When the Television Academy announced this year’s Emmy nominees a couple weeks back, a heartening development got buried amid all the predictable chatter about why “Modern Family” is still getting nods. For the first time, the Academy recognized music supervisors. The inaugural class of nominees includes the masterminds behind the music on “Master of None,” “Girls,” “Better Call Saul,” “Big Little Lies,” and, of course, “Stranger Things.”
It’s a stellar group, but one puzzling exclusion is the HBO comedy “Insecure,” which returned this weekend for its second season. Music supervisor Kier Lehman—along with Solange, who consulted heavily on season one—stocks each episode with approximately an album’s worth of largely independent hip-hop and R&B tracks. Both the show’s co-creator and star, Issa Rae, and its most frequent director, the music-video genius Melina Matsoukas, also play major roles in pairing songs with scenes, and their contributions are palpable in selections where the mood builds on those of the characters. What’s most remarkable about the show’s music is the insight it gives us into the ever-evolving personality of Rae’s heroine, Issa Dee. In this golden age of music supervision, “Insecure” is perhaps the best example of series that use an inspired soundtrack as a tool for character development.
When we meet Issa, in a pilot set on her 29th birthday, she’s bogged down by repression and inertia. “Being aggressively passive is what I do best,” she says. Her relationship with her longtime boyfriend Lawrence (Jay Ellis), a depressed, unemployed developer who’s supposedly putting together a business plan for an app startup, has gone stale. At work, she’s the sole black employee of We Got Y’all, a nonprofit enrichment program for underprivileged children in Los Angeles public schools. Her casually racist colleagues treat her like an authority on urban slang and exclude her from important conversations. Her boss sees that she’s checked out and challenges her to recommit. Meanwhile, in the classroom, the kids ask her why she talks like a white lady.
Once an aspiring rapper, Issa only vents her anger and frustration when she’s freestyling in the bathroom mirror or in her car when she’s psyching herself up for some daunting task. The show’s syncs reflect her deep musical knowledge (an ex who works in the record industry, Y’lan Noel’s Daniel, credits her for getting him into music). Many artists, from Kamaiyah to SZA to Thundercat, appear over and over again, as though Issa has them on heavy Spotify rotation. In early episodes, there’s a disconnect between Issa’s passivity and the confident, aggressive female vocalists who dominate the soundtrack: Junglepussy, Sophie Beem, Kari Faux. Audio Push’s “Servin’”—key lyric: “I feel like it’s me vs. everybody”—plays as she sits on a hot school bus, surrounded by catty coworkers and hyper children. The songs express things she can’t say out loud.
As season one progresses, Issa realizes she’s on autopilot. When she impulsively sleeps with Daniel, it’s a wake-up call to take responsibility for her decisions and appreciate what she has with Lawrence. But the soundtrack foreshadows more romantic troubles to come: Frank Ocean’s “Pink + White,” an ominous meditation on a past-its-prime relationship, plays as she and Lawrence lie in bed together after she’s cheated on him.
The show’s music mellows out as she pulls off a successful work fundraiser, turning towards full-blown melancholy after Lawrence discovers that she cheated and moves out. Issa mopes around her apartment to Moses Sumney’s wounded “Plastic.” This mood carries over into season two, as she continues to mourn her broken relationship and complains that she’s running on empty: “Dick on E, bank account on E, life on E.” The premiere opens with NxWorries’ wary “Scared Money,” and the listless sounds of Smiles Davis’ “Morning Blues” accompany a trip to the mailbox that reminds her of Lawrence.
If the songs of “Insecure” map Issa’s evolution and express everything she leaves unsaid, the music of the HBO mini-series “The Young Pope” provide a more elliptical, but no less powerful, form of insight into Jude Law’s titular protagonist, Lenny Belardo. Its soundtrack is mostly instrumental, mixing the venerable compositions associated with the Catholic Church (like “Ave Maria”) with such contemporary artists as Kronos Quartet, Labradford, and Dirty Three. As the show’s creator, Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, explained, he and music supervisor Lele Marchitelli deliberately inserted bursts of electronic music and occasional “outrageous forays of pop music.” The use of one techno track, Recondite’s “Levo,” in an early episode, inspired a lengthy paean from Michael Baumann at The Ringer, who pointed out how the song’s slow ascension to a subtle climax underscores a monologue in which Lenny explains his intention to disappear from the public eye. The song, he writes, is “both propulsive and comforting, rocking you to sleep like an airplane engine on an overnight flight. It is, like the Young Pope himself, a blank canvas.”
“The Young Pope” is a witty, weird, and initially impenetrable character study of a man who, as Baumann points out, begins the mini-series as the sum total of the expectations projected on him. But Lenny is also an American in his forties—a member of Generation X—and that’s where the pop music comes in. He protects his newfound power by building up an air of mystery around himself, a strategy he’s learned from pop culture. As he explains to an adviser, an “invisible red thread” ties together the most important artists of the past several decades: J.D. Salinger, Stanley Kubrick, Banksy, Daft Punk. “None of them let themselves be seen.” He resolves to make himself “as unreachable as a rock star.” No other song captures that isolation like “All Along the Watchtower,” which plays over the opening credits in many episodes. As Lenny selects ornate robes, fussy shoes, and a bizarre metal headpiece in hopes of making an intimidating first impression on the College of Cardinals, we hear LMFAO’s silly “Sexy and I Know It.” It’s jarring to imagine a Pope who might conceivably know that song.
Lenny is, among other things, an embodiment of the conflict between an ancient institution and contemporary American life. In the second half of the season, stricken with self-doubt, he visits a private home and sees a contestant singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on “The X Factor.” When he’s alone with the family’s baby, the soundtrack switches to Jeff Buckley’s emotional cover of the song—a subtle demonstration of this cold, severe orphan’s soft spot for children and a confirmation that it’s possible to have spiritual experiences within the context of secular life. Although he once performed a miracle, Lenny’s faith is shaky at best. This moment marks a crucial step in his journey from agnostic posturing to genuine belief, a character arc that mimics the show’s own path from inscrutability to transcendence.
There are other shows that effectively use music to illuminate characters’ inner worlds. The vintage psychedelia of FX’s “Legion” and the manic eclecticism of USA’s “Mr. Robot,” which hops from Mozart to the Cramps to Len’s “Steal My Sunshine,” approximate the surreal subjectivity of protagonists who are or seem to be mentally ill. ABC’s “Scandal”—which features one of network TV’s best soundtracks, thanks to “Mad Men” music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas—uses funk, soul, and disco to make viewers feel as empowered as its superhuman lead, Olivia Pope. The HBO mini-series “Big Little Lies” introduced a six-year-old with serious music industry aspirations by having her queue up a PJ Harvey deep cut in the car, and underlined a young mother’s obsession with the man who raped her by repeatedly showing her listening to Martha Wainwright’s “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole.”
What makes “Insecure” and “The Young Pope” unique, though, is the way they use music not only to tell us who Issa and Lenny are, but to show us who they become over time. No other medium has the same potential as television, which tells stories that can stretch out over ten hours or ten years, to develop evolving, multi-layered characters. These two shows make music nearly as central to that process as speech. When SZA’s “Love Galore” plays, as Issa waits for Lawrence to pick up his mail in the final scene of the “Insecure” season two premiere, it expresses her uneasy mix of nervousness and longing with more elegance than dialogue ever could.
