NPR Music - New Music Friday: The best albums out July 19

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

This week on New Music Friday from All Songs Considered, NPR Music's Daoud Tyler-Ameen and Stephen Thompson listen to a grab bag of new releases out on July 19, including what's being called the last Childish Gambino album ever, returns by public radio faves Los Campesinos and Dr. Dog and a vibe-heavy follow-up made by the creators of one of the longest-running Billboard singles of all time, just in time to greet the the heat waves of summer 2024 (sorry).Then, one of the week's biggest albums sends Daoud and Stephen down a rabbit hole in which they attempt to figure out what happened to the blockbuster soundtrack and why, in the aftermath of an exceptional example from 2023, there might be an opportunity to revive the form. Featured albums• Childish Gambino, 'Bando Stone & the New World'• Los Campesinos, 'All Hell'• Denzel Curry, 'King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2'• Glass Animals, 'I Love You So F****** Much'• Dr. Dog, 'Dr. Dog'• Jimin, 'Muse'• Various Artists, 'Twisters: The Album' OSTSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Just a heads up, this podcast contains explicit language. Stephen, have you ever seen Valley Girl, that early Nicholas Cage movie from like 83? Probably, wow, I think so, like on basic cable? Yeah. But it would have been so long ago that I remember basically nothing. It was a cable staple, I think. I was thinking about this movie because I knew we're going to be talking about soundtracks today. And I remembered that during the falling in love,

montage that you get in most rom-coms from that era. The song that they play is, I Melt With You by Modern English. Great song, really an emblematic new wave kit. The thing that I had forgotten is they play the whole song. It's like four minutes long. That song has like two bridges. You know what I'm talking about? The Futures Open Wide part.

So you're just watching the movie and like the song is just in full. You're just watching a music video within them. It's nuts. It's you get Nicholas Kee's. Cage and Deborah Foreman, who's the love interest, going on what feels like a lifetime's worth of dates. They go on walks and they go bowling and they go to movies. They drink one soda with two straws. I think he drops her off at home like four times before it's over.

It is ridiculous, but it's also very charming. And maybe a little honest about suburban teenagers going on dates. Like there's only so much stuff for them to do. Yeah, there's only so many interesting things that can happen. So you kind of have to loop them after a while. Hey, listeners, it's New Music Friday from NPR Music, here to talk about the new releases dropping on July 19th. I'm NPR Music editor, Daud Tyler Mien, here with writer-editor, Stephen Thompson. Hi, Stephen.

Hello, Dau. Folks, we're going to cut to the chase. This is going to be a slightly weird episode because it's a slightly weird week. For one thing, we're right in the middle of Blockbuster season, and one of the marquee releases of this week is Twisters the album, the soundtrack of the new movie, which made us. realize that we actually have a lot of thoughts about movie music. So in the second half of this episode, we're actually going to break format and talk a little bit about the state of the modern movie soundtrack, how these feats of brand synergy work and would have been some of our favorite soundtracks to stand the test of time. But first, there are a few big albums this week that we

haven't gotten to here yet and others that we wanted to touch on, but we couldn't decide between. And so instead of just forcing our usual format, today, we're doing it. something a little different, we're putting the lightning round first. It is an oops all berries kind of day. Come languish in our indecision. Yeah. So we're going to run through half a dozen records right off the bat. So why don't we start with The Man of the Hour?

Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino, and his new album, Bando Stone and the New World. I feel liberated, over-medicated. This is ostensibly the final Childish Gambino album. album, I've heard that claim from rap artists at the top of their game before. But the funny thing here is I really wonder how to define the stakes for this guy now, because he sort of is Mr. Brand Synergy. He started out as this weird, you know, curiosity. It's, oh, the guy from community is rapping. How cute. But a couple years later, he had an

acclaimed TV series. He was in a Star Wars movie, and he was not. nominated in all the top categories of the Grammys in the same year. Yeah, and it's hard to tell even what his ambitions are right now. Like he's still clearly, if you watch the video for Littlefoot, Bigfoot, he still has huge artistic ambitions, right? Like, he is still prone to take a big artistic swing. And if you listen to that song, back to back with Lithonia, the most recent single from this record,

it's really hard to even get a grasp of what this record is going to sound like. He's got the guitar is turned all the way up here. Yeah, and like Lithonia is like this kind of, it's like a three-minute Prague Emo Pocket epic where it's, in a way, as you're listening to it, you feel like this song contains so much ambition, it must be eight minutes long. Yeah. And yet it's just three. And then if you watch the video for Little Foot, Bigfoot, it's like a miniature film. It's got Quinta Brunson in it. It's got these really lofty production values where if you watch it on YouTube, the credits for who worked on the film just scrolls and scrolls and scrolls. So he is still, you ask the question of like what are the stakes for him now. It's hard to tell commercially what they are. But artistically, they're very, very high. Yeah. I mean, it's weird because he pops up everywhere.

