7 March 2013 (Day 66) – Some Movie Soundtracks

I knew it was going to be a busy day at work with quite a few time consuming meetings.  But I also wanted reassurance that my reimport of all my compilations had been successfully completed.  I thus concentrated on single disc comps and they all just happened to be movie soundtracks. 

As I see things, four basic types of movie soundtracks have been released on CD, not counting live recordings from concert films such as Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense or the Woodstock album.  These are albums containing incidental music written for the film, specifically written songs, compilations of previously released songs that appear in some form or other on the actual soundtrack or songs that with no direct connection to the movie but thrown together as an extra money-spinner.  In many instances a soundtrack album will contain combinations of the above.    The only real variation to this scheme was that developed by Trent Reznor for Natural Born Killers in which tracks are faded in and out of each other (the transition from Leonard Cohen’s Waiting For The Miracle into L7’s Shitlist is an absolute masterstroke) and dialogue from the actual movie.

It’s been remarkable how well some movie soundtracks function as stand-alone albums.  I can’t think of that many successful albums of incidental music by rock musicians apart from some of Ry Cooder’s (such as Paris, Texas), Peter Gabriel’s Passion (the soundtrack for The Last Temptation Of Christ) or Isaac Hayes Shaft.  (You could probably add many of the early Pink Floyd albums such as More or Obscured By Clouds here as well.) There’s been a greater strike rate for acts creating song soundtracks such as Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly, Prince’s Purple Rain and Parade, the Bee Gees component of Saturday Night Fever, The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night and many others.

But it is the compilation soundtrack that has produced some notable artistic successes that have stood the test of time because the filmmakers were able to put together a fairly representative compilation of a particular scene or artist at the right point of time.  A lot of the concert documentary soundtracks such as Woodstock and Wattstax, The Concert For Bangladesh or The Band’s The Last Waltz fit here.  But the real successes are the Singles soundtrack which is a great overview of the Seattle gunge era, Saturday Night Fever for its depiction of disco, FM with its overview of 70s American MOR and at least two of the albums played today including my first selection:

(174) Various Artists – The Harder They Come

This is the album that introduced reggae music to generations of music lovers and along with Bob Marley’s Legend compilation, the reggae album most likely to be found in the large collections of people whowant to say they own reggae music.  Even if you never heard it, chances are that you’ve heard many of the individual tracks either in their original form or via cover versions.  The star of both the album and movie is Jimmy Cliff who contributes You Can Get It If You Really Want, Many Rivers To Cross, Sitting In Limbo and the title track, all now acknowledged classics.  Among the remainder there’s The Melodians The Rivers Of Babylon (subsequently butchered musically by Boney M), 007 (Shanty Town) by Desmond Dekker and the song covered by ska bands everywhere, Pressure Drop by The Maytals. 

(175) Various Artists – Dead Man Walking

I’ve always been ambient about Dead Man Walking the movie.  I know that it is about redemption and faith but is also supposed to be a coherent argument against capital punishment.  Yet when one gets to the actual execution and Sean Penn’s character finally admits his guilt and seeks forgiveness, I always think that I’ve seen the one powerful argument in its favour for the relief it gives the victim’s family.  I have no such problems with the powerful soundtrack.  The tone is set by Bruce Springsteen’s acoustic Dead Man Walkin’ and is carried through by similar superb efforts from Johnny Cash, Steve Earle, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lyle Lovett, Patti Smith and Michelle Shocked.  Light, shade and musical curve balls come courtesy of Suzanne Vega, Tom Waits and the duo of Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn.

(176) Various Artists – O Brother, Where Art Thou

What The Harder They Come did for reggae, this album did for bluegrass music.  The soundtrack to the film by the Cohen Brothers it is notably for thrusting Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss to mass notice but also for highlighting some of the best bluegrass tunes.  These include Harry McClintock’s Big Rock Candy Mountain, You Are My Sunshine (performed here by Norman Blake), Man Of Constant Sorrow (a few versions here) and O Death (performed here by Ralph Stanley).  The current popularity of the Americana genre is simply unfathomable without it and marks another major success for the movie’s music director, the grossly under acknowledged, T-Bone Burnett.