Backlit by an orange sky, Romeo seems. He smokes on a derelict outside stage; the solely curtains right here the blonde hair framing his face. The moody keyboard of Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host” swells, a 21-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio comes into focus, and one million teenage crushes are launched.
The yr is 1996 and director Baz Luhrmann has reimagined William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” for the MTV-era. Fair Verona is now a Venice Beach-style metropolis, the rivaling households tote weapons moderately than swords, and Romeo pops an ecstasy capsule earlier than going to the celebration the place he falls for Juliet, performed by a 17-year-old Claire Danes.
But it’s the soundtrack – an eclectic combine of songs spanning Des’ree’s ballad “Kissing You,” The Cardigans’ sugary hit “Love Fool” and Garbage’s horny journey hop tune “#1 Crush” – that captured each the movie’s kaleidoscopic vitality and shape-shifting ‘90s music panorama.
A becoming introduction to a really ‘90s Romeo
On its thirtieth anniversary yr – and with ‘90s nostalgia at full tilt – the compilation is also a snapshot of a unique cohesion between film and record companies. A time when albums were a key part of the movie experience that continued on peoples’ CD gamers lengthy after they’d left the cinema.
For teenagers throughout the decade, soundtrack albums had been must-have merchandise, PARENTAL ADVISORY labels be damned. The identical yr as “Romeo + Juliet,” “Trainspotting” got here out and Iggy Pop’s thumping “Lust for Life” set the tempo for an additional CD that was each achingly cool and an enormous industrial success. This was the period of “Dangerous Minds” (1995), “Good Will Hunting” (1997), “Cruel Intentions” (1999), and plenty of extra nice albums that these of a sure age bear in mind as clearly as the motion pictures themselves.
What was driving all these compilations? CDs had been comparatively low cost to make, with huge revenue margins (bear in mind paying $15 for a brand new launch?), and report firms had been promoting a ton of them. The Nineties marked the biggest boom in record industry history. “Record companies could afford to pay six and sometimes seven figure sums for the soundtrack rights for the film,” stated Marius de Vries, co-music producer on “Romeo + Juliet” for which he and fellow music producers Craig Armstrong and Nellee Hooper gained a BAFTA.
The “Romeo + Juliet” album itself peaked at No.2 on the Billboard 200 charts and went multi-platinum in a number of international locations. Meanwhile, as de Vries factors out, movies in the ’90s had been “regularly spawning enormous hit singles.” Think Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” (“The Bodyguard,” 1992) or Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” (“Titanic,” 1997).
Soaring orchestral strings for Romeo and Juliet’s embrace
With huge cash got here longer manufacturing occasions of typically a yr or extra, in high-end studios. For the pivotal second Romeo meets Juliet, Armstrong used a 60-person-strong string orchestra, one thing he stated can be uncommon in the present day. Likewise, de Vries had a classical choir in the studio for the movie’s soulful renditions of Prince’s “When Doves Cry” and Rozalla’s “Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good)” – each sung by baby-faced choir boy Quindon Tarver.
Luhrmann needed industrial music to kind the “spine” of the movie, recalled acclaimed Grammy-winning composers Armstrong and de Vries, with these songs bleeding into the rating. Radiohead’s specially-commissioned “Exit Music (for a Film),” as an illustration, performs quickly after the star-crossed lovers perish. Its ghostly lyrics start: “wake from your sleep.” Luhrmann “uses Radiohead the same way that you’d use a piece of Mozart… he has no class barriers where music is concerned,” stated Armstrong. “Whether it’s contemporary, classical, garage, electronic, he treats it all with the same reverence.”
So how did sure songs make the reduce? The curation was largely right down to elusive multi-Grammy-winning producer and songwriter Hooper. Friend and musician Justin Warfield recalled Hooper’s epic home events in London, the place the producer usually performed dance tracks that ended up in “Romeo + Juliet.” Hooper was “testing the music as a DJ would in a nightclub,” stated Warfield, “but trying it on an audience of friends before he put it in the final cut of the film.”
One night time Hooper confirmed him a tough reduce of the movie’s gasoline station shootout scene between the Montague and Capulet boys, with the thought Warfield’s band at the time, One Inch Punch, would do the accompanying music. Warfield was electrified by what he was seeing: “I can’t believe the guns they’re using, the wardrobe, the language, the modernization of Elizabethan in an almost street language.” Absolutely, he would do the music. But first, Hooper had a query: “Baz (Luhrmann) really wants to know if you can rap in Shakesperean.” Warfield duly researched the prose and rapped one of the scene’s tracks: “Pretty Piece of Flesh.”
Part of the magic of the ‘90s was the commissioning of new music only for soundtracks, stated Yasi Salek, host of the podcast, “Bandsplain.” “You got these really special songs that would only ever exist on this one CD at that time. So you were, of course, going to run to the store and buy it.” The compilation CD was “like a portal that opened up worlds to you,” she added.
At the identical time, nice indie movies had been being made, and underground music was now the mainstream. As Salek notes, Nirvana’s “Nevermind” reached No.1 on the Billboard charts in 1992. And “this brief, intersection moment,” is “why, for me, soundtracks from these ‘90s movies are just top tier, gold standard.”
A marriage tune to make teenage audiences swoon
In the subsequent decade, the rise of on-line streaming and demise of CDs marked the finish of the movie soundtrack as we knew it. And whereas the present wave of ‘90s nostalgia is partly cyclical, it also taps into a longing for a “much more unified mass culture,” said Rob Harvilla, host of the podcast, “60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s.” In the fragmented internet age, “you don’t have that very same feeling of unity, the place everyone is listening to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ or ‘You Outta Know’ at the very same time.”
These days you’re extra prone to see “songs that are included within a film or TV show that are a ‘moment,’” stated Salek. She pointed to Katy Perry’s “Firework” in the film “Eddington” (2025), or the method Emma Stone’s character in “Bugonia” (2025) sings alongside to Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”
De Vries in the meantime is inspired to see “a lot of fresh, young, adventurous, experimental film composers coming up,” like Daniel Blumberg who final yr gained an Oscar for his “extraordinary” rating for the “The Brutalist.” De Vries sees a bit of a sea change in “how much musical experimentation is being allowed into filmmaking again, and how much tolerance the right directors have for pushing the envelope.”
But unquestionably, the ‘90s had been “a bunch of very golden years,” he stated. “At the time, we were just having a lot of fun, and I think possibly that was reflected in the music we were making.”
Video by Max Burnell, NCS.