Yeah. But he really seems to mostly pop up on his own terms. Remember when he popped up in Magic Mike XXL? I haven't seen that movie. Oh, my movie's so good. I know, I got to get back to it. I'm catching up on Stephen Soderberg this summer. I saw the line me for the first time.

Great one. Anyway, that's Bando Stone in the New World by Childish Gambino. Donald Glover keeps us guessing. Next up, All Hell by Los Campesinos. This one Shed in my skin Devils are that just let him in Though I love them like a brother

Me and my friends are sick of each other This one took me by surprise And the reason why is that I remember what this band sounded like When they first got famous And they were way more men They were like the definition of like chaos muffets. They were just like Yelpy and like frenetic.

And I don't think all of that energy is gone. But man, I was so taken aback by just the energy of this record, which if anything reminded me more of like early Jimmy Eat world, like the clarity era. I don't know. Did that hit for you? Yeah, I was struck by how polished this record sounds. It is Los Campesino's first album in seven years.

But as I listened to it and started to understand, packet a little bit, a lot of the ingredients that made me fall in love with this band are still there. The dense, knotty wordplay, the way that his lines kind of like loop back in, and sometimes it's puns, and sometimes it's interesting rhyme structures, sometimes it's references that sneak up on you. I have really, really loved this band. And for this, it still feels, like, listening to this record, I mostly felt glad to have them back. Some of it felt a little too polished for me. Some of it is a little more atmospheric. There are kind of interludes on this record. Yeah. But at the same time, there are these moments where they get in the pocket and still

sound like their past selves. It feels like a little bit of a natural progression. They're not angry young people anymore. They've maybe be settled into more, maybe they're musically a little more assured, maybe they've grown up a little bit, but they still have the signposts of the stuff that I, that I love. Yeah, I'm always really curious with a band like this. I'm thinking of bands like Bell and Sebastian, bands, you know, that are sort of these tottering masses of people where, like, line-up changes have to happen over time, and, you know, there are, uh, sometimes the songs will switch off lead singers and things like that.

The way that a band like that evolves over time is, I think, really different from the sort of, like, core, you know, for people who play the same instruments. It's just a, it's a totally different process. Yeah, the roles in the band aren't as clearly defined. Yeah. But still, Gareth's voice remains at the center of it. And I think that's part of what makes it feel still like Los Campesinos to me. Yeah. That is the album all held by Los Campesinos.

and now for something completely different. Denzel Curry has a new mixtape called King of the Mischievous South, Volume 2. I can make money from the comfort of my sofa. So much drive, now I gotta get a chauffeur. One day I'll be big, but I know I'm getting closer. Don't be Denzel, aka Big O. The world in my hands, because I took it off the shoulders.

Money on my feet, you know I got the shit from lower. I'm bawling like Mike when you see him on a poster. Like y'all, they gotta get one in my hostile. Strike. I go around and catch a hot one to your two. This is a sequel to his tape from 2012. That's way, way back in the, like, Datpiff era. I don't know how to describe this guy's career.

I mean, he's been a steady hand in some sense in that he's been, like, pretty prolific. He has so many interesting collaborations. but if I were asked to try to define his sound and kind of nail it down, I would really struggle. Yeah, listening to Hot One, the song we just heard, the first thing that jumped out at me stylistically is the genre I would tag it to is TikTok. Where it felt like you could pull any 15 seconds out of that song and really set a tone. Really, you could set a lot of action to that song. And I don't think that's Denzel Curry's overall approach, overall sound. Even listening to a different single from this record, it doesn't have that same vibe.

This to me feels kind of brilliantly engineered to work as a collection of 15-second snippets in a way that's very, very savvy. And one way that you get that is with well-placed features. Right. And he's got well-placed features all over this record. I think it's basically every single track. Yeah. Yeah, no, you've got ASAP Virg on this record. You know, Max O'Cream shows up.

Two Chains has a great feature. A-Sap Rocky. Several A-Saps. Yes, right. The two major ASAPs. Project Pat shows up. That's a cool moment. And, yeah, I mean, I feel like when Denzel Curry first really jumped out to me is

he had a couple of moments around like 2019 where he was experimenting a lot more with rock sounds with sort of distorted guitars and these very sort of abrasive ideas he had this live cover of Bulls on Parade by Rage Against the Machine that got a lot of attention he did I think a Spotify studio session with bad brains he has those do you remember the unlocked project that he did with Kenny Beats which is just this weird like

crazy genre odyssey that felt like Kenny Beetz, who is, you know, one of the more sort of like adventurous and prolific producers working right now just seemed like he kind of like, you know, dumped over his toy box and they just, you know, like smashed action figures together for an afternoon. That's a, that's a wild ride. Yeah. And I think that's ultimately when you get to what is the Denzel Curry sound. I think it's just that willingness to play, that willingness to try new sounds, work with a lot of different people. Being a dedicated collaborator where collaboration is clearly part of his artistic process tells you this is a great creative mind at work. Yeah.

