Music Monday: May the 4th Be With You
Happy Star Wars Day! A Playlist That Starts in 1850s Germany and Ends With Denzel Curry Naming a Song After an X-Wing.
Forty-seven years after “Star Wars: A New Hope” landed in theaters, John Williams’ main theme remains one of the most recognizable pieces of music ever written. You could hum four bars of it to a stranger in almost any country on earth and watch their face change.
But Williams didn’t build that sound from nothing.
As the story goes, George Lucas came to Williams in 1977 with a specific request: write something that recalled the swashbuckling Hollywood scores of the 1930s and ‘40s. The kind of music that made audiences feel like the fate of the world was at stake during a swordfight on a sailing ship.
The young filmmaker pointed Williams toward Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the Austro-Hungarian composer whose lush orchestral scores for films like “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938) made adventure feel mythological.
Korngold’s main title for the 1942 drama “Kings Row” is the direct ancestor of the Star Wars theme.
Go further back and you hit Gustav Holst. The English composer’s 1916 orchestral suite “The Planets” haunts the Star Wars universe in ways both subtle and not. “Mars, the Bringer of War” — the suite’s brutal opening movement — is essentially a first draft of Darth Vader’s musical identity, the same martial drive, the same grinding brass.
Williams absorbed it, reconfigured it, and gave it a face.
Then there’s Richard Wagner, who invented the concept Williams built an entire universe around. The leitmotif — a distinctive musical phrase assigned to a specific character, theme, or idea — was Wagner’s signature contribution to the operatic form, most fully realized in his four-opera “Ring” cycle. Williams didn’t invent the idea of giving Luke Skywalker his own theme or Darth Vader his own march. He inherited it from a 19th-century German composer who died 41 years before “A New Hope” premiered.
Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” (1937) deserves a spot on that ancestral tree, too.
Listen to the choral opening of “Duel of the Fates” — the track Williams wrote for the lightsaber battle in “The Phantom Menace” (1999) — and Orff’s dramatic cantata is right there under the surface: the massed voices, the urgent rhythmic drive, the sense of something ancient and unstoppable.
Williams knew his forebears. He wasn’t hiding it.
The score itself — five Williams tracks anchoring this playlist — holds up against all of it.
The “Binary Sunset” sequence, in which Luke stares at Tatooine’s twin suns while Williams’ Force Theme swells beneath him, remains the saga’s emotional peak. Not the lightsaber battles. Not the Death Star run. A kid from a desert farm staring at the sky. The music does all the work.
“The Imperial March,” introduced in “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980), is the Holst debt fully collected — Wagner’s leitmotif concept applied to pure menace. “Duel of the Fates” is the prequel era’s one unambiguous masterpiece. And “Cantina Band,” the most deceptively joyful 90 seconds Williams ever wrote, came from a Lucas directive that sounds like a fever dream: imagine alien creatures finding 1930s Benny Goodman swing band music in a time capsule and trying to reconstruct it.
Williams did exactly that. It became one of cinema’s most beloved musical jokes.
The Force Is Strong With This Van
You can’t go through the day without Sirsy spreading the Star Wars Day joy.
Rich Libutti tells Star Wars jokes between songs. On purpose. Every night.
It shows up in venue listings, fan reviews, and promotional copy for shows with enough consistency to count as a selling point.
A Bandsintown review from a show in Asheville, N.C., put it plainly: “Loves his Star Wars. May the Force be with you.”
The van they tour in is named Obi-Van. According to a November 2025 profile in the Daily Gazette, it hauls instruments, merchandise, and the occasional back injury across the country, roughly 200 shows a year. The name was not an accident.
May 4 — Star Wars Day, the annual fan observance built on the pun “May the Force be with you” — tends to show up on the band’s social media feeds the way it would for anyone who named their vehicle after a Jedi Master. Naturally. Without much effort.
Mel sings. Rich plays guitar with his hands and bass with his feet and makes nerdy Star Wars jokes in between. They’ve been doing this since 2000. The Force, apparently, remains with them.
Meco — a New York-based producer — heard the film in 1977 and proposed a disco version of the score to Casablanca Records. The resulting “Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band” went platinum that same year. It is, in the most literal sense, the first piece of music the Star Wars universe inspired — released before the year was out. A 1977 disco cover of a 1977 film score built on a 1942 Hollywood movie score built on an 1860s German opera. The whole thing happened inside 12 months.
The galactic conversation never stopped. Blink-182 wrote an unrequited love song to Princess Leia in 1997 — “A New Hope,” on “Dude Ranch” — and Mark Hoppus came to it completely sincerely. Ash, the Northern Irish punk trio, covered the Cantina Band as a B-side during the same era. Clutch buried a Wookiee reference inside one of their most hypnotic grooves. Wilco named an entire album “Star Wars” in 2015 — Jeff Tweedy confirmed it had nothing to do with the films, but said the title made him feel “limitless.” The Mountain Goats wrote a song called “The Ultimate Jedi Who Wastes All the Other Jedis and Eats Their Bones.” Hip-hop, in particular, never let go: Nas, OutKast, Childish Gambino, Denzel Curry, MC Chris — the galaxy far, far away has been an active lyrical reference pool for nearly five decades.
In 2016, two things happened that deserve their own footnote. First, Rick Rubin curated “Star Wars Headspace,” a 15-track electronic compilation built entirely from Star Wars sound effects and dialogue — no John Williams music allowed, by Lucasfilm decree. Flying Lotus, Röyksopp, Bonobo, Baauer, Galantis and others rebuilt the universe from its component sounds. FlyLo said later that the audio design of Star Wars felt like a precursor to electronic music — that the R2-D2 bleeps and lightsaber drones were proto-electronic before the genre existed. The Röyksopp track “Bounty Hunters” and Bonobo’s “Ghomrassen” stand as the project’s most genuinely compelling entries, the ones that transcend their concept.
Second: J.J. Abrams needed a cantina song for “The Force Awakens” and John Williams, who was scoring the film, told him to find someone else to write it. Abrams had recently attended a performance of “Hamilton” on Broadway and, during intermission, Lin-Manuel Miranda had jokingly offered his services if a cantina song was ever needed. Abrams later called. Miranda said yes. The resulting track, “Jabba Flow” — performed in Huttese, the language of Jabba the Hutt — was written under the band name Shag Kava and appeared in the film. The lyrics translate, roughly, to “No, lover, it wasn’t me.” Miranda described it as “a Shaggy intergalactic remix.” The Rick Rubin/A-Trak remix on “Headspace” is the most widely available version.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Messersmith — a Minneapolis-based indie folk songwriter — wrote a song called “Tatooine” that captures the binary-sunset longing of that desert-planet childhood better than almost anything else in the entire pop catalog. It sounds like something Luke would have written himself, at 17, before any of it happened.
There’s a through-line running from Wagner’s Ring cycle to Galantis naming a song “Scruffy-Looking Nerfherder” on a Rick Rubin-produced electronic album. It is not a straight line. It bends through a century and a half of cinema, rock, hip-hop, and dance music, picking up Holst and Korngold and Orff and Stravinsky along the way. It runs through a disco cover that went platinum in 1977 and a Huttese reggae track written during a “Hamilton” intermission in 2015.
Williams didn’t create any of this alone. He was standing at the end of a very long line of people who figured out how to make music feel like it was about something that mattered. Lucas handed him a film and said: give me a body of work comparable to the greatest masterpieces of symphonic history.
He did.
Then everybody else got to work, too.
—Michael