Perfect Soundtracks for the Summer Heat

Jul 10, 2013

Summer is a season unleashed. From the start it is, like all seasons, a race against time, the beginning of the end of the heat. But unlike winters spent hunkered down, the heat of summer brings everything to the surface. Right out in the open. Arms flail, tempers flare, and the city streets bake like a urine-soaked cement oven.

So in celebration of what's sure to be another summer spent trying to escape the heat, here are 5 soundtracks that embody the heat of summer. Though summer vacation tends to disappear with the slow clock of time, the undercurrent of revival and urgency that come with a summer's out-of-doors freedom courses throughout every pick.

Soundtracks are a collaboration by nature, asked to translate the image's sentiment into sound. It doesn't come easy, and these picks are more often than not the brainchild of a single person, be it an artist or the — though RZA and Quentin Tarantino cooked up some outrageous cake together. But more than anything else, it's the world that's created through the unity between soundtrack and image. Though the situations are foreign and unique, the sentiments of summer are familiar, from George Lucas's nostalgia to Spike Lee's frustration.

While blockbusters do dominate the box office, they ignore the grace notes that come with a strong soundtrack, made with the story in mind, the subtler moments that give anything its personality. When sound and image click into place over the next five slides, you can feel the sweat trickle down the back of your neck and smell the heat in the wind.

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Summer is a season unleashed. From the start it is, like all seasons, a race against time, the beginning of the end of the heat. But unlike winters spent hunkered down, the heat of summer brings everything to the surface. Right out in the open. Arms flail, tempers flare, and the city streets bake like a urine-soaked cement oven.

So in celebration of what's sure to be another summer spent trying to escape the heat, here are 5 soundtracks that embody the heat of summer. Though summer vacation tends to disappear with the slow clock of time, the undercurrent of revival and urgency that come with a summer's out-of-doors freedom courses throughout every pick.

Soundtracks are a collaboration by nature, asked to translate the image's sentiment into sound. It doesn't come easy, and these picks are more often than not the brainchild of a single person, be it an artist or the — though RZA and Quentin Tarantino cooked up some outrageous cake together. But more than anything else, it's the world that's created through the unity between soundtrack and image. Though the situations are foreign and unique, the sentiments of summer are familiar, from George Lucas's nostalgia to Spike Lee's frustration.

While blockbusters do dominate the box office, they ignore the grace notes that come with a strong soundtrack, made with the story in mind, the subtler moments that give anything its personality. When sound and image click into place over the next five slides, you can feel the sweat trickle down the back of your neck and smell the heat in the wind.

2. Super Fly

Director: Gordon Parks Jr.

Year: 1972

The soundtrack for Super Fly doubled as Curtis Mayfield's third studio album, one of the great soul records ever made. The ghoulish organs and horns provide Mayfield the dark, slicked-back atmosphere necessary for him to do some pondering about drugs and dealing in Harlem, backing a film that outgrew its original label as blaxploitation long ago. It got there in part because Mayfield makes you invest in the music, creating a groove to be taken seriously.

As drugs are exchanged and stakes are raised, Super Fly becomes a very crowded movie—characters mushed up together in the hot fog of the city. This is the kind of uncomfortable, sticky heat that factors into any plans you make, the kind that leaves you standing stock still on a subway platform begging for a breath of stale tunnel air. For as strong as the movie is, though, the soundtrack is better. Mayfield's album is one of the few soundtracks to outgross the film it backs. Super Fly is best known for its silky title track, but is an album/soundtrack laden with gold like "Freddie's Dead" and "Pusherman." Stream the full album below:

3. American Graffiti

Director: George Lucas

Year: 1973

George Lucas' first feature was a testament to the land that made him, a vivid mural filled with varsity sweaters, car radios and "golly gee willikers" The radio shaman makes an early appearance in American Graffiti in the form of The Wolfman, the legendary Wolfman Jack playing his gravelly self as a local DJ. The music he plays throughout has come to be a definitive record of pop music in its last seconds before the musical revolution of the 60's blew up the suburban landscape that had congealed over the industry. Wolfman was creating the last NOW mix of an era, just forty year ago. You know they're still making NOWs? Fuckers got tough skin, rhino hides.

