The 101 Greatest Soundtracks of All Time

OK, granted, the back half of this is mostly schlock — can we interest you in two Kenny G songs, a dance-pop cover of Bill Withers, and some overproduced Eighties Joe Cocker? However, this 18-times-platinum monolith stands as one of the 10 best-selling albums of all time for a reason. That would be Side A, 26 minutes of once-in-a-generation vocal talent Whitney Houston yearning (“I Have Nothing”), grooving (“I’m Every Woman”), hurting (“Run to You”), hard-rocking (“Queen of the Night”), and singing the gospel (“Jesus Loves Me”). And of course, there’s “I Will Aways Love You,” a bravado, world-conquering crescendo of a song that peaks with what is probably the most iconic key change in pop history.

What’s more ambitious than Todd Haynes’ nonlinear biopic where six different actors play disparate parts of Bob Dylan’s creative self? How about a two-CD soundtrack — longer than the movie itself — featuring a who’s who of indie rockers covering Zimmy’s catalog. Sonic Youth scuzz-and-fuzz their way through the title track, Cat Power does a bluesy version of “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” Yo La Tengo brings a low-fi crunch to “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” and Anohni and the Johnsons soar through “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” with their inimitable mix of fragility and fearlessness. A house band of sorts was assembled with members of Sonic Youth, Wilco, Television, and Medeski, Martin and Wood, allowing luminaries like Eddie Vedder, Karen O, and Stephen Malkmus to go electric alongside some of the best.

One of the rare Eighties period pieces that actually manages to nail the soundtrack, 2016 musical Sing Street shows the John Hughes era as an appropriately awkward place to find one’s footing instead of a winky ode to Rubik’s Cubes and Flock of Seagulls haircuts. With the help of his older brother’s record collection, lovestruck Irish lad Conor Lalor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) begins to navigate a path to New Wave glory. The original Sing Street songs are indeed era appropriate, and appear amid some of the biggest synth-pop hits of the day — Duran Duran’s “Rio,” Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out,” M’s “Pop Musik,” and Hall and Oates’ “Maneater.”

Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” blasts through Radio Raheem’s boom box from his introduction in Do the Right Thing to his tragic end — the greatest protest song of a generation serving as perhaps the greatest leitmotif in cinema history. But Do the Right Thing’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood pulses with so much more than righteous anger. Mookie could turn the corner to hear the New Nack Swing of Guy (“My Fantasy”), the go-go of E.U. (“Party Hearty”), the roots reggae of Steel Pulse (“Can’t Stand It”), the vocal harmonies of Take 6 (“Don’t Shoot Me”), the R&B balladry of Al Jarreau (“Never Explain Love”), and the gleaming Latin pop of Rubén Blades (“Tu Y Yo”).

Given that Brian Slade, the fictional glam-rock icon at the heart of Velvet Goldmine, was so clearly based on David Bowie, Bowie’s decision to veto the use of his music in the film could have been disastrous for director Todd Haynes. But instead, Haynes and soundtrack co-producers Randall Poster and Michael Stipe enlisted a dream team of Bowie-inspired rockers, and others steeped in the glitz and grit of the early Seventies, to provide a more-than-suitable workaround. Art-punk eccentrics Shudder to Think brilliantly evoked the Ziggy Stardust era on “Hot One” and “Ballad of Maxwell Demon,” while the Venus in Furs — led by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood — expertly inhabited Bryan Ferry’s high camp on a handful of Roxy Music covers. Elsewhere, Wylde Rattz — a supergroup featuring members of the Stooges, Sonic Youth, and Mudhoney — backed Iggy-embodying co-star Ewan McGregor on a raucous cover of “T.V. Eye,” bringing the proto-punk era yowling back to life.

The audio companion to Less Than Zero, the 1987 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ career-making tale of drug-fueled L.A. debauchery, doubled as a scrapbook of Rick Rubin’s growing musical empire. Many of the core names of the Def Jam roster were featured, including LL Cool J, whose early classic “Going Back to Cali” first appeared here; Public Enemy, debuting the iconic “Bring the Noise” before it later led off It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back; and Slayer, turning in a raging cover of Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” The unlikely secret weapon: Glenn Danzig, who belted out an original Fifties-style torch song (“You and Me (Less Than Zero)”) with his Power and Fury Orchestra — a nascent version of the band Danzig — and penned another for one of his vocal idols, Roy Orbison (“Life Fades Away”).

