Sandbox / Genre Motif

Popular music has always been a mainstay in 20th century fiction. The practice of licensing music for use in films, TV shows, and other forms of fiction that incorporate sound has been as ubiquitous. Most of the time, this is done to accent the fiction in question. While it is sometimes done simply for commercial reasons, it's very rare to hear music in fiction that has no ties whatsoever to the theme of the piece. Most of the time, the particular song used was chosen specifically based on the content of its lyrics or style and its applicability to the work of fiction.

However, over time, certain trends of using music have come up for genres of music. A Genre Motif is when a particular song is used not so much for its lyrical content, but instead for its genre. Unlike the other motifs (which are particular instrumental elements that may or may not be part of a larger piece), this refers to when the genre of the song itself (as opposed to the content) is used to invoke something. The content of the song's lyrics is irrelevant to the fact that the song just simply IS that genre and we're expected to feel a certain way about a character or setting because of it. Often, this is a way to show that someone is a member of a subculture.

A Genre Motif can apply to a whole work when much of its soundtrack is of a certain genre, to a location through its background music, or to individual characters or groups through the use of Leitmotifs. See also AM/FM Characterization and Establishing Character Music.

Some examples of common ways genres are used:

• Rock, a genre that is often loud and energetic, is commonly used to represent the Action Genre or an Action Hero.
• Punk Rock is strongly associated with rebellion against authority due to the cultural context in which it was created.
• Electronic Music, due to being produced by computers and synthesizers, is linked to Science Fiction, robots, and nerds.
• Hip-Hop is a genre created by African-Americans who mainly lived in the poor urban areas where crime is rampant. This makes it a common choice for "urban" black characters and Gangbangers.
• Country Music tends to be associated with Cowboys, The Wild West, the Deep South, and the Western genre.
• Classical Music is seen as a classy, refined genre, and is often used to portray a character or location as having those traits too. It may also be used to denote someone as boring.

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Examples:

Anime

• Baccano! uses jazz as its core much in the same way that Cowboy Bebop does, though with a focus on various forms of 20's/30's jazz.
• The entire soul and fiber of Cowboy Bebop is based on 70's jazz.
• Io Fleming in Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt is big fan of free jazz and he sometimes plays it while slaughtering his enemies. His Arch-Enemy, Daryl Lorentz, was able to identify him due to his penchant of playing jazz on his cockpit.
• Princess Tutu - if it's a classical song from a ballet, it's in here. Even the few pieces composed for the show are heavily based on famous German ballet pieces.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann uses rap as a general motif of sticking it to the man in some of its songs, most notably the aptly titled "Rap is a Man's Soul", better known as "Raw Raw Fight The Power".

Fanfiction

• In Ain't No Grave, Bucky Barnes, despite being a white guy who was born nearly a hundred years ago, develops a fondness for gangsta rap. He is a tough guy with a Dark and Troubled Past so it fits thematically, even if it is amusingly incongruous when Captain America's buddy who grew up during Prohibition starts making Wu-Tang Clan references.

Film — Animated

• The delinquent hotrods in Cars are introduced blasting hip-hop from their speakers.
• In The LEGO Movie, the fact that Emmet's favourite song is manufactured-pop noise "Everything is Awesome" is used to characterise his Ridiculously Average Guy personality. The robots also all love it. Wyldstyle insists she hates it, but seems to know all of the words, leading Emmet to realise her hatred of it is an affectation.

Film — Live-Action

• Plenty of R&B shows up in American Gangster as a way of cementing the culture that the title character was a part of.
• The gangster controlling the block in Attack the Block produces his own Gangsta Rap, which shows off how much he's romanticised his own image of being a gangster. The other character in the movie shown prominently listening to hip-hop is the wealthy white college student who goes to the block to buy weed from the gang members, whose taste in music combined with his clueless contribution to the social conditions that produced all the music he likes is used for deliberate irony.
• Alex in A Clockwork Orange is consistently characterised with classical music, his second favourite thing after raping and murdering - it reflects his extreme intelligence as well as a fundamental part of his identity. After experiencing The Ludovico Technique, his predilection towards violence is gone, but he can no longer hear his favourite music without experiencing excruciating pain.
• In The Blues Brothers, there's a sequence where the title characters are being chased by every police force and National Guard unit in the Chicagoland area. In the climactic scene, shots of Jake and Elwood Blues riding the elevator (playing some appropriate elevator music) are spliced alongside shots of the police, SWAT units, and military organizing outside with appropriate martial style action music.
• In the first Kill Bill film, Japanese Rockabilly-style all-female Power Trio The 5.6.7.8's got a showcase. It was meant as a bit of a Soundtrack Dissonance moment, where something that was so American in nature gets used in a Japanese setting.
• Christopher Lewis in Seducing Doctor Lewis loves fusion jazz, much to the chagrin of Steve and Gérmain, as a way to portray him as a trendy, sophisticated yuppie.
• The Silence of the Lambs: Hannibal Lecter listens to and plays classical music exclusively, with a particular fondness for Bach's "Goldberg Variations." Prior to his incarceration he attended the symphony religiously and often threw dinner parties for the symphony board, which on one occasion featured an incompetent flutist as the main course.
• A fairly generic punk listening to an even more generic song was featured in a scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. It was meant as sort of a contrast between the squeaky clean Enterprise members and the anarchist underbelly of San Francisco/the modern age.
• In The Talented Mr. Ripley, the title character listens to classical music almost exclusively. It's used as a contrast to the Jazz that the other characters listen to.

