Another Way To Die

Eyewear readers know the profane calendar can be divided into years, months, and days, that do, or do not, feature a James Bond film. In one of the great pop culture moments of all time, the cult singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, dying of cancer, said it would be "a drag" if he died before the next Bond film came out. Paul Muldoon, as we know, worked with Zevon - what the world needs now is a Muldoon long poem on Bond. In the meantime, we have the new theme song (well, we did until it was removed from Youtube for copyright reasons) from Jack White (and Alicia Keys) for the Qauntum of Solace film; the song's title is not the title of the film, which seems needlessly busy (but Bond movies do that sometimes, think of the classic Louis Armstrong ditty), but is instead, Another Way To Die. Well, okay, it isn't Duffy, or Amy Winehouse - they would have been elegantly, or at least retro-great, with the Ronson treatment. But, in the same cluttered offbeat tradition of Paul McCartney's Live and Let Die, White's song captures some of the uneven, even stilted violence and suspense at the core of the Bond mythos, with moments of stuttered grandiosity and sampled trumpets. It'll do.