That's King of the Mischievous South, the new mixtape from Denzel Curry. And speaking of TikTok, let's get into it. Glass Animals has a new record whose name I cannot say on the air, so I will call it, I love you so effing much. I have an interesting relationship with this band. they, for those who don't know, Glass Animals had one of the most inescapable songs of the last five years with a song called Heat Waves,

which came out in 2020, then charted in 2021, then hit number one in 2022. If you want a perfect example of the, this weird permanence of certain songs where they don't just like climb the billboard charts hit number one for a week and then

kind of have a slow decline into oblivion to be replaced by the artist's next single. This is a song that just would not die and I have to say, speaking entirely for myself, that I can testify that this song wouldn't die because I kept trying to kill it. It would not go away. And it's one of the songs, like, all I would have to hear is the order of notes.

And then the song would just be stuck in my head for a week. Yeah. It's one of those earworms that is like an earworm not in a necessarily good way. And at the same time, I have to tip my hat to it because it's so catchy. It's got such a smooth glide to it. It's, it's, it's, there's a reason it wouldn't go away, right? Like there's a reason that it got eight bajillion plays on the radio. It's really, really catchy.

And listening to Creatures in Heaven, a single from this record, I caught some of those same vibes. I didn't find it as annoying. But I still understood, like, oh, this is very catchy. Three in the morning, making love,

laid on the floor of your apartment, birds have view of the two of us, facing makeup and cheap fake blood. What to think about? when you think about love. I'm tomstruck when you're tender, but it's three in the morning, B in the moment, here in the moment. It's strangely low key for a band this popular.

It's not what I expected when I, you know, whenever it was that I was like, what's this class animal song that everybody's on about? It sort of reminded me of back in like 2015, 2016, when I kept hearing about 21 pilots and kept being told that they were just like, you know, the hugest band that had like penetrated mainstream and yet like there was a generation of people that like above a certain age range like

hadn't even heard of them and then I think I heard stressed out and I was like this is weird this is not what I imagine it has some of that same weird vocal processing you know the it's you know wake up you need to make money that whatever that voice is called well I think what's what's interesting about you mentioned 21 pilots and we're talking about glass animals and we could also throw in I don't know imagine dragons. There are certain bands that are massively, massively popular that critics just do not engage with. Yeah. And so you don't necessarily have this like cultural conversation around them. And I think for a lot of people who, who, you know, moving through the world, could walk past the lead singer of any of those bands and have no idea it was them. Now, for many, many people, that is not true.

For many, many people would be like, what are you talking about? Of course, the lead singer. of Glass Animals as Dave Bailey. Yeah. I know his face anywhere. But I think for a lot of people, these songs exist on the wind without necessarily, they're not necessarily performing on a lot of awards shows. They're not necessarily making a lot of critics lists or, you know, getting big reviews when they come out.

Yeah. That is the band Glass Animals and their new album. I Love You So Effing Much. Expletive Deleted. Next up, Dr. Dogg, Philly indie band, who we have not. heard from in a little bit. They have a new self-titled album. Eve, this is their first record since 2018. I think, you know, it seemed like when they decided to stop touring a couple years ago, that, you know, maybe that was the last we were ever going to hear from them. And also, their drummer,

Eric Slick, has been collaborating all over the place, even got pulled into the Taylor Swift verse. Oh, boy. Yeah, I know. It's like Skynet. It just takes over, you know. But this is them, you know, I think like back in the pocket, I mean, the thing that people loved about them is that they really were able to lock into this sort of 60s, 70s power pop feel. And this song Lost Ones is very much like a, you know, it's got those Beatlesy harmonies. It's got a little, you know, ELO to it. And I mean, I'm just thinking about like, you know, the NPR of the two three. thousands and sort of like public radio in general just like fell in love with with this band. One of the first bands ever to play a tiny desk concert. Oh really? And we were still trying to

figure out how to handle percussion. We were still like we didn't want to have the drummer bring in a kit. And so we played a suitcase. It's a very, if you think of that Saturday Night Live parody of the tiny desk concerts where she's playing the gravel in a milk carton or whatever and she usually plays the cello. It was a little bit, it was a little bit. It was a, a little bit like that. But it's interesting. This particular sound, this big, lush, indie pop sound

of the late, you know, first decade of the 2000s does feel like it's picking up steam again. And we're going to talk about the Twisters' soundtrack in a minute, but there's a little bit of that Mumfordy sound kind of starting to seat back into the pop cultural firmament.

Artists like Noah Khan and Benson Boone, you know, who are kind of starting to, like, there's an audience of young listeners who are nostalgic for that era. Yeah. And I think this is actually a pretty good time for Dr. Dog to come take another swing, a very sturdy, very solid band that I think a lot of people have come to take for granted over the years. Yeah, no, that makes sense.

It's, we got through our indie sleaze revival. Now it's time for the stomp-clap, Sons of Mumford Revival. That's right. That's Dr. Dog. Their new album is simply called Dr. Dog. Next up, Jimin, one of the many members of BTS, off on his own with his second solo record, Muse. So as you said, Daoud, this is Jimin's second solo album. BTS has been on hiatus. Each of its members has been dropping projects to the point where it can be very difficult for even BTS fans to keep up with all these releases.

