Music Analysis - Blog Posts

I do know why, but I think the Suicide Squad 2016 soundtrack reflects ‘91 Negaduck as a character, especially “Sucker for Pain” and “Wreak Havoc.” Its hard for me to explain without you guys listening to the songs, but I’ll try.

Negaduck seems like the type to not only enjoy others’ pain but also his own. In his head, pain is pleasure. Which is basically what ”Sucker for Pain“ is about.

”Wreak Havoc” is about someone who enjoys causing chaos and loves being bad. There‘s a few lines from the song that resonates Negaduck vibes for me, “The only reason I’m here is to wreak havoc, everybody prayin that I’ll change, yeah, Maybe one day but tomorrow I’ll be back at it,” & “Go against me & you’ll die hard.” The first line explains all the fun has chasing destruction, while the latter line implies that he’s not afraid to kill anyone who goes against him.

What do you guys think? What other songs do you think fit Negaduck?

Dead On Arrival by FOB is one of those songs that has levels of complexity to it. Like for me, the song literally is talking about itself. I ALWAYS skipped DOA because it was different from a lot of the other songs I was listening to by them. And then I gave it a listen and was like oh I forgot the ending bit is more interesting and I started fighting that instinct to skip it. Then I listened to it HIGH. I heard the words and got the meaning and I was like ohhhhh. It’s the irony of how fans react to music YEARS later. Because it has been yeaaaaaars and I’m still the target audience of emo sad hours and I’m being perceived by their music and it’s just so poetic, and then I’m like these are just some dudes and I am just high and this is just a song.

Many times in my life I have come across music, stories, art, and thought…not yet. I’ll love you, eventually, one day. I’ll come back when I’m ready. You’ll find me again when I need it.

I loved singing as a kid. I grew up with a mom who kept Songs About Jane by Maroon 5 in the CD player, and a Grandmother dancing along to Patsy Cline any chance she got. My Aunt got an iTunes account just to download Carly Simon’s and Adele. My grandfather sobbing hymns.

Eventually, I got scared of sharing the music I love. I was told it was too melancholy, too angry, too overwhelming. That I was those things too. Friends would say I had terrible taste, like it was a joke, like it was obvious, like I was obtuse for not noticing.

Over the last year I’ve been trying to change that. Making music recommendations, playing Passenger DJ, singing by the sea.

I am honored by your response. Thank you.

Ready, Set, Go…

What’s your favorite Hozier song? Why? No, you can’t say all of them. And don’t choose something stupid like cherry wine (there’s nothing wrong with cherry wine. Obviously. But gods man, have an actual opinion).

You are, however, perfectly welcome to list a handful in no particular order. Here, I’ll start,

Wildflower and Barley ft. Allison Russell

“(I feel as) useful as dirt, put my body to work.”

If this song does not fill you with the incredible longing to fall in love with life, and love, and dirt, you are listening to music wrong. I am sorry, you are beyond redemption.

To Noise Making (Sing)

“Your head tilt back, your funny mouth to the clouds. I couldn’t hope to know that song and all it’s words wouldn’t claim to feel the same it felt the first time it was heard.”

“Was it that or just the act of making noise that brought you joy?”

Enjoy the moment because it will not last, but rejoice in the knowledge that more are coming, as similarly meaningful and unique and impossible to duplicate to the one you are currently living!

Make music. Make bad music. Make music for the sake of exaltation. Make art because if you don’t then what is the point in living! Make art because one of the first things a child learns is to take marker to a wall, or pudding to a carpet. Make art because it is an expression of self. Make art because it is proof of life. Live.

Too Sweet

“Don’t you just want to wake up, dark as a lake? Smelling like a bonfire, lost in a haze?”

Get drunk with your friends and skinny dip off a pier. Ignore the rules, what are they for anyway? Find meaning in how you see it. Confront the wild beast in the woods and let it merry meet the one in you.

Those church bells in the background- Are they ringing in a wedding, or a funeral? A simple Sunday Service, or acknowledging the hour? Life goes on, always. It’s the one continuity. It never stops. So what are you doing with it?

Moment’s Silence (Common Tongue)

“A cure I know that soothes the soul, does so impossibly. A moment’s silence when my baby puts the mouth on me.”

“When the meaning’s gone, there is clarity, and the reason comes on the common tongue of your loving me. And it’s easy done, our little remedy…”

Hot.

What, I can’t like music with an…oral focus? Too low brow? The beat and flow of the music takes you on a sensual journey as much as the lyrics.

Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene by Hozier, Fiachra Kinder, and Rory Doyle

“Jarring of judgement and reasons defeat, the sweet heat of her breath in my mouth, I’m alive.”

