Music in The Sopranos: Offering Humanity in a Show Absent of It

                If you’re looking for a show that explores the kindness and generosity of the human spirit, than The Sopranos is not your best option. David Chase's television classic focuses on the anxieties and personal struggles of middle aged mobster Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini, as he goes through therapy. The show's viewpoint of people and the psychological makeup that makes them tick is deeply pessimistic. Everyone is selfish and self-serving. Conversations are not exchanges of thoughts and ideas as much as a series of thoughts spoken aloud to one another with little to no value given to what the other participant says. Characters store emotions up inside of them for years until they explode, often at the expense of people entirely uninvolved with the situation. And by the end of the show, many characters who claimed to have changed themselves and their evil ways find themselves in a far worse place than they ever started. There are moments of empathy and humanity, and these scenes are indeed powerful, but they are few and far between, more often the exception to the rule. Basically, the show seems to believe that people are often no good. This is such a deeply pessimistic viewpoint runs the danger of being far too oppressive viewpoint. But it never does, in no small part thanks to the music.

                The use of licensed music in film and television is nothing new. Ever since movies like Mean Streets, Easy Rider and American Graffiti, licensed music has become a means of accentuating and commenting upon the emotional core of any scene in a variety of films and television shows. And certain television shows, such as LOST, Twin Peaks and Breaking Bad, have used music to great effect. But The Sopranos truly stands out amongst them all with the strength of aural landscape. Songs are deftly utilized to convey any number of sentiments. Sometimes they will be an indicator of the times or a character’s interest, such as when Britney Spears plays in the background of a fast food restaurant. Often the music is used as a means of getting into a character’s head, such as at the end of the episode Blue Comet, when a sparse piano piece lays as Tony sits on a bed alone holding onto a machine gun, his friends either fatally injured or killed. Sometimes it serves as a means of juxtaposition, such as in the pilot when a Doo-Wop song plays as Tony beats a man so he can get his money. One of the most notable uses of music is the montage that begins season two, which plays to Frank Sinatra’s “It Was A Very Good Year.”

                As we watch the characters live their everyday lives, Frank sings nostalgically about his days of youth. But intertwined with this nostalgia is a sense of melancholy. As each verse passes, the character gets older and older, yet he still finds himself dwelling on the past. The song ends in the autumn, with the character reflecting on all the good times. Autumn, the season where the weather gets colder and the plants and trees start to die. The brutal winter is not here yet, but it is on its way. But these are the good times. This may be as good as it ever gets. Revel in it, enjoy it. Because it may not always be this way. And so as we watch these characters live their everyday life, there a combined sense of comfort at how things are and one of dread for what is to come. I was able to articulate this by analyzing the song, but it is understood on an emotional level as soon as one watches it. That the show could conjure such a complex emotion out of a short three minute montage is laudable. Magical moments like this are strewn all over The Sopranos seven year run, to the point where it makes the perfect mesh of song and image seem easy.

                There is such a consistency to the one of the music, with much of the selections being a heavy dose of classic rocks songs such as The Rolling Stones and The Kings mixed with a hint of deeply humanistic, sometimes spiritual songs. The music landscape almost becomes, if not another character, than an entirely different viewpoint for the show to articulate and further its overall perspective. A song does not only comment and accentuate the single scene it plays against; it works alongside the established musical palette  and deepens our understanding of the overall show. The song selections come together and form a shading of the show’s viewpoint as important and tangible as the writing, acting and cinematography. And whereas the other shadings of this perspective typically work to further the show’s pessimistic declaration of humanity, the music instead offers with a deeply emotional and sentimental tone that allows us to enjoy the characters and occasionally empathize with them. This is not the only aspect of the show to make these characters and the shows viewpoint tolerable, humor also being quite important to what makes the show work, but it may be the most affective one.