Welcome back to Parsons Playlists! Today’s playlist is curated by Music Library student assistant Naron (class of 2023) and features music from assorted movie soundtracks.
Movie Music
Some movie soundtracks have left a deep impression on me with their impressive music. The music in movies is usually carefully crafted by artists to match the main theme. The music often sounds even more powerful, carrying the memory of the story in the movie. Here is a short list of music from popular movies that left an impression on me:
Editor’s note:Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
If you’re anything like me, Mama Mia! is a classic pick for movie night. The catchy songs, written by Swedish 70s group ABBA, are upbeat and danceable. The movie features Meryl Streep, who plays the hardworking Donna. Her daughter, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), is getting married and wants to invite her biological father. However, it could be one of three different men that Donna was involved with. Sophie sends invitations to all of them, leaving her mother in a predicament as she faces her former lovers. With the addition of breathtaking Greek landscapes and hilarious friends, this film embodies the music that brought it to life. The sweet, slow ballad reminds me of the waves crashing on Greek beaches while the fiery electric guitar solos personify the energy that the men bring to Donna’s life once again. I often wonder how a series of ABBA songs could correlate to form an entire movie. The original recordings are so iconic on their own but Mama Mia! brings them all together for one hilarious story. Parsons Music Library offers both ABBA CDs and the score from Mama Mia!, so you can also listen and read along with these iconic tunes.
Welcome back to Parsons Playlists! Today we’re featuring a collection of film soundtrack music curated by Music Library student manager Colin (Class of 2021).
Films have been my go-to source of entertainment for years. In high school, my friends and I became heavily invested in the awards season of movies, in which we tried to watch every film that was nominated for Best Picture by the Academy. Movies are not measured for enjoyability by their success winning awards, nor do awards automatically make a movie “good.” Rather, this activity was something that my friends and I enjoyed doing, and exposed us to a lot of new films and directors. Particularly interesting for us in watching films was hearing the soundtrack, as all of my friends and I were involved in my school’s music program. We loved talking about the scores of films, and the impact that specific songs have through their leitmotifs or influence on the narrative. For example, we were obsessed with the soundtrack from La La Land, because, well let’s be honest; who can’t tap their foot or hum along with the songs when listening to its music?
Richard Wagner had a great influence upon the film industry and its scores due to his methodical approach to writing operas, in which the music he composed enhanced the narrative through the use of leitmotifs, or short musical phrases that indicate the appearance of a character or narrative theme. This concept was recognized by the film industry, and was expanded on by different film composers, specifically Max Steiner who is known as “The Father of Film Music.” Steiner was heavily influenced by Wagnerian musical concepts, and would incorporate leitmotifs, non-diegetic sounds and other elements that enhanced the musical experience in movies and their relation to narratives. Since Steiner, films have grown to incorporate songs into their soundtracks that are either specifically written for the movie from a preexisting band, or the rights are bought from a band to include their song in the movie. The songs themselves share the same focus that Steiner envisioned for his films, in that songs are used for a narrative purpose in order to advance the plot, express the emotions of a specific character, and/or give credibility to the environment in which the film or a scene takes place.
A sampling of films scored by Max Steiner
With this playlist, I wanted to highlight songs used in films that transcend just their immediate presence in the film. The rules of this playlist are rather loose, in that the songs included may have been written for the specific movie in which they are famous for being in, or written before the movie and added to the soundtrack and become a staple song for the film. I have included highly popular choices that the general film-viewing population would agree with, such as “My Heart Will Go On” in Titanic and “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” in The Breakfast Club. However, I have also offered some of my personal choices of songs that I believe greatly enhance the movie and urge audiences to listen to the song outside of the filmic experience, but do not necessarily have the history or popular recognition by audiences. I hope that choices like “Slip Away” from Booksmart and “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” from Rocketman will expand your music and film libraries. I have organized the songs in order of their film’s release date, and my personal choices begin with “Send Me on My Way” from Matilda. And this playlist does not feature any instrumentally focused soundtracks that typically appear in large blockbuster films, but rather individual songs focused on lyrics. I hope you enjoy this eclectic playlist and relive some great film experiences through music!
