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0:00 so it's finally time to break down the biggest blockbuster of summer 2018 I know I've been looking forward to this for a while now there's a lot of expectations on a film like this especially in a market that's saturated with superhero films so without further ado let's get into it this is Deadpool - so eons ago I made a video talking about guardians of the galaxy and Suicide Squad and their extensive use of pop music in their score and if I've made anything clear on my channel it's that I'm not a huge fan of what comes on the radio in terms of how useful it can be for telling a story but in case you're new here I'll give you a TL DR if you use licensed music to communicate a specific feeling in your film it's not gonna be as effective as creating your own theme or light motif so when we look at something like Deadpool 2 and we hear them play DMX I was immediately sucked out of the movie and I thought of that one scene from Rick and Morty where Rick and summer get
0:45 jacked and start beating the crap out of people or like when they played the coffeehouse acoustic version of take on me at the very end I started thinking of that Family Guy riff on the music video I don't know maybe I'm just easily distracted in the grander scheme of things you just don't have control over what a piece of music means to somebody if that person has prior experience with the music but on a surface level you can see why these directors are picking the pieces of music that they are like you can see folding ideas list off why they picked the songs that they did for Suicide Squad this trailer style peppy montage relies heavily on pop music in the bluntest way possible it's a prison in Louisiana House of the Rising Sun by the animals harley isn't your plaything you don't own me by Leslie Gore Amanda Waller is bad and she's going to introduce a bunch of devils sympathy for the devil and
1:31 Deadpool - does something similar that pills at work play nine-to-five by Dolly Parton I'm all out of love by air supply players and DPS killing himself because his girlfriend's dead we get ashes by Celine Dion when Deadpool is questioning if we can ever move on from where he is now place kill extermination dubstep thunderstruck by ac/dc you nailed inside of the airplane and why not tomorrow from Annie when cables talking about his dead family I'm sure there are a lot of other examples in this film but those are just the ones that come off the top of my head I mean even infinity war does it sorta when they reintroduce the guardian of the galaxy they're playing the rubberband man [Music] why because rubber band snap in Thanos snaps credit goes to haki taki from reddit for finding that one and having said that there are some actual regular light motifs in Deadpool 2 as well for the newbies here a light motif is a
2:17 piece of music that represents a person place or thing in a story so we get this like brassy almost cheesy hero theme for Colossus in the x-men I'm terribly sorry for their loss wait you are broken coming up [Music] then we get this like 80s bassy synth line for cable
3:02 except I think they got a little backwards here and this is actually the cheesy hero light motif when cable grabs a cable Sergi by the way the film actually has original light motifs as well as the licensed music which was very similar to what guardians one did but they kind of throw a monkey wrench in the system here because they don't just play whatever they want whenever they want it check this out when Vanessa dies and DP grabs the bad guy and we get the opening James Bond montage we hear ashes by Celine Dion [Music] this was the title song that they released on YouTube that I loved a whole
3:48 bunch and it makes sense this is like the big soundtrack song for the film nothing really new or groundbreaking here but we hear it again very briefly after he breaks out of prison right before he talks to Vanessa again now the final time we see him talking to Vanessa and what I guess is heaven we end up hearing that coffeehouse version of take on me but in the super cool extended edition they swapped that track out with a coffeehouse version of ashes
4:33 [Music] that means that in the extended cut Ash's functions more like a traditional light motif within the context of the film instead of a pop tune that might just help sell theater tickets because it represents more of what their relationship means to Deadpool than just a funny tune that they play in the opening montage but the one thing this film does that is crazy cool is that it manages to merge its reason to use external licensed music with how and why that music is used within the context of the film let me splain in this cable flashback we hear tomorrow from the musical Annie it's when cables drinking and thinking about his family from the future that just so happens to be listening to the soundtrack on a vinyl because vaporwave aesthetics are thing but either way they were listening to tomorrow from Annie
5:20 but we hear it again when cables telling the team about what happens with Russell in the future and killing his family and stuff I wasn't too happy about that he was trying to hurt Manny no exactly now I'm gonna admit and it's important to note that it's kind of hard to make it out during the flashbacks it's not super clear but check out what happens in the scene where DP sacrifices himself to save Russell so we have this song which in its original context is sung by an orphan that's all about trying to stay optimistic for the future which is kind of thematically appropriate for this film in more ways than one that is
6:06 then used to represent a dead family that is motivating one of the supporting protagonists I mean cable isn't really the villain right I don't know jack about story structure but you hear this song at the climax of the film where Deadpool who has some sort of connection to an orphanage you got no family what I didn't have a family you live in this dump well guess what I still just like it is saving Russell who is implied to be an orphan and showing that there is a brighter tomorrow and always something to look forward to which is literally what cables fighting for he's fighting for tomorrow so it's this bizarrely well-done instance of taking another piece of music with its own meaning in its own context and reutilizing and redefining it within the context of another work now I came up with a term for this I don't know if anyone else has talked about this and if someone else has at me on Twitter because I'm a feel real bad if somebody else has already talked
