Now That’s What I Call an OST:
6 Writers on the Best Soundtracks in Film

A few years ago, I was at my friends’ apartment in Santa Monica, thinking about this decade-plus gulf that separated the summer breaks I’d spent in LA as a kid and the work trips I’d recently started taking there as an adult. We were planning dinner at a restaurant that had just opened a location in the nearly-renovated Century City Westfield. The words “Century City,” must have triggered this recollection of me, a kid in the mid-90s, begging my parents to take us to a restaurant called Dive!, a novelty restaurant owned by practical effects and nautical enthusiasts Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Unreal experiences that propelled my formative imagination in ways that begged the question: could any of these places possibly evoke the same response in adult me?

I apologized to my friends and told them that I needed to visit Universal Studios. Thankfully, my friends love theme parks. There was only one attraction I was actually there to revisit: the Jurassic Park River Adventure Ride. I’ve always loved movies about facilities (Deep Blue Sea, The Thing, Aliens, Sphere, etc) and 1993’s Jurassic Park is the undisputed don dada of films that concern elaborate corporate boondoggles in remote locations gone awry. You might imagine how my ten-year-old brain went completely supernova when I’d last visited Universal Studios in 1996, the year their Jurassic Park attraction debuted. As far as I was concerned, this ride had confirmed that Jurassic Park was real: I felt the heat roaring off the gate torches, heard the electric fences crackling, opened crates with inGen logos stenciled on the sides, brushed past ferns the size of SUVs, and tasted the green Jell-O in the gift shop that seemed lifted straight out of the movie.

Back then, as I panicked through the winding line to get on the ride, I found myself overcome by the heady blend of awe and fear that John Williams has regularly spoken of trying to achieve with his seminal, unimpeachable two hit combo, “Theme from Jurassic Park” and “Journey to the Island.” By the time we got off the boat, drenched and having survived a T-Rex ambush by plummeting down a dam wall, the people next to us noted that, while they’d never heard a kid swear so much, they appreciated me pointing out every dinosaur and corresponding scene from the movie.

You’ve probably guessed by now that almost nothing about Jurassic Park River Adventure Ride holds up. The animatronics are saggy and need new paint. The plants seem sparse. The gift shop mostly sells stuff from other movies. The “drop” at the end of the ride feels less thrilling than accelerating over a speed bump. And yet, as soon as you hear the first, plaintive strains of “Theme from Jurassic Park” and “Journey to the Island” piping through the speakers hidden in rocks strewn around the waiting area, all of that decrepitude washes away. Immediately, you’re right back to where you were when you saw Jurassic Park in 1993, gaping bug-eyed alongside Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler as they scramble out of a Jeep Wrangler to catch their first glimpse of a living, breathing Brachio-fucking-saurus, softly backlit atop a rolling knoll on Isla Nublar. For me, I was seven and positively glued to a theater seat in Hong Kong, unable to process the prickly buzz shooting through my nervous system while the string section gave way to the horns, but somehow fully aware that this indelible score would secretly play in my brain for the rest of my life whenever something took my breath away with its unknowable majesty. It’s why classmates paid me in ice cream to draw the T-Rex skeleton silhouette on their notebook covers (before it became cool to draw skate logos instead). It’s why I convinced everyone in junior high band to basically unionize and inform our instructor that the only thing we’d be playing in the fall recital was “Theme from Jurassic Park” and/or “Journey to the Island.”

John Williams, for all of his indispensable contributions to cinema, truly tapped a vein with the Jurassic Park score...and “Theme from Jurassic Park” and “Journey to the Island” are the crown jewels amongst a soundtrack of crown jewels that sit atop an oeuvre comprised exclusively of crown jewels. There are dozens of think-pieces that explain how the motifs throughout these two compositions tickle our reptile brains or whatever, but I, for one, am simply and eternally grateful that—in an era increasingly calcified by jaded irony— a piece of music will forever remind me that eliciting an honest feeling is why we endeavor to tell stories, at all.

Thank you, John Williams.

Phil Chang is an independent creative director and brand strategist based in New York City. He has had the great fortune of working on multidisciplinary projects with clients across a broad spectrum of industries. Some of these clients and partners include Apple, Nike, Netflix, Calvin Klein, SSENSE, Bottega Veneta, adidas, Samsung, HBO, The Museum of Modern Art, Dropbox, ESPN, A24, and Arc'teryx.

