The brilliant choice of iconic songs as narrative events: from Bowie’s Heroes to Iron Maiden’s The Trooper
One thing is certain: Stranger Things 5 has definitively erased the boundary between TV series and soundtrack. The most successful Netflix phenomenon of recent years has in fact reinvented the very function of music within audiovisual narration. In Stranger Things 5 music is no longer an element at the service of the images, but a parallel narrative plan, designed to continue to exist even when the image withdraws.
According to traditional canons, a soundtrack lives and spreads “inside” a series: it accompanies the images, underlines the key moments, then disappears with them. In Stranger Things 5 it happens instead. the opposite. THEand musical sequences are constructed so that they can be extrapolated from the narrative without losing meaning. The scene does not “burn” the music and the music survives the scene. This is the heart of Stranger Things 5’s perfect algorithm: each song in the tracklist is designed to work on multiple levels simultaneously. It must support the scene, but also the memory. It must be inseparable from the image, but also autonomous. Musical sequences are built to be isolated, remembered, listened to again. The series doesn’t use music: it throws it. And, in this context, silence takes on an essential role. A significant part of the fifth season silences the soundtrack for long sequences, creating a space of waiting. So, when the music enters, it does so as an event.
An event prepared with obsessive care. The most fitting example is the one following the final scene of episode 8, the last. Instead of the classic credits sequence, there’s a pause, followed by a nostalgic animated segment with David Bowie’s Heroes playing in the background. «The perfect closing of the circle» declared the Duffer Brothers (Matt and Ross), creators and directors of the series. Bowie’s voice seals the end, an irreversible moment: it is powerful and evocative, like the melody of the piece which resonates in the millennial audience as if subliminally connected to the vision of Stranger Things. And that’s right, because Bowie’s song had already been used in the previous seasons of the series, but in the background, with a slowed down version sung by Peter Gabriel.
To certify the success of the operation, the sensational more than five hundred percent of clicks in streaming of the White Duke’s classic. Joining the Duffer Brothers in choosing the songs is the American Nora Felder, a legend in the world of professionals who work as “music supervisors”. His source is obviously digital platforms, but above all a personal collection of twenty thousand albums. the minimum database for those who do their job.
In addition to having resurrected Running up that hill from oblivion, an old, little-known song by Kate Bush, which became a best seller in the charts around the world after its appearance in Stranger Things, Nora Felder placed another masterstroke by combining the sugary melody of Fernando from Abba to a relaxing moment of Karen sipping some wine before a hot bath just at the moment in which the monstrous creature called Demogorgon tries to kidnap her young daughter Holly in another room of the house. The calm before the storm.
Travel without gender distinction in the 80’s the Stranger Things 5 soundtrack which is now out on CD, red vinyl and cassette, a format, the latter, that smells of the Eighties, which becomes a perfect metaphor for the soundtrack of the final season: a support that requires attention, which works through sides, pauses, silences, rewinds. It does not flow invisibly, like streaming, without interruption, but signals its presence. When he leaves, you can feel it. When it stops, it leaves a void.
Just like music enters the series: not as a constant background, but as a conscious gesture. Among the pearls of the collection, Rockin’ Robyn by Michael Jackson, a 45 rpm single dated 1972, when the future king of pop was 14 years old. A somewhat destabilizing piece, which underlines in its progress the striking contrast between that thin child’s voice and the leading role, even then, in the big entertainment business.
And then Iron Maiden, the metal band par excellence, which enters the fold of Stranger Things with a classic called The Tropeer, taken from the album Piece Of Mind. Not a casual passage, but another closing of the circle, the result of a cameo from the fourth season, which was missed by the vast majority of the general public, but not by Iron Maiden himself. Who with a post on
In the Stranger Things 5 soundtrack, nostalgia is only the starting point of a more complex process. THEand carefully chosen songs, whether from the Seventies or the Eighties, function as an already known language, which allows the series to communicate quickly and deeply without having to explain. The effectiveness of the soundtrack arises precisely from this familiarity: the songs must not introduce an emotion, but activate it. They arrive when the stage is already set. The Seventies and Eighties are no longer evoked to reconstruct an atmosphere or for the sake of retrospective, but to intervene in the present of the story. The music is not for the viewer to remember what it was like, but to recognize what is happening. Here and now.
