Will Sinners do for blues what O Brother did for bluegrass?

Hmm, that's it? And so creamy. Hey, we can then pop a creamy sign! Nutella. Or if I'm Mama and Papa, I'll leave.

Not Nutella. It's Nutella.

“When you think of someone with ADHD, who comes to mind?”

Is it a woman in her 30s? Just this constant feeling is being too much. You know, too kinetic, too loud, all the two, anything.

And just really feeling like people got some kind of social rulebook that I never got.

The changing face of ADHD. That's this week on Explain It to me. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Switch on Pop, I'm producer Rianna Cruz. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan.

Nate, I'm a big movie guy. Coincidentally, on the movie topic, it is the middle of February, and thus we're in the throws of a word season, specifically Oscar season. The 98th Academy Awards are less than a month away, and something of note for this year, in particular, is that the leading best picture nominee, the film with the most

Oscar nominations of all time, has a pretty heavy focus on music. And I'm talking about Rianna Cruz, sinners, 16 nominations, we've talked about it on the podcast on multiple occasions, due to its centering of blues, and the African American musical canon. That was Miles Catton's, I'd lied to you, a frontrunner for best original song. I love the low G Funk whistle in there, that's probably my favorite part.

Sometimes, a film's ultimate impact can be measured in its potential to shift the culture in different ways, and since sinners and music focus film is now officially the most nominated film in Oscar history, I thought today we could take an opportunity to look at some examples from the last 60 or so years in which the world of cinema has influenced the world of music.

I'm so here for it, I mean, if you look at the history of popular music, what really often moves the needle in making a song popular or a style of music popular, is it being featured in a film that goes back to say the birth of rock and roll, you know, rock around the clock.

The first big rock hit, one, two, three, a clock, four, a clock, rock, five, six, seven

a clock, head a clock, rock, nine, ten, eleven a clock, twelve a clock, rock, we're going a rock around the clock tonight, one, two, three, two, three, four, and it was popular in part because it was featured in a film. So there is such a symbiotic relationship between film and music, and I am super excited

“to better understand it through digging through a few key examples of that relationship.”

selfishly, this also serves as a trojan horse for me to talk about movies on a music podcast. But, since we are a music podcast, it makes sense to bring in an outside voice, specifically an expert in movies and movie scoring in particular, and that's Volcker's own Fran Hoffner.

Welcome to the show, Fran. Thank you so much for having me.

Fran wrote an incredible piece for Volcker last year titled The Death of the Classic Film

Score, which we were trying to tie into an episode for months afterwards here on Switch on Bob. So this is a bit of wishful film, and let's do it. No time like the present. Exactly.

Exactly.

“And, you know, I know your piece was about score, but I think that extends to make you an”

expert in movie music, writ large, which is Kismit, sure, for today's conversation. Yeah. So as we're noting, before we get into it, you know, a film score is different than a film soundtrack, but for the sake of our argument, we'll be speaking of both under the guys of music in a movie, the large bucket.

And there's previously been examples of movie influencing music and vice versa, Nate just brought up one, rock around the clock. But I'm thinking of something like the era of defining disco of Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. For one of my personal favorites, RAV culture being showcased in the train spotting soundtrack, with songs like Born Slippy from Underworld, making an indelible impact on underground

dance floors everywhere.

and Barbie.

And today, we're bringing, for example, to the table, movies that could serve as a precedent

for sinners, impending impact in the world of blues and R&B. So let's take a back to the year of 1973 and talk about the classic Paul Newman, Robert Redford joint, The Sting. Directed by George Roy Hill, one seven Oscars, including Best Picture, and was instrumental in bringing back the turn of the century genre of ragtime.

“Nate, could you put on your music colleges hat for a second?”

Because I admittedly unfamiliar with ragtime due to the fact that I'm 26 years old. So can you elucidate for the class? What exactly is the genre of ragtime? Well, to be clear, there's no-one alive who was around for the dawn of ragtime at this point, but your point is well taken.

