Just a few years after “Walk This Way”-and just a few before “Nookie”-the Judgment Night soundtrack envisions a rap-rock future where Helmet and House of Pain, Biohazard and Onyx, and Pearl Jam and Cypress Hill are not just contemporaries but peers working in tandem, with raps exploding over pulverizing licks. The soundtrack, however, offered a concept that was daring at the time: getting rap and rock acts to collaborate.
#GREASE ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK FRONTCOVER MOVIE#
Is there any greater chasm between the reception of a movie and its soundtrack than Judgment Night? (Perhaps a better question: Has anyone who adores the Judgment Night soundtrack actually seen the movie?) The plot to the movie is fairly standard fare as 1993 action thrillers go: Some dudes (Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeremy fuckin’ Piven) witness some drug dealers (led by Denis Leary) kill someone, so they go on the run. But High School High wasn’t an anomaly in its era-it was one of its defining documents. A soundtrack this stuffed for a movie this forgettable couldn’t exist today.
#GREASE ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK FRONTCOVER PLUS#
The movie itself was a straight turkey (though I’m still partial to the “Rhinestone Cowboy” scene), but the soundtrack tracklist reads like a rap purist’s fever dream: Two Wu-Tang Clan songs! A Large Professor and Pete Rock collaboration! De La Soul! The best A Tribe Called Quest deep cut post– Midnight Marauders! Also mixed in: some of the biggest R&B stars of the era in Faith Evans, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, and Jodeci, plus a gigantic R&B radio hit in the Braids’ cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and a Quad City DJ’s remix. There’s no better example of the power of the ’90s rap soundtrack than the one for High School High, the 1996 Jon Lovitz–helmed sendup of inner-city-schools-as-a-war-zones flicks like The Substitute and Dangerous Minds. Long-forgotten movies like Soul in the Hole, Sunset Park, and Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood were all accompanied by minor-classic soundtracks, while Hype Williams’s Belly and its music have both endured as cult favorites. Later in the decade, projects for The Nutty Professor and Bullworth produced massive hits that have far outlived the vehicles that showcased them. As hip-hop was becoming a titanic commercial force early in the decade-both on the Billboard charts and at the box office-heralded movies like Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society enlisted a bevy of established stars while unearthing new talents for their accompanying albums, and sold a boatload of copies in the process. The ’90s marked the Golden Age of the rap soundtrack. If you asked Em, he’d probably swear it was worth it. It’s a soundtrack that functions as legend-building at its most audacious. It’s just that the cultural trappings of the record, like everything with Eminem, are so souped-up on testosterone, so acidic and sometimes just plain gross, that it no longer gets to be simply a piece of music. It’s got a Freeway verse on “8 Miles and Runnin’” where the Philly MC is at his barrelling peak (Hov manages to stretch his legs out for a bit on the track too).“Wanksta” may have looked like a mixtape-cut from 50 Cent’s “How to Rob” days, but it still holds up.
It’s a lot like most Eminem albums, but with more features. The 8 Mile soundtrack is a good soundtrack. There’s a lot of baggage around this, so I’m going to try to tread lightly. Now that that’s covered, here are the 50 best soundtracks from the past 50 years. A tough beat for John Williams, to be sure.
Second, in the spirit of Saturday Night Fever, only pure soundtracks were permitted-no scores. Our humblest apologies to The Graduate and The Wizard of Oz.
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