It was in the classic Six Feet Under episode "The Room" that main character Nate Fischer learns of just how little he knows about his recently deceased father Nathaniel. Discovering some unusual bookkeeping practices at his family's funeral home, he seeks out individuals who made unconventional deals for burials of family members. A mechanic exchanged regular oil changes for a funeral service while a horticulturalist gives Nate his father's monthly supply of hydroponic weed. Finally, he meets the owner of an Indian restaurant who shows him a secret room that his father would use.
Nate looks around the dusty, unkempt room and soon begins to rummage through a crate of records. Having previously believed his dad to have been mostly interested in old big band tunes, he is surprised to discover pop and rock in his collection. He puts on The Amboy Dukes' "Journey to the Center of the Mind" and imagines his father playing cards, doing drugs the bikers, sleeping with mysterious women and firing a gun out the window just for the hell of it. He then smokes some weed himself and has a fantasy chat with his dad over the mellow sounds of the Classics IV.
As with all music used in Six Feet Under, "Spooky" is an excellent choice of soundtrack for this scene. (A third selection, "Let's Go Out Tonight" by Craig Armstrong and Paul Buchanan, plays at the episode's end and it's in a very poignant scene) Nate has been chilling under the influence of all that J but he is still dumbfounded by what he has learned — and, indeed, by all that he'll never learn. You might say he's spooked by it all. Significantly, the show's main character has also recently begun an intense and tumultuous relationship with Brenda, a messed up genius who he finds equally intriguing and intimidating. But most importantly, he ultimately feels uncomfortable that he, a grown man in his thirties who has lived much of his life running away from loved ones and responsibilities, could become just like his mysterious father who know one really knows.
The relationship between Nate and Brenda is the essence of the spookiness in "Spooky": while she challenges him to become so much more, he refuses to get dragged into her manipulative games (or, more accurately, he refuses yet still often gets sucked into them anyway). The two are rocked by what the other represents. While their on-again, off-again relationship doesn't work out in the end, there's no question that they've changed each other profoundly. Sadly, there's less of a give-and-take dynamic in the song itself. Normal, everyday guy has this bird who changes on a dime. She blows him off one minute, then comes right back to him the next. It's unclear if we're supposed to sympathize with him or not but it does feel like he's more than a little turned on by her flightiness.
I could go on about Six Feet Under. (I have considered doing a blog about it, believe me) What I'd prefer not to delve into is Classics IV or, indeed, much beyond how their biggest hit works in an episode of one of my favourite TV shows. While there are many remarkable aspects to the HBO dark comedy, its use of music is largely overlooked. I can praise music supervisors Gary Calamar and Thomas Golubic for selecting great songs by Radiohead or slow-core masters Spain but I'd rather give them props for choosing material that buttons up scenes regardless of whether I like them or not. Some hipsters from my generation seemed to like Death Cab for Cutie but they never did much for me. That said, the use of their song "Transatlanticism" in a season four episode is inspired and for a fleeting moment I can understand why many people got into them back at around the time of the Millennium.
While it has a sparkling, jazzy rhythm, "Spooky" isn't nearly as sexy at it thinks it is — nor is it even all that spooky. (Billboard would have you believe otherwise, putting it at number twelve on their list of the 25 Biggest Halloween Songs of All time on the Hot 100, stating that it's a favourite of "sensual spectres", whoever they are) Still, it is rather creepy, I'll give it that. Plenty of perfectly normal people have ended up in toxic relationships but the vast majority of us have the decency not to celebrate them so openly. At least Nate and Brenda learned something from all the shit that they put each other through which is more than can be said for the loser narrating this passable yet strangely unmoving song.
Score: 5
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