There was a time in the beginning of the 20th century when a music arrived that ruffle a lot of feathers was associated with loot and was serious dancing was seen as a product of African-American subculture and caught on with white audiences in a huge way prompting a lot of moral outrage and that music was ragtime. It sounds like I could be describing jazz or hip hop or rock, but it was ragtime was

maybe the first to do it.

And when we listen to a song like the one that's featured in the opening credits of The Sting Scott Joplin's The Entertainer, it doesn't sound that disruptive, but the jagged syncopation of this music, the underlying funkiness, the dissonant harmonies. This was all very threatening to the status quo of American music at the time. I mean you can just feel the sense of danger and licentiousness with every gentle piano

note of that. It's titillating 100%.

“I think it makes sense that the filmmakers and the composer Marvin Hamlish would select”

this music to score the journey of two low-life conmen trying to make their big score. It would have been really appropriate for these dangerous conmen to be associated with this dangerous low-down music. That's an interesting read because when I hear the entertainer and when I hear Marvin Hamlish's adaptation of The Entertainer, it doesn't feel radical, it feels very standard

by the book and maybe it's because in modern contemporary times, the entertainer is used to herald the arrival of an ice cream truck, so I think that impact or rather that dangerousness is lost in a modern era. I was honestly quite confused by the choice, but I guess there's an element of playfulness to what you're hearing and it kind of accompanies this cat and mouse tension in the film.

Joplin was also not especially well known at this time. It was a little bit like bringing someone back who had been kind of lost to an era

“when publishing and copyright were much moneyer than they are now and so I think in part”

this felt like a little bit of radical scoring because this style of music had sort of drifted so far from cultural consciousness. This is a score. I associate this film and this music was childhood. I grew up playing piano and I think Joplin is taught to a lot of piano students as a kind

of like first step beyond just doing like dinky little melodies and his work is quite demanding

and quite athletic and requires not only a really good sense of internal rhythm that can be mutable but also there's a lot of jumping around especially in your left hand and a lot of big octave stretches, I have a very small hand, so Scott Joplin's music is very rough on me personally. I think of something like the entertainer which is ostensibly I think we think of as a kind

of classical music or coming out of classical music but the entertainer feels like a needle drum feels like a pop song in the context of this film and it exists in sort of a weird in between in film scoring where this is both an isolated song that exists in its own context and also in a bigger sort of more classical canon. Wow, Fran, we brought you in as a film expert but we're already learning your secret

I love this, this movie and the score are such a weird anomaly, you know Marvin Hamlish

wins the Oscar for this but he's winning the Oscar for arrangements of someone else's music.

“What you pointed out is important here too, Fran, because I think it's fair to say that”

you and so many other piano students, myself included, played pieces like the entertainer growing up, thanks to the sting, reviving this composer and his music, it's pretty remarkable an album of Scott Joplin's piano rags, I don't have the exact stat but it was maybe number one on the Billboard album charts, yeah, number one. It hit number one from multiple weeks, like that feels so good.

Yeah, people couldn't get enough of Scott Joplin and I feel like this is such a testament

to the power of film to change people's musical perspectives because if I think about

like why someone would want to go to listen to Scott Joplin after watching this sting, is it fair to say it's because they want to keep recapturing that feeling of watching the movie and, you know, staring into Paul Newman's piercing blue eyes and Robert Redford's handsome lock and the excitement of the caper, I don't know, I'm curious if you all have thought something like why people respond to music in this way after seeing

it in a film.

“I think like often times I feel very moved when I watch a movie in theaters and recently”

this happens to me, I was watching the Jim Jarmouche flick go-stog way of the samurai and the soundtrack is a beautifully curated selection of songs by Rizza and so there's these really detailed textures and soundscapes of urban life, the movie takes place in Jersey and when I walked out of the theater I was walking to the bus stop and I was just playing that music and I just felt like I didn't want to remove myself from the world so I think

when you're so moved by a picture and it moves you so much, you just want to keep those good vibes going. Yeah, I think the sting also has a kind of, I've seen the movie so many times and I have great affection for the movie but it's kind of slow and it's really kind of conventional and I think the score gives it a little bit of an edge or something of a calling card

that sets it apart from similar films of that time.

