The 25 best soundtracks of the '90s

Grunge shook up the rock music world in late 1991 with a trio of multi-platinum releases from three Seattle-based bands: Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. By the summer of ’92, grunge was a full-fledged fad and one that Cameron Crowe was poised to capitalize on with his Seattle-set romantic-comedy “Singles.” Warner Bros inexplicably bumped the summer release to the fall, but the soundtrack dropped in the middle of summer and became an instant classic thanks to tracks like Alice in Chains’ “Would?,” Pearl Jam’s “State of Love and Trust” and Screaming Trees’ “Nearly Lost You.”

Richard Linklater’s immersive 1970s flashback hit theaters in 1993 and quickly became a cult favorite among college students who were barely sentient for the era depicted in the film. While the soundtrack was a must-own, its 14 songs were a meager sampling of the wall-to-wall ‘70s music in the movie. A second soundtrack was released the following year, bumping the song total up to 26, and even then there were still pivotal songs missing (most notably Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion”). But these two soundtracks generally hit the classic-rock spot for “Dazed and Confused” fans.

Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee assembled an essential early-‘90s hip-hop time capsule in the soundtrack to Ernest Dickerson’s Harlem crime flick, “Juice.” The 14 songs mostly showcase the hard-nosed East Coast sound, the highlights being Naughty by Nature’s “Uptown Anthem,” Eric B. & Rakim’s “Juice (Know the Ledge)” and EPMD’s “It’s Going Down.” But an up-and-coming crew from Los Angeles called Cyprus Hill nearly steals the show with “Shoot ‘Em Up.”

David Lynch’s bizarre mash-up of “Wizard of Oz” and Elvis films won the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival at the height of the “Twin Peaks” craze. Anything associated with Lynch was hip. Though the movie was a box office disappointment, the soundtrack proved a hot commodity thanks to the audacious speed metal of Powermad’s “Slaughterhouse,” Nicolas Cage’s Elvis covers and Chris Isaak’s top-10 hit “Wicked Game.”

Paul Thomas Anderson studied his Scorsese well before crafting his heartfelt porn-industry masterpiece “Boogie Nights.” The film kicks off in the lively disco heyday of the late 1970s before skidding out in the power-pop wasteland of the early 1980s, and while its two soundtracks draw heavily from these eras, they also work in timeless classics from The Beach Boys, Melanie and War. The collections lose points by not immediately following up Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” with Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl.”

Happy Walters made a name for himself as a Hollywood music supervisor with this sporadically successful concept soundtrack. The idea to pair hip-hop acts with rock artists was roughly inspired by the film’s nice-suburban-dudes-vs-urban-bad-dudes premise, and, leaving aside the troubling cultural implications, yielded at least one classic in the De La Soul/Teenage Fanclub team-up “Fallin’.” The soundtrack wasn’t a commercial success (nor was the film), but it was several years ahead of the rap-rock revolution.

This Allan Moyle cult hit stars Christian Slater as a nerdy introvert who unexpectedly becomes a truth-telling hero to his peers when he launches a pirate radio station out of his basement. He complements his profanely inspiring diatribes with rebellious rock of the past and present, some of which is featured on the film’s soundtrack. Those hoping to hear Leonard Coen’s original recording of “Everybody Knows” might’ve been disappointed to find only the cover version by Concrete Blonde (played over the film’s closing credits), but the rest of the soundtrack (featuring the likes of Soundgarden, Bad Brains and Sonic Youth) is aces.

When Dr. Dre and Ed Lover made a play for big-screen stardom with 1993’s cop comedy “Who’s the Man?,” they reached out to the countless hip-hop artists they’d promoted over the last five years on “Yo! MTV Raps” for a little soundtrack assistance. They were rewarded with an 11-track masterpiece of a mixtape that kicked off with the first commercially released solo track from The Notorious B.I.G. and kept on bumping with previously unreleased gems from Mary J. Blige, Erick Sermon, Jodeci, House of Pain and more.

