vulture lists

The xl Greatest Movie Soundtracks of All Time

Photograph: Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Home Video, Gramercy Pictures and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

This post has been updated to account for the release of A Star Is Built-in.

Arraign Kenneth Anger. Back in 1963, the underground creative person and puckish provocateur debuted his moving-picture show Scorpio Ascension, a 30-infinitesimal barrage of erotic imagery and American iconography, scored to unlicensed stone and R&B songs by the likes of Elvis Presley and Ray Charles. A staple of art-house cinemas and university movie programs, Scorpio Rise influenced the way that aspiring directors like Martin Scorsese would come up to remember about the juxtaposition of moving pictures and popular music. When Scorsese's generation took over Hollywood at the end of the 1960s, they carried Acrimony in their hearts and minds.

Cutting to 2018, and if early projections hold, one of the yr'south about popular albums is going to be a soundtrack. Managing director/star Bradley Cooper'sA Star Is Built-in is the latest updating of a story that'due south been a cinematic perennial since the 1930s; and it'southward already a hit at the box function. A large part of the marketing has been focused on the music, with videos of performances by Cooper and his co-star Lady Gaga quickly going viral, well before the film'south release. The intersection of alluring images and tricky songs remains a reliable money-maker.

With A Star Is Built-in out this week, nosotros decided it was time to determine the 40 best movie soundtracks of all fourth dimension. For this list, I leaned almost exclusively on the Scorpio Rising model: films scored from a variety of musical sources, many of them preexisting. There are a few exceptions. It'southward difficult to skip over Shaft or Superfly, even though they were created by single artists, exclusively for those projects. I'm also assuasive movies that characteristic diegetic musical performances (likeRoyal Rain.One time, and, yeah,A Star Is Born), though in order to avoid making this list too unwieldy, I'yard excluding direct-up musicals. (Deplorable, Disney; sorry, MGM; sorry, Grease.). I'm also skipping conventional original instrumental scores … fifty-fifty when they're unconventional, like Miles Davis'southward soundtrack to Elevator to the Gallows, or Anton Karas's inescapable The Third Man zither, or the Brazilian bossa nova of Black Orpheus.

Instead, what you'll mostly find below are song-driven soundtracks that had significant cultural touch, in various ways: past becoming all-time sellers; by introducing (or reintroducing) songs to heavy radio rotation; by summarizing unabridged musical subgenres; or by helping to create atypical cinematic moments. To comprehend every bit much ground as possible, I express filmmakers known for their peachy soundtracks (like Spike Lee and Sofia Coppola) to one entry each. But just about every modern musical genre is represented, from hip-hop to grunge to avant-garde classical.

Allow's driblet the needle….

Simply similar the N.W.A biopic, its soundtrack tracks the history of the hip-hop grouping from its earliest recordings to its post-breakup solo work. But the Straight Outta Compton anthology also includes some of the funk and R&B legends (in particular George Clinton and Roy Ayers) who helped inspire Dr. Dre's laid-back, bass-heavy Westward Coast sound. This isn't merely a drove of some of the nigh influential recordings of the '80s and '90s, it's an origin story for how they came to be.

Some of the best unmarried-artist soundtracks function as de facto compilations. AC/DC has never released a proper "greatest hits" drove, just their album Who Made Who — featuring new and sometime songs that the Aussie difficult-rockers permit Stephen Male monarch employ in his lone directorial effort, Maximum Overdrive — comes closest. "You Shook Me All Nighttime Long," "Hells Bells," "For Those Well-nigh to Rock" … these are staples of classic-rock radio and sports arenas, and a point from Male monarch that his motion-picture show about killer trucks is meant to be good, dumb fun.

Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann loves the big emotions and unapologetic artifice of former Hollywood movies and Peak twoscore music; then throughout his career he'southward been unafraid to score scenes with tricky tunes, even when they may seem on newspaper like a mismatch. His boffo Shakespeare adaptation is daring in the manner it puts the Bard's words into the mouths of warring crime families in a modernistic coastal metropolis. But Luhrmann then intensifies the anachronism by having his star-crossed lovers (played past an impossibly young and sweet-looking Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes) smooch and swoon to posh songs like the Cardigans' "Lovefool" and Des'ree's "Kissing You." The soundtrack went triple-platinum in the U.S., signaling pop culture's move away from gruff grunge and toward danceable romanticism with a synthesizer sheen.