“I think that film and Oscar history was considered kind of a, maybe not Oscar-bait the”

way we think of Oscar-bait now but a very safe choice and all the categories that it won but I think the score is maybe one place in which it was taking a really big risk. The success of the soundtrack I think is exceptionally interesting when you look at other music of a similar era, the best selling record the same year as the sting 1973 was Pink Floyd's dark side of the moon.

So when you look at a record like that and songs like "Great Gig in the Sky!" Next to Scott Joplin it's fascinating that this was able to catch on like the entertainer Hamletch's version reached number three on the Hot 100 in May of 1974. Wow. Wow.

That's wild. Yeah. That's me calling the video. I need to hear Scott Joplin's the entertainer and because Ragtime and Scott Joplin had kind of been lost to history the sting put it back in the public consciousness it brought

its key composer to a new generation and speaking to Scott Joplin being forgotten, Scott Joplin had died in an unmarked grave then it became marked the year after the sting one best picture.

So people were really tapping into the Scott Joplin discography the first Scott Joplin

Ragtime festival in Missouri launched in July of 1974 and Scott Joplin was given a posthumous Pulitzer in 1976 and would that happen if the sting didn't have this as a score probably not? So what are some of the other examples from film history where a film has actually kind of moved the needle in terms of changing people's awareness of a composer or even a whole

style of music? We got a flash forward to the year 2000 and I'm talking the Cohen Brothers movie "Ober Brother" where art thou the movie if you're not familiar is a loose adaptation of the Odyssey and perhaps as the most distinct connection between the world of film and music as the soundtrack album one album of the year at the Grammys and it joins an elite list of

fever in 1979 and the soundtrack for the bodyguard which won in 1994 and featured Whitney Houston at the peak of her powers like on the track I have nothing.

Drag brunches were never the same but the difference between those soundtracks and "Ober

Brother" art thou is that the soundtracks for those movies the bodyguard and Saturday night fever were mainly pop music. The "Ober Brother" soundtrack is a little different in that it's mostly composed of traditional and bluegrass songs, re-recorded by contemporary musicians like Allison Krauts, Gillian Welch, Emmy Lou Harris and others and it's a real whos who of traditional American genres.

There's also classic traditional folk staples on the album like Harry McClintox, Big Rock Candy Mountain Recording, "I'm headed for a land that's far away beside the crystal found so come with me we'll go and see the big rock candy mountains." So a little context on the soundtrack it was curated by producer T-Bone Burnett who was

“known for what the New York Times once called "American Magical Realism" which I think is”

interesting because he's worked before with artists like Bob Dylan and Los Lobos kind of crafting this narrative of what "American music" is throughout his career and the soundtrack was made before the film was written so these tracks serve as a North Star for the direction of the script and that allows the music to influence the movie rather than the movie being

created first and then people picking music.

The New York Times upon release of the "Obrother Where I Thou" soundtrack called it one of the least mainstream Hollywood soundtracks ever offered for sale. It makes sense to have these songs the film is set in the great depression and most of the

“music in the film is diagetic meaning it's concurring in universe and I think of the baptism”

scene that's set to the track down to the river to pray, performed on the album by Allison Krauss or when the sirens in the film sing the full song didn't leave nobody but the baby. The most interesting hit here though is the track that the main trio of characters played by George Clooney to Blake Nelson and John Tuturo perform early in the movie as the soggy bottom boys the track I am a man of constant sorrow.