41 tracks long, the American Graffiti soundtrack whips through ditties, numbers, and ballads like—well, a radio station—as the hot summer night unfolds around the universal teenage tribulations of a babyfaced Dreyfuss. The music is a character, setting the tone in every interaction and the stage for every scene. But what lands this soundtrack on the list is it's longevity. I like thinking about Wyclef and Lauryn faded out on the couch one night at 4 a.m. watching this movie 20 years after it came out, seeing the scene below and locking eyes : "yooooooo......."

4. Kill Bill Volume 1

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Year: 2003

The first half of Tarantino's kung-fu Uma two-parter was a sensory overload of the highest caliber. From the Pussy Wagon to the Crazy 88's, Kill Part Vol. 1 separates itself from the pack with its delirious energy, aided in no small part by its soundtrack. The dry, arid singularity of The Bride's mission is something to suffer through, droughts and dry lawns for the silver screen.

RZA and Tarantino worked together to create the film's sound, creating a score laden with kung-fu samples, film dialogue, more doo-wop—even an original RZA beat. It seems to have gone pretty well, at least according to RZA: "It was more of a collaboration. He had an idea and a vision when he wrote the script. I think I was more of somebody that kept it in the guidelines of what he wanted. He was like, here go the eggs, the milk, the cake, the sugar, everything, and I’m going to stir it up. Put this in the oven, watch it, take it out in forty-five minutes. Now, am I going to take it out in forty five minutes or am I going to fall asleep? I made sure it got out and if I saw something wrong with it, I fixed it. So when he saw it, he was like, this is cake."

The film's cartoonish violence is a more bittersweet representation of summer. As we've seen year after year, heat shortens tempers and if you're Quentin Tarantino that means spilling a lot of blood. That harshness comes through the soundtrack throughout the film and across the sonic spectrum, alternately comic and dramatic.

5. Easy Rider

Director: Dennis Hopper

Year: 1969

The ultimate summer activity—the road trip—will always need a good soundtrack. Therefore, the quintessential road trip movie—Easy Rider—needed to have some solid sounds to accompany Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper as they burned across America on their hogs if it was going to be a success.

Hopper was the mad genius here. The film's production was a drug-addled tornado that, against all odds, ended up being a career-changing success for almost everyone involved. Easy Rider captured the malcontent of an America split in two—the hippies on their bikes "searching for freedom" and the hayseed farm population so bored in the summer heat that they'd hate just about anything to distract themselves. The soundtrack is filled with anthemic '60s classics like "Born To Be Wild," "If 6 Was 9," and "The Weight.

"But Hopper also let his freak flag fly, creating a variety of tripped-out sound collages all coming to a head in a sequence that finds the pair tripping acid in a New Orleans cemetery with a couple ladies from The House of Blue Lights.

6. Do The Right Thing

Director: Spike Lee

Year: 1989

Spike Lee's crown jewel is set on the hottest day of summer. A city block in Bed-Stuy sweat it out together as the concrete boils back up at them, sucking any energy and patience out from all directions. The radio shaman makes his second appearance—Samuel L. Jackson as the honorable Mister Señor Love Daddy—and uses the radio as a tool to bind together two communities: the one on the screen and the one in the theater, a tactic also practiced by George Lucas in American Graffiti.

Hip-hop, reggae and soul all share time on Lee's soundtrack but it is Public Enemy's "Fight The Power" is the film's main theme, battle cry, and swan song. It's used first in the opening credits that made Rosie Perez a star and resurfaces again and again throughout the film to represent the oppression, frustration and hopelessness borne down upon the block by the heat and their city. Do The Right Thing was released in 1989 and it represented one of the first times hip-hop was projected and re-presented in this medium. Bringing rap music into the cinema — and the frou-frou Cannes Film Festival, no less, where Lee was nominated for the Palme d'Or — paved the way for countless artists in the years following.

Alongside "Fight The Power, "My Fantasy" and "Don't Shoot Me" created an environment of throbbing dance and movement that matches the intensity of the film's slow crescendo. The heat is real here, and the block comes to a boil at the end of the film as night falls. Whether or not Mookie does the right thing in the end, the message and music combined to make people ask the question.

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