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Since the release of the trailers and Batman looking a certain way — shaggy hair, pale face, and extensive dark eyeliner to match — jokes have been made about the current iteration of Batman. Here’s one:
The Dead Oceans account, a label which houses Mitski (and shoegaze progenitors Slowdive, an all-time great of the genre much like Mazzy Star) replied under this tweet: “cedric diggory / edward cullen got vibes.” The vibes in question is, of course, that Battinson is an emo. Looks aside — those looks, dude — through much of the 2022-released film, Bruce Wayne is caught between stoicism and open, blankfaced trauma in a manner that looks a lot like angst; in a pivotal late-game scene, he’s wide-eyed and terrified, and the hard mask of Batman eventually changes to a beacon of hope and resilience and vulnerability. Accordingly, the list askuafied presented is a very 2022 list of that emo archetype — had the movie premiered fifteen years earlier, we’d have read the Battinson playlist consists of My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Radiohead, Evanescence, and Panic! At The Disco. If askuafied was Turkish, maybe we’d have read that the “Bat playlist” consists of Mor ve Ötesi, Şebnem Ferah, Duman, Müslüm Gürses, and Teoman. (And, in order to keep the PinkPantheress spirit, let’s even add Mirkelam to it). If asukafied was German, the Bat playlist would likely have Tokio Hotel; the list goes on.
Compiling this Bat playlist — like every playlist and mixtape — reveals more about the creator than it does about the character or the artist. And in this instance, the artists presented say something about askuafied’s last.fm profile; the relatability of the character is there, certainly, but it’s almost secondary. As much as the idea of Bruce Wayne watching Serial Experiments Lain and bumping Bôa’s duvet is fun, it’s a fantasy.
But what does Battinson listen to then? Here’s where Something in the Way by Nirvana comes in. The last song on their landmark record Nevermind, it’s been used in the first trailer, served as inspiration to Paul Dano’s Riddler portrayal, and, according to writer and director Matt Reeves, the song itself is “part of the voice” for this generation’s Bruce Wayne. The song plays twice in the movie. In the first, Batman has to turn down the song while he’s listening to the news saying something about his parents. This is important, as it means that the part of the voice is not just metatextual, it actually appears in the text, meaning that Batman bumps Nirvana. Not just any Nirvana and not just any song from Nevermind — the emo Nirvana. The one that has a hidden track tacked ten minutes after the song’s over that sounds violent with its metal thrashing and Cobain’s guttural screams throughout its almost seven-minute run. It makes perfect sense for The Batman as a movie. More crucially, though, this is our parameter towards what Batman actually listens to, not just what the author listens in their own free time.
In the following paragraphs I will present my thesis of what Batman — this Batman — listens to.
Here are my caveats and additional parameters:
As much as I’ve tried to eliminate the factor, this playlist still reveals me and my tastes — I am just not a white man who had a history of emo music. Still, no Bir Derdim Var and no Her Şeyi Yak are present, though it would fit Batman (Bruce Wayne) if he was from Batman (province in Turkey). On the flipside, this also means an artist you would have put was likely not on my radar because of said tastes (so no Joy Division as they’re not a band I enjoy listening to), or I don’t know the song, or I forgot.
While viewing Batman struck me as somebody in his late twenties — the role was conceived to be “around thirty”. This is crucial to understanding what Batman might actually listen to: less new things, more “comfort music”, and songs in the same vein. Accordingly, the newest song of this list was released in 2013.
Gotham's time era was difficult to gauge, so my baseline year was 2022 or maybe a little beyond that, but not the 2030s.
Everybody can (theoretically and may even do so in practice) listen to anyone, but Batman is a white man. Just like how Mitski is a beacon for gay women and/or women of color because she is able to depict their pain accurately, white men have their own repertoire of artists that depict their pain and suffering accurately. This is, more often than not, a list of white male artists. The artists of color white people like are very obvious to anyone who is into music fandoms, but suffice to say you can count them on one hand, and they are cishet men.
I actually did not intend the list to have a common theme in the artists besides musicality — four of them have struggled with drug addiction of some kind — but considering Matt Reeves’ words on Batman being addicted to revenge (a “Batman Kurt Cobain”, which is a little tasteless considering drug addiction and beating up people is not the same, and what Bruce Wayne goes through is not comparable with what Kurt Cobain went through, but that is besides the point of this essay) I believe the outcome to be almost inevitable.
To reiterate: Bruce Wayne listens to Something in the Way, the sole emo song of Nevermind. Not Come As You Are (although it feels the closest to The Batman’s ethos). Not Pennyroyal Tea. Not Negative Creep. Something in the Way is an incredibly singular song in the Nirvana discography, if not in sound then in lyrical content; All Apologies might sound close, but is folkish and a little more hopeful. That’s not even touching the lyrics. Thus, no additional Nirvana song has been included in the making of this playlist.
No Cellophane. But I think that’s a song The Riddler bumped, even if Paul Dano didn’t. Bruce Wayne isn’t that kind of self aware. He’s vengeance (sad and traumatized).
The playlist is roughly in plot order, so spoilers for The Batman (2022) follow.
With all this out out of the way, here is the playlist — the Bruce Wayne Tunes:
Linkin Park — Breaking The Habit
As Batman opens, Gotham is a bleak city full of violence — to the point in which Batman, in voiceover, tells the viewer that he has to pick and choose who to rescue. It’s a thankless task: Batman is a six foot tall, broad, masked man, speaks in a low growl, and doesn’t exactly promise safety. Gotham may never change, but I have to try, Batman finishes. The ostensibly heroic task belies a darker desire: to avenge his murdered parents and mend the scar he’s carried for twenty years. The fifth single off their second record Meteora, Breaking The Habit eschews the nü metal influences that Linkin Park made their name with, instead featuring the late Chester Bennington’s vocals as he speaks candidly of a mental instability, confusion, the inability to fix destructive behavior even while the narrator is aware of what is happening — and addiction being both cure and demon. The string section in the production lend the song a dramatic, heavy aura to it all, while the rapid kick emulate the urgency and panic the narrator goes through. When Bennington speaks of “breaking the habit”, it reads double-edged — an empty promise to do better starting now despite never being alright, or the finish point to everything? It’s a similar situation Bruce Wayne — and, in his view, Gotham City — finds himself in.
Fugazi — I’m So Tired
Clocking in at just under two minutes, this song by Washington post-hardcore outfit Fugazi — the band that was an inspiration to Nirvana as well — is a simple affair on the piano in which Ian MacKaye sings about his exhaustion from the narrator from the rest of society and no longer interested in being reached by anyone. The initial conceit that Bruce Wayne has to try and push through is only one end of the pendulum — the other end is the long tired fight that so often feels pointless of Bruce, let alone keeping up the charade of being a rich socialite when his parents are gone, much like how MacKaye abruptly ends the song with I’m not sticking ‘round.
Kid Cudi — Day N Nite (slowed + reverb)
The lonely loner seems to free his mind at night might as well be written for this version of the Dark Knight himself — though in the song the narrator likely refers to weed, a motif that runs throughout The Batman is that wearing masks may help the characters to tap into their real selves, unburdened by societal expectations — and often the answer to emotional turmoil is violence, both for The Riddler and The Batman, a connection the movie explores and makes explicit at length. The only issue with the song is that the original may be melancholy and contemplative, it’s simply too fast for the kind of person Batman is. But no fear: the “slowed + reverb” trend has taken off in recent years, and the syrupy pace as well as the oddly pitched vocals of Scott Mescudi not only help making the song melancholic, they give the song a hazy edge, as though everything is experienced from a depersonalized point of view. The seconds stretch to nothing by day.
Tame Impala — Feels Like We Only Go Backwards
The issue with people that are not you is that they don’t react like you — worse, they also make you act in ways you didn’t expect yourself to be. When Catwoman aka Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz) enters the picture and doesn’t do what Batman tells her to, frustration seeps into his voice as he demands answers she can’t give right away. In Feels Like We Only Go Backwards, the narrator feels like the relationship just can’t seem to progress — be it his own lack of commitment or the way he can’t escape his own action, or even the way he sees the love interest as someone they’re not. Complete with the washed out, airy vocals of Kevin Parker, the first person to feel like they go backwards is the narrator himself, then them together. Through much of the film, Batman and Catwoman work together only to disagree on crucial issues only to work together again — a waltz, too, is a circle of moving forward and backward.
Beach House — Silver Soul
Beach House is immaculate at drawing pictures in clear water, the kind that is hazy, formless, and undefinable by design. Over the years and records, they would refine and polish their mastery at this black hole of an emotion and leave everything to interpretation and non-interpretation, but Silver Soul is the one song that doesn’t shy away from a clearly defined feeling: missing someone and hurting. The centerpiece of the record is the central hook it is happening again, repeated over and over. The hypnotic quality of it, the way vocalist Victoria Legrand intones it with fervor, the unclear goal of the sentence — what is happening? — and the way the drums marches on amidst the watery organs and synths overall make this the perfect song to want to float but also to cry it all out.
