Killmonger: scoring modes and representation in Black Panther

Killmonger: scoring modes and representation in Black Panther > Ntombi Ngubane University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4872-3473) ABSTRACT Anticipated by many, and equally a site of contention or reverence, Black Panther and its accompanying original musical score as composed by Ludwig Görranson is rife for analysis and brings to fore the question: in what ways is a Hollywood practice used in a film with seemingly other aesthetic aims? A score which features few disparate and disconnected vague references to an “African sound” for the imagined country of Wakanda is undercut even more so by the insistent use of an otherwise purely western orchestral score. Firstly, through a brief overview of Göransson’s production approaches to the score for Black Panther, and his collaboration with local experts, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of authorship arising from such collaborations between these expert improvising music and film composers who tend to be the sole credited composer s. Fur thermore, musical representations are complicated by the recurring theme of the “other” according to Classical Hollywood tropes through the integration of occasional African instruments. In section two, brief transcriptions of the music composed for the character Killmonger are provided, in the search for representation devices – how the music works to or fails to establish the character. Also provided are the authors’ personal insights as to whether or not Göransson’s intentions with the music are in fact evident in the film. Keywords: Afrofuturism, music in film, film music, representation, African music in film, film scoring, Black Panther, film scoring practice, orchestration, leitmotif, musical representation. Published by Original research African Perspectives on Marvel’s Black Panther Number 36, 2022 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2022/n36a6 ISSN 2617-3255 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) page 01 of 14 Introduction The Marvel science-fiction action film, Black Panther, released in the United States on February 16, 2018, by American writer and director Ryan Coogler, was a box office sensation. Not only was it highly anticipated by Marvel comic book fans, but also by the millions of moviegoers who had been patiently waiting for Hollywood to cast a superhero (protagonist) of colour. Not only did Hollywood not disappoint in this regard, it went above and beyond at bringing us colour and diversity – in the cast, the film’s location, the dialogue, and in the music composed for the film. The film’s budget was $200 million, and the box office turnover was estimated at $1.347 billion. Even if a person is not a great comic book fan, they too may have gotten caught up in the excitement of Black Panther and what having a superhero of colour means for Hollywood and for future generations. However, some may have been more critical and less celebratory of the film – particularly in the way it represented Africa and Africans. The widely acknowledged intention of Black Panther was to foreground the idea of Afro-futurism, portraying a future in which Black people use technology to become leaders and forward thinkers of their worlds, outside a world largely controlled by white-dominated superpowers (Robinson & Neumann 2018:3). These themes are explicit in Black Panther. The rest of the world believes Wakanda to be a poor nation of farmers, when in reality it is a highly advanced nation, capable of far surpassing its economic competitors. The aesthetic representation of this idealised futuristic African world is one of the film’s major achievements. According to Anthony Michael D’Agostino (2019:2), ‘the online understanding of Black Panther implies a rather tightly bound conceptual circuit of inclusive production, representation, and identification’. D’Agostino (2019:2) elaborates, ‘black creators create more legitimate representations of blackness (usually because of their own identification with some stable concept of blackness) that are automatically identified with by black viewers who are positively impacted by that identification’. Since its release, discussion around the film has been generated in academic journals, roundtable discussions and online reviews, confirming the film as not just another Marvel superhero film but a film functioning as a significant cultural moment. The Journal of Pan African Studies dedicated a special issue to the film titled ‘On Coogler and Cole’s Black Panther Film: Global Perspectives, Reflections and Contexts for Educators’, in which the authors Marsha Robinson and Caryn Neumann (2018:4) discuss Black Panther as a ‘product of 1960s politics, African imagery and science fiction’. They state that the film is a ‘version of Afro-futurism, a genre that draws from social movements, technology, music, religion and literature’ (Robinson & Neumann Number 36, 2022 ISSN 2617-3255 page 02 of 14 2018:4). The focus here, within the discussion of Afro-futurism, is how representation can be a hit or miss, specifically through music. The use of newly composed music to accompany moving images has long been a tradition in classical Hollywood cinema. The earliest uses of synchronised sound in film, beginning in 1926 with the seminal film Don Juan (Crossland), included the synchronisation of recorded orchestral music as well as sound effects that would be used to accompany films. In the 1930s, classical film scoring became standard practice, and has been defined by film music scholars in various ways. Claudia Gorbman (2006:4) suggests film music to be ‘scoring that casts music as an inconspicuous part of storytelling’. Ben Winters (2010) offers that we accept music in a film as operating within the fictional state of the world created on screen. Therefore, music not only aids the narrative but belongs in that world as much as any other sound coming from the film (Winters 2010:229). Another tradition, the practice of using ‘compilation scores’ of pre-existing music, persisted from the 1910s, ‘when catalogues of popular music were published to accompany films, through the “library music” of the sound film era of the 1930s and beyond’ (Rodman 2006:120). The difference between a film score and a compilation score is that the former refers to music specifically composed for the film, and typically performed by an orchestra, whereas the latter, a compilation score, refers to the use of pre-existing music or a selection of typically popular songs. Black Panther consists of both a scored soundtrack composed by Ludwig Göransson, which is made up of orchestral music, as well as traditional African music, and newly written songs produced by Kendrick Lamar. Mark Slobin (2008:3) refers to this use of music in film as being a ‘superculture’, a term that refers to the ‘dominant, mainstream musical content of a society, in effect, everything people take for granted as being “ (...truncated)