You Should've Heard Just What I Seen (2020)

Phil Dellio makes a wide-ranging survey of movies and TV in this book focusing narrowly on the uses of pop music. I say "narrowly," but Phil's discursive conversational style, strewn across dozens of review-style pieces, covers a lot more than just pop music. More than just pop music, but he is reasonably exhaustive on the music. And it's a lot of fun to read, even when you want to argue with him about things, the music or the movies or both. His center of gravity and touchpoint is the TV series Mad Men, which full disclosure I still have not seen, anticipating rightly or wrongly too much David Ogilvy for my taste. Phil reaches back to The Graduate, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino, as one must—it had to start somewhere. He acknowledges The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, with oddly nothing to say about Deadwood or The Wire—no pop music or bad pop music, maybe. No Lost either, which did have good pop music, though The Leftovers is mentioned several times. From about 2015 on, since Phil's blog of the same name started (with Scott Woods contributing), he has stayed well abreast of the latest in peak TV, or prestige TV, or premium TV. Call it PTV. His long list at the end makes apparent how deep into the weeds of TV series he has gone. He can pull rabbits out of his hat too. His argument for the Jackie DeShannon song at the end of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice has resigned me to looking again at a movie I recall as insipid. To be honest, though, that's why I read books like this, and Phil is really good at it. I learned a lot, have 15 or 20 titles to go looking for, and that's a lot more than I get from a lot of the books I read. I've come away even more sensitive to the way music and a narrative moment can build on each other to create something unique and memorable. It's still cinema, even if it's on a TV screen, and it's something only cinema can do. (Further full disclosure, Phil is a friend and kindly mentions my name in this book.)

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