I have often used writing as a means to rant about my pet peeves, but the real joy in writing is to do it about something you like. Also, the social distancing and self isolation (due to Covid-19) has insulated me from a lot of frustrations. So, even though there are 8 other blogs in draft, I have decided to pour my heart out on a relatively recently discovered joy of mine.I say relatively because this recent thing first happened in 2014.

My taste of movies and music has been evolving with time (exponentially in the last 5 years) . Would you believe that I hated music as a kid? I would change the channel when ever there was a song on the television. Then, I was introduced to my uncle’s collection of old Hindi songs, the mix tapes that people used to get custom made instead of buying the entire cassette. This was the first music I ever liked. Fast forward to 2020, The analysis of my Apple music library for last 5 years looks like this….

17.5% of my plays come from 7 artists who make up just 0.56% of the total artists I listen to. What is more interesting is that 7 of the top 10 songs that I played the most featured as background scores in movies. Today I am going to try and explain how my taste in music has been shaped by movies. Heck, I took an Apple music subscription just because I was not finding enough sources to download or stream my specific tastes in music. So how did a music hating kid end up becoming obsessed with certain types of songs/genres? How did I evolve from Mukesh and Burman to Led Zeppelin and The Doors?

If you count the most listened music on the basis of total amount of time, the winner would be a song whose length is 10 mins and 29 seconds and was introduced to me by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill Volume 1.

In 2014, I watched the movie Guardians of the Galaxy. It kind of shattered the way I watched movies. Before I dive into what profound realization I had when I watched this movie, let me set the tone with a few examples. First watch the below trailer for the upcoming 3rd installment of the Kingsman franchise.

Now, watch it again – after I break it down for you. The trailer starts with a dialogue describing an upcoming war. Then, right when the the logo of the studio appears, a piano starts playing… Its the tune for the song ‘War pigs’ by Black Sabbath. Once Ralph Fiennes has introduced the logo of Kingsman on the shop front, the actual song kicks in. From then on, each and every cut in the video is synced with the instruments playing in the song. Every punch thrown, every fist thump, every explosion, everything. It doesn’t just stop there. Look at the lyrics of the song..

Generals gathered in their masses

Just like witches at black masses

Evil minds that plot destruction

Sorcerers of death’s construction

War pigs by Black Sabbath – 1970

The visuals in the trailer are exactly what the lyrics say. It feels like the song was written and composed explicitly for this trailer. Right?

Wrong!

The song was first released in 1970, some 50 years before Matthew Vaughn made this movie. You must be thinking that the film makers are getting too lazy to compose music. Again, Wrong! It is much easier to compose own music than find one existing song that suits all your needs among a gazillion songs available out there. If you look back at the trailers of the first and second installments of the movie, you see that the first one features Five to One by The Doors, a 1968 song that is neither in sync in terms of lyrics nor the tune, then the second one features remixed version of My Generation by The Who. Now the second movie trailer is cut in sync with the music but the lyrics only vaguely match the plot. So, what changed? Why was Mr. Vaughn so specific in choosing music this time? Was it just a coincidence that he found this song? Is there a new phenomenon that is catching up? Is it just me or has anyone else noticed this?

Now watch the trailer of another upcoming movie Wonder Woman 1984. Like Kingsman 3, this is also a prequel and the song that plays in the background is Blue Monday, by ‘New Order’. It establishes the time line (the song was released in 1983), it is in sync with the cuts and…. the trailer talks about a ‘New Era’ which basically is synonymous with New Order. This is becoming more and more common with Mission Impossible Fallout trailer featuring Friction by Imagine Dragons. The entire pace of editing is based on the rhythm of the song. Watch when the beat holds off for a moment to show Henry Cavill flexing his muscles before matching each punch and kick.

Now that you have seen enough examples of how non – diegetic sound enhances the viewing experience, you are ready to hear the amazing things in the movie Guardians of the galaxy. Well, only if you know what diegetic and non diegetic sounds are. To put it simply, each movie scene contains a lot of sounds. Any sounds the characters in the scene can hear are called diegetic sounds (e.g. foot steps, car honking, baby crying etc. ) and all the sounds that only audience can hear (background score) are called non-diegetic sounds.

Now that you got an idea, lets test your knowledge. Watch the below video and classify the kind of sound in the video….

Sorry, that was a trick question. The director makes you believe that the sound is non-diegetic only to reveal at the end that it is in fact diegetic.

Before we look at the more complex diegetic music, lets look at an example of the other form. Hans Zimmer has been the master of non-diegetic music for major part of his carer that spans for 44 years. Everyone is very familiar with the German’s work, but many don’t know him. Are you familiar with the theme music of ‘The Pirates of the Caribbean’? What about the songs from ‘The Lion King’ that bring out the child in you , every time you watch it? But for me his best work was in Dunkirk, where he manages to keep the sense of impending doom for about 2 hours continuously closely followed by the final scene of Dark Knight. The music gives me goose bumps every time I watch it.

Though composing great music needs a lot of talent and creativity, finding existing music for reuse also needs imagination. It requires one to be an encyclopedia of music.

Now coming back to Guardians of the galaxy, the male lead carries an old walkman with a mix tape of songs called ‘Awesome mix’ (Hit songs of the 70’s). It is really awesome. The songs here are diegetic sound because the character in the movie always listens to it. I hadn’t paid it much attention when I saw the movie for the first time, but because I liked the songs so much, I went to tunefind.com, searched for each and every song and added them to my library. The words in one song made me think and made me watch the movie again, this time focusing only on the music in each scene. It was just amazing, each song made perfect sense to the visuals. The song that caused this Eureka moment was in fact an ultimate analogy to the male lead’s life.

