The Many Shades of “Axel F”
While under the weather over the weekend, I watched a bunch of movies, including Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. I was never particularly into Eddie Murphy, as something of a non-comedic-oriented consumer of pop culture, but if you’re Gen X, as I am, then the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” has a power not unlike the role “All Along the Watchtower” played for Gen C (by which, of course, I mean Cylons). (Murphy, by the way, is quite something in the movie, fully in control of manner in which he navigates and comments on generational and racial divides.)
For a weekend spent largely in bed, the new one hit the spot pretty solidly, but the main thing I want to note is how effectively it did what so many movies and TV shows do (I’m looking at you, The Detectorists and Succession), which is to repeatedly redeploy the theme melody over and over, and to do so in different ways as a means to serve as the backing score to different scenes with varying emotional and narrative states. One might even draw a comparison between the way the riff changes throughout the movie and the “code-switching” that is referenced in a scene when a valet parking attendant suddenly adopts a British accent to deal with a regular.
Apparently the film’s composer, the prolific Lorne Balfe (Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Ambulance), did some tech-historical research to accomplish what he was after. Writes Drew Taylor at thewrap.com:
“Balfe worked with the Vintage Synthesizer Museum, located in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, to source the instruments and to find players who could operate them. ‘It’s like an archeological deep-dive of finding out what the sound was, recreating the patches, trying to get it back to how it did sound originally,’ Balfe said.”
The theme in question is, of course, the indelible “Axel F,” composed by Harold Faltermeyer for the very first Beverly Hills Cop, back in 1984. The Vintage Synth Museum is a fantastic resource. It used to be in Oakland, for eight years, before relocating to Los Angeles at the end of 2021.
