Feedback: Making the Great Gatsby Modern and Popular
October 28, 2014
Courtesy of Clash Music.The Great Gatsby is a lurid story, one read over and over in English classes in the USA, but despite its repute it belongs to a different time. The movie version tries to modernize the story by changing up some details, but also through music. This version of the Great Gatsby uses music to create a clean, modern message and make an old story popular.
If the book itself was a horse and analysis was a stick, literary critics would have beaten the book down to its marrow by now. Plenty of different views about the book emerge, but I have never seen it argued as a simple love story of rags opposed to riches. But the movie version makes it just that.
The movie turns the green light Gatsby stares at into a symbol of love, and the story into this forlorn romance torn apart by dangerously selfish hyper-rich people. But green has always been the color of acquiring, greed, jade.
The book’s Gatsby was chasing the green light, not a lovely pink one, nor a passionate red one. The book’s Gatsby possessed a very real greed not so different than the greed in Tom. The book’s Daisy is not a clear hero or an intelligent woman subjugated by an oppressive and adulterous husband. She’s a bit of a ditz and not so clearly devoted to Gatsby as in the movie. The change the movie makes modernizes and popularizes the story.
Instead of a complex story, burdensome to unpack and fully understand, the narrative turns to good and evil. Gatsby’s flawed, but overall good. He is using a cultural obsession with money to get the love of his life. Tom is an evil American aristocrat born into money trying to destroy Daisy and Gatsby’s happiness to keep from being socially embarrassed. A story of rich people’s dangerous behavior destroying love and livelihood has a direct relevance to a society still dealing with the repercussions of the biggest financial crisis in decades.
However, the modernizing elements of the changes to the story are fairly subconscious. The movie could still end a period piece on the 20’s, with a modernist twist of a message. The music physically and consciously modernizes the piece, reinforces the popular message, and even fuses the roaring 20’s with the 2000’s.
The soundtrack takes BeyoncÌ©’s hit, “Crazy in Love” and gives it a swing vibe. The song opens with muted trumpets to set the tone. Jay Z no longer hypes it up for BeyoncÌ©. Instead, Emeli Sande enters, covering BeyoncÌ©’s parts.
Raucous drum rolls and tame trumpets lead on an instrumental ensemble that backs up the vocalist. Do not mistake the sound for something authentic to swing or the 20’s. Sande performs very well, and the imitation captures a key essence of the twenties, but the song is still mostly modern. In this way, Sande’s cover for the movie does a great job of modernizing a 20’s vibe.
Other songs like Florence + The Machine’s “Over The Love” emphasize the romance aspect of the Great Gatsby. Florence belts with the best of them, and the strength of her vocals brings raw passion to the symbol of the “green lightÛ.
Her lyrics do a great job of referencing the movie’s idea of the romance. She chants “you are hard soul to save/with an ocean in the way” referring to the New York sound, and Gatsby’s gazing across it. She finished with a hopeful, “but I’ll get around it/I’ll get around itÛ. Florence’s powerful ballad reinforces the romantic element of the Great Gatsby, and makes Gatsby’s struggle for Daisy something wrought with epic turmoil.
Will.i.am’s incredibly bizarre, but quite fun track “Bang Bang” does both. Even if it is a bit hamfisted, it takes old jazz ensembles and fusing them in with techno choruses. The song samples straight from the Charleston jazz song, written to accompany the dance.
The lyrics of “Bang Bang” speak directly to the love story in the Great Gatsby. “Bang Bang” is all about the singer and his passion for a girl, “lovesick, I got that feverÛ. But the song directly references how the story pans out when will.i.am sings, “my baby shot me down again/shot me down her love and it go bang bangÛ.
In the end of the movie Gatsby gets shot almost directly because of his love for Daisy.
Bizarre as it seems, will.i.am’s contribution to the Great Gatsby’s soundtrack encompasses how music can modernize and popularize a story. Music in a movie can dictate the setting, rather than blending into a visual background.
In the case of the Great Gatsby, it helps the directors of the movie simplify a story to make it easier to tell in about two hours. It helps the directors make it about relatable old love, and it helps modernize a story entrenched in odd wealth dynamics of new and old money in the 20’s.
