(t5!) Heroes Of The Zeroes Singles: #24: Imogen Heap - Hide And Seek (2005)

 

One of the more regrettable casualties of pop culture in the Zeroes was the successful soundtrack single. There were a few legit hits at the beginning of the decade—“Lady Marmalade” from Moulin Rouge, “Independent Women” from Charlies Angels, “Shake Ya Tailfeather” from Bad Boys II—but towards the end, its existence reduced to pretty much nil. This can be explained pretty reasonably: in the mp3 era, the notion of spending money on a soundtrack album where you probably only care about one song is ridiculous, so labels stopped wasting songs with high commercial appeal on them (likewise, the filmmakers became less involved in purchasing them as well). Eventually, the public’s lives aren’t as affected by the fact that Nickelback or R. Kelly are not writing songs specifically for the latest summer blockbuster. However, I sometimes yearn for those videos with the film clips mixed in, and seeing weird soundtrack albums that mix in pop crossover gems with weird indie one-offs.

Another phenomenon did come of this decade, however: the emergence of the TV soundtracks. I don’t remember this being as common before the decade, but because of iTunes, viewers could hear “Chasing Cars” off Grey’s Anatomy and immediately pay to download it, skyrocketing it up the charts. Thanks to teen dramas serving as tastemakers for their persuadable audiences, the link between TV and popular music was as strong as ever. Enter The O.C. and Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek”.

If there was a legacy left behind by The O.C., it’d be helping to establish indie as a genre with certifiable commercial promise, thanks to Seth’s constant namedropping, the bands the cast would occasionally see at the show’s fictitious hangout “The Bait Shop, and of course, it’s famous (or infamous, depending on which side you are in) soundtrack. Since the show’s first episode, two of the bands in the Seth Cohen Starter Pack, Death Cab for Cutie and The Shins, have had #2 debuts on the Billboard album charts, and the other, Bright Eyes, sent two albums to the top 20 simultaneously. And its soundtrack had already had its hand at putting a few songs, both from the past and the present, in every teen’s iPod: Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah”, Death Cab For Cutie’s “A Lack Of Color”, Ryan Adams’ cover of “Wonderwall”. “Hide And Seek” is probably not the show’s biggest crossover hit, but the people who weren’t regular viewers of the show, it’s probably the one song that is most attached to the show because of the digital short made by Andy Samberg in SNL to parodize the show. It certainly was my favorite out of the all the mood-setting O.C. tunes.

The key to “Hide And Seek” is its most obvious trait: there are no guitars in this track, there’s no beat, there’s no single instrument that isn’t coming out of Imogen Heap’s melancholic mouth. Technically, you can call it an acappella performance, but that’s like calling filet mignon a hunk of meat. “Hide And Seek” packed a grab bag full of immaterial phrases into a vocoder and came forth with a stunning distillation of clarified, glacial beauty. For a while, the zeroes was an era where artists made music by making as little music as possible—hip-hop showed off the gaps of silence in between their beats; techno and house went cold; indie rock cleaned up all the noise. But Imogen may have blown the whole minimal movement away with “Hide And Seek”.

If Imogen Heap’s vocoded voice floating like a feather, ebbing and flowing in the atmosphere, is not enough to attract you, the little robot choir shows off by separating in canon, immersing the listener’s ears with melodious harmony. Whoever it is that wronged her must have done something indefensible because you can taste the disdain, even in the sweet melodies. After retiring into blankness, her army of voices belts “you say you only meant well, well, of course you did,” and fading into a submissive coda: “you don’t care a bit.”

Imogen wasn’t able to follow up her one and only successful hit, mainly due to the fact that no other show has casted any of her other songs as soundtracks. Still, “Hide And Seek”, one of the most emotionally enthralling moments of the decade, did enough to put this girl from Essex on the map, and it’s a perfect evidence of why the other mediums of our popular culture is still a vital device to put a song over.