90s Nostalgia: The Boomerang Soundtrack

Setting adrift on memory bliss

The first Compact Disc I owned, my first album besides Christmas with the Chipmunks, really, was the soundtrack for the movie Boomerang. Boomerang was about… actually, I have no idea what it was about. I was 13, Boomerang was a rated R movie, and though my parents weren’t particularly prudish, that might have had something to do with my not seeing it.

To see it, I would have had to have been accompanied by my parents, and I doubt my parents were rushing out to see a “black” movie, not when A Scent of a Woman, A Few Good Men, and The Last of the Mohicans were competing at the box office. Movies I saw in the theater in 1992 instead included Wayne’s World and Batman Returns.

All good, as why did anyone have to understand what a movie was about to love the soundtrack. Not as a white suburban boy in Nebraska. All I had to do was enjoy the R&B beats in the evening, talking with girls on the phone, wearing Z Cavaricci jeans, a Girbaud sweater, lots of hair gel, and Cool Water cologne.

I got the Boomerang soundtrack just as I got my first stereo system, an Aiwa with 6” subwoofers with ports for stronger (as in not that strong) bass. I was excited it included a track by my favorite artist, P.M. Dawn. I remember the bass of “I’d Die Without You” as one of my first experiences with music in which bass was the focal (or aural) point, and so one of the seeds to my later obsession with packing the trunk of my Honda Accord with JL Audio 12s in my custom-designed-and-build MDF speaker boxes.

The title lyrics of “I’d Die Without You” were appropriately melodramatic to express whatever burning I felt in my chest for the crush of the week, but the song itself was disappointing as far as what I expected of P.M. Dawn. It was no “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss.”

I’m more than old enough to watch Boomerang now, but with a 49% Rotten Tomatoes score, it has a lot of competition in my Letterboxd account.