geekTunes

I've been spending quite a few evenings lately crawling around the Apple iTunes store hunting for music that I don't already have on CD to load into the new iPhone I was given for Christmas. In addition to an assortment of rock, blues, jazz and classical pieces, I've been pleasantly surprised at how much in the way of SF-related stuff I've been able to find.

Tonight's geeky acquisition was a historical piece - Orson Welles Mercury Theatre radio play of "The War of the Worlds". That'll be a great one for a road trip sometime.

And yet, I would have been somewhat surprised if the site hadn't had that gem. The real shocker was some of the soundtracks that turned up, from movies that were either old or not well received by the general audience. I mean, I found the main theme for "Krull"! The movie was shit (mostly) but man did Horner write a big, ballsy piece of classically-inspired music. John Barry's score for "The Black Hole" is also there - another craptacular movie (which, I've admitted openly before is one of my guilty pleasures) that you wouldn't expect to find on a site like this ('cause Disney sure as hell doesn't seem to have any memory of it beyond the anniversary DVD that was released a few years ago). There are a couple of renditions of the "Tron" score available too, although with "Tron 2" (or however they're trying to funk-up the spelling now) in the works, it isn't surprising that this old chestnut would get dusted off for playlists. This led my to Journey's "Only Solutions" from the movie's end credits, which I've enjoyed for years but have had a tough time finding until now. Follow that up with a couple of John Carpenter pieces - Snake's Uniform from "Escape from LA" (a badass blues riff on the old "Escape from New York" theme) and The Porkchop Express from my favourite "Big Trouble in Little China" (and no piece of music could be more appropriate right now, what with me living hin the heart of Richmond - the new Little China - and the whole Lower Mainland being socked-in with fog as thick as wet wool that would make San Francisco envious) - and I'm a happy guy.

And bonus points for stocking comedian Sean Cullen's "Food of Choice" song. Not SF per se, but it's the kind of thing a mad scientist or wannabe Bond villain might hum under his breath while preparing to proceed with his nefarious and science-fictionally-inspired scheme, so it's worth mentioning here.

Say what you will about how loyal geeks are in buying up stuff related to their favourite cult classics, I hadn't expected to find this stuff because, let's face it, the site is about making money and you'd figure they wouldn't be devoting storage space to music that the largest percentage of the population wasn't clamouring for. Makes me wonder what the purchase stats are for some of this stuff - whether, in fact the geeks are logging-on in droves, or whether the site's geeky creators added this music as part of their own little sub-culture corner.

At any rate, good on Apple for picking a nice bushell of geek tunes!