that’s right, baby. you heard me! the mulan soundtrack is straight poetry from start to finish. lea salonga, donny osmond and stevie wonder on the same album? ummmmm okay!!

what have you been worried about? your relatives in the midst of a deadly pandemic? isolating yourself socially and feeling the weight of your own conscience bear down on you every day? nonsense!! you should have been listening to this MULAN SOUNDTRACK, babyyyyyyy! i mean, come on… Christina Aguilera’s cover of Reflection in the limited 14-track bonus edition of the album? somebody stop her! it was hard enough for Jerry Goldsmith to walk through Disney HQ in 1997 without people sneering at him and rubbing shoulders and muttering ‘he’s no Alan Menken tho is he’ into their mickey mouse shaped coffee mugs , but for him to get Christy Aggy on the MULAN SOUNDTRACK? Uhhhh, wow-za. let’s raise our glasses to Jerry 🙂

i’m not going to talk about the instrumentals on this album, although they are excellent and ‘the burned out village’ is an absolute treasure. i’m going to talk about the four songs which drive the narrative and themes of the film: Honor to Us All, Reflection, I’ll Make a Man Out of You, and A Girl Worth Fighting For.

see, Mulan is having a pretty tough time throughout this film. as far as im aware, she’s restricted by three different big themes: her relationship with herself, her cultural expectations, and her gender. the three often go hand in hand, but these four songs communicate them in fantastically unique ways.

Honor To Us All, is, I suppose, the most ”traditional” song on the soundtrack , using chinese flutes and a pentatonic scale throughout. it’s an expository song which gives an overview of the world Mulan inhabits, wedged between strict gender roles and a culture which is heavily centred around family pride. The lyrics are supposed to be ironic, though. I especially like her grandma saying ‘and even you can’t blow it!’ with a lovely ‘why-I-oughta’ vocal infliction, and the bit in the video where Mulan casually kicks two guys butts by reading their game of chinese checkers. it’s light hearted, playful and busy, with a spring in it’s step from start to finish. if this is a culture of ridiculous gendered traditions, it is aware of the fact, and it expresses this perfectly. the most serious section of the song is when Mulan walks out the bath house and prays to her ancestors for her father’s strength, and suddenly you see a beautiful and sincere and quite sacred side to this culture. Ugh, it’s too good.

Reflection obviously belongs in the ‘self’ corner of the Mulan triangle. as is the case with most introspective musical songs, it’s a heartwrenching ballad in the key of g minor with a lot to say and not enough time to say it, baby. i actually made all that up. i don’t know anything about this song. If I’m completely honest, it’s just really pretty, and a lovely summation of Mulan’s ultimate aim- to become ‘who she is inside’. But there’s a little irony in her saying i’ll never be a ‘perfect bride’, or a ‘perfect daughter’- because that’s. not. Mulan. do you get it? Am i making any sense? To reach that comfortable place of self understanding, Mulan’s gonna have to defy cultural conditioning and kick gender stereotypes in the ballsack. rachel berman from ‘Oh My Disney’ dot com is not a credible source in the slightest, why is she here, she adds nothing to the argument, here’s what she said.

We’ve all wished that it was easier be to ourselves sometimes. Take puberty for example. That was especially rough. But we have a secret (which we learned in part from this movie): we owe it not only to ourselves, but to everyone else, to be exactly who we are.

She’s right you know. puberty was a bitch. But for Mulan to become who she is, she’ll need to break some more boundaries. that’s when the men come in. oh jerry goldsmith you beautiful bastard.

I don’t listen to many songs about Chinese gender roles in 620AD but oy va voy, if I did, these two would be up there. I think my favourite thing about Girl Worth Fighting For and I’ll Make a Man is that they’re both kind of sung by pathetic idiots? goldsmith manages to parody the macho stereotype of the warrior by having his soldiers fuck up on pretty much every level (and get completely outsmarted by Mulan at the end), and then he gets those same soldiers to sing an unabashedly misogynistic song about going off to war and snagging yourself some arm candy. You can almost hear Mulan’s eyes rolling in this song. The comically low voices, the flowery, airy violins, the fact that just after this song they become scared shitless, encountering the ruins of a recent massacre from the Huns. war is real, death is real, and cultural expectations and gender roles become stupid in the face of true danger (every male character learns this lesson as the film progresses). I adore leah salonga asking them if they want a girl who speaks their mind and them all shrugging her off like nah. I love the weird army inspector dude becoming the victim to basically the first ever yo momma joke. I love the morbidly obese food obsessed character wanting a refrigerator for a wife. i love the delicious, delicious irony of donny osmond telling mulan she’ll never be a man, then watching along in shock as she single handedly wipes out an army then does a sick gender reveal. this band of loveable idiots set Mulan further away from the enforced elements of her culture and gender, and closer to her true self. of course, your true self contains elements of both. and your true self is constantly changing. but it’s lovely to witness an unconfident reflection blossom into something truly unfettered and unrestrained as the film progresses. that’s true beauty that is. cheers goldsmith. rest easy my friend.