SOUNDTRACKS ON CD: Shaun de Waal
MOVIE soundtracks – the compilations of miscellaneous pop/rock tracks, not the original film scores – are highly favoured by record companies because of their commercial potential. Nine of them are sitting on this week’s Billboard Top 100.
Such collections can often spark interesting juxtapositions between songs one might not expect to find in the same place, or provide opportunities for bands to step out of their usual oeuvres and do something different, as did U2’s Bono and Edge for Goldeneye, or Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor with his sound-collage for Natural Born Killers – “a better movie than the movie”, said one critic.
Baz Luhrmann’s MTV-styled Romeo and Juliet was a huge hit last year. It relied on a pop-video look and its choice of music was correspondingly important. Clearly, it worked: the soundtrack (EMI) has spent six months on the Billboard chart, and now there is even a second volume. It mingles the rocky grunge of Garbage and Everclear with the poppier sounds of Des’ree and The Cardigans.
The Saint’s soundtrack is also on the US charts. It leans towards dancey electronica, with tracks by The Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Daft Punk, and an updated Saint Theme from Orbital. Putting a blot on the whole package, though, is Duran Duran’s new song – one with the highly original chorus “I’ve got to get you out of my mind.”
Music from the Motion Picture Michael (BMG) is drawn from the John Travolta vehicle. Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison and Al Green provide some classics, but the likes of Don Henley and Norman Greenbaum (this is a name for a rock star?) contribute no more than background music that should stay there.
Quentin Tarantino, by contrast, knows how to use music in films – as commentary as much as ambience. The Tarantino Connection (BMG) gathers a bunch of songs used in films with some kind of link to the enfant terrible.
Thus there are delights such as Urge Overkill’s Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon from Pulp Fiction and The Cowboy Junkies’ version of Sweet Jane from Natural Born Killers. Apart from a couple of interview segments with Tarantino himself, which one does not wish to hear twice, The Tarantino Connection makes an off-beat and piquant anthology.
The soundtrack of Julian Schnabel’s film about the Icarus of the New York art world, Jean-Michel Basquiat (Island), is a good listen, what with David Bowie’s A Small Plot of Land and PJ Harvey’s gorgeously world-weary Is That All There Is?
But the soundtrack’s mix of Nineties newies and the odd recherch oldie totally ignores the actual music of the period, the mid- Eighties. And Schnabel missed the opportunity to provide a sense of the promiscuity of Basquiat’s musical tastes, which were as catholic as the sources he used in his work.
Where are Basquiat’s culture-heroes, Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix? Or Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis, to whom he paid tribute in art? The CDbooklet helpfully lists some music Basquiat “also listened to”, but it’s hardly a substitute for a soundtrack that could have been as wildly diverse and exciting as a Basquiat painting.