First Listen: Music From Baz Luhrmann's Film 'The Great Gatsby'

by ANN POWERS, May 02, 2013 9:43 AM

One of the many trailers promoting Baz Lurhmann's film version of The Great Gatsby ends with Leo DiCaprio uttering a crucial line adapted from the original novel. "My life has got to be like this," he says, pointing a finger toward the sky. "It's got to keep going up." That extravagantly aspirational spirit is captured in the soundtrack to the film, executive-produced by the kingpin rapper Jay-Z and featuring a stunning array of hip-hop royals, pop champs and de rigueur alternative rockers. Distilling the essence of the Jazz Age though never completely reflecting it, this soundtrack is as much an event as is the film that inspired it.

How did the music in the original Great Gatsby feel to its characters and audience? The question is central to Lurhmann's latest high-end refurbishing of a thoroughly lived-in classic. The word feel is crucial. We know what the music F. Scott Fitzgerald chose sounds like, because his Jazz Age morality tale includes the names and even some lyrics of the songs that feed its momentum. Readers have compiled Fitzgerald's choices; scholars have analyzed them as expressions of modernist energy or sexual tension, or even as the music-loving author's own satirical stab at music criticism. Lurhmann could have easily commissioned updated versions of ducky numbers like "The Love Nest" and still accomplished his goal of connecting the dots between Jay Gatsby's moment and our own.

The soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann's film The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, comes out May 7.

But that's not Lurhmann's way. He is cinema's boldest remixer, infusing familiar works with new rhythms that refresh their relevance (or, in the view of Baz haters, overwhelm and distort them). His version of Romeo and Juliet rethought rebellious young love for the moment when grunge collided with rave; in Moulin Rouge!, he brought Verdi's La Traviata into the era of the Now That's What I Call Music! compilations. His style of twisting texts into the present may seem facile at first, but they're extremely effective. Kids come for the hits and stay for the stories. English class suddenly gets fun for a whole new generation.

Whether Lurhmann's film does justice to Fitzgerald's essential work will become widely evident when the film opens on May 10. First, we have the film's soundtrack, which like Lurmann's previous ones both arises from within the film and stands separately from it. Some have wondered why, after Lurhmann enlisted Jay-Z's help and announced that his movie's music would recast hip-hop as the jazz of our boom-and-bust era, only a few rappers show up on the album. But just as Fitzgerald peppered his text with references to jazz-influenced pop songs to show how that music became a lingua franca, so this soundtrack aims to show how hip-hop now deeply informs rock, dance music and the Top 40.

Read more: http://www.npr.org/2013/04/30/180098344/first-listen-music-from-baz-luhrmanns-film-the-great-gatsby?sc=nl&cc=mn-20130502&refresh=true