What a Fantastically Weird Tarantino Film Tells us About The Future of Music Listening
Chapter One: Three Questions
One movie dominates so many lists of all-time favorite. From Brad from your local drinking hole, to your fifteen-year old cousin who puts “cinephile” on her Instagram bio, one particular movie stands out for its vibrancy and its ability to be universally loved. Influencers still meme Confused Travolta, café intellectuals still quote that line about “Royale with Cheese”, night clubbers still imitate that disco-diner dance.
Pulp Fiction is fantastically weird. And its weirdness leaves me with 3 big questions:
1. What makes this movie — so — damn — good?
2. And, a more self-indulgent question — how can I distill the magic of this movie and apply it my domain — perfecting the listening experience?
And…
3. What’s in that damn briefcase everyone wants?
Was it the circularity of time? The calibrated dialogue, that sputters and flows, vividly documenting these wildly ungrounded characters?
Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is indeed chaotic, excessive, and gratuitous. But more importantly, it is a tremendously fun film that takes the strands of different stories and characters and puts them together, no, layers them together in a seamless way to make the sum of the story more meaningful, more suspenseful, more memorable.
As someone who is obsessed with how people appreciate music — how people enjoy music — I am fascinated by how Pulp Fiction tricks us in approaching this 3-hour long film as a sit-down blast.
Tarantino managed to manipulate the very narrative structure of time to create a story that is somehow more astounding, more memorable, and somehow more cohesive! What makes the film so spellbinding — why do we want to know what’s in Jule’s briefcase? What does Pulp Fiction teach us about music listening?
What does Pulp Fiction teach us about music listening?
Chapter Two: The Long and Short
Pulp Fiction is essentially a collage of some of the best scenes ever conceived on film put together in a way that somehow feels…right. Now, this is extremely complex. Tarantino is able to take disparate stories and combine them in a thoughtful manner, weaving together a 3-hour long flick full of psychedelics, Royale with Cheese, Uma Thurma and John Travoltas’ smooth twists, into something that feels like a cinematic breeze.
So what makes a movie great? “Three good scenes. No bad scenes.” If what the director of Scarface, Howard Hawks says is true, then this is the recipe for artistic greatness.
Here’s our take on what makes a mix great:
“Three good new songs. No song skips.”
A personal measure for the greatness of a piece of art is how well it sticks to your brain and gnaws at your mind. No other movie in history can conjure up as many quotable and incredulous moments as Pulp Fiction. Tarantino masterfully pops up here and there, within the movie’s disjointed narrative, with wonderfully memorable scenes — a burger-filled dialogue, a quote of Biblical proportions, that moment a comatose Uma Thurman jolts back up, gasping.
For such a meandering movie, Pulp Fiction comes across as being punchy. Unlike The Revenant where Leonardo di Caprio mud-wrestles a bear for what seems like an eternity, Pulp Fiction is infinitely more engaging because it consists of shorter narrative chapters, flitting between story arcs seamlessly. Surprisingly, Pulp Fiction is also 22 minutes longer than The Revenant in terms of runtime.
The gist of it is: if you’re able to gather the best parts of every scene, juggle them in a way that makes sense, you would be able to keep your audience’s attention for a much longer time.
If you’re able to gather the best parts of every scene, juggle them in a way that makes sense, you would be able to keep your audience’s attention for a much longer time.
So when we envision the future of music listening and how we relate to tangential ideas like music mixing, we see ventures like TikTok going off based on the concept of a seamless highlight reel, somewhat like Pulp Fiction.
While the average length of a popular TikTok video is only 16 seconds, people spent an average of 52 minutes per day on the video app. While Instagram and Facebook still take the lead in terms of being attention grabbers at 53 minutes and 58.5 minutes respectively, TikTok’s ability to captivate you for long periods of time based on short-form content is simply, a tour de force.
TikTok’s ability to captivate you for long periods of time based on short-form content is simply, a tour de force.
Chapter Three: Filler Killer
To envision where music might go from here, we can learn something from Pulp Fiction. We can use the same principles that Tarantino uses to captivate our attention for long periods of time with how we play around with the format of music.
You have to find the best part of every song. That’s what DJs do to keep you interested and make you dance.
You have to find the best part of every song. That’s what DJs do to keep you interested and make you dance. That musical segment that captures the spirit of the song and the audience in glorious matrimony. That snappy, punchy part that keeps you excited and wide-awake — if you can identify that special segment in every song you listen to, you’d be able to stay attentive for longer.
Based on this counter-intuitive principle of shorter segments over a longer period of time, you’d be able to listen to more songs whilst being just as entertained, if not more so.