“Inhalation is a beginning as much as exhalation is an ending. The only trust required is to know that when there is one ending, there will be another beginning,” poet Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in one of my favorite books on female archetypes, Women Who Run with the Wolves. Forest Whitaker’s Waiting to Exhale (1995) is about four friends (the maiden, the queen, the lover, the mother) all “holding their breath” until the day they find a love that’s right and can finally exhale. Whitney Houston is in love with a married man. Lela Rochon can’t let go of her ex. Angela Bassett’s husband leaves her for a white woman. The father of Lorretta Devine’s baby is gay. Besides the film imbuing the rich, glowy hues of 90s beauty queens (chestnut lowlights, brown lipstick, cocoa-colored negligées), its Babyface soundtrack is particularly memorable for its love ballads, an emotional framework to the interior lives of four Black women navigating the complexities of singlehood.

What I love most about the storyline, and soundtrack, is that it weaves themes beyond romance. It transports us through a woman’s evolution, and her sources of comfort (a phone call after a hard day, dancing at home to TLC, the late night radio DJ, walking into a busy room, alone, a little more confidently just because Brandy is playing). Maybe it’s in the ineffable composition that results from a soulful roster of all-Black female R&B artists—Toni Braxton, Mary J. Blige, Aretha Franklin, Brandy, Chaka Khan, Sonja Marie—but what they all impart so well here is the beauty and logical range of each character’s emotions: Crucial is her rage. Her devotion. Her disappointments and strengths to overcome. Her progression, her transformation. Her friendships. The score lends itself to being the quintessential “I WILL NOT GIVE UP ON LOVE” playlist—searching, melodramatic—every song flows into the next like waterworks, making you want to let out a deep, resigned sigh. It’s what you’d put on the stereo during a first date, or daydream to when you’re at the salon after a fresh breakup. As Whitney Houston asks, “Why do people write these songs? It makes people want to believe and dream.”

Vivien Lee is a writer and DJ based in NYC and Seoul. Her writings have appeared in New York Magazine, Document Journal, Observer, and elsewhere.

I’ve always been struck by how a note on a synthesizer can last forever. No breath is needed, no strumming or bowing to keep it going. It feels like a new relationship to time in music, maybe closest to the blast of a church organ, eternally held. Michael Mann’s Thief opens with chords like this, streaming over the night streets of Chicago like mist, as a safecracking crew embarks on a heist. One guy sits in a car with a police scanner, another rewires the building’s alarms, and somewhere deep within, mastermind Frank (James Caan) goes to town on a safe with a 200-pound drill. While Frank breaches steel, the music shifts to staccato notes that gallop and trip along, amid the lightning strikes of electric guitar riffs that cut across the score. A thumping beat drops once Frank’s inside the safe. High notes return for the getaway by car, now suggesting rays of light from the dawn just hours away. Loot locked away, the crew split up. Safe.
“Diamond Diary” is one of three main sequences on the Thief soundtrack, by German band Tangerine Dream, the titans of analog who scored William Friedkin’s Sorcerer and the subway dreaming of Risky Business. Their music now feels custom-built for Frank’s industrial-strength operations. They signify first progress, then suspense—the soundtrack to an obscure work ethic and thieves’ code of honor, in the face of corrupting mobsters and dirty cops. These synths mingle with the musique concrete of Frank’s jobs and the city.
Yet Tangerine Dream was not the obvious choice for a movie set in the home of Chicago blues, which Mann also considered. (The scene of a bar meetup between Caan and Tuesday Weld does feature a live North Side number, Mighty Joe Young’s “Turning Point,” that’s got a walking rock you can’t help bobbing along to.) But the massive sequencers of Tangerine Dream have a novel commanding force, quite unlike the lightweight synths that became an 80s cliché (see also: “Axel F,” Beverly Hills Cop). And that weight to Tangerine Dream’s sound still fascinates me. You almost can’t imagine someone playing them; it’s as if they’re generated from the earth.
These chunky synths have—and I’m not even sure Mann intended this—an implicit brittleness. Yes, they can be thrillingly cold, hard, even metallic. But the power can also go out. The switch can be thrown. At the end of Thief, the soundtrack soars with a Pink Floyd-esque electric guitar freak-out (not played by Tangerine Dream), when Frank firebombs his own house and hunts down his mobster patron. The scene is spelled out as the nihilistic exit strategy of an excon, but the music tells the story. The monumental synths built up by Tangerine Dream have crumbled, the eternal chords are gone, and mortal time goes back to marching on.