Sofia Coppola's best moving-picture show makes analogies between privileged royals and overexposed, misunderstood 21st-century celebrities. The soundtrack too plays up those similarities across centuries, letting music by modernistic trip the light fantastic-popular acts and '80s post-punkers paint Marie Antoinette as a typically moody child, who unwinds by clubbing. Coppola's previous soundtracks for The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation were similarly hooky and foggy, simply Marie Antoinette is the finest example of how the director uses music to add together dimension to her characters and setting.

French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve based Eden on the experiences of her brother Sven (who co-wrote the script), a moderately popular DJ whose career was overshadowed by his more successful EDM peers, including the guys in Daft Punk. The official soundtrack — which runs twice as long as the moving-picture show — is a adequately comprehensive survey of what Europeans kids were dancing to in the '90s. It's not essential to understand the fine distinctions between "house" and "garage" and "jungle" to savour all the swift tempos, bumping beats, soulful voices, and spare samples on Eden's score. Just grab a glow stick and hitting the floor.

The Oscar-nominated song "Beautiful Maria of My Soul" — performed in English by Los Lobos and in Castilian by Antonio Banderas — is probably the best-remembered role of the non-hitting movie adaptation of Oscar Hijuelos'due south novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. But the gold-selling soundtrack's lively revival of mid-20th century Latin jazz (with an emphasis on Puerto Rican and Cuban styles) is an outstanding intro to the genre, and defenseless the ears of a wider audition a few years before the Buena Vista Lodge became an international sensation. The film of The Mambo Kings is a stirring story most how music helped two immigrant brothers find a identify in America. The winning performances of Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, and Arturo Sandoval helped sell that tale.

This ludicrously twisty, overheated criminal offense picture show would be pretty justly forgotten were it not for its ane-of-a-kind soundtrack: an experiment in creating a new musical genre. It's not that rap-stone didn't exist before Judgment Night; acts like Body Count, Anthrax, Urban Dance Team, and Beastie Boys had all produced some interesting hybrids prior to 1993. But dissimilar the "grinding metal meets bro boasting" format that would go commonplace in the late '90s, Judgment Nighttime put some unlikely collaborators in the studio together: De La Soul with Teenage Fanclub; Sir Mix-A-Lot with Mudhoney; House of Pain with Helmet; and Cypress Hill with both Sonic Youth and Pearl Jam. The results weren't always especially musical, but they did demonstrate refreshing openness and imagination.

I of the bleakest movies e'er made almost American teenagers — following a agglomeration of pocket-sized-town burnouts conspiring to cover up a murder committed by one of their friends — is accompanied past 1 of the harshest soundtracks e'er recorded. At a fourth dimension when other '80s high-schoolhouse movies were pepped up by jangly college-stone and bouncy British synth-pop, River's Edge leaned on the bludgeoning sludge of Slayer, Hallows Eve, and Fates Alarm. No poseurs allowed.

Though this self-consciously goofy comedy is about teenagers who desperately want to meet the Ramones, the soundtrack'southward actually a hodgepodge of tardily-'70s New Wave and fine art-rock, putting arguably the nigh important American punk band of all fourth dimension in the context of performers similar Nick Lowe, Brian Eno, Devo, and Todd Rundgren. Yet, what makes this an essential document are the Ramones songs: the jet-fueled title track, the swinging retro-ballad "I Desire You Around," and an 11-minute live medley that preserves the phase presence that made this band into insubordinate heroes.

The loftier-schoolers in Richard Linklater'southward 1976-set up suburban Texas slice of life are convinced they're living through one of the lamest eras in American history. The songs diggings out of their automobile stereos suggest otherwise. Peradventure these kids missed the rebellious '50s and the radical '60s, only the beatniks, hippies, and early rockers who came before them at least cleared the manner for them to fume dope all twenty-four hours and listen to Foghat, Alice Cooper, and ZZ Top. In the twelvemonth of the American bicentennial, teenagers had never been so free.

