Soundtracks: Buffy's The Bronze in 2017

words & curated by Matthew Latham

Buffy The Vampire Slayer has a huge place in my heart. It’s my number one show of all time and it’s had an impact on who I am as a person. It’s also affected my taste in music. I wore out the original compilation album’s CD due to overuse, and I miss it dearly. What a collection of songs on it, though: Garbage’s Temptation Waits, Hepburn’s I Quit and Face to Face’s God is a Man to name a few. The highlight for me is easily Guided by Voice’s Teenage FBI. It’s a song whose lyrics speak to how the impact of your feelings for someone can affect you deeply and change your behavior without realizing it. It spoke to me at the time as that was what I was feeling and it still resonates every time I hear it.

I try not to focus on the fact that only a couple of years ago I read that it’s in fact about Robert Pollard’s time as a school teacher, specifically when we was caught picking his nose by a pupil. I was a little distraught. But also it explained the “clean out the hive” line.

I digress! The show’s relationship with music has been explored by many (and I mean many) think pieces and articles about what it did for bands. A common area that the characters visited in the show was the fictional club/venue/bar The Bronze. It looked so cool: live bands and club nights that seemingly happened every night of the week. It was here much of the non-score music took place. Michelle Branch (in her Spirit Room days) showed up, and so did Aimee Mann (and even got a line).

But what if the club’s fate didn’t happen the way it did. There’s some spoilers for a twenty year old show incoming, so beware: the Bronze ended up destroyed in a massive crater. But what if it survived and a new generation of teenagers/vampire food was frequenting the establishment? What music would it play? Who would play there? What if the promoters now could use social media to find new bands to invite to play? It’s a shame it never lived along to find music on MySpace - let alone Twitter and/or Bandcamp!

So here’s a collection of songs which I believe could very well show up on a Bronze playlist or two in 2017. A bit of dirty grunge rock, some pop punk and a chance for Mitski to build up to a dramatic montage at the end of an episode before getting her own Aimee Mann-esque line...