Film: The Cult Classic "Pump Up The Volume" Turns 35

Debuted on 22 August 1990, "Pump Up the Volume" the coming-of-age teen drama film written and directed by Allan Moyle. The film stars Christian Slater, Scott Paulin, Ellen Greene, and Samantha Mathis. Despite positive critical response, the movie topped out at $11 million at the box office at the time. 

The plot was this: high school student Mark Hunter lives in a sleepy suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, and broadcasts an FM pirate radio station from his parents' basement which functions as his sole outlet for his teenage angst and aggression. The station's theme song is "Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen and there are glimpses of cassettes by alternative musicians such as The Jesus and Mary Chain, Camper Van Beethoven, Primal Scream, Soundgarden, Ice-T, Bad Brains, Concrete Blonde, Henry Rollins, and Pixies. By day, Mark is a loner who has difficulty socializing. By night, he become Happy Harry Hard-on or simply "Hard Harry", he expounds outsider views about problems with US society, expresses teen angst, and exposes the underhanded actions of the faculty. His audience grows from a handful of loyal listeners to the entire student body.

Depressed teenager Malcolm Kaiser writes to Harry seeking advice about committing suicide. Harry flippantly expresses disbelief that Malcolm is sincere, saying "Maybe you'll feel better tomorrow." The next day it is discovered that Malcolm committed suicide.

Fellow student Nora De Niro deduces that Mark is Hard Harry, and attempts to assuage the guilt he feels over Malcolm. The radio show becomes increasingly popular after Harry apologizes to Malcolm for not telling him not to follow through, and exhorts his listeners to confront their problems instead of surrendering to them through suicide. At the climax of his speech, overachieving student and consistent listener Paige Woodward jams her medals and accolades into a microwave, causing an explosion which injures her face.

Unrest at the school increases as students share bootleg tapes re-playing Harry's show. A meeting of faculty and parents concludes that the pirate DJ is responsible for the problems at the school. The police investigate, first cutting off Mark's access to his P.O. Box, and then cutting off the wireless phone that Mark had surreptitiously hooked up at a neighboring house. The FCC begins an investigation.

Mark decides to make a final broadcast. He installs his radio station in his mother's Jeep, creating a mobile transmitter so the FCC will have difficulty triangulating the radio signal. Nora drives while Mark broadcasts pursued by the police and the FCC.

Harry's broadcast is heard by the entire school who have gathered at the athletics field. Mark's father, school board commissioner Brian Hunter, confronts Principal Loretta Cresswood demanding to know why she systematically expelled students with low test scores. Cresswood insists they were losers and troublemakers and that she did it for the good of the school. Brian immediately suspends Cresswood.

The harmonizer Mark uses to disguise his voice breaks, and Mark decides to broadcast his final message as himself. The Jeep drives up to the crowd of students, and Mark tells them that the world belongs to them and that they should make their own future. He encourages them to "steal the air" and begin their own shows to put their thoughts and feelings out into the world. The police arrest Mark and Nora. As they are taken away, students shout their appreciation of "Harry". Mark turns to the students and tells them to "Talk hard!" As the film ends, the voices of students, and even one of the teachers, are heard introducing their own pirate radio shows.

It was one of the most important roles in the career of Christian Slater, who a year after starring in cult favorite Heathers, made noise with another movie that has since earned a loyal following. This movie arrived decades before podcasters started using their medium for raw confessionals, writer-director Allan Moyle’s Pump Up the Volume featured Slater as a high school student and pirate radio DJ who causes a stir with candid commentary from his alter ego, "Hard Harry."

Moyle had written an unpublished novel that became the basis for Pump Up the Volume. John Cusack was considered for the role before it went to Slater. I’m quite surprised that it got greenlit when it did, but I doubt very much that it would get greenlit today,” says producer Rupert Harvey, who notes that New Line‘s later projects, including the Lord of the Rings franchise, were considerably more ambitious. Scott Paulin, Ellen Greene and Samantha Mathis rounded out the Pump Up cast, with Frank Zappa’s son Ahmet and Seth Green in supporting roles.