Yeah. And some of those BTS projects have had a little bit more of an edge to them. You know, I think about someone like R.M who's very informed by hip-hop. Jimmin is a little bit more of a pop voice

within BTS. And this record, at least the singles that have dropped so far closer than this, which came out late last year, and Smaraldo Garden Marching Band, the track we heard at the top of this segment, those are full, like, boy band pop.

He's not leaning into his edges. He's leaning into accessibility and warmth and this kind of sweet, breezy catchiness. And it's interesting, you know, going on YouTube and watching these videos and kind of soaking up these singles, the BTS Army is still like fully engaged with these solo projects. There is a lot of excitement in the BTS. You mentioned the Taylor Swift universe. In the BTS universe, there is a lot of excitement for these songs. I think he is a big fan favorite.

I mean, all seven of them are fan favorite. Don't get me wrong. But I think he is definitely, he has some pop stardom going for him as a solo artist. Yeah, no, there's a couple of people in my life who have like traveled cost country to see BTS and the Associated Solo projects.

I know all about it. That's Muse, the new album from Jimin. And finally for this segment, in a preview of coming attractions, twisters the album, the soundtrack from the new legacy. sequel. What do we got here? Well, what we have here is the longest album I've heard since the tortured poets department. It is 29 songs, a huge cross-section of rootsy country music. To me,

it is totally wild, having just seen the movie Twisters, shortly before we recorded this, I was shocked that Chris Stapleton is not on this soundtrack, because Chris Stapleton, his voice is all over the movie. There's a very memorable scene that that deploys Chris Stapleton's song, Arkansas. I expected to hear him here because that is the vibe of so much of this music, which is to say country music

that has crossover appeal to rock audiences and to Grammy voters. If I were to name Chris Stapleton's genre, it's Grammy country. A style of country music that has really been embraced by critics as well as fans. And this record really gives you an interesting kind of scene report on interesting artists in that field.

You've got Lainey Wilson pops up very prominently. Luke Combs sings the song at the top of this segment. Jelly Roll, who's a fan favorite, Grammy favorite. Shows up twice, I think. Yeah, shows up twice. And definitely, you know, he's got this big, grand, booming voice. It pops up very prominently on this. on this soundtrack, Miranda Lambert shows up.

There's also, I would say, a couple of pieces of more right down the middle, kind of that strain of country music that's really, really strong on country radio. A lot of guys with two first names, like Thomas Rhett among them, you know, who are singing more kind of checklists of country talking points. Thomas Rett has a song like that called Feel and Comptain. Country. Kane Brown has a song called Country Classic that is just like, it sounds like a composite sketch of every country song I've heard on the radio in the last 10 years. So you get a really thoroughgoing survey of a lot of what is going on in Roots music, as well as some really

interesting up-and-coming names. People like Tanner Adele, whose song Too Easy, I can say, is very prominently placed in the film. It really jumps out among this, a scene. of songs that are deployed in that film. So you get a really nice, you get a good cross-section. If you have any interest in Roots Music of any stripe that is being made by living artists, you should check out this soundtrack. Yeah, and think about that term broadly. There's a Leon Bridges track on here that really, like, got me right away.

Megan Maroni, who Ann Powers shouted out on the show last week, and now I'm really psyched to go and listen to her album. It's a really strong track. Even Mason Ramsey, maybe it's just the novelty of it because, you know, I mean, everybody came to know him as the kid yodeling in a Walmart. Very bizarre to hear him having grown into his voice. Maybe it's more accurate to say that his voice has grown into him. And the fact, we haven't even mentioned that Shania Twain. Oh, Shania kills that track.

It pops up on this record with Breeland. And, you know, I mentioned in a previous segment that kind of stomp and clap sound. You've got Benson Boone here. You've got Dylan Gossett. who are kind of fusing country with more of that kind of stompy-clappy Americana, indie big band sound that was so prominent 15 or so years ago. Yeah. Well, that is Twisters the album,

but that is not it for soundtrack talk right after the break. We're going to be talking a whole lot more about movie soundtracks, so stick around. Welcome back to New Music Friday for July 19th. I'm Daoud Tyler Amin here with Stephen Thompson. We are right in the middle of Hollywood. with Blockbuster season, which means it is soundtrack season two. There's a new Deadpool movie, the franchise that gave us a Celine Dion club hit a few years ago. There is a new bad boys movie. I'm sure that inner circle song pops up at least once. And of course, there is Twisters,

which, as we discussed a moment ago, gave us a truckload of new material from Nashville's finest, all of which makes us stop to think, how are movie soundtracks doing? Like, as an institution, as a tradition, what made them into these cross-cultural event releases that they often were in the past? And how is the streaming era changed things? That is what we're talking about in the second half of today's episode. And Stephen, I feel like we should start with you because you were the one in the room who has actually seen twisters. So having heard the music on its own and then in context, how does your experience compare to the sort of music-heavy movies that may have touched your life in the past? Does it measure up?