“With her sweetened breath, and her tongue so mean…”

“With her straw blonde hair, her arms hard and lean, she’s the angle of death and the codeine scene.”

I’m gay. Extraordinarily queer. Do I need to elaborate? This sound sounds like a death march. It sounds like the echo in your ears as you dance yourself to death. Years passing away in the span of a single dance and you don’t care, as long as she is your partner. You can’t manage to rip your eyes off her to save your life. You won’t.

Almost (Sweet Music)

“I’m almost me again…she’s almost you.”

It was Almost Sweet Music. We were Almost something. I’m Almost able to be normal about this song. Seperated by a pair of parenthesis, kept apart and yet part of the whole.

Foreigner’s God

“Her eyes look sharp and steady into the empty parts of me. But still my heart is heavy with the hate of some other man’s beliefs.”

“I’ve no language left to say it, but all I do is quake to her. Break it if I try to convey it, the broken love I make to her.”

If you, somehow, have missed the message that Hozier’s music is incredibly political- If you have ignored Nobody’s Soldier, Eat Your Young, and oh, I don’t know, just about 70% of his discography… What do you think this song is about?

It’s also just a really fucking good song.

Boy Clothes by Nxdia does what most people think white guys wearing eyeliner does for gender revolution

I've been thinking a lot about the iconic Murray Gold theme This is Gallifrey, Our Childhood, Our Home. It's often referred to as "The Gallifrey Theme" or "The Time Lord Theme".

I don't think it is either of those things. In most scenes the theme is used in, it signifies either one or both of two things:

The Doctor's longing for home.

The Doctor and the Master's childhood friendship and their mutual longing for it.

The first time we hear This is Gallifrey, it is in Utopia when the Doctor is praising Professor Yana's scientific prowess. Of course, neither the Doctor, the audience, or Yana himself know that this is really the Master, but this theme underscoring the scene between the two men shows the immediate bond between them, and I think sets the tone of the Doctor/Master relationship for the rest of Murray's (first) era, the understanding that they are supposed to be friends, and if these two ancient beings had a clean slate from centuries of fighting and resentment and Time Wars, they would bond straight away.

The next major use is an episode later, in The Sound of Drums, when the Doctor is reminiscing about Gallifrey. However, I don't think the music is being used as a theme for Gallifrey itself, but rather the Doctor's memories of his childhood home. And the music continues playing when we see the flashback of the Master staring into the Untempered Schism. I think the use of This is Gallifrey is less about the place itself, but the Doctor missing home, and the Doctor remembering his childhood friend, and the moment his friend was cursed with the insanity that would ruin their friendship.

The theme is used once again, when the Master chooses to die to spite the Doctor. The Doctor breaks down sobbing while a heartbreaking rendition of This is Gallifrey plays. Once again, it is very much used as the Doctor and the Master's friendship theme, a sad variation as the Doctor loses his oldest friend once again.

The next time we hear This is Gallifrey, it is being used when the Doctor refuses to accept Jenny as his daughter or a Time Lord. We know that he is rejecting her because of his grief and regret over the family he lost on Gallifrey, and the theme is used again later in the episode when the Doctor admits this to Donna. This is Gallifrey is used to signify the Doctor's family, and all the painful memories of them that he feels when he looks at Jenny.

And then we're on to the End of Time. Simm's Master is far less open and vulnerable than either Missy or Dhawan's Master, but we get a rare moment when he and the Doctor are together in the landfill site. The Master remembering how he and the Doctor used to run through the fields as children. And sure enough, a very soft variation of This is Gallifrey can be heard, showing that the Master still misses their friendship.

A more militaristic variation of This is Gallifrey can be heard at the beginning of Part Two of The End of Time. I'd say this is one of the few times it can realistically be called a Gallifrey theme. However, I'd argue that it's less about the Time Lords themselves, and more about the Doctor's childhood home having become a warzone.

The theme is absent for most of Matt Smith's era, not returning until The Name of the Doctor. Once again, there's a credible argument that it's being used for Gallifrey/The Time Lords. However, it's important to note that the theme is being used for the flashback of an echo of Clara influencing the First Doctor to choose his TARDIS, and then showing Clara echoes helping the Doctor throughout his incarnations. I think this might come back to the theme of family, that while the Doctor mourns his family, there has been someone who has been with him from the very beginning on Gallifrey, even if he hasn't really met her yet.