Nicolas Rapold is an editor and writer from New York. He writes regularly for The New York Times and has contributed to Artforum and Reverse Shot, among other publications. He has worked as editor-in-chief of Film Comment, and hosts the podcast The Last Thing I Saw.

Over the years, the films of Portuguese director Miguel Gomes and their soundtracks have gotten me through many sad holiday seasons. I remember December 2015 by my solo dates to Lincoln Center, where I watched all three volumes of Gomes’s sweeping, six-hour-plus epic, Arabian Nights, followed by chilly walks around the Upper West Side listening to different versions of “Perfidia”—the musical centerpiece of the film. Even beyond the end credits, I’d put on the playlist and stew in my own unrequited feelings until my quiet suffering started to feel romantic.

A few Christmases earlier, it was the 2012 film Tabu that left my heart ripped out of my chest, beating violently. Taking place in two different time periods, Gomes’s black-and-white drama is as much about colonialism in Africa and its reflection on modern-day Portuguese politics as it is an intimate, enchanting look into personal memories. It is one of the most romantic films I have ever seen. In its latter half, the narrator, Gian Luca (voiced by Gomes and acted out by the impossibly handsome Carloto Cotta) recalls a steamy love affair he had with a married woman named Aurora sometime in the 60s. These flashbacks are without dialogue; instead, along with the narration, it’s filled with sounds of rustling nature and alternate versions of heart-tugging oldies—somewhat more wholesome accompaniments to its sumptuous, erotic images. Twice, the Spanish cover of The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” plays (Les Surfs’ “Tu Serás Mi Baby”). Both times, different characters cry on screen; every time, I cry along with them.

But one of my favorite needle drops of all time sits between those two instances: The Ramones’ cover of The Ronettes’ “Baby, I Love You.” Gomes positions this song not as a background piece but as a performance itself. Gian Luca’s band plays the song at a poolside party, lip-synced by its frontman Mário. It is odd and anachronistic (The Ramones covered the song in 1980). And though the words don’t come out of Gian Luca’s own mouth, the first lines further contextualize the illicit, sensual touching between him and Aurora—shown just the scene before—with even more pained longing: “Have I ever told you / how good it feels to hold you / it isn’t easy to explain.”

Kristen Yoonsoo Kim is a South Korea-born, New York-based film critic who writes for The New York Times.

One of the best things about the film industry, or maybe the best thing, is the glut of work it creates: the jobs, jobs and more jobs that get laid for a movie to happen. Gaffers set the lights and best boys run the department; there are sub-foremen and techs and gang bosses and draftspersons, there are caterers. Excelling on one film means the chance to shine on another, move to a bigger chair, or just keep working; in a desiccated work market, film production, built on unions, offer one of the few real brass rings left. One job, music supervisor, is about what it sounds like. In the 1990s, Happy Walters, a freshly graduated college kid from Indiana, did just that for a lousy action film starring Emilio Estevez, and in the process more or less birthed a whole genre of music.
The Judgement Night soundtrack, which Walters supervised, produced and executed—along with a ton of other people—is one of those ancillary curios that outlives its main point, like a meme from a reality TV show or a nice museum postcard. The movie is about police, I think—I’m not super sure—and its soundtrack is a collaboration of rappers and rock groups writing songs about that. The bands ran the gamut from big time to critical darlings to also-rans and the rappers were established and new, solo and groups. Is it a good record? Hard to say. But it’s a colorful one, and has lasted, with a sonic variety that set the parameters of rap-rock, nu-metal, whatever it’s called, over the next decade. Before Judgment Night, that genre peeked out in fits and spurts: a Rage Against the Machine record here, some collaborative songs there. Afterwards it was set.
A Rolling Stone oral history of the record from a couple years back reads like a beltway account of a senate campaign, full of logistics and wheeling-dealing. Artists get corralled, they have managers, and make serious money. But in rap, where a good year can feel like a decade, this music, from 1993, is charming and distant. An industrial-sounding Helmet-House of Pain collaboration begins things; Ice-T and Run DMC mostly shout on their respective tracks, which works; Cypress Hill appears twice. Some songs sound like intro scenes from high school movies set in South California. There’s a whole mess of goal posts here. The record comes off as a set of varied production techniques to set behind rapping.
It all makes for an honest document from an era when flush industries let artists throw ideas at the wall, and see what stuck. Some did. Walters would go on to manage Korn and Incubus, and Ozzfest happened. Ice-T would sing for a metal group; he still does. Walters supervised another collaborative experiment a bit later, the Spawn soundtrack, this time mashing up metal and electro. Kind of like a sequel to a sound.

