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Surprisingly enough, Aaron turns out to be a part of Fisk’s gang as he, along with Doctor Octopus, Scorpion, and Tombstone chase Miles back to May’s apartment where the Spider-Men prepare for battle.
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Peter unsuccessfully trains Miles who eventually ends up retreating to his uncle Aaron’s house. Meanwhile, another universally lost individual named Gwanda -Miles’ high school crush- appears and leads the duo to the house of May Parker, who shelters and takes care of numerous other Spider-Men.
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Peter reluctantly decides to train Miles only because he also desires to return to his original universe. But where soundtrack tunes so often indulge in the audio-production equivalent of pyrotechnics, some of Spider-Verse’s best songs triumph for the exact opposite reason-Vince Staples’ closer, “Home,” and Swae Lee and Post Malone’s “Sunflower” ride the lowest of lo-fi beats to really let their lyrics shine.Additionally, an older version of Spider-Man appears in his original form, also known as Peter Parker. And Nicki Minaj turns up the patois over Caribbean vibes on “Familia”-a rare song that directly references the film-alongside verses from Puerto Rican trap artist Anuel AA and Zimbabwean singer Bantu. Lil Wayne and Juice WRLD each offer introspective tracks (the former featuring a surprise appearance from the late XXXTENTACION) that use literal darkness as a metaphor for emotional pain. LA MC DUCKWRTH’s “Start a Riot” is a jump-up-on-the-table party-rap rager. While these songs were written for the movie, they often don’t sound like movie songs in the conventional sense. So it makes sense that the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse-which features multiple cross-racial, cross-gender, cross-generational, cross-dimensional characters with Spidey powers-has a soundtrack that really upends the franchise’s own long-established aesthetic and cultural awareness. But surveying it 16 years later, there was something awfully homogenous about its lineup: Sum 41, Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger, Theory of a Deadman, Aerosmith, Pete Yorn. There was nothing necessarily wrong with the soundtrack to 2002’s Tobey Maguire-starring Spider-Man.
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