One of the reasons I don't think This is Gallifrey is a Time Lord theme is that it is absent from The Day of the Doctor, despite Gallifrey and the Time Lords featuring heavily in that episode. Because Day doesn't really touch on the Doctor's grief or his longing for home. While those things undoubtedly factor in, the main drama in the episode is the Doctor's guilt for being forced to kill billions of innocent people, particularly the children, and how that came to define his future incarnations. This is Gallifrey was never really about that. That's what the excellent The Doctor's Theme represents.

This is Gallifrey is used when the Time Lords send the dying Doctor a new cycle of regenerations. It's quite an interesting use, when you consider Clara's dialogue immediately before:

CLARA: if you love him, and you should, help him.

In my opinion this is very much a "coming home" moment, a resolution to 7 seasons of storytelling. Yes, the Doctor doesn't physically reach Gallifrey, but the Time Lords have accepted him and saved him. He hasn't gotten home "the long way round" yet, but he's no longer the "Last of the Time Lords". He has somewhere to belong, at last.

Obviously, this doesn't last, and when the Doctor returns to Gallifrey in Hell Bent, it's not on pleasant terms. For this reason, This is Gallifrey never appears in the episode, because the episode isn't about the Doctor returning to his childhood home or reuniting with his loved ones. It's an episode about a man being driven to extremes by the loss of his love.

Series 10 heavily explores the Doctor/Master relationship, and This is Gallifrey underscores many of the Doctor and Missy's scenes together during the latter half of Series 10, most notably during the "Your version of good is not absolute" and "Every star in the universe" scenes. It's also used throughout the scene on the rooftop, when both Missy and Simm!Master are tormenting the Doctor, only for him to gain the upper hand. I think in this scene it is meant to show the cyclical relationship between them, how the Master's schemes inevitably fall apart at the Doctor's hands, and how normalised this game between them has become, to the extent that the Doctor takes apart the Master and Missy's scheme within the first ten minutes of the episode.

And then we get to what is in my view the defining use of This is Gallifrey: Missy killing her past self. To me, this is the moment the show had been building towards since that conversation between Ten and Yana in Utopia. The moment Missy chooses to reject her violent past in favour of rebuilding her friendship with the Doctor. And the music perfectly carries that story.

Or so we thought...

The next time we see the Master, Murray Gold has left the show and Segun Akinola is composing. Now, I'm not one of the people who thinks Akinola should've reused Gold's themes. Gold got to build his soundscape from the ground up, so it's only right Akinola got to do the same rather than riding Murray's coattails. While I don't think this is intentional, I think the absence of This is Gallifrey reinforces what is being made clear on screen, that the Doctor and the Master's friendship is over. There is now too much hurt on both sides. SpyDoc is a very different kind of relationship to either TenSimm or Twissy, with the Master's bitterness over the Timeless Child, and the Doctor's bitterness over Missy's seeming betrayal, leaving nothing but resentment between the two of them. Akinola speaks about the complexities of his theme for Dhawan!Master here , and how it reinforces the tragic nature of his character, and the thwarted potential for change in him.

Personally, I hope the Master gets a good long rest, but since RTD seems to be continuing the Timeless Child storyline, if Dhawan does return, and the possibility of reconciliation and healing after the revelation is considered, then I hope Murray does bring back This is Gallifrey as their friendship theme, possibly playing it against Akinola's Spy Master theme.

Ready, Set, Go…

What’s your favorite Hozier song? Why? No, you can’t say all of them. And don’t choose something stupid like cherry wine (there’s nothing wrong with cherry wine. Obviously. But gods man, have an actual opinion).

You are, however, perfectly welcome to list a handful in no particular order. Here, I’ll start,

Wildflower and Barley ft. Allison Russell

“(I feel as) useful as dirt, put my body to work.”

If this song does not fill you with the incredible longing to fall in love with life, and love, and dirt, you are listening to music wrong. I am sorry, you are beyond redemption.

To Noise Making (Sing)

“Your head tilt back, your funny mouth to the clouds. I couldn’t hope to know that song and all it’s words wouldn’t claim to feel the same it felt the first time it was heard.”

“Was it that or just the act of making noise that brought you joy?”

Enjoy the moment because it will not last, but rejoice in the knowledge that more are coming, as similarly meaningful and unique and impossible to duplicate to the one you are currently living!

Make music. Make bad music. Make music for the sake of exaltation. Make art because if you don’t then what is the point in living! Make art because one of the first things a child learns is to take marker to a wall, or pudding to a carpet. Make art because it is an expression of self. Make art because it is proof of life. Live.

Too Sweet

“Don’t you just want to wake up, dark as a lake? Smelling like a bonfire, lost in a haze?”

