The Genre-Blending Phenomenon of ’90s Soundtracks: A Conversation with Yasi Salek

I’m really preoccupied with the ’90s. More so than the average person. The ’90s soundtrack movies were a result of the convergence of a few factors, one being that the music industry was at the height of its powers and CDs were super cheap to produce, so basically the industry was printing money.

Also, to your earlier point, Nirvana hitting number one on the charts at the top of 1992 changed the entire musical landscape—the underground became the mainstream. Record labels realized they could make money off of these soundtracks, and became invested in making good ones. It was this really special time where discovery of music came in so many different forms, and one of those main forms for me was the movie soundtrack.

I keep thinking what a miracle it is that Pump Up the Volume got made and released without there being a commercial guarantee. That’s so cool. And its soundtrack really shows you that the subculture of music was already bubbling up in the late ’80s.

On the other hand, you have Singles, which was made and shelved until grunge became big. Suddenly they rushed to put it out, like, “Wait, where’s that movie? Put that out right now!” Again, Cameron Crowe had tapped into something starting to happen in the late ’80s. And the minute the music broke through, the film was ready to go. The Singles soundtrack is an artifact, a slice of time—it’s anthropology.

The films I tried to choose were reflective of these pulses that were going through music and rising to the top. Take the Trainspotting soundtrack, with Underworld’s “Born Slippy”—that marked a moment when electronica was coming to the forefront. Or Judgment Night, which matched hip-hop and rock artists and foreshadowed a genre mashup that would dominate the next decade. You can see all the scenes that were happening in the movie soundtracks.

I think a lot of these soundtracks were picked by these auteurs with care, because the songs enhance the movie so much. The soundtracks are almost like characters in the film. 

The circumstances were different for all of them. In the case of Singles, Cameron Crowe had been a music journalist. He was married to Nancy Wilson, from the band Heart, who brought him into the world of musicians. Along with music supervisor Karyn Rachtman, he put artists he was friends with, like Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, into the movie.

There are some films that come in the mid-’90s—and this is not a criticism of them at all; I love these films and their soundtracks—where you can see that it was more, “oh, kids love X, Y, Z, and we’re going to include it.” Like Empire Records, in which there’s the commissioned Gin Blossoms song, because the Gin Blossoms were big. Clueless, Can’t Hardly Wait—these are the youth culture films that existed in the afterglow of grunge becoming a phenomenon. It wasn’t contrived, but it was just more self-aware. Whereas some of the earlier films were tapping into something brand new that people hadn’t really experienced yet on that level.

I love the Garden State soundtrack. And if we’re looking back to the eighties, I also think of Repo Man. The soundtrack had so much cool punk on it. Alex Cox was an original punk filmmaker.

Pretty in Pink, by John Hughes, had the Smiths in it. Valley Girl, Times Square. Looking at those soundtracks is a great way to see the difference between the ’80s and ’90s, right?

In many ways, it’s the most representative document of that time. It’s showing two subcultures that had exploded in the ’90s but had not held hands with each other until this, except maybe with the 1986 Aersosmith and Run-D.M.C. collab “Walk This Way.” Bringing together rock and rap acts was very post-Lollapalooza. Putting the artists together on here in this way was so inspired.

With love and respect to the filmmakers of Judgment Night, the soundtrack holds a massive place in culture, whereas with the film, people don’t care if it gets buried in a ditch and nobody ever sees it. Just such a huge divide, which is kind of funny, because all the rest of the films, I would argue, are good films.

In no particular order: Grosse Pointe Blank has so many, it’s almost impossible to choose, but maybe it’s a tie between “Mirror in the Bathroom” (when the protagonist, Martin, has to fight an assassin) followed immediately by “99 Luftballons” (which plays while he and Jeremy Piven’s character, Paul, have to wrap the body up in hallway posters to dispose of it).

Trainspotting also has many iconic ones, but for me it’s the “Born Slippy” drop at the very end, when Renton realizes he is done with this life and gets up to put his shoes on and leave.

Also, there’s the moment in Singles when Cliff Poncier is giving an interview about his band Citizen Dick at the club over the strains of Alice in Chains.

Every time I study something from the ’90s, I’m just kind of slapped in the face with how good we had it—I don't know how else to say it. In Singles, you have these young people living in a city affordably while having these artistic ideals. They weren’t beaten down by hustle culture or technology.

Back then, you could just work in a café part-time and work on things you cared about in your off-hours. And the purpose, it seemed, was just to live an engaged life in the world that didn’t have to do with aspiration—it was almost frowned upon to be aspirational. You didn't want to sell out, you didn’t want to climb the ladder. I think that’s so far gone.

For a brief period, we had won: the subculture had broken through, but hadn’t become completely co-opted and sold out yet. So that’s what I see when I watch these movies.

They’re being confronted with “What kind of person do I want to be? What kind of life do I want to live?” Now we see an insane preoccupation with how we seem to other people in a hyper-sped-up way because of social media. It’s never enough. It’s the difference between living your life to be witnessed by the world and honing a personal brand, versus living in a way that you can stomach, in a way that is fulfilling and allows you to ask the bigger questions.

I’m going to sound like an old man yelling out the clouds, but man, did we get robbed of the possibility of even grappling with those things because we now have such a lack of attention span and a dopamine addiction.

In the spread of this program you see where the ’90s starts—with Pump Up the Volume, where it was very much about the idea of being the outsider and fighting for the right to have your own way of thinking and not be forced into the cookie-cutter sameness of the ’80s. As you go through the films, you see that the ’90s allowed for more and more weird, antiestablishment behavior. And then it almost became too much. Like in Trainspotting, people fell off the cliff a little bit of being too hedonistic, individualistic, and nonconformist.

So many of these films are about connection and community. You work to find your people. You could actually try to find the music that made you feel. You had to go outside—talk to people, go to the coffee shop, go to the show, broadcast on pirate radio, you know?

You couldn’t just sit at home on the internet. You had to do something. Go back to your hometown to commit a murder during your high-school reunion. Find true love. Go to MIT and solve a math problem on your downtime as a janitor.