How The ‘Twilight’ Soundtracks Changed The Way We Thought About Mainstream Music

Over the last four or five years, our culture has embraced the kind of content that we’d once have referred to as a ‘guilty pleasure’ — and rightly so.

Cultural snobbery was always a boring waste of time, anyway. There’s nothing more insufferable than a consumer of art who believes that the implicit has objective value over the explicit. In actual fact, masterpieces come in many forms, from the wackadoo pleasures of ’80s slashers to the austere magnitude of an Ingmar Bergman flick.

Nowadays, most sensible viewers see no inherent distinction between the Fast and the Furious franchise and the movies of Lav Diaz; nothing that makes a HBO drama better than a Hallmark film. Sure, The Sopranos might actually be more entertaining, more moving than A Christmas Prince, but there’s nothing that necessarily makes that so — no essential quality of art.

But while many once derided cultural properties have been reclaimed through this process of re-evaluation — Keanu Reeves, Babe: Pig In The City — one series that has yet to receive the same treatment is Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight.

The books and the films are still sneered at, rejected as being sappy and soapy bits of froth designed for a non-discerning pre-teen audience. And yes, there is a degree of truth in there somewhere: the Twilight movies in particular have always sat at the exact midpoint between occult daytime sitcoms like Passions and early-2000s video game animations.

But that’s the joy of them. They are nothing without their magnitude — without their great, soaking silliness. The bait-and-switch, “it was all a dream” ending of Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part Two is batshit bananas, the kind of strange, melancholy delight that you can only find in the filmography of Kenneth Anger. Watching Edward sniff at the cloud of Bella’s stank, or the saga’s horrifying CGI baby is a kind of transcendent, demolished joy that you can get from few other sources.

And then there are the soundtracks.

The Twilight Soundtracks Walked The Line Between Sap And Surrealism

The first Twilight film, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, is a Sirkian melodrama as shot by a marketing manager from Hot Topic. It’s stately and it’s bugnuts all at once, a film being pulled in two distinct directions.

The soundtrack is the same. Subdued folk heroes Iron & Wine brush up against arena-sized rock machines like Muse. ‘Bella’s Lullaby’, the sedate and beautiful work of acclaimed composer Carter Burwell, comes fast on the heels of a Paramore song. There is no unity to the tracks, except for their bold, full-throated ambition.

Who wants to listen to the twilight soundtrack together and be depressed? pic.twitter.com/bB46FUShsv

— unideal homophiliac (@wtf_bro_not_gay) April 24, 2020

As a result, the soundtrack decimates the divide between high and low culture as totally as the film it is designed to accompany.

There’s no false sense of what makes ‘good’ art driving the curation of the tracks; no snobby sense of aesthetic ‘politeness’. Like any good art designed for teenagers — or for the part of being a teenager that we never lose; that we always carry with us — the name of the day is sheer, unbridled feeling.

That sense of tonal whiplash would only get more distinct as the series progressed. The Twilight Saga: New Moon album features everyone from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke to OK Go, the band best-known for their YouTube-breaking, treadmill-heavy music videos. On Eclipse, Beck, Florence + The Machine all rub mid-oughts indie shoulders.

By the final instalment of the series, all bets were off. Green Day bump up against St. Vincent. And Burwell returns for the most unhinged, weepy-eyed track of his entire career, ‘Plus Que Ma Propre Vie’.

The whole thing is a love letter scrawled with rose-scented soap on a bathroom mirror; just this waxy, wonderful way of looking at the world, where emotions always come first.

Movie Soundtracks — And Culture — Would Never Be The Same Again

The soundtracks sold very well, of course — the first one was the best-selling movie soundtrack since Cabaret. But they also had a profound impact on music culture and criticism.

The snootiness of the early-two thousands music blogs was already beginning to erode, slowly, but the soundtracks helped push the high art/low art divide even further from people’s minds.

Pitchfork, the site that once refused to touch pop with a barge pole, came around on baroque maximalists like Panic! At The Disco and Andrew WK. St. Vincent won a Grammy without prompting ‘sell-out’ conversations. No longer was there a hard distinction between folk singer-songwriters and wacky, ’80s inspired rock bands, or uber cool, cutting edge songwriters and chart-topping sensations. Pop music had become omnivorous.

It’s been years and I still think the twilight soundtrack was an absolute bop

— Kate ♐️ (@thickiemcgee) May 2, 2020

The soundtracks didn’t single-handedly cause that shift — but they were part of a wave of cultural forces that were changing how people understood what the mainstream could be.

The Twilight movies did the same. Stripped from its own context and success, the Twilight series is almost avant-garde in its oddness. Its attitude towards romance and sex; its moody-yet-slick visual language; its strange, heightened style of performance — once upon a time, these would be as far from the boundaries of the mainstream as it is possible to imagine.

But times have changed. Our cultural world is weirder, more experimental. It’s better for it, too. And we have Twilight — and those albums — in part to thank.

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Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @Joseph_O_Earp.