What better way to soundtrack mathematician Max Cohen losing his grip on reality than with the 1990s sounds where math met madness — techno, drum & bass, trip-hop, and especially so-called intelligent dance music. The soundtrack to Darren Aronofsky’s feature debut, Pi — some songs in the movie, some not — throbs and convulses with state-of-the-art sounds: the anxious skitter of Roni Size remixed by Ed Rush and Optical, a murky subterranean mood piece from Massive Attack, some chilly throb from GusGus, and Banco De Gaia turning dripping water into a pumping banger. Most important however is the challenging work of two IDM icons. Autechre’s “Kalpol Introl” layers buzzing and hissing sound worlds, and Aphex Twin’s mind-melting “Bucephalus Bouncing Ball” allows blips to accelerate as if affected by gravity. 

Baz Luhrmann’s bold mid-Nineties recasting of Shakespeare, which transported the action from Verona, Italy, to the gritty modern-day setting of imaginary Verona Beach, California, never could have worked without a soundtrack that felt every bit as contemporary. Garbage’s sultry, trip-hop-inflected “#1 Crush” set the perfect tone of star-crossed love with its portentous refrain of “I would die for you,” and Everclear’s “Local God” (“Will you be my Romeo?/My go-go Romeo?”) added an element of sneering 120 Minutes–style attitude, while the Cardigans’ “Lovefool” radiated sleek bubblegum-pop bliss. The rest of the tracks ranged from the stoned ravings of Butthole Surfers’ “Whatever I Had a Dream” to the operatic romance of Des’ree’s “Kissing You,” conveying Luhrmann’s uncanny knack for uniting hedonism and high art.

An indelible triumph of AOR cheese, Footloose was able to chart seven of its nine tracks on the Billboard Hot 100, a pop phenomenon occurring in what may be pop’s greatest year. Kenny Loggins’ high-octane theme song became his only Number One, and was followed later that spring by Deniece Williams’ “Let’s Hear It for the Boy.” The list of dubiously overproduced smashes is staggering. Loverboy’s Mike Reno and Heart’s Ann Wilson teamed up for a soft-rock hit (“Almost Paradise”). Bonnie Tyler supplied the bombastic score to Kevin Bacon playing chicken with a tractor (“Holding Out for a Hero”). Shalimar scored their last big hit (“Dancing in the Sheets”). Singer-songwriter Karla Bonoff got adult-contemporary play (“Somebody’s Eyes”), and Loggins even double-dipped on the Top 40 with “I’m Free (Heaven Helps the Man).”

This grainy, grubby indie flick takes place amid the mid-Nineties explosion of math rock, post-hardcore, and noise rock, with many of the big players — Polvo, Unwound, Crain, Versus, Ruby Falls — making cameos. Despite the scene never crowning a breakout star in the post-Nirvana gold rush, the dissonant, mathy, DIY groups documented on the soundtrack ended up influencing generations of bands that use the word “angular” in a press release. Come for the snapshot of disaffected Nineties creatives, stay for the obscurities like Big Heifer, Boondoggle, and Dungbeetle.

Director Wim Wenders told his all-star lineup of collaborators to submit the music they thought they would be making 10 years from now. No one understood the assignment better than U2, whose “Until the End of the World” swam in the Achtung Baby-era atmospherics of production-engineering team Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, and Flood — unquestionably an influence on the next 10 years of music. Julee Cruse, Crime and the City Solution, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and even Depeche Mode evoke the space where David Lynchian noir meets Wendersian roadscapes. R.E.M. gave a soaring B side that rode the wave of their wildly successful Out of Time, and reunited krautrock giants Can provide junk percussion and South African-tinged harmonies.

The kids in Harmony Korine’s Kids exist somewhere between slackers and sociopaths, played by nonactors and filmed by Larry Clark in a gritty, cinema verité style. For the soundtrack, Korine naturally tapped low-fi lodestar Lou Barlow (Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr.), who contributed eight tracks from his project with songwriter John Davis. With the satirical name Folk Implosion, their dizzy little scuzz-pop-motorik oozed with distortion, loops, weirdo textures, and multiple Silver Apples samples. Amid it all, somehow the cool and woozy “Natural One” became a Top 40 hit. The controversial Kids became a cultural sensation upon its release, opening the wider world to not only the Folk Implosion, but also to the soundtrack’s mixtape-traded treats, like math-rock heroes Slint, outsider pop icon Daniel Johnston, and Barlow’s shaggy Sebadoh.

The soundtrack to A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper’s rendition of the oft-remade musical drama, was as much of an event as the movie itself. The big hook here — that Cooper actually sang and in some cases co-wrote the songs his character, Jackson Maine, performs — carried an equally big risk, but fortunately for the actor and for audiences, he pulled it off beautifully, with an invaluable assist from co-star Lady Gaga. The album yielded several genuinely excellent songs, most prominently “Shallow,” the wrenching acoustic tearjerker that Gaga co-wrote with Mark Ronson and others. Jason Isbell penned the lovely bummer-folk tune “Maybe It’s Time” for the film, while Cooper wrote riffy blues rocker “Black Eyes” with help from Promise of the Real leader Lukas Nelson. And leave it to Gaga to turn in two other show-stoppers — “Always Remember Us This Way” and “I’ll Never Love Again” — that solidified her place among pop’s all-time great belters of stadium-ready drama.

