Words and Guitar, Vol. 10: Motion Picture Soundtracks

The tenth entry in a weekly column by Terence Cawley.
I love a good movie soundtrack album. Not so much albums of instrumental film scores, though I do enjoy some of those; I’m talking about the mixtape-style compilations of songs by various artists that were either featured in the movie or simply “inspired by” the film in question. My dad and I used to buy a lot of cheap used CDs at record stores, Goodwills, flea markets, and the like, and soundtrack albums – with their mix of recognizable hits and tracks by lesser-known artists – seemed like a pretty good bang for our buck. Whether or not we were familiar with the movie itself was beside the point. Which brings us to this week’s list:
Top 5 Soundtrack Albums for Movies I Have Never Seen and Will Probably Never See
Often, I would end up seeing a movie in part because I had enjoyed the soundtrack album so much. For every time this led me to a film I loved, like Dazed and Confused, there was a case like Wicker Park, where the stellar 2000s-indie soundtrack had almost nothing to do with the confusing, underwhelming “thriller” it was designed to promote. The movies to which the soundtracks on this list are attached have an average Rotten Tomatoes score of 37.4%, so I’ve largely resisted the urge to check any of them out. The soundtracks themselves, on the other hand? Well, I hope I can convince you to give at least one or two of them a spin.
Also, if this is the kind of thing you find interesting, I highly recommend The A.V. Club’s recent Soundtracks of our Lives feature, which digs into many of my favorite soundtrack albums, from The Crow to Grosse Pointe Blank to Rushmore.
- Godzilla (1998)
Film-wise, the late-90s Godzilla is the most notorious flop on this list. Yet the soundtrack was a platinum-selling smash hit, as the studio threw its significant financial resources into assembling a star-studded collection that has dated horrifically in parts but which also contains some truly fantastic songs. Even the trainwrecks, many of which are mysteriously unavailable on Spotify, are a fascinating time capsule- P. Diddy rapping over a “Kashmir” sample! A remix of Green Day’s “Brain Stew” where Godzilla himself is credited as a backing vocalist! That P. Diddy disaster, “Come With Me,” was inexplicably a hugely successful single, as was The Wallflowers’ competent take on David Bowie’s “Heroes.” The tracklist is transparently padded with whatever C-tier artists Epic Records was pushing at the time, though for my money the contributions of sneering post-grunge acts Fuel, Days of the New, and Silverchair have held up better than the milquetoast L.A. singer-songwriter fare served by Ben Folds Five and Michael Penn. And, uh, the less said about this, the better.
For those unwilling to invest an hour in this particular roller coaster, allow me to highlight the three truly essential tracks. First: “Deeper Underground” by Jamiroquai, a funky track whose mock-“dark” tone treats its monster-movie source material with exactly the right level of serious unseriousness. Second: Rage Against the Machine’s notorious “No Shelter,” in which Zack De La Rocha, taking his band’s destroy-the-machine-from-within ethos to its logical endpoint, raps “Godzilla, pure motherfucking filler/To get your eyes off the real killer.” Finally: “A320” by Foo Fighters, a majestic ode to the miracle of flight which might be the greatest song Dave Grohl ever wrote.
- Can’t Hardly Wait (1998)
High-school movies often have the best soundtracks, a reflection of the outsized role music plays in so many teenagers’ lives. Though I’m a sucker for a good coming-of-age flick, the one time I tried watching Can’t Hardly Wait, I gave up after about 10 minutes of having my intelligence insulted by an endless parade of clichés- house parties, hormones, cliques, the whole deal. Though given how much I enjoyed the writer-director team of Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan’s next effort, Josie and the Pussycats, perhaps I should give Can’t Hardly Wait another shot someday. Until then, I’ll make do with the soundtrack.