At its middle, Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights is a smart-ass cinematic prank, answering the question, "What if a filmmaker practical the sweeping, emotionally intense, visually dynamic storytelling of Goodfellas to a movie nigh porn?" The soundtrack is office of that joke. In the place of Martin Scorsese's collection of archetype pop, rock, and R&B, Anderson fills his movie with tricky cheese like Melanie's "Brand New Fundamental," Walter Egan's "Magnet and Steel," and Night Ranger's "Sister Christian." Because what better mode is there to score a picture about guilty pleasures?

Information technology has a improve reputation at present, but when Empire Records was released in the mid-'90s, it bombed at the box part and underwhelmed critics, who pegged this "24-hour interval in the life of a record store" dramedy as a cynical attempt to smoothen and sell the postal service-Nirvana alt-rock scene. Nevertheless, the moving-picture show resonated with a pocket-size but fervent audience, who helped elevate it to cult status, while clinging passionately to a soundtrack filled with mod rockers like Gin Blossoms, Better Than Ezra, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Cracker, and the Cranberries. Both the film and its score document an era when the eccentricities of early on-'90s music were straightened out and floated into the mainstream, and both make the case that even something blatantly commercial tin can yet be meaningful to the people who buy information technology.

Cameron Crowe started writing the movie that would get Singles not long after he moved to Seattle, where the former Rolling Stone reporter was immediately impressed with the then-secret music scene. Past the time Crowe finished the moving picture, his friends in bands like Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and Mudhoney were some of the biggest stone stars in the world. Singles only pulled modest box-function returns, merely its soundtrack album was huge — non only because it captured "grunge" at its peak, only considering Crowe framed the movement well, calculation songs by '80s alt-stone hero Paul Westerberg, '70s FM star Nancy Wilson (Crowe'southward married woman at the time), and legendary Seattleite Jimi Hendrix to bear witness where the likes of Alice in Chains and Screaming Copse came from.

When writer-director John Carney's shoestring indie drama Once debuted at Sundance in 2007, Glen Hansard was only an Irish singer-songwriter known to a handful of rockists diligent enough to be aware of his band the Frames. Then this story of an amateur street musician — coming together a woman (played Markéta Irglová) who inspires him to record a demo — then moved audiences that Hansard and Irglová'due south songs "Falling Slowly" and "When Your Mind'due south Made Upwards" became radio hits and won major industry awards, before going on to ballast a Broadway musical version of the pic. Which just goes to evidence: Who needs a big budget when you've got cracking tunes?

Fifty-fifty in a era when no i actually buys albums anymore, fans of Marvel's cheeky catholic adventure pushed its soundtrack to the top of the charts. Why? Credit the likable mix of '70s Top twoscore, heavy on songs like Elvin Bishop's "Fooled Around and Cruel in Love" and 10cc's "I'thousand Not in Love" that are fondly remembered but not overplayed on oldies radio. Credit likewise the way this "crawly mix" is used in the bodily movie: as the last remaining bond between a star-hopping rogue and the belatedly mother who taught him to dearest the hits.

More than just a collection of tunes that were featured in the picture show, this soundtrack aims to recreate the whole experience of the latestA Star Is Born, with dialogue snippets and multiple versions of the aforementioned numbers, just like in the film. Preserving the almost documentary-similar quality of the musical performances besides allows this record to concur onto the tension at the heart of the picture show: between the bawdy spontaneity of the rootsy alt-rock that Bradley Cooper's graphic symbol Jackson Maine sings (with words and music contributed by the likes of Jason Isbell and Lukas Nelson, son of Willie) and the more polished, practiced pop of Lady Gaga's Ally. The songs tell a story, almost the different ways of retaining some personal expression inside the soulless behemoth that is the modern American recording industry.

