La La Land is a different type of musical than many we have seen in the past years, the director Damien Chazelle and Music writer Justin Hurwitz have created a modern Los Angeles reminiscent of 1950’s musicals.
More than anything, La La Land talks about the evolution of Jazz in modern history, the story of Sebastian (Ryan Gosling). Struggling to make his mark on a city that is ever changing. Rooted in the early foundations of jazz, Gosling ends up teaming up with Keith (John Legend), where he discovers this new age of Jazz, a mash up of jazz, electronic, RnB, and funk. Gosling deals with this internal struggle as he decides if fame or his musical values are more worth sticking to. If you want to listen to this evolution of Jazz, I recommend listening to Herman’s Habit and Start a Fire.
Sometimes, musicals nowadays fail to connect all the pieces together. It’s almost like you’re watching a bunch of mini movies with an interconnected plot. In La La Land, the director ties everything together with musical themes. We see Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian’s theme used throughout the movie to help tie everything
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In today’s society, we are exposed to so many different types of music through the mass accessibility of the internet that even if you weren’t alive to experience the 1950’s you can feel nostalgia just by watching movies and listening to music from that era. I think that this type of accessibility is what helped La La Land to succeed to so well, the director banked on this ‘phantom nostalgia’ that many people experience from being exposed to old music over a long period of time.
If you perhaps haven’t seen La La Land yet, I highly recommend that you go, not just for the plot, but the way the director uses music to weave a story together about two people struggling to achieve their