Marvel Studios’ all-star “woke superhero fantasy” Black Panther is already the biggest blockbuster of 2018, and it isn’t even out for another 10 days. Directed by Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed) and starring Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong’o, Michael B. Jordan, Angela Bassett, and Forest Whitaker, the movie has already broken Marvel’s presale records and is now outpacing typical ticket sales in the superhero genre. Beyond its commercial dominance, Black Panther is a milestone in the film industry’s ongoing fight for diversity: to date, it’s the largest Hollywood production with a majority black cast.
Based on characters created by famed Marvel tag-team Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Black Panther follows T’Challa (Boseman), the king and protector of his homeland, the fictional African nation of Wakanda, as he fights to earn the kingship that has only recently been passed down to him. Wakanda produces vibranium, the most valuable metal on Earth, and the country is the most technologically advanced civilization on the planet because of it. But the nation has remained hidden from the rest of the modern world for generations. T’Challa is tasked with handling their transition out of the shadows. The idea that black Africans could be self-sustaining innovators, free from colonization’s grasp, was quite progressive when Lee and Kirby created Black Panther in the 1960s, so it feels radical to bring that story to the big screen.
Since music remains one of the primary outlets for storytelling across Africa, it’s also a crucial element of Wakanda world-building. While Kendrick Lamar and his label home TDE created an original soundtrack to embody the film’s message of black excellence, Coogler’s longtime musical collaborator, Ludwig Göransson, was tasked with creating a score that strikes a balance between traditional African instrumentation and the swooping orchestrals that typically soundtrack superhero battles. Göransson, who’s worked on everything from Creed and “Community” to Childish Gambino’s catalog and Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap, traveled around the villages of West and South Africa with local musicians for months in preparation. It was there that the Swede absorbed a musical world that is clearly not his own, listening to and learning from Africans in the hope of honoring their traditions in Black Panther.
We spoke with Göransson recently by phone about bringing Wakanda to life through sound, working alongside Kendrick, and jamming his way through Donald Glover’s P-funk rebirth on 2016’s “Awaken, My Love!”
Ludwig Göransson: I’ve worked with Ryan [Coogler] for about eight years now—since we both started working in the business. I started doing his student shorts [at USC]. The first thing I do whenever he tells me about a new project is—because we have such a good relationship—I get started extremely early. Even when he’s writing a script, as soon as he’s done with the first draft he sends it to me. In this case, it’s such a massive movie. After I read the script and I started reading the comic, I knew the only way I could do this was to go to Africa and do research. I took a month off and traveled to Senegal.
I got connected with this artist, Baaba Maal, and traveled around with him while he was on tour. After, I was able to get into a studio and just record amazing musicians for weeks. One of the instruments that really caught my attention was the talking drum, which is the first type of telephone—the first type of communication device. It’s a drum you put under your arm on one side of your body and you can press down your arm under the drum and essentially pitch it, so it’s like a voice—you’re literally talking with a drum. And that sound became the sound of the king. That was the first seed of how the instrumentation affected the process. I came across this really interesting guy called Amadou that played the Fula flute [or tambin] and I told him what the movie was about and explained Killmonger’s persona [Killmonger is T’Challa’s rival, returning from exile to challenge his claim to the throne], and he just started to play and it fit so well with the character. So I started connecting all of these different instruments into different themes and characters of the movie.
After I read the script and learned about Wakanda, I thought a lot about what music they would have there. It could be anything! But it’s still in Africa, and music from Africa is a language—it has a purpose. You don’t just play music for people to hear, every rhythm is written for a specific reason—for a ceremony, for the king. The officiants in Africa are called griots, which literally means “storyteller.” The only way to be a griot is if you’re born into it. You’re born into storytelling. If you look at your family tree, there are generations of storytellers. So all the music passes through the generations. There are so many different instruments for every different tribe, and every sound means something.
After I spent the month in Senegal, I traveled to South Africa because I’d heard about the International Library of African Music in Grahamstown. There was a British guy who went around to thousands of different tribes in Africa with a field recorder, recorded the music, wrote down what it meant, bought their instruments, and brought it all back to the library. There are 20,000 vinyl records in there and hundreds of instruments, and a lot of that music doesn’t exist anymore because of colonization. So I spent a lot of time listening to these recordings and discovering. It was an extremely inspiring experience, and I returned to L.A. with a new idea of how I could use all this traditional African music. The most difficult part is that as soon as you put production and orchestra on top of African music, it doesn’t sound African anymore. So the challenge was incorporating these things and making them still feel African.
It was important to me was to make music that fit in culturally with each scene. For example, if there’s a big fight, there are traditional African rhythms created 1,000 years ago for these specific kinds of moments. Finding ways to use these rhythms that have always soundtracked those moments for scenes in the film can make them really special.
The movie has songs and it has a score. There’s a lot of music in it. Being able to have Kendrick on board for a project—that’s like a dream collaboration for everyone. I can’t go into specifics about what’s going on where, but I worked with Kendrick and Sounwave. I was with them in studio for a bit and there are collaborative excerpts throughout the movie.
Kendrick is one of my favorite artists, and Sounwave is one of my favorite producers. Whenever you get an opportunity like that you just kind of get into the room and try to learn as much as possible, and then see what you can bring to the table, too.
It’s different in a lot of ways, but my main collaborators to date have been Ryan Coogler and Donald Glover, and Donald is also a very visual person—he also does films and TV. So, these are both people with great vision, and as long as you’re working with people that have that vision it’s always going to be inspiring and you’re going to push each other. Needless to say, when I work on a film, it’s mostly just me alone in my room just waiting to present the music to the director—and either he likes it or not. There’s so little time to speak with directors during that process. When when I work with Donald, we’re constantly together, working and collaborating. It’s definitely a more social working experience.
It’s interesting because a lot of people have told me how different it was and asked how we came up with the sound, but anyone who has seen Childish Gambino live knows that the live band is a huge part of our show. We’ve toured together for six years, and any time where we’re setting up—or any time we’re able to—we’re just jamming for hours. That’s kind of how we started the process of making “Awaken, My Love!”. We got the band together in the studio and just spent two weeks jamming and experimenting. After two weeks, me and Donald took the material back to my studio, worked on it for six months to a year, and made it an even more crazy experimental album. When we were almost done with that we realized the music was really out there.
Out of that initial jam session, we made an album that was really interesting but wasn’t as cohesive as Donald wanted it to be. So we took “Me and Your Mama,” which was the first riff I had come up with in our jam session, and asked how we could make an album that fit in that universe. We spent another year in Donald’s studio. We just kept recording and ended up with “Awaken, My Love!”
