Obsessed with INXS
Why HBO's Euphoria can't get enough of throwbacks like the band's 80's pop gems
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Currently in its second season, HBO’s Euphoria is bursting with throwaway drops of throwback hits—Gerry Rafferty, anyone?—to such a point that it’s almost a little funny. Like, why are these Gen-Z high schoolers listening to Can? Even the famously hip New York Times has caught on. So what’s the deal? Says Julio Perez IV in the Times piece: “We were interested in plenty of music — too much music for some. The show, in a sense, would be a musical.”
In other words, realism’s out, and romanticism is in. Euphoria after all is driven by its emotional excesses. And its crazy-jukebox approach to music is, you could say, not unlike how Tarantino or Scorcese drop in pop tunes in perfectly inappropriate places just to amp up the energy.
But if the show is a “musical,” whose musical is it, anyway? The soundtrack cuts are so often so knowingly hip, it’s like an Other Music playlist. Like when Elliott is cavorting with Rue and Jules on his bed in an innocent, we’re-just-playing-around moment tinged with sexual tension, to the sound of Jonathan Richman’s I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar. Alright guys, we get it. I mean, I love that song. The more Richman gets royalties, the better. but, a little on the nose, shall we say. And honestly I kind of prefer the more contemporary tracks the show uses. They rule.
Among all these super cool needle drops on the show, there’s one artist whose music is doing more than helping to create an edgy music video moment in season 2, it’s following, nay, haunting one character in particular, and helps to soundtrack his self-inflicted meltdown: Cal Jacobs, Nate’s violent, closeted father who leads a double life frequenting and abusing prostitutes.
The music that’s haunting Cal? That would be INXS’ 1987 mega-hit album, KICK.
As we learn in an extended flashback, when Cal was in high school, he had an intimate, loving friendship with another boy that constantly crossed over into homoerotic/homosocial territory, often soundtracked to INXS’ hits, and that culminated in a cathartic romantic moment at a roadside gay bar while the boys mooned to Never Tell Us Apart.
25 years later, Cal is tormented by this lost love, and whenever KICK comes on, it’s all over. The album is more than a sonic memento—it’s a straight up haunted mourning object. A nice memento is a reminder of the past—oh, what a good time we had. A haunted object like KICK actually just makes things worse. It hypnotizes you. Drags you back into the past with it. If a character in a story pulls out their haunted object, watch out—this isn’t going to end well. Just watch Cal put INXS on his Jeep stereo while he drives blotto drunk down a highway at night, in a balls-to-the-wall tormented erotic fever.
Cal torpedoes downward in a desperate effort to confront the bottled up sides of himself and agonize over his past and his identity. This is a very gothic storyline for Cal—as a recent excellent podcast episode by Wake Island describes it, gothic plots are essentially about not being able to get over the past. You’re alone in a castle, or your study, and you’re haunted by an image of a dead person that won’t leave you alone—think Leonore in Poe’s The Raven, or Heathcliff’s obsession with Catherine in Wuthering Heights. In gothic realms, characters are often torn to psychic shreds by the return of the past, which is often because the past has not been mourned properly.
In Euphoria, INXS is kind of a musical prosthesis for Cal. It’s helping him mourn his lost love, because he can’t do it alone. But like a drug, the music is having some bad side effects even as it apparently provides relief. Is listening to INXS making him feel better, or just making his condition worse? Or both? In any case, here’s hoping that your next gothic meltdown, unlike Cal’s, doesn’t end with you whipping your shlong out at your family and pissing on the carpet. Maybe try INXS in moderation next time.