Your own personal soundtrack

Generation Walkman and the Needledrop

Getting on the northbound train at King’s Cross, finding a window seat facing the direction of travel and pressing play on the C90 of Pixies’ Come On Pilgrim with — entirely by chance — precisely the right timing, so that the train lurches into motion with the first splayed chord of ‘Caribou’ and speeds up as the song gathers momentum, the terraces of North London drumming past as Kim Deal chugs in on bass. ‘I live cement / I hate these streets’. 

Stepping onto Waterloo Bridge on a warm summer afternoon, the light grainy with heat, just as ‘Vivid Youth’ by The Pastels and Tenniscoats comes on: a strolling, light and lazy song, perfectly matching the laid back, sunny city. 

On the way back from a European work trip, the same river from a few hundred feet above, the plane turning straight down the Thames into the setting sun, towards Heathrow. The river glittering in the low light, the skyscrapers throwing long shadows eastwards, the greatest city in the world miniaturised and glowing. And a swing cover of the Talking Heads’ ‘This Must Be the Place’ by Scott Bardlee’s Postmodern Song Orchestra kicks in, perfectly timed with the descent across the tiny West End. Hammersmith Bridge, then the glint of the Kew glasshouses at the bend of the river. I can see my house from here. 

Home.
It’s where I want to be,
but I guess I’m already there

If you’ve ever walked around listening to music through headphones — which is to say, if you’ve been alive since 1980 and the introduction of the Walkman — you’ll know these moments: the moments when the music on your device fits perfectly with your movement and time and situation, when your life becomes suddenly, perfectly soundtracked. If you think of your life as a movie, most of it is probably European arthouse: awkward conversations, office kitchens, long takes of featureless bedroom ceilings. But every now and again there are shining moments in which your movie becomes hip, heightened. Hollywood.

Your own needledrop.

Needledrop is not the name for the pitiful tree in A Charlie Brown Christmas but rather a term of art for the use of pop music in film soundtracks, usually at a dramatic moment of purely visual motion and emotion. Needledrop songs are most often used non-diagetically, which is to say they are a part of the soundtrack, rather than in-scene: they are not obviously ‘heard’ by the movie’s characters.

It’s a technique that’s as old as movies; it pre-dates even the use of in-scene sound in film. Live musicians would usually accompany silent movies, adding a layer of emotion, drama and artistic unity, exactly as film soundtracks do now. While some films came with sheet music supplied, the accompanist was just as often having to improvise their own soundtrack and would use snatches of well known melodies to evoke the appropriate sentiments.

This kind of thing persisted after the birth of sound, most notably in the work of composers like Carl Stalling, the genius who scored cartoons for Warner Brothers. Stalling was brilliant at producing a musical equivalent to the manic inventiveness and high-speed comedy of directors such as Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones. He would match his soundtrack to the helter-skelter of the action, changing registers in an instant and often quoting from popular songs in order to comment on the action. In an example plucked at random from YouTube, here he drops in the tune from ‘I’ve been working on the railroad’ to match a gremlin hammering on a bomb:

Plenty of live-action film makers used pre-existing music to more serious effect. You could argue that David Lean’s use of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto in Brief Encounter (1945) is a form of needledrop, dramatising the great emotions quivering under the stiff upper lips. Michael Powell’s use of ‘Commando Patrol’ by The Squadronaires at the beginning of the sublime Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) is definitely a needledrop. The big band brass punches in as the army trucks come thundering by: this is the sound of modern, total war coming to Britain.

But needledrop really came into its own after Elvis and the mainstreaming of rock n’ roll. Elvis broke the fourth wall to sing ‘Jailhouse Rock’ at us in much the same way as Astaire and Rogers had broken scenes to dance at us, but the change really came with a new generation of directors who had grown up with rock n’ roll as the music of their own lives. This is best typified by that great fan of Michael Powell’s, Martin Scorsese.

The moment in Mean Streets (1973) when Robert De Niro’s chaotic fuck-up Johnny Boy walks into a bar as The Rolling Stones’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ starts playing is the exemplary needledrop. The music captures and heightens the fervid subterranean energy of the scene, and also perfectly introduces Johnny Boy. He is Jumpin' Jack Flash, and absolutely everything to him is a gas, gas, gas.

Scorsese has talked about how, growing up in New York, he was surrounded by music. The streets were full of ambient sound sources that soundtracked the world: tannoys in stores, record players next to open windows, jukeboxes in bars. Perhaps more importantly, his generation were the first to have portable transistor radios. They were the first cohort of people who could have music wherever they went.

---

---

What’s interesting about all these sources, though, is that you, as the listener, were not exclusively in charge of them: other people too were putting records on the turntable, or dimes in a jukebox, or buying discs that made their way into the playlist at a radio station. You were surrounded by unwitting directors, all picking things that didn’t necessarily fit with your ideal personal soundtrack.

Perhaps this is the explanation for the way needledrop sometimes counterpoints a scene rather than supplementing it: contrasting with the action, providing a surprising alternate reading. Again — and of course — Scorsese provides the perfect example of this in the opening to Goodfellas (1990).

Tommy, Jimmy and narrator Henry have a not-quite-dead murder victim in the boot of their car and stop in the middle of nowhere to finish him off. The silence of the woods, the grisly sound of stabbing and the flat exclamations of bullets are soundtracked by Tony Bennett jauntily singing ‘Rags to Riches’. This is all very dark. The bright cheerfulness of the song heightens the gruesomeness of what has gone before, but also punctuates it as a black joke. Scorsese uses the needledrop to underline the difference between the glamourous gangster image that first appealed to Henry, and the hideous reality. Henry has been suckered, and we’re being suckered too. This irresistible brassy song holds us in an iron grip and pulls us happily in, even as we see all of the worst aspects of Henry’s world.