Sam Reiss writes a newsletter for GQ about vintage clothing and a column for Inverse.com about powerlifting and nutrition, and about furniture, design, and other topics for GQ Style, ESPN and other publications.

In movies, southern hip-hop has enjoyed even less thoughtful engagement than it has historically received in the press. With a handful of exceptions—Cash Money Records’ Baller Blockin' (2000), the crime saga shot in New Orleans that produced the hit “Project Bitch”; Hustle & Flow (2005), with original music by legendary Memphis group Three 6 Mafia; OutKast’s Idlewild (2006)—there’s not much to point to. Were it not for southern rap, hip-hop wouldn’t be the most popular genre in contemporary music. But you wouldn’t know it by sticking to the megaplex.

Before the first shot, Barry Jenkins’ Best Picture-winner Moonlight (2016) nods to its in-the-know audience members. In your ear, there’s the wash of the tide against the shore and then the voice of Boris Gardiner singing: “Every n***** is a star.” Damn, you may be thinking, this is set in Florida but it’s still looking outside the south for artistic credibility. Revisit Moonlight with the volume cranked, though, and you can hear a subtle but important shift in Gardiner’s voice: it’s been screwed.

The legend of DJ Screw doesn’t diminish in the retelling. In the early 1990s, in Houston, Robert Earl Davis, Jr. introduced a style that expanded musical possibility forever by slowing (screwing) a record’s tempo, while also stuttering and repeating certain moments (chopping). Using the pitch control and crossfade on two turntables, Davis would make bespoke mixes for friends that featured freestyles from local artists and peers, along with chopped and screwed versions of popular records. Those tapes are otherworldly and beautiful celebrations of community, of what’s possible with your crew gathered in a room together, taking turns creating. (A 24-minute track called “So Tired of Ballin” resurfaced earlier this year because it held a verse from George Floyd.) Across the city, demand grew for Davis’ homemade tapes, eventually known as screw tapes. He sold them from his home before opening a store of his own in 1998. It stocked nothing but his music. He died two years later, of a codeine-related overdose.

Moonlight is the first major movie, if not the first movie period, to use chopped and screwed on its soundtrack. After the opening, the first real taste arrives in the film’s third chapter, when the protagonist Chiron is living in Atlanta, serving and posturing behind gold grills and chiselled muscle in a low-slung Cutlass Supreme. Driving at night while listening to chopped and screwed is fantastic—the languid drift of the car around corners and through yellow puddles of street-lamp light mirrors the unhurried vocals blowing through the speakers. Time is dilated. In the soft beams of the headlights and the dashboard glow, the entire world is spectral. Chiron listens to Erykah Badu’s “Tyrone” as he winds through housing parking lots; the crown resting on the dash glitters but doesn’t move an inch as Chiron steers. He takes his time. “Take my pills, pay my bills/I'm here to let you know that what I feel is real,” Badu sings in the syrupy style originated by Screw. (He often used R&B songs in his mixes to stunning effect.) Later, Jidenna’s “Classic Man,” chopped and screwed, accompanies Chiron’s return to Miami.

These scenes are short and unshowy. A lesser filmmaker might have embellished the moments, exulting in their own brilliant idea to use this music. (Nicholas Britell, the composer, hadn’t heard of chopped and screwed before Jenkins introduced him to it.) Jenkins uses it diegetically. For the film’s characters, chopped and screwed is just one of the sounds of life.

Ross Scarano is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn.