Star Wars: The Force Awakens “Snoke” (2015)

This particular theme in the Star Wars: The Force Awakens soundtrack means a great deal to me, because it helped spawn a theory that took four years to be proven correct. Remember how Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker revealed that the Emperor had been alive all this time? Well, even before that reveal, I half-suspected that something like this might happen, and the “Snoke” theme in Star Wars: The Force Awakens had a great deal to do with it.

Listen carefully to Snoke’s theme below and then I’ll explain what I mean.

You hear all of that? Snoke’s theme is pretty ominous; a droning male choir, the smallest hint of a dark melody, the entire thing reeks of tension and pure evil. In fact, it sounds like a close relative of the Emperor’s theme (as heard in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi), in spirit if not in actual musical relationships. And that is what really drew my attention: this theme for Snoke sounded so much like the Emperor’s theme that, combined with the fact that Snoke was based on concept art for Palpatine, that I could only draw two possible conclusions:

Snoke was Palpatine, just in a different form
Snoke was Palpatine’s puppet/mouthpiece

Time would eventually prove me somewhat correct on the latter conclusion, and it’s all thanks to the music. There’s also the fact that John Williams is not the type of composer to craft a character’s theme a certain way for no good reason. If one theme resembles another, it’s not unreasonable to say that character (in this case Snoke) might be connected to another (in this case, Palpatine). I’ve said it many times, you should always pay attention to the music if you want to get hints about the true identity/true nature of a character. Four years before Palpatine was revealed to the world, John Williams created a theme hinting at the Emperor’s continued presence (there’s an even more blatant hint in The Last Jedi but I’ll discuss that another day).

Let me know what you think about “Snoke” (and whether you drew similar conclusions) in the comments below and have a great day!