If you need a couple of musicians to score a nightmare, you can’t do much better than Trent Reznor and Angelo Badalamenti. The soundtrack for David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” is as disturbingly seductive as the film; it hooks you with David Bowie’s haunting “I’m Deranged” before handing the keys over to Reznor and the pulverizing industrial rock of “The Perfect Drug.” Contributions from Smashing Pumpkins, Rammstein and Lou Reed are interwoven with mesmerizing instrumentals from Badalamenti. It’s a great soundtrack to lose sleep to.

Wes Anderson hit the hipster jackpot big time with this stylishly rowdy film about a private school troublemaker (Jason Schwartzman) who befriends a disillusioned industrialist (Bill Murray) while falling for a grade school teacher (Olivia Williams). If the movie hit your sweet spot, you probably marched straight out of the theater to the nearest record store, where you snatched up the soundtrack featuring songs from Cat Stevens, The Who, Yves Montand (!) and forgotten British Invasion bands like The Creation and Unit 4+2.

This short 12-song collection is essentially the greatest hits of Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas.” The film itself boasts a track list of nearly 50 songs, ranging from the 1950s crooner pop of Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis to the hard rock and punk of The Rolling Stones and Sid Vicious. As a result, it’s best to focus on what’s there than what’s missing. Taken on its own, the “Goodfellas” soundtrack is a keeper (i.e. it’s got the piano exit from Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla”).

This might sound like sacrilege, but it’s true: No filmmaker has a better ear for music than Quentin Tarantino. In his first film, “Reservoir Dogs,” the man revitalized the careers of obscure 1970s acts like Stealers Wheel and The George Baker Selection. That was just a warm-up for the musical smorgasbord of the “Pulp Fiction” soundtrack, which deftly segues from the surfer rock of Dıck Dale to the funk of Kool & the Gang to the good-time country of The Statler Brothers — all interspersed with memorable dialogue samples from the movie. It’s the party mixtape you never knew you needed.

Eager to replicate the commercial success of “Pulp Fiction,” Miramax threw every bit of its then-considerable marketing muscle into promoting Danny Boyle’s junkie caper “Trainspotting.” While it didn’t come close to matching the U.S. box office haul of Tarantino’s masterpiece, the soundtrack had an equally profound pop-cultural impact. You can thank this LP for the ubiquity of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” in television advertisements. On the plus side, the soundtrack brought Underworld mainstream success thanks to its inclusion of “Born Slippy (Nuxx).”  

Never one for half-measures, Spike Lee followed up his incendiary “Do the Right Thing” with a film that he believed would kick off a modern jazz renaissance. Overlong and a touch self-indulgent, Lee’s “Mo’ Better Blues” didn’t make much of an impact in theaters. Tragically, the film’s wonderful soundtrack featuring the commercially accessible jazz of Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard also came up short, failing to connect with younger listeners as intended. For those with an ear for peerless musicianship, it’s ripe for rediscovery.

Quentin Tarantino threw his fans for a loop with this relaxed, non-transgressive adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s “Rum Punch,” which might explain why the film’s soundtrack isn’t nearly as celebrated as his other compilations despite being the best of the bunch. It’s a soul-centric assortment of songs that’s as sly, sexy and melancholy as the movie itself. Tarantino audaciously starts the film with the theme song from the Blaxploitation classic “Across 100th Street,” and cleverly drops in star Pam Grier’s “Long Time Woman” from her 1971 prison flick “The Big Doll House.”

Allen and Albert Hughes’ debut film is a cautionary gangster tale set in the Bloods-and-Crips battlefield of early 1990s Los Angeles, which means there’s a lot of great music to go along with incessant gun play. Compton’s own MC Eiht gets the standout track with the ruminative  "Streiht Up Menace," but there are some equally strong contributions from Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Ant Banks and Too Short. And don’t forget DJ Quik spending his entire verse of "Can’t F--- Wit a N----" spit-roasting House of Pain’s Everlast as payback for some ill-advised slight.

