If there was any ambiguity in ‘The Great Gatsby’, it all disappeared when Baz Luhrmann got his hands on it. The man never met a melodrama he didn’t like. So you can’t really blame soundtrack executive producer Jay-Z for following suit, roping together a collection of songs about decadence, parties and doomed love. Because you see, Luhrmann’s assertion that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novel is simply a tragic love story, actually, both spectacularly misses the real point and fails to depict the incorrect one. Soulless pop, drunk on its own false sense of profundity, sits alongside teeth-grindingly atrocious club BANGERS with properly authentic wah-wah’d trombones and record crackling, projecting the film’s version of a love story that has no real reason for being entitled to your time or investment and a celebration of excessive and vapid lifestyles amongst the beautiful and rich.
The album reeks of money; maybe that’s the point, since its dead-eyed glossiness fits nicely with Luhrmann’s admirable and firmly-held belief that there is no such thing as ‘over the top’. Lana Del Rey’s ‘Young And Beautiful’ is the flagbearer of sweepingly cinematic ‘style’ creating the vacuum in which ‘substance’ ceases to exist; ‘Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?’ she wails, and maybe Jay-Z and Luhrmann think it’s representative of ‘The Great Gatsby’s depiction of decadence and the loss of youth, but nonsensical rubbish like, ‘All that face makes me wanna party’ suggests they wouldn’t have aced their dissertations.
Then there’s Emeli Sandé (there’s always Emeli Sandé). Ubiquitous and inoffensive Emeli Sandé. Her Mos Eisley Cantina Band cover of ‘Crazy In Love’, that monstrous roar of a pop masterpiece, is rendered hollow and meaningless when stripped of its noise and ceremony. Sandé’s voice can’t match the ferociousness of Beyoncé’s; she blurts out all of the original’s post-production-achieved backing and layered vocals in one breath, barely keeping up with the song or injecting it with the requisite oomph. The Bryan Ferry Orchestra is her back-up and they make another contribution with a version of ‘Love Is The Drug’, 1920s jazz-clubbed up to the eyeballs and infused with an intensely sinister – and wholly welcome – slinkiness. It’s like the growling, lascivious cover a Strepsil-dosed Tom Waits would pull off. It is sexy. It is brilliant.
The soundtrack’s main talking point is the Beyoncé/André 3000 cover of ‘Back To Black’, a fascinatingly weird concoction that would probably be the greatest song of all time if it hadn’t been done by the (late) person who wrote it about the relationship that was slowly destroying her. Winehouse’s original is difficult to listen to; it’s personal tragedy, her heart being torn out. It’s infused with pain and resignation. Beyoncé and André’s take is cool but it’s also oddly sultry (almost inappropriately so) and disposable. André 3000 takes some of the lyrics for the cheating partner’s voice, which ever so slightly weakens its impact; the words become taunts used against the original speaker and it’s no longer a portrait of one person’s state of mind. To apply the song to this context is, vaguely, maybe, a little bit, crass.
Elsewhere, there’s little worth paying attention to. The less said about will.i.am’s risible ‘Bang Bang’ (which takes a lot of its cues from that cultural cornerstone, ‘Doop’ by Doop) and Fergie’s ‘A Little Party Never Killed Nobody’, the better. Florence + The Machine, Sia, Nero and The xx provide the soundtrack’s more elaborately cinematic moments (some good, some fist-bitingly embarrassing); it’s Sia’s offering, ‘Kill And Run’, that proves most effective, her husky vocals and simplistic backdrop of a piano and a few strings lifting to a genuinely affecting and soaring ending, cut off before it gets a bit too Del Rey. ‘Love Is Blindness’, Jack White’s U2 cover, is overdone in some places, but almost magnificently so; The White Stripes’ appeal was that they could overcook a song with only two instruments and White’s broken vocals and screaming guitar are wonderfully, unsettlingly overwrought. It is, perhaps, a shame that Jay-Z didn’t infuse the soundtrack with more hip-hop; the ridiculous excess depicted by so much of the modern incarnation of the genre would certainly have sat well within the context of the film. As it is, the only real hip-hop offerings are Jay-Z’s own contributions, ‘100$ Bill’ and, on the download version, his effectively imposing collaboration with Kanye West, ‘No Church In The Wild’.
You can probably see where Mr. Luhrmann and Mr. Carter are coming from; we’re all well-versed in Luhrmann’s everything-with-bells-on schtick by now. Ultimately, though, there’s not really enough imagination to make this anything more than a gimmick. ‘Moulin Rouge‘ had the modern songs in the historic setting and, even though it was far more tedious than anyone is willing to admit, it mostly worked because Luhrmann had the tone right. It was a big, stupid, elaborate setting on which to place big, stupid, elaborate scenes of Ewan McGregor shouting Elton John songs. ‘The Great Gatsby‘ (IN 3D) is neither the time or the place for half of the Black Eyed Peas or the guy who wrote ‘Party Rock Anthem’. Maybe, in that sense, Luhrmann and Jay-Z are successful with linking the music to the film; it’s astutely representative of a sad and futile existence in crap clubs playing empty music.
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