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So, Star Wars is in the news again as we barrel towards The Last Jedi- the middle film of the new trilogy. Given that Star Wars is suddenly a trending topic worth capitalizing on I thought I’d take on one of the strangest corners of the Star Wars universe: the musical history of Star Wars. I’m not talking about the film soundtracks, though there is a soundtrack on this list but we’ll get there.
I’m instead talking about the way Star Wars has come up in geeky and popular music throughout the past 40 years since its inception. The truth of the matter is that Star Wars is THE multi-media nerd juggernaut and always has been, eclipsing all others in its field and that includes spreading into the world of hit songs, nerd rap, parody music, and viral musical phenomena. I’m sure we’ll see more of this as the new trilogy continues on but for now let’s dig into the bizarre musical history of Star Wars.
STAR WARS THEME/CANTINA BAND – 1977
The story of Star Wars and popular music can honestly be traced back to one man: Meco. He was a session musician and sci-fi geek working in the music industry in the late ‘70s when he first saw Star Wars. Naturally, he fell in love with the film, like most of America, and, being a classically trained musician, he elected to rework the film’s score for the age of disco. This kind of stuff was actually more common back in the Golden Age of disco than you might think, just the year before Walter Murphy had released his ‘A Fifth of Beethoven’ that reworked the famous symphony into a disco track.
Meco’s Star Wars was the first thing to use sampling and remixing on a track that was popular right that moment and it became a number one hit, outselling the original score itself. There’s still 4 decades of Star Wars music to get through and we’ll see Mecos many more times before this list is over but I doubt the franchise would’ve had the gas in the tank to do as much as it did without this initial mammoth success.
Meco’s Star Wars was the first thing to use sampling and remixing on a track that was popular right that moment and it became a number one hit, outselling the original score itself. There’s still 4 decades of Star Wars music to get through and we’ll see Mecos many more times before this list is over but I doubt the franchise would’ve had the gas in the tank to do as much as it did without this initial mammoth success.
STAR WARS LOUNGE SINGER – 1978
This is actually the first piece of Star Wars non-movie music I ever heard, mainly because my dad used to sing it any time Star Wars was mentioned. Back in 1978, Bill Murray was still working away as a performer on Saturday Night Live and one of his reoccurring sketches was as ‘Nick the Lounge Singer.’ Nick’s gimmick was just being a dopey and over the top lounge singer usually crooning out overwrought renditions of songs or adding lyrics where none previously existed.
In 1978 they decided to run a sketch where Nick gave his own spin on Star Wars, cooking up a pretty silly collection of lyrics to sing to the main melody that, once heard, will never leave your brain. I think this particular entry has faded a bit in recent years but it’s still well enough remembered that when The Force Awakens came out in 2015 Oscar Isaacs sang a weird cover of it that he posted to YouTube, which has got to count for something.
In 1978 they decided to run a sketch where Nick gave his own spin on Star Wars, cooking up a pretty silly collection of lyrics to sing to the main melody that, once heard, will never leave your brain. I think this particular entry has faded a bit in recent years but it’s still well enough remembered that when The Force Awakens came out in 2015 Oscar Isaacs sang a weird cover of it that he posted to YouTube, which has got to count for something.
MECO PLAYS MUSIC FROM THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK – 1980
I told you we’d see Meco again on this list, also that title above is the real name of the album and not a joke, it really is that cumbersome. Just three years after his initial success Meco was struggling for prolonged relevance and while his initial remix was perfectly timed and well made his disco Imperial March really is not. Part of that is just that a march is harder to dance to by nature of its more rigid beat clashing against the syncopation needed for a good disco track.
Moreover, by the 1980s the disco craze was on the wane and synthesizers were on the rise, neither of which turned out to be that friendly to reworked movie soundtracks. Even though this second attempt to capitalize on the franchise failed it would in no way dim Mecos spirits as that same year he was contacted by George Lucas himself to produce another Star Wars album.
Moreover, by the 1980s the disco craze was on the wane and synthesizers were on the rise, neither of which turned out to be that friendly to reworked movie soundtracks. Even though this second attempt to capitalize on the franchise failed it would in no way dim Mecos spirits as that same year he was contacted by George Lucas himself to produce another Star Wars album.
THE STAR WARS CHRISTMAS ALBUM – 1980
I honestly have no idea what possessed George Lucas to make him think Star Wars and Christmas were going to be the peanut butter and chocolate of the blockbuster world but he truly believed it. Just 2 years after The Star Wars Holiday Special came out to universal shame and derision Lucas got the man who made the Star Wars Theme a hit to produce a whole Star Wars Christmas album. The album is probably the most different thing Mecos ever produced in his own heyday, taking a break from the big orchestral dance remixes for more traditional Christmas pop formats. Most of it is pretty forgettable in the way that all Christmas albums are, with the sole exception of ‘What do you get a Wookie for Christmas? (When he already owns a comb.)’
I don’t know about any of you out there but just hearing that title makes me shudder right down to my DNA and the song itself is just as bad as it implies, sung in this unlistenable robot voice. It’s one of the most skin-crawlingly bad Christmas tunes I’ve ever heard, cut from the same cloth as ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer’ or the barking dogs' version of Jingle Bells. However, I suspect we all owe this song a debt of gratitude as it pretty much killed Lucas’ interest in combining Star Wars and the Christmas season.
I don’t know about any of you out there but just hearing that title makes me shudder right down to my DNA and the song itself is just as bad as it implies, sung in this unlistenable robot voice. It’s one of the most skin-crawlingly bad Christmas tunes I’ve ever heard, cut from the same cloth as ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer’ or the barking dogs' version of Jingle Bells. However, I suspect we all owe this song a debt of gratitude as it pretty much killed Lucas’ interest in combining Star Wars and the Christmas season.
EWOK CELEBRATION – 1983
Don’t worry- this entire list isn’t going to be about Meco and his bad romance with reworking Star Wars film soundtracks to steadily decreasing returns. Six years after his initial success his reworking of the ‘Ewok Celebration’ was pretty much the last hurrah for Meco, to the point he actually retired from music after this song filed to land. He’ll still show up again on this list but we’ll get to that in due course.
This is the first of his Star Wars tracks to actually feature lyrics…kind of. It’s just someone actually singing that nonsense Ewok speak with various Star Wars names sprinkled into it and it wears out its welcome incredibly quickly. By this point, Meco’s remixes had slowly decayed from lush, orchestral rearrangements of the song to basically just adding a dance beat under the original composition and that lack of effort is really grating. It was probably for the best this was the end for him, for the most part anyway.
This is the first of his Star Wars tracks to actually feature lyrics…kind of. It’s just someone actually singing that nonsense Ewok speak with various Star Wars names sprinkled into it and it wears out its welcome incredibly quickly. By this point, Meco’s remixes had slowly decayed from lush, orchestral rearrangements of the song to basically just adding a dance beat under the original composition and that lack of effort is really grating. It was probably for the best this was the end for him, for the most part anyway.
CHEWBACCA – 1994
In 1994 the geek cinema indie circuit was taken by storm by a little black and white movie called Clerks by then-unknown director Kevin Smith. Smith was the latest in a new breed of film geek turned director, with a vast lexicon of Gen X pop culture and nostalgia to inform his material and at the crux of that was Star Wars. So ingrained is Star Wars into Smith’s Clerks that the film introduced the world to a minute long piece of music by the group Supernova entitled ‘Chewbacca.’
I wasn’t there at the time but even I know, just from the opening guitar riff, that Supernova’s ‘Chewbacca’ is the sound of Clerks and it’s an absolutely great little track. Given that the lyrics are literally just “Chewbacca. Chewie. Chewbacca. Chewie. Chewie is that you? What a Wookie” it’s probably good the song is only a minute long- that would get old quickly. It also features someone doing a terrible Wookie impression but amateurish skill made up for by raw passion and energy was pretty much the cadence of Clerks so I guess it fits.
I wasn’t there at the time but even I know, just from the opening guitar riff, that Supernova’s ‘Chewbacca’ is the sound of Clerks and it’s an absolutely great little track. Given that the lyrics are literally just “Chewbacca. Chewie. Chewbacca. Chewie. Chewie is that you? What a Wookie” it’s probably good the song is only a minute long- that would get old quickly. It also features someone doing a terrible Wookie impression but amateurish skill made up for by raw passion and energy was pretty much the cadence of Clerks so I guess it fits.
SHADOWS OF THE EMPIRE SOUNDTRACK – 1997
This is such an odd piece of Star Wars ephemera I’m kind of surprised we don’t talk about it more. After the Heir to the Empire trilogy launched in 1991, the Star Wars EU entered a period of unbridled production, with Shadows of the Empire as something of a zenith. If you’ve never stumbled upon it before, it was a story set between the events of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi that was described as having all the marketing tie-ins and push of a major motion picture without ever making a major motion picture. The best example of this curious phenomenon is, of course, that they made a soundtrack for a Star Wars EU novel/game.
It was Joel McNeely in charge of the music duties and he really did an impressive job with it. It’s not John Williams but he captures a lot of the essence of Williams big, sweeping choruses and operatic verbosity to the music. It’s a classical style of soundtrack that’s a real change of pace from the overly string heavy and minimalist material that informs a lot of modern film and video game tracks. There’s nothing in it to rival the memorable motifs of Williams’ original scores but it does the job well.
It was Joel McNeely in charge of the music duties and he really did an impressive job with it. It’s not John Williams but he captures a lot of the essence of Williams big, sweeping choruses and operatic verbosity to the music. It’s a classical style of soundtrack that’s a real change of pace from the overly string heavy and minimalist material that informs a lot of modern film and video game tracks. There’s nothing in it to rival the memorable motifs of Williams’ original scores but it does the job well.
THE SAGA BEGINS – 1999
We’ve now entered the prequel era of Star Wars and arguably the song that would define the entire next decade of Star Wars music: Weird Al’s The Saga Begins. The ‘90s had been kind of a harsh decade for Al as the eclectic genres of the era were a lot less forgiving of parody. However, the 2000s were a damn blessing thanks to the emergence of gangsta rap, which lent itself far more to Al’s style, and the take over of nerd ephemera in the mainstream.
Al’s parody of ‘American Pie’ reworked to tell the story of The Phantom Menace came smack dab in the middle of his resurgence and was honestly a lot more popular than I think anyone might’ve initially realized. It probably helped that Al’s parody was easy to see as a standard bearer for the growing hate and disillusionment with the prequel era. That’s going to be a reoccurring theme as we get closer to the present, the way Star Wars fan angst became a greater and greater force in the material we’d see, but first- one last hurrah for the previous trend.
Al’s parody of ‘American Pie’ reworked to tell the story of The Phantom Menace came smack dab in the middle of his resurgence and was honestly a lot more popular than I think anyone might’ve initially realized. It probably helped that Al’s parody was easy to see as a standard bearer for the growing hate and disillusionment with the prequel era. That’s going to be a reoccurring theme as we get closer to the present, the way Star Wars fan angst became a greater and greater force in the material we’d see, but first- one last hurrah for the previous trend.
DUEL OF THE FATES/AUGIE’S MUNICIPAL BAND – 2000
Part of me is kind of surprised that Meco deemed The Phantom Menace a popular enough Star Wars film to come out of retirement for but on the other hand when you’re solely famous for remixing Star Wars tracks you kind of have to. And to Meco’s credit John Williams’ Duel of the Fates is easily the best piece of music to come out of the new trilogy, though I’m not sure it needed a techno remix, which is what this is.
For the sake of context this was still about 4 years prior to GarageBand becoming ubiquitous and everybody and their brother making genre-bent version of popular songs, not that that makes it any better. I’m not a huge techno fan but I’m enough of one to know that Duel of the Fates and Techno do not go together terribly well. Meco only came out of retirement for this one piece, declining to adapt the completely forgettable music of the next two prequels, which was probably for the best. Meco was an old-school nerd and his time was pretty much done, the future belonged to a new breed of music nerd.
For the sake of context this was still about 4 years prior to GarageBand becoming ubiquitous and everybody and their brother making genre-bent version of popular songs, not that that makes it any better. I’m not a huge techno fan but I’m enough of one to know that Duel of the Fates and Techno do not go together terribly well. Meco only came out of retirement for this one piece, declining to adapt the completely forgettable music of the next two prequels, which was probably for the best. Meco was an old-school nerd and his time was pretty much done, the future belonged to a new breed of music nerd.
STAR WARS GANGSTA RAP – 2000
If you weren’t there for the Star Wars Gangsta Rap I can only imagine it seems kind of insensitive and decidedly lame and date, which, to be fair, it is kind of dated. It’s one of those weird viral sensations from the earlier days of the Internet, predating even YouTube itself. The original version of the song came from Jason Brannon, Brian Leonard, and Chris Crawford billed together as Bentframe. The song caught the ear of one Thomas Lee who liked it so much he made a Flash animation for it, which Bentframe really liked and together the 4 men became BentTV. The rap, which mostly recounts Empire Strikes Back in the Weird Al tradition, became so popular they released a more polished version of the video in 2004, right around the time videos online were becoming more prevalent.
That re-release is probably a big part of why the Star Wars Gangsta Rap managed to persist as it got filtered into the earliest days of YouTube and became a key part of the site’s rotation when streaming video became more viable in 2007-2008. Thankfully, despite being one of the whitest raps of all time it’s surprisingly inoffensive and seems fueled by a genuine appreciation for rap and Star Wars that’s tempered by awareness of how silly they are together.
That re-release is probably a big part of why the Star Wars Gangsta Rap managed to persist as it got filtered into the earliest days of YouTube and became a key part of the site’s rotation when streaming video became more viable in 2007-2008. Thankfully, despite being one of the whitest raps of all time it’s surprisingly inoffensive and seems fueled by a genuine appreciation for rap and Star Wars that’s tempered by awareness of how silly they are together.
FETT’S VETTE – 2001
I feel like MC Chris has curiously faded from general awareness in recent years. Nowadays MC Chris is probably best known for his voice work on shows like Adventure Time, which seems like a shame given all the stuff he did back in the day. He was one of the first nerdcore rappers to come out of the iPod era of the 2000s when more niche stuff was able to sustain itself a lot easier, the same phenomenon that helped Weird Al in that era as I recall. He premiered in 2001 with the album ‘Life’s a Bitch and I’m Her Pimp’ which featured the incredibly popular track Fett’s Vette, an ode to the most inexplicably popular Star Wars character of Boba Fett.
I’ve never totally gotten the popularity of Boba Fett but I have to admit this track is killer. It’s got a smooth yet rapid-fire flow that was a lot more popular in the mid-2000s that always felt like everything was moving in fast motion. Also, that chorus was absolutely memetic before that was even truly an Internet thing, basically making ‘Fett’s Vette’ another pre-viral viral Star Wars sensation. I’m not totally sure what the name is supposed to mean but it’s a cool enough track to not matter.
I’ve never totally gotten the popularity of Boba Fett but I have to admit this track is killer. It’s got a smooth yet rapid-fire flow that was a lot more popular in the mid-2000s that always felt like everything was moving in fast motion. Also, that chorus was absolutely memetic before that was even truly an Internet thing, basically making ‘Fett’s Vette’ another pre-viral viral Star Wars sensation. I’m not totally sure what the name is supposed to mean but it’s a cool enough track to not matter.
EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY 2010-2013
Speaking of the dawn of phenomenon, Star Wars was totally there at the start of the popular YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History. The first ever video they made was a rap battle between Darth Vader and Adolf Hitler, which proved popular enough to launch two sequel battles and the series as a whole. They even returned to Star Wars in 2015 with a Deadpool vs. Boba Fett video, which is easily the best of the bunch. I can’t really say that the Hitler vs. Vader videos have aged terribly well now that so many of the net nerds have gone from ironic Nazism to sincere Nazism- they were products of their time, we’ll say.
