Jordan Peele Is The New King Of The Needle Drop

thegamer.com:

This article contains very minor spoilers for Get Out, Us, and Nope.

In Jordan Peele's first scene as a filmmaker, pop music was already integral to his approach to horror.

Get Out begins with Andre (Lakeith Stanfield), a Black man lost in the suburbs. When a white car turns around to follow him, we can hear the jaunty World War 2-era song "Run Rabbit Run" playing on its speakers. Noticing the car, Andre turns around to walk in the other direction. But, before he can get very far, a figure in a metal mask knocks him out and drags him into the trunk. As the song's instrumental bridge plays, the sleepy neighborhood is none the wiser.

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In the wake of Get Out's stratospheric success, Peele has continued to write and direct original work. With the recent release of his third film, Nope, we have a good amount of material to work with to start identifying the markers that define his style. In addition to often-discussed hallmarks like his ability to blend trenchant racial, social, and political commentary with genre entertainment, wary Black protagonists who avoid the mistakes that white characters commonly make in horror, and his tension-relieving use of humor, Peele's use of pop music needle drops has now emerged as a key element that continues to show up in his work.

For the uninitiated, the term ‘needle drop’ may call to mind a record player's arm lowering into the groove of a well-loved LP, and that's essentially what it means. A needle drop is any moment when a film uses existing music, not original score, to soundtrack a scene. That music can be classical, as when Francis Ford Coppola used Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" to score American helicopters assaulting a Vietnamese