Jarmusch chooses to open the movie Only Lovers Left Alive with a spinning vinyl record to introduce his main protagonists.
Josef Van Wissem, an electric lutist contributed music to Jarmusch’s 2013 film, Only Lovers Left Alive. In 2014, Wissem described Jarmusch’s attitude towards filmmaking and musicianship as being intrinsically linked, in which case he approaches both mediums from a similar place, creatively. “I know the way [Jarmusch] makes his films is kind of like a musician,” he said. “He has music in his head when he’s writing a script so it’s more informed by a tonal thing than it is by anything else.”
The main character is dancing to Earl Bostick's American jazz, rhythm, and blues. Jarmusch takes his time, perhaps to let the hero enjoy the song as much as Jarmusch would have enjoyed it himself.
Jarmusch often casts musicians turned actors. Tom Waits, for example starred in Down By Law, Mystery Train,Coffee and Cigarettes, andThe Dead Don’t Die.John Lurie, who also plays one of the leading roles wrote the music for Stranger Than Paradise inspired by the works of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. The main reason is that the film features Hungarian immigrants looking at America through their own eyes.
Ghost Dog is about rap music and here is how Jarmusch makes his characters talk about the musicians involved.
So let's meet the rappers and Ghost Dog himself.
The music soundtrack stresses these displacements in a very effective way. Ghost Dog’s rolling and awkward walk is audible in “Ghost Dog Theme.” The loop on which RZA mixes metallic percussions with machinery noises in the background is far from perfect and sounds as if it were recorded from a scratched record. In the last third of “RZA #7,” the composer inserts a slower second beat box track between the beats of the first one, then fades it out. The Wu-Tang Clan’s mastermind does not seek rhythmic efficiency at any cost. His stylistic standpoint is to include samples which do not completely blend with the others, as he does not want to conceal the nature of his work as bricolage. Indeed, originals are not untouchable. Two versions of the same track can be used 12 on a soundtrack which accompanies, but is also part and parcel of the movie. Jarmusch does not only resort to what Michel Chion calls “musique de fosse,” or pit music, that is music whose source and origin are not visible (Chion, 1995: 189). Besides RZA’s music, with its traditional role of narrative cueing (Ibid.: 121) when it signals or stresses a particular situation or a character’s point of view, Jarmusch uses several times what Chion calls “musique d’écran” or diegetic music, that is music whose source is visible, in this case the car radios of the vehicles Ghost Dog steals and the one he has transformed into a hi-fi system, or to be more precise, the PA systems which play data written in a digital medium. If rap is mainly studio music cut on CDs or vinyl records, it can also be performed without samples or loops. Jarmusch films four African-Americans in the park where Ghost Dog meets his Haitian friend. Unlike in most movies, where recorded music fades in when characters start to sing, the film uses an exactly opposing technique. SOURCE
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