Let’s say if we were able to listen to every song on the planet and find the best 1–2-minute segment of every one of them, we would be able to capture the spirit of Tarantino’s principle. Everyone would be able to enjoy more good songs over a longer period of time. It’s a powerful way to weave together the fabric of disparate tones and themes in a coherent, but always fascinating form.
This concept of ‘playing the best parts’ also means that you trim the fat off the songs we like. You get rid of the intro, and the outro, perhaps a repeated verse towards the end of the song.
Artists are clearly aware of this too, which is why lots of famous artists have started positioning the catchiest parts of their song right at the beginning. So that when you come across that song in a playlist, it jumps straight into the catchiest bit.
Just off the top off my mind, I already have a couple earworms as examples. For Dojo Cat’s “Say So”, the insanely catchy chorus starts playing within 10 seconds of the song. Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now” (I’ve been spending way too much time on TikTok these days) does something similar — the opening of the song flirts with the melodically infectious pre-chorus, before introducing the first verse.
These changes in song structure are signifying a broadening reaction/action to how we listen to music. If we’re just engaging in inactive music discovery (where we already know what we kind of like and want to find more of that vibe, we wrote about this topic last week), excessively long intros and buildup prevent listeners from engaging with the ‘best parts’ of the song.
In the modern playlist framework, where each individual song relates to the other individual songs not through the artistry of a single creator but through you and I (hurray for personal curation!), song aspects like intros and outros are less important. Perhaps even fillers for the long-ago past.
Instead of relying on artists and music producers to make a song’s structure to be catchier right from the beginning, here’s a big what-if.
What if we were able to play the best part of every song right from the get-go? Meaning that you could skip the intros, and dive right into the essence of a song — without skipping a single beat?
That’s why our ‘Play Best Parts’ concept is so fundamental. Not only do we play the musical highlights, it goes deeper and beyond as a filler-killer. Get rid of filler music and your listening experience with playlists will be elevated dramatically.
Get rid of filler music and your listening experience with playlists will be elevated dramatically.
Because then, your playlist will be elevated into a smart mix that looks like this.
Chapter Four: Song and Scene
Just kidding. Your smart mix will look more like this.
We’ve learned a thing or two to help the listening experience by drawing on how Tarantino layers separate but related scenes in cohesion in the world of cinema.
This mixture of tone and mood would not have worked in the hands of less visionary directors, but Tarantino is able to bring balance by varying intensity and tension in a gradual way, with carefully-calibrated drops and climaxes in terms of energy. Think about how Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta hints at the importance of burgers and how that burger scene eventually pays off.
The same fundamental points carry onto the music world. The playlist is a collection of songs that we create based on what we already like over hours and hours of listening. In layman terms, a playlist is a compilation of musical highlights for ourselves. What shuffling a playlist does is that it spits out a random sequence of songs that we like in the unruliest manner. It’ll be like getting your 15-year-old auteur director of a cousin to edit Pulp Fiction in post-production: your Pulp-Fiction wannabe film will be completely incoherent, even though the film will still have great scenes.
The playlist is random. The playlist frustrating. The playlist is ill-conceived.
The playlist is random. The playlist frustrating. The playlist is ill-conceived.
The concept of the playlist is plagued because it’s a format that does not support the intricacy of having different tones and ideas in the same place. Because its built upon the organizational framework of the shuffle button.
A great scene, like a great song, can carry itself. But given their place within a wider narrative structure, they also need to be placed at the right moment. Similarly, you can put together The Greatest Hits of [Insert your name here] as your playlist, but if your songs aren’t compiled in a way that makes sense, your playlist will be a sonic dumpster fire.
We’re exploring ways to place songs at the right time. If you’re interested, you can check out what my AI music startup, Mixonset does.
Chapter Five: The Secret to Pulp Fiction
So what makes Pulp Fiction so universally loved? Quentin Tarantino does 3 things:
- He is able to combine short scenes to captivate your attention over a long 3-hour film.
- Taking this collage of disparate but memorable scenes and weave them together in a seamless way.
- Even though the scenes are not chronological, he masterfully uses tone and motifs to calibrate the general flow of the film.
What this holds for the future of music listening:
1. If you’re able to gather the best parts of every song, juggle them in a way that makes sense, you would be able to keep your listener’s attention for a much longer time.
2. Your listening experience needs to be contextual so that your music just flows. The right song needs to play at the right time based on musical parameters like Mixonset’s proprietary energy level.
3. Throw the ‘Shuffle’ button into the garbage. Replace it with ‘Smart Mix’.
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This article was written by Boris But, Co-Founder and CMO of Mixonset. Find him on Linkedin or email him at boris@mixonset.com.
To learn more about how Mixonset revolutionizes our music experiences with Smart Mix, install our iOS app for free.
Mixonset is available for Spotify Premium and iTunes MP3 Library. Mixonset Premium lets you find new songs without skipping a beat. Check out how it works here!
