Spike Lee names his favourite Spike Lee needle drop: “Had to be there”
At some point in our lives, we’ve all put our headphones in the car, pressed our head against the misty rain-soaked window, and pretended that we are the protagonist in our own tragic movie. As we pull the headphones out from our ears and the music abruptly cuts, we swiftly realise that the only real tragedy was in our delusional behaviour.
Nevertheless, it’s a rite of passage for us culture-fed millennials, driven by the immersive drama of the movies we’ve grown up watching. Through moments of iconicity, we’ve been introduced to the idea that music amplifies emotion and heightens the intensity of any given moment.
After all, Quentin Tarantino’s soundtrack choices are often studied as closely as his own direction, for people crave those iconic moments of drama that will be relived through the replaying of any given song.
He passionately explained the use of music in film, saying, “That’s one of the things about using music in movies that’s so cool, is the fact that if you do it right, if you use the right song, in the right scene; really when you take songs and put them in a sequence in a movie right, it’s about as cinematic a thing as you can do.”
He added, “You are really doing what movies do better than any other art form; it really works in this visceral, emotional, cinematic way that’s just really special.”
It’s a creative trope many directors, as well as Tarantino, understand well. One such director who has perfected the art of the years is Spike Lee, who triumphantly used Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’ in his racially charged Do the Right Thing, while his use of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Living for the City’ perfectly depicted the struggles of urban life in Jungle Fever.
But it is his use of Sam Cooke’s ‘Change Is Gonna Come’ that felt overwhelmingly profound in his epic biopic Malcolm X. Lee described it as his “favourite scene in Malcolm X,” adding, “The scene is a montage between several characters, all heading to the final destination, Audubon Ballroom, where Malc was assassinated.”
He continued, “You have the assassins from the mosque in Newark, New Jersey on their way there. You have Malcolm’s wife, the late, great Dr Betty Shabazz, with her four daughters, and Malcolm being tailed by the FBI, CIA. We cut back and forth, and we had that shot where he’s like floating, and that’s one of the best, in my opinion, uses of a song with the scene. I knew where it would go, and I wanted to use that song, for sure. Sam Cooke had to be there.”
The song is hopeful and tragic all at the same time, perfectly depicting the brutal reality of Malcolm X’s activism. Because there was a sense of knowing within Denzel Washington’s portrayal of Malcolm X in that scene that the change he was striving for was, in fact, coming, but at the cost of changes within his own life. Coupling all of that with Spike Lee’s famous dolly shot, and you have a truly perfect marriage of music and cinema.