Harvey recalls a lengthy postproduction process to secure rights to songs from buzzy artists like Beastie Boys, Pixies, Ice-T and Soundgarden. The producer also remembers having to edit out some of the spicier language to achieve an R-rating for the film, which would later get attention for a scene involving Hard Harry simulating on-air masturbation.

"Pump Up the Volume" was a cult-movie that still resonates today, "Do you ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked-up?” as Christian Slater contemplates the fucked-up state of America in the Neighties. Now in 2025 when Donald Trump, a convicted felon, is president; people are being snatched off the streets and sent to foreign gulags; others are about to be kicked off of Medicaid. It’s easy to forget, prior to the internet, the feeling of being voiceless.

Is curiously to see how Pump Up The Volume predicted, and helped spark, a '90s teenage counterculture by simply depicting a shy teen with a ham radio who questions adult wisdom, challenges corruption at his school, blasts alternative music, and encourages his peers to “talk hard.”

Also contains one of the most enduring and influencer soundtracks. Leonard Cohen’s version of “Everybody Knows” which serves as the perfect song to open the movie with. Still the soundtrack does have a lot terrific tracks from The Pixies, Soundgarden, Cowboy Junkies and Sonic Youth highlighting alternative culture prior to the alternative breakout that Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991) would ignite.  Pump Up The Volume absolutely paved the way. “It felt like something was happening,” observes Samantha Mathis, who was 19 when she portrayed Mark’s poetry-writing love interest Nora in the film. “We were moving away from that synthesized sort of sound and moving into something edgier, and we had the dissonance of being around the ‘greed is good’ era of filmmaking and finance in the world. There was anger, and I thought Allan really tapped into that with this movie.” 

Rocktrospectiva: The Trangressive "Pump Up The Volume (Music From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) Turns 35

Released on 14 August 1990, "Pump Up the Volume (Music From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)"  was the soundtrack to Allan Moyle's 1990 drama film Pump Up the Volume. The album peaked at number 50 on the US Billboard 200 chart. 

"Do you ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked-up?” following that premise said by Hard Harry and still relevant 35 years later, the film told the story of Mark Hunter (the cool as fuck Christian Slater), a depressed high schooler in suburban Phoenix, Arizona, who hacks his shortwave radio and launches a pirate radio station. Under the moniker Happy Harry Hard-On, Mark slowly earns a cult following amongst his fellow screwed up students, doling out bullshit-free advice, dropping graffiti-worthy catch phrases (“So be it,” “Talk hard”) and challenging his school’s questionable expulsions of at-risk students.

It was a macabre idea for a teen movie, but even Moyle's suicidal DJ had his roots in actual 1960s history. Growing up in small-town Quebec, Moyle had a high-school classmate who had an amateur printing press in his basement. The classmate would write fiery screeds and then distribute them via anonymous pamphlets all over the school. Some of them were deeply felt musings on life, while others boldly criticized the principal and the school itself. Moyle admired this student from afar, and regarded him as someone unusually sophisticated for his age and his environment.

Going back with soundtrack, Moyle, who adored underground music, would have to make concessions, like naming the film Pump Up The Volume after a mainstream late-’80s dance hit by M|A|R|R|S. Still, much of Pump Up The Volume revolves around Harry and his unconventional musical tastes. In the same way that Moyle’s defiance towards homophobia had been shaped by working on Times Square, he also brought the underground instincts that had been showcased on that film's soundtrack to Pump Up The Volume. Featuring Sonic Youth, Concrete Blonde, Soundgarden, and the Pixies, Pump Up The Volume’s soundtrack would end up introducing its teenage audience to bands they’d never heard of—a year prior to the alternative explosion that Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991) would ignite. 

