How Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 uses music to tap into our nostalgia for another time

(From left) Pom Klementieff as Mantis, Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-Lord, Dave Bautista as Drax, Karen Gillan as Nebula in a scene from "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3." (Photo: Marvel-Disney via AP)

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 opens on a note significantly darker than the previous two films in the blockbuster Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) series. Quite literally, as we find, from the accompanying mixtape, released a month ago almost as a ritual, on streaming platforms.

Announcing its arrival, director James Gunn said in an interview: “It doesn’t start with ‘Mr. Blue Sky’”, referring to the 1977 classic by Electric Light Orchestra. “It doesn’t start with (Redbone’s 1974 track which also headlined the first GotG mixtape) ‘Come and Get Your Love’. It starts with Radiohead’s acoustic version of ‘Creep.’ And that’s just a much different tone from the beginning than the other two films.”

Oxford alt-rock band Radiohead’s “Creep” was a strange song about, well, a stalker-type character that develops an unhealthy obsession with a member of the opposite sex, and channelled Thom Yorke’s feelings of unworthiness and self-loathing. Worlds away from the sunny synth-laden, disco-friendly bops that populated lead character Peter Quill’s (Chris Pratt) days, became a key feature of the series, and propelled the first two Guardians of the Galaxy (GotG) mixtapes into chart-topping territory of their own.

Even more interesting: “Creep” was an anthem of the 1990s, a definite era departure from the 1970s, which the earlier GotG mixtapes focused on. Narratively speaking, as the only remains of lead character Peter Quill’s long-gone Earth mother, it made sense these cassette tapes were songs of the time she’d have been alive in. Quill (or Star-Lord)’s mixtape in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 is discovered from a Microsoft Zune that he finds at the end of GotG 2.

Microsoft Zune was a little-known and ill-fated digital music player launched in 2006–five years after the iPod and one year before the iPhone, which in turn would swallow the iPod in a decade’s time. As with any MP3 player of its time, it could hold whole giga-bytes—meaning entire eras and whole worlds—of music.

Gunn chose the Microsoft Zune to replace Peter Quill’s precious Sony Walkman in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, partly because he thought it was “funny”, but mostly because the whole story had to shift to years after the events of Avengers: Endgame, when half the universe is obliterated with the snap of a finger. This means Peter Quill’s mixtape swerves into multiple timelines, far beyond the sexy Seventies.

Microsoft Zune 80 and Zune 4. (Photo by Bkwparadox via Wikimedia Commons 3.0)

The songs on the mixtape, streaming on Spotify, include The Flaming Lips “Do You Realise??”, Alice Cooper’s “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”, Florence + The Machine’s “Dog Days Are Over”, Bruce Springsteen’s “Badlands”, X’s “Poor Girl”, The Mowgli’s “San Francisco” among others. Evidently, this GotG Vol 3 mixtape hops across decades. It taps into a nostalgia not just for any specific generation or genre of music, but for the way we began to listen to music roughly 15 years ago.

Of the entire MCU, music as a way to evoke nostalgia has been core especially to Guardians of the Galaxy. The Awesome Mix Vol 1, which Peter Quill brandishes in the first film, transports him to his childhood and his relationship with his mother. The mixtapes, including Vol 2, are his only connection to a past he isn’t fully clear about, and define his character in the present. They present the action, humour and heart of the GotG films.

Marvel Cinematic Universe and music

But GotG isn’t the only MCU product that relies on music to develop a sense of time or atmosphere. Spider-Man: Homecoming featured songs by Michael Jackson and The Ramones; Thor: Ragnarok channelled Led Zeppelin to accentuate its very masculine quality. Music—original scores, original anthems, sampling recognizable themes as inside jokes—has been key to the emotional impact that MCU films have had; becoming a core feature of the entire franchise.

Of course, in the US, music and Hollywood have been not-so-strange bedfellows for a long time. Back in 1967, Mike Nichols’ The Graduate made a star of Dustin Hoffman, as well as the music duo Simon & Garfunkel through an original soundtrack that endures to this day. Randal Kleiser’s Grease came in 1978, but was set in the 1950s, an era evoked through an original soundtrack that went on to be the second-best selling album of the year in the US. Soundtracks like this in turn came to define their time, the characters and types of stories they underscored.

Then there were the soundtracks that looked back by sourcing the music of those times. In 1986, Rob Reiner’s coming-of-age drama Stand By Me, set in the 1950s, used rock and roll songs like The Coasters’ “Yakety Yak” and The Chordettes’ “Lollipop”. The 1994 blockbuster Forrest Gump, starring Tom Hanks, spanned three decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s, and used popular songs of each era, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”.

The 1985 sci-fi megahit Back to the Future used tracks like “Johnny B Goode” and “Earth Angel” to transport its audience to the 1950s, while its lead protagonist Marty (Michael J. Fox) uses a time machine to get there. The 2000 cult hit Almost Famous, built around a rock band’s tour through the US, also evokes the 1970s with classic rock songs like Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”.

There are film scores—background music to underline the drama as opposed to soundtracks—that are iconic in themselves, notably by maestros such as Hans Zimmer. But “borrowed music”, as this sort of sampling can be called, can and has successfully been used in conjunction with new narratives and stories to create new meaning.

It’s a cool trick: Take a hit, repackage it with all the bells and whistles of new-age technology, and sell a shiny new thing. Not only will it call to new audiences, but also to those who heard those sounds in their teenage and early 20s, got sick of them but also had them forever imprinted on their brain. Nostalgia was at the core of Marvel’s mantra, which tapped into the heyday of comic books and built an empire of superheroes. It’s only fitting that at least one of its franchises uses music to do the same.

It is as Don Draper, the best (if fictional) ad man that ever lived, said: “Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent… It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship: It’s a time machine…It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel: It’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels—around and around and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 released in theatres on May 5, 2023.