This week, Tor.com posted a list of songs that did (and didn’t) work in SF and fantasy TV shows and films.  Natalie Zutter, Emily Asher-Perrin and Leah Schnelbach compiled a fun list.

Face it–if you grew up without cable TV and before the advent of on-demand music, movies might be your only chance to discover interesting stuff that commercial radio had dismissed.  I first encountered a whole lot of my favorite songs on soundtracks to movies.

And directors can take a song that sounds “okay” on record and find something in it that the rest of us missed.  (Jonathan Lethem famously noted the way “The Man in Me” by Bob Dylan “blindsided” many long-time Dylan fans who heard it on the The Big Lebowski soundtrack, though we’d had the album for years; that’s probably the pinnacle of this sort of thing)

I won’t list a bunch of my favorites right now except to say “Yes!” to their thought on Guardians of the Galaxy‘s soundtrack (power pop and yacht rock in a space fantasy=genius), and “Hell Yes!” to their inclusion of The Pixies “Where is My Mind?” from Fight Club.

For the record, my personal favorite soundtrack to any SF movie: