Music Appreciation

cbabe

(4,048 posts) Tue Jul 30, 2024, 11:50 AM Jul 30

What's your number one? Meet the man who ranked every Disney song

https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jul/30/ranked-every-disney-song-robert-komaniecki-

Wanna be like who? Meet the man who ranked every Disney song

When musicologist Robert Komaniecki decided to score the cartoon tunes using complex objective criteria (and some ‘vibes’), he found some startling winners. He shows us his workings

Rachael Sigee
Tue 30 Jul 2024 03.00 EDT

When Robert Komaniecki started ranking Disney songs, he thought he knew how it would pan out. “I was born in 1990 and so in my mind, those are the best Disney musicals,” he says of the renaissance period that produced Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. “I think a lot of my fellow millennials reading this list reacted in a similar way. They were like, ‘You have songs from The Little Mermaid below a song from Frozen? That’s unthinkable!’”

But Komaniecki is a music theorist, and his list removed nostalgia from the equation, instead assigning songs rankings out of 500, scored on lyrics, music, vocals, plot integration and subjective enjoyment (“vibes, basically”). By the time he posted his findings to X, counting down in daily batches of five to fierce debate from followers, he had meticulously analysed and ranked 115 songs.

“A great Disney song needs to be inextricable from the plot of the film,” he says. “It needs to have lyrics that are clear and concise, thoughtful and artful and have plenty of rhyme. And it needs to bring us closer to the character or characters that are performing it. It needs to say something that the dialogue and the animation cannot.”

…

But while his critical brain may have been satisfied by the strict methodology, Komaniecki acknowledges that ultimately, a favourite Disney song is not about technical perfection but about the way it makes you feel. For him, that is Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. It may have only just scraped into the Top 40 thanks to some dodgy balance issues with the background singers, but it’s this wry, rousing villain number that has his heart. “It’s so funny and I love Howard Ashman’s lyrics … There’s a reprise with ‘No one plots like Gaston / Takes cheap shots like Gaston / Likes to persecute harmless crackpots like Gaston’. It’s fourth-wall-breaking. It’s so cute. I love it.”

The full list…

(What’s your song and why?)