Cylons Love Bad 60s Folk Music

Warning: there are music-related SPOILERS coming up in this post about the season finale of Battlestar Galactica.

Turns out that creepy music everybody was hearing in the first half of the season finale was none other than the music of the Cylon . . . Bob Dylan! And Tigh quotes spookily from the Dylan song throughout the episode. Maybe I'm hopelessly Gen X, but the whole Dylan thing fell completely flat for me. Wouldn't the Cylon be more likely to listen to Miss Kittin or The Orb? C'mon, they're techno-creatures! At least give 'em a little electro-clash or frakkin rave music. I'd love to see Six dancing to a Peaches track. The Cylon already live in ships that look like they're ready for a bunch of rollin' party kids anyway.

When you investigate this musical travesty, it just gets worse. BSG music composer Bear McCreary writes in his blog:

I learned that the idea was not that Bob Dylannecessarily exists in the characters’ universe, but that an artist onone of the colonies may have recorded a song with the exact same melodyand lyrics. Perhaps this unknown performer and Dylan pulled inspirationfrom a common, ethereal source. Therefore, I was told to make nomusical references to any “Earthly” versions, Hendrix, Dylan or anyothers. The arrangement needed to sound like a pop song that belongedin the Galactica universe, not our own.

OK, that's it. Dylan's music is from an "ethereal source" other than "wanting to make money and get chicks"? Set the controls for barf. Charlie Anders at other blog sums up the current problems with BSG nicely:

Ohh kay then… so that “classic rock” is actually even more classicthan we’d suspected. Or something . . . I do hope the fourth season is the last, and it forces Moore, Eick andthe others to focus on some tighter storytelling. A lot of the thirdseason felt like padding or just drift. It reminded me, in particular,
of what used to bug me about Deep Space Nine:
long, long stretches where nothing much happens, followed by one or twoepisodes where “everything changes” — and then back to inertia again.

101.7 the Bone Klassik Rokk Is the Cylon Radio Station of Choice [via other blog]