The Greatest Film And TV Soundtracks Of The Decade
From Nashville to Hawkins and beyond, the last 10 years have been a golden era for soundtracks.
This past decade has seen television surge and largely usurp film as the dominant entertainment force.
The rise of streaming services and the bottomless pockets of Netflix, HBO, and various other cable channels has resulted in the best creatives turning their attention to television, while the Marvel onslaught and the need to appeal to international audiences in order to justify big budgets means that the entire middle has fallen out of the movie industry.
The types of comedies and dramas once made for the big screen are now delivered as six-part series, and the mainstream movies and TV shows that once treated soundtracks as an afterthought — a promotional tool controlled by the major record labels — now put as much care into them as any other aspect of their art.
Gone are the days when an entire Friends episode revolved around going to a Hootie and The Blowfish concert, or a bunch of rich teenagers from Beverly Hills get unconvincingly ecstatic about the prospect of a Rolling Stones gig populated by over 50s.
The last 10 years have been a golden era for soundtracks, so in honour of the impending end of the decade we’ve wrapped up the best of them below.
FILM
The Social Network (2010)
When David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin teamed up for this dark tale of power and betrayal, it was hailed as both an expertly-rendered character study of a kid who hadn’t yet revealed his intentions, and a snapshot of a changing of the guards, the chronicling of a brave new world where college kids can build billion-dollar companies from their dorm rooms.
As we have seen in the preceding decade, this film vastly underestimates the power that Zuckerberg would yield or how irresponsibly he would do so, focusing on his less-than-ethical dealings with friends-turned-business partners, while treating Facebook itself as a rather benign creation. Of course, none of us could have predicted the privacy breaches, the electoral meddling, the mood experimentations, the fake news, the broadcasted massacres – the end of the world as we know it.
Somehow, Trent Reznor and co-conspirator Atticus Rose seemed to understand where it would all lead, their prescient soundtrack signalling the demise perfectly. Reznor described their “emphasis on sound fraying around the edges” and this dystopic, disturbing bellwether adopts moody ambience, droning dissonance, modem-like blips, decaying drums, and pianos that scale soullessly, as if it’s all being driven by an unseen algorithm.
The soundtrack won both the Oscar and the Golden Globe for Best Score, just two of nine major awards it received.
Black Panther (2018)
Black Panther’s soundtrack was a one-two punch from the unassailable Kendrick Lamar, who was coming off the back of his Pulitzer Prize winning album Damn, and Ludwig Göransson, who was months away from his first number one single, as co-writer and producer of Childish Gambino’s vital ‘This Is America’.
Göransson got deep into the project, visiting Senegal for a month to study up on different forms of traditional music and instrumentation used across the African continent, then spent a week in South Africa at the International Library of African Music, recording hundreds of various instruments that “don’t really exist anymore.” He combined this with swelling, Marvel-friendly orchestral pieces recorded at Abbey Road to arrive at a truly unique sound.
Lamar was originally tapped to provide only a few songs, but decided to create a 14-song album based off the film, featuring his own production and vocals on each track, as well as the talents of The Weeknd, Future, SZA, James Blake, 2 Chainz and Travis Scott.
Both the score and the soundtrack were weaved throughout the film, and both won Grammy Awards, critical acclaim, and numerous other shiny accolades.
Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010)
A soundtrack of a film based on a beloved comic book will always have its haters, but the music from Scott Pilgrim Vs The World succeeds by matching the zine-meets-CD-R tone of both. The amuerish fuzz of ‘We Are Sex Bob-Omb’, written by the ever genre-less Beck, sounds like the type of half-baked song that comes out of many non-descript garages, created by whipsmart teens with more style than skill.
The soundtrack also contains one of Beck’s most beautiful compositions to date, the stirring ‘Ramona’, which appears as an aimless acoustic version used as a punchline in the film (after Michael Cera shows it hopefully to the object of his affection, she derisively says, “Can’t wait to hear when it’s finished) and as a lush ‘finished’ version which sounds like it could have slotted onto his Seachange album.
