My Five Favorite Movie Soundtracks

James Gunn didn’t just put a bunch of old songs into Guardians of the Galaxy. He made them part of the movie’s DNA. Peter Quill’s Awesome Mix Vol. 1 isn’t background music or just a convenient collection of recognizable hits. It’s one of the only real connections he still has to Earth and to his mother, which gives songs that could have been used as simple nostalgia drops an actual reason to be there.

The album jumps all over the place without ever feeling like a random playlist. Blue Swede’s “Hooked on a Feeling,” Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love,” Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky,” The Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb” and Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” shouldn’t necessarily belong together, but inside Guardians they fit like a glove.

That’s one of the things the movie pulled off better than almost anything that followed it, including its own sequels. Plenty of movies have tried loading up on recognizable songs since then, but Guardians of the Galaxy made the music feel inseparable from the character carrying the cassette player.

John Cusack standing outside Ione Skye’s window holding a boombox over his head while Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” plays has become so permanently attached to Say Anything... that you can show somebody the silhouette without anything else and they know exactly what movie you mean.

I don’t know a single guy who hasn’t thought about standing outside someone’s window holding a boombox and praying that the person inside comes to the window. The problem is, we can never actually do it. It’s already been done to perfection, and this soundtrack captures that feeling better than anything else could.

The rest of the soundtrack earns its place here too. It’s got Cheap Trick, Fishbone, The Replacements, Joe Satriani, Depeche Mode and, of course, Peter Gabriel. Cameron Crowe was already using music as more than decoration years before Almost Famous, and you can hear that sensibility all over this movie.

There’s also something about a soundtrack like this that immediately places you inside a specific era without making the music feel trapped there. The songs aren’t just telling you that this movie came out in 1989. They’re telling you who these characters are and let you feel what they felt.

If Guardians of the Galaxy uses music to create warmth and memory, The Crow uses it to build an atmosphere where you can practically feel the weight of everything behind it.

The soundtrack is soaked in the alternative and industrial music of the early ’90s, with The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Stone Temple Pilots, Rage Against the Machine, Helmet and Violent Femmes all showing up. It’s dark, angry, melancholy and occasionally beautiful, which encapsulates the movie perfectly.

The Cure’s “Burn” kicks the whole thing off and immediately tells you what kind of record this is going to be. Nine Inch Nails tears through “Dead Souls,” Stone Temple Pilots brings “Big Empty,” and Rage Against the Machine drops “Darkness.” There isn’t much daylight anywhere on this thing, but there shouldn’t be.

A soundtrack should belong to its movie, and this one couldn’t belong to anything else. You can listen to it without watching The Crow, but you’re probably going to start seeing rain, rooftops, fire and Brandon Lee’s black-and-white face in your head whether you intended to or not.

Of course there may be soundtracks with more critical credibility than Footloose. Here’s the thing, though: I’m not sure there are many that fit the film and time better than this soundtrack. I first heard this while I was just a baby in elementary school, and it still has its hold on me today.

Kenny Loggins opens the door with “Footloose,” and from there the record just keeps throwing songs at you that refuse to leave. Deniece Williams has “Let’s Hear It for the Boy.” Bonnie Tyler has “Holding Out for a Hero.” Shalamar has “Dancing in the Sheets.” Mike Reno and Ann Wilson have “Almost Paradise.” Loggins comes back with “I’m Free.”

This thing is basically an ’80s jukebox with Kevin Bacon dancing next to it.

More importantly, the music is the movie. Footloose is literally about a town where dancing and rock music have been banned, so the soundtrack has to make you understand why these kids are willing to fight over getting them back. If the songs don’t work, neither does the movie. And man, do the songs work!

There really wasn’t another choice for number one.

Purple Rain isn’t simply a movie with a great soundtrack. The music is the reason the whole thing exists. “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Take Me with U,” “The Beautiful Ones,” “Computer Blue,” “Darling Nikki,” “When Doves Cry,” “I Would Die 4 U,” “Baby I’m a Star” and “Purple Rain.” That’s the album.

There’s no filler sitting between the songs everybody remembers. Prince and the Revolution built one of those records where removing almost anything makes the entire thing feel incomplete. It works as the soundtrack to the movie, it works completely independently of the movie, and decades later those songs still sound like the gods of rock have personally braced your speakers with their blessings.

“Purple Rain” also has a little history here at Cobra Kai Never Lies. When The Juke Report started, “Purple Rain” was the very first song through the door. Looking at this list now, that feels exactly right. The soundtrack sitting at number one on this High Five also supplied the song that started one of the site’s original recurring features.