The Can’t Hardly Wait soundtrack is just as much of a late-‘90s time capsule as Godzilla, but while the latter captured the brooding self-seriousness of much of the era’s popular music, the former mostly kept things fun and light, from pop-rock gems like Third Eye Blind’s “Graduate” and blink-182’s “Dammit” to choice cuts from Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliott. Even the Smash Mouth song, a cover of ? and the Mysterians’ “Can’t Get Enough of You Baby,” is enthusiastic enough to win over an “All Star” hater. There’s a strong selection of classic ‘70s and ‘80s party-starters thrown into the mix as well; hard to go wrong with Parliament’s “Flashlight,” Run-D.M.C.’s “It’s Tricky,” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City.” But the main reason this soundtrack holds a special place in my heart is because, by including the song from which it takes its title, Can’t Hardly Wait introduced me to one of my favorite bands: The Replacements.
- Twilight (2008)
This is the film on this list I’m most likely to someday watch, if only because I find that the older I get, the more curious I become about the phenomena of my youth which I was too snobbish for at the time. Even when the Twilight backlash was at its peak, pretty much everyone I knew had to concede that the soundtrack albums were pretty good. 2009’s The Twilight Saga: New Moon had Death Cab for Cutie, Thom Yorke, a Bon Iver/St. Vincent collaboration, and Grizzly Bear, but it’s the soundtrack to the first film in the series which I’ve listened to the most.
Twilight pulls heavily from the moodier, goth-adjacent wing of 2000s alt-rock, opening with the slinky Muse banger “Supermassive Black Hole” and featuring two original Paramore songs, “Decode” and “I Caught Myself,” which hinted at the shift from mall-emo to a heavier, more introspective rock sound which the band would take on their 2009 album Brand New Eyes. Linkin Park, having fully outgrown nu-metal at this point, fit in surprisingly well with the relatively understated ballad “Leave Out All the Rest,” while ‘90s alt-rock gets its due with a decent Collective Soul song and a confounding one by Perry Farrell. Robert Pattinson himself gets a track on here, “Never Think,” which is a perfectly fine knockoff of the soft, mumbly acoustic singer-songwriters commonly found on Zach Braff soundtracks at the time (more on that later). The inclusion of Iron & Wine’s “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” was a canny concession to skeptical indie kids, but my favorite discovery from the album is probably Blue Foundation’s ”Eyes on Fire,” whose brilliantly haunting melody makes me wonder why I haven’t heard anything about this Danish band before or since Twilight.
- Judgment Night (1993)
Perhaps no soundtrack has so thoroughly eclipsed the film it ostensibly exists to support in the public imagination than Judgment Night. Apparently it’s an action film whose stars include Denis Leary and Jeremy Piven and whose core conceit is that cities are Bad and Dangerous and Filled With Criminals, so…probably doesn’t hold up? By contrast, the soundtrack’s pairing of rappers with alt-rock bands was, if a little gimmicky and clunky, also kind of revolutionary. Coming after “Walk This Way” and Rage Against the Machine, Judgment Night can’t claim to have invented rap-rock or nu-metal, but it certainly got to the party relatively early, and had a heck of a good time throwing a ton of collaborations against the wall to see what stuck.
Most of the tracks attempt to find common ground aesthetically between the chugging riffs of hard rock and metal bands and the barked threats of rap’s most aggro MCs. Most of these team-ups are good, lunkheaded fun; I want the one dude who keeps yelling “JUDG-MENT NIIIIIIGHT!!!” on the Biohazard/Onyx title track as my ringtone. The songs which reward repeat listens most, however, are the ones which deviate from this formula. That would be the blissed-out, Tom Petty-sampling “Fallin’” by De La Soul and Teenage Fanclub; the hazy, exactly-what-it-sounds-like Cypress Hill/Sonic Youth track “I Love You Mary Jane”; and Sir-Mix-A-Lot and Mudhoney’s “Freak Momma,” whose goofy, I-can’t-believe-we’re-doing-something-this-silly energy nicely deflates the puffed-up machismo which otherwise dominates the disc. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about Dinosaur Jr. and Del Tha Funky Homosapien’s contribution, “Missing Link”– there are few things in this world I enjoy more than a J Mascis guitar solo, but does combining them with Del’s dense verses just clutter the track? Guess I’ll have to keep watching this amazing Arsenio Hall Show performance (with Mike Watt on bass and Mike D on drums!) until I figure it out.