Martin Scorsese may be the filmmaker from the '70s "New Hollywood" heyday most closely identified with wedding ceremony dynamic images with gritty rock and soul. With Mean Streets in the '70s, Goodfellas in the '90s, and The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street in contempo years, Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker — and well equally his occasional musical consultant Robbie Robertson — have created fully integrated audio-visual experiences that other artists have shamelessly tried to copy. The team's boldest work by and large eschews popular music (aside from a few dreamy oldies) in favor of passages from avant-garde classical composers. Besides drawing attending to the modern geniuses of a wholly different genre, the unfamiliar, virtually alien sounds of the Shutter Isle soundtrack reinforce the film's tale of hallucinatory madness.

It's hard to go incorrect with just about any soundtrack from just most any Spike Lee articulation: the go-go heavy School Daze, the Public Enemy–anchored Do the Right Thing, Stevie Wonder's Jungle Fever, Prince's Girl 6, and so on. Just Mo' Amend Blues may be the score that'southward closest to Lee's heart. The movie is partially inspired by his own jazz musician father, Beak Lee (who equanimous the title track), and it's set to a mix of original Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard numbers that run the gamut of jazz styles, from sultry song ballads to snazzy melodic popular to avant-garde dissonance. The album'southward most vital track may be Gang Starr's "Jazz Thing," a hip-hop history of the genre that many neophytes have used as a recommendation list for what to mind to: from Theolonious Monk ("a melodious thunk") to Ornette Coleman ("another soul man").

One of the most beloved movies of the late '60s — and a Best Picture Oscar winner to boot — Midnight Cowboy is too a detailed report on how the era of LSD and free beloved played out in a grimy New York City, where harder sexual activity and drugs were more popular than the happy hippie kind. The soundtrack too plays with the sounds of the city and the times. The mind-angle drone of Elephant'due south Memory (doing their best Velvet Underground impression) sits side by side with the lyricism of John Barry's harmonica-driven instrumentals, the ersatz grooviness of the Groop, and Harry Nilsson'due south shatteringly cute embrace of Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'." The latter rail in particular, playing nether images of two pathetic hustlers striding through Manhattan, captures both the possibilities and the disappointments of a and so-crumbling metropolis.

Information technology'southward impossible to talk virtually the union of movies and pop music without mentioning the Beatles, whose films A Difficult Day'southward Night, Aid, and Yellowish Submarine influenced cinema, idiot box, mode, the counterculture … you name information technology. Merely the all-time actual Beatles soundtrack comes from their worst picture. The rambling, muddied-looking, made-for-TV Magical Mystery Tour is a chore to watch: all inside jokes and secondhand psychedelia. But the album is wall-to-wall classics, including "The Fool on the Hill," "I Am the Walrus," "Hello, Goodbye," the title track, and the contemporaneous singles "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "All You lot Need Is Dearest." The latter two weren't in the film itself, just they corroborated what the band was upward to musically at the time, marrying timeless melodies to potent trippiness.

One of the movies that signaled a shift in Hollywood toward youth-oriented A-list productions, The Graduate used music that appealed both to kids and their parents, shifting easily between Dave Grusin'southward traditional orchestral swing and the winsome folk-rock of Simon & Garfunkel. The images of a soul-sick Dustin Hoffman — playing a bright immature human not quite ready to be a grown-upwards — set to pretty, melancholy songs similar "Mrs. Robinson," "Scarborough Fair," and "Apr Come up She Will" persuaded older viewers that perhaps something really was troubling the ascent generation. The phenomenal sales for the soundtrack and the "Mrs. Robinson" single convinced the studios to showtime prowling Sunset Strip, looking for the long-haired musicians to stick a microphone in forepart of.

Cheers to the Beatles and The Graduate, the rock moving-picture show soundtrack had developed a kind of formula by the end of the '60s: mostly performed by unmarried artists, relying on a mix of erstwhile hits and new recordings, padded out with some novelty tracks and instrumental filler. Then Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda decided to dedicate a big part of their Easy Passenger upkeep to licensing the popular acid-rock songs that their editor Donn Cambern was at beginning simply using as a temporary score. In addition to sounding of-the-moment with its fresh Steppenwolf and Byrds cuts, Easy Passenger just felt more organic than the soundtracks that preceded it — more like something the film's characters would actually be listening to.

If nix else, the baby-boomer fave The Big Chill was responsible for what would go one of the biggest Hollywood cliches of the '80s and '90s: the scene of blithesome middle-aged folks bopping around their firm to a well-loved pop oldie. In the example of The Big Chill, this story of hippies turned yuppies sparked a renewed involvement in '60s ideals during the heart of the Reagan era — and it restored some commercial viability to Motown classics and vintage AM radio hits by the likes of Creedence Clearwater Revival and Procol Harum. The soundtrack commodified the pervasive feeling in the culture that something vital was being lost.

Thirty-ii million copies. That's the rough tally of international sales for the Dirty Dancing soundtrack: a surprise boom, accompanying a modest period romance that itself became a much bigger hit than anyone expected. Though it'due south prepare in 1963 — and features a score dotted with pre-Beatles pop from the likes of the Ronettes and the Five Satins — this story of an underestimated teen and the hunky dance instructor who notices her felt remarkably modern back in 1987. A lot of that had to exercise with songs similar Patrick Swayze'south "She's Like the Wind," Eric Carmen's "Hungry Eyes," and Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes'southward Oscar-winning "(I've Had) The Fourth dimension of My Life," all of which sacrifice '60s authenticity for gimmicky snap.

Make no mistake: The Bodyguard has the biggest-selling soundtrack of all time (an estimated 42 million copies sold worldwide) because of Whitney Houston's peerless recording of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Honey You lot," which spent 14 sequent weeks as Billboard's No. i song on the Hot 100 Singles chart. Only the album overall is as well an excellent drove of early on-'90s developed-contemporary pop, highlighted past the six smooth and soaring Houston numbers that occupy the first one-half. Side two mixes low-cal jazz and soft soul, rounding out the record's — and the flick's — air of sophisticated romance.

A film about Scottish heroin addicts shouldn't feel every bit total of life as Trainspotting does. Credit director Danny Boyle, screenwriter John Hodge (adapting Irvine Welsh'due south novel), and a set of songs that exemplifies wastrel cool. The film and the soundtrack both kicking off with Iggy Pop's exultant ode to decadence, "Animalism for Life," and what follows is a mix of tracks that range from druggy glam (Lou Reed'south "Perfect Day") to post-punk disco (New Order's "Temptation") to '90s rave faves (Underworld'due south "Born Slippy .NUXX"). The music'southward mostly pretty and mostly danceable, but is underlaid throughout with a sense of worldly danger.

Two rites of passage for aspiring punks in the mid-'80s: finding a video store hip enough to stock Alex Cox's eccentric saga of 50.A. deadbeats, crafty creditors, and alien life forms; and so buying, borrowing, or stealing a copy of the Repo Human being album. Anchored by some of the titans of the early West Coast hard-core scene (Blackness Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, Circle Jerks, Fearfulness), this soundtrack is at one time a primer on one of the major punk scenes, and a collection of songs and then tuneful and witty that it proves even astringent-looking people with piercings and shaved heads tin have a sense of humour.

The clichéd crime drama Abdomen is marginally fascinating today, if only for the way that writer-director Hype Williams tries and mostly fails to translate his flashy music-video fashion to the large screen. But the movie is better remembered for its soundtrack, which merely happened to take hold of the New York hip-hop scene as it was undergoing an important evolution. With contributions from Jay-Z, Nas, DMX, D'Angelo, and several members of the Wu-Tang Clan — all either at the tiptop of their creative powers or just about to be — the Belly album catches Due east Coast rap's move toward harder edges, starker lyrics, and more than sophisticated musical arrangements. Who would've expected that a message from the genre's future could be transmitted via some clumsy B motion picture?

Before hip-hop acts started regularly getting MTV airplay and hit the Tiptop 10, a lot of middle Americans relied on soundtracks from rap cash-in movies like Vanquish Street and Krush Groove for an piece of cake way into the genre. True connoisseurs tracked down the score for Wild Way, put together by Blondie guitarist Chris Stein and entrepreneurial MC "Fab V Freddy" Brathwaite, with author-director Charlie Ahearn. The trio fabricated expert use of their friendships with influential New York rappers like Decorated Bee, Double Trouble, and the Cold Shell Brothers, and recorded the kind of energetic street rhymes that had previously only appeared on unofficial "battle tapes." Like the film, the soundtrack preserves an essential slice of musical history.

