I am really enjoying the Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men’s Chest soundtrack. It has just enough of the original movie’s themes but then builds on them to create totally new pieces of music. To me, it’s the way a sequel soundtrack should be done.
I was talking about this with a fellow soundtrackophile who dislikes the soundtrack because something about it bugs him. “The guitars,” he says. “I don’t think they should use instruments or songs in movies where they wouldn’t exist in the movie’s time in history. Take A Knight’s Tale, for example. They start singing, ‘We Will Rock You’! That bugs me.”
Though I saw his point I still disagreed — I just couldn’t exactly think why except that I knew that stuff usually didn’t irritate me. I also couldn’t think of any good movie examples to refute him, so we let the conversation wander on to less debatable things.
I was thinking about the subject again this morning as the Pirates soundtrack was blasting through the house, and an idea struck me: people of our current time and generation relate to different types of music in a much different way than people of previous time periods and generations do. That’s why modern instruments and songs in otherwise period movies don’t grate against me.
For example, take Beethoven. Most of us hear his Fifth Symphony and images of dour old laidies in pearls and men with waistcoats and pipes sitting around a grammarphone dance in front of our eyes. However, that was not how that piece of music was perceived in Beethoven’s time. People were shocked when they heard the crazy things he was doing with musical sounds — much like the way adults were horrified when the Beatles became popular. Beethoven was a rebel — he did things with music that nobody dreamed of. The punk rocker of his day, that one.
Back to A Knight’s Tale and the crowd of common folk sitting in the stands, chanting “We Will Rock You!” Because we know that song and relate it to sports events, competitions, and general one-upmanship, we get a much better idea of what those people back in that era were feeling when they went to jousts. It was a rarin’ good time! Knowing what that chant means to us makes us realize their sporting events meant no less to them than a good Auburn/Alabama rivalry game means to us. We could not have made that connection had there been a four-piece ensemble of fools playing oboes.
And so with Pirates, the guitar kicking in during the exiting, tense bits of music bumps up our knowledge of the struggle and adventure that is going on on the screen. We relate that sound to high-adrenaline rock bands and that’s how the moviemakers want us to feel when watching the action scenes.
So to my fellow soundtrackophile — ’cause I know you’re reading this — I have just two words for you.
Moulin Rouge.
.