A Guide to the 'Westworld' Season 2 Soundtrack
For as silly as it is, the music of Westworld-complete with old-timey saloon covers of Radiohead-was a perfectly fitting as a soundtrack to the show's first season. This was a theme park for sleazy people to get sick kicks in an R-rated DisneyLand jazzed-up with a cheap Western veneer.
These obvious Top-40 tracks given the lazy cowboy treatment serve as a perfect reminder that this exists in a real world, where recordings of Soundgarden and The Rolling Stones occupy the same universe as robots who think they're human and do sex things. It's so bad and so perfect.
As Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy told me during Season One:
I think that we did want to gently remind the audience that this was possible, that this is not a real western, that this is a synthetic western. The point of view of the show is largely limited to what the hosts understand about their world. And they don't understand much; they don't know what that outside world is, they don't know when that outside world is. They're coming to discover that. But their world has been sort of fabricated and filled with cultural references. Their dialogue features allusions and homage. That music in the saloon. And on a creative level, we just loved the idea of being able to take advantage of popular music but recast it as something that you'd feature in the Old West. And we love the player piano as the symbol for the hosts themselves, but as a symbol for the kind of collision of the Old West and the modern world.
That continues to be the case in Westworld's second season. During the Super Bowl, the first trailer for Season Two featured a haunting piano version of Kanye West's "Runaway." There are few things on TV as ridiculous as humming along with West's lyrics-"Here's a toast to the douchebags"-while a robot Evan Rachel Wood rides a horse and fires an 17th century rifle.
Here's a guide to the contemporary songs given the Westworld treatment throughout Season Two, just in case you missed them because you were too busy trying to decipher the multiple timelines.
Episode 8: "Kiksuya"
In one of the most important episodes of the season, Westworld followed Ghost Nation leader Akecheta as he woke up and learned of the true nature of his existence. Composer Ramin Djawadi's moody cover of Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box" played as Akecheta wanders through the halls of the Westworld labs, where he finds his true love, Kohana.
Episode 4: "Akane No Mai"
Just like the old-timey Western version of "Paint It Black" in the show's pilot set the tone for the series' soundtrack, the Japanese-inspired cover that introduced Shogun World also signified that this new park-and its hosts and storylines-is a lot like the one we've seen before.
Likewise, Djawadi's cover of Wu-Tang Clan's "C.R.E.A.M." was a perfect instrumental choice for Akane's dance scene, and it served as a great nod to the hip-hop group's East Asian references.
Episode 3: "Virtù e Fortuna"
We finally got our first look at another Delos in the episode's cold open, and Ramin Djawadi's sitar-heavy instrumental cover of The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" was an inspired choice to introduce The Raj.
Episode 2: "Reunion"
As it was teased in the Super Bowl ad for Season Two, we hear Ramin Djawadi's version of Kanye West's "Runaway" played over one of Dolores's flashbacks to her time in the real world outside of Westworld. (Sadly, we don't hear it when Logan literally offers a toast to the douchebags and assholes at the Delos party.)
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