In A Different Ink

book dedications are so tender here is this piece of art i made for an audience of thousands. but really every word is for you

When there’s only one left 🔪

— problematic texture gap

'The Phantom of the Opera' 1925. Original Movie Posters.

IN THE DEAD OF THE NIGHT...🩸☠️🎸

Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" turns up again on the anniversary circuit — Batman Forever soundtrack, June 1995, thirty-one years on

Like, the first thing you have to know about "Kiss from a Rose" is that it was a flop. Twice, kind of. Seal wrote it in 1987, in a squat in London, on a four-track, before anyone knew who he was — and he was so embarrassed by it that he threw the tape in a corner and didn't touch it for years. He thought it sounded like a medieval folk song, which it does, that's the whole appeal, the 6/8 waltz time and the stacked madrigal harmonies, but in 1987 "sounds like something a troubadour would play at a Renaissance faire" was not a career move for a Black British guy trying to get into the funk-and-house circuit. So it sat in the corner.

Then in 1994 Trevor Horn pulls it out of him for the second Seal album — both his albums are just called Seal, which is the kind of thing you can do when Trevor Horn is producing you — and it gets released as a single, and it does basically nothing. Charted, stalled, fine, whatever. Album track.

Then in the summer of 1995 it gets stapled to a scene of Val Kilmer and Nicole Kidman on a rooftop in a Joel Schumacher movie, and it goes to #1 in America, wins three Grammys including Record and Song of the Year, and becomes the kind of permanent cultural fixture that gets covered on every singing competition show for the next three decades.

So the conventional read here is "great song finally finds its audience," and okay, that's correct, and it's also not what happened, because the thing that found the song an audience wasn't an audience. It was a corporate restructuring. Stick with me, I swear the Batman stuff is the actual story.

Here's the chain.

In 1992, Warner Bros. releases Batman Returns, the Tim Burton one with the Penguin drooling black bile and Michelle Pfeiffer doing latex psychosexual material that holds up uncomfortably well. It makes money — $266 million worldwide — but it makes LESS money than the 1989 one, and more importantly, McDonald's catches hell for the Happy Meal tie-in. Parents' groups, letters, the whole apparatus. McDonald's had paid for a kids' promotion attached to a movie where a man bites a guy's nose off. And the thing you have to understand about a 1990s tentpole is that the box office was almost the smaller half of the business — the merchandising, the fast-food promotions, the toys, the licensing, that's where the real position was. The 1989 Batman did something like $750 million in merchandise against $400 million in tickets. The movie is, in a meaningful accounting sense, an advertisement for the products.

So Warner doesn't fire Burton exactly — he gets kicked upstairs to "producer" — but they hand the franchise to Joel Schumacher with an explicit mandate: make it brighter, make it toyetic, make it safe for the Happy Meal. Schumacher, to his credit, understood the assignment completely and never pretended otherwise; he said in interviews for the rest of his life that he was hired to make a kid-friendly Batman and that's what he made. (He also made it the gayest studio blockbuster of the decade, neon and nipples and Tommy Lee Jones in a leopard onesie, which is its own essay — the man cut his teeth as a window dresser at Bendel's and a costume designer, and Batman Forever is basically a window display with a $100 million budget. The toy mandate and the camp aesthetic articulate with each other perfectly, by the way. Toys are bright. Camp is bright. Nobody at the studio could tell the difference.)

Okay, but this is really important: the same logic that governed the toys governed the soundtrack. Because the other thing about 1995 is that it sits at the absolute peak of the soundtrack-album economy, which is a specific, datable, material phenomenon that has now died so completely that people under thirty don't know it existed.

The mechanics: a CD retailed for $16-18 and cost under a dollar to manufacture. A soundtrack album was a CD you could fill with songs you'd acquired at favorable rates — because the artists' labels wanted the promotion — and then market with a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign you were ALREADY PAYING FOR, because it was the movie's campaign. Every TV spot for the film is a radio ad for the album. Every music video is a trailer for the film. The marginal marketing cost of the soundtrack rounds to zero. The Bodyguard soundtrack moved 45 million copies. Titanic's did 30 million. In 1994 the Lion King soundtrack was the best-selling album in America, period, beating everything by every actual band.

