With all apologies to David Lynch, in “That Thing You Do!” the film isn’t the thing.

Tom Hanks’ directorial debut, which was released to critical praise but was a box office disappointment, doesn’t hinge on the charming, passable performances of its lead actors. It doesn’t get by on its script, which tells the story of an out-of-nowhere rock ‘n roll band and their earworm of a hit song. Written by Hanks, the screenplay is so thin that the star lists out the stock types of each character in the third act. It definitely doesn’t get by on studio glitz; even if the production team did a bang-up job of recreating the early 1960s, they can’t get around the fact that much of this movie is set in a dreary Erie, Pennsylvania. Whether “That Thing You Do!” works for audiences — and the cozy, quick story of a flash-in-the-pan band has resonated with a ton of people since its release in 1996 — depends entirely on if the title song lands. 

Credit for that has to go to Adam Schlesinger, the late pop-rocker and bassist for Fountains of Wayne who wrote the track with nothing more than the film’s title and a few hints at the story. He needed to recreate the sound of the thousands of teenagers who had their heads rearranged by The Beatles and immediately ran to their garages to pick up guitars — and he nailed the teenybopper perfectionism of early Lennon-McCartney joints. The song’s backbeat is crisp. The bassline struts. The emotions are big, dumb and messy, but no one told that to the harmonies. Even the brief imitation of Lennon’s “losing control” scream is laser-precise, meant to boost the song’s momentum and carry it through a cheery and lazy surf solo. Give it a listen; it sounds like it was written by committee and by four bored teens in equal measure. It’s lightning. 

“That Thing You Do!” had to be that good, because no fictional rock band has ever leaned harder on their hit. The film follows the whirlwind, two-month career of The Wonders, a group so replacement-level that we first meet them arguing over “The” band names that are already taken. Drummer Guy Patterson (Tom Everett Scott) is the star of the film but the bassist joining him in the rhythm section, played in the film by Ethan Embry, doesn’t even have a name. (He’s listed as T.B. Player in the credits.) With lead singer Jimmy Mattingly III (Johnathon Schaech) and guitarist Lenny Haise (Steve Zahn) out in front, they go from local sensation to Billboard chart-toppers in weeks and implode just as spectacularly. Across that timespan, the audience is treated to “That Thing You Do!” in part or in full eight times, once every 13 minutes. Whether that’s the result of a threadbare script or just Hanks knowing what he had is up to the viewer to decide. What’s certain is that “Thing” never gets old.

Unlike The Wonders, Schlesinger’s ability to write a world-beating earworm was no fluke. He pulled off that trick multiple times. Just give a listen to “Pretend to Be Nice” from 2001’s “Josie and the Pussycats.” He’s the pen behind 2005’s “Just the Girl” by the Click Five, which laid a mall-emo whine and reverb-heavy drums over The Wonders’ tried and true formula. If you’ve heard of Schlesinger at all — and aren’t a power-pop geek or a “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” superfan — it was likely through his band Fountains of Wayne and their 2003 hit “Stacy’s Mom.” Though that’s not his band’s best — that honor goes to “Radiation Vibe” or “All Kinds of Time” depending on the mood — it’s more proof that Schlesinger had a direct line to the idealized past in his brain. He could channel an undeniable pop hit out of that ether whenever he wanted.  

Talent like his is in short supply in 2026, especially after Schlesinger himself passed away in 2020. Watching “That Thing You Do!” climbing the charts throughout the movie is a peek into an alien musical world, one that was both more regional and more monocultural than the one we inhabit today. 

The song starts as a word-of-mouth sensation, filling a local restaurant as more and more teenagers hear about this new band and their soon-to-be hit from their friends. They press vinyl to sell at shows, and it gets into the hands of disc jockeys at ever-larger radio stations with an increasing number of watts behind their broadcasts. A labelman, played with equal parts tenderness and sleaze by Hanks, swoops in to take the boys on a tour of state fairs. When the song outgrows the blue-ribbon crowd, they’re flown to Los Angeles for one nationally televised performance before falling out in a bit of dressing room melodrama. 

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The Wonders’ origins and skyrocketing fame built by the ability to press a record locally and impress radio programmers who curated their playlists by hand, are practically a fantasy in the consolidated media landscape of today. The idea of one song taking hold among the entire nation’s teenagers is even more ridiculous now that streaming has fractured the musical monoculture. Global connection came with a kind of dispersion, diluting shared connections closer to home while allowing for worldwide discovery.

For proof, just look at the (Wonder-less) Billboard charts today. Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” just broke the record for most weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100. Meanwhile, the chorus of people who claim to have never heard the song grows louder every single day. The debate whether this is a mark of country music classism rages in the pages of the Rolling Stone, itself a bit of a relic from those more culturally unified days. 

“That Thing You Do!” hides its nugget of pop music consensus inside another bygone bit of shared culture: the afternoon cable movie. These easy lifts don’t ask you to think too much. They get in and out in under two hours, often starting as minor hits that become part of the cultural fabric through repetition; they’re on in the background and there when you need them. Films like “That Thing You Do!” are neither notable nor offensive to the typical viewer, and they never make you wonder “Who is this for?” If that question was ever asked, the answer is simple. It’s delivered in three-part harmony in the opening seconds of The Wonder’s lone pseudo-hit, gorgeous and unmissable. 

Who wants to listen to this Beatles pastiche, dreamed up to get Tom Hanks’ film studio off the ground? You.

The post At 30, “That Thing You Do!” is the perfect fake one-hit wonder appeared first on Salon.com.