Did you feel like it clicked? Well, one thing that Twisters does that I think a lot of recent films haven't done as much is it integrates a lot of new songs into the film. A lot of movies do kind of conventional needle drops, you know, familiar songs that set the tone or that kind of heighten the action. And there's certainly some of that here. The film deploys lots and lots of songs that are not in the same. soundtrack. But it still is finding ways to very prominently and memorably deploy songs that feature on the soundtrack, which are new and original songs.

And so that's something that Twisters kind of picks up from a very, very different film that came out last summer, Barbie. Yeah. A film that, you know, very famously had a blockbuster soundtrack full of new songs by major artists. When I wake up in my own. Pink World I get up out of bed

and wave to my home girls Hey Bobby Hey She's so cool And integrated those songs As well as songs that were written Specifically To play out as musical numbers in the film

I mean Barbie is a more well-rounded fully integrated soundtrack than Twisters I'm actually surprised that there are no points in Twisters where you see any of these artists like at a roadhouse performing these songs and then a tornado strikes. Yeah.

There's nothing like that. But to me, this album and the way this movie integrates this album, it does a really nice job really mixing in these songs to juice up the action in the film, of which there is a lot. But it manages to combine a few different styles of soundtrack that I really like. We'll get into this in a second. This taxonomy that I've started working up in my head of. of like different kinds of movie soundtrack. But Twisters fits into the categories of it,

like it's a scene report, where it's giving you a survey of a style, of a genre of music. In addition to serving as kind of a thematically apt playlist, these songs were written for this film. They feel like they were written for this film. Many, many evocations of wind and storms and rain and ill weather effects

kind of pop up in the lyrics throughout this record. And so for me, it feels like a little bit of a throwback to the classic soundtracks that we're about to talk about. Yeah. One thing that Twisters does not have, at least not yet, that Barbie managed to pull off, though, is a sort of theme from, in quotes, a song that becomes really iconically linked with it.

And I'm thinking of sort of the classic, sort of like, those high-concept movies that get these major theme songs, You've got, my heart will go on, obviously, from Titanic. You've got Danger Zone from Top Gun. I will always love you, the Whitney version from the bodyguard. Maniac from Flash Dance. I have wondered a lot.

Footloose from Footloose from Footloose. There's so many of these. And then after a certain point, they sort of start dropping up. I was trying to think about like, when was the last time we really had a big one besides Barbie. And in the past, like, decade plus, it's tough. It's few and far between. I guess See You Again from Furious Seven kind of qualifies, although it's very, very much

because of that movie's connection with Paul Walker having passed and it, you know, being this sort of like big memorial for him. There's also the Black Panther soundtrack, which was a big cultural event and had this single, All the Stars, with Kendrick Lamar and Siza. but the album as an idea, I feel like, was so much more, I mean, I guess that's the word. The album was more of an idea than any one song basically had sort of a lasting imprint that you sort of hear it and instantly you're sort of seeing the images from the film. I just, I wonder why that is. Part of me has to suspect it's just because of the kinds of movies that have become the most popular in the 21st century.

Like we're living in this era, maybe less so a little bit more lately, but like the 2010s were so defined by these gigantic franchises and these interconnected universes. And having a pop needle drop sneak into a Star Wars movie or, you know, a Harry Potter movie or even a Marvel movie, which tried it a couple of times. Like it just feels like a weird or fit. It feels incongruous with the world that those movies are trying to create. Yeah, and I mean, there have certainly been indelible movie songs in that time. I mean, we could talk about shallow, you know, from a Star is Born. Speaking of Lady Gaga, we could talk about Hold My Hand from Top Gun Maverick, which is definitely going for a lot of that theme from Top Gun Maverick vibes.

It's a very 80s video. But it's tricky. I agree with you that there's been a little bit of a loss of that, that, that, like 360-degree cultural experience from a movie where you have a signature song that becomes inescapable and that becomes really tied to the era in which the movie was released. The way of Footloose or Take My Breath Away or Danger Zone might have defined the era from which they came. And I think one thing that Barbie is bringing back, you know, there was so much discussion in the

aftermath of Barbie's massive success of like how are studios going to try to duplicate this, right? Yeah. And remember there was like this big rush of stories about there are going to be all these movies based on toys. Right. So there's going to be an Uno movie and a Polly Pocket movie and, you know, all these movies based on toys and games.

And a lot of audiences were sort of like, no, could you just like make something good? Because that's why I liked Barbie, because it was good. You took the wrong lesson. You took the wrong lesson. But I think one lesson that people can duplicate from Barbie is really trying to lean hard into making an iconic soundtrack. And if you are properly resourced to do that, where you have the power not only to go to major artists and say, give me your B-sides, but to go to major artists and say, write me an indelible song that will be the love theme from Twisters or whatever. To get them to really lean into putting a song on a soundtrack that stands among their best material, that's a really hard thing to ask people to do because most songwriters only have so many great songs in them, and you're not just going to toss them off to some movie soundtrack, you're going to want to put them on your own album. And one thing that really stood out about Twisters for me was I felt like I was getting the A game of a lot of these artists.