The songs from Scott’s ‘rival’ band Crash and the Boys are even more teenage and loose, with excellent titles ‘I Am So Sad, So Very, Very Sad’ and ‘We Hate You, Please Die’ performed by a straight-faced Broken Social Scene, who dial the art-rock wank up to eleven.
These original songs are intercut with classics from T-Rex, The Rolling Stones and Frank Black, which act as aspirational moodboard tunes for the self-proclaimed “terrible” high school bands featured in the film.
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
It’s quite a feat for a film soundtrack to reach the number one spot on the Billboard chart, but it’s quite another thing to achieve this with a collection of previously-released music that has been in high rotation for 40-something years.
With the very idea of the mixtape baked into the film’s DNA, courtesy of a cassette tape that Chris Pratt’s Peter Quill character carries around in a Walkman, Awesome Mix Vol. 1 featured a bevy of timeless songs that were largely unfamiliar to younger audience members — but favourites of those parents who were dragged along to the cinema.
Classics from 10cc, The Runaways, Marvin Gaye, and The Raspberries were bundled together in haphazard formation, and quickly sold over a million copies in the U.S alone. The soundtrack was a best-seller digitally, then on vinyl, and then again when released as a limited-edition cassette for Record Store Day — the first cassette tape released by Disney since Classic Disney: 60 Years Of Musical Magic, and a perfect souvenir for kids to whom a weird magnetic tape is a novelty seen only in films like Guardians.
They successfully replicated this success for Awesome Mix Vol. 2 with an even more impressive lineup: George Harrison, Fleetwood Mac, ELO, and Cheap Trick, to name but a few.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)
It took over a decade for Stephen Chbosky to turn his deeply personal 1999 coming-of-age novel into a film, repeatedly refusing to hand over the writing and directorial reins to numerous studios that came knocking for the rights, feeling that nobody else could do his book justice.
Fittingly, he also curated the soundtrack, which perfectly captures the dizzy, messy open-hearted rush of the film through a British-leaning selection of perennial teenage favourites like The Smiths, New Order, Sonic Youth, and David Bowie.
It’s no coincidence that the songs chosen are the types that hit you hard during that formative period when you really begin attaching your identity to music, writing lyrics on pencil cases, making mixtapes instead of writing letters, and wondering how a mopey man from Manchester with a quiff could summarise your seemingly singular experiences so succinctly.
The most memorable line in this film comes when the main character stands up in a truck hurtling through a tunnel and claims “We are infinite.” This soundtrack is filled with music that delivers that same indescribable, undeniable connection to the universe.
TV
Westworld (2016)
Westworld is set in a Wild West theme park populated by robot citizens who exist to fulfil the whims of the park’s incredibly rich patrons.
It’s an odd concept, based on a Michael Crichton film from 1973, and the mood swings between a leisurely-paced Western of old and a hurtling sci-fi. The eerie impact of these disparate themes is beautifully tied together by a score from composer Ramin Djawadi, who basically records elevator versions of songs from the popular music canon, using raindrop pianos and subtle strings to wrestle out the melodies of Radiohead’s No Surprises, The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint It Black’, ‘A Forest’ by The Cure and numerous other delights.
By using stripped-down arrangements, he is able to conjure many moods: ‘Black Hole Sun’ by Soundgarden sounds like a mournful ode played on a tack piano in the corner of a saloon, while Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back To Black’ swells like a tidal wave. Djawadi intercuts these classics with his own moody compositions, the result being that familiar tunes swell in and out of more ambient selections, like melodies being carried along with the wind.
Stranger Things (2016)
Like many period pieces, Stranger Things feels less like reality as it was, and more like a hazy recollection of an era, with references prompted by a ‘Remember The 80s’ special and a box of old tapes: fluro and mullets; BMX and VHS.