Nine Inch Nails — The Day The World Went Away
Kurt Cobain and Trent Reznor are not exactly people you’d compare to one another. Reznor has gone to rehabilitation and left the mainstream at his lowest, while Cobain did no such thing. Reznor started out with pop of a hard edge, while Nirvana would channel pop moments in their second album. Yet both were accused of selling out, both tap into the kind of anger you feel of being left out, and both channel sadness into utterly devastating moments. For Nirvana, that was Something in the Way. For Nine Inch Nails, it’s this b-side from the And All That Could Have Been tour b-side Still that leaves the listener at an uncertain place with that extensive instrumental section featuring a lonely percussion and plucked strings swelling underneath, and the lyrics don’t exactly alleviate matters, either. For Cobain, the lyrics were often a mix of fantasy and reality, genuine emotion and posturing; for Reznor, who wrote his emotions in a blunt manner stretched thin and refracted a thousand times across lengthy concept albums, The Day The World Went Away shows a personalized type of utter black void. For somebody who has released an entire concept album around a mentally ill man that succumbs to suicide, this song truly feels like an end. It’s the type of void Batman would feel closely drawn to, although repeated listens of the song may be a cry for help.
Elliott Smith — Everything Means Nothing To Me
Frustration takes center place on this cut of Elliott Smith’s final album before his untimely death. Recorded after an argument with people from DreamWorks Music about his career in the future, Smith reportedly carved the word NOW into his arm with a knife and played the piano right after while the blood was dripping1. After a beautiful solo piano dominates much of the song, the studio version also bring in strings and drums that kick in at the eighth time everything means nothing to me is repeated. There’s a lot of moments you could fit in this song within the Batman plot — say, right after the moment Bruce finds out his father had an innocent man murdered because he was desperate to win the mayoral election twenty years ago, or the moment he finds out the family butler and the man who raised him, Alfred (Andy Serkis) was shot. For a brief moment, living is simply too much — and not simply in a way of resignation, but utterly visceral. Or, in some alternate universe, this was the song that played during Alfred and Bruce’s first conversation. The wealth he’s inherited and the bloody legacy of his father means nothing to him, although over the course of the plot he must acknowledge that it means something to other people.
Vampire Weekend — Hudson
Hudson is a harrowing arrangement in which the backing synths ghost through the recording whenever vocalist Ezra Koenig isn’t singing, accompanied by a drum that sounds like the marches of soldiers or even machine guns firing rounds. The ticking clock, a motif that Vampire Weekend explores quite a bit in their third album Modern Vampires of the City, shows the futility of the passing time. As mentioned before, Gotham is a bleak city to live in, one in which the rotating cast of mayors with their empty promises go nowhere and do nothing — the dissatisfaction fuels The Riddler, Batman, and mayor candidate Bella Reál (Jayme Lawson) in equal measure. Throughout the plot, The Riddler’s game shows the rabbit hole of corruption within the city, one that seems to be impossible to be solved by well-meaning people alone — and The Riddler employs people online to enact violence to destroy Gotham without any look towards the future. The never-ending visions and prize that’s changing hands turn the clock to a drag when the answer is everything but socialism. This is the song that encapsulates this version of Gotham best, and is suitably melancholy for our protagonist also, who must overcome his dead-end way of thinking.
Radiohead — Bulletproof… I Wish I Was
This deep cut from the UK band’s second album The Bends features a gentle guitar and long, drawn-out vocals from Thom Yorke as he wishes, over and over, to become bulletproof — that no pain penetrates through him, that no external judgement got to him, and maybe even that he was made that way. This cut feels both gentle and distant and lyrically there’s a lot of interpretations that could be had here, but it makes perfect sense with Bruce Wayne, who can’t look into people’s eyes when he’s outside the mask, but is (literally) bulletproof with his outfit — all but his head, where in a pivotal scene he’s close to being shot to. The desire to be invulnerable, versus the need to become vulnerable and connect with other people, is the strongest aspect of the movie, and one in which Bruce must grow as a person to face escalating crises in Gotham that increasingly also include himself - Bruce and Batman.
American Football — But The Regrets Are Killing Me
One of the major bands that gave the midwest emo genre its initial popularity and all of its markers that it would be known for today, this song from American Football’s debut stands out with its long, melodic guitar work and its time changes throughout, anger bubbling under the surface but never actually exploding. The climax of the song is a long, drawn out I’m not dead — only to stop and add: yet. The beauty of emo, especially emo of this subgenre, is that its melodic preference tap into both sadness but resignation, a sweet spot most commonly known as nostalgia. In the context of this film and the coda of Bruce’s character arc, it’s quiet acknowledgement that the worst has occurred. By the end of the film, Gotham has been swamped over, Batman has realized his role in society and that picking at your own scars doesn’t help, but Catwoman leaves, and as both depart with their motorbikes, he watches her leave from his rearview mirror.
The Batman is available on HBO Max and Hulu; all songs (besides the slowed and reverb version of Day n Nite) are available on your streaming platform of choice.
Retrieved from “Elliott Smith: ‘Mr. Misery’ Revisited, Years After The Singer-Songwriter’s Controversial Death” by Liam Gowig, published in SPIN Magazine.