Week 483: “Life In Mono” by Mono

In my mid-teenage years, I had inexplicable and simultaneous crushes on Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Well, not totally inexplicable. Gwyneth Paltrow was gorgeous, sophisticated, and was dating the lead singer of a British band I liked (no, not that band, this one). Ethan Hawke was cool, but not too cool. Unlike the River Phoenixes and Christian Slaters, he seemed like he could be your friend.

So when Hawke and Paltrow were cast opposite each other in “Great Expectations” in 1998, all signs pointed towards this being my new favourite movie.

Hold that thought.

In the mid-nineties, the music world had huge and simultaneous crushes on Brit-pop and trip-hop. The latter was a subgroup of the former, as virtually all of the biggest trip-hop acts were from the UK. Leading the charge for Brit-pop were Oasis and Blur; bearing the flag for trip-hop were Portishead and Massive Attack.

Naturally, Hollywood looked to capitalize on the trend, and populated its soundtracks with anything that sounded even vaguely Portishead-ish. Trip-hop already had a cinematic quality, so it was a perfect little bit of entertainment synergy.

This brings us back to “Great Expectations,” the movie that, true to its title, carried expectations of box office supremacy: a Dickens novel adaptation starring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, Robert DeNiro and Anne Bancroft. The soundtrack was stacked with 90s talent, from Tori Amos to Chris Cornell to Pulp, and a surprise hit by a British trip-hop act called Mono.

The movie couldn’t miss.

And then it missed.

“Great Expectations” may have been a hit if it had been released a year earlier. But by early 1998, trip-hop’s mainstream shine was fading. Portishead would soon go on hiatus, Massive Attack would lose a key member, and the trip-hop sound was about to give way to shiny pop stars, pre-fab boy bands, and big-voiced divas.

Oh, and a few weeks before “Great Expectations” hit theatres, another movie opened that would dominate popular culture for the better part of a year: a love story featuring a sinking ship and a song by a big-voiced diva.

Okay, bad timing might not fully account for the disappointing success of “Great Expectations.” Reviews were lukewarm at best, and the updated setting didn’t sit right with many people, as often happens in film adaptations of literary classics. I didn’t find the movie any better than most critics did, and my crushes on Hawke and Paltrow began to cool. He started to strike me as too mushy, she as too snobby.

But the song is still solid. Dated, yes, but it captures something about the cultural turning point from late-90s to early-00s that few other songs can.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Singer Siobhan de Maré’s voice takes the whisper-singing associated with trip-hop just about as far as it can go without sounding ridiculous.

2. During the chorus, a double-time drum sample clatters along in the background. It’s the “Amen break,” and it’s perhaps the most-used drum sample of all-time. After about 1998, it would have been hard to use this sample without being intentionally ironic or unintentionally derivative.

3. The song was Mono’s only hit, from their only studio album. Given the one-hit-wonder connotations of the band’s name (and the song’s title), I wonder if de Maré and Martin Virgo formed Mono with the understanding that they only had a 15-minute fame window ahead of them. If so, they might have the most striking combination of prescience and self-aware resignation of any 90s band.

Recommended listening activity:

Enjoying a tall glass of milk on the night before its expiry date.

Buy it here.