My father married a pure Cherokee
My mother’s people were ashamed of me
The Indians said that I was white by law
The white man always called me “Indian squaw”

Half-breed, that’s all I ever heard
Half-breed, how I learned to hate the word
Half-breed, she’s no good, they warned
Both sides were against me since the day I was born

Half-breed by Blue swede – 1974

In 1988, following his mother’s death, a young Peter Quill is abducted from Earth by a group of alien thieves and smugglers. The movie starts twenty-six years later on an abandoned planet, where Quill steals a mysterious orb. He is a space pirate now, leading the life of a cast away.

The analogy between the story in the song and Peter Quill is not very obvious. One was an out cast because of being born to a mixed race couple, the other one is an out cast because of being born to once species and then being raised by another species. I would say, it’s a perfect analogy. How many hours of research went into finding the song? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to write a new song?

Side Note: Mad max fury road has an awesome score, but hanging a guitar player from the truck to make the sound diegetic felt a little underwhelming for such an innovative movie

Another example of excellent use of diegetic sound is in the Netflix series Stranger things. The story is set in the 80’s and the series is filled with awesome ways to incorporate music into a scene. Weather it is the scene where a handsome hunk arrives in his muscle car to the high school with music blazing on the car stereo or the song playing on the street when a girl runs away from home after a fight with her father (figure) or material girl playing in the mall when the girls go shopping……. The list is endless.

Such sound is sometimes used to do more than conveying an emotion or complementing a scene. In the opening scene of the Amazon prime series – Jack Ryan, 2 kids in Middle East are dancing to ‘Safety Dance’ when the American planes bomb the area and one of the sibling is killed. The surviving kid grows up to become a terrorist in the present time.

Now, the scene could have started with the text Lebanon, 1982. But the same was conveyed with a song released in that year. Of course you would need the information that the US was taking part in the Lebanon war during that year. It also helps portray an image that the Lebanese were more liberal folk during that time period and embraced the music and culture from the west unlike the general portrayal of them as a conservative bunch. It also gives a sense of justification for a kid to become a terrorist.

Quentin Tarantino is the master of both kinds of music. He is director and not a composer. He hasn’t written any music, he cannot play a single instrument. Yet in 8 of the 9 movies he made, he did not hire a music composer. He just reuses the existing songs. His knowledge of music is amazing, his head is like a library of old and new music and movies. Right from the use of music by a scarcely known (in the west) Japanese artist for one of the most important scenes in his film ( introduction of the villain), to a bad guy dancing to a song ‘Stuck in the middle with you’ before chopping off the ear of a person, when they are literally stuck in a warehouse hiding from cops, he understands the impact of music as a medium of expression. He actually starts writing his screenplay only after he has decided the music that would go with it.

I have saved best for the last. It is relatively easy to find music to suit a 3-4 minute trailer. May be that is why more and more film makers are doing it. One cannot make a feature length film which just features existing music with only industry or the finances to hire a large team to work for you, It needs passion. Tons of it. For a long time Quentin Tarantino had been my gold standard for music in films, but in 2017, Edgar wright blew the entire concept out of water with his movie ‘Baby Driver’. The 46 year old Englishman had just 5 films under his belt when he made this epic musical master piece. Though he had co-written screenplay for a couple of household movies like Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin and Marvel’s Ant-man, his best work till then has been the cult classic comedy Hot-Fuzz. The trailer and the movie do give you glimpses of Mr Wright’s understanding music ( In simpler words, you know that he knows his shit). But Baby Driver is a movie that changed the definition of background score for me.

It is the story of a young man who is dragged into the life of crime due to a mistake he did in his teens, who suffers from Tinntus, a condition that causes him to hear a continuous buzzing or ringing sound even when there is no external noise. To, drown it out we always listens to music (and we hear it). Such a nice premise to give the freedom to add diegetic music where ever the director wants. Below is the first scene in the movie that in sets the tone for whats to come later… This time focus on how music is used to create a unique visual experience.

I am not sure if you have observed, but every cut in the scene and every character movement is in sync with the music. The guy chewing gum, opening the car trunk, closing the trunk, people walking into the bank, car drifts and the scene length. Then comes the second scene in the movie….

This time the director does a one up. A simple task of getting coffee… shot with the words in the song written on walls with graffiti, the way music volume reduces when the character takes out on ear phone to order coffee, the way the guy scatters across the road when he sees a cop and the song says ‘Hitch, Hitchhike baby, across the floor’. Every time I watch this movie, I notice something new.

Watching movies so intently, has introduced me to tons of music from 70’s and 80’s. It has gradually changed the way I watch movies and also increased my appetite for old music. Listening to these songs makes me relive the wonderful cinematic moments. My driving time gets significantly reduced if my phone shuffle picks The Chase Begins or Brothers in Arms (If you know what I mean) .But Focusing on the lyrics made me distinguish art made with passion from art made for money. So people like Tarantino and Wright have spoilt me with their excellent tastes in music and turned me into a guy who is put off my the latest music trends.

Just take those old records off the shelf

I’ll sit and listen to ’em by myself

Today’s music ain’t got the same soul

I like that old time rock ‘n’ roll

Old Time Rock and Roll by Bob Seger – 1978