That's interesting because I listen to the soundtrack I watched the movie and it did not connect with me mostly because I came to it after this music had its big push so I was not super invested in what was happening but I do think the song here is pretty good it's very tactile it's very compelling there's a bare bones instrumentation but the Greek chorus like back up vocals add a sense

“of grandeur to it it's much more rock than anything else on the soundtrack and I think this is”

probably the most compelling song in that movie. I mean I think this music is great and I actually hadn't known the extent to which this film was shaped around the inclusion of the music versus writing it and then kind of back filling which in that case kind of reminds me of sinners which I think also came together in a similar fashion where like we see Ludwig Goranson as an executive

producer which you don't see for a lot of composers on a film so I've always really loved how

the co-in brothers use music in their films I maybe don't like the over other soundtrack more than say inside Lou and Davis but I'm always so charmed with how they see music play a role in their work. This is an interesting example to me because is it fair to say that the soundtrack kind of

it was nominated for best picture it was only nominated for best adapted screenplay and cinematography

so score blanked but I think because this is pre-existing music it kind of self eliminates but beyond that this wound up being more of a kind of cult classic co-in brothers film than one of their more esteemed pictures. I'm surprised that the academy would make them put in the adapted category if it's based on the Odyssey it's like isn't that just I don't know it's fun to me.

“We have to make sure that Homer gets his real music. I remember that reminds me of one of”

Rianna Cruz's favorite lines ever on the show which is the only Homer I know is Simpson. I mean to give you a sense of what an impact the soundtrack made of me when I was a freshman in college there was like a talent show for all the new admins and I convinced my roommate Arthur to play violin in a company me while I played banjo in a version of the song for like the entire freshman class. Wow and I wore overalls and the coon skin cap and

immediately forgot all the lyrics to the song and it was a really low a low point and then everyone was like Harry the guy who forgot all the words that song at the the big freshman talent show. So all to say this this soundtrack made a big impression on me is I guess what I'm trying

“to say. I think the curation of the soundtrack by T-Bombernet is particularly interesting because I think”

the songs on it carry a duality between tracks like this track I am a man of constant sorrow has really depressing lyrics it's a very stark in its imagery that's so haunting and has even more impact when you play songs like that and the folk song O death which is also on the soundtrack. Next to tracks like Big Rock Candy Mountain and you are my sunshine like it's perhaps a reason for the album success it's such thoughtful sequencing the fact that the album was conceived

first and then the movie later kind of lends it more creative freedom in terms of what it is

trying to do out of context the soundtrack might seem like a slight blip in the culture like remember when we all were overalls in listen to bluegrass music but much like the sting when you put it next to the popular music of the time there's a certain authenticity to songs like I am a man of constant sorrow that is necessary next to hits of the moment like bye bye bye it's drastic and compelling and serves as kind of like a bomb to the pop scene that was happening in the

industry at the time what do you think filmmakers are calculating when they approach a film like this is it a gamble to put the success of your film on basically how much people are going to like the music in it like how do you think filmmakers and their composers you know go about making those

“calculations when they're preparing a film. I think those relationships are a lot more collaborative”

than they used to be what I wrote about when I was researching my piece last year is we now have filmmakers seeking out first of all composers who don't come from a classical background who come from all sorts of musical backgrounds but composers who they hired to do the thing that they know

how to do versus retroactively fit the style of a movie I always think about when Trent Resner

and Atticus Ross won the Golden Globe for their Challenger score and they were like thank you so much to Luca Guadini no for not telling us to turn the music down these are not guys not bringing on to your project because you want them to play it cool and quiet they can do cool and quiet but you kind of want them to go big and I think increasingly a lot of composers and musicians who work on film scores have a lot more freedom to try stuff out and to be a more collaborative part

of how a film is shaped rather than getting I don't know a cut of some scenes and like figure out some violence to fit in here that's interesting right if we look at the nominees of twenty twenty six I guess there's some other examples of composers from not from that classical world we have giant green wood for one battle after another are there other examples we have the case of ham net which Max Richter did an original score

of daylight

“and I spoke to him in the fall about it and he had written an original piece for that climax”

and Chloe Xiao came to him and said I want to use the music that I was using in temp

that we were using on the day that we shot this was just so happens to be another piece by him but a piece composed under a completely different context in an original work by him that was like reckoning with the violence of the Iraq war wow so not something that we maybe think of as fitting in with Shakespeare but makes for really interesting addition to an otherwise new work by a composer who has a really distinctive sound I so back to over other where I thought the outside

of the movie as we talked about the soundtrack had a demonstrated impact it also much like the