These were all well known tracks. ‘Rags to Riches’ was number one record in the States for eight weeks in 1953. ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ reached number one in six countries and has been played by the Stones on every tour since its release in 1968. Scorsese uses these songs in much the same way as silent film accompanists and composers such as Carl Stalling used popular songs: he conjures with the associations we already have, and encourages us to bring them along. That recognition is part of their power and appeal.

‘Little Green Bag’ by the ‘60s Dutch band The George Baker Selection, on the other hand, had been a minor hit in the States in 1970, and had pretty much vanished after that. In 1992 it was not well known. At least, not outside of Holland.

The way Quentin Tarantino used ‘Little Green Bag’ in the opening credits of Reservoir Dogs (1992) was a new kind of needledrop, in much the same way that the film was a new kind of indie movie. Just as Tarantino was compiling a mixtape of his favourite obscure B-movie moments to create a new kind of post-modern thriller, so he was compiling a mixtape of his favourite obscure ‘70s hits on the soundtrack.

He didn’t use ‘Little Green Bag’ to capitalise on the associations it already had for the audience, because we didn’t have any. The jaunty psychedelic pop contrasts with the suited up bank robbers in the same way that Tony Bennett contrasts with Henry Hill, but it's a double surprise because we don’t know this song. This is the hipster cool of a ‘deep cut’, a neglected treasure to match all the noir neglected treasures that Tarantino references. And, to be fair, it is very cool. 

If the Boomers were Generation Transistor, X were the Walkman Generation. Instead of that tinny, public blaring of some random DJ’s music choice, we were muffled in our own private heads with our own private music. We were our own DJs, laboriously piecing together mixtapes to construct our own private soundtracks. In fact, I had, in the ‘90s, a mixtape that opened with ‘Bellbottoms’ by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, just as Edgar Wright opens his mixtape of a thriller Baby Driver (2017).

---

---

Throughout the ‘80s the needledrop had been woven into the commercial imperative of the Hollywood machine. The ‘British invasion’ directors — Ridley and Tony Scott, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker — had cut their teeth on adverts and music videos. They were used to thinking of pop music as integral to visual storytelling, and also as a nice little earner. Movies started to have pop hits built into them, so that little Tommy Cruise could have his breath taken away by Berlin and log into ‘The Danger Zone’ with Loggins. There was an air of corporate cross-promotion about all of this, uncomfortable log-rolling between record companies and movie studios; these songs weren’t very good, sometimes to the extent that they would barely appear in the movie at all but were still marketed as being associated with it. This model had been spearheaded by the Bond franchise, which had perfected a kind of reverse needledrop, inserting the movie into the pop charts before it had even reached the cinemas.

But even in the ‘80s, indie movies were using needledrops in a different way. The appearance of Tom Waits’s ‘Jockey Full of Bourbon’ at the opening of Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law (1986) is part of his worldbuilding, as is the appearance of Waits himself in the film. Waits’s world of beatnik, carnival outsiders fits Jarmusch’s fictional world perfectly, and his music is so distinctive that you don’t need to be familiar with it to understand the associations. The queasy shuffling rhythms, Marc Ribot’s angular guitar and Waits’s gruff muttering build a mise-en-scene, as all film music does.

But it is also a signal of hipster sensibilities, of obscure eclecticism. This is an underground movie and it has underground tastes. At this time Waits was in the process of reinventing himself. He was shedding his ‘70s image (tipsy barfly crooning amusing jazz songs at the back of a bar) and becoming the scarecrow ringmaster of a freak show run out of an abandoned concertina factory. He was weird, his music was weird, and this movie was for weirdos.

This was the inheritance that Tarantino took mainstream. His music choices weren’t just amplifying his films; they were amplifying him. He was displaying his oblique music tastes as well as his abstruse taste in film. In doing so, he introduced us to that music. This is the needledrop of Generation Walkman. It’s best exemplified in James Gunn’s choices for the Guardians of the Galaxy films, where the music is explained as being an actual mixtape made by the protagonist’s late mother. This enables Gunn to drop unexpected ‘70s pop hits into a comic book sci-fi movie, like Blue Swede’s ‘Hooked on a feeling’ (also, of course, used in Reservoir Dogs, a reference that the watching mums and dads are presumably supposed to notice).

The aim of a mixtape was always to generate a mood, a sensibility; to soundtrack a party, or a relationship, or oneself; to encapsulate and contextualise some emotion or moment. Perhaps this is why the needledrop has become so integral to Gen X filmmakers such as Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson, whose films are all sensibility and mood. The hipster music choice is an integral part of their fictional worlds, building their milieu. 

These solipsistic, idiosyncratic, artificial little worlds can be just as annoying to some as they are delightful to others. That Wes Anderson-ness of Wes Anderson is part of what infuriates his detractors. This is a feature of Walkman culture: it’s wrapped up in itself, isolated from the crowd. It favours the individual over the communal experience. Rather than living in public and imposing choices on a community, Generation Walkman chooses isolated curation. In some ways this is simple good manners but it’s also a rejection of compromise, and of moderate, middle-of-the-road choices that provoke neither hatred nor delight.

But if you’re in the club — if you’ve already put your money down for the Anderson or Coppola experience — these films escape from isolation into a miniature community. They are not only Walkman experiences; they are also mixtape experiences. In piling up references and influences their express purpose is to share, to generate a mood. They are one of the last sources of surprise and inspiration: curation that defies the algorithm and gives us not what we wanted, but what we didn’t know we needed.

---

For more needledrops from Sofia Coppola, try Rowan’s piece on her movie ‘Marie Antoinette’: