Pump Up the Volume Is the ’90s Teen Movie That’s Relevant Right Now

Pump up the Volume Christian Slater

There is no needle drop quite like the one that kickstarts Pump Up the Volume. We are less than five minutes into the movie. Credits are still popping up on screen in neon, graffiti script, but we’ve already seen that the kids are not alright in this completely ordinary town. The camera leads us into a bland suburban home, into a room stocked with cassettes and audio equipment. Someone— we’ve heard his voice, but have yet to see his face— literally drops the needle on a Leonard Cohen record.

“Everybody knows that the dice are loaded/Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed,” he sings. 

I hadn’t thought about this scene in years. But, on a recent Wednesday night at Alamo Drafthouse, every memory I had of a movie that I saw who-knows-how-many times between 1990 and 2000 came back to me in that opening sequence. And that song, it tells you exactly what you need to know about the movie right at the start of it. 

Released at the end of the summer of 1990, Pump Up the Volume is a teen drama starring Christian Slater, who had already earned his hot-bad-boy reputation in Heathers, as a nerdy kid who just moved to a sleepy town in Arizona that looks suspiciously like Santa Clarita, California. (The movie was filmed in Saugus, btw.) But Slater’s character, Mark Hunter, also has a secret. He’s the host of a pirate radio station that’s about to expose how corrupt the local high school is. 

“Everybody knows the war is over/Everybody knows the good guys lost,” sings Cohen. 

Pump Up the Volume was the first R movie I snuck in to see. Technically, it was the only time I “snuck” into an R movie. The older sister of one the girls in our group bought the tickets for us, but we quickly realized that not one person at the Granada Hills UA cared that we were years away from 17. It was a moment of liberation. Now we knew that we didn’t have to wait for VHS releases of the movies that our parents were okay with us seeing, but some old biddy somewhere decided was too racy for middle school kids. 

When my friends and I saw Pump Up the Volume back in 1990, it was absolutely, 100% because of Christian Slater, but, I was already starting to shift from an ‘80s pop kid to a ‘90s alt teen, so, culturally, the movie resonated with me. I had spent much of my summer vacation listening to KROQ with a blank cassette in the tape deck, ready to record songs from bands like the Pixies, Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream. I understood many, but not all, of the references in the movie. Plus, I read enough news to have a feeling that the world is a mess. So, when Slater’s voice-in-the-night opens the film with, “You ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up?” it made sense. 

I watched Pump Up the Volume many times over a period of years, but there’s a big difference between watching a teen movie when you are one and revisiting it when you’re a full-fledged grownup. Similarly, there’s a difference between watching one of the quintessential ‘90s movies in its time and sitting through a revival screening in 2025. 

Maybe at the time, I understood that Pump Up the Volume wasn’t talking down to its young audience, but, as an adult, I see how important that is. Even the choice of the Leonard Cohen needle drop goes against what people assume about kids. “Everybody Knows” came out in 1988, but Cohen had been active since the ‘60s. My parents knew who he was. I didn’t. It would be roughly equivalent to using a recent song from Belle & Sebastian in a movie targeting today’s teenagers. It’s a choice that would baffle the marketing department, but it works from a narrative standpoint and it works if you know that the intended audience is thoughtful enough to listen to lyrics that will remain relevant decades later. 

“Everybody knows the fight was fixed/The poor stay poor, the rich get rich,” goes the song in the movie. 

There’s also one scene that seems more poignant now than it did back in the day. Mark, in his Happy Harry Hard-On radio persona, connects with a student on-air who describes how he was the subject of a homophobic prank. He speaks about how he knows he’s gay— “I’m not ashamed,” he says as he starts to recount the events— and the response is subdued. Hard Harry, as he’s also known, doesn’t crack jokes. The kids listening to the show are silent. This kind of empathy for LBGTQ characters was pretty unusual in film and television at the time. The movie’s release was two years before The Real World debuted and My So Called Life was still four years away. When I saw the recent Pump Up the Volume screening, I noticed the silence and then recalled how quiet the theater was during the scene so many years ago, when it was full of actual teenagers. 

A decade before he directed Pump Up the Volume, Allan Doyle made a movie called Times Square, about two teen girls who meet in a hospital ward and run away together. It’s not expressly stated that the girls are in a romantic relationship, but it’s inferred that they are. While the caller in Pump Up the Volume only appears in one scene, his frankness points to changing times, that movies about young people could be more open in 1990 than what was possible in 1980. 

Yet, the world doesn’t change all that drastically. It’s worth mentioning that the adult characters who tuned in to Hard Harry during that scene mostly respond like assholes, which is how they respond to virtually everything throughout the movie. 

When you’re a kid, it’s easy to take the young-versus-old trope at face value. I mean, it’s not exactly a lie. Adults do forget their own youth. They do flex their authority while ignoring the concerns younger people have. Generally speaking, adults are assholes. 

“That’s how it goes/Everybody knows”

But, the young-versus-old trope is also a good metaphor for any type of power structure. The youth in revolt could refer to everyone in the U.S. who lacks clout. We might think we can make our own decisions, but choice is, to an extent, an illusion when you’re living in a society dominated by all-too-powerful corporate interests. In this case, then, the adults would specifically be the corporate bigwigs and gazillionaires who say they’re doing what’s best for us because they are rich and therefore know better, when, in reality, they’re simply trying to hoard more wealth for themselves at our expense. 

I’m not going to breakdown the whole plot of Pump Up the Volume, but, yes, there is absolutely a parallel between a 1990s movie about students rising up against a school run by greedy pigs and people in 2025 living in a United States run by greedy pigs. So, go find the movie and watch it. Maybe it will inspire you. Maybe pirate radio stations need to make a comeback. 

Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique MixFollow on Instagram for more updates.

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