Are These The Autumn Years of the Film Soundtrack?

(Or, I Really Hope These Aren’t The Autumn Years of the Film Soundtrack)

Alexander Boucher
Sep 3, 2018 · 6 min read

“Oh, there’s talking on this album”.

It was weird, then sort of normal, and is now very weird again that the soundtracks to popular films often contained tracks that were essentially just dialogue snatches from the film. Somewhere in between PJ Harvey and Run DMC, the Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back soundtrack would offer up sound clips of things like Ben Affleck talking about Ben Affleck’s performance in Phantoms. This might sound odd in retrospect, and odder still to learn that I owned the Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back soundtrack on CD (it was 2001, okay?). But at the time it was commonplace for CD soundtracks to have this idiosyncratic feature. The film clips almost worked like little skits, the kind you’d get on a great early De La Soul album or a fucking terrible Eminem album. And perhaps the dialogue clips only feel so weird now because of how rapidly the way we listen to music has changed.

Let’s say it’s 2001, and you’re a weirdly smug person who puts on the Ocean’s 11 soundtrack at a dinner party, maybe because you want your guests to feel like you’re slicker than a person who owns the Ocean’s 11 soundtrack. This isn’t a playlist you’ve made, it’s not a bunch of songs on shuffle; it’s a carefully selected collection of cuts from the soundtrack of a hugely successful movie. So, when George Clooney’s voice starts loudly talking in the next room, none of your guests are confused or begin to smash things. But let’s say it’s 2018, and you’re throwing another dinner party and for whatever god forsaken reason, you have not let go of your Ocean’s 11 soundtrack and have it in libraries across the platforms. Your spotify library is on shuffle and just after Van Morrison’s Moondance, George Clooney starts talking loudly in the next room. Or even worse, Andy Garcia. Now it’s harder to explain. Now you feel silly, the concept of dialogue snatches on soundtracks absolutely absurd. Hell, maybe even soundtracks in general feel absurd. Because why would you possibly want an audio file of Andy Garcia talking about casinos on your phone??

It feels so weird because the context of the clip has been completely removed. The constraints of listening to albums have been lessened, and instead we’re picking and choosing which bits we want, because of course we are. We get to be the soundtrack supervisor of ALL of music. If we think a cut from an album is sub-par? ZOOM. We can send Come on Eileen to the depths of spotify hell in an instant, and that feels extremely good. It’s a power-trip. I don’t mean to imply that we don’t listen to albums at all anymore. We absolutely do — the perseverance of CDs and the return of vinyl are evidence that it’s still something we care about. And listening to albums in full isn’t exactly limited to physical media.

But the popular model of music listening today can be a fragmented experience, and i’m not here to say that this is either good or bad. I’m saying it’s interesting because it makes pre-made compilations — or film soundtracks — almost entirely redundant. Why go and spend a tenner on an album when you know damn well that the only song you really liked on the Deep Blue Sea soundtrack was LL Cool J’s Deepest Bluest which, to my knowledge, is the first and only song told from the viewpoint of a rapping shark. When it comes to an album by an artist you actively like or, at least, are interested in, it goes without saying that you’ll buy or listen to it in full somewhere. Streaming services haven’t exactly thwarted that concept like some people worry they have. But film soundtracks are a different beast altogether. If you’re watching a movie and there’s a song you like in it — several, even — are you more likely to think “I should buy this soundtrack!”, or are you more likely to google the lyrics, find the individual songs you like and add them to your library? I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess it’s mostly going to be the latter.

That’s mostly what I do! And it means you don’t end up with clips of Andy Garcia yelling. But, as we move away from the film soundtrack, I do start to miss the weird experience of listening to them in full. Like a film score, a well crafted soundtrack is not only a good reminder of that movie you love, but it’s a collection of thematically linked songs that tell their own story. Sort of like uh…an album! I picked up the vinyl soundtracks to two great horrors, Fright Night and Return of the Living Dead, from my local record shop a while back for just a couple of quid each, but man, do they bring me almost as much joy as the films themselves. Between them, their roster includes the likes of Devo, The Damned, The Cramps and Sparks, but even with the lesser-known bands and some of the less classic tracks, there is something truly satisfying and cohesive about them being put together on one disk, with some beautiful cover art to go with it. Opening Fright Night’s soundtrack with its eponymous track and closing it with Brad Fiedel’s shimmeringly electric and sexy Come To Me is a phenomenally well-chosen way to bookend an album that stands as a shining example of why film soundtracks should still exist.

There is (hopefully, anyway) some sort of artistic intention behind the film soundtrack, something a little more than just marketing a tie-in to go with the feature. Something that’s an excellent artistic expression doesn’t necessarily even need the film to make it succeed: I love Prince’s Purple Rain soundtrack but have never actually seen Purple Rain. And there is great pleasure of being transported back to the world of the film by music. The same is true of television soundtracks — The Sopranos Peppers and Eggs compilation is a terrific collection of music that both works as a good playlist but also as a companion piece to the series, with songs that go some way to explaining who Tony Soprano is. I’ll never be able to listen to The Kinks’ brooding Living on a Thin Line without thinking of Tony sulking in the dark with a contemplative cigar wedged between his fingers.

And I actually don’t want to listen to a lot of these songs on their own — I want to listen to them as they’re presented by the album, dialogue clips and all. I want Uncle Junior swearing at me, and I want the Every Breath You Take/Peter Gunn Theme mashup made specially for the show, because it’s one of the smartest, most fun pieces of music in a show ever. As odd as dialogue clips can be, I like the sense of atmosphere that they can add to the soundtracks. Just listen to them being put to bewitching use in the Inherent Vice soundtrack, which features a clip of Joanna Newsom’s dreamy narration whispered over Jonny Greenwood’s paranoid freakout.

A soundtrack, at it’s best, is an effective little trip back to a world that you know well. When I hear the fidgety drums that open Can’s Vitamin C, all I can ever picture is Joaquin Phoenix as Doc Sportello nervously eyeing the shadows that pass him. When I hear Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London, i’m trapped inside an Adam Sandler film and I want to die. With the former (not so much the latter), hearing the song nestled amongst a slate of specific cuts takes me on a trip that couldn’t be fully achieved by hearing the song alone, on shuffle. I listen to music on shuffle all the time and always enjoy it, but having the option to listen to a complete soundtrack is a beautiful indulgence. Aside from not paying their artists properly (fuck you, spotify), streaming services can be absolutely awful with soundtracks, almost never featuring full and complete ones. I just hope that they prosper elsewhere, and that, as weird as they might sound on shuffle, we never lose such precious nuggets at this from appearing on soundtracks in the future.

Also:

My good friend Dev (Absolute Travis T) and I have an ongoing series of chats in which we discuss such Bad film soundtracks as American Pie and Batman Forever. Check it out!

Alexander Boucher

Written by

Film graduate who will talk about Inherent Vice for 48 hours straight if you let him.

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