There Is No Soundtrack

Guru Dutt’s final film as a director, Kaagaz Ke Phool/Paper Flowers (1959), follows the successful film-maker Suresh Sinha (played by Dutt himself) as rumours of his affair with hi...

Koji Kondo's Super Mario Bros. (1985) score redefined video game music. With under three minutes of music, Kondo put to rest an era of bleeps and bloops—the sterile products of a l...

Saturday Night Fever is simultaneously one of the biggest-selling albums of all time and one of the most reviled. How can a record create such a polarizing reaction? Aust...

As chiptune has grown in significance and popularity, the sound has begun to feature more in commercial releases, not just in commercial music tracks but in television advertising ...

Set against the turbulent backdrop of the UK miners’ strike (1984–5), Billy Elliot (2000) follows eleven-year-old Billy as he pursues his dream of becoming a ballet dancer. Hailed ...

This chapter focuses on Kentuckian Bill Stepp, who worked as a logger in his younger days, then later turned his energies to fiddling for neighborhood hoedowns. Stepp is the creati...

Garth Brooks was the best-selling country artist of the 1990s. Actually, he was the best-selling artist of the ‘90s period. So why did he close out that triumphant decade by t...

Vs. is the sound of a band on fire. The same confluence of talent, passion, timing, and fate that made “grunge” the world’s soundtrack also lit a short fuse beneath Pearl Jam. The ...