Cobra Kai: Settling the Score

How Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson — composers on Netflix’s blockbuster series, Cobra Kai — craft the perfect (not to mention badass!) eighties-style score

- By Richard Bienstock

Here at guitar world, we tend to emphasize the guitar as a vehicle for writing and performing original music in the traditionally understood rock ’n’ roll paradigm — you get up on stage with a band to play songs, garner an audience and, if you’re lucky, make some records and build a career.

To be sure, that’s one road to success in the music industry. But there are, of course, many others to travel. Just ask Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson, two musicians who have built thriving careers as composers and scorers for film and TV, and for the last few years, have created all the original music for the breakout Netflix series Cobra Kai.

The show, as everyone with an internet connection knows by now, is an update of the 1984 blockbuster The Karate Kid, and revisits the titular star, Daniel LaRusso (played by Ralph Macchio) and his hard-living, hard drinking, hair-metal-loving high-school karate nemesis Johnny Lawrence (William “Billy” Zabka) in the present day as two (ostensibly) grown men navigating life, love and middle age — and who still want to kick each other’s asses hard. During two seasons on YouTube, Cobra Kai shattered records, with Season 1 named the world’s most in-demand streaming television show during May 2018. After moving to Netflix for Season 3, Cobra Kai became, for a period, the most viewed original series on a streaming platform.