That Luke Combs song that opens the Twisters soundtrack sounds like a great Luke Combs song. It sounds like a big anthem. Now, I don't know if it's going to become a hit. I don't know if it's going to get nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars. I don't know its ultimate fate. But it really felt to me like most of the main artists

on that soundtrack were giving us something that really represented them well. And I think that's one of the things that has really, I think, caused soundtracks to suffer in the streaming era is that fewer and fewer artists are willing to part with their best material and let it be used in soundtracks. Interesting. It's funny because, you know, in the past, there have been times when this relationship can be mutually beneficial. Like, the Google Dolls were a popular band, but once Iris hit from the City of Angel soundtrack,

like, I don't know. I mean, I think that's probably their most popular song. I'm sure they play it every time that they perform. It's at least the song that has lived on the most in retro radio land. Yeah. And these things, I mean, they take time. I'm pretty sure that Johnny Resnick from that band got to see a cut of that movie before he wrote that song. So you're talking about a process that begins months, years before you're actually going to ship something.

And I don't know. I mean, maybe another casualty of the, the, the streaming era in terms of streaming entertainment generally is that not across the board, but in a lot of places, there is a little bit more of a sort of catch-as-catch-can assembly line approach to movie making where, you know, certain corners are cut in the sense of like, you know, well, we couldn't get this actor here on this day. And so we, you know, green-screened them and we're going to, you know, put them together later. And I wonder if that, you know, that sort of efficiency has kind of bled into less of a willingness to, you know, be thinking about these

things, you know, years in advance, the kinds of sounds, the kinds of artists that you want in order to, you know, be able to really make something that does feel integrated, that does feel organic. Yeah. And I think, like I said, I think Barbie has the potential to actually be a game changer in that way because the artists who worked on that soundtrack were rewarded handsomely. for their work. Many of them were nominated for Grammys or even won Grammys for their work on that record. You know, obviously they were associated with a movie that made all of the money. All of the money. And so success tends to breed more success. And I think even like listening to the Twisters soundtrack and watching Twisters, it felt like the musicians were part of the creative process of that film in a way that echoed the way the artists on the Barbie. soundtrack felt like they were part of the voice of that film. And I think the more filmmakers

lean into that, there's not really a downside to doing it. If you do it well, you have a livelier movie, you have a great promotional vehicle for the movie in the form of the soundtrack, and you make more money. I feel like we might be on the precipice of a renaissance in the film soundtrack. Well, there's plenty of past soundtracks that today's filmmakers might look to as role models for what we're talking about here. We'll get into a few of our favorites right after this. I feel like it wouldn't be a Stephen Thompson segment without some kind of pop culture taxonomy. So why don't we get into that? Well, yeah, when I started thinking about movie soundtracks, I was starting to break them up into categories, right? Well, first of all,

you have a very traditional form of soundtrack, which is the score plus a major hit. That's the Titanic model, where you got your James Horner, you got your My Heart will go on, you know, cut print. You got what you need. You've got a form of soundtrack that I really love, which is the artist showcase. That's the graduate school. And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson. Jesus loves you more than you will know. Whoa, whoa. The movie The Graduate is punctuated by all these Simon and Garfunkel songs to the point where

they're almost like a narrator of the film. Purple Rain, you know, obviously showcases a ton of Prince songs. There's something about Mary showcases Jonathan. in Richmond, Dan in Real Life and Sandra Lerka, there are films that are kind of pairings of story and songwriter, where the songwriter really gets to inject themselves into the film. And I really like that. You've got the 80s throwback. This is the Barbie model, where you have songs that are not only integrated into the film,

but where the film actually stops, you said this with Valley Girl, the movie kind of stops and plays the song. Right. Really, like, fully integrates the song into the film, whether. it's a musical number like I'm just Ken, or a free-floating song like Dance the Night by Duolipa. Then you've got, and we talked about this with Twisters, the scene report,

which is a survey of a genre, a survey of a style or scene that has many or most of the major players. Boys on the Side, I think falls into this category. Judgment Night with like, a judgment night with like heavy metal and hip-hop. Every time there is a rock rap hybrid that penetrates the cultural consciousness, I feel like we wind up talking about judgment night again. Exactly. That soundtrack album greatly outlasted the film that spawned it and really gave you like a full sense of a sound. The last one that I've got on my taxonomy, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some, is the playlist.

a soundtrack that really feels like somebody put together a really rip-in, era-appropriate Spotify playlist that then just kind of plays at appropriate times in the movie. Guardians of the Galaxy, most fits that. It's very era-specific. It's tied into a lot of the themes of the film, sets the movie in kind of evoking a time and place, but also is something that a soundtrack that you wouldn't

necessarily have to buy the album, even if the soundtrack didn't exist, you could just assemble it via streaming. You could just put together a Spotify playlist with all the songs from that movie. And this is kind of the elephant in the room of all of this stuff that we're discussing, right? Is that in a certain way, the streaming era kind of obviates the need for soundtrack albums. And so the ones that really stick, the ones that really manage to make an impression, have to do it in a way that feels integrally connected to the story being told. And so Guardians of the Galaxy is maybe the one time that the Marvel universe managed to have, you know, a legit soundtrack phenomenon and actually be able to replicate it.