A hyper-aware show filled with gratuitous nods to the films of John Hughes and Spielberg, the Stranger Things world is rendered all the more vivid due to an era-friendly soundtrack created by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, whose band Survive seems custom-built for such a task, their music straddling the line between synth-driven anthems and a low budget horror score, warped from sitting in the sunny window of a Video Ezy for years.
The duo’s score is supplemented by the big-swinging artists of the era who reached middle America; we’re talking instantly familiar hits by Duran Duran, The Police, Toto, Devo, Cyndi Lauper, The Bangles, and many other MTV faves.
Having said that, a few obscure cuts make it into the mix; the moody ‘Nocturnal Me’ by Echo and the Bunnymen and ‘Atmosphere’ by Joy Division would never have reached the ears of these suburban ‘80s kids, but that seems like splitting hairs, considering the show does revolve around a psychokinetic girl named Eleven.
Nashville (2012)
Not surprisingly for a show about the country scene, the music was front and centre throughout Nashville’s six season run.
While soundtracks that hinge on original compositions sang by actors can be extremely dicey (see: Empire) or be nothing more than expositional pieces (again, see: Empire), the conceit of Nashville means that the likes of Connie Britton and Charles Esten can lock eyes and serenade each other with heartfelt nothings, and it rings true in the context of the show: they are meant to be songwriters, after all.
Many of the actors from the show have gone onto achieve real world musical success: Clare Bowen, Lennon and Maisy Stella, Sam Palladio and even Charles Esten, previously known for his improv comedy on Whose Line Is It Anyway, have all launched music careers off the back of the show and its rapid fanbase.
Further closing the gap between reality and onscreen, cast members performed the show’s songs live at legendary country music venue the Grand Ole Opry, and toured America and the U.K. The show itself even moved across to the Country Music Television channel for its fifth season, after being cancelled by ABC.
True Detective (2014)
There seems to be an unspoken rule that any gritty HBO drama that wants to be taken seriously nowadays needs to have a soundtrack heavy on dark, country-tinged tunes; music that leans heavily on tremolo guitar, rattlesnake percussion, and baritone vocals.
It started with the use of ‘Woke Up This Morning’ by Alabama 3 during the sprawling opening credits of The Sopranos, and carried through Sons Of Anarchy, True Blood, House Of Cards and True Detective.
The latter show perfected the concept in 2014 by focusing on devil-fearing music by storytellers like Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Lera Lynn and Bob Dylan, those who write of redemption and sin, songs stepped in the Old Testament, the Deep South, and deal with age-old themes. Time is a flat circle, after all.
Girls (2012)
As her alter ego Hannah claimed in the pilot episode of Girls, for a while there Lena Dunham seemed to be a voice of a generation, delivering a sweetly unsentimental show that captured the “in-between spaces” between the heightened drama of high school and the assured strut of Sex and the City.
Amidst all the hurried, harried opinion pieces that dissected each frame of the show as if it was the Zapruder film, an often overlooked aspect of Girls was the strong musical choices. From the adventurous, empowering use of Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own’ early in the show’s run, through to a cheesy, albeit heartwarming, group dance sequence set to the Nillson deep cut ‘You’re Breaking My Heart’ in season three, Girls rarely misfired with its smart musical choices.
As with The OC a decade earlier, the show’s zeitgeist-y appeal made it a perfect place for uber-cool artists to debut new music, while songs such as ‘Completely Like Me’ by Jenny Lewis and St Vincent’s ‘Teenage Talk’ were created exclusively for the show — the soundtracks are still the only place to hear them.
The music used through the six seasons plays like a Spotify mix the characters themselves would curate, with a heady blend of indie obscurities such as Lia Ices’ ‘Little Marriage’, shameless weepers like Ellie Goulding’s ‘Here’s To Us’ and bangers like Mark Ronson’s ‘Bang Bang’.
Nathan Jolly is a freelance writer based in Sydney, and was formerly the Editor of The Music Network. He tweets from @NathanJolly.
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