More NICO FIDENCO… It might be easy to write him off as camp and corn if you just look at his filmography. He scored a lot of garbage. That can’t be denied. The music though, cannot. It’s definitely not what we would have called cool back there in the 70s with the rest of pop music exploding in so many different directions. The cool kids weren’t running out to buy the soundtrack from the Emmanuelle movies, or from Porno Holocaust (yes that was a real film). I still hear the influence though in more mainstream pop. The intro to this score sounds an awful lot like Madonna’s Like A Prayer, and there are quite a few other echoes as you work through the length of this video. Fidenco’s sound didn’t just disappear at the end of each film. People are listening and drawing from the well even now nearly 50 years later. It’s real. There are shorter versions of this soundtrack, by the way, but they don’t include some of the tracks with the muted background porno sounds, which I think need to be in there to really capture what was going on in 1976. It makes this more of a historical document in addition to being just a film score.

Youtube is a hell of a deep rabbit hole, for sure. If you’re willing to go in unawares not knowing where you may end up… if you’re willing to approach it all with a totally open mind, you can expand the universe at your fingertips. There is so much going on in a world of billions of souls. It’s so much more diverse, I’ve found, than the world of film or television and all the various media of conveyance for visual entertainment. Film and TV do exist on Youtube, but it’s music where they really surpass everything else. Being more user driven, it’s simply more expansive and diverse. Anyone can create something, or find some arcane treasure, and post it. It may not be easy to find, but without trying I’ve found precious things that have been up for several years with less than a thousand views. It’s out there. You couldn’t visit enough record stores in a decade to find as much as you can on Youtube in a month. It’s just not possible.

Why am I carrying on about this? I suppose it’s gratitude, in a way. It does make me feel connected, and that’s especially valuable these days when even without a pandemic social distancing thing, connection is harder to achieve.

So yes, it’s gratitude.