Interesting, only to me, of course, but these polls made me realize that I only loved the first song of the Craig era and only liked the second and the third song of the Brosnan era.
So, Bond songs which were an automatic love for me before have become an obligatory thing to be tolerated which I force myself to like - something I would never do with other pop songs.
And - pet peeve alert - during the last two eras there never was a fun song. It was all gloomy, dark, „this time it’s serious (joyless)… again.“
Will there ever be a Bond song again signaling: this is going to be fun, and Bond is here to save the day?
Unless it’s attached to a film that delivers on that promise, what’s the point? At least you can’t accuse the gloomy, dark songs as false advertising.
But are “good” and “fun” the same thing? I can appreciate the Craig entries quite a bit without ever saying I had a rollicking good time watching them. A title song should represent the film it’s attached to, and Craig’s generally have: they’re moody, introspective and full of regret and angst and foreboding. They fit in a way an exuberant LALD or AVTAK-type theme would not. The closest the Craig era comes to a “fun” song is “You Know My Name,” which is muscular and forceful and defies expectations, like the film it’s attached to. After that, we eventually settle into darker, almost elegiac entries both in terms of scripts and songs…with a brief stopover at “loud, discordant and jumbled” for QoS and its song, “Another Way to Die.” In their own way, they all fit.
Anyway, my point is I can love, let’s say “Saving Private Ryan” and still know “The Colonel Bogey March” would have been the wrong song for it.