Top Gun Soundtrack Revisited
The pop score for Tony Scott’s 1986 hit remains catnip for fans of gloriously over-the-top 1980s synth-rock
Pop music in cinema during the 1980s was often used to great creative effect. This creativity stands in stark contrast to the irrelevant-power-ballad-lazily-stuck-on-end-credits trend of the 1990s (think Bryan Adams’s Everything I Do (I Do It For You) and Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On, in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Titanic respectively). To be clear: With 1980s pop scored films, I’m not talking about tracks sourced from archives as aptly deployed needle-drops (unlike, say, American Graffiti, or many films from Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino), but music composed specially for the film. Examples include Flashdance, Footloose, Beverly Hills Cop, Back to the Future, The Lost Boys, and, of course, Top Gun.
I’d argue it is scientifically impossible to get any more 80s than Tony Scott’s 1986 smash, both in terms of the soundtrack and the film itself. For the uninitiated: Whilst attending elite Air Force training school Top Gun, Tom Cruise falls for one of his instructors (Kelly McGillis), clashes with rival Val Kilmer, and generally lives up to his callsign as “Maverick”. The flight sequences are terrific, even if the whole thing feels like an extended pop video. In short, whilst I…
