Southern California in the 1970’s.

One of the layers that makes the movie so brilliant is the use of music, (namely pop hits from the period in which the movie takes place) to convey mood in any given scene; Best Of My Love by The Emotions accompanies the opening scene, a panoramic, no cut shot, leading the viewer from some iconic Los Angeles street, glowing with night life, right into the nightclub where we’re introduced to the characters, including Dirk Diggler and Roller girl. Spill The Wine by Eric Burden and War plays at a party by the pool, as if it’s being listened to in stereo, poolside, the sound designer of the movie going as far as adding a strange, underwater echo to the song, as the camera follows a swimsuit clad woman, jumping into the water right as the snare in the song climax’s. It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

You could easily assume that Sean Penn, the music coordinator for Boogie Nights chose Melanie’s Brand New Key representing the first sex scene between Roller Girl and Dirk Diggler, for it’s chorus, which the title cleverly doesn’t elude towards: I got a brand new pair of roller skates, and you got a brand new key. The song seems ripe with sexual innuendos, but according to Melanie, the meaning of the song’s lyrics have been open to interpretation. “Brand New Key, I wrote in about fifteen minutes one night,” she says. “I thought it was cute, I kind of old thirties tune.”

I Guess a key and a lock have always been Freudian symbols, and pretty obvious ones at that. There was no deep serious expression behind the song, but people read things into it. They made up incredible stories as to what they lyrics said and what the song meant. In some places, it was even banned from the radio.

Yes, it seems, the lyrical content of songs are open to interpretation, especially those that challenge the status quo. The Doors appearance on the Ed Sullivan show comes to mind; the band asked to omit or change the lyrics to Light my Fire, “girl we couldn’t get much higher,” implied drug use, and this couldn’t be accepted on telivision. Who knows really if Jim Morrison implied the verb higher as a metaphor for love, or if it implicitly meant “no, we can’t get much higher on these drugs, babe.” It’s hard to say, and in the end it doesn’t entirely matter, because the interpretation of the lyrical content is up to the audience or listener. Or more severely, when the lyrical intent of a song is questioned in a legal setting: Ice T’s Cop Killa, or various pieces from N.W.A’s catalog come to mind.

Later, in the same interview, Melanie offers, “my idea about songs is that once you write them, you have very little say in their life afterward. It’s a lot like having a baby. You conceive a song, deliver it, and then give it as good a start as you can. After that, it’s on it’s own. People will take it any way they want to take it.”