When
Spike Lee
decided to score his basketball drama
He Got Game
with the music of
Aaron Copland
, it was an unusually bold move, even for an unusually bold director.
Copland
's music has always been associated with the American heartland. Just take a look at the track titles on the soundtrack:
"The Open Prairie,"
"Appalachian Spring,"
"John Henry,"
"Lincoln Portrait,"
"Hoe-Down."
Yes,
was a film composer, but for movies about rural or small-town white folks, like
Of Mice and Men
and
Our Town
.
is a movie about African-American basketball players growing up in the Coney Island projects. Of course,
Lee
is not the first person to connect
's music with sports.
"Fanfare for the Common Man"
has become as much of a sportscast cliche as
"I Believe I Can Fly"
Randy Newman
's music for
The Natural
. In fact,
Newman
was clearly influenced by
, as plenty of other film composers for sports films have been as well.
James Horner
lifted chunks of
's
"Grover's Corners"
for his classic
Field of Dreams
score.
wanted to make the point that basketball is as quintessentially American as cowboys,
Lincoln
, and
himself. The opening sequence of the movie shows Americans shooting hoops across the country -- in the 'hood, in the 'burbs, in the Kansas cornfields.
's gamble pays off in that it gives
a sense of universality, underlining the essential humanity of its characters and their experience. But one can't help feeling that the music seems a little out of place. Yes, basketball is played all over America, and, yes, it is a distinctly American game. But it's connected to an entirely different stream of Americana.
is slow, grand, patient. Those adjectives describe baseball. By contrast, basketball is fast, confrontational, freewheeling. It seems more compatible with equally American genres like jazz, rock, or R&B. ~ Evan Cater