“sting hit number one on the billboard 200 it went eight times platinum and also led to I think a”

widespread acceptance of Americana as a genre because now artists that previously defied categorization

they didn't necessarily fit into traditional country now you could put a label on artists like Gillian Welch and also move bluegrass into the modern era when we come back from break we'll have two examples of genres being incorporated into popular culture through their respective movies hey keroswisher here I want to let you know that vox media is returning to South by Southwest in Austin for live tapings of your favorite podcast join us from March 13 through the 15th for live

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with your other work bestie and hopefully everyone you've ever met so in the case of ragtime and bluegrass those genres became revived through their use on the soundtracks in their particular movies there's an interesting case here in the 90s where in old genre had been revived through movies but it was more than just a repreciation it was kind of a cultural reinvention i'm talking about a couple movies here namely the mask

which came out in 1994 and swingers which was released two years later and i'm talking swing revival that was jump jive and whale by the brines sets are orchestras brines sets are orchestras one of the

a concentrated siop it's the mix of classic swing alas someone like cap cal away

with vintage aesthetics of rockabilly and i don't really like it but in the 90s it was all the rage i definitely remember as a child being riveted by the the gap adds that used the soundtrack of jump jive and whale and featured lindy hop dancing the acrobatic style of partner dance named for Charles Lindbergg solo flight across the Atlantic because of the way that the dancers would throw each other in the air and and throw each other

over their over their shoulders i remember seeing the mask and you know being being captivated

“by jim carry at that point who i believe to be the funniest person alive and also the”

the soundtrack it it does feel like a weird blip now to look back at this moment and think how we're like we were all really getting off on big band swing friend what what what was your experience of this swing revival i was a little too young to appreciate the swing revival i actually haven't seen these films but i'm broadly anti-swain i can put that i can put that

on the record um but my disayn mostly comes from electro swing which i feel like had a weird

revival towards the end of the time that i was in college as a sort of attempt to maybe make a one sun cool genre that briefly became cool again and then became uncool maybe a different kind of cool and i remember hearing that music and just being like now what the hell's going on and sort of going about with my life but more than other genres or types of music that this inspired a kind of revival sort of shocks me yeah and makes me feels though i don't understand um how history

happened well let me provide a brief timeline of the events that led us to swing revival delusion in america gym carries the mask comes out in 1994 and it's all bright zoo suits and swing that's

“the aesthetic of the movie i think the iconic image of gym carry the green face and the giant”

yellow suit and in the mask specifically there's an iconic scene with the music of the band the royal crown review and their song hey patchuko then two years later so in 1996 we have the movie swingers which frames swing music as a small part of a larger lifestyle it's a classy life with suits casinos martinis and the emotional climax of the film where john favreo the main character is getting over his breakup and he's dancing with a very beautiful heather Graham it's set to big bad

voodoo daddy then also pause the names of these bands are so upsetting to me there's worse ones like

“squirrel nut zippers and cherry poppin daddies which i think is the absolute worst but big bad voodoo”

daddy is definitely like top three worst band ends of all time anyway that scene is set to the song go daddy uh oh most of swingers isn't swing related you know the way that something like old brother where at that was centered around a traditional american music but it associates swing with being cool in Los Angeles where the movie is set so you're kind of having this lifestyle connotation along with dancing to swing and then boom late nineties america's there the band

called squirrel nut zippers charts the same year swingers 1996 with their song hell which i think is one of the better tracks in the swing revival which strikes me about that song is that it sounds darker and different than the bright cheesy sheen of the other songs like i think squirrel nut zippers

hotel i don't know is that considered swing absolutely yeah it's a little it's a little hard to

hear uh reanna because you know you are describing some of uh i was so into all of these bands as a teen i guess my apologies am i am i insulting your culture i'm so sorry i mean i i went when i hear you say some of these names out loud i do recognize that they are um pretty uh cringy