Editor’s note:Arachnophonia is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
With the 92nd Academy Awards freshly behind us, I’ve been thinking about my favorite film soundtracks. For me, a driving factor of what makes a movie memorable or great is its music –either score, soundtrack, or both. I love when I hear a song that I recognize during a scene, which I can dance or sing along to in my seat. On the other hand, I also love when movies introduce me to music. The only reason I loved the songs “Hungry Eyes” and “Be My Baby” so much as a kid was because of the movie Dirty Dancing.
My parents showed me Dirty Dancing at a young age, probably because I was a dancer whose first childhood dream was to be a Broadway star, and it instantly became one of my favorite movies. The soundtrack, which features songs spanning multiple decades, made an already wholesome and fun movie even more enjoyable. Even as a child, I could feel the nostalgia that it portrayed, as it features 50’s and 60’s pop hits like “Love is Strange” and “Stay” that instantly transport the viewer to a summer in 1963. Naturally, a distinctly 80s sound is also incorporated in songs like “She’s Like the Wind” sung by lead actor Patrick Swayze himself, a man of apparently many talents. And of course, many of these songs are used in dance scenes, following Baby and Johnny’s journey from frustrating rehearsals to final performance.
There are many iconic movie scenes that will be forever associated with their respective songs, or vice versa. Think: “(Don’t You) Forget About Me” with Judd Nelson’s fist in the air at the end of The Breakfast Club, or “Girl You’ll Be a Woman Soon” in Uma Thurman’s apartment in Pulp Fiction. But undoubtedly one of the most commonly known and referenced music/movie scene pairings is “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life” from the final dance scene in Dirty Dancing –with extra emphasis on the achievement of Baby’s lift that happens right as the song climaxes. This is the kind of flawless, emotional moment that makes the right fusion of a scene and a song selection one of my favorite aspects of film. It’s also one of the many moments that made the Dirty Dancing soundtrack go multi-platinum.
Editor’s note:Arachnophonia is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
This special edition of Arachnophonia features contributions from students in Dr. Joanna Love‘s MUS 235 class: “I Want My MTV: Music Video and the Transformation of the Music Industry.”
To understand the importance of Prince’s CD album, or CDs in general, during the 1980s one must take a step back and look at the differences between our modes of listening to music today as opposed to the 1980s. In the 2000s CDs began to be phased out of popularity due to the improved technology that came about to form Itunes. This decade has seen an even bigger change transitioning from the Itunes format of music listening to streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Soundcloud. The concept of paying a monthly fee to gain access to a massive music library had not even come to fruition as a concept back in the 80s.
Created in 1982, CDs were the easiest method to listen to music to during that era. CDs were the most compact and easiest to transport at the time and as long as someone had a CD player or a car stereo then the stage was set. Getting a new CD in the 80s would be comparable to taking a kid to the candy store or getting a new video game in the modern era. I was never able to really experience the true atmosphere of a music store where shelves were lined with records and CDs as seen in movies like Wayne’s World but it appears to be very similar to going to the video store back in the 2000s to get the latest movie that had come out.
Music store in the 1980s
Since CDs were commonplace at the time and hundreds were displayed next to each other on shelves, it was also important that the cover art of the CD case and the design of the CD were eye-catching and could convince someone to purchase the album. Designed by art director Laura LiPuma and photographed by Ed Thrasher and Stuart Douglas Watson, Purple Rain’s album art has since become iconic and has been especially useful in defining an identity for the city of Minneapolis (where Prince was born and raised). The picture of Prince sitting on his purple motorcycle clad in his quintessential purple suit with smoke billowing out behind him is only further emphasized by the words “Purple Rain: Prince and the Revolution” in thick purple letters. This is also symbolic in the sense that this was the first time Prince included his band, “the Revolution,” in the album art. The photo is lined on both sides by beautiful flowers which can be tied back into the perception of androgyny in his music and fashion. The inside flap of the case is made up entirely of these flowers and their petals. The album art breathes mysteriousness and insinuates that seeing this movie will give you the full “Prince experience” in regard to his musical and acting abilities. The effects of this album art can still be felt in popular culture today with the city of Minneapolis “adopting” purple as their color and even blanketing the city in purple during the halftime performance at the Super Bowl last year after Prince passed away in 2016. In addition to this the basketball team located in the city, the Minnesota Timberwolves, have also created Purple Rain-inspired jerseys for this upcoming season.