6:52 about this but I think this should be called thematic appropriation appropriating thematic material from one work to fit within another it's a piece of music that makes sense in its original context but is also used and developed throughout a new context to ultimately make sense both as a reference and as an independent light motif now this film was kind of a perfect storm for me because I was in the middle of one of the most confusing books I've ever read when I went to go and see DP - so I've been pretty outspoken about how I don't really like pop music in general or the pop music industry and I'm just not a fan of having licensed music in the score - your film and all my complaining led to a couple people to recommend a book to me the song machine by John Seabrook and that book kind of made me dislike pop music even more but there were a few passages from that book that kind of shocked me and I really want to let you know why like at one part of the book
7:37 Seabrook talks about how the top 40 began and in him referencing a few other books he says paraphrasing here that way back when in the 50s no song would get repeated on the radio over the course of 24 hours it was just an unwritten rule they figured that people would get bored of the music if they played it too often but these two dudes Tod stores and Bill Stewart who worked at a radio station in Omaha Nebraska found a pattern in a restaurant across the street from the studio where stores his girlfriend worked the restaurant had a jukebox and they realized that even though everyone who worked at the restaurant would have to listen to the jukebox all day and they figured that they would get sick of the music by the time they had to close after the restaurant had cleared out the staff would just repeat the same tunes they'd heard throughout the day they never actually got tired of the music the opposite happened and they enjoyed what they were listening to sorts and Stewart went back to their studio started playing the same tunes over and
8:23 over again and their ratings skyrocketed and it's kind of weird to think that people would like a piece of music just because it was repeating over and over again but this is apparently an open secret in the industry also in his book Seabrook mentions that a big record label will organize to have their tune be released on the same day on a bunch of different radio stations that way once it's released people listening to the radio will have no real choice but to experience the new tune that's why whenever a new potential number one hit gets released you can't really help but bump into it at some point in your day but the real part of the book that messed me up was right here where Seabrook talks about how he didn't really like Katy Perry's roar when he first heard it but after ten or so listenings he finally started getting into it he references a book called on repeat how music plays the mind by Elizabeth Margolis and how according to this book repetition is the key to enjoying music like in general at all
9:10 the direct quote that Seabrook uses from Margulis book is that the songs in heavy rotation are executing our volition after the fact or to put it in terms that I think I could understand better listening to the same piece of music more than once hacks your brain so speaking as a guy who has literally walked a mile and a half in the snow to get to music class to take a morning test so that he could graduate with decent grades with a music degree it's really dismissing to hear that repetition is kind of like the one big key thing that you need in order to enjoy music that is unavoidable in the human condition and the implications that all that has over something like oh I don't know light motifs and how they work kind of freaked me out so I did the only rational thing and I bought the book and now I'm thoroughly freaked out
9:56 I'm not gonna lie this is the densest most dent densest this is one of those complicated books I've ever read and it takes me a while to completely digest everything it's saying but just look at this Margulis ran a study where she'd play a piece of music that was not repetitive at all for a bunch of people who knew basically nothing about music theory and she found that when she'd altered the pieces of music to have repeating sections or fragments at some point in the piece the listeners would rate the excerpts with repetition as more enjoyable in researching for this video I actually found a video by Vox that covered the exact same experiment one version was the original no alterations the other two versions were digitally altered just to be repetitive without regard for the aesthetic quality of the music but the part that really screwed me up was that she repeated this experiment at a meeting of the Society
10:41 for music theory and found that even professional music theorists would rather have music that had some degree of repetition in them over nothing at all which is like kind of shocking like does that explain what happened with serialism in the early 20th century there is this compositional process called serialism and it was pretty complicated I'm not gonna go into it if you want to know more I'd suggest checking out classical nerds video on serialism he goes into really great depth on how serialism affected the world of music academia if they were lucky they might be able to get away with writing a major third every now and again now I'm serious that was actually told to students if you want to know more of the theory behind how serialism works the night suggest checking out twelve tones videos I mean his channel is literally called twelve tone but in short serialism is all about not repeating notes you couldn't repeat the same note until you played the other eleven notes that were