Black Panther. Besides Black Panther. Right. That's right. Yeah. And part of the reason I think it works is because it's connected to this central Starlord character that Chris Pratt is playing, who is this earthbound guy, the whole. whole point of his performance in those movies is that he's sort of an eternal fish out of

water. He's just this goofball who's been sort of yanked off of the street and dropped into the middle of all of this craziness. And it's a, it's sort of a winking performance in that way, where he's always sort of reminding you that, like, he does not belong there. And so, the fact that he's always going back to this era of beloved music that was sort of handed down to him and that he, you know. And that he literally listens to on a cassons. On a cassette walkman. It's, yeah, that's the way they're able to make it work. Whereas, like, you know, Captain America, you know, sitting in his apartment listening to, like, a Cardi B song, I don't know.

I don't know if it would work. He probably listens to, like, Lawrence Welk, actually. He's kind of a man out of time, too. Well, I'm thinking about some of the soundtracks that made an impression on me. And so many of these are from the 90s. And I think that's partly because that's just when my youth was. but also partly because, like, there was something about the entertainment industry at the time

that sort of made it a fertile moment for these things. You're talking about, like, the peak MTV era, so there was this whole avenue for films and soundtrack albums to be promoted and to sort of, like, give each other shine. And, you know, it was just the CD era. It was everything kind of felt, like, right for it. The first soundtrack that I remember buying was actually the Can't Hardly Wait soundtrack,

which is weird. It's kind of, it's this funny mixed bag because I don't know that there's anything that necessarily unites the songs on that album except that they sound very much like the songs that you might hear at a high school grad party in the late 90s. You've got some third eye blind,

you got Blink 1282, there's a Buster Rhyme song, there's a Missy Elliott song, there's a couple of throwbacks, a Run DMC, Guns and Roses Paradise City, P-Funk's flashlight, it was probably the first parliament, song I ever heard. Beyond that, a couple of years later, oh, God, I've told the story a couple of times on NPR of how my first girlfriend in high school came over to my house, looked at my CD

collection and said, like, oh, boy, we got to do something about this. And the next time she came over, she brought like a shopping bag full of stuff and was like, you need to listen to this if we're going to hang out. God bless her. I, listen, she did a lot for me. I was, I was really struggling. She should, really, you should tithe some of your

paycheck to her. It probably should. But one of the things that I remember best from that collection was the Mallrats soundtrack.

Malrats, I mean, rest in peace, Shannon Doherty. But Mallrats was sort of a, it's from the, you know,

the Kevin Smith movie from 1995, his second movie, the first one that kind of looks like a real movie. And he,

was able to curate all of this sort of like alt rock from that era that was just a little below the surface. It wasn't the like, you know, post-grunge stuff that was on MTV. It was like elastika and like belly. It was the first time I heard arches of loaf. Web in front is on that soundtrack. One of the best songs of the 90s. One of the best songs ever. Let's just say it. So that I guess you could call sort of a scene report where it's like you're looking at these like Slack or teenagers who were kind of, you know,

hanging out at the mall, not a whole lot to do just getting in the shenanigans. And this really feels like the music that might be part of their lives. The other one that really jumps to mind from my youth is the wedding singer soundtrack. And it was very, very special to me because I was a 90s kid with extremely

unearned nostalgia for the 80s. I did not remember the 1980s, but I loved them. So that's a movie. This is the, Adam Sandler movie where it's set in the 80s. It doesn't really need to be in order for the story to work, but they're having so much fun with the references and they're doing it in this very self-aware way. It's not, you know, this sort of thing that you're supposed to take seriously.

It's this kind of funny like pastiche where like every 30 second there's a character who's wearing like a thriller jacket or somebody pulls up in a Delorean. And so the music that you hear is the police, every little thing she does is magic. Elvis Costello every day I write the book. Blue Monday is in there. Hold me now by Thompson Twins. Pass the Dutchie by musical youth. And the thing that I think I really loved about it and that has sort of stuck with me over time, I have a lot of weird affection for that movie. I caught it on TV like a couple of months ago and I was like, this is doing a lot of things right, is that it is this, you know, grab bag of stuff that's very much of the era and is pretty on the nose as far as that goes.

But I mentioned Thriller, like the song Thriller does not play. Like a Virgin does not play. You know, born in the USA does not play. Purple Rain does not play. It's not like the absolute, you know, marquee stuff that you associate with the era in this sort of like received wisdom iconography way. I believe that these characters, you know, are listening to these records and that this is, you know, part of the fabric of the world that they inhabit.