I couldn’t help but notice some people on social media dunking on a post from @nicksaraev, a self-described entrepreneur helper, who boldly proclaimed on X a few days ago: “I am not joking when I say this. Spotify, Apple Music, and streaming in general is over. AI music is now very, very good. You just don’t know yet because all AI music circulating today is from ~2-3 generations ago. Suno v6 pro et al has solved infinite personalized music.” He followed it up with “Yes, this probably hurts your feelings. It’s still going to happen.”

While my feelings are unhurt, and I don’t really know what “infinite personalized music” means or how it could be “solved,” at the same time, I can easily guess what is implied here and I don’t actually want to know more. As one Bluesky user observed, the inherent idea here comes “when you have no concept of how people engage with music.”

Nonetheless, we don’t seem able to escape this trend. I have a friend who has, on a few occasions, sent me AI-generated raps with his name or a joke inserted as the lyrics. They can be technically proficient, maybe even a little funny, but there is always an underlying cadence of the uncanny valley that I still doubt Suno v6 pro et al. or whatever has totally overcome. Please don’t send me examples; I actually don’t care. It’s not that I’m offended by the idea of generated art; it’s just that it bores me. I’m having plenty of fun engaging with music made with human ears, hands and minds.

Way back in the Bush II and Obama years, I volunteered at my college radio station in the Music Procurement Department or whatever it was called. Our job was to sort through the massive mailer box of padded envelopes and bubble mailers that came in from record labels, big, small and in-between. It was like Christmas every Wednesday afternoon as we shredded packages and stacked CDs, occasional stickers and vinyl, splitting the spoils and loading them into our computers — by hand even! We made notes about what should get added to the radio catalog as fodder for our aspiring DJs — and what should get chucked out or given away for free at radio events.

If we didn’t already know the band, the way we chose which albums to review was often based on cover art, the promo materials we skimmed, or a sticker on the front that read RIYL: Recommended If You Like. Almost every artist would put something like “RIYL: Jay-Z, Radiohead, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Talking Heads.” Sure, totally random indie label from Seattle, all of your bands sound exactly like Nirvana. It could be a pretty boring, sometimes horrifying process — I’ll never forget the thrash metal song we received about Shannen Doherty that sounded like it was recorded in a blender. I still can’t get over the inane lyrics: “Shannen Doherty, Shannen Doherty / You’re in my head. Shannen Doherty, Shannen Doherty / I like bread.” I wish I were making this up.

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But the crate digging, which I also did in physical record stores, was always worth it when you found your new favorite band or heard the summer’s hit track long before any of your friends. I was introduced to so many artists, many of whom I still turn to today. Hot Chip, Sea Wolf, Fleet Foxes, to name a few. It taught me to always give music a chance, no matter how ugly the art or how crusty the jewel case. Usually, you can listen to the song up to when the vocals kick in before giving up or listening longer. By then, you usually know if you’re gonna hate it or not.

I still devour new music this way, clocking a daily average of four hours of tunes familiar and novel. It helps me write and focus and relax and otherwise temper my mood throughout the day. I’m always looking for new artists to try. And I hope I always consume — I hate that word, but there it is — music this way, instead of becoming a curmudgeon who only appreciates the tunes from their youth and thinks anything modern is trash. If you think that, you aren’t digging deep enough. 

The only thing I can think of that’s worse than getting stuck on Greatest Hits or Top 40 is pushing a button and generating “infinite personalized music” with no human influence. It bores the sh*t out of me. It’s not just the lack of discovery, though that is critical, maybe because it scratches those deep primal hunter/gatherer itches. It’s more about the lack of anything personal behind the music. No history, no struggle, no catharsis, no exploration, no humanity. I listen to music because it’s flawed, raw and human, not just noise to fill my day. I have no doubt AI music will keep improving, at least to a point, but I predict few people who actually love music are going to listen that way because it has lost its essence.

Yes, I have streamed plenty of AI music on YouTube, often unintentionally when the vaporwave or atmospheric DnB mix I’m vibing to autoplays some slop channel. I can almost always tell when it’s generated. There’s a flatness, like an echo of a song you heard a long time ago, something better. It puts me to sleep and I inevitably switch it off. Maybe it’s gotten better lately. But I still think I’d notice. At any rate, I’d never seek it out.

As a child I was once gifted a “custom” cassette tape with songs “written for me.” Every single track on the album was centered around “Troy,” with my name mentioned as often as possible. I listened to that thing over and over again, until I spilled a bottle of soap in my tape deck and ruined it. But anyway, none of the songs were actually produced with me in mind. It was made by a company called Kidselebration that in 1986 made “personalized” cassette tapes like these for a whole boatload of names. The songs never changed, someone just dubbed in a different name into the song for Kyle, Sarah, Robert, etc. I can’t imagine how much friggin’ work this must have been before Pro Tools, but it was probably just the ‘80s equivalent of a lot of cut-and-paste.

You can listen to the one for “Jessica” here if you really want to. Every time they say “Insert Name,” it sounds totally awkward and weird. But even as a kid, I suspected on some level that this tape wasn’t really for me specifically. Something always felt off. If infinite personalized AI music doesn’t give people the same vibe, maybe they’re not listening hard enough. And please, don’t send me your robot music. Send me anything else.

The post Please don’t send me your robot music appeared first on Salon.com.

I wrote a few years ago about the mysterious and legendary 200 (!) unused songs that Stevie Wonder recorded for his 1976 masterpiece album Songs in the Key of Life. The musicians and engineers who worked on the double (plus) album have expressed amazement at the quality of the many, many songs that were fully formed and recorded but discarded. — Read the rest

The post Stevie Wonder finally releases four unheard songs from Songs in the Key of Life appeared first on Boing Boing.