The Rolling Stones: You Can't Always Get What You Want, in The Big Chill (1983) The precise moment in which the counter culture capitulated to the emergence of reactionary conservatism can be identified with Lawrence Kasdan's requiem to liberty and free expression. At the funeral of a free spirit's suicide, middle-aged baby boomers face a future of uncertainty with a mixture of hopelessness, malaise, and nihlism.
They wanted freedom, they wanted to change the world, but in the face of reality, they gave up the fight, leaving their heirs to fend for themselves, without champions, without direction, and without any guidepost but need.
Tangerine Dream: Love on a Fast Train, in Risky Business (1983)
One of the most cynical manipulations of a cultural outcome in movie history, Risky Business was originally intended to serve as a rejection of the materialistic values it came to exemplify. Origionally, the ending left Tom Cruise' character out of Princeton and without the girl. Instead, the sexiest moment in modern movie history forever tied success and the labidos of a generation to machiavellian business tactics.
Just as the left gave up their grasp on the future, the right grabbed it with enduring effect.
Lynrd Skynrd: Sweet Home Alabama, in Forrest Gump (1994)
No film has ever defined an era more successfully than Forrest Gump defined the Viet Nam era. Here in clear relief, Americans are presented with a simple hero, filled with love and unenumbered by sophistication RUNNING headlong into the difficult war, its violent, unhinged detractors, and the suicidal drug culture they enabled.
Gump's selfless heroism embodied the self image of many southern, conservative and traditional voters. These voters couldn't help but rally around the profoundly loyal and mythologically powerful image of a southern man's walk through history. When "Sweet Home Alabama" peals through the film, it seals the deal. Forrest Gump's celebration of souther values, virtue and faith in the face of tulmultuous 20th Century history solidified the conservative vision in the American psyche as a positive celebration of faith.
Jordan Houston, Cedric Coleman and Paul Beauregard: It's Hard out Here for a Pimp, in Hustle and Flow (2005)
Eastern traditions remind us that the lotus grows in the mud. There has never been a more emotional moment embodying this profound truth than when a run-down prostitute delivers a stirring, powerful, moving song "hook" in the Academy Award winning theme song from Craig Brewer's explosive Hustle and Flow.
Could there be a more painful reminder of our fragmented society that the first Academy Award for Best Song ever awarded an African American is an elegy to a pimp. Our culture continues to disenfranchise and remove opportunities from the least among us, regardless of race, and American economic populism continues to gain traction among all races across the nation.
Smashmouth: All Star, in Shrek (2001)
There has never been a moment where the media better carried the message. When Smashmouth's "All Star" introduced American audiences to the digitally-animated, self-actualized ogre, Shrek, it perfectly prepared us for the film's de-Disnified message of authenticity over image and truth over fairy tales.
Rousing, nonsensical, and filled with joy, "All Star" takes the edge off the dirty truth of real life that Shrek's mudbaths and earwax-candle-lit dinners embody. Shrek's authenticity debunks the materialism that has subsumed American culture and that is underscored by the Disney ethic of success found through perfect beauty. This is the defining moment of our children's cultural psychology, and it bodes well for the future. "Love's true form" is not the elegant Fiona, but the Fiona Ogre who is loved for who she is.