The Important Role Music Plays in Jordan Peele's 'Us' (2024)

Warning: Spoilers for Us ahead.

Anyone who's simply watched the trailer for Jordan Peele's much-anticipated new movie Us has likely spent some time thinking about Luniz's "I Got 5 on It." The trailer, which dropped in late 2018, was enough alone to get people talking about the 1995 hit.

The scene in particular, which was included in the trailer, arrives in the first act of the film. The Wilson family—comprised of Adelaid (Lupita Nyong'o), Gabe (Winston Duke), Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and Jason (Evan Alex)—take a family road trip to Adelaide's grandmother's place in Santa Cruz. They drive to the boardwalk, which is the location of Adelaid's childhood trauma—where she came face to face with her Tethered doppelgänger as a child. The song comes on the radio, and the family has a discussion about what it means. "It's about drugs," Zora tells her younger brother. "It's not about drugs. Don't do drugs," Gabe tells the kids.

So, what is the song actually about?

Well, yeah, it is about drugs. Simply enough, the hook is a reference to throwing $5 down on some weed. Specifically, it means throwing down half on a dime bag of pot. But within the context of this film, it seems to take on an entirely different meaning. "I Got 5 0n It" works as the theme music to Jordan Peele's Us, both as the original version of the song and a creepier remix. As Peele told EW about the use of the song in this movie:

That song, it came pretty simple, I’m making a movie in Northern California, that’s a bay area hip-hop classic and I wanted to explore this very relatable journey of being a parent [and] maybe some of the songs you listened to back in the day aren’t appropriate for your kids. So that was one level, and another part was, I love songs that have a great feeling but also have a haunting element to them and I feel like the beat in that song has this inherent cryptic energy, almost reminiscent of the Nightmare on Elm Street soundtrack. So those were the ideas that that song hit the bullseye on for me, and also, it’s just a dope track.

So yes, regionally a track from the Bay Area makes a ton of sense in this particular film. But there's another interesting connection to this song that Peele might not have realized fit so perfectly with Us.

Shortly after the Us trailer dropped, The Ringer's Anna Lucente Sterling outlined the story of a musician who claims to have written the entire hook to the song—and has been erased from history with no financial compensation for the hit.

“I’m one of the people you’re playing in your car all the time!” that man, Michael Marshall, told The Ringer. “I ain’t got nothing from it.”

As he tells The Ringer, Marshall found out that the song was included on the soundtrack the day the trailer was released. “Do they not think I’m alive?" he asked.

What's interesting within the context of the movie is that the Tethered are doppelgängers who have lived beneath the surface of the United States, left forgotten in the shadows. Kind of like Marshall himself. That story adds kind of a strange unintentional layer to Peele's Us.

But beyond that, Peele uses pop and hip-hop tracks sparingly, yet effectively, in the movie. Janelle Monae's "I Like That" plays after the terrifying and tense cold open, arriving like a sigh of relief as the film introduces the happy Wilson family. The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" acts as a chilling juxtaposition to the gruesome murder of the Tyler family. Shortly after that, Peele uses NWA's "f*ck The Police" for a great punchline. When the Wilson kids are trying to get an Alexa-adjacent personal assistant to call the police, the machine mishears and plays the NWA track—acting as a perfect background track for the killing of Elisabeth Moss's doppelgänger (it also works considering the police are completely f*cking useless in this film).

Beyond that, the actual score by Michael Abels is effective and fascinating, alternating between tense and beautiful with an experimental approach similar to Jonny Greenwood's There Will Be Blood soundtrack.

One thing is certain, after this movie, you'll never hear "I Got 5 on It" the same way again.