In addition to Spotify's 70-track career survey that Tarantino curated himself, a handful of other playlists on the service focus exclusively on the sound world of Once Upon a Time, including many of the oddly mesmerizing snippets of Steele's voice (giving local weather, plugging suntan oil). This alone should send a shiver down your spine. This tactic finds its apotheosis in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Like the video-format trompe l'oeil director Michael Haneke uses to jolt us out of passive viewing, Tarantino's audio trick serves a profound subliminal role, scene-shifting from Malibu to Inglewood, uniting his interlocking characters and stories into a single common experience. The Dick Dale throwdown “Misirlou” plays throughout its black-screen title credits until a burst of static and jagged sound bites evoke a hand twisting the knob across an FM dial, landing on the menacing groove of “Jungle Boogie” by early Kool & the Gang, heralding Samuel L. In 1992's Reservoir Dogs, nearly all real-time events occur against a backdrop of the fictional program “K-Billy's Super Sounds of the 70s.” Pulp Fiction uses a similar device to dispense the first frisson after its opening diner robbery. Though his soundtracks arrived at the twilight of the CD age, Tarantino's screenplays draw deeply from that profoundly analog medium, classic FM radio. It's the musical antipode to the Forrest Gump soundtrack. Even with a film set as firmly in as specific a time and place as the first six months of 1969 in Los Angeles, you won't hear one obvious hit from the era. If it's a well-known song, it's a lesser-known artist's version, not for obscurity's sake but for the grittier production and associative possibilities. The de facto house mix to untold hipster bars at the century's end included: alternate takes from Morricone scores, blaxploitation interstitials, midlist '60s soul, obscure surf bands, rockabilly curios, forgotten FM baubles, and not one sucker cut. This mode of narrative assembly leaves Tarantino's distinct footprint on each of his soundtracks, which are diverse but hardly random. To start a movie, he writes, “I go through my record collection and just start playing songs, trying to find the personality of the movie.” He then heads into the immense vinyl LP vault in his basement and digs through crates in search of what both DJs and screenwriters call the “beats” that remain to be hit. compilation album, The Tarantino Connection, the director shared his secret. Like Tarantino's previous revisionist genre flicks, 2009's Inglourious Basterds and 2012's Django Unchained, this Manson-adjacent picaresque is at once preposterous, distasteful, and a genuine magic trick, taking such firm hold of our senses that it manages to suspend 50 years of true-crime lit for nearly three full hours. himself, the sui generis curator who made Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood live both on the screen and in your earbuds.įrom its first needle drop, Once Upon a Time takes us on a giddy joyride through real epochal horror. In fact, this award might not suit anyone but Q.T. It would also exclude film-linked albums by established artists such as Curtis Mayfield, whose Super Fly album outearned the film, or, well, the Beatles, whose lock with this year's Yesterday would simply be unfair. The award would be distinct from best original score, whose honorees compose orchestral suites for onscreen drama and whose albums are often snores. New award categories haven't exactly set the world on fire-see that nonstarter of 2018, outstanding achievement in popular film-but the Oscars still need a way to recognize one director's truly, and singularly, “outstanding achievement in popular culture.” In that spirit, we present for your consideration: the category best original soundtrack album, which we would suggest awarding to Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood-and the soundtrack to every film Quentin Tarantino has released in the quarter century since Pulp Fiction.
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