What is a soundtrack? (geeky rant—too trivial for the Pit)

Cafe Society
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Okay, so I’m a soundtrack geek. I have been since I was a young teenager. I buy mostly film scores—you know, where someone like John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner or Rachel Portman composes a mostly (or usually, completely) instrumental score. Once in a while I’ll get a “compilation” soundtrack (collection of pop songs from different artists used in the film), but usually it’s just the instrumental score.

I know I’m not the only geek out there. There are scores (okay, I couldn’t resist) of publications and record labels that cater to the score-driven soundtrack fan. We’re geeks. We’re hardcore geeks. Scores to old movies that people don’t really remember anymore are resurrected because the composer (who may be long dead) is a particular favorite of us geeks. It’s all about the composer for some of us.

So it really gripes me when I read soundtrack reviews on places like Amazon.com and see a really quite good film score get poor to downright dismal ratings because the idiots (and yes I mean idiots) can’t seem to get it through their head that this soundtrack was of the score. That’s right, the instrumental score. Outraged reviews (complete with one-star rating) proclaim, “This score didn’t have XXX’s (popular rock or pop group) song on it! I bought the CD for this song! This is no soundtrack! It’s a fraud! Who are they trying to kid? What is this stuff that is on the CD?!?! What a rip-off!”

If it were just one or two reviews that had this attitude, it wouldn’t drive me so batty, but in some cases it’s a lot of them. So bad that a really wonderful score (perhaps by an Oscar-nominated composer) will get one or two stars. All because a bunch of morons can’t get it through their head that soundtracks don’t always mean pop songs from the movie. I don’t know where people get that idea. They just aren’t thinking, I guess.

Of course, the record labels could do a better job sometimes. For instance, in one of Jerry Goldsmith’s Oscar nominated scores (he had so many . . . ) L.A. Confidential, the record label released two soundtrack CDs: One with the oldies songs used in the movie, and the other with Goldsmith’s outstanding score. Good all around. (Though I’m sure that a few bozos bought the “wrong” soundtrack and then proceeded to bitch about it.)

So, that’s my rant. I am fed up with people assuming that all soundtracks have got to include the pop songs—that this is what a soundtrack is—just a compilation of pop songs. No, it isn’t. Not always. If these people think that the record label is always going to forsake an outstanding score by Hans Zimmer, or Thomas Newman, or whoever, just so that some pop songs (which in some cases can be found elsewhere) can be placed on the CD, well, they need to get educated. And they need to stop trashing perfectly good soundtracks, simply because they’re too ignorant (and too lazy) to look at the track listing on the CD and see what exactly is on there.

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Soundtracks include all the songs in a movie. Even though they may have played for only 10 seconds.

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Ain’t that the truth. Very often I have a hard time figuring out where a particular song was played, it was so fleeting. But oh my gosh! It must be on the CD! Boot off part of the instrumental score to make room for this (inconsequential) song that nobody was really able to hear!

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See, I always thought that the score was the instrumental part, and the soundtrack was the songs. Isn’t that standard?

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Actually, I don’t think so. I always took it to mean any music that is used in the background. And Dictionary.com says so too:

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Maybe we should trot out a specialized word here: underscore. That’s the non-song music that does not come from any on-screen source in a movie, and is not part of a musical number.

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I think I can narrow your rant down to a point in the 80s, when movie musicals died and were replaced by movies about music, in which soundtracks comprised mostly of songs with lyrics overwhelmed instrumentals. That is one element that changed people’s perceptions of what soundtracks were and what they then expected a soundtrack to be.

By the 90s the music industry and movie industry realized there was money to be made off of rights to songs used in movies (“The Big Chill” comes to mind right away), so that eventually we ended up in a situation where, by this point, some movies market songs as if certain songs were as important as the actors. And like the lame trend of video games based on movies, you can typically find a lame soundtrack of pop/rock/rap songs for just about every movie. I don’t know how well these sell, but I do know they labels give these things away to music critics like they’re candy.

Someone complaining about a song not being on a soundtrack because it’s the instrumental tracks, wow, talk about sad and not very resourceful. Chances are likely that song is already on an album or EP anyway unless it’s like the “theme” from the movie.

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Actually, this is just another abuse that can be laid at the foot of George Lucas (i.e., American Grafitti). Prior to that, it was rare for a non-musical film to have a soundtrack filled with popular songs*. Lucas used it to good effect, but two things happened: directors started imitating the concept, and producers realized they could make money with an album of the songs. Now it is routine for a movie to use popular songs everywhere they can. You can even see them promoting the songs in their ads (“Lousy Movie” starring blur blur blur, and featuring songs by BIG HIT ARTIST!")

