When a popular song is inserted into a story, it has the potential to overtake it. We, as audience members, have our own associations with a given popular song outside of the story at hand, so our first instinct is to project those feelings, even if they do not match. Sure, you can have a new experience while listening to a popular song in a movie, but there is at least one moment when you’re brought out of the world of the film for as long as it takes to think, “Oh, that’s ‘Dirty Work’ by Steely Dan. I used to listen to it a ton in college!” Your brain enters a state of recognition and of personal association rather than one of discovery. You're taken out of the world of revolutionaries and high-speed car chases and brought back into your own life. Take this in comparison to an original score, like in Challengers, or a more artful use of soundtracking like in Sinners where you can experience the music as part of the story. Each sound, each lyric, completely supports the tale being told, instead of seeming pasted-on after the fact. There is no moment where you’re made to step out of immersion.
Of course, different projects require different approaches to music. In a film about a specific time and place, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, which takes place in 1970s Los Angeles, the sounds of Gordon Lightfoot, Taj Mahal, and Wings are necessary to help land you there. The pop culture references are part and parcel of the story it is trying to tell. All of the cultural associations that come with that music help us imagine what it was like to grow up in the San Fernando Valley in 1973.
Or maybe the soundtrack asks you to import your personal associations with music, and uses them to comment on the story. Like in Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, where the modern-day youth-coded music of The Strokes and Aphex Twin makes you remember that, though Marie Antoinette was an 18th-century queen, she was also a teenager. But not all instances of soundtracking are as successful as these, and not all needle drops are created equal.
Certain music choices are a way for a filmmaker or showrunner to appropriate taste without actually supporting the story, prioritizing style over substance. However, many aspects of Love Story prioritize style over substance. After all, it’s about two people who were much more notable for their appearances than they were anything else. Bessette and Kennedy were tastemakers of their time, with an impact on fashion and personal style that still radiates today. So it tracks, that a show about them would have the same aesthetic motives. There might be a meta point here about taste that the series is attempting to make, by choosing a soundtrack full of 90s signifiers of taste. The poor quality of the show, though, which suffers from stilted acting, a lack of relatability, and a questionable impression of Jackie Onassis, is only made more apparent by its soundtrack. The needle drops hit the viewer as an attempt to co-opt good art. The level of taste in the soundtrack outweighs the quality of the show so much so that the effect is grating.
via @lovestoryfx
The best soundtracks can add to a story without taking you out of it, even while using popular music. A well-curated soundtrack changes each song by putting them in conversation with one another. It’s Wes Anderson combining the 60s art pop ethos of Nico and The Rolling Stones with the turn-of-the-century strings of Maurice Ravel in The Royal Tenenbaums. It’s the simple, sweet songwriting of The Moldy Peaches put in the unpolished voices of Michael Cera and Elliot Page in Juno. It’s Simon and Garfunkel carrying us through the comedy and tragedy of coming-of-age in The Graduate. Preexisting songs are transformed into something else by the hand of a creator. There is very little sense of curation in the music of Love Story. You don’t feel the hand of an auteur as much as you hear someone who hit play on an AI-generated “Vibey 90s” Spotify playlist. So when you hear Fiona Apple’s “Sullen Girl” over a scene where Carolyn agonizes over becoming a public figure, you don’t think about much except “Wow, I love Fiona Apple.”
The needle drop has become a crutch that even excellent filmmakers fall victim to. It’s a way to import meaning into a piece of art without generating meaning from inside of it. There are ways to use it to enhance a story, but it can never save something that didn’t have much to offer in the first place.