Literature

• One of the motifs in Haruki Murakami's after the quake is Jazz music as a metaphor in freedom in life.

Live-Action TV

• Spoofed in A Touch of Cloth in the "Undercover Cloth" arc. Jack goes into a Bad Guy Bar and pounding hip-hop starts playing, but the lyrics literally describe what the characters are doing.
• Temperance Brennan in the TV series Bones enjoys jazz, much to the surprise of Booth.
• Dance Academy has the sweet but rebellious girl Kat Karamazov live and breathe hip-hop. When there is street-dancing in the series, it tends to involve hip-hop.
• Doctor Who:
  • T he Seventh Doctor's Establishing Character Moment in the TV Movie (intended as a point of introduction to people who didn't watch the show) is listening to jazz on a gramaphone while his TARDIS sails through the vortex. Since he is Dying to Be Replaced (the narration from the Eighth Doctor has already explained that he's "nearing the end of [his] seventh life") this is used to establish his age and old-fashioned-ness, and how it is time for him to be replaced with someone young.
  • Susan's Establishing Character Moment is for her to be spotted secretly dancing to an instrumental pop song by (fictional) "John Smith and the Common Men", a 1960s pop group that she claims excitedly has gone from 19 to 2 in the charts. Here, it's used to illustrate that, despite being an alien, She Just Wants To Be Normal, especially since she's playing it on a futuristic radio and she is dancing alone - and her dancing, while not bad at all, looks very weird.
  • Vicki's decision to use a device that allows her to view any historical event to view The Beatles performing "Ticket to Ride" on Top of the Pops 1965 is used to illustrate both her youngness and her Future Imperfect view of the past... and the fact that Ian enjoys it a lot more than her shows off how much of a Cool Teacher he is.
  • In "An Unearthly Child", Ian is able to talk pop music trivia with Susan, and when she's surprised he knows about it, he explains he's open-minded and has a wide variety of interests.
  • In "The Happiness Patrol", the Stepford Smiler planet of Terra Alpha is subject to constant bland, inoffensive easy listening muzak broadcast twenty-four seven. The Doctor's companion Ace dismissively refers to it as 'lift music'.
  • The Retconned out Ninth Doctor played by Richard E. Grant loves showtunes and sings songs from "Cabaret" at the monsters to defeat them at the end of his only serial, Scream of the Shalka. This is probably just done to emphasise his weirdness, but since this incarnation is actually in a same-sex relationship, it is probably to play up his Campness too. (It could also have been an attempt at writing material for The Cast Showoff, as singer Robbie Williams was slated to play the Doctor until relatively late in development.)
• The soundtrack of Kamen Rider Double is heavily influenced by jazz, fitting the Hardboiled Detective theme.
• In the Men Behaving Badly episode "Cardigan", easy listening music is used to emphasise Gary's discomfort with getting older (which in his case is vaguely closer to forty).
• Scrubs frequently has gags involving "speed metal". One episode had a delivery driver who likes "speed metal" (the song played is "Driving Down the Darkness" by Devil Driver, which is metalcore, or Groove Metal, depending on how picky you are) helps J.D. get to work. It then shows J.D. acting demon possessed while listening to it as the character riding with him tries to ignore it.
• JJ's series 3 episode of Skins stands out from the show's normal poppier motifs by relying almost exclusively on classical music (particularly Debussy) for its moods.
• The Wire doesn't have any actual soundtrack, but gangster characters are often introduced by a steady hip-hop beat coming from their car stereo.

Music

• Eminem, nodding to A Clockwork Orange, often uses classical music interpolations and instrumentation (generally harpsichord and classical piano) to represent his Heroic Comedic Sociopath alter-ego, Slim Shady. In particular, "Brainless" (which is about how if Slim wasn't so stupid, he'd be a mass shooter) is based on Johann Sebastian Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor".

Newspaper Comics

• Calvin and Hobbes: Since his parents grew up with Rock and Roll, Calvin resorts to using "Easy Listening Muzak ... played real quietly" as the music of choice when he wants a genre of music that will annoy them.

