Hacker Cinema
Pump Up the Volume
1990 · Film · 102 min
Directed by Allan Moyle
Mark Hunter, a lonely high school student, uses his shortwave radio to moonlight as the popular pirate DJ "Hard Harry." When his show gets blamed for a teen committing suicide, the students clash with high school faculty and the authorities.
4 positive7 neutralfrom 11 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
11 comments on Hacker News
This whole thread makes me think of Pump Up the Volume. As a teen, we used to get together in one location and everyone would tune in to the same station and leave doors open or windows down so music was everywhere just like scenes in the movie. Doing that with streams makes this impossible. Even with the popularity of streaming, if there was a station with a show that catered to the teen hang out like this I can see it regaining popularity.
Pretty sure I first found out about Cohen (and Pixies!) via Pump Up The Volume (1990). Fantastic movie. I thought the Concrete Blonde Everybody Knows cover was good, but then I dug and found the real thing and was blown away..
Probably inspired by Happy Harry Hardon https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100436/
I've been a radio enthusiast for as long as I can remember (one of my favourite movies is "Pump Up The Volume"). Since late 2022, I've developed a knack for programming. I started coding at the age of 48, just before the AI tidal wave.
Out of these twin passions, I've built a small project which is already being used by DJs, radio presenters and a few podcasters: the AI JINGLEMAKER.
The AI JINGLEMAKER enables you to create DJ drops, Station IDs, podcast intros and other jingles in a few seconds.
You can pick an intro FX, a background sound, an outro FX, create your voiceover with the power of AI and let the JINGLEMAKER magically generate your jingle in the blink of an eye! You can download both the final jingles and the raw voiceovers.
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QOs2MEsL5o
"pump up the volume" is also a cool movie about high school pirate radio
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_Up_the_Volume_(film)
This probably doesn't matter very much, but I found it very interesting. If you watch some old 80s movies, you'll find they had a very naive sense of information, deception, and revolution. I'm thinking particularly of movies or shows like Pump Up the Volume or Max Headroom. "The People" (ie, a few extras and the main characters) were presented with "the truth" (ie, a few sentences about some minor corruption.) and this led to a deus ex machina revolution where those powers were somehow "defeated." Even if this didn't happen on screen, it was sort of implied "everything is ok now."
I think these sorts of cultural ideas hearken back to the cold war, and refer directly to the USSR. Real, specific coverups occurred, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Soviet_cover-ups) and were perpetrated directly by specific government officials, and these specific government officials sat atop a very fragile and vulnerable government structure. Furthermore, the government truly attempted to cover things up, usually successfully.
Obviously we're in a much different world now, and the propagation of information has forced an evil government to move from coverup to disinformation. (or at least spin and messaging.) It sometimes feels like the culture has not quite caught up to this yet. I still see people shouting that people need to know "the truth," and there seems to be an expectation that once "the people" know "the truth," then everything will be alright, just like we saw on TV so many times.
This made me think of the movie, “Pump up the Volume,” where Christian Slater has a pirate radio station and at one point he moves all his gear into a moving van to avoid detection.
Isn't this illegal? How is the student data making its way into the sheriff department's hands?
This reminds me of the 1990 film Pump Up The Volume [0] where the school's dean was creating dossiers on singled out students, which was eventually portrayed as a criminal act in the end.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_Up_the_Volume_(film)
[0.0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100436/
Remember the movie, “Pump Up The Volume?”
Reading this kind of reminded me of old Christian Slater movies like Pump up the Volume and Heathers, and other movies of the GenX era. (But, I’m sure films of the 60s fit, as well)
Hopefully this is a sign that this generation is forming its identity and ready to express it with some real cultural movements! I’ve been waiting eagerly for their cultural identity to emerge and express itself with authentic art, music, film, etc.
However, I also find the essay ironic. When the Internet first went mainstream, one phenomenon was “the lurker” - the fact that most, the mass majority, of internet users only “consumed content” (although, back then it wasn’t called content). That’s because few of us felt confident enough to claim enough expertise to share much. Therefore, most of us just “lurked”. We let the experts speak, and we indulged in surfing on their knowledge.
In this “Instagram era”, though, everyone is expected to be a “content creator”. (e.g. everyone has a github!) But, to be one, one unfortunately misses out on a long history of prior work. One gets so bogged down by creating new content and reading all of the new content created within the previous few hours, that much of the past 108 years of knowledge and wisdom isn’t fully accessible. And, although the author seems to try to escape that vortex, they also seem to have ignored that they’re mostly reinventing ideas that were created between McLuhan and 2010.
But, that is ok! I actually read the whole thing and enjoyed it (because it also kinda reminded me of reading Zines). Yeah, as others have said, it could use some editing, but at least it has paragraphs!
There was a time in the 80s when you could pick up a TB-303 or a TR-808/909 for $20 -- nobody wanted them! The 303 didn't sound like a bassline. The 808 certainly didn't sound like actual drums. And the people buying them weren't classically trained musicians: they were dudes who liked the music and wanted to try it themselves.
There's a documentary I really like on the history of House music called "Pump Up The Volume," and it can actually be found entirely on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1HpY65cXDA -- it covers what some of the early genre originators were doing and feeling at the time. Generally they were just experimenting, as well as doing the "track -> venue/club -> evaluate" feedback loop so common in the origin of genres. However, I still think it's cool to hear them discuss their unique contributions to a style that would eventually grow far larger than they ever expected.
There are also some good books on the history of electronic music I can recommend, the best one being "Last Night A DJ Saved My Life" http://www.amazon.com/Last-Night-DJ-Saved-Life/dp/0802146104/