Welcome to Adrie’s beats of the week, a weekly column dedicated to remarking upon the intricacies of modern music. To submit any songs for entry, please contact [email protected], with the subject line, ‘beats of the week.’
Frozen came out in 2013 when I was eight, and I mostly remember “Let It Go.” In fact, I don’t even think I watched the whole movie for several years, but I do remember walking through the aisles of stores, and feeling like I was constantly being bombarded with crazy amounts of Frozen promo.
I remember listening to the radio one morning and the host saying something like “you know it’s gone too far when they are playing ‘Let It Go’ on the radio.” And, I won’t say whether or not it was too far, but it had certainly hit that level. In fact, when I recently asked my mom what she remembered about the movie coming out (because I don’t), she immediately started singing the song.
I don’t know what made that movie so special, I’m sure it was a combination of a lot of things. I think the plot line was different from other Disney princess movies, but also the music was just really, really good. Frozen went on to win a lot of awards soon after, but more than that, it won the hearts of people. Sappy, but true.
Kristen Anderson- Lopez and Robert Lopez are the musical masterminds behind it, and sadly they didn’t say anything about being ‘super shocked’ in their lovey rhyming Oscar speech, but they had to have been. Or maybe they just knew that their song was that good.
Point being, (and to be totally fair, I’ve only been alive for sixteen years) I’ve never seen anything like that happen with a movie before.
That was until Encanto was released earlier this year. I, at least, didn’t notice a whole lot of hype for this movie, but maybe that was just me. Lin Manuel Miranda was behind the songwriting though, so expectations were high.
My general feeling about the movie as a whole aside (good, but also a children’s Disney movie, absolutely no shade), I was immediately very fond of the soundtrack. To me it was emphatically Lin Manuel Miranda-esq, and different from anything I had heard backing a movie before. I would say, as with a lot of musical movies, the songs do a good bit of the storytelling.
Personally, there isn’t a song in the bunch that I don’t like, but the people (and by that I mean the millions and millions on Tik Tok) certainly seem to have a favorite.
I don’t know where I was, or when it was, the first time I heard “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” but I do know that I have not been able to get it out of my head since. Three out of seven mornings, I wake up singing that song (or this version), and proceed to do so for the rest of the day.
I think the lyrics are a wonderful, storytelling masterpiece, and so funny, but I also can’t stop singing them. It’s not bad now, but I wonder if it will be, in a short while. The melody of the song is probably what makes it so catchy, and while I have proof that songs can be catchy and still suck, this is not one of those cases.
My favorite lyric might be “He told me my fish would die/ The next day: dead!,” mostly because I just like to shout it like that character in the movie. Also, I think it’s really a comical point that Bruno is being blamed for all of the prophecies that he is just trying to deliver.
Elvis Duran says something about the movie that I like, in an interview with Miranda, “It’s a colorful story, even if you couldn’t see it.”
I think that that is true of the movie, and I think it is also true of all the music that makes it so.
A surprise to us all (I’m assuming), this song did not get submitted for Oscar nomination, which might have been unfair to all the other songs nominated anyways.
I am guessing that it would have guaranteed Miranda his EGOT, but he says in the same interview, “It’s not about whether you win or not, it’s about [picking] the one that best exemplifies the spirit of the movie itself.” Seemingly no regrets there.
It also hit No. 1 on Billboard’s top 100, only the second Disney song to ever do so.
I am not surprised that “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” became such a hit, but I am surprised that they have finally figured out how to brainwash people with music and no one has noticed yet. I will report back when this song is finally out of my head, but I may have graduated by then so who knows.