A love story that doubles as a love letter to hip-hop, Brown Sugar gets its smoking grooves from 2002’s most-beloved torch carriers at the nexus of alternative rap and neo-soul. The character of Sid Shaw (Sanaa Lathan) is writing a book riffing on Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.,” so naturally Erykah Badu does a flip on the song that became a Top 10 single, and the Roots donate their own sequel from their breakthrough Things Fall Apart. Jazz great Cassandra Wilson puts her spin on Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time”; Mos Def gets four tracks, all produced by increasingly famous producer Kanye West; and the love songs come from contemporary R&B royalty like Angie Stone, Jill Scott, and Mary J. Blige.

Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni’s arty chronicle of American counterculture, has been called both “the worst film ever made by a director of genius” and a “stupid skin flick,” the latter by no less than acoustic-guitar innovator John Fahey, who actually appeared on the cult-favorite soundtrack. Detached from the movie, the assortment of tracks is a charmingly diffuse time capsule of psychedelia circa 1970, with Pink Floyd showing their full early range, from surreal sound collage (“Heart Beat, Pig Meat”) to acid rock both pastoral (“Crumbling Land”) and explosive (“Come in Number 51, Your Time Is Up,” a rerecording of earlier track “Careful With That Axe, Eugene”); the Grateful Dead snipping out a soaring excerpt of a “Dark Star” jam; and Jerry Garcia contributing a lovely multitracked electric-guitar instrumental (“Love Scene”). Easy-riding tunes from Kaleidoscope and the Youngbloods round out the aural equivalent of a mellow all-night trip around a campfire.

During the production of Tim Burton’s first Batman film, execs at Warner Bros. began to consider their options for the soundtrack. Wanting to “keep it in the family,” and perhaps inspired by a certain color-palette affinity, they turned to Prince, who was then signed to Warner. (“We started seeing dailies, and it so happened that the Joker character was dressed in purple,” the then-head of Warner Bros. Music later recalled. “The cars were purple. It started to point to Prince.”) The resulting record doubled as Prince’s proper 11th studio LP, spawning an unlikely Number One single in “Batdance,” a bizarre film trailer in song form that wove audio clips from the movie into a sprawling, episodic electro-funk track. Meanwhile, “Partyman,” an upbeat theme song of sorts for Jack Nicholson’s Joker, went on to crack the Top 20. Other songs like midtempo groover “Vicki Waiting” and “The Arms of Orion,” a melodramatic Sheena Easton duet, seemed to have very little to do with the Caped Crusader, but somehow the strange pairing worked and the album topped the Billboard 200 for six weeks in the summer of 1989.

Death Row Records was the biggest label in the world, executive producer Suge Knight was the businessman of the moment, and supervising producer Dr. Dre had hip-hop’s Midas touch. Of course its soundtrack to basketball drama Above the Rim would be a backboard-breaking slam dunk. The indelible Number Two smash “Regulate” made instant stars of Warren G and Nate Dogg, and the giddy “Afro Puffs” established the Lady of Rage as the First Lady of Death Row. There’s plenty of smoothness from a dream team of Nineties R&B stars (SWV; H-Town; Jewell; Aaron Hall; Al B. Sure! covering Al Green’s “I’m Still in Love With You”), but the real draw is a cornucopia of tracks from the peak G-Funk era — Tha Dogg Pound’s buoyant “Big Pimpin’,” Thug Life’s melancholy “Pour Out a Little Liquor,” O.F.T.B.’s rowdy “Crack ‘Em,” and (for those lucky enough to get the cassette version) the 2Pac, Treach, and Riddler collaboration “Loyal to the Game.”

Diablo Cody’s offbeat teen-pregnancy comedy took the world by storm thanks to an Academy Award-winning screenplay and Elliot Page’s quirktacular performance. Director Jason Reitman asked the actor about Juno’s hypothetical music preferences, and Page suggested twee New York indie-pop duo the Moldy Peaches. In turn, co-Peach Kimya Dawson has eight songs across the soundtrack album (even more on the deluxe edition), creating a perfect mood of pencil-drawn charm, acoustic innocence, ragged indie-pop edges, and occasional humming. There’s also the ur-twee text “I’m Sticking With You” from the Velvet Underground and two songs from twee-pop titans Belle & Sebastian. The soundtrack’s most lasting impact, however, may be the version of the Moldy Peaches tune “Anyone Else but You,” sung by Page and Michael Cera at the end of the film — a version that even managed to crack the lower reaches of the Hot 100.