*Woodstock may have also been an influence – the album was a monster hit – but that was a concert film.

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I’m also a soundtrack loon, although my tastes run to Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Hermann, Max Steiner, Dmitri Tiomkin, Wolfgang Korngold and their ilk.

The thing is that the record (CD, whatever) is always shorter than the movie – the record is perhaps 20 minutes or 30 minutes of music. The movie is anywhere from 90 minutes to 4 hours. So the CD is never a “complete” soundtrack (or score), they always leave lots of stuff out.

My vinyl soundtrack of HELP!, for instance, has (in addition to all the Beatles’ songs), several cute little instrumental bits (like the James-Bond-like theme that plays during the first ice-cream truck scene, with the nails dropping out of the headlight.) The CD version didn’t have any of those.

So, someone somewhere picks and chooses. Alas. What I wouldn’t give for the complete soundtrack from THE TEN COMMANDMENTS or ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD…

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I’ve always used “score” as the term for the music made to create atmosphere in a movie, and “soundtrack” to describe one of those “hits of today” compilations they associate with movies. Of course, using “soundtrack” by itself is ambiguous I suppose but “score” is fairly unambiguous.

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Ideally they should all of both. The soundtrack for Born on the 4th of July is a good example of how to do it right. All the pop songs come first (in their entirety, unimpeded by overlays of dialog or volume-changes / radio static / etc as deployed in the movie) then the excellent score (unimpeded by pop songs and etc) follows, divided into movements. Easy to listen to one, the other, or both.

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Ideally , sentences should a verb.

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Word of advice: Anyone who refers to a Broadway “soundtrack” within the hearing range of a musicals fanatic is likely to be crushed with the nearest heavy object.

Shows have “cast recordings” darlin’.

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Thanks everyone, it’s nice to get some further input on this (and to be able to kvetch!).

Yeah, they’re all good too (Bernstein and Herrmann are also on my short list—don’t have enough soundtracks by Tiomkin or Korngold at the moment).

It’s always been this way, or so it seems. Some soundtracks are worse than others. Back in the LP days they were limited by the space on the LP—usually not more than 50 minutes or so. But now that CDs can have up to 75 or so minutes, there really isn’t any excuse to not have more music. In some cases, they do. (I’ll never forget my shock when I discovered that the Rambo II soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith was about 70 minutes long!) But I’ve heard that when the soundtrack is shorter, it’s often because of some contractual red tape with the orchestra, or something. (I can’t remember the details right now.)

You might just get them. I’ve been picking up “special editions” to some of my old favorites (Goldsmith’s Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, etc.) that have all tracks, including ones never used in the movie. Now that both Goldsmith and Bernstein have recently died (:frowning: I still can’t believe it), I suspect that more “re-releases” of their works are going to come out.

I know. I know. This trend has happened before, I think, like as far back as the '60s. Jerry Goldsmith (yes, he is my favorite) was interviewed years ago and he said that back then it was a big deal to try to have a “hit theme song” for a movie. He was sometimes pressed to write one, and he did sometimes get a semi-hit (The Sand Pebbles “And We Were Lovers” was sort of popular in its day, I think).

Exactly.

I don’t blame someone for being disappointed if they find that the song they were looking for was not put on the CD. Ideally, (as AHunter says), a soundtrack should have both. But to act as if the instrumental score isn’t part of the soundtrack, or doesn’t belong there—that’s just assinine. Even though many soundtracks these days are compilation pop song-type CDs, obviously not all are. The popular soundtrack to Titanic had more than just the Celine Dion song, it had James Horners’ Oscar-winning score. Same with all the Star Wars soundtracks by John Williams. And that’s what they’re called: soundtracks.

It’s almost as if these people think that orchestral or instrumental music doesn’t “count.” They probably don’t even hear it—it fades into the background for them and they don’t realize it exists. But that’s no damned excuse for not looking at the CD tracks and seeing what’s on there and what isn’t. Even if the soundtrack was all pop songs, there’s no guarantee that the one they’re specifically looking for will be included.

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Ooh! Okay! Okay! I’m not a big Broadway show fan (I like them but don’t have many in my collection), so I didn’t know this!

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In addition to the time constraints imposed by the recording medium, there is the fact that most film compositions make repeated use of several themes or motifs.

Often the producer of the soundtrack will pick the best statement of the theme from the film, rather than every single one.

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Then, of course, there’s the fact that not every single moment of the film is scored, necessarily…