As my Song Factory course at the New School comes to its conclusion, we are moving past the specifics of particular genres and eras and into larger questions about the cultural life of songs. This week we are discussing songs in movies and TV shows. The conversation deliberately will not include scores or musicals, interesting though those are; instead, we will focus only on soundtracks. We will start off by distinguishing between scores and soundtracks: scores are custom-created for the film or show, while soundtracks are compiled from existing music. They are created by different people, too; scores are written by composers, while soundtracks are selected by music supervisors.
Next, we will explore the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic music. Diegetic music is part of the characters’ reality: songs playing on a car radio or home stereo, or a musical performance taking place. Non-diegetic music, on the other hand, is not part of the characters’ reality, it exists “outside” it. Nearly all film scores are non-diegetic, but soundtrack songs can work both ways.
The first episode of Succession starts with a classic diegetic song. After a short scene of Logan and Marcia at home, we hear “An Open Letter to NYC” by the Beastie Boys over establishing shots of downtown Manhattan. You might initially think that this is serving as underscoring, but it turns out to be playing in Kendall’s headphones. (There’s a brief and funny shot from the perspective of the driver, as Kendall raps awkwardly along without the track being audible.)
This is straightforward character establishment: Kendall is a rich guy who is culturally aware enough to know the words to a Beastie Boys song, but maybe not culturally aware enough to realize that he sounds like a douchebag rapping along to them.
For contrast, here’s a clip accompanied by a non-diegetic song: the first scene in the first episode of Better Call Saul. We see people working in a Cinnabon in a shopping mall, shot in arty black and white, to the sound of “Address Unknown” by The Ink Spots.
You will probably quickly figure out that Jimmy/Saul/Gene seems like he doesn’t belong there, though if you haven’t watched the show, you may not know who exactly he is. We are expected to understand that “Address Unknown” is not playing in the Cinnabon, and that the people in the scene probably wouldn’t be familiar with it. We in the audience aren’t expected to recognize the song either, or even place what decade it’s from. (It was released in 1939; I certainly couldn’t have guessed that until I looked it up.) A show like this can turn its limited song licensing budget to its advantage by picking delightful obscurities. It’s certainly more interesting than whatever song would actually have been playing in a Nebraska Cinnabon in 2010.
Here’s a different character-establishing non-diagetic song from The Big Lebowski: Bob Dylan’s “The Man In Me” playing over the opening credits as ordinary-looking people bowl in slow motion.
When I have played this for students, they can identify the singer as Dylan, but no one recognizes the song. I would have guessed that it’s from Dylan’s deeply uncool 1980s period. That’s incorrect, the song is from 1970, but the basic idea here is that that this song is not a classic. A Los Angeles bowling alley wouldn’t have been playing Dylan in 1991, but you could imagine The Dude listening to him. This isn’t necessarily why the Coens chose “The Man In Me”, though. More likely, they are pointing to the cultural status of characters: slovenly, unhip, out of touch. This is not a compassionate portrayal; while the characters in the film are uncool, the movie itself is extremely cool.
Here’s a more complicated song choice from HBO’s amazing Watchmen series. We see a rich older white guy (Jeremy Irons) doing something mysterious in an opulent manor house. Early in the sequence, we see his record player, a gorgeous old gramophone, and we see the cover of the record that’s playing on it: “Israelites” by Desmond Dekker and the Aces.
Who is this guy? What year is it? Is this a dream? I won’t spoil the answer; I recommend watching the show. I will say that there is some backstory to the seemingly inexplicable song choice: in the original Watchmen comic, this character mentions liking dub music, which at the time would have signified that he had surprisingly cool and forward-thinking taste. However, while “Israelites” is Jamaican, it isn’t dub, it’s ska. So rather than sounding futuristic (or retrofuturistic), the song just registers as weirdly unrelated to whatever is happening. That could well have been the point!
Here’s a scene where the song matches up with the action in an obvious way: the ending to The Breakfast Club, set to “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds.
This example doesn’t exactly fit my theme, because it was written specifically for the movie, so it’s more of a score than a soundtrack. But the song also has a cultural life of its own independent from the movie, so I think it still counts. It was a bit of a challenge for my students to hear its sonic signifiers as meaning anything other than “80s”, since at the time it just sounded like, you know, how music sounded. One student did pick up on how nostalgic the vocals sound, even amid the very-of-its-time production.
Speaking of the 1980s, here’s another iconic closing credits sequence, from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, set to “Oh Yeah” by Yello. What does it mean?
For another example from an earlier generation, check out The Graduate’s use of “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” by Simon and Garfunkel.
Dustin Hoffman’s character is fresh out of college, and Simon and Garfunkel would have sounded new, cool and youthful at the time. However, this particular song dates back at least to the 19th century, and parts of it go back several hundred years further. Its use of Dorian mode certainly sounds medieval. The instrumentation includes glockenspiel and harpsichord, which are not medieval-sounding at all; instead, they communicate an unspecific old-timiness, a kind of wistful mysticism. Imagine how differently this scene would play over a jazz ballad.
For something lighter, here’s a good diegetic song from Breaking Bad.
Another lighter example: Bridgerton’s use of current pop songs as performed by the Vitamin String Quartet, a neat parallel to the contradictory reality of the show. It supposedly takes place in England in the early 1800s, but is full of anachronisms, not just in its multiracial casting, but in the hair and costumes too.
Compare Bridgerton’s soundtrack to something like Game of Thrones or Harry Potter. Imagine if you heard a current pop song in either of those series. How weird would it be? This is especially surprising for Harry Potter, which supposedly takes place in “our” world in the very recent past. Yet you would never see Harry listening to the Smiths or Dizzee Rascal. There is one moment when the movies do suggest that the young wizards have a youth culture, and it is extremely awkward:
This band includes Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey of Pulp and Jonny Greenwood and Phil Selway of Radiohead. But they were given an impossible task, to write a rock song for a world that can’t have any actual rock music in it.
My last example is the Mad Men episode “Lady Lazarus“, which ends with the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows“. This placement cost $250,000. In my opinion, it was well worth it.
I love this so much. Megan would absolutely have known and loved this song, and Don would absolutely have hated it.
It seems like being a music supervisor would be an easy job (choosing the music, anyway; negotiating the licenses doesn’t seem easy at all). But it is hard to get it exactly right, because songs have to work on so many different levels at once. Any piece of recorded music comes tangled in a dense web of signifiers and associations, most of which act on us unconsciously. One common trap is for music supervisors to project their own excellent taste onto characters who are unlikely to be as cool as they are. My example of this is the iconic series ending of Six Feet Under, set to Sia’s “Breathe Me“.
This sequence is deservedly beloved, but Clare is listening to “Breathe Me” in her car on a mix CD that her finance bro boyfriend made for her. A finance bro would probably not have been listening to Sia in 2005. The converse problem is music supervisors not being as cool as the characters. I watched a little of Euphoria, and was distracted by all the 90s rap on the soundtrack. That music reflects the tastes of the middle-aged TV producers, not high school kids in California in 2019. Some teenagers do like 90s rap! Not the ones in Euphoria, though. A student pointed out that the use of 90s rap in Into The Spider-Verse did make sense, because Miles would have been introduced to those songs by his uncle.
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