Soundtrack as Prophetic Dissonance in Spike Lee’s ‘He Got Game’ (1998)
Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) electrified audiences, pleased critics, and was a mainstay on cable in the Nineties. When he teamed up again with leading man Denzel Washington for He Got Game (1998), the reaction was less enthusiastic, but the film is yet another of the director’s many films as entertaining as they are insightful. Only superficially a sports film, He Got Game shows Lee to be an auteur right down to his choice of soundtrack music.
He Got Game’s protagonist is Jake, a man serving time for accidentally killing his wife in a drunken domestic altercation. His son Jesus is a high school basketball phenom whom universities are already wooing. When the governor grants Jake work leave on condition of persuading Jesus to play for Big State, Jake finds himself on the streets again, reconnecting with his family, tempted again by the bottle, and headed back to the pen if he doesn’t get what the governor wants. There’s a little one-on-one, but the script is less interested in basketball than questions of virtue in an American setting.
Everyone is chasing a perversion of the American dream, which is to say money. Jesus’ girlfriend Lala, his uncle Bubba, his high school coach, the coach at Big State, the governor . . . They all want in on the benefits promised by Jesus’ talent. All he has to do is indicate where he’ll go to university and play ball and everything will be his: big bucks, fame and sex, sex, sex. He Got Game isn’t a religious film in the usual sense, but Lee didn’t name his character Jesus for nothing, and the script makes clear that he was raised in a family that was at least casually religious. Thus, he’s confronted with a question he may have run across at church:
“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Matthew 16:26)
Half of the soundtrack belongs to hip-hop group Public Enemy. “Game Face” plays as the police drop Jake off at his hotel on Coney Island, PE intones in the background as wannabe gangsta Big Time Willie picks Jesus up in his new wheels, and “He Got Game” (feat. Stephen Stills) plays as Jesus enjoys being on top of the world, hanging with his girl even as other girls ogle him everywhere he goes. In 1998, hip-hop had no dearth of rising talent — DMX, Outkast, Jay-Z — but PE was a good choice for maintaining the tone of the film because of its tough-talking but conscious lyrics and boisterous music. That’s all to be expected, though. The surprise is in the symphonic score.
It’s all the all-American composer Aaron Copland, but Lee is up to more than feel-good Americana. Sure, majestic Copland sounds to picturesque scenes of youth playing basketball everywhere from barns in the country to courts in the city, and pensive Copland plays as Jake and Jesus engage in a heart-to-heart, but Copland also plays as Big Time Willie talks the gangsta talk, throwing around racial epithets, and as Jake physically abuses his wife and child. The music doesn’t fit the on-screen action at all, but that’s the point. For most, life in the U.S.A. is like a championship game between the sheen of its myths and the sometimes rotten core of its realities.
Prior to Lee’s creative use of Copland, that discordance was already present in the composer’s most famous composition, the orchestral piece Appalachian Spring (1944). Originally written for a ballet co-created with choreographer Martha Graham, it has long since become part of the American canon, a favorite of high-school symphonic and marching bands, town-square bandstand ensembles looking for relief from John Philip Sousa on July 4, and filmmakers looking to score their latest project about people who walk through fields of wheat, running their hands along the spikes. Chances are you can recognize its recurring theme lifted from the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts” and maybe even sing along:
“’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
’Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.”
Thus, “Appalachian Spring” is at once mainstream America’s music of choice for all that is great about America — religious freedom, the equality of all people, and so on — and a work appropriating a melody from a persecuted minority. Rappers from Chuck D to Yeezus might see parallels to white America’s treatment of black America — in music, sports and more — in the way Appalachian Spring functions as art in society. In fact, those two rappers have had a few choice words on the general subject. For starters, see “Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamps” and “New Slaves.”
There is a prophetic quality to this. Dissonance in music, according to The Oxford Companion to Music, “creates the expectation of resolution on to consonance.” That’s what makes composers like Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) so difficult for many listeners. We keep waiting for a closure that never comes. Lee provides closure of sorts in He Got Game, but it’s as imperfect as real life. Our problems persist, leaving us as a society chasing solutions — via politicians, parties and policies — the fullness of which won’t come anytime soon. Perhaps along the way, however, we can make some serious improvements.
According to AllMusic, Sony Music released the original film score for the film’s music from Aaron Copland, but if you’re looking to check out the music, any Copland anthology should do. I occasionally put on The Copland Album , but for the most part, Copland simply isn’t to my taste. The Public Enemy soundtrack, on the other hand, is a favorite. Track it down, look up the movie on Disney+, and feel the richer for it.