Despite the pumping Day-Glo pink beats that make up the Barbie soundtrack – helmed by Mark Ronson – the film’s most important musical moments are not part of that original collection. Though the doll has a 64-year history, Barbie’s director Greta Gerwig focuses on two huge hits from the late ’80s and ’90s. Was this because they remind her of her own coming-of-age moments? Quite possibly, and for a large part of the audience they make up an easily recognisable cultural reference point too. These songs, which are covered on the deluxe soundtrack, tell us more about the main character (and Ken) than perhaps the entirety of the two-hour, surprisingly existential film. But what are they? Fire up that Walkman, dude, and let’s dig in…
Barbie’s anthem: “Closer To Fine” by Indigo Girls
This Barbie has a playlist for every road trip! Well, less a playlist and more a signature song that is played – and sung along to, of course – every time she puts pedal to the metal in her pink Corvette. This is her ride-or-die, hype-em-up, mantra of a song to belt out when she wants to remind herself of who she is: she’s Barbie, and she’s just fine!
Except, when she’s not. Given her intrusive thoughts about dying, her flat foot debacle and some cellulite beginning to peek through her shiny, bronzed limbs: she’s far from fine.
“Closer To Fine”, written by Emily Saliers, one half of the Indigo Girls, at first glance is a joyful, folksy little ditty. But the lyrics reveal that the person singing is confused about their place in the world, searching all around for a sign to point them in the right direction as to who they really are.
It was a feeling that Saliers was also experiencing when she wrote the song just shy of the ‘90s (it was released in 1989). She wrote it on a porch in Vermont, while on holiday with her family, and, as reported by Stereogum: “She had just graduated from college and was ruminating on a world of academia that seems fraught with seemingly sure-footed answers that often fail to be full. Once again, that questioning spirit of hers comes barreling through, as she turns over every rock, from the insight of sages to the council of children, understanding that the most complete answer to anything is never under just one of them.”
The song’s also been a constant in other popular culture as shorthand for a powerful moment of emoting. It got a shout out from a drunk Jim and Andy in The Office (US) – and who here hasn’t felt something encroaching a spiritual awakening from a couple of glasses of wine, only for it to recede again with the rest of the bottle? – and it’s had previous form as the perfect road-trippin’ tune, as Ali, Sarah and Maura from Transparent sing along to it on the way to a festival; like Barbie, it’s a song of empowerment, and to pump them up for whatever may lie on the road ahead of them.
On a musical level, there’s something life affirming about the note jumping up an octave in the last syllable of “fi….ine”, implying that everything’s going to work out just fine in the end. This ties in with the repeated lyrical phrase at the song’s end (along with a “Yeah”): “The less I seek my source for some definitive/the closer I am to fine”, which suggests the truth of what we need to know is hidden deep within ourselves, and we shouldn’t be distracted by outside influences who claim that they know us better.
Would Barbie have received this enlightenment if she hadn’t travelled to the real world, and met people along her path who helped her understand who she was? Possibly, possibly not. But her favourite song was suggesting self-realisation right from the very start.
Ken’s choice cut: Push by Matchbox Twenty
“This song is so good, I want to play my guitar at a woman on the beach with this while staring uncomfortably into her eyes for 4 minutes,” is just one of the many new comments on the YouTube video of this song, which has soared with plays over the weekend, taking it up to 106 million views.
Of all the Kenergy he brings to Barbie Land, it’s Ken’s insistence on performing a song to Barbie on his guitar at the beach, while she watches, presumably in adoration, that’s most laughable. Especially when the chosen song is… “Push” by Matchbox 20.
With big incel vibes from the start – witness the chorus: “I wanna push you around/ Well, I will, well, I will/ I wanna push you down/ Well, I will, well, I will/ I wanna take you for granted/ Yeah, I wanna take you for granted” – it is the antithesis of what Barbie hopes for on her return to Barbie Land. This is not the song to win them over, Kens, it only serves to make the anti-brainwashing of the other Barbies more urgent.
Ryan Gosling’s incredible earnest cover of this track – it’s the closed-eyes moments that send me – appears to be reinforcing the notion that the Kens want control over the Barbies, so much so that they’re apparently willing to commit physical violence against them, and not just plague their ears.
But this was a fallacy that Matchbox Twenty faced when they released the song back in 1997. Lead singer Rob Thomas told MTV News: “It’s not about beating women, that’s for sure. In fact, in the song I turned around the point of view on it. It was actually about a relationship that I was in and how I was being manipulated. It was all about emotional manipulation and emotional violence.”
His band mate Brian Yale said: “We were kind of surprised when we heard all that stuff. [Our response] was, ‘Wow, really? No, it’s not about that.’ I mean, just meet us. We’re not the manliest of men all the time. I’m a short guy. I don’t think I could kick anyone’s (butt)”. Which has very Allan energy.
So while this song isn’t the misogynist’s anthem some may have taken it for, it speaks volumes for Ken’s behaviour in the film. He feels undervalued, unloved and always like the lesser partner (after all, he’s just Ken). For all the wrong ways Ken then goes about it (of which there are…many) he just wants to be heard and also is on his own journey, like Barbie, to find his own identity outside of their relationship.
For Gerwig, she felt the song from her childhood perfectly aligned with Ken’s troubled state of mind: “It was playing all the time on Quad 106.5 when I was in seventh grade,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “I really loved that song. I listened to it all the time and I was like, ‘I feel it. Something’s in this.’”
She added: “I was like, well, if Barbies loved Indigo Girls ‘Closer to Fine’ which is one of my favourite songs of all time, the Kens might really attach to Matchbox Twenty.” That’s also why they’re likely to become canon for a new 90s-obsessed generation too.