The punk rock Saturday Night Fever, this tale of two teenage runaways finding themselves among New York City’s warehouses and rooftops came with a double LP full of New Wave gold. Nearly a year before MTV hit cable boxes, curious suburban outsiders could discover Gary Numan (“Down in the Park”), the Pretenders (“Talk of the Town”), Talking Heads (“Life During Wartime”), XTC (“Take This Town”), Ramones (“I Wanna Be Sedated”), the Ruts (“Babylon’s Burning”), the Cure (“Grinding Halt”), and others. Even the original track from the actors Trini Alvarado and Robin Johnson, as the Sleez Sisters, draws a line from the punk poetry of Patti Smith to the provocative Nineties slash-‘n’-burn of Bikini Kill. 

Top Gun remains the gold standard for the shamelessly over-the-top Eighties blockbuster, and it’s hard to imagine the film’s high-flying action-romance hybrid truly taking flight without a pair of iconic hits: Kenny Loggins’ rev-you-up rocker “Danger Zone” and Berlin’s synth-cocooned slow jam “Take My Breath Away,” which hit Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 and picked up both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Original Song. Euro-disco forefather Giorgio Moroder penned both songs at the behest of Top Gun co-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, with lyrical assistance from — who else? — a mechanic who came by to fix Moroder’s Ferrari. A Loverboy power ballad (“Heaven in Your Eyes”), a Miami Sound Machine party anthem (“Hot Summer Nights”), and an unlikely Harold Faltermeyer–Cheap Trick team-up (“Mighty Wings”) rounded out this quintessentially 1986 spread, which topped the Billboard 200 for a total of five weeks that summer and fall.

Though the Hughes Brothers heist flick Dead Presidents is often lumped in with the rap-heavy “hood films” of the early Nineties, its 1973 setting means its soundtrack is a wonderland of vintage funk, soul, and R&B: Sly Stone’s moody “If You Want Me to Stay,”  Isaac Hayes’ deeply cinematic “Walk on By,” James Brown’s giddily angry “The Payback,” the Spinners’ Philly-soul standard “I’ll Be Around” — and that’s just the first four tracks. The album went gold and hit Number 1 on Billboard’s R&B chart, a testament to little else beyond just being a collection of absolutely unassailable songs — Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Al Green, Barry White — arriving at the right time.

Ben Stiller’s directorial debut became a Gen-X touchstone, and its soundtrack became a radio-dominating sensation. Reality Bites actor Ethan Hawke suggested a track from his friend Lisa Loeb, and the folk-pop heartacher “Stay (I Missed You)” promptly became the first alternative-rock song to hit Number One in the SoundScan era. Big Mountain’s gentle reggae cover of Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way” was a Top 10 hit too, and the Juliana Hatfield Three’s “Spin the Bottle” and Crowded House’s “Locked Out” both ended up getting their share of radio play. The Knack’s “My Sharona” even got a boost 15 years after the fact, reemerging on the Billboard charts after its newly edited music video made Janeane Garofalo’s convenience-store dance moves an MTV staple.

Blend one upbeat, montage-friendly rocker, preferably involving Glenn Frey (“The Heat Is On”), a buoyant dance-pop jam that meshes perfectly with a chaotic car chase (the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance”), and a moody, impossibly catchy synth theme (Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F”), and you’ve got the full emotional palette you’ll need for the ultimate Eighties action comedy. It’s a formula that would be replicated by countless lesser films, but here — rounded out by righteously energizing Patti LaBelle tracks “Stir It Up” and “New Attitude” — it feels entirely fresh, reflecting the impressive emotional range of Eddie Murphy’s iconic starring role.

Superstar beatmaker Metro Boomin served as executive producer for this box-office-breaking animated blockbuster, providing not only his gifted ear for Billboard-topping trap pop but his formidable Rolodex as well. Nas performs an entire song as the webbed wonder, Future compares himself to Venom, and Lil Wayne raps, “Weezy Carter, I’m ’bout to go Peter Parker/I’m Spider-Man, if he ain’t me, he just a creepy crawler.” Miles Morales may meet people from other dimensions, but this soundtrack is a stacked transmission for a high schooler on our very own Earth circa 2023: 21 Savage, Lil Uzi Vert, A$AP Rocky, Offset, Swae Lee, Coi Leray, and many more.

Director Gus Van Sant defied the “world music” suggestion in the script of Good Will Hunting, and instead began piecing together the film using existing music from fellow Portlander (Oregon) and indie folk’s best-kept secret, Elliott Smith. Smith agreed to let Van Sant use four of his gleaming, fragile, somber songs, and donated the original “Miss Misery,” a song that became so acclaimed that Smith ended up singing it, alone onstage, at the 1998 Academy Awards. He lost the Best Original Song award to the unstoppable force that was Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” but it was a huge moment, indie rock wearing its heart on its sleeve on cinema’s biggest stage.