In the '80s, Hollywood studios became multimedia conglomerates, working synergistic deals with other corporations to deliver non just movies, but marketing opportunities. Cynics would say that the big bosses back then crushed the original outlaw spirit that defined American filmmaking in the '70s. Fans would counter that the product that came out of this era — the toys, the comics, and yes, the albums — was so well-made that information technology justified the sell out. Between 1983 and 1987, pretty much every twelvemonth featured a mammoth soundtrack: Flashdance, Top Gun, Dirty Dancing … and the rex of them all, Footloose, which stacked up half dozen Tiptop 40 hits, all recorded for the movie. Sure, the songs are all motorcar-tooled to boss the mainstream. But acts like Deniece Williams, Bonnie Tyler, and Kenny Loggins (the '80s soundtrack king) besides made them catchy as hell, with an upbeat vibe that defines 1984 equally well as Piece of cake Rider does 1969.

By the fourth dimension Quentin Tarantino fabricated his fourth and 5th films, fans pretty much knew what to look from his soundtracks: a couple of half-forgotten pop hits, some classic R&B, a few obscure garage-rockers, and snippets of dialogue. But the two Kill Beak movies were designed to show that Tarantino could tell stories torn from the heart of pulp fiction, not only the margins — and their soundtracks, too, were an expansion of the filmmaker'south palette. In between typically Tarantino-friendly songs similar Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang" and Johnny Cash'south "A Satisfied Mind," the movies and their scores borrowed freely from the piece of work that composers like Ennio Morricone and Luis Bacalov had done for sometime spaghetti Westerns and thrillers. Tarantino even resurrected the title theme from the Japanese criminal offense picture New Battles Without Accolade and Humanity, turning it into a ubiquitous stadium anthem.

It'due south perhaps the ultimate compliment to a filmmaker when his or her style becomes and so well-known that it can exist parodied … right down to the soundtrack. Function of what made Wes Anderson's Rushmore such a revelation when it arrived at the finish of the '90s was that the director and his co-writer Owen Wilson took the moving, relatable story of a loftier-school misfit — a pretty mutual move-movie premise — and gave it the theatrical flair that the graphic symbol himself would've adopted if he were making a film about his life. The hero's dramatically self-witting persona is reflected in the film's music: a set of '60s British Invasion deep cuts that make the whole picture experience displaced from time. Like many of the other great soundtracks on this list, Rushmore established a template that many other filmmakers and music consultants still follow.

In the '80s, writer-director-producer John Hughes hit upon the perfect formula for teen-flick gold: Tell familiar stories about popularity and romance, set to music so hip that even loftier-schoolhouse weirdos became fans. The Hughes-penned young-developed favorite Pretty in Pink takes its name from a punky Psychedelic Furs song (rerecorded for the film to be much smoother) and features a soundtrack that's a who's who of angsty British pop. The Smiths, Echo & the Bunnymen, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, New Club … if viewers weren't already fans of these acts before they arrived at the multiplex, the album practically served as a checklist for what truly absurd kids should be listening to.

Disco was mostly a niche genre earlier youth-savvy multimedia impresario Robert Stigwood produced a movie virtually crude-hewn working-course New Yorkers, enjoying moments of grace and self-expression on the dance floor. The motion-picture show became a blockbuster, and its soundtrack became the disco album that even people who'd never been to a club had on their shelves. A mix of kitschy novelty numbers (like Walter Spud'south "A Fifth of Beethoven"), '70s popular classics (The Trammps' "Disco Inferno"), and some of the Bee Gees' best dance numbers, Saturday Night Fever spread the disco craze across the land and the earth, popularizing the music to such a degree that in the years that followed musicians who wanted to sell records were all just required to give their songs a thumping beat.