John Singleton’s coming-of-age tale was the first American movie to thoughtfully explore the gang violence that had turned South Central Los Angeles into a war zone in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it hit hard. It also spawned a hugely influential soundtrack featuring solid contributions from Ice Cube (“How to Survive in South Central”), Main Source (“Just a Friendly Game of Baseball”) and Tevin Campbell (“Just Ask Me To”). And for once, the obligatory selection from the film’s score — “Black on Black Crime” from jazz great Stanley Clarke — wasn’t intrusive!

Based on the first entry in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins detective series, this Denzel Washington vehicle takes advantage of its 1948 setting with a well-curated assortment of vintage jump blues, boogie-woogie and jazz standards from greats like Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Wynonie Harris and Memphis Slim. It’s a specific time-and-place that doesn’t get a great deal of cinematic traffic for infuriating reasons, so when you get a film and a soundtrack that treats the era with the utmost respect, you’ve got to savor it.

In the liner notes for the “Malcolm X” soundtrack, Spike Lee writes, “Malcolm loved to dance, and to be around the music. We have attempted to recreate that music, that sound — the distinct sound of the African-American experience.” It’s all here: jazz, blues, R&B and 1960s soul. Though Malcolm X’s story ends in tragedy, Lee finds a degree of hope in the music that swirled around the man, closing out the soundtrack with Sam Cooke’s prayer for humanity, “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Oh yes, it will.

Todd Haynes’ chronicle of England’s glam rock scene in the early 1970s captures the look and the attitude of the era despite having to make do without a single David Bowie song (he disapproved of the screenplay). Haynes cleverly mixes up original versions of hits from T. Rex and Roxy Music with first-rate covers by Placebo, Shudder to Think and new songs from The Venus in Furs (a Brit-rock supergroup fronted by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke).

The slasher film made a postmodern comeback with Wes Craven’s “Scream," and this time it had a hip alternative soundtrack. This isn’t meant as a knock on the metal-friendly “Friday the 13th” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” sequels. I mean, who among us has never banged their head to Dokken? But the less aggro approach perfectly complemented the film’s subversive tone. Besides, you don’t have to be loud to be scary, as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds prove with “Red Right Hand.”

The movie stinks, but that didn’t stop this sucker from becoming the top-selling soundtrack of all time. The LP includes the Academy Award-nominated songs “Run to You” and “I Have Nothing,” but it’s all about Whitney Houston’s cover of a little Dolly Parton song called “I Will Always Love You.” Houston was already one of the biggest pop stars in the world when the film came out, but this success was unprecedented for even her. 

The perfect 1970s soul primer for younger listeners who’d just been turned on to the sweet sounds of Al Green and The Brothers Johnson by “Pulp Fiction.” Filmmaking brothers Albert and Allen Hughes stuffed their Vietnam War-era crime flick with prime cuts from R&B greats like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes and Isaac Hayes. As was the soundtrack custom of the day, the label shoehorned a piece of the movie’s orchestral score into the mix, but other than that incongruity, this LP is a stone groove.

You were always an Aimee Mann fan, but you might not have known it before Paul Thomas Anderson dedicated the majority of this soundtrack to her. The film is a multi-character study of lives under duress in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, and for reasons that make perfect emotional sense, Anderson links them via Mann’s music. At one point, the film pauses to allow its characters to share a sung epiphany via the song “Wise Up.” The Mann tunes would be more than enough, but Anderson sweetens the deal by throwing in a couple of Supertramp classics. 

The SNL-inspired comedy smash earned some of its biggest laughs through its references to pop hits like Gary Wright’s “Dream Weaver” and The Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz (covered in the film by Tia Carrere). But most people bought the soundtrack so they could replay the group-participation cover of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Wayne, Garth and Co. There are also some above-average unreleased tracks from Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Alice Cooper too!