In addition to everything else, Michael Mann is a genre of music. A cousin to something like night bus, Manncore is defined not by a single sonic palette or era but by mood. It began in the miasmic swamp of ambient: Early films were a soup of swirling synthesizers and flutes. In the '90s, titanic figures emerged from this fog -- swashbuckling strings, hard-driving trip-hop, wailing adult-contemporary guitars. Naturally, also, Audioslave. Mann is a notoriously hard editor, shredding the original compositions of his collaborators as he repeatedly re-edits his films, fitting all the barely comprehensible terminology and overwrought music into increasingly baroque configurations. You just assume he needed this many songs, over time. Phil Collins' "In The Air Tonight" is perhaps the ultimate example of Manncore -- in the Miami Vice pilot, the song's famous drum roll lends a sense of triumph to a man who can't stop working. Mann repurposed the song for the show's 2006 reboot, this time eschewing the original for a cover by the unknown nu-metal band Nonpoint. The point is that only Mann sees in Miami Vice an art-damaged cyberpunk dream; only Mann could soundtrack it to nu-metal. The core is pure sound.
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