Jim Jarmusch: The Art of the Music in His Films

In the ear­ly 1980s, aspir­ing film­mak­er Jim Jar­musch immersed him­self in New York’s under­ground music scene. He played keyboards–a “fair­ly prim­i­tive Moog synthesizer”–in places like CBGB and the Mudd Club with a No Wave band called The Del-Byzan­teens and was deeply influ­enced by the spir­it of punk rock. “The aes­thet­ics of that scene real­ly gave me the courage to make films,” Jar­musch lat­er recalled. “It was not about vir­tu­os­i­ty. It was about expres­sion.”

Over the years, Jar­musch cast musi­cians instead of actors in many of his films: Joe Strum­mer, Tom Waits, John Lurie, Iggy Pop–all had some­thing in com­mon. Each had stood up against com­mer­cial pres­sure from the main­stream pop­u­lar cul­ture. Jar­musch car­ried the same uncom­pro­mis­ing spir­it into the cre­ation of his films.

In the dis­cus­sion above, record­ed some­time after the release of 1999’s Ghost Dog, Jar­musch explains his approach to using music in film.

The open­ing sequence of Jar­musch’s 1986 film Down by Law (above) rolls to the groove of Tom Wait­s’s “Jock­ey Full of Bour­bon,” from the clas­sic Rain Dogs album. Waits him­self plays a lead­ing role in the film. His music fits per­fect­ly into the atmos­phere of the sto­ry, writes Juan A. Suárez in his crit­i­cal study, Jim Jar­musch: “Wait­s’s songs tell of frac­tured romances set in an under­world of drifters, pimps, and prostitutes–to a large extent the milieu of the film. And both Jar­musch’s film and Wait­s’s songs recy­cle retro idioms. The visu­al style of Down by Law draws from a num­ber of 1940s and 1950s stu­dio gen­res, while Wait­s’s songs are replete with pas­tich­es of pol­ka, waltz, clas­sic blues, and Caribbean rhythms.”

For the sur­re­al 1995 west­ern Dead Man (sam­pled in the mon­tage above) Jar­musch enlist­ed Neil Young to com­pose and per­form the sound­track. “To me,” Young is quot­ed as say­ing at the out­set of the project by Jonathan Rosen­baum in his BFI Mod­ern Clas­sics book on the film, “the movie is my rhythm sec­tion and I will add a melody to that.” Young record­ed his min­i­mal­ist score, much of it impro­vised, in a large ware­house in San Fran­cis­co while watch­ing a rough cut of the film. Young played all the instru­ments: elec­tric and acoustic gui­tars, pump organ and a detuned piano.

The oth­er-world­ly, some­times jar­ring music baf­fled a few of the crit­ics. “A mood might have devel­oped here,” wrote Roger Ebert in a scathing review, “had it not been for the unfor­tu­nate score by Neil Young, which for the film’s final 30 min­utes sounds like noth­ing so much as a man repeat­ed­ly drop­ping his gui­tar.” Oth­ers heard genius. Rock his­to­ri­an Greil Mar­cus, in his “Ten rea­sons why Neil Young’s “Dead Man” is the best music for the dog days of the 20th cen­tu­ry,” wrote: “The music, as you lis­ten, sep­a­rates from the movie even as it frames scenes, ban­ter, recitals. It gets big­ger and more abstract, and it becomes hard to under­stand how any film, show­ing peo­ple doing this or that in spe­cif­ic, non-abstract ways, could hold it.”

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Music in Quentin Tarantino’s Films: Hear a 5‑Hour, 100-Song Playlist

New Jim Jar­musch Doc­u­men­tary on Iggy Pop & The Stooges Now Stream­ing Free on Ama­zon Prime

Jim Jarmusch’s Anti-MTV Music Videos for Talk­ing Heads, Neil Young, Tom Waits & Big Audio Dyna­mite