Although there's no reason that a bad movie can't feature a good soundtrack -- after all, there's plenty of good movies that feature rotten ones -- we've tended to focus, here in the OST feature, on movies that have both. A soundtrack, after all, is meant as complementary; it's an enhancement to a good movie, not a substitute for one. Still, every once in a while, a movie rolls around where the product on screen is pretty lousy, or at the very least forgettable, but which provides us with a soundtrack or score that will provide enjoyment years after anyone's forgotten what the movie was even about. The relatively recent Hollywood trend of propagating otherwise mediocre would-be hit movies with pop songs -- often by bands under contract with the studio's parent company -- has been particularly helpful in this regard, as it can ensure that the filmmakers will be able to recoup at least some of the losses they took from no one going to see the movie from those same people deciding to take a flyer on the soundtrack, because at least it has that one good song on it by Sevendust or whoever.
Which is not to say that Spike Lee's movie on the wicked world of college basketball,
He Got Game, is a terrible movie. It's not even a terrible Spike Lee movie. It's just not a great movie. A skillful performance by Denzel Washington gets cancelled out by a pretty dismal one by real-life basketball star and non-actor Ray Allen; a skillful script about a subject of genuine interest is scuttled by one too many over-the-top scenes, and -- surprisingly, given Lee's love of basketball and the presence of genuine NBA stars in the cast -- the sports action scenes generally fall somewhat flat. However, the soundtrack definitely has emerged as a much more worthwhile endeavor than the movie. Originally conceived by Spike and Public Enemy frontman Chuck D. as a straightforward soundtrack to the film, PE's
He Got Game eventually emerged as an entire and distinct album by the revolutionary rap group -- and one which came at a time when many critics had written them off as a thing of the past. Taking the thematic elements of the film (basketball, family life, big money, and the temptations of being successful and black) as jumping-off points for their usual firebrand political concerns, Chuck and his crew crunched their lyrics down over the baddest beats they'd used since
Fear of a Black Planet -- more stripped down and minimalist than their old Bomb Squad production work, but perfectly suited to the material, and timely insofar as they were heavily influenced by the dense East Coast hardcore style pioneered by the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA and others. Although they'd never recapture the groundbreaking immediacy and power of
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy -- fronted by a then 40-year-old Chuck D who sounded as furious as ever -- proved that they were still a going concern; the Bomb Squad proved that there was more to their sound than just the busy collage-making that gained them such fame in the late 1980s; and Spike Lee proved that, even with his lesser projects, he was still capable of inspiring those who worked with him to hit new heights. Film and hip-hop have been together since the rap genre was invented, and it's often been a rocky relationship, but rarely has a hip-hop soundtrack so complimented, dominated, and eventually surpassed a movie than in
He Got Game.
BEST TRACKS: The track most remembered from the He Got Game soundtrack is the title song, noteworthy for the catchy hook which straightforwardly samples the hook from Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth". But in a lot of ways, it was one of the weaker tracks on the album, overly simplistic and with lyrics that didn't do a strong enough job of selling the hook as relevant to a young black audience. Far stronger, however, are many of the less celebrated tracks: "Unstoppable", which finally pairs Boogie Down Productions' KRS-One with his chief rival from the 1980s, Chuck D, and makes us wish that they'd been collaborating all along; the cutting, incisive and insightful "Politics of the Sneaker Pimps"; the perennially underrated Flavor Flav showcases (the raucous party anthem "Shake Your Booty" and the sinister, insinuating "Is Your God a Dog?"); the nasty, plodding "Super Agent", which, with its rattling percussion and taunting background vocals, wouldn't have seemed out of place on Fear of a Black Planet; and, perhaps best of all, the powerhouse "What You Need is Jesus", which starts off with a mocking Charles Barkley saying "Hallelujah, Jesus, hallelujah!" to the movie's title character and goes on to feature Chuck D kicking some of his fiercest rhymes in a decade.