And Warner was uniquely positioned to run this play because Warner was VERTICALLY INTEGRATED for it — Warner Bros. Pictures and the Warner Music Group sat inside the same conglomerate, so the studio could feed its own labels, keep the synergy in-house, and book the revenue twice. The 1989 Batman had already proven it: that movie famously has TWO soundtrack albums, the Danny Elfman score AND a Prince album, because Warner had Prince under contract and needed product to move, and they jammed his songs into the film in places they manifestly did not belong. The Prince Batman album went to #1 for six weeks. Nobody involved cared whether "Batdance" served the narrative. The narrative served "Batdance."

So by Batman Forever this is a refined machine, and the soundtrack — on Atlantic, a Warner label — is assembled like a portfolio: U2 contributes "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" as the lead single, you get Method Man, PJ Harvey, the Flaming Lips, Brandy, a genuinely strange roster whose strangeness is the diversification strategy, one holding per demographic. And Seal — a Warner-affiliated artist, ZTT through Sire/Warner in the US — has this year-old album track lying around that didn't perform.

Here's the detail I love: Schumacher had wanted the song for a scene, couldn't make it work where he'd planned, and it ended up scoring the rooftop love scene more or less as a salvage decision. The single's music video — directed by Schumacher himself, which tells you exactly how seriously Warner took the cross-promotion — is Seal performing on a Gotham rooftop next to the Bat-signal, intercut with film footage. The Bat-signal is doing for Seal what it does for Commissioner Gordon. Summoning the asset.

And it works beyond anyone's projection. The song that died on its own in 1994 spends the late summer of 1995 at #1. Same recording. Same Trevor Horn production. Not a remix, not a re-edit — the identical master, now collateralized by a Happy Meal movie. The 45 million radio impressions that Warner's film division bought as movie advertising got paid out a second time as a hit single. The Grammys it won the following February — Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Male Pop Vocal — went to a song the market had already evaluated and declined, at the original offering.

(The genuinely funny part is the mismatch. Batman Forever is a loud plastic toy commercial with Jim Carrey screeching in green spandex, and its signature musical legacy is a hushed pseudo-Elizabethan waltz about — nobody knows what, Seal has spent thirty years refusing to say what the song is about, partly because, per interviews, he's not entirely sure. The song and the film share nothing except a balance sheet. They are still together forever, like a couple that stayed married for the mortgage.)

Now — you could read all this as a debasement story. Pure artwork, written in a squat, sincere and strange, gets strip-mined by a toy conglomerate. And I can see how you'd get upset. But the thing is, the squat version of the song was going to stay in the corner with the four-track tape. The medieval waltz was unsellable in 1987 and demonstrably undersold in 1994; the only economic structure on Earth that could move a 6/8 madrigal to the top of the Hot 100 was one that didn't have to care what the song sounded like — a distribution machine so indifferent to the product that it would push a Renaissance-faire ballad with the same force as "Batdance," because the song was never the product. The movie wasn't the product either. The product was the cross-promotional position itself, and the song was just riding in the sidecar, and it turns out the sidecar is the only vehicle that ever could have carried that particular song to that particular destination. The indifference WAS the patronage.

Which is, I'd note, not a new arrangement so much as a very old one with a worse logo. The court composer also wrote what the duke's wedding required, and the duke also did not listen very closely, and some nonzero amount of the Western canon exists because a patron needed content for an event and the content outlived the event. The axis where the rhyme breaks: the duke at least had to sit through the piece. Warner's accountants never had to hear "Kiss from a Rose" at all — it cleared as a line item, and the listening was outsourced to us, in perpetuity, on every adult-contemporary station and wedding playlist since.

The soundtrack economy itself died around 2003, when the CD margin collapsed and took the whole structure with it — there is no Spotify equivalent of a $17 disc you buy for one song, that specific arbitrage is extinct — so the machine that made "Kiss from a Rose" a standard can no longer make anything a standard. The song outlived its own infrastructure. The squat is gone, ZTT is a back-catalog holding, the Schumacher Batmans are a punchline, the CD pressing plants are condos, and the medieval waltz just keeps compounding on the principal a toy commercial put up in 1995.

Same as it ever was.

​metaphorically undressing myself via truth nuke

Someone get this guy his sunglasses

The Lost Boys (1987) // The Lost Boys Musical (2026)

people become so beautiful when you love them. do y'all know about this

Patrick Swayze as a ballet dancer in the early 1970s in New York City. Trained at Harkness and Joffrey Ballet schools and joined the Eliot Feld Ballet Company. His professional ballet career was cut short by a knee injury.

Party Knight. ⚜️

Part 14 in my weekly poster series for 2026

*twirls hair*