America (the ideological concept of the United States) asserts that it is nation based not on land or a people, but an idea. This view leads easily to mythologizing, often projecting backward, while other nations project forward from their roots. Not least of these myths is manifest destiny, the idea that the nation should stretch across a continent perceived as “empty.” It is in this frontier space that American ideals of individualism and freedom are celebrated in the Western film — and later television — genre, with music that shifted from simple action-adventure, period-based music to a new, modernist language in the post-World War II era. By the 1960s, a parallel exploratory/settler genre, science fiction, emerges with a distinctive naval inflection, fostered by the naval and air power that helped establish America’s superpower status. This music became powerful signifier of might-made right and a kind of soulful purity.
Cast in the Western as the other, almost more natural hazard than people, the indigenous population is stereotyped, exoticized, and marginalized when not erased. Their voices emerge only in the late 20th century, often in road-trip films that recapitulate aspects of the Western genre, like Powwow Highway (1987) and Smoke Signals (1998). One of the dominant musical voices in this emergence is Canadian First Nations songwriter Robbie Robertson, who had helped forge a popular “Americana” idiom c.1970, but only felt able to declare his heritage in the late 1980s. His last musical work, for Killers of the Flower Moon (Scorsese, 2023), literally underscores the film’s conscious countering of the white gaze and the genuine, racist conspiracy at the narrative’s center, adding back a visceral component to a musical language that had become lofty and abstract.
