Let my children hear music: Songs of hope and failure from Bob Ferguson and Bill & Ted

Note: This article contains spoilers for One Battle After Another and Bill & Ted Face The Music.

The song that leads the transition from One Battle After Another‘s failed revolutionary past to the current fascist moment is Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work,” a weary tune about being used over and over again and still not breaking out of the cycle. The despairing vibe fits how Leonardo DiCaprio’s revolutionary Ghetto Pat has become bombed-out dad Bob Ferguson, but the song’s meta component is what really lands. Steely Dan songs, per the late great Steve Albini, are “made for the sole purpose of letting the wedding band stretch out a little” and shit, let the man cook:

“All you ‘I used to hate them’ people, pleading their case like it’s a natural infirmity. ‘I need readers now, take pills for my prostate. Get winded on the stairs. And oh, I like that cocaine shit music now. Not just Boz Skaggs either.'”

Fucking guilty. Steely Dan is the band that you start to feel as you get older, when the party math starts hitting the 2:1 hangover ratio of bad days to good. It is music to feel let down and left behind to, and it is superb in that regard. I like that cocaine shit music of “Dirty Work” now (especially the version put out a few years back by my fellow Millennial Abbie Barrett). What a drag it is getting old, unable to see not just the future but the present. What are the kids even listening to these days? Whatever it is, it’s probably crap. Not like our music.

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A few years ago, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter reunited after nearly three decades to star in Bill And Ted Face The Music, a long-in-the-works sequel to their characters’ previous Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey. Bogus Journey ends with our heroes leading a concert that unifies the world, their newborn children on their backs as they shred away. The song they are “playing” is actually KISS’ cover of the Argent song “God Gave Rock And Roll To You,” an incredibly earnest and lame tune being performed by the most bombastic and mercenary rock band to ever strut across a stage. And somehow, adding corn to cheese makes something magical (a Cheez Doodle?), a song that finds the sincerity in bluster and platitudes and turns the final gasp of hair metal (still present in the early 90s but already being supplanted by alternative bands like Faith No More and Primus, both present in the film) into a blessing.

Face The Music undoes all of that. It turns out our boys didn’t actually write the song that unites the world, as the first movie’s prophecy foretold, and they’ve been failing to come up with a righteous tune ever since, despite the encouragement of their now-young-adult daughters, Thea Preston and Billie Logan. As apocalypse looms, Bill and Ted come up with the brilliantly dumbass idea of stealing the song from their future selves (who have obviously come up with it already), while Billie and Thea go off on their own into the past to collect musicians from Mozart to Hendrix in order to help their dads. In a shocking twist, it turns out that Billie and Thea wind up creating the world-saving song, by letting their chosen geniuses cut loose and then remixing the sound in vague fashion. 

“They offer something to the Bill & Ted trilogy that feels genuinely contemporary: voracious and omnivorous music fandom,” Evan Minsker writes in a perceptive Pitchfork column about the movie and its soundtrack, and how the titular heroes’ daughters bring their own sensibilities to bear. “In contrast to their dads’ teenage worship of Iron Maiden and Bon Jovi, these two go deep across genres. They’re instantly excited to see Kid Cudi when he appears in their front yard and they confidently reference the work of theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore.” Unfortunately, as Minsker notes, this enthusiasm and erudition results in a song that is not excellent, if not quite non-non-non-non-heinous. “Building to a wordless millennial whoop, it feels like an Arcade Fire knock-off with some ’80s hair metal harmonic guitar solos thrown in,” Minsker writes, and that is not wrong but my millennial ears also detected the uplifting cheer of indie folk, specifically that of the recently re-derided Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeroes. “God Gave Rock And Roll To You” feels like something the quasi-teen Bill and Ted would come up with in 1992, a dopey song these dopes would come by honestly from what they’ve listened to over the years. The song “Face The Music” feels like what Bill and Ted in 2020 would imagine their kids are into, based on the last time they paid attention to popular music. It’s pleasant for what it is, but a fraud.

At the end of Battle, Bob and Willa are back in their old home when Willa gets word of a protest in Oakland. She hits the road with Bob’s blessing, and the song that follows her out the door and into the credits is Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” which unlike the mush that closes Face The Music is one of the few songs that has a claim on being beautiful and true and openhearted enough to unite the world. It’s a song that claims Willa in its lineage, and Willa is a girl raised on promises who can claim the song as a promise that may still be kept. It’s also song that is four years removed from “Dirty Work.” And while it is timeless as long as there are girls and open roads and closes out the movie on a high note, it’s also a song handed down to someone who we never see listening to her own music (and whose prom plays fun but tired hits like Walk The Moon’s “Shut Up And Dance”). If “Face The Music” is a well-meaning and ham-fisted gift, an ugly sweater of a song, this deployment of “American Girl” is a dad’s dream.