- The Last Kiss (2006)
So I’ve mentioned in previous columns that The Shins are my favorite band. Well, I first heard The Shins through the Garden State soundtrack. Yes, those songs really did change my life. However you feel about the movie (which was my favorite for a time in high school, and which I’ll still maintain has some good parts even if my former devotion to it mostly makes me cringe), the soundtrack holds up as a lovely scrapbook of 2000s indie at its gentlest and most wistful. Zach Braff’s curation of that soundtrack, and the subsequent ripple effects it had on The Shins and indie rock in general, is well known; what’s less well known is the next soundtrack he curated.
The Last Kiss looks like a pretty generically bad 2000s rom-com, and at first glance, if you’re feeling uncharitable, it’s easy to see the film’s soundtrack album as an equally generic exercise: Braff trying and failing to pull the same magic trick twice. Yet just because the movie it accompanied flopped doesn’t mean its soundtrack deserves the same fate. Admittedly, you have to have a certain fondness for Braff-core, with its very soft, very white version of indie rock where hyper-sensitive singer-songwriters and hyper-sensitive post-Coldplay guitar bands reign supreme.
To that end, there are four repeat offenders from the Garden State soundtrack: Coldplay themselves, Imogen Heap (who appeared on Garden State with her band Frou Frou), Cary Brothers, and Remy Zero. Braff must be drinking buddies with the frontmen of those last two bands or something; neither of them seems to have much of a pop-cultural footprint outside of his soundtracks, though their songs, “Ride” and “Prophecy,” are among my favorites here. And yes, the Imogen Heap song is “Hide and Seek,” appearing after its use in The O.C. but before the SNL parody of its use in The O.C. The soundtrack also opens with “Chocolate” by Snow Patrol, which I just learned from Wikipedia appeared in ads for Garden State but not the film or soundtrack itself. Still, The Last Kiss otherwise differentiates itself from Garden State in subtle but significant ways.
While Zach Braff cowrote the screenplay for The Last Kiss, he did not direct it; in other words, this was not as complete a passion project for Braff as Garden State. The soundtrack seems to reflect this, as its selections feel like a less idiosyncratic, arguably more mainstream-friendly take on the Garden State template. That means no Shins, no Colin Hay, and no retro, record-collector picks like Nick Drake. Instead, The Last Kiss sticks to contemporary artists who mostly recorded for major labels but were probably still marketed as “indie” at the time, in part because Garden State had shifted the goalposts for what that term could encompass. I realize it sounds like I’m building a case against The Last Kiss here, and I’ll admit that compared to Garden State it does seem a bit slick and bland. But the best songs here are as good as anything there. Beyond the aforementioned tracks, my favorites include Ray LaMontagne’s husky, yearning plea “Hold You In My Arms” and “Pain Killer” by Turin Brakes, which overcomes some awkward lyrics with a sublimely soaring, wind-blowing-in-your-hair-in-slow-motion chorus. Braff also expanded the definition of Braff-core to include the clever, craft-obsessed singer-songwriters of L.A.’s nebulous Largo scene. Fiona Apple’s “Paper Bag,” Aimee Mann’s “Today’s the Day,” and Rufus Wainwright’s “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk” are heartfelt and cerebral in equal measure, songwriting masterclasses which embarrass the lesser singer-songwriters with the misfortune of having to follow them on the tracklist- sorry, Amos Lee and Joshua Radin.
All to say, The Last Kiss soundtrack will almost certainly not change your life, but it might very well introduce you to some new songs you’ll love.
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Thanks as always for reading, everyone! Check out the Spotify playlist, and I’ll see you here next week!