The Power of Music
- UpRising Editors
- 35 minutes ago
- 5 min read
[THE MAIN EVENT]
Derryck “Big Tank” Thornton—the music supervisor responsible for the gritty and authentic sound of Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson's TV universe—breaks down his scoring process and offers teasers for BMF's upcoming season.
UpRising: What is the difference between a composer and a music supervisor?
Derryck "Big Tank" Thornton: As a music composer, that's what I did on The Boondocks—I wrote all of the music, from the theme song to all the pianos in the background, just every stitch of music written that set the tone. As a supervisor, I'm also setting tone, but it's more with song than with music. So if it's a sex scene or a chase scene, you can do it both ways. You can put a song in that sounds like [Wu-Tang’s] "Bring da Ruckus." So one guy is articulating the scene through music and kind of making his own plate, and the other person is picking the song to make the emotion happen. They're both very creative jobs.
Because of streaming, viewers have the option to jump right into a show. Is it harder to make a show’s theme songs stick now than it was in the '70s and '80s?
I never looked at it that way. But when we're creating a theme song, it does set the tone. People want to hear it. If you look on X or Twitter, after one of our shows aired, whether it be BMF or Ghost or Raising Kanan, or even back when I had The Boondocks—people remember those songs. It lets you know the show was coming. I think back to the old shows like Give Me a Break or Sanford and Son, any of those. As soon as you heard that song, you felt a certain way.
How involved is 50 Cent when it comes to selecting the music for his universe?
50 still touches everything. He's definitely got his pulse on everything that has to do with the music of all the shows.
He’s got a natural ear for melody. Does that translate to these shows?
One-hundred percent. As a producer myself and working with somebody who's got as many platinum records and smashes as he does, I'm pretty much guaranteeing you that we're going to have great music every season because this is what we do every day. He and the showrunners all have impeccable ears.
From your work on My Wife & Kids to BMF, how has your process changed?
That was my first job composing ever. So I had to really just study it and learn how to compose. When you're a producer, you work in like four- or eight-bar phrases [or] sometimes two-bar phrases. So you hear the same repetitive things, and that's what music is. When you start getting into composition, it's very linear. So you're really learning how to make music on an emotion. So as the scene is doing something, you do something. My Wife & Kids was a sitcom, so it was more bumps and real quick little things. They get you in and take you out of commercials, bring you back from a commercial, things like that. But the process of scoring, I really started to get into it even more so with working with Stanley Clark on a movie and going to UCLA, taking composition courses. Becoming a supervisor was a completely different bag. Being a supervisor is more like being an A&R. You're really looking for songs and if you understand chord structure and things like that, you really want to accent the emotion of the scene.
You’ve said working on period pieces is more challenging. Why is that?
It has to be authentic. If we're doing a show from today, people make music for right now all the time. So it's easy. But if we said, "Hey, I want you to do a song for 1984," then we got to go back. The way I work, we have to go back and find the drums, sampler, a keyboard that they were using, the slang, the verbiage, the topics that they were talking about, because music has changed tremendously in the last 30 years. If you want it to sound right, you should use that equipment [from back then]. I'll even go back and find the producer and talk to them if they're still with us.
What producers have you spoken to when trying to score?
I speak to DJ Premier all the time about things that he was doing in the early '90s. On BMF, I spoke with AZ and got him to do a record that sounds like [Run-DMC’s] “Sucker MCs.” I wanted to get an early '90s rapper and have them cut a song to sound like [hip-hop’s Golden era]. He got into his bag.
When BMF migrates to Atlanta, there's a lot of Miami bass music that represent that time because ATL's hip-hop scene hadn't quite developed yet. What will be the soundbed for season four?
The story that's going to be told is amazing. We cover a larger time span, so Atlanta music will be introduced. And we're going to touch some other places. We go to St. Louis and L.A., so we're going to touch sounds from different areas this season. You're going to get a plethora of music from different areas.
What was the sound of St. Louis at that time?
It was more musical. They used more live instrumentation than we did. New York was more sample-based and boom-bap. Detroit was digital techno. Atlanta was starting with the fast hi-hats. St. Louis was more musical and chill. They had their own twang to their music.
You use the phrase "right song, right scene" to represent the nirvana of scoring. What’s one scene that you didn’t create that hits those notes?
If you've ever watched the movie [Malcolm] X, there's a scene where Denzel [Washington] is walking and dealing with some things. The song “A Change is Gonna Come” [by Sam Cooke] plays. A woman tells him Jesus [will protect him], but he's just spinning. Every time I hear that song, I think of the scene.
What’s your G.O.A.T. score moment?
On this last season of Ghost when Mary was getting shot up and I played “Hail Mary” by Tupac. I knew it was going to go. I went back and forth with the showrunner and kept telling him, "This is the one!" We finish these shows about seven, eight months out. So when the episode aired, I watched it and went to bed afterwards, my normal thing. The next morning, by the time I woke up, I probably had 40 texts, like, “Dog, this is crazy. Have you looked on the internet?” I went on X and it was viral, it was trending. There's times when you get a feeling about something and you just know—the double entendre of "Hail Mary" and Mary J. Blige, the way it's edited—it really connected with the audience. This wasn't a big crescendo type of record for this scene, but it spoke to the emotion of it.
—Jermaine Hall
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Extra: Tank will be helping retool a classic next. "I'm working with Debbie Allen right now on A Different World," he said. "We've already had several discussions about music. It's going to be crazy."
Watch the new season of Starz's BMF on June 6.
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