So I can't decide if this is a matter. master's thesis, a separate discussion, a listical, or what. But I do think there is a fascinating discussion to be had about the evolution of 80s nostalgia and how different 80s nostalgia looked in the early 90s when I went to college and my student radio station through 80s dances, which were like nostalgia for 19-year-olds. versus a movie like the wedding singer, which is 1998, where it's had a little bit of time to digest 80s pop culture and then synthesize what it sees as some of the highlights

versus what has kind of lasted to the present day where you have so many radio stations now that specialize in this kind of from the 80s to today. You hear a lot of 80s retro on pop radio stations, And it's all kind of boiled down to like girls just want to have fun and summer of 69. And the occasional Michael Jackson song. Like it just gets distilled down to like a handful of songs. But it's so interesting to me if you stop at different points on the timeline how people think of what constitutes 80s culture. Well, speaking of nostalgia, what I feel most nostalgic for as we talk about this is a time when soundjack albums.

were just an inevitability. There were just a thing everybody had lying around. If you went through somebody's CDs or records, they would always have a few. And some of them were just kind of ever present

in it through a lot of my early life. The Pulp Fiction soundtrack, I think I heard that, you know, like probably hundreds of times in the 90s because it was just this funny thing. I mean, you know,

you had these integrated moments from the movie. And then you had, you know, all of this stuff that, like, as a, you know, a 10-year-old or whatever I was, like, I didn't have a lot of context for, like, Dick Dale and, you know, like Chuck Berry and Ricky Nelson. But over time, I came to understand that this was Quentin Tarantino sort of framing this ostensibly contemporary story with a previous generation's youth music

and kind of making things feel sort of stuck out of time in that way. The Royal Tenin Bones, it goes to show you never can tell. They furnished off an apartment with a two-room, the robot's safe. The Royal Tenin Bounds, you know, is another one that was huge for me, and I think Wes Anderson was doing a similar thing, taking these characters who could exist basically at any time and using, you know, Nicos these days and me and Julio down by the schoolyard

to sort of cast everything in, A version of the 20th century, but not pin it to any one moment. These days I seem to think a lot about the things that I forgot to do. And all the times I had. If you wanted to talk to popular girls at school when I was going to school, you had to know the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack, you know, backwards and forwards. That was major.

You know, it minted hits for garbage and the cardigans. It's got that amazing. want to die's song. It's always you and me always. That song is amazing. I had so many friends who had the Forrest Gump soundtrack, what I like to call the boomer box set. Sure, exactly. You just look at it and you're just like, this is every song ever. They're going through so much of American history in it that you sort of, it's just like, well, we need a needle drop for like, you know, when Elvis shows up. We need a needle drop for, you know, the Vietnam War. We need on the road again for when he decides to start running.

Like, it's just, it's everything. On the road again, just can't wait to get on the road again. If I love is making music with my friends, and I can't wait to get on the road again. Yeah, I mean, that one kind of fits into something that we've talked about, a fair bit in this conversation, is the soundtrack as survey. Yeah.

And if your film is attempting to capture an era, you want the music to run. really convey that era. And for a movie like Forrest Gump, that is trying to convey such a sweep of American history, you're going to get this like really broad cross-section of music. Speaking of scene reports, I've got a shout out everything from, Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou, to Garden State, to singles, to above the rim. If you want a survey of great 90s hip-hop, above the rim is a great, is a great pick for that. I mean, God, you know, you get into Some of the most classic sounds of the last hundred years are coming from movie soundtracks. Superfly and Shaft and Purple Rain.

We haven't really even touched on animation and how much soundtracks to Disney, particularly Disney, animated films, have been such an indelible part of the pop music landscape for as long as Disney's been around, which I hear tell is something like a lot of years. Well, look, there was no way that this conversation was going to be anything near exhaustive. I know that there's a zillion that, you know, we don't even have time to go into now. It's our producer is texting us right now and being like, what about train spotting, dudes? What about dirty dancing? Empire Records. So what I'm going to say is, you know our feedback address. It's all songs at npr.org.

If there's stuff that we didn't get to that you want to tell us, about. Please send us an email and damn, Stephen, maybe we'll have to do another one of these. Might have to extend this conversation. This has not been the last word on movie soundtracks. Yeah. Well, that'll have to do it for today. Today's highly unusual show. Steven, thanks for going down this rabbit hole with me. Thank you, David. As always, send your feedback and your soundtrack picks to all songs at npr.org. Leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to our newsletter at NPR. NPR.org slash music newsletter.

Stephen writes every single week about what's happening at the tiny desk. And remember, you can get this show sponsor-free and support our work by joining NPR Music. Go to plus.nepr.nepr.org slash NPR Music or search for NPR Music in Apple Podcasts to sign up. Today's episode was produced by Alejandra Marquez Hanse. We had editorial support from Jacob Gans, Suria Muhammad, and Linnea Anderson. I'm Diyud Tyler Amin. And I'm Stephen Thompson. Happy listening, everyone.