logoalt Hacker News

shagietoday at 12:20 AM0 repliesview on HN

Digging more into this... because why not... it appears that he (Kirk Thatcher) also wrote the song and there's a nice bit of real life lore in the Wired article.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/I_Hate_You

> According to the movie credits, the song was performed by the obscure band Edge of Etiquette. (Edge of Etiquette was, indeed, so obscure that it is rather difficult to find anything more about them than their having performed this particular song.) The punk on the bus who flipped Kirk "the bird" was played by Star Trek IV associate producer Kirk Thatcher. According to the Star Trek Encyclopedia, 4th ed., vol. 1, p. 354, Edge of Etiquette was a pseudonym for Thatcher.

> Thatcher also wrote the lyrics for the song to music written by Mark Mangini. A game card, from the Star Trek Customizable Card Game released by Decipher, excerpted the lyrics of the song. Thatcher had complained that the new wave music previously considered would not have been an accurate representation of what a 1980s punk would listen to, and offered to write "I Hate You" instead.

This links to https://www.wired.com/2016/09/punk-star-trek-iv-vulcan-nerve... ( https://web.archive.org/web/20161222223425/https://www.wired... ... ghads, their "you must log in" blocker even worked through the wayback machine ... use reader mode)

> But portraying “Punk on the Bus” would turn out to be Thatcher’s most lasting contribution to The Voyage Home. He and Nimoy had grown chummy during filming, so when the filmmakers were looking to cast the punk, Thatcher lobbied the director to get the role. “I told him, ‘Look, I used to have a mohawk, and I’ll dress the part—you won’t recognize me,'” Thatcher says. “Leonard said, ‘Huh, really,’ in that deep, basso profondo way. I couldn’t tell if he thought it was a stupid idea.”

> ...

> The song itself came later. Paramount Pictures had a music-licensing deal that gave it to access to songs by new-wave artists like Duran Duran, but none of those bands seemed like a good fit for Thatcher’s snarling character. “I said, ‘Leonard, that’s not punk. I could write you a punk song and it will cost you nothing. I’ll do it for [a few hundred dollars],'” says Thatcher. He wrote out the nihilistic lyrics, which he brought to his friend (and future Mad Max: Fury Road Oscar winner) Mark Mangini, a sound editor who came up with the song’s snotty, simple guitar riff. Thatcher himself sang vocals, and the whole tune was recorded on a weekend night, in a hallway that would provide the necessarily shitty sound.

> “My idea of punk at the time was the Dead Kennedys, Germs, Black Flag—real West Coast hardcore punk, that real raw sound,” Thatcher says. “I also wanted a Sex Pistols ‘God Save the Queen’ vibe, which is why I did the British accent.”

> As for Nimoy’s response? “He came by, heard it, and said, ‘OK. That’s very punk.'”