"You have to remember where music was at the time," recalled Dave Grohl at SXSW in 2013, listing Billboard’s Top 10 artists of 1990 when Nirvana was in the midst of signing with a major label (Bon Jovi, Billy Idol, En Vogue, Phil Collins, Mariah Carey, Madonna, Bell Biv DeVoe, Sinéad O’Connor, Roxette, and Wilson Phillips). “How Kurt could even think we’d make a ripple in this ridiculous mainstream world of polished pop music was beyond me.” 

Pump Up The Volume absolutely paved the way. "It felt like something was happening," observes Samantha Mathis, who was 19 when she portrayed Mark's poetry-writing love interest Nora in the film. "We were moving away from that synthesized sort of sound and moving into something edgier, and we had the dissonance of being around the ‘greed is good’ era of filmmaking and finance in the world. There was anger, and I thought Allan really tapped into that with this movie."

Moyle understood that there was no way Hard Harry could deliver blistering screeds on how his Boomer parents—and the school faculty—had sold out '60s ideals while blasting Phil Collins. The soundtrack and film itself borrows from the '60s—Leonard Cohen, the MC5, Sly Stone, and Mark’s obsession with Lenny Bruce's How to Talk Dirty and Influence People—but it doesn't idolize the era. Instead, it filters those influences through a late '80s/early ’90s haze of cultural exhaustion, skepticism, and Reagan/Bush fatigue. The soundtrack's juxtaposition of counterculture relics with then-rising bands like Soundgarden and Sonic Youth forecasts the coming explosion of '90s alternative, but the vibe is still characteristically Neighties—in-between, defiant, in honest search of definition and meaning.

At the same time, the film captured our awkward, stubborn '80s-ness—the part everyone wants to forget still existed in 1990. "It felt like the eighties might live forever when the Berlin Wall fell in November of '89, but that was actually the onset of the euthanasia (though it took another two years for the patient to die)," writes Chuck Klosterman in The Nineties.

Pump Up The Volume's soundtrack kicks off with Concrete Blonde's cover of Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows," Johnette Napolitano singing in a sultry, whiskey-soaked tone. Cohen's original version of "Everybody Knows" became the semi-official theme of Hard Harry's show after Moyle had fallen in love with the brooding song, which his then-wife had worked on as a sound engineer. 

But not everyone was a fan. The head of New Line, Bob Shaye, thought Cohen's version was too down head to be the opening song of the movie. He said, God that's dreary! Moyle recalls. So the studio had Concrete Blonde, a band with indie cred, do a cover. The Cohen song, however, was still used throughout the film, no doubt due to Cohen's '60s roots and its anti-establishment message.

The album then takes a romantic, melancholy turn with Ivan Neville's soulful "Why Can't I Fall In Love." After all, it's Mark’s relationship with Nora. Liquid Jesus performs a very '80s-sounding version of the 1969 Sly Stone song "Stand!," which calls for standing up for one’s principles and community.

Next up comes "Wave of Mutilation (U.K. Surf)," which would introduce many listeners to the Pixies for the first time, prior to Kurt Cobain's naming them as a major Nirvana influence. Moyle liked the song because it references a Charles Manson lyric, "Cease to Exist," which was released by the Beach Boys as "Learn Not To Love," about the tensions Manson witnessed between the Wilson brothers (Manson, oddly, struck up a friendship with Dennis in 1968). Peter Murphy's "I've Got A Secret Miniature Camera" contributes a lo-fi '80s vibe to the soundtrack, while a version of "Kick Out The Jams" by Bad Brains with Henry Rollins adds a snarling, '80s-steeped take on the late-'60s proto-punk classic.

Next one's "Above The Law's "Freedom of Speech" offers a welcome hip-hop addition—a genre that was about to explode alongside grunge. And speaking of grunge, Soundgarden's trippy, psychedelic "Heretic" draws parallels between Hard Harry's plight and another bygone era. "Titanium Exposé" by Sonic Youth was inspired by the ban's bohemian beginnings in early-'80s New York, when Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon were falling in love. "I wanted to write a straight-ahead urban love song, and when I say urban I mean I always love ideas about two people living within their means," Moore said.

