Rate the James Bond Movie Theme Songs

Because it's Saturday and I'm bored, I think I'll...

Rate the James Bond Movie Theme Songs

• a-ha - The Living Daylights

  Fans were all over a-ha back when they had that hit video they did once about crooked bikers beating people up with wrenches. What they were doing years later writing the theme for Timothy Dalton's best Bond movie is anybody's guess. a-ha's problem is that their sound is far too pussy for the likes of James Fucking Bond. Now if they'd done the Steel Magnolias soundtrack.... D
  
  

• Duran Duran - A View to a Kill

  Top notch work by a band whose members probably have all banged Grace Jones, so that gives this song some raw experience. I remember being positively awed by the video when it was new, but VH1 Classic giveth and, in this case, taketh away. Even if this song didn't totally rock, it would still get a good grade because of the lead singer's willingness to close the video by saying "Bon. Simon LeBon." This song may in fact even be better than the film itself. A
  
  

• Garbage - The World Is Not Enough

  Just when you start suspecting that Shirley Manson is forgetting how to glam, she hits you with a song so seductive, so vampy, that Madonna should've taken a can of gasoline and set her own ass on fire and apologize for that whole Breathless Mahoney bullshit. The tone of the song really fits the style of the film, which itself seems to be a two-hour apology for Tomorrow Never Dies. If the DVD of this movie included a feature to replace Denise Richards's on-screen time with, I don't know, maybe loud static or a test pattern, that would be marvelous. A+
  
  

• Lani Hall - Never Say Never Again

  A trite and uninspired disco fugue plagues this song, which matches the movie perfectly: this was Sean Connery's last Bond movie, and, if I recall correctly, the only Bond film not made by UA/EON Productions. It's basically Thunderball with arthritis. And, like Connery's unconvincing hairpiece, this song shows just how tired the sound had become. It's lucky I give it a: C
  
  

• Paul McCartney - Live and Let Die

  Even if this song wasn't forever tied in my mind to images of Roger Moore banging Jane "Two Different Eye Colors" Seymour after torching a tarantula with a cigar and some Aqua Net, I'd still enjoy McCartney's fusion of an orchestral sound with reggae rhythm. This song is another example of a theme that's better than the film. B
  
  

• Rita Coolidge - All Time High

  This song is probably called "All Time High" because nobody wanted to try to rhyme "Octopussy". There was a period of time in the 1980s when "Valium" became a household word and everybody started appreciating the mellow vocal stylings of Crystal Gale and Anne Murray. I don't quite get it, and this song is just too laid-back to pair with a film that features rotary saw yo-yos and guys getting octopi latched to their faces. A pleasant song on its own, but certainly unworthy of a Double-0 agent. C
  
  

• Sheryl Crow - Tomorrow Never Dies

  I'm pretty sure Sheryl Crow was going for the same sultry tone in this song that Garbage got later on with "The World is Not Enough", but she ended up sounding like she'd just woken up and didn't quite know where she was. She may be a capable artist in her own right, something akin to a Liz Phair you can let your parents hear, but the subject matter easily outclasses her abilities. If the best that Crow can come up with is "martinis, girls, and guns / It's murder on our love affair", she should probably have passed on the project. F
  
  

• Shirley Bassey - Goldfinger

  A classic. There is no more memorable theme song than this. It is the absolute pinnacle of Bond songs. It enjoys the big band sound that Bond bore in his earliest films combined with a lyrical analysis of the main villain's desires and modus operandi. If only Shirley Bassey had worked the words "Operation Grand Slam" into it somewhere, the song might have served as its own radio promo. A+
  
  

• Shirley Bassey - Moonraker

  If you ask Shirley Bassey to write a Bond song and she gives you "Goldfinger", you sure as hell are going to ask her to do it again. Unfortunately they waited too long and ended up getting "Moonraker", which is as aimless and ad-hoc as the movie itself. Moonraker got rushed into production to cash in on the space action craze created by George Lucas's Star Wars franchise. I enjoy this movie, but almost exclusively because Hugo Drax can do no right. In my mind, he was a subtle inspiration for Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith persona from The Matrix, albeit considerably dumbed-down for that performance. When you're watching a Bond movie, you don't want to feel like you have to yawn in the first ten minutes, which is exactly what this song does to you. D
  
  

• Tom Jones - Thunderball

  At some point, Tom Jones looked at Shirley Bassey's performance in the previous Bond movie and said "I have to copy that." What we get is his knock-off theme, an uninspired high energy big band romp that explains just how competitive, unrepentant, and proactive Thunderball is. Jones can't even get away from Bond's theme, threading it through the melody in so many places that you start wondering if "Thunderball" is an original song or not. The only saving merit of this tune is Jones's big Welsh pipes, which masterfully deconstruct just how much we all suck and how much Thunderball rocks. B