For historical value alone, Krush Groove is a thing of legend. This fictional account of the Def Jam story made an instant star out of brash 17-year-old powerhouse L.L. Cool J (“I Need a Beat”) and took the obnoxious, beer-spraying Beastie Boys from the punk clubs to MTV (“She’s on It”). Kurtis Blow got another classic with the glimmering “If I Ruled the World,” and the Fat Boys made sure you never looked at a Sbarro the same way with “All You Can Eat.” Chaka Khan and Debbie Harry got some dance hits out of the deal, and the Force M.D.s got their crossover moment with the modern bump-and-grind standard “Tender Love.” 

Sure, the soundtrack to the 1979 film Quadrophenia is essentially an obscurity compared to the Who’s classic rock opera Quadrophenia, originally released in 1973 — but what other movie soundtrack can boast 13 songs by the Who? Set in the mid-Sixties, Quadrophenia was released amid the U.K. mod revival of the late-1970s, meaning that in addition to a bunch of lightly remixed songs from the original LP, you get “Zoot Suit,” the quartet’s ignoble 1964 debut single as mod quartet the High Numbers. Side D is simply seven unassailable early-Sixties singles — James Brown, Booker T. and the M.G.’s, the Ronettes, the Crystals, and others — that could appropriately pregame any night on a Vespa.

Dirty Dancing was set in 1963, and while period-appropriate songs like the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” were essential to the film’s nostalgic appeal, the central romance between Jennifer Grey’s Frances “Baby” Houseman and Patrick Swayze’s Johnny Castle never could have caught fire without the quintessentially late-Eighties strains of Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’ “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life,” Eric Carmen’s “Hungry Eyes,” and Swayze’s own haunting ballad, “She’s Like the Wind.” Medley, previously best known as half of the Righteous Brothers, later admitted that he thought Dirty Dancing sounded “like a bad porno movie,” but the soundtrack became a pop-culture phenomenon, spending a whopping 18 weeks at Number One on the Billboard 200 chart, selling more than 24 million copies — making it the third best-selling soundtrack of all time, behind The Bodyguard and Saturday Night Fever — and blasting at full volume in countless suburban minivans for years to come.

The soundtrack to the brooding, black-clad comic-book film The Crow was proof positive that goth — not in sound but in essence — had taken over the world. Here was “Burn,” a lead track by no less influence on The Crow itself than goth-rock titans the Cure. Here was platinum alt-gnash behemoth Nine Inch Nails offering their first ever song for a movie soundtrack, and it’s a cover of Joy Division’s uneasy “Dead Souls.” Here’s the industrial rock of Machines of Loving Grace and My Life With the Thrill Kill Cult; the timeless dorm-room angst of Violent Femmes; the American shoegaze crew Medicine getting Liz Fraser from Cocteau Twins to do guest vocals; and Rollins Band covering proto-darkwave synth-punks Suicide. There’s some more aggro stuff, too (Rage Against the Machine, Helmet, Pantera), and a smash Stone Temple Pilots single (“Big Empty”), making The Crow a three-times-platinum sensation for all temperatures of disaffection.

Bill Murray’s road trip in Broken Flowers is powered by the slinky, serpentine grooves of Mulatu Astatke emerging from CD in his rental car. So smitten with the music of Astatke, director Jim Jarmusch wrote neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright) as Ethiopian American as a way to introduce Murray’s character to the music. The film broke the Ethio-jazz’s funky and shadowy songs to a wider American audience, kick-starting a wave of reissues, international tours, and hip-hop samples. Two of the six Astatke songs used in the movie are here — notably the beaming 1969 groove machine “Yègellé Tezeta.” Much of the rest leans into Jarmusch’s love of garage rock (the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Holly Golightly, The Greenhornes) and doom metal (an excerpt of Sleep’s hourlong stoner symphony Dopesmoker).

Warner Bros. wouldn’t let David Byrne helm his directorial debut unless it could ensure there was a Talking Heads album to go with it. Many of the songs in True Stories were actually handled by actors like John Goodman and John Ingle, ensembles like the St. Thomas Aquinas Elementary School Choir, and certified legends like Pops Staples — certainly a great fit for the eccentric little town of Virgil, Texas. However, Byrne himself leads the nine versions on the soundtrack album — a Talking Heads album for sure, even if it’s widely regarded as the band’s weakest. Still, it delivered one legitimate hit (“Wild, Wild Life”), an under-heralded hard rocker sardonically bulging with ad slogans (“Love for Sale”), a beaming ballad (“City of Dreams”), an oddball piece of steel-and-fiddle Americana (“People Like Us”), and one song that gave a certain English band its name (“Radio Head”).