The city of Minneapolis lit up in purple during the Super Bowl, Feb. 4, 2018
The album art of Purple Rain has also been differently portrayed by other artists using its major themes and elements. In 2016, hip-hop artist Future dropped an appropriately titled mixtape named Purple Reign, where the cover art to the album draws off of Prince’s style with the title of the mixtape in thick purple letters and a near dark background.
Future: Purple Reign mixtape art 2016
As far as relevance I wanted to research a topic for this assignment that was fascinating to me and the success of soundtrack albums in music especially piqued my interest after having watched the movie Purple Rain for class in early October. Overall, this CD album art was useful for the movie because it was an excellent marketing tool for Prince. As discussed previously, the compactness of CDs made it the most popular mode to listen to music with in the 1980s. With over 25 million copies sold worldwide, this can be translated as 25 million advertisements for a movie in marketing terms. The album art not only represented the contents (songs) inside the CD case but also signified the opportunity to see a good movie. The movie Purple Rain cost $7 million to make and achieved box office sales of $70.2 million while Prince took home the Academy Award for best original score. It was Prince’s entrance into the film industry and he went on to further direct, compose, and act in other classics such as Under the Cherry Moon and Graffiti Bridge.
The album art of Purple Rain also represents the precedent that Prince helped set that a soundtrack album can produce quality music. Until Purple Rain came out there was no real popularity in soundtrack albums besides other classic movies like Grease and Saturday Night Fever in the late 1970s. Since then there has been an explosion in popularity with soundtrack album especially within the last 20 years. Marshall Mathers, aka Eminem or The Real Slim Shady, put together a highly successful soundtrack album for his 2002 biopic 8 Mile. His song “Lose Yourself,” which is played in the ending scene as Eminem walks away down the street after winning the final battle, became a hit sensation and is often seen as one of his best pieces of work if not the best. Recently, “See You Again” by Wiz Khalifa featuring Charlie Puth from the movie Furious 7 (Fast and Furious movie franchise) set streaming records for most streams in a week and in a day in 2015.
In summation Purple Rain and its album art helped usher in the popularity of soundtrack albums, give an identity to the city of Minneapolis, and promote Prince’s now classic movie Purple Rain.
What makes a film great? Some may say an Oscar-worthy performance by a lead actor, or the presentation of aesthetically pleasing cinematography. For me, although both of these are important, what really makes a movie stand out is music. Whether it’s the soundtrack, the score, or both, the ability to perfectly match a song to a scene is impressive. It can bring the emotions I’m feeling while watching up to another level.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, directed by Wes Anderson, is a comedy-drama about an oceanographer played by Bill Murray. This film is an excellent example of one that uses a unique background of music to enhance its tone, which is whimsical and quirky.
Mark Mothersbaugh, a former member of the pop group DEVO and a frequent Anderson collaborator, is the composer of the film’s score. Five of Mothersbaugh’s instrumental tracks appear on the official soundtrack, including “Let Me Tell You About my Boat”, which accompanies one of the most famous scenes in the film: Steve Zissou breaking the fourth wall by directly introducing himself to the audience.
Mark Mothersbaugh
The coolest part about this soundtrack is that it features five covers of some of David Bowie’s best songs… in Portuguese. The movie itself showcases Seu Jorge performing a variety of Bowie covers including “Rebel Rebel”, “Starman” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”. Jorge plays one of Steve Zissou’s crew members in the movie, and sings the songs with a red beanie on his head and an acoustic guitar in his hands. These covers do not only provide a fresh take on several well-known classic rock songs, but also give the film unforgettable character.
