Let’s talk about recipes, but ones that are a bit special. If you’ve read the title (of course you have, otherwise you wouldn’t be here reading) you already know that since this is Breaking Bad and not a cooking show this article might be about recipes of a certain kind. But I’m going to change your mind right now, because I’m not going to tell you how to synthesize the methamphetamine that Walter White (the main character in Breaking Bad, if you had never seen it) was producing with his partner Jesse Pinkman. Also because this is a playlist, or this article is about a playlist.<\/p>\n
There are other kinds of recipes though, and today’s explains how to create the perfect soundtrack. And, as it is the quintessential perfect TV series, so is its soundtrack.<\/p>\n
A good soundtrack, whether for a movie or TV series, starts as early as the theme song. If hearing the first 4 notes of that precise theme song gives you shivers of pleasure or sets off bombs of memories and fireworks of memories in your head, then we are talking about the perfect theme song. Like the one in Breaking Bad, of course.<\/p>\n
But the theme song is only a few seconds long, right? It is all the music that comes after and accompanies the unfolding of the action and story that matters. And the one from Breaking Bad is perfect, needless to say. It is so both because it is perfectly relevant to the story and enhances or mitigates certain excesses, but more importantly because it is harmonious with it.<\/p>\n
Harmony between images and music is created when music functions as an antagonist or congruent commentary. I mean that sometimes it works in contrast to the action (perhaps introducing an ironic or capable element to lighten a particularly heavy scene), other times it acts in total adherence to the action. In Breaking Bad this mechanism always works perfectly.<\/p>\n
Moreover, its soundtrack has another aspect that makes it not only beautiful but also perfect: it is varied, unpredictable, full of pearls lost at the bottom of the sea of musical memory and rediscovered thanks to director Vince Gilligan’s over-the-top taste.<\/p>\n
What a crazy series, what a crazy playlist.<\/p>\n