Released the same month as Three Six Mafia’s “Stay Fly,” the Hustle & Flow soundtrack is perhaps the final moment of Memphis rap as a still relatively underground phenomenon. The Academy Award-winning “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” would take Three 6 Mafia to Hollywood for an eight-episode MTV reality show, but the rest of the soundtrack served as a high-profile look at some of 2005’s crunkest denizens of Music City and beyond. A naturally luxurious 8Ball and MJG track, a mosh-pit-ready banger from Al Kapone, and Terrance Howard’s scene-stealing version of “Whoop That Trick” (produced by Kapone and Lil Jon) all put down for Memphis, but a handful of Southern-rap A-listers (Juvenile, T.I., Mike Jones, Lil Boosie, Trina) serve as delegates to the larger Dirty South boomiverse.

This classic Eighties romance was known as Crazy for You in the United Kingdom, thanks to the runaway success of a certain song performed in the film by a still-on-the-rise superstar named Madonna. The rest captures mid-Eighties AOR rock radio at its most inspirational and soaring. There’s at least three “Eye of the Tiger”s on here: Journey’s youth-fire fist-pumper “Only the Young,” John Waite’s heart-gushing “Change,” and Dio’s the-Who-in-leather-pants chugger “Hungry for Heaven.” Matthew Modine, playing teenage wrestler Louden Swain, jumps rope to Red Rider’s proven hit “Lunatic Fringe” and cruises around to Don Henley’s heartland-rocking “She’s on the Zoom.”

This story of scrappy Delaware record-store clerks trying to thwart the encroachment of big business was an absolute bust in theaters, making less than four percent of its reported $10 million budget. However, the soundtrack might as well have been Batman Forever to alternative radio, yielding smashes like Edwyn Collins’ retro-cool “A Girl Like You” and the Gin Blossoms’ breezy “Til I Hear It From You.” The soundtrack is notable for Evan Dando duetting with Liv Tyler on a cover of Big Star’s “The Ballad of El Goodo,” but is mostly remembered as a perfect encapsulation of major-label alternative circa 1995, thanks to tracks by the Cranberries, Better Than Ezra, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Cracker, and A&M also-rans like the industrial-adjacent Drill, Southern power-pop crew Lustre, and punky ragers Ape Hangers.

Barbie truly owned pop culture in 2023, with the Mark Ronson–produced soundtrack generating nearly as much buzz as the Greta Gerwig feature it accompanied. The track list features some of the world’s biggest stars excelling in their signature lanes: Dua Lipa firing up the neo-disco mirror ball on “Dance the Night,” Billie Eilish grappling with the darkness on “What Was I Made For?,” and Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice toasting the luxe life with an assist from Europop legends Aqua in their riff on “Barbie World.” Meanwhile, contributions from Karol G, Tame Impala, and Fifty Fifty add crucial range via hints of reggaeton, psych-pop, and K-pop. And let’s not forget the cherry atop this decadent pink sundae: “I’m Just Ken,” co-star Ryan Gosling’s irresistible Eighties-style power ballad that had us all feeling the Kenergy.

“You gotta hear this one song — they’ll change your life, I swear,” Natalie Portman’s Garden State character says to Zach Braff’s as she loans him her headphones to check out the Shins’ “New Slang” in the film’s classic waiting-room meet-cute. It’s a fitting moment given that this compilation will forever epitomize the notion of film soundtrack as indie-rock mixtape. “Essentially, I made a mix CD with all of the music that I felt was scoring my life at the time I was writing the screenplay,” Braff said at the time of a track list that also included acts such as Coldplay, Zero 7, Iron & Wine, Nick Drake, and Simon and Garfunkel. It’s a perennially cozy selection that helped the Shins become an indie-household name and won Braff a Grammy for Best Soundtrack Album.

The Royal Tenenbaums was where Wes Anderson established himself as modern cinema’s foremost purveyor of the film soundtrack as immaculate hipster mixtape, a collection of songs both classic and obscure that blended as well as a chic outfit pieced together from thrift-store finds. The crown jewel here is, of course, Nico’s strangely affecting “These Days,” which soundtracks the momentous bus-stop reunion between doomed sibling lovers Richie and Margot, but other selections are just as inspired: the Ramones’ “Judy Is a Punk,” which plays behind a montage of Margot’s globe-trotting romantic past; Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay,” which accompanies Richie’s wrenching suicide attempt; and Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” the perfect counterpart to rogue patriarch Royal’s daytime mischief spree with his young grandsons.

