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  • Clueless about Listening Formations?
  • Ben Aslinger (bio)

There’s only one site I know of where David Bowie, Salt-N-Pepa, Jill Sobule, Coolio, Counting Crows, and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones coexist: the Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995) sound track. A mixture of hip-hop, rock and roll, singer-songwriter, and pop music, the Clueless sound track is remarkable in that production personnel largely eschewed strict genre boundary lines in favor of embracing a diverse musical palette. Although it might be overblown to compare the meaning-making capacities of Clueless’s compiled musical score to that of American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973), the film undeniably taps into Generation X sensibilities and a 1990s context wherein listening practices foregrounded reductive constructions of genres and demographics and selected parties in the music, television, and film industries sought to replace existing industrial discourses by revaluing musical hybridity and diversity. Clueless signals how clueless mainstream recording industry executives increasingly were as to actual listeners’ tastes and behaviors; it illustrates one attempt to construct a listening formation that embraces musical diversity and hybridity over listening formations rooted in the narrow politics of genre. Clueless can be seen as an important genealogical moment in the shift away from artists and repertoire (A&R) personnel and music executives as power brokers in constructing adolescent sonic cultures. The film is part of a shift to an era in which directors, producers, and music supervisors place music in filmic, televisual, and ludic platforms and craft sonic palettes for specific demographics (for more on the ways that female producers propelled Clueless as a convergent phenomenon, see Hunting’s essay in this “In Focus”). Karyn Rachtman, Capitol vice president of A&R and sound tracks, and Tim Devine, Capitol vice president of A&R, prepared the sound-track album; however, Amy Heckerling’s adroit use of music in her film Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and her incorporation of music into Clueless suggest that she played a definitive role in choosing musical tracks and [End Page 126] syncing music and image.1 After Heckerling, deployments of the compiled popular music score in film and television would be increasingly treated as authorial flourishes from Hollywood players such as Greg Berlanti and Ryan Murphy. The music of Clueless signaled an increased hybridization of teen listening tastes. Listening tastes would become even harder to map and diverse listening practices even more mainstream, with the rise of Napster, Spotify, and emerging music-discovery apps that allow users to order, remix, and customize their pathways through networked and algorithmic listening.

This piece is inspired by ongoing conversations in media studies on popular music sound tracks, music licensing, and the effects of music on spectatorship.2 Clueless signals shifts in how Hollywood deploys the popular music sound track. The film also serves as an important genealogical moment that helps us historicize contemporary articulations of target demographics, subcultures, and compiled popular music scores.

As Clueless was based loosely on Jane Austen’s Emma and was characterized by clever writing, critics focused primarily on other elements of style, narrative, and technique besides the sound track (for more on the Emma comparison and dialogue in Clueless, see O’Meara’s essay in this “In Focus”). Aside from judgments on whether Heckerling was bastardizing Austen or updating Austen for the 1990s, critical responses of the time engaged with how the film was helping to redefine teen film.3 Journalist Lawrie Zion wrote in 1996, “This is as much a landmark for the teen-flick genre as Before Sunrise is for on-screen romance.”4 Other reviewers explicitly compared the film to Heathers and contrasted it to Larry Clark’s difficult and disturbing film Kids (for more on this comparison, see Leppert’s essay in this “In Focus”).5 The New York Times put Clueless in conversation with films made popular by baby boomers, such as Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977), Flashdance (Adrian Lyne, 1983), and Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986), positing that Clueless signaled the arrival of generation X and the return of the teen girl spectator to the multiplex.6

Clueless depicts, in broad brushstrokes, teen audio cultures in the 1990s under the swath of the “alternative” radio format...

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