“as i i guess your your generation would say but i think what's cool about this moment to me is”

i really want to focus on the dance of it all actually because i think i love that these films and their soundtracks may have helped people rediscover not only like swing dance but but maybe

other forms of partner dance you know i i think there's so much to be said for the way that

people dance with each other in an earlier era now i feel if you go out to a club or something you're just everyone's kind of like doing their own thing right it's all like very you're there like throwing shapes and everyone else is doing their own little thing but you know in an earlier era you were like dancing with a partner and you had all these pre-coreographed moves that you could

“do together and i think there was something really beautiful about that and so if whatever the”

the foibles of this swing revival where i think i'm definitely going to praise it for bringing back that kind of resurrection i guess so in 1998 the gap puts out an adds to the song i played earlier jump drive and will jump drive and will eventually nets best pop performance by duo or group with vocals at the grandmise and the band that is featured in swingers big bad voodoo daddy is featured in the super bowl 33 half-time show alongside Stevie Wonder and Gloria Stefan so

demonstrated cultural tale coming from Jim Carrey in the mask and it's an example of film helping to usher in a micro scene and grow it exponentially the movement and i put quotes around movement had fizzled out by the end of the nineties people stop dancing swing and i can imagine like similar to how rock and roll took over big band music but rock smothered swing revival the time lines kind of sync up but it did bring about a genre that is perhaps even more controversial as

friend mentioned electroswing which turns the good aspects of swing revival like analog instruments into synthetic sounds so film inspiring music which in turn inspires more music which in turn inspires a film because the soundtrack to another more contemporary movie 2013's The Great

Gadsby features lots of electroswing including the track a little party never killed nobody

by fergi q-tip and goon rock ooh that's a tough lesson i haven't seen great gatsby since it came out in theaters but i've really convinced myself that i rewatched it i'd be like it's genius but then i hear something like that i'm like there's no way i can't do it but i really like convinced myself that bazz can do anything

“i really like bazz i think he's probably the eminent camp director and i think he's able to like”

access the beauty and derided things like he's so into garrish aesthetics that it kind of swings around in like horseshoe theory and to being genius like this song is so terrible that i love it you know yeah i hundred percent now bazz did not succeed in making electroswing like a phenomenon with the great gatsby as far as i'm aware the great gatsby soundtrack has young and beautiful by lanadella right which i remember being a really early big push for lanadella who i had only known

from like little blogs at that time and i feel like if nothing else that soundtrack actually kind of launched her into a kind of legitimacy in a mainstream sort of way well i'm happy to bring up lanadella because i think that gives me a segue into the last movie with modern musical legs and i i invoke lanadella because she is a perfect example of i think

million scorpion jackets and that's the 2011 Nicholas winning Reffen Ryan Gosling movie drive

the score was made by Cliff Martinez but the real power here is in the soundtrack it's probably the most iconic soundtrack of recent memory one lodged firmly in the French house subgenre of synthwave i'd like to take a listen to kvinsky's night call one of the most French songs

“i think i've ever heard there's just a certain genocide qu'a it shifted cornball 80s synthesizer”

music aesthetically something that's very bright and and bubbly into something that's very dark and brooding you know i think of depression mode as a probable precursor and inspiration for this type of music and the rise of synthwave kind of dovetails with the rise of tumblr and other aesthetic based platforms like i said vibe driven music and if it's best when placed in the context of the movie like the movie enhances the power of the music because it's slowly pulsating in the

case of night call you know there's the striving beat to it and it's placed over the opening credits of drive in which you're getting these aerial views of Los Angeles and it feels like the fitting soundtrack for driving around the city lately this is like the first movie i remember coming out in my lifetime to be really cool yeah like i remember going to college and there were there were like the cool movie posters like the fight club the like that whole thing but like

those movies were older those that come out like when we were kids and i felt like drive coming out was like the first time i was the right age for something that was having a moment in the

zeitgeist and like any want to be alternative person at that time i never saw it because i

so resented it's kind of coolness but the impact of it at the time was undeniable and completely inescapable i remember the Halloween after drive came out like everyone had that jacket and i felt like even without having seen the film that soundtrack that music was everywhere i finally started in 2019 and was like this movie's pretty cool i don't know what i was holding myself back from you would think over time the movie would lose some of its coolness but like every couple of

years i revisit it and i'm like oh no this is just as dope as the first time i watched it it's really awesome yeah like he is a cool guy and what he did was fine you know so much of that cool factor has to be attributed to the music i think into the visuals i guess but certainly not the

