Those Gilmore Girls Sure Do Know A Lot About Music

“Twenty-five years ago, a show called Gilmore Girls premiered and apparently took the season of fall hostage,” announced Lauren Graham at the Emmys last Sunday. The actress, who played Lorelai Gilmore, stood on a recreation of the Gilmores’ front porch alongside her on-screen daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel), and presented the award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series. She also read my mind: I feel one single chill in the air, or see a slightly crisp leaf, and I know it’s time for a Gilmore Girls rewatch. I’ve seen this series at least 20 times, first when it aired and then on DVD as a teen in the 2000s; I recently started a rewatch with my partner, who hails from near Hartford, Connecticut where the show is set but has never seen it.

There was a level of skepticism at first, the subtext being the usual: How good can this cozy-ass show about a mother and daughter really be? Now, at least once an episode, he’ll find some shot, transition, or structural dichotomy that recalls The Sopranos. We point out the ways its creators, Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, were clearly influenced by David Lynch; how the quaint utopia of fictional Stars Hollow is like the inverse of “the evil that men do” in the Twin Peaks universe. It’s the level of comparison that Gilmore Girls deserves but rarely receives, for reasons right there in the name: it’s a show about girls… girls who happen to know more about books and movies and music than you do.

Now, part of this is necessity. Lorelai, Rory, and their friends say more in 30 seconds than most characters do in entire scenes. A matter of both speed and density, their speech is littered with so many cultural references, it’s actually aspirational. (Blink and you’ll miss one of my favorite asides: “I don’t know about Korn, but Weezer would be pretty comfortable here,” quips Lorelai while giving her grandmother, who’d recently rented her Connecticut mansion to Korn, a house tour.) Watching Gilmore Girls taught me about everything from Dorothy Parker and Beat poets to John Waters and Disco Demolition Night. Sometimes these references turn into absurd diatribes underscoring how much a character knows, like when Rory’s bestie Lane Kim crushes hard on a bandmate and runs through a not-so-abridged history of musical breakups: 

Lane: There’s a danger here, the band thing. Need I mention the rock‘n’roll casualties from intra-band dating? Not that there’s not success stories. You’ve got your Crafts, your Yo La Tengos, your Kim and Thurstons… 

Rory: Sonny and Cher, the early years.

Lane: Plus, you’ve got your bands that survived breakups: No Doubt…

Rory: Wish they hadn’t.

Lane: X, Superchunk, the White Stripes. But in the negative you have...

Rory: Sonny and Cher, the later years.

Lane: Jefferson Airplane, Fleetwood Mac. I know of two country music stars whose backup singers shot him in the groin.

Later, Lane asks Rory to listen to two different Rilo Kiley songs—one written before Blake Sennett and Jenny Lewis split, one after—and cues up “Science Vs. Romance” over the phone.  It’s par for the course with a character whose musical identity had real stakes to it. I mean, Lane once embroiled two grown men and Rory in an elaborate plot just to smuggle a new Belle & Sebastian single past her ultra-Christian mother. She hid CDs in her floorboards and was kicked out of the house over drumming in her band, Hep Alien. (Hilarious sidenote: Skid Row’s Sebastian Bach was also in Hep Alien, barely cosplaying as a hair-metal sandwich shop owner.) Sometimes Lane is wrong—like taking the anti-disco stance, or believing in the idea of “guilty pleasures”—and that mostly stems from the rockist way that taste is performed on Gilmore Girls. It’s often played for laughs, cranked up to 11; imagine Jack Black in High Fidelity, obviously without the Belle & Sebastian disdain. A cartoonishly impassioned snob in the body of a teenaged Korean girl, Lane Kim was everything to me in my youth. 

None of this is new information, and those who know, have long known. But as I pummel towards the Bad Place in my rewatch—i.e. season seven, made without the Palladinos—I’m appreciating the musical world-building of GG in a new way. Lane’s quest-like pursuit of the rock canon feels relatable to critic types like myself, but Lorelai and Rory’s fandom feels more natural, as though it’s modeled after real people. Every once in a while, Lorelai’s love of spunky ’80s groups like The Bangles and The Go-Go’s comes up, whether in the events of the show or the onscreen soundtrack; same with Rory’s penchant for PJ Harvey. The Palladinos were assembling a different kind of canon, one that’s rooted in women’s autonomy, pleasure, and pursuit of the perfect comeback. They topped it with a warm-and-cozy patina: Carole King and her daughter Louise Goffin singing the Tapestry cut “Where You Lead” as the theme song, and the comforting flourish of singer-songwriter Sam Phillips’ la-la-las in every episode. “The thing about Sam’s music is it sounded like it was coming out of the girls’ heads,” Amy Sherman-Palladino has said. “It felt like it was an extension of their thoughts.”

I went down the Sam Phillips rabbit hole last weekend while making a playlist of Gilmore Girls music. I had no idea she’d been married to, and often collaborated with, roots-music producer T-Bone Burnett; or that she started out as a Christian singer; or that her early secular work sounded kinda like The Bangles. On 2001’s Fan Dance and 2004’s A Boot and a Shoe, you can hear some of the show’s interstitial music blossom into devastating and wistful folk songs. “And the moon’s never seen me before/But I’m reflecting light,” Phillips croons in “Reflecting Light.” This one was too gorgeous not to include in its full glory: Luke and Lorelai’s romance is, after many years, clinched by a moonlit dance set to “Reflecting Light.” 

Girls are not considered culturally frivolous in the Gilmore Girls universe. That may sound obvious, but it’s also not a given, especially not in media from the past. I just watched an episode where Lorelai introduces a bunch of 13-year-old girls to Molly Ringwald via John Hughes’ Pretty in Pink, stressing the actress’ utmost importance as they trudge towards womanhood. Two episodes later, Yo La Tengo, Sparks, and Sonic Youth (specifically Kim, Thurston, and their daughter Coco) invade the center of Stars Hollow looking to be “discovered,” following the label signing of the town troubadour (played by singer-songwriter Grant-Lee Phillips). That was the last episode helmed by the Palladinos until the Netflix reboot, which feels extremely appropriate: their tastes—high, low, everything in between—wholly defined this world.