TUXEDOMOON – Pink Narcissus – LP limited – CBOY1919LP

The comparison between the actual music chosen for Pink Narcissus and Tuxedomoon’s score is inevitable, but it’s still one worth looking at. The classical pieces in the original soundtrack, alternating between Russian 19th century composer Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Night on Bald Mountain, seemed an intentional appropriation of the music. Mussorgsky, driven to alcoholism by his repressed homosexuality, based Pictures at an Exhibition on a series of watercolors painted by the straight, young painter Viktor Hartmann, with whom he had a painfully unrequited love and to whose memory the piece is dedicated. Whether or not it was chosen by Bidgood with this knowledge in mind, the decision to include the piece in Pink Narcissus is an apt one that placed the film within a larger historical lens of repression and homosexuality, as though the ability of the film to withstand over forty years of relevance in both the queer community and pop culture at large was known as far back as the film’s 1971 debut. Tuxedomoon’s music for Pink Narcissus, while immersive and suggestive in its own right, doesn’t quite achieve that same feat. Instead, like Bidgood’s street hustler escapist fantasies, Pink Narcissus the album is a lush, sometimes unnerving trip into the dark, exposing the erotic mysteries and desires so often obscured beneath it.

Eric Torres / Pitchfork