The box-office smash Flashdance pioneered the idea in making your movie look and feel like the music videos beaming off nascent cable channel MTV. And after its cohesive synth-pop soundtrack had people dancing in the aisles, MTV would quickly become the hottest way for studios to advertise their movies. The iconic synths of Irene Cara’s “Flashdance … What a Feeling” (six weeks at Number One on the Billboard Hot 100) and Michael Sembello’s “Maniac” (two weeks at Number One on the Billboard Hot 100) still evoke images of off-shoulder sweaters and leg warmers. Synth hero Giorgio Moroder produced the gushing “Love Theme,” Donna Summer’s robo-punk banger “Romeo,” and Joe Esposito’s gauzy “Lady, Lady, Lady” — and he might as well have produced Karen Kamon’s “Call Me” rip “Manhunt.”

The acting debut from Mick Jagger was in Nicholas Roeg’s gritty, sex-soaked arthouse flick Performance. Warner Bros. did not get the Rolling Stones album they were hoping for, but instead got a Jack Nitzsche-produced barn burner featuring the Jagger blues-punk rager “Memo From Turner,” a hard-rocking Randy Newman number, some country-fried Ry Cooder guitar solos, and two pieces of blazing soul from Merry “Gimme Shelter” Clayton with Bernie Krause going absolutely Tron on the Moog. The performance of “Memo From Turner” in the film was marked by furious edits, lip-synching, and erratic lighting, foreshadowing what we would later know as “music video.”

In the giddiest, most wholesome John Waters movie, the dreams of Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake) revolve around The Corny Collins Show, WZZT’s fictional dance-music show broadcast across 1962 Baltimore. The soundtrack — which Waters called “obscure hits that remind you of the scariest kids in high school … the girls with giant hairdos and mosquito bites on their ankles, who quit school and ran off with carnival workers” is a loving collection of quirky, forgotten moves from the land of a thousand dances. Learn to do “The Roach” (Gene and Wendell), “The Bug” (Jerry Dallman and the Knightcaps), and “The Madison Time” (Ray Bryant Combo) on this masterwork of retro-kitsch curation from its reigning hero. The real boffo experience, however, remains watching the movie itself for more than a dozen more 45s (“The Fly,””The Bird,” “Mashed Potato Time,” “Limbo Rock”) from the beehive era.

The ultimate mixtape, the two volumes of New Jersey Drive don’t seem to have any overarching concept beyond “Let’s get all the hottest rappers of 1995 in one place.” It worked — the album went gold — and it’s got almost too many highlights to list. New York’s Ill Al Skratch (“Don’t Shut Down on a Player”) and Harlem’s E Bros (“Funky Piano”) shared opposite sides of an amazing 12-inch; OutKast (“Benz or Beamer”) previewed the robo-nocturnal feel of the following year’s ATLiens; the Notorious B.I.G. helps launch Bad Boy R&B group Total (“Can’t You See”); and Young Lay claimed an early national victory for Bay Area rap with “All About My Fetti.” New Jersey is, of course, represented by Redman, Lords of the Underground, and (on Vol. 2) Naughty by Nature.

The sunny, cheery alterna-pop of the Clueless soundtrack plays like a gel-pen riposte to the angsty, macho soundtracks of films like Natural Born Killers and The Crow. Bubble-punk heroes the Muffs cover Kim Wilde’s anthem “Kids in America,” Cracker storm the Flaming Groovies’ power-pop classic “Shake Some Action,” and Counting Crows cover coming-of-age-flick veterans the Psychedelic Furs. Absolutely loaded, the Clueless soundtrack features funky freak-outs from Lucious Jackson and Coolio, a scuzzy Beasties B side, Superdrag’s biggest hit, Jill Sobule’s sublime “Supermodel,” and an appearance from the film’s house-party band, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

Harmony Korine’s bleak and quirky look at rural America in the shadow of poverty was one of the earliest pieces of media to spotlight heavy music’s burgeoning underground — Scandinavian and American black metal, New Orleans sludge, California power violence, stoner metal, death grind, and more. Long before the YouTube generation’s obsession with black metal’s raw sound — and occasionally criminal backstories — Korine was layering Gummo with relentless blurs of Bathory, Nifelheim, Absu, and synth experiments of the notorious Burzum. The inclusion of two miasmic songs from Sleep’s stoner-doom standard Holy Mountain became a key point on their journey from cult Sabbath freaks to headlining icons.