“dialogue i don't remember if anyone spoke in this movie honestly i guess they must have to like further”

the plot but really when i think of this movie all i think of is just like people driving in silence walking slowly with purpose and this this throbbing french house synthwaves soundtrack i feel like it's a testament to how important music is in setting a vibe and i feel like a lot of filmmakers kind of followed this template afterwards maybe realizing like i don't need to

have a ton of plot a ton of dialogue we could just have some great visuals and an amazing soundtrack

and it'll just establish kind of a feeling for for for the audience to really lock into

“well i think something interesting about this soundtrack is that the songs because the driver”

doesn't talk in the movie or maybe as a few lines but the songs and the lyrics within them kind of speak on behalf of Ryan Gosling's character because the first lyrics of night call include the line i want to drive you through the night down the hills like it's a song about driving and then i think of the inclusion of another song a real hero by college featuring electric use

good intentions you know even though his actions might be a little controversial

“and the movie is successful because of the music and i think synthwave in particular”

because of drive has such a long tail in the current cannon of popular music like i think like contrary to the other movies we talked about with showcase a short term revival of a dead genre or in the case of a brother we're at that promotion of a niche subculture synthwave is the one that i think has influenced what we hear in the main stream on a larger grand scale even

in 2026 some of the biggest pop songs in recent memory are direct descendants of the sound like

midnight city by m83 which feels like a more optimistic cousin of night call you know it's the same sonic the same filtered vocals but it sores and it grows i mean that's a song that also

“has made its way into a lot of films and into a lot of film trailers i think in part because of”

the success of something like drive super like the the music and then the genre that these bands are making serves itself well for a visual companion because the songs themselves are cinematic

like they grow and deflate and they have climaxes and they serve as kind of like internal hero's

journey is when you look at the lyrics of some of these tracks and like it just feels kism it to put them next to visual media so what do we think is it possible that sinners or another contemporary film could have the same effect that some of these movies we've been discussing could in the sense that will everyone start playing delta blues after you know watching sinners seeing it potentially win a record number of academy awards will this have the same impact

of you know brother where art thou the sting drive swingers like is it still possible even for movies to move the cultural dial in this way when we're like as many of argued we're in a more sort of fractured cultural landscape i think soundtrack's definitely can but often independent of awards or accolades like i think the work that Ludwig Goronson has done so far to influence movie music comes far before he did work on sinners i think his score for often hymer and i think his work

on black panther we see kind of trickling down to how things are now it'd be curious to see where things are five to seven years away but then i think of something like challengers which at least kind of briefly crossed into a mainstream party scene but like didn't have much success as like a legitimate awards player it's hard to say i think these things move a little bit more independently of each other than they used to i think with all the soundtrack so we've talked about today i see

two different elements i see art full curation and i see compelling soundscapes and i do think sinners has both of those things like the soundtrack and the score is very artfully curated and composed it sounds new it sounds refreshing i think of when i played i lied to you earlier and it feels like 60 years of black music compressed into one singular song well somebody take me

“in your home and the soundtrack also has critical acclaim which i think is important i could see”

a young kid picking up a guitar and listening to the blues in that movie being like i want to be like semi now i completely agree i think that film has done something really remarkable which is like bridge that which is artful and challenging with that bombastic and thrilling in a way that so few movies are able to do nowadays the 98th academy awards is on March 15th so they are a month away more time for us to think and sit on the beauty of sinners and only time will tell if five years

from now there's a number one blues record and they interviewed the dude that made it and he says hey i watch sinners and god inspired that would be lovely it's which i'm pop is produced by reanna

of vulture and vox media podcast network speaking of vulture you can check out more

“of friends brilliant writing if you just head over to vulture.com and we'll post a link in our”

show notes to the excellent article we've been discussing in this episode about the brutalist

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