The Batman Should Have Original Songs But Probably Won’t
I have a simple thesis: it was great when household-name pop artists created new, original songs for Batman movies. (And to be clear, I’m not talking about the scores, which are always original.) I don’t know if the world was necessarily better when major recording artists did this, but certainly several Batmen benefitted.
When the first teaser trailer for Matt Reeves’s The Batman dropped in late summer 2020, I was struck by how overtly it appeared to be emulating The Crow (1994). Good on them, I thought, because more art should be like The Crow.
And one particularly enduring aspect of THE CROW is its soundtrack. It has an original song by The Cure (“Burn,” which is objectively great and still regularly played live), “Dead Souls” by Nine Inch Nails (a Joy Division cover that also appears on NIN setlists to this day), and at least one re-recording (“After the Flesh” by My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult). The musical tie-ins are actually important to the movie, too: “Burn” plays during a pivotal origin scene.
MLWTTKK itself appears on stage (NIN was originally supposed to play as the cameo band, but they got a much better opportunity to fill this role about 20 years later). Not to be outdone, The Crow: City of Angels (1996) is nothing if not an excuse for another great soundtrack, including Hole’s cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Gold Dust Woman” and Bush’s cover of Joy Division’s “In a Lonely Place.” Songs that we can listen to, today! Songs that wouldn’t exist if the director hadn’t asked for them.
So, while The Batman definitely teased The Crow’s vibes early on, I knew it was unlikely to go as far as getting artists to create new songs for the soundtrack. It’s too bad, because the Batman franchise has been a historically great breeding ground for musical movie tie-ins. I’d contend, in fact, that some of the most enduring pop music of my lifetime has resulted directly from Batman films.
It started early. Warner Brothers commissioned/mandated an entire Prince album for Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). Prince! Dour chamber music be damned: we got “Batdance” and “Partyman” instead, and the accompanying score was composed by the same guy who sang “Weird Science.” The Prince songs somehow made sense in Tim Burton’s vision of Gotham City. It makes sense that the Joker plays “Partyman” on a boombox while defacing an art gallery. It makes sense that “Partyman”–a song created specifically for a Batman movie–endures as a pop culture touchstone of the year 1989. We were reminded of this in 2020 during The Last Dance.
Batman Returns (1992) continued the tie-in tradition by getting an original Siouxsie and the Banshees (plus Danny Elfman producing) track, “Face to Face”, installed as the movie’s theme.
But when it comes to music recorded specifically for Batmen, Tim Burton walked so that Joel Schumacher could run. The cultural apex of this niche art form is, without a doubt, the soundtrack of Batman Forever (1995). Schumacher snagged several original songs, including one by U2, fresh off a similar tie-in gig with their re-recording of “Stay! (Faraway So Close)” for the Wim Wenders film of the same name, a sequel to his masterpiece Wings of Desire. For Schumacher, U2 recorded “Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me,” which started as another song from the Zooropa album, was cut, and made it onto the Batman Forever soundtrack instead. And although a plan to sneak Bono into the movie did not pan out, they did turn the music video into a kind of Batman spin-off. Batman Forever also gave us the original song “There is a Light” from Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, themselves no strangers to having work commissioned for movies, including movies by Wim Wenders (more on this later).
Where Batman Forever differs significantly from its predecessors, however, is the relevance of the music within the universe of the movie. If you are a Fetid Decaying Millennial Corpse like me, then maybe your memories of the movie, the soundtrack, Total Request Live, and the McDonald’s collector glasses have amalgamated into something indistinguishable from truth, and the songs make sense in the context of the film. But objectively… they don’t. They cannot. The biggest hit from the soundtrack—Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose”–does not even appear in the movie! And yet “Kiss From a Rose” is Batman canon, likely because Joel Schumacher himself directed the music video and sprinkled bits of his movie on top of it like confetti. It became a pop megahit, though technically recorded for an earlier album, that now plays on a loop in our heads. All because of Batman.
The downfall of this golden era began immediately. Batman & Robin (1997) did include several original songs on its sountrack, but the movie was simply too bad for them to land. The Smashing Pumpkins’ “The End is the Beginning is the End” plays over the credits and is a highlight. R Kelly’s “Gotham City” is decidedly not a highlight. And that’s just about all she wrote. Batman returned 8 years later with the Christopher Nolan trilogy and a Very Dramatic Score by Hans Zimmer (and/or his ghost composers). Oh remember Nick Cave? Zack Snyder’s Justice League soundtrack includes two more of his songs, possibly inspired by an incredibly tragic commonality between Cave and Snyder. They weren’t originals–but then again, neither were “The Carny” or “From Her to Eternity” at the time of their performance by Cave in perhaps the G.O.A.T. appearance by a musician playing themselves in a film.
And now here we are: a fresh Batman with a fresh director. An opportunity to revive the lost art of newly commissioned tie-in music, likely squandered. The Batman’s score was released on February 25, and I have sampled it. It’s pretty standard, entirely competent, mostly quite serious stuff from a studio regular (Michael Giacchino). Despite The Batman’s 186-minute runtime, it appears very unlikely we’ll see any attempt to turn the soundtrack into an opportunity for modern artists–perhaps even those inspired by the likes of NIN, Prince, U2, or the Smashing Pumpkins–to join in the cultural touchstone. Robert Pattinson probably won’t walk into an FKA Twigs concert, or have Deafheaven play over a montage of him brooding angrily (and my god, wouldn’t both of these things be perfect?). It seems even less likely, for many reasons outside anyone’s control, that we’ll see a series of music videos by various pop artists that are all vaguely Batman-themed released with the movie. The Batman might end up looking or feeling like The Crow, but it’s destined to sound like every movie made in the last decade that is calculated to make as close to a billion dollars as possible.
New songs recorded for Batman films. I worry that, to paraphrase John Mulaney, it’s merely a concept I liked as a kid, which means it was better back then. But to paraphrase Jack Shepherd, I think we have to go back.
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