11:27 in the octave and it gets stupid complicated really quickly but in short the music basically never repeated and a lot of people who follow the serial of school were total jerks about it like you had to write serious music in music school or they just kick you out every once in a while you meet an older professor and hear them talk about serialism like they're having a flashback from Nam it was bad but the response to this super dissonant non-repeating music was minimalism a style of music that is known for its insane amount of repetition like repetition to the point where some people have discussed that it puts you in a trance which eerily enough Margulis also has a kind of explanation for this she cites her sources and talks about how without any other stimulus that might cause any sort of vigilance like if you're not looking out for some new sound or noise and you know actly what's going on the rest of your brain is just left to relax and calm all
12:13 the way down more than it would otherwise and your internal voice stops or something like that I'm not completely sure I understand it there's a lot to it but in the end of the day repetition in music just kind of hijacks your brain there's even a part of this book that mentions something she calls a listening biography which kind of suggests that a lot of people tend to just listen to very similar music over the course of their life which sort of supports what I said in my cocoa video but coming back to film and Deadpool and light motifs there was a part of this book that had me lying in bed staring at the ceiling and questioning my life it was on page 113 and I quote there's something about rehearing the same piece exactly the same way again and again that lulls us into a sense of its special rightness on first hearing the sound might seem to have been put together haphazardly but each time we go down the musical path edged out by the piece its track gets deeper and deeper
12:59 such that we fall down it more and more easily until it carries with it some sense of inevitable rather than accidental reality this is an inevitability we feel rather than believed which if you've seen my four chords video kind of reinforces the idea that as something meets your expectations you're going to feel good about yourself on a chemical and neurobiological level but beyond all that and later on the same page she finishes with this some effects of repetition including an emergent sense of inevitability on rightness can depend on a lack of awareness that repetition itself is mediating the experience some support for this notion comes from data showing that the mere-exposure effect is a yonks finding is that the simple representation of a stimulus could increase subjective ratings of it not only held but actually intensified when the stimuli were presented subliminally outside of conscious awareness so long
13:45 as people are not expressly aware of the extent of their prior experiences with a piece they are particularly liable to misjudge repetition effects as consequences of particular stimulus characteristics meaning that if all you have to do to get somebody to enjoy a piece of music is to get them to listen to it more than once but they haven't realized that they already heard it while walking around the mall or when it was on the radio while they were in a phone call then the first time they actually pay attention to it they'll be more likely to enjoy it because they've already heard it before without realizing it and attribute their enjoyment of the piece to the construction of the piece itself instead of the fact that they've already had that piece planted in their head before or how terrifying is that it really looks like the more repetition both within and outside of a piece of music ie the more the piece itself has
14:31 repetitive parts and the more time you listen to that specific piece of music the more likely you are to like it unlike a neurobiological level so if you're watching a scene and you don't really realize you're listening to an E and then they remind you even though you still might not realize that you're real istening to an e by the time all this repeats at the final payoff of the film where it's kind of the central focus of the scene it's gonna hit you harder emotionally and you won't even realize it so a critical aspect of a basic light motif success could potentially come from the fact that it's just repeating and that's just something that people's brains like which has kind of been an open secret in the worlds of record labels and radio stations for the last 70 years and has pretty much controlled the entire business which means that really Disney must know this but it still took them a decade to have a flagship film with a really strong main
15:16 theme and as soon as they put that one main theme in all the commercials which were constantly playing on repeat whether you were paying attention to them or not and then you have that main theme in the film I could probably ask you to hum the Avengers theme and I bet you could do it I know I had it stuck in my head and that might be why which is another thing Margolis this book talks about how your worms are kind of the product of repetition so freaky to think about there's a shocking amount of evidence to suggest that just having a piece of music repeat in your life will make you like it more maybe that's why the most popular music from video games tends to be the battle music that you have to hear on repeat over and over again it really looks like repeating music just hijacks your brain but at the same time having specific pieces of music repeat at very specific times during a story can have the soundtrack help tell a better story
16:03 so at what point do we like a movie theme because it helps tell a story instead of just liking it because it repeats thanks for watching I like to thank my patrons for making these videos possible with a very special thank you to Hayden Elsa Donovan Hodges Andrew Luke - Matt Ethan Rooney Karen Rosa now and Clara tan if you like what you saw here be sure to check out my other videos follow me on Twitter and twitch to have some usable questions answered live and if you really like what I'm doing consider supporting the channel on patreon that's all I got for now thanks for watching [Music]
