Buffy wouldn’t listen to Widespread Panic: 11 fictional characters assigned questionable taste in music
1. Buffy and Willow embrace Widespread Panic and The String Cheese Incident, Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Just being fictional doesn’t prevent characters from being entitled to their own tastes in art. Sometimes a character’s musical preferences can serve as lazy shorthand to establish an identity: Slap a Clash T-shirt on Jesse Bradford in Bring It On, and bang, instant punk cred. Other times, what characters listen to feels as essential to their personalities as what they actually say. Witness Samantha Morton in Morvern Callar, soundtracking her hazy way through an in-between-days state-of-mind with krautrock, or Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra’s “Some Velvet Morning.”
More often, musical choices serve as yet one more detail used to build a personality. But what about when those choices feel at odds with the character? Keen-eyed viewers of Buffy The Vampire Slayer noted a proliferation of flyers for Widespread Panic and The String Cheese Incident popping up in the show’s background. While it made sense for those hard-touring bands to make regular stops in Sunnydale, California—it is a college town, after all—it didn’t make that much sense for the show’s supernatural Scooby Gang to care. The Bronze didn’t seem to play host to jam bands, and neither Buffy nor her friends seemed likely to embrace the granola-and-spliffs lifestyle. So what to make of the Widespread Panic poster in Buffy and Willow’s dorm room in the fourth season? Did Buffy hang out with the hacky-sack crowd between episodes? Did the earthy Tara turn Willow on to the pleasures of noodly solos, along with witchcraft? Or is this a case of jam-inclined production designer run amok?
2. Punk Richie loves The Who, Summer Of Sam
When Spike Lee’s crime drama Summer Of Sam came out in 1999, he probably figured he was going to take some ribbing for stepping out of his comfort zone and telling a story that was mostly about white people. (He even made a meta-joke about it in the film.) But the film’s loopy depiction of punk culture in ’70s New York isn’t completely his fault; much of the blame lies with his two screenwriters, Michael Imperioli and Victor Colicchio. Anyway, someone has to take the fall for the mass of confusion that is Adrien Brody’s Richie, an Italian-American outcast from the Bronx. Even if we buy the fact that he’s a punk rocker partial to British bands when punk was just gaining popularity in England, why on Earth does he affect the liberty spikes and sartorial style of a stereotypical L.A. punk from the early ’80s? And while there’s no denying The Who’s influence on the genre, it’s pretty unlikely that someone going to such lengths to establish his punk cred would claim “Baba O’Riley” as his favorite song. Still, he did manage to find the one diner in New York that had Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” on the jukebox, months before it was even released, so maybe Richie was even hipper than he looks.
3. Blossom and Six dig C+C Music Factory, Blossom
As played by Mayim Bialik, Blossom Russo became a funky early-’90s fashion icon for teenage girls who didn’t really care if they were out of touch with popular kid tastes. So it ought to have been safe to assume that her offbeat choices extended to her listening habits, which made the 1992 episode “You Must Remember This” especially baffling. Enthralled by the music of their favorite band, Blossom and her similarly quirky friend Six (Jenna Von Oÿ) camp out 15 hours to get tickets to a concert by… Take a guess. Sonic Youth? Siouxsie And The Banshees? Pixies? How about C+C Music Factory, whose pounding dance hits “Gonna Make You Sweat” and “Things That Make You Go Hmm…” already felt tired by 1992. (Not coincidentally, they also guest-starred in the episode.) The show’s producers couldn’t have booked a less Blossom-like choice if they’d landed Boz Scaggs.
4. Hannah’s sister is a punk rocker, Hannah And Her Sisters
Along with ethnic minorities and parts of New York City outside of Manhattan, rock ’n’ roll is alien territory in Woody Allen movies. So it’s unlikely he made Dianne Wiest a punk-rock fan in Hannah And Her Sisters after catching a killer Dead Boys set at CBGB. In fact, the scene where Allen and Wiest go to a punk show indicates that the Woodman would probably take a direct flight to Mars before hopping a cab and venturing to one of his city’s non-jazz establishments. (“Don’t you just love songs about extraterrestrials?” “Not when they’re sung by extraterrestrials.”) For Allen, “punk-rock fan” is simply shorthand for “misguided, misunderstood, and strung out on coke.”