How to Listen to a Tarantino Movie - by Hollis Robbins

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How to Listen to a Tarantino Movie<br>Starting with "Django Unchained"

Hollis Robbins<br>Jul 09, 2026

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To begin, start by assuming that Quentin Tarantino knows what he’s doing, because he does. I first started paying attention to his film soundtracks with Django Unchained (2012) and I still think this is the best example. The late great Ennio Morricone complained in 2013 that Tarantino “places music in his films without coherence” and said he’d never work with him again, but changed his mind to write original music for The Hateful Eight (2015). Why? Likely he figured out that Tarantino always knows what he’s doing, even if the audience has little idea.<br>Everybody’s writing about taste but I think aesthetic deliberation and intentionality are much more interesting, especially in the AI era. To do the work to understand what went into a work of art (and to grasp how the artist is situating the work in a political and aesthetic context) requires more than taste. It takes work.<br>The soundtrack to Django Unchained uses fifteen songs borrowed from nine films (many notable spaghetti westerns) made between 1966 and 1974. Nobody tells you this; you have to look it up and recognize what was going on during those years. Spike Lee hadn’t considered what Tarantino was doing when he tweeted “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them” (since deleted). Tarantino’s choices are, in fact, deeply coherent, when you look at how they work to create Jamie Foxx’s “fastest gun in the South.”<br>Tarantino’s method for musical allusion is both obvious and subtle. In general, a musical borrowing, like any other kind of allusion, provokes associations to something: another work of art, a particular genre, and the idea that the work is deliberately in conversation with other works. Allusion means the artist is working in context and wants you to keep that context in mind. Tarantino does this visually for his film buff fans all the time, like with the wanted poster for Edwin Porter, the director of The Great Train Robbery, one of the first movie Westerns.1<br>Musical allusion works on an emotional level as well as a cognitive one. The point of music in a film is to make you feel a certain way whether you “get” the allusion or not. Many people can sense the era that a film or television score came from. Film music from the late 1960s and early 1970s tended toward a certain melancholy. Think of The Graduate (1967), with “The Sound of Silence;” The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) with “Windmills of Your Mind”; Midnight Cowboy (1969) with “Everybody’s Talkin’”; “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) with “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head,” and the entire score of Shaft (1971).<br>Note that the non-violent era of the Civil Rights Movement ended with the Watts Riot of August 1965. The mournful scores accompanied a more militant protest era.2<br>The most important musical allusion from Django Unchained is Luis Bacalov’s theme song from Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 film, Django. Tarantino knows there are people who know Corbucci’s movie well and people who have never heard of it.3 The music works for everyone. Tarantino took it straight from Corbucci’s film to open his own without changing anything. The key is D minor; the ballad begins with a very brief instrumental triple meter introduction followed by compound duple meter accompanying the lyrics. (Compound duple meter, evoking hoof beats, is common in the music of 1950s and 1960s Westerns.) It is conventional, with a male voice, guitar, bass, and drum set, with a dramatic background female chorus, strings, piano, and tambourine. The song’s lyrics are as follows:<br>Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedDjango! Django, have you always been alone?<br>Django! Django, have you never loved again?<br>Love will live on, oh, oh…<br>Life must go on, oh, oh…<br>For you cannot spend your life regretting.<br>Django! Django, you must face another day.<br>Django! Django, now your love has gone away.<br>Once you loved her, whoa, oh…<br>Now you’ve lost her, whoa, oh…<br>But you’ve lost her forever, Django

[Chorus]

When there are clouds in the skies and they are grey<br>You may be sad but remember that love will pass away<br>Oh Django, after the showers, the sun<br>Will be shining<br>The drama is Rocky Roberts’s gorgeous tenor joined by the chorus. The song evokes a sense of nobility and tragic dignity, with the rhythmic freedom signaling independence. Take another listen.<br>In a famous 1973 essay, “After Innocence,” The New Yorker critic Pauline Kael described how the discontent brought on by the Vietnam War and the Watergate hearings was overshadowing the summer’s movies, “yet the corruption that Watergate has come to stand for can be seen as the culmination of what American movies have been saying for almost a decade.” Vietnam, Kael...