Great Gatsby - Music Analyis

573 Words3 Pages
Typically when it comes down to choosing whether I like a book or a movie about the book, I will choose the book. However, though the book The Great Gatsby added a bit more detail than the movie did, the soundtrack from the movie is what really drove me towards liking the movie more. The desire of the soundtrack was to blend the music of the Jazz Age associated with the 1922 setting of the story with a modern spin, and in my opinion, was done perfectly. I chose three songs from the soundtrack to mash up and sing/play on the piano. The first song is a major musical motif in Baz Lurhmann’s 2013 Great Gatsby, and the title is “Young and Beautiful”, sung by the amazingly talented Lana Del Ray. The lyrical development of the song helped to ground it in the world of the film. Lana chose a very clever way of wrapping universal pop lyrics around universal themes, but somehow her lyrics fall in beautifully with the themes of the film. Musically, I think it’s an unusual song, because on the one hand, it has romance and tells a love story, but at the same time, it’s filled with real yearning and melancholy, which I think is at the heart of the story, whether you’re looking at it from Gatsby’s or Daisy’s point of view. There’s a real sadness in the story, and that’s reflected beautifully in this song. There’s a fox trot version of the song, which plays at one of Gatsby’s parties. You can’t watch the film without hearing this song about a dozen times. The second song in the mashup, “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody (All We Got) is sung by Fergie and GoonRock, ft. Q-Tip, and is personally one of my favorite songs. This one is kind of a parallel expression to ‘Bang Bang.’ It appears during the very same party scene. It’s one where the musical directors looked to create a song with very contemporary rhythms and beats, in conjunction with some period elements that

More about Great Gatsby - Music Analyis

Open Document