The story of Eminem’s career highlight “Lose Yourself” is told by his Academy Award, his multiple Grammys, his Hot 100 domination, his Super Bowl performance, and the Mom’s Spaghetti restaurant in Detroit, open daily until 12 a.m. However, beyond Slim Shady, the rest of the circa 2002 gangsta rap on the official 8 Mile soundtrack doesn’t appear anywhere in the film. But the film- and period-accurate More Music From 8 Mile features an incontestable playlist of hip-hop classics booming throughout the semi-fictional 1995 of the film’s Jimmy “B-Rabbit” Smith. Of course, there’s Detroit legend MC Breed, but also the year’s most epochal song, the unwaveringly bleak “Shook Ones Pt. II” by Mobb Deep. The time capsule mostly showcases the rhyme pyrotechnics coming from the East Coast via certified radio hits by the Notorious B.I.G., Method Man, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and Naughty by Nature, but it also features the earliest trickling of contemporary Southern rap via Outkast’s ebullient debut, “Player’s Ball.” 

Following the blockbuster success of 1995’s Waiting to Exhale soundtrack, the Soul Food soundtrack provided seven more chances for songwriter Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds to work his syrupy, deeply emotional R&B magic. His sentimental piano ballad “A Song for Mama” (“Mama, I just want you to know/Loving you is like food for my soul”) was perfect for the family dramedy and became the fifth R&B Number One for Boyz II Men. Babyface’s melodramatic “We’re Not Making Love No More” was another chart smash for Dru Hill. Even his song for Milestone — the fictional in-universe group made up of K-Ci and JoJo, Babyface, and most of After 7 — became a Top 40 hit. The other five originals come courtesy of some of the greatest producers of the era: Teddy Riley, Puff Daddy, Jermaine Dupri, OutKast, and Timbaland, who scored a futuristic stutter-funk hit with Total’s “What About Us.”

Sofia Coppola’s offbeat, riotously stylized tale of Marie Antoinette’s life in the late 18th century was given a thoroughly modern soundtrack to match the Eighties New Romantic look and those infamous blue Converse. The explosion of pastel-coated images may look like French decadence, but her innate teenage energy is represented by a hall of fame of post-punk and mope rock: New Order, the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gang of Four, Adam and the Ants, and nü-brooders the Strokes. A montage of Antoinette enjoying champagne, shoes, jewelry, ostentatious hair, purse dogs, and colorful sweets is set to Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy.” “I mainly wanted to show that these were teenagers, and I associate this music with my teenage years,” Coppola told Vogue. “I wanted it to feel like those Adam Ant music videos I loved as a kid.”

The haunting freak folk of artists like Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom didn’t just crawl out of a cornfield on its own. Folk-horror classic The Wicker Man gave a sinister luster to British folk ballads, nursery rhymes, lullabies, and bar chants, providing not only an eerie vibe to the island of Summerisle, but providing a new way to give goosebumps. Spilling over with concertina, fife, lyre, jaw harp, fiddle, and ocarina, Paul Giovanni and Magnet plucked ominous strings. Movies and musicians seeking a mix of the pastoral and uneasy have been decamping to Summerisle ever since.

“The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem,” says John Cusack as High Fidelity‘s emotionally stunted record geek Rob Gordon. Luckily, music supervisor Kathy Nelson took the time for the film’s soundtrack, nailing a snob-approved aesthetic without ever tumbling into the world of the inaccessible or esoteric. Only the most contrarian of geeks could deny these canonical icons (Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello), Sixties proto-punks (Velvet Underground, the Kinks, 13th Floor Elevators), and turn-of-the-millennium indie acts (Smog, Royal Trux, Stereolab, and the Beta Band). Oh, and of course, Jack Black absolutely blazing through “Let’s Get It On.”

Quentin Tarantino’s ultraviolent debut juxtaposes its scenes of torture and chaos with the idyllic pop rock of the late Sixties and early Seventies: Blue Swede, Harry Nilsson, and, of course, Michael Madsen doing a little ad hoc surgery to “Stuck in the Middle With You” by Stealers Wheel. Tarantino had his mind set on the song before they even hired actors, and says the rights ate up the entirety of the film’s original $30,000 music budget. “The problem was, for the $30,000 they were paying, it was probably going to stop others from using the song,” Tarantino told Deadline in a tribute to EMI music executive Pat Lucas. “That came true; whenever you hear ‘Stuck in the Middle With You,’ you see Michael Madsen torturing that guy.”

The rocksteady-heavy soundtrack to 1972’s The Harder They Fall gets the accolades for exposing reggae to the world. The music for 1978 Jamaican Robin Hood tale Rockers is essential for exploring the aftermath — a darker, moodier collection that takes in the emergence of the slower-paced, highly political roots reggae and the murky influence of dub. Rockers emerged during the late-Seventies zenith of roots reggae, showcasing acts like Burning Spear, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, and Third World as they were taking over U.K. punk clubs. Junior Murvin’s police-brutality landmark “Police and Thieves” is here, as well as Peter Tosh’s indelibly tough “Steppin’ Razor” and Jacob Miller’s privacy plea “Tenement Yard.”