The Needle Drop: Music as a Storytelling Device

In movies we have a concept that has come to be known as The Needle Drop. This is when a famous pop song is used in a movie. The terrific YouTube film critic, Patrick H. Willems has a wonderful video on The Needle Drop and the best pop songs used in movies. His video, in part, inspired me to want to discuss the use of popular music as a storytelling device.

One of my earliest memories of my pre-teen to teenager years is collecting cassette singles. I loved the little cardboard sleeves and the unique art, often different from the album and cassette covers. But most of all, I loved that I could pretend to be a radio DJ by setting up three radios, two with cassette singles of popular songs, and a third that would pick up the sound of those songs and me doing my DJ bit in between the songs.

Eventually, thanks to this odd childhood obsession, I actually became a radio disc jockey and it has been my primary profession outside of film criticism for the past 28 years. But another unique obsession also emerged from these cassette singles, the notion that, if I found the right series of songs, I could create a full length story using the lyrics. If I found the right songs I could fit them together like puzzle pieces to tell a story just like a movie.

I was young enough then to only be vaguely aware of Broadway and the concept of the Jukebox musical was something just beyond my comprehension at the time. Regardless, I failed miserably in each attempt. I simply could not get the story right or get the right songs in the right order to tell the story I wanted to tell. I could not bend the will of these set in stone lyrics from popular songs to fit my story. It was also quite tedious and I was not a kid with a tremendous attention span for such things.

That said, this experimentation created a lifelong interest in how music is used to tell a story. Specifically, I am thinking of movies where a pop song plays a genuine role in the storytelling. A great pop song carries with it many different vehicles for storytelling. It can place your story in a specific time period. It can offer a commentary on what is happening to your characters within the story you are telling. Or it can simply capture a mood such as a song to make your characters want to dance, a song that illustrates a romantic feeling, a sexy song, or it could be a song with an ominous feeling that creates a sense of foreboding or danger. Think of how you feel anytime a movie starts up the song Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones. Something bad is about to happen.

My favorite needle drop of all time is in a not so well known film. The 1997 film Grosse Pointe Blank stars John Cusack as a contract killer who is hired to kill someone in his former home town of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. After trying to avoid the job, he winds up in the middle of his High School reunion. He's brought back to his High School sweetheart, played by Minnie Driver, and he's caught up in an existential crisis about his job and his place in the world.

All of these conflicting emotions, nostalgia, love, anxiety, fear, danger, and the search for meaning come to a boil as Cusack sits down with a former classmate who now has a baby. As she is attending to something, she hands the baby to Cusack who has no idea what to do. The baby, a symbol of innocence and a perfect opposite to the curdled darkness of Cusack's killer. As he stares at this baby the song Under Pressure by David Bowie and Queen is the big needle drop.

The lyrics and the propulsive melody, the notion of being Under Pressure, all come crashing down on Cusack and he's overwhelmed. As the song reaches a crescendo Freddie Mercury comes pounding in with the lyrics "Why can't we give ourselves one more chance, Why can't we give love one more chance," and the words are a gut punch to Cusack's character who has been considering this very idea for the entire movie. Can he give himself the chance at a new life, a different life. Can he give himself another chance at love with Minnie Driver? Is this possible given the weight of his past and the terrible things he's done?

Just thinking of this scene, the context, the meaning and that song, chokes me up. It's a beautiful moment. The soundtrack for Grosse Pointe Blank is one of the best of all time. The film even has a second great needle drop, one that is less related to the actual plot of the film but is nevertheless incredible as it manages to draw a laugh simply via the timing and placement of the song. As Cusack is having a gun fight in a convenience store, that now occupies the space where his childhood home once stood, the song Live and Let Die by Guns N'Roses is heard.

That song begins very softly with Axle Rose intoning 'When you were young and your heart was an open book, you used to say live and let live.' The gentleness is unusual for a G N'R tune and it lingers for nearly a minute at the start of the song before it has this incredible drop. When Axle sings the chorus Live and Let Die, the legendary guitarist Slash comes in like a stick of dynamite going off and the song blasts into a new gear. Just as this happens in the movie, the convenience store explodes in a massive conflagration as Cusack and a very confused store clerk make a narrow escape.

Here, music is used for comedy and emphasis. The song does have some contextual resonance as it is literally a song about growing up and becoming cynical, going from Live and Let Live to Live and Let Die is a nice mirror to Cusack's journey from a young adult with a loving girlfriend and a bright future to a man whose moral flexibility makes him perfect for the role of contract killer, or, at least a man who thinks he's a perfect contract killer.

The most typical way that music is used to tell a story is when a song is used to communicate a period of time. For example, if a storyteller wants to inform the audience that their film takes place in the era of Vietnam and the hippie movement, you're likely to hear the song Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival or Aquarius by The Fifth Dimension. If you want to make sure your audience knows that the story is set in the neon colored 1980s you can trigger that thought with Cyndi Lauper's iconic Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

Similarly, music can be used to create a feel. Let's say you want to tell your audience that your story is set on or around Halloween. You could use Michael Jackson's Thriller to evoke a spooky feel for the story. Or depending on how serious or unserious your story is, you could use the iconic Screamin' Jay Hawkins tune, I Put a Spell on You, a song that effortlessly creates an atmosphere of creeps and scares. Maybe avoid getting too far into the chorus as it becomes about an unhealthy relationship, but there is more than enough of the background of that song to create a spooky atmosphere.

Needle Drops aren't just for movies. Granted, in a movie you can hear the song and the audience is triggered to your ideas visually as well as audibly, but, for a novel or short story, mentioning a song title can be effective in setting a tone, setting a time frame, or using the lyrics, fully written out, as a way of defining your character. As I mentioned earlier, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun is so iconic of the 1980s that just reading the name is a time machine back to that era.

On a character level, you can mention that your main character likes a particular artist or style of music and it can say a lot about that character based on the cultural association of the artist. If you say your main character is a Swiftie, a picture emerges in the mind of your audience that you can lean into or use as a counterpoint. A typical Swiftie is a woman but your main character is a burly football player. Suddenly you've revealed a unique, seemingly incongruous, character trait that you can play off of as a storytelling device. He's big and burly but secretly, he's got a lot of big emotions hiding behind that buff exterior.

Can you think of some other good examples of using music as a storytelling device? Leave them in the comments.