Get drunk with your friends and skinny dip off a pier. Ignore the rules, what are they for anyway? Find meaning in how you see it. Confront the wild beast in the woods and let it merry meet the one in you.

Those church bells in the background- Are they ringing in a wedding, or a funeral? A simple Sunday Service, or acknowledging the hour? Life goes on, always. It’s the one continuity. It never stops. So what are you doing with it?

Moment’s Silence (Common Tongue)

“A cure I know that soothes the soul, does so impossibly. A moment’s silence when my baby puts the mouth on me.”

“When the meaning’s gone, there is clarity, and the reason comes on the common tongue of your loving me. And it’s easy done, our little remedy…”

Hot.

What, I can’t like music with an…oral focus? Too low brow? The beat and flow of the music takes you on a sensual journey as much as the lyrics.

Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene by Hozier, Fiachra Kinder, and Rory Doyle

“Jarring of judgement and reasons defeat, the sweet heat of her breath in my mouth, I’m alive.”

“With her sweetened breath, and her tongue so mean…”

“With her straw blonde hair, her arms hard and lean, she’s the angle of death and the codeine scene.”

I’m gay. Extraordinarily queer. Do I need to elaborate? This sound sounds like a death march. It sounds like the echo in your ears as you dance yourself to death. Years passing away in the span of a single dance and you don’t care, as long as she is your partner. You can’t manage to rip your eyes off her to save your life. You won’t.

Almost (Sweet Music)

“I’m almost me again…she’s almost you.”

It was Almost Sweet Music. We were Almost something. I’m Almost able to be normal about this song. Seperated by a pair of parenthesis, kept apart and yet part of the whole.

Foreigner’s God

“Her eyes look sharp and steady into the empty parts of me. But still my heart is heavy with the hate of some other man’s beliefs.”

“I’ve no language left to say it, but all I do is quake to her. Break it if I try to convey it, the broken love I make to her.”

If you, somehow, have missed the message that Hozier’s music is incredibly political- If you have ignored Nobody’s Soldier, Eat Your Young, and oh, I don’t know, just about 70% of his discography… What do you think this song is about?

It’s also just a really fucking good song.

Okay so I saw atsv recently and while I love reading everyone’s takes on the art styles, I have to bring up the music

I’m a pretty basic music nerd with minimal theory study, but I’ve taken to just playing the soundtrack. (I’m referencing specifically the Metro soundtrack, I prefer songs with lyrics, but I’m positive this will apply to the other soundtrack too, the crew of spider verse are that amazing) And in doing so, I just need to bring up how carefully these songs are constructed??

See, backing track songs need to be subtle. That’s what (in my experience) can make them boring or difficult to compose - how do you make something interesting but able to blend in? But these people, they’ve just - pulled back layers?? And spread them out???? Rarely is there more than about 3 things happening at any one point in the songs, and it means they can pack so much into them. And more than that, it gives them room to give every song a style, a reference and a character to link them to!

Take ‘Hummingbird’, for example: it’s the song that plays when Gwen opens the portal above Miles’ bed. Then compare it to ‘Sunflower’, from the original movie. The artists are completely different, the tone of the movie has changed entirely, but the songs mirror each other!! The way the vocals have a little flick (flick? Reach??) at the end, the bass and trap in the background, heck, even the emotions they convey! Miles, in each instance, is at a turning point, whether he is aware of it or not.

But the composers haven’t just decided to mimic Miles’ song from the original song - they’ve dampened it to fit the tone of the movie. The trap beat and pulses are muted, and the vocals are slightly subdued. And of course, the lyrics are very different. They are both about love, but one is optimistic, and one is resigned. GOD these people!!

And it’s like this with basically every song I’ve come across! While a lot of the characters have less (or nothing) to compare to, the composers have put bits and pieces in to make the characterisations and emotions peak through. Just look at the percussion in ‘Link Up’ (a mixture of the clicking from ‘Self-Love, which kinda was Gwen’s theme in the album, and the percussion from ‘Silk & Cologne’, which I think is supposed to be Miles’ family and their party (?)) which I took as showing Miles’ split between Gwen and the Spiders, and his family.

Just, this soundtrack has som much care and love stuffed into it. I don’t know how much this makes sense (It’s 3 AM), but I didn’t see anyone talking about it and that is a CRIME

Hold up, cushfuddled made that video?? Cushfuddled, the RISD alum who made Warriors: Twin Shadows, an absolute masterpiece of a comic in terms of visual storytelling? Well THAT gave me whiplash to find out Like cushfuddled, I'm an artist, not a musicologist-- but I love looking at the scores for my favorite games and movies, and for Frozen, it was a special kind of musical fixation. So I've been putting off watching that video.

