Historical Markers of the Modern Soundtrack

5	Colors	1989 - Dennis Hopper (USA)
	Spatiality & frequency	Dolby Surround; planar & dimensional mixing; urbanism; bass; Hip Hop; slang; guns & death

The opening title to Colors is superimposed over shots of East LA seen through the window of a roaming cop car. A spray can 'bloods' the title lettering and red spray paint drips down like blood; it's aural presecence sounds like it has been smeared onto the cinema screen itself. From this point on, the cinema space is configured as a threatening zone, a territorial realm where you as an audience member are under threat. Constantly and consistently, sounds come from behind, above, extreme left and right so that one is always left suspecting there is more than what is depicted on the screen. As such, off-screen sounds of screams, gunshots, sirens, footsteps, breaths are signs of potential death in the black night of the urban jungle. Before too long one is engaged in 'reading' sounds as cues for survival. The deep hum of cruising low-riders nearing their drive-by, the fractured Electro and Latin Hip Hop beats from a boom-box, the yelping of killer dogs chained to the wire mesh of desolate front yards - all are signs of one gang transgressing the turf of another, and clarion calls for inevitable clashes and violence. This is all handled by sonic means, accentuating the sonar nature of urban gang warfare and transporting it onto the film's soundtrack.

The placement of gun shots in Colors' mix is designed to psycho-acoustically convey the effect of being shot, using high-pitched clicks to peak percussive impact and diffused low thuds to wrack the body with queasiness. Their gun shots' spread of frequencies in the surround space is crucial to the sound enveloping you, just as it is intended that you do not simply observe human tragedy but you sense it through noting your own irrationally emotional reaction to being manipulated in this way. Taking its cue from the incessant use of gun shot sound effects in Hip Hop over the preceding decade and a half, Colors replays the fetishization of those sounds and intensifies them. To tone them down would amount to a denial of the social reality of vicious crime circles within which so much of black America is trapped.

But even if one choses to dismiss the death aesthetic the film relishes, it is hard to ignore the film's predominance of bass. Colors is a film that lets bass boom vociferously in the auditorium. The title track by Ice-T is mixed into the film soundtrack without diluting the power of its 808 kick, making the music take on the full sensory throb of a club environment. Bass is acceptable in film sound as earthquakes, spaceships and the voice of God - but the sheer electronic intensity of drum machines and sampled loops usually finds but mere crevices for placement in the final mix of a film. Colors uses its subsonic musical pulsations to occupy the soundtrack and reframe the frequency range one expects of music cue placement. Exploiting the wilful and heady excessiveness that energizes music that is "too black - too strong", Colors occupies the cinema auditorium through sonic extremism, and celebrates the earthy totality of Hip Hop's aural landscape.

From the BFI book 100 Modern Soundtracks.

See also The Architecsonic Object: COLORS, Sound & Space.