'HE SOUNDTRACK BOOM - World Radio History

'HE SOUNDTRACK BOOM

More and more hit albums are coming out of the movies.

all it the Various Artists Syndrome. We're talking about the recent spate of

movie soundtrack albums-the ones accompanying major commercial

flicks in which the work of a lot of big -name pop music acts either figures

C in or comments on the action. It's not a new idea, of course; in the rock era it's as old as the soundtrack

to The Graduate (1967). Saturday Night Fever was a hit in the Seventies, Top Gun

and Dirty Dancing in the Eighties. And you don't have to be a brain surgeon to

figure out why record companies like these things-from a business standpoint

they're relatively risk -free. Soundtracks are usually cheap to produce (a couple of

pricey superstar tracks can be padded out with old, inexpensive -to -acquire materi-

al), and, more important, the movies function as ads for the albums. Sometimes a

CD makes it even when the movie bombs. The soundtrack CD for 1993's Arnold

Schwarzenegger vehicle The Last Action Hero, for example, sold quite re-

spectably despite the film's untimely death in theaters.

To be sure, there are aesthetic reasons behind the soundtrack boom as well.

Many of today's younger directors and writers are more comfortable with pop mu-

sic than their predecessors were, so it's natural that they would try to integrate

contemporary songs into the emotional framework of their material. And-if the

filmmakers have done their job right-it's also natural that the moviegoing audi-

ence would want to hear the music at home on CD.

But striking a balance between what works in the theater and what works as a

coherent album isn't an easy task. "Basically, you have to pick stuff that's going to

serve the movie," notes Ron Fair, the RCA exec who supervised the music selec-

tion for Reality Bites with director Ben Stiller. "A great song itself isn't the only

criterion; it's got to mean something in the context of the film."

Which means that a great movie soundtrack doesn't necessarily make a great

soundtrack CD. That being the case (and given that this peculiar hybrid album

genre seems likely to be a flourishing one for the foreseeable future), here's a

look-in no particular order-at some examples you'll find prominently dis-

BY STEV played in record stores this very moment.

E

S

PHILADELPHIA

EPIC SOUNDTRAX 57624 The film this CD is drawn from is one of the more depressing in recent memory, so "Philadelphia" isn't exactly a party record, and at home the music can seem jarringly uneven. Bruce Springsteen's Streets of Philadelphia is something of a triumph, a haunted -sounding elegy unlike anything he's ever done before, and the Maria Callas aria from Andrea Chenier, which accompanies one of the film's most affecting moments, is gorgeous. But Neil Young's closing theme is simplistic, Peter Gabriel's Lovetown is too earnest to work on its own, and the Spin Doctors' cover of Have You Ever Seen the Rain confirms their status as America's luckiest not -so hot bar band. GUTSY MOVE: Springsteen is now the first heterosexual superstar to have released a song taking the point of view of a gay man.

SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE

EPIC SOUNDTRAX 53764 Any album that features Nat King Cole singing Stardust is worth hearing, and the rest of this package-starring Jimmy Durante (As Time Goes By), Louis Armstrong (A Kiss to Build a Dream On), and Gene Autry (Back in the Saddle Again)-is mostly charming in a deliberately old-fashioned romantic way,

M EL

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