Video Games

• Brütal Legend is a tribute to the metal genre made into a Fantasy RTS/Brawler video game. Each of the three armies in multiplayer is associated with a specific genre: Ironheade with Heavy Metal, The Drowning Pool with Goth Metal and The Tainted Coil with Industrial Rock.
• Cytus II gives each character a different genre motif which fits both their personality and the style of music they produce In-Universe. For example:
  • PAFF, an Idol Singer, gets vocal pop songs.
  • Neko#ΦωΦ is a Gamer Chick and EDM producer whose songs mostly fall under the genre of Happy Hardcore, fitting her energetic and chaotic personality.
  • ROBO_Head is a robot with artificial intelligence who produces hardcore electronic music and dubstep.
  • Xenon is a guitarist who plays Hard Rock and Metalcore in a band of robotic duplicates of himself.
  • ConneR, an Adventurer Archaeologist with a passion for acoustic instruments, has Artcore tracks with orchestral elements.
• Unsurprisingly, the Def Jam Series makes heavy use of hip-hop, since it was licensed by the record company of the same name and featured many Hip Hop and Rap artists as fighters.
• The Guilty Gear series is entirely built around various metal themes and concepts, with a completely metal soundtrack, characters made in the image of various genres, and non-stop Shout-Out's to various metal artists and groups.
• Lollipop Chainsaw:
  • The Dark Purveyors are associated with different genres of rock:
    • Mariska represents Psychedelic rock, being a Horror Hippie that strums a sitar and induces hallucinations.
    • Lewis Legend represents classic Rock & Roll, having a classic greaser-look and uses an electric guitar/gatling gun as a weapon.
    • Zed's theme is Punk; he wears punk fashion with a massive red mohawk, his attacks involve intense shrieking and his boss fight takes place in the city junk yard.
    • Vikke represents Viking Metal; he dresses like a viking (including a living bear-pelt for a pet/cape), he has a drum-set that shoots lightning, he rides a flying boat and wears corpse-paint.
  • In contrast to the above, protagonist Juliet is associated with pop songs "Lollipop" by Chordettes and "Hey Mickey" by Toni Basil.
• MadWorld and its pseudo-sequel Anarchy Reigns have a heavily Horrorcore-based soundtrack, a genre whose violent lyrics match the extreme violence of the gameplay.
• Persona 5's soundtrack was specifically described as "acid jazz" by its composer, Shoji Meguro.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • The titular character is associated with Pop Punk, with many of the songs associated with him falling under this genre. This combination of edgy, rebellious punk rock with lighter, friendlier pop music matches how he has a lot of attitude, but with a heart of gold underneath it all.
  • Knuckles the Echidna is associated with Hip-Hop music in Sonic Adventure 2, with his character theme and the background music to his levels being rap songs performed by Hunnid-P. Many of these are Boastful Raps, fitting his prideful personality.
  • In Sonic Adventure 2, Rouge's theme and the background music to all of her levels is jazz-based.
• Many stage themes in the Super Mario Bros. franchise are jazz-style, with the main themes of the original game, 3, 64, 3D Land, and 3D World having particularly heavy influences.

Visual Novels

• Naegi in Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc informs us in his introductory narration that his favourite music is always 'whatever is at the top of the charts', stressing how much of a boring Unlucky Everydude he is. He mentions that his only trait he has that isn't insanely average is that he's a little more optimistic than most people.

Webcomics

• The Dynamite Twins and Friends is heavily influenced by hip-hop and graffiti. Especially from the 80s and 90s.

Western Animation

• One episode of American Dad! has a sequence showing how the military roots out homosexuals from their ranks. The interviewing officer starts a sentence with "Clang clang", which causes a random person in line to burst into "The Trolley Song" from Meet Me In St. Louis in a very Camp Gay manner.
• Centaurworld: In "My Tummy, Your Hurts", a smooth jazz melody plays when the herd swims across the water atop Horse, accentuating the awkward waiting moment before they get to the other side.
• Parodied in the Danny Phantom episode "Pirate Radio", when the antagonists use an easy listening station to brainwash all the adults in Amity Park (and Jazz), capturing them to turn them into slave labor for their ship. All the kids in town, including the protagonists, absolutely can't stand it.
• Pop music is associated with The Question on a few occasions in Justice League Unlimited, which reinforces his air of eccentricity.
• Metalocalypse basically has extreme metal as one of its core themes. Whether it's mocking the genre (with it's gorn and over-the top fantasy/action bent) or paying a tribute to it (with songs that some viewers see as Awesome Music) is rather up-in-the-air.
• According to Patrick in SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Grandma's Kisses", one of the requirements of being a grown-up is developing "a taste for free-form jazz."