The Canadian band Cowboy Junkies presents "Me And The Devil Blues" which was a remake of a song by Robert Johnson, who the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes as "the first-ever rock star." The album ends with the rare "Tale O' The Twister" by Chagall Guevara, the first verse describing the type of Manic Panic alterna-chick you’d see at Lollapalooza: "She was a cool blue redhead / She was a virgin vixen / She had the eyes of Lassie / She had the lips of Nixon."

In the final scene of Pump Up The Volume, as Hard Harry is being pushed into a squad car, he raises his fist and encourages his listeners to “steal the air.” We then hear a gathering of multiple voices, all with their own pirate stations. “You know how it ends with these voices announcing themselves?” Moyle said. “That is so internet! Blogs and podcasts! That scene still gives me the shivers because it’s such a powerful idea that kids in their rooms all over America can be expressed. And then wow, it happened!”

Pump Up The Volume went on to earn a modest $11.5 million in the U.S. and earn critical acclaim, not to mention help Christian Slater capitalize on his bad-assery in Heathers and become the hottest young actor in the universe. But perhaps more than anything, the film's soundtrack introduced unsuspecting viewers like myself to a whole group of artists that were on the verge of bringing alternative music to the masses. On the album were Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Pixies, and three fantastic covers: Concrete Blonde covering Leonard Cohen, Cowboy Junkies doing Robert Johnson, and Bad Brains with Henry Rollins offering a disorderly take on the MC's "Kick Out The Jams." A number of songs prominently featured in the film did not appear on the officially released soundtrack, including the original version of "Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen, which appeared on his 1988 album, I'm Your Man. Although Cohen's version serves as the theme song for Mark's (Christian Slater) pirate radio program during most of the film, he opens his final broadcast with the Concrete Blonde cover that appears on the soundtrack. Another Cohen song appears briefly when Mark is talking about Malcom's suicide on the air. The song is "If It Be Your Will" from Cohen's 1984 release Various Positions. Also present in the film but absent from the soundtrack are "Hello, Dad, I'm in Jail" by Was (Not Was) from their 1988 album What Up, Dog?, "Fast Lane" by Urban Dance Squad from their 1990 album Mental Floss for the Globe, "Weinerschnitzel" by The Descendents from their 1981 EP Fat, "Love Comes in Spurts" by Richard Hell and the Voidoids from their 1977 album Blank Generation, and "Talk Hard" by Stan Ridgway. "Girls L.G.B.N.A.F." by Ice-T is played on a boombox outside of the school by some boys.

Not as prominently featured is a legendary early track by the Beastie Boys entitled "The Scenario". Although the song appears only briefly in Pump Up the Volume, it is notable because it never appeared in any official release, however is available on hard to find bootleg recordings. The song was cut from the Beastie's Def Jam album Licensed to Ill after being deemed too explicit. Christian Slater's character explains this when he introduces it on the air saying, "Now here's a song from my close personal buddies, the Beastie Boys...a song that was so controversial they couldn't put it on their first album. "The Scenario," which to date has never received a commercial release.n the last few years, Pump Up The Volume has received its share of retrospective love, not only in how unappreciated it was at the time of its 1990 release, but also how the film was also far ahead of its time, predating blogs and podcasts as a way of teens dealing with social anxieties.

 

Pump Up The Volume (Music From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Track List: 

 

1. Concrete Blonde "Everybody Knows". 

2. Ivan Neville "Why Can't I Fall In Love"

3. Liquid Jesus "Stand!"

4. Pixies "Wave Of Mutilation (U.K. Surf)"

5. Peter Murphy "I've Got A Miniature Secret Camera"

6. Bad Brains & Henry Rollins "Kick Out The Jams"

7. Above The Law "Freedom Of Speech"

8. Soundgarden "Heretic"

9. Sonic Youth "Titanium Exposé"

10. Cowboy Junkies "Me And The Devil Blues"

11. Chagall Guevara "Tale O' The Twister