Music from any place and any time can speak to a person of any age, of course. See Barrett’s cover of “Dirty Work” above, or maybe the 20th anniversary re-release of Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Linda Linda Linda, about a group of teen girls who cover the Blue Hearts at a high school concert. The movie does not show Doona Bae’s initial reaction to hearing “Linda Linda,” instead having her new bandmates describe her tears of joy at hearing one of the world’s most exuberant songs for the first time. Bae’s face is visible at the end of the film, though — plaintively singing the verse before shouting out the chorus, the band jumping in with her and pushing the beat, simultaneously claiming the song for themselves and blasting it out to an immediately apeshit crowd of fellow teens. The song doesn’t change or save the world, it just means everything in that moment, with no adults around. 

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The one thing Face The Music absolutely nails is casting Samara Weaving as Thea (aka Bill’s daughter) and Bridget Lundy-Paine as Billie (aka Ted’s daughter). Both actors physically resemble their movie parents in aspect and demeanor (Lundy-Paine in particular is uncanny as a young person whose dad is Keanu Reeves’ spacey and insightful Ted) and both play off their elders with affection and sweetness, apples who have fallen far enough from the tree to grow on their own while still carrying their lineage forward. And Reeves and Alex Winter play their frazzled dads with the support and singular focus of parents who are trying their best but still have not realized their children are now adults. This is funny but also touching and it leads to a wonderful moment that could only happen in a movie this goofy — Billie and Thea get killed and Bill and Ted find out about this and immediately commit suicide. Because they have experience in the afterlife (c.f. much of Bogus Journey) and know how to deal with its weirdness, and it is not even a question that they will blow up their own lives to help their daughters escape. They’ve been there before and they know the way out.

As Willa, Chase Infiniti does not at all resemble DiCaprio in One Battle After Another, although that is revealed to very much be the point. And yet they still share a bond. Bob Ferguson is a burnout, a guy who lectures high school teachers and threatens high school students (and who, to be clear, is hilarious and more right than not both times). He is going nowhere and content in this, Steely Dan made manifest, until the government forces that put him and his daughter Willa on the run in the first place come for them again. This does not turn Bob into a Liam Neeson character, he is nearly as fucked-up and fried when dealing with a network of secret revolutionaries as he is when trying to watch The Battle Of Algiers on TV. But while he can’t remember all the codes he still knows enough to move his ass through an escape tunnel, to pick up what a covert social worker is laying down, to take a rifle and honestly be a pretty fucking badass shot from a prime sniper position he’s scoped out. He’s immediately falling back to (if not properly executing) procedures that have penetrated even deeper into his life than decades of crappy weed in order to save his daughter. Who he’s already taught to save herself — Willa may have her own fuck-ups like her old man (that damn cell phone!) but has also paid attention to the admonitions and advice and self-defense lessons that help her triumph before her dad can come to the rescue.

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Bill and Ted dive into Hell after their daughters, but need Billie and Thea to actually get everyone out (by facilitating a reunion with Death, their estranged bass player, and just fucking watch Bogus Journey already if none of this makes sense). The tensest part of the movie, as far as a genial comedy like this can be tense, is whether some stubborn old guys will listen to the advice of some younger women. The tensest part of Battle is not whether Willa will kill her pursuers but whether father and daughter will shoot each other after the enemies have (for a time) been vanquished. Willa demands more code words and Bob doesn’t have them, but he has his dopey, loving self and Willa sees that, just as Billie and Thea know their dads for what they are and aren’t.

There is a strange mix of hope and need in these movies, both written by aging Gen Xers (Paul Thomas Anderson, and Bill & Ted creators Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson) with kids of their own. I don’t have kids, but I think wanting more good and less bad for your children than you had yourself is an overwhelming drive for parents — not a frictionless life for the people you have raised, but a life that avoids the mistakes and setbacks of your own. But what happens when you’ve done your best and the world is still falling apart? When you’re leaving something broken behind, the people who follow you are the only ones who can fix it. That is a hell of a burden to carry. 

Maybe these movies can’t help but come up short. You can only see as far as your own horizon and guys like Bob or Bill and Ted, and their creators, have more to look back on than forward to. Willa and Billie and Thea are listening to things their parents never will, but they also have heard some dad rock they’ll take with them. Maybe this is the conduit that Benicio Del Toro’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos is talking about when he says “we’ve been laid siege for hundreds of years,” centuries of knowledge being passed on in contrast to the narrative — one particularly tied to would-be revolutionaries — of parents letting down their kids. I don’t believe in “Face The Music” saving the world and if we’re really honest, I don’t believe in “American Girl” keeping the revolution alive at the end of Battle. At worst, these songs extol youthful action on terms set by the old guard, they sound like washed dudes who don’t want to do the hard and dirty work of fighting for the future anymore and instead pass the buck to their kids. But at best they are an attempt to share the idea of a song going forward, knowing that what will echo in the future is not for our ears. We can give rock and roll to everyone, but what they do with it is up to them.