Cutting edge music is reaching a wider audience thanks to exposure on several quality television dramas, especially The Sopranos, writes Brian Boyd
Tony Soprano opens his front door and walks down his driveway. In the background, Afrika Bambaataa and John Lydon deliver the sturm und drang apocalypse rap/rock that is World Destruction:
"This is a world destruction, your life ain't nothing. The human race is becoming a disgrace. Countries are fighting with chemical warfare. People, Muslims, Christians and Hindus are in a time zone just searching for the truth. Who are you to think you're a superior race? Facing forth your everlasting doom. We are Time Zone. We've come to drop a bomb on you. This is the world destruction, your life ain't nothing. The human race is becoming a disgrace."
World Destruction was recorded in 1985. It was used in the opening scene of the fourth series of The Sopranos. That particular episode was written in the week after 9/11. It was as near a perfect melding of music and drama as has ever been seen or heard on television. MTV may not like it, but "music television" has now taken on a different meaning. It began back in 1984 when Crockett and Tubbs were driving in the Miami night on their way to bust some nasty drug dealer types. Over the footage, they played Phil Collins singing In the Air Tonight.
A bad cop show and an even worse song, admittedly, but that particular scene is credited with presaging the shift in how American TV would use music as an ancillary dramatic device. (British and Irish dramas have slowly followed suit but are still, in the main, over-reliant on the book of musical cliches.)
Such is the amount of music being used and the degree to which it can enhance a programme's appeal that the buzz phrase in TV land is now "Have you heard any good TV lately?" This isn't just a TV producer flicking through a CD collection and flinging a well-known song at a dramatic scene; the music being used now has been assiduously selected and artfully choreographed.
The Tony Soprano/Afrika Bambaataa moment showed just how far TV drama had moved away from the time-honoured tradition of using original orchestral underscore music. The Sopranos is now the gold standard in music television. Not only does the show eschew the obvious and cliched, but it goes to massive lengths to get the right song for the right moment. A scene where a dancer is murdered in a strip-club uses The Kinks' Living on a Thin Line. In a single Sopranos episode you can hear Ben E King, Elvis Costello, Frank Sinatra and Nils Lofgren.
As some indication of how seriously the programme takes its music, consider that the producers license up to 100 "source" (existing material) songs per 13-episode run.. Sometimes just a specific part of a song is used. During a tense meeting in the Bada-Bing in one episode, you can hear just the bassline of a Metallica song seeping in from next door.
The other two notable music/drama programmes are (surprisingly to some) Scrubs and the recently ended Six Feet Under. You always knew that the people behind Scrubs really knew their music from the moment they used a cover version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. Nine times out of 10, the overrated Jeff Buckley version would be rolled out, but Scrubs used the best version of them all: the John Cale rendition.
"We are incredibly, psychotically passionate about music," says Bill Lawrence, the creator and producer of Scrubs. "We only became aware of how big a deal the music used in the show is when a day after an episode aired, the most hits on the website we're asking what the title of a song we used was or how they could get the song." Based on the show's audience demographic, you'd think they'd favour popular chart acts. But if you want to hear something by XTC (and who doesn't?), Scrubs is the only place on television. Similarly, Six Feet Under took a recherche approach to music - it could have been anything from Peggy Lee to Ted Nugent to PJ Harvey.
There are more than musical considerations to be taken into account here. The reason why most of the music used on the three above shows is at a distance from the mainstream is because overly familiar music can ruin a TV drama. This is the reason you'll never hear a Feels Like Teen Spirit or Hey Jude: TV producers are worried that people will start singing along with the words, thus disturbing the "background" intent of music in drama shows.
"We do chose artists who are very left-field and very textural," said Thomas Glubic, music supervisor on Six Feet Under. "The idea is, rather than pulling you out of the scene like a lot of pop songs do, to create a musical backdrop that gives the scene a whole other feeling without you even noticing. Sometimes people will tell you the show was great and very emotional, but they don't even remember hearing the music. At first, I thought that was a little weird, but I've come to realise it's a compliment."
It's no surprise that the two Sopranos soundtrack albums have both gone gold. They've outsold efforts by medium-to-big names (despite all the songs being previously available) and the songs used in the programme make up a playlist which doubles as an alternative radio programme.
Overseeing all this are the networks behind the shows, which actively encourage the widespread use of popular music. Their assumption is that the music attracts a young and desirable demographic. In reality though, shows such as The Sopranos and Six Feet Under have more of a Mojo magazine feel to what they play.
Newer shows such as Grey's Anatomy don't feel the need to use a similar style musical approach as The Sopranos/Scrubs/Six Feet Under. But if you're looking for who influenced who (and leaving aside Phil Collins and Miami Vice), you'll come up with a surprising answer.
Northern Exposure, the quirky and oft-times surreal drama series about the inhabitants of a small Alaskan town, ran for five years from 1990. This was the first major network show to include music as an integral part of its appeal. On Northern Exposure you would hear anything from Booker T and The MGs to Miriam Makeba to Daniel Lanois. But it had a different take on how the music was used: all the songs were played on a jukebox.
It hasn't gone unnoticed in the music world that the type of music being played in today's shows is attracting a lot of curiosity. Simply because of the fragmented music place, the younger viewers of today's shows are being exposed to acts such as XTC and Nils Lofgren, and even The Kinks and Elvis Costello, for the first time. The internet bulletin boards show that people will buy an album by an artist simply because a song by that artist was featured on a popular TV drama.
Ba da bing ba da boom! Television is the music industry's newest and most potent cross-promotional tool.