This was very much in the dregs of the Star Wars franchise- the prequels had well and truly killed all interest and the Clone Wars 2008 movie had buried it in an unmarked grave. This was the era of Force Unleashed 2 and Soul Caliber IV using Star Wars characters, basically the peak of fan angst and public mockery of the once invincible franchise so having Vader go up against Hitler I guess it made sense for a time when “George Lucas raped my childhood” was a more acceptable phrase to throw around. The worst of this era was yet to come though.
This was very much in the dregs of the Star Wars franchise- the prequels had well and truly killed all interest and the Clone Wars 2008 movie had buried it in an unmarked grave. This was the era of Force Unleashed 2 and Soul Caliber IV using Star Wars characters, basically the peak of fan angst and public mockery of the once invincible franchise so having Vader go up against Hitler I guess it made sense for a time when “George Lucas raped my childhood” was a more acceptable phrase to throw around. The worst of this era was yet to come though.
HAN RIDIN’ SOLO – 2012
If you weren’t there for this particular fan tantrum you probably don’t understand why a nothing track from Kinect Star Wars is making it was onto this list. That’s where that name comes from, incidentally, a remix of Jason Derulo’s ‘Ridin’ Solo’ track to be about Han Solo that was used for Han’s dance number in the Galactic Dance-Off mini-game. It’s a really dopey idea but not an inordinately terrible one, basically, a bad ThinkGeek T-Shirt that briefly came to life in a very public trailer for the game. However, as I mentioned, this was the absolute lowest era for the Star Wars brand and Lucas Film sanctioning this bit of mild buffoonery roused a massive internet hate mob that really should’ve raised more alarm bells than it actually did.
As I said, it was incredibly strange seeing such a massive campaign of vile and vitriol over a fairly nothing little video that most folks probably would’ve liked if it was fan made. I think it was the Lucas sign-off that made this such a site of controversy as there was still a lot of leftover hatred from the prequel era. This was the last piece of Star Wars music that got released in the prequel era as just a few months later Disney took over the franchise and did a lot to mellow out the fan base, as you’re about to see.
As I said, it was incredibly strange seeing such a massive campaign of vile and vitriol over a fairly nothing little video that most folks probably would’ve liked if it was fan made. I think it was the Lucas sign-off that made this such a site of controversy as there was still a lot of leftover hatred from the prequel era. This was the last piece of Star Wars music that got released in the prequel era as just a few months later Disney took over the franchise and did a lot to mellow out the fan base, as you’re about to see.
STORMTROOPER TWERK – 2014
To date this is the only track of Star Wars music to make any waves in the Disney era, probably owing to the company’s much tighter leash on intellectual property. At the same time, viral novelties have decreased in recent years as it’s become harder to sustain prolonged interest in them so it’s possible this will be the last Star Wars music track that ever gets even marginal attention unless there’s a Star Wars musical in the works somewhere. Regardless, Stormtrooper Twerk was a two-minute video from 2014 made more to promote artist Scott DW’s song than anything else but it proved popular enough.
It’s basically just a bunch of guys in very good Stormtrooper costumes hip-hop dancing to a decent if forgettable track, making it the entry on this list that most strains the original definition of “Star Wars Music”- I just didn’t want to end it with the Ridin’ Solo tantrum. Personally I hope we do see more of this stuff if only because it represents the weird and mutated stuff that happens when a franchise is more embraced by fans of it and they get to create freely. I’m not sure that’ll happen under Disney’s tightly manicured control of the series but we can always hope.
It’s basically just a bunch of guys in very good Stormtrooper costumes hip-hop dancing to a decent if forgettable track, making it the entry on this list that most strains the original definition of “Star Wars Music”- I just didn’t want to end it with the Ridin’ Solo tantrum. Personally I hope we do see more of this stuff if only because it represents the weird and mutated stuff that happens when a franchise is more embraced by fans of it and they get to create freely. I’m not sure that’ll happen under Disney’s tightly manicured control of the series but we can always hope.
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