But if I could have lunch with two Disney legends, it would be Dame Julie Andrews and Alan Menken. I have no musical talent whatsoever, but even I can recognize that Alan Menken is in a class of his own.
I've been listening to the Aladdin soundtrack on repeat, especially the score. (I don't know if it counts as "classical" music, but I find the instrumental music helps me concentrate when I'm writing or course planning.) And the more I listen to "Speechless," the more I find myself humming it as I'm unloading the dishwasher or singing fragments when I'm replying to emails.
Take a listen below:
Yes, it obviously has a different sound than the other music -- but it's not like the music from the original animated film is completely coherent. As Mari Ness explains for Tor, Aladdin's production history was interrupted by Howard Ashman's death. Jeffrey Katzenburg didn't like the initial script that Musker and Clements produced so they brought in Tim Rice (who would later work with Elton John on the soundtrack for The Lion King). Of the main songs on the soundtrack "A Whole New World" and "One Jump Ahead" are written by Rice and Menken, and "Prince Ali" and "Friend Like Me" are Menken and Ashman's collaborations.
All of this is to say -- there's a pastiche element to the soundtrack already, so adding "Speechless" to the mix doesn't really bother me. Perhaps that's because it was written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul who worked on two of my favorite soundtracks at the moment, Dear Evan Hansen and The Greatest Showman. And they're Disney aficionados, which endears them to me even more. Look at them, they're adorable!
I appreciate that they pointed out that Jasmine needed her own song -- it's always struck me as odd that, despite it being Aladdin's movie (technically), Jasmine is one of the official Disney princesses. To be fair, when they created the brand in 2000, they played fast and loose with the definition since Tinkerbell was originally included (before they realized that the Fairies could be a profitable brand on their own) and characters like Pocahontas and Mulan are included, despite not technically being princesses.
And yes, the song is a powerful feminist anthem, especially considering that, in the film, it comes directly after Jafar's line that "princesses should be seen and not heard."
But more than that -- it's intricately connected to the original animated film in such a smart, subtle way that you could almost miss it if you were dazzled by the visuals of the film. (I did. And I loved that scene where the characters around Jasmine disappear into poofs of smoke as she dismisses each of them. I think critics were divided over it, but I thought it was a visually cool effect.) It was only after I started listening to the song divorced from the visuals that the connections started to click together.
The song starts with the lines:
"Here comes a wave meant to wash my away / A tide that is taking me under / Swallowing sand, left with nothing to say / My voice drowned out in the thunder..."The line to "swallowing sand" struck me -- and it seemed more than just a throwaway reference to the Arabian setting. To me, it seemed like a callback to the scene in the original film where Jafar traps Jasmine in the giant hourglass, literally silencing her.
It's a scene that increasingly bothers me the more I teach the film. It's weirdly sexual for a kid's film and is rivaled only by, perhaps, Frollo's "Hellfire" song in Hunchback. Plus Slave Jasmine makes me think of Slave Leia in her gold bikini, but without any of the subsequent empowerment Leia gets.
Pasek and Paul thought so too, apparently. In an interview with The LA Times, Pasek says:
“We were really inspired by a line in the original movie where Jafar very misogynistically says, ‘You’re speechless, I see. A fine quality in a wife'...In the world that we live in, so many people need to reclaim their voice — or claim it for the first time — and be outspoken about who they are and what they believe in. It was a really exciting opportunity to put that message into the voice of Jasmine.”Which...I love. I love that they found inspiration in a line from the film -- one of the more misogynistic parts of the film, TBH -- and flipped it on its head and turned it into an empowering anthem.
And there's another part of the song that I think is also a direct callback to the original film. In the song, Jasmine sings,
"Try to lock me in this cage / I won't just lay me down and die / I will take these broken wings / And watch me burn across the sky..."I can't be sure, of course, because Pasek and Paul don't address it specifically with The LA Times (which isn't to say that they don't address it somewhere else; I haven't found it yet, if they have) -- but it reminded me of the scene in the animated film where Jasmine is in the courtyard with Rajah. The Sultan's just come pestering her about marrying a prince before her 16th birthday (UGH) and Jasmine is lamenting her lack of freedom and her desire to get out of the palace. (Although this exact scene isn't in the remake, the premise is consistent, and may be alluded to when Jasmine sings "written in stone / every rule, every word / centuries old and unbending.") Frustrated, Jasmine sets the birds, who were previously locked in the cage, free:
It's a nice moment in the animated film -- foreshadowing Jasmine's escape from the palace -- but given that she ultimately ends up back in the palace, it rings a little hollow. (And heavy-handed with the symbolism, but that's definitely an adult perspective.) I like that this scene wasn't kept in the remake, but I love that Pasek and Paul alluded to it. It shows a familiarity with the original film and pays homage to it by acknowledging that there were memorable moments in the original film that don't hold up in 2019.
It's smart and it's subtle and it works. And it makes a kick-ass anthem.
