MARVELlous Music
OK, Marvel Entertainment, LLC or whatever your full name is. What you are doing to music, it has to… Continue!
I just finished the latest Marvel superhero series. It’s about the indestructible black man named Luke Cage. He lives in Harlem, NY and wants to be left alone but personal reasons convince him to fight the mafia leaving me once again astonished by the selection of music made by the producers.
On that note (when you see it), I want to make a recap of the music Marvel brought to my attention. Some of this was really new to me and some of this was really old to me. I will give you the link for the song that stuck in your head and you couldn’t Shazam but first let’s get some things straight for the uninitiated.
It all started with Guardians of the Galaxy and the Awesome Mix Vol 1:
If you have not seen the movie, you should. If the name of the soundtrack is not self explanatory to you first you should check your self. Anyway it was just a cassette tape that a dying mother made with her favourite tunes for her son. It was a mix of songs from the 70s when music was undoubtedly awesome. Peter’s mom made a consistently great selection of songs. I was listening on this album on repeat for months and I didn’t skip a song. I was going all the way holding this mix tight.
Then there was a couple of good but expected tunes from Iron Man and Avengers movies. Nothing spectacular really. With all the explosions good music would have been ruined anyway. Why waste it.
The rest is from Netflix. When they introduced Daredevil they did it with a really nice trailer. Half the way through the video a song kicks in. That song stuck in my head and it is still on my “get your shit together” playlist:
But with Luke Cage things reached another level. Here Marvel portrays Harlem and you can’t do that without Hip Hop, Jazz and weird converges between the two. The art, the music and the traditions and that have branched out of the harlem renaissance are there and the series does a good job of making them known to the mainstream.
The artists are primarily dark coloured which is one of the issues the series is pressing on and range from Wu-Tang Clan and 2Pac to Faith Evans and Raphael Saadiq. Actually Saadiq sings an unreleased song on the first episode of the series which is awesome. We don’t even know the name of the song but one can safely assume. The soundtrack is to be released next week and I can’t wait.
Until then no one compares…