Even fervent music buffs didn't know a lot well-nigh ska or reggae before a scruffy little Jamaican crime picture became a cult hit worldwide. Attack the fringes of the Kingston recording industry, The Harder They Come put a spotlight on the lilting rhythms and tropical haze of a musical style that was just starting to get exported more widely. The film and soundtrack made a star of leading human Jimmy Cliff, whose wiry free energy and raspy voice connected cantankerous-culturally. Songs like "Rivers of Babylon" and "You Can Go Information technology If You Really Want" were easy on the ears, no thing how askew their tempos.

Every at present so, writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen brand a motion-picture show that reaches a wider audience, even though the brothers themselves hardly ever change much near their offbeat fashion or personal preoccupations. The cornpone comedy O Brother, Where Art M? was one of those left-field hits, and was buoyed in office by its octuple-platinum soundtrack: one of the few LPs of motion-picture show music to win an "Album of the Year" Grammy. (Sabbatum Dark Fever is another, as well as The Bodyguard.) Produced by T Bone Burnett, the O Brother score re-creates the sound and feel of Depression-era folk and country, with gloomy murder-ballads and half-ironic anthems of promise conjuring upward the ghosts of what critic Greil Marcus once chosen "the old, weird America."

Prince fictionalized his own ascension through the Minneapolis R&B scene for Purple Rain, a movie about an eccentric genius mocked by his peers for his cross-genre hybrid music and erotically charged stage shows. The film's entertaining, but kind of ridiculous, given that it features the songs and live performances of an artist and then on top of his game that just a stubborn dolt could deny his awesomeness. Yet the soundtrack is bulletproof. "Let'southward Get Crazy," "I Would Dice 4 U," "Baby I'm a Star," "When Doves Cry," "Purple Pelting" … there's a reason why these songs turned Prince from a popular oddball to a culture-pervading superstar.

Earlier Isaac Hayes was tapped to write, produce, and perform the soundtrack to the gritty detective picture Shaft, he was already known as one of R&B'southward peachy innovators, thank you to his epic-length, richly orchestrated covers of white artists' hits. Shaft ended up being a revolutionary film, finding such a large African-American audience that it inspired the depression-upkeep activeness genre that came to be known as "blaxploitation." Hayes's music was groundbreaking, also. His theme song won an Oscar, and his anthology — the first double LP from a soul act — won multiple Grammys. Shaft established a busy, soaring sound that countless movies and cop shows in the '70s would emulate.

Shaft was the groundbreaker for blaxploitation soundtracks, just Superfly is the masterpiece that Curtis Mayfield built atop Isaac Hayes's foundation. Onscreen, Mayfield'southward songs annotate on the action, capturing both the outlaw cool of a drug dealer's life, and the real human cost of the products he sells. On record, Superfly is an most overwhelming listening feel, with lush strings and polyrhythmic percussion defining funk at its well-nigh sophisticated. The flick's well-nigh unnecessary. The anthology itself is plenty cinematic.

Before his whole life and career became all near Star Wars, George Lucas was known effectually Hollywood as a nerdy cinephile with artsy, experimental inclinations — more of a Kenneth Anger than a Steven Spielberg, in other words. Because of his rep, expectations were low for what turned out to be Lucas's breakthrough film: an elliptical ensemble piece, gear up in pocket-size-town California in 1962, scored to an unceasing stream of early rock and doo-wop hits. The soundtrack was a costly extravagance that Universal Pictures initially balked at — simply it turned out to be 1 key to the movie's stunning success. The use of these real old songs by Fats Domino, the Platters, Chuck Berry, and the like — instead of the cheaper simulations the studio wanted — lent a docu-realism to Lucas's impressionistic portrait of restless teens. The music besides struck a cornball chord in the audience, which would keep reverberating throughout the decade, affecting the kind of stories Hollywood would tell and the kind of tunes they'd gear up them to. The album version was cleverly constructed also, using legendary DJ Wolfman Jack'southward voice as a bridge betwixt propulsive pop that never quits. Like nearly all the collections on this list, the American Graffiti LP instantly brings dorsum about everything fans love about the motion picture. All that's missing is a hot rod.

The 40 Greatest Movie Soundtracks of All Time