I made leitmotif compilations combing every animated feature and even the Broadway musical. Comparatively observing where the Frozen musics use themes and how. What I learned from doing that is, the way Frozen uses its leitmotifs, it's like the equivalent of consistent writing for music.

The goal is for those leitmotifs to be recognizable, and you can hear callbacks all throughout the film. (Sorcery shows up very often of course, which makes sense given how many magical duels are going down, and how often it's used to represent Elsa.)

But there's also PLENTY new recognizable leitmotifs which F2 introduces-- the spirits all share one (G#, G, E) in addition to each having their own unique one. More on this.

And concerning Atohallan's kulning / Dies irae, it actually does show up a lot, just not in a form that would be glaringly obvious to the audience.

The notes in the siren call are F# F, F# D#. As characters are moving through the mist, or find the ship, you get little inklings of the spirits' theme (that G#GE I mentioned, though sometimes it's transposed to something like E E♭ C or has a few notes changed to sound dissonant and create tension). The general formula though is: a root note, followed by a half-step down, and then three semitones down from that.

The relation of the siren call is that it's a resolved form of this dissonance. The first two notes will have the same relationship as in the spirits' theme but it ends with D#, completing the chord. Almost like Ahtohallan is a higher power presiding over the spirits...

There's a special leitmotif which plays whenever Elsa performs "the next step" in her journey (i.e. taming a spirit). This one begins F# E C. I'm pretty sure anyone who has watched the film can hear the moment when Elsa gets on Nokk's back and there's that triumphant swell of strings as she rides toward the glacier. That same motif plays again when she stops the flood. THAT'S THE ONE I'm talking about. That's beautiful! That's so beautiful actually!

And guess what! It's designed to resolve the spirits' themes (or at the very least Nokk's), and then it leads into Show Yourself, which is itself a resolution of the main theme which all the spirits share

Saying the music is bad because it's not putting up more glaring road signs about the siren's call... takes away the artfulness? It's intelligently written. It's also so fun to catch bits of other songs in parts of the score. The Epilogue does a really good job of weaving them all together, especially with how many new ideas are musically introduced with old ones.

If they're talking about the songs being unmemorable, there are entire videos dedicated to how wonderful SY and TNRT are. But even When I'm Older, which the thumbnail suggests they're using as the butt, messes with the playful instrumentation that Olaf is always known for. His musical entrances are a bit less cohesive, but they always sound like someone tripping up a set of stairs. He has a jazzy showtune feel to all of his songs (When Everything Falls Apart, from the Broadway musical, is so fun) and When I'm Older, I would argue, incorporates that instrumentation at center stage. So if anything they should not be couching their argument in that song, because it uses glaring instrumental choices that make sense for Olaf.

And if anyone who's actually good at music theory wants to articulate better on anything I’ve said, feel free-- I'm going back into hermitage while I try to survive finals

I feel I have to write something about this video critique on Christophe Beck's score of F2, especially since I'm mentioned favorably in the video description. The creator (cushfuddled on Tumblr) had a chat with me a while back on the Frozen 2 soundtrack, as they were creating this video.

Unfortunately, this video gave me great pain as I watched. I couldn't finish it and stopped at about 30minutes.

This is an opinion video, so, we can agree to disagree. The creator did tell me in Tumblr chat that they didn't like the F2 soundtrack, so, fair warning, but I was not prepared for the level of criticism in the video.

The creator said that the score of the film is not memorable - I totally disagree. I could play any of the themes from the score right now on the piano for you, even 5 years after the movie was released. The creator also set a 3 question quiz testing the listener on whether they could identify which 3 out of 12 excerpts of music was from F2, trying to "prove" that the music of F2 is forgettable and unrecognizable - well, I got all 3 questions correct. Easily.

The creator made a big deal about composer Christophe Beck not being "allowed" by Disney to use the 4-note "siren" call in his score because its use had to be reserved for the moments in the plot that the siren calls to Elsa. This is sort of true, Beck has mentioned this in interviews but I don't see the problem. He wasn't "banned" by Disney per se, it's mutual discussions between the filmmakers and the composer about what is best for the film and Beck is just doing his job and what a damn fine job he did!

This is not a personal attack on the creator, it's just my opinions. Agree to disagree, I'm not one to start online wars. The creator did mention me favorably in the description. I do recognize that I am on the other end of the spectrum in that I'm hyper fixated on the music, am a musician myself and I memorize and internalize music effortlessly, and most of all, I LOVE THE SCORE.