If you've been following the "OST" feature here at the Screengrab for a while, or even if you're just familiar with the kind of chicanery that goes on in the music business under the guise of protecting intellectual property, you'll know that an astonishingly large number of movie soundtracks present you with a product that's wildly -- even borderline fraudulently -- different from what you encountered in the movie. The difficulty and cost of obtaining clearance rights to music, especially for small, cash-poor independent films, and the greed and short-sightedness of record companies (or just their willingness to butt heads with equally greedy movie companies over the size of their slice of the pie) has sunk many a soundtrack. Jim Jarmusch's inventive, compelling Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai ran afoul of this very problem, but with a curious endgame: there are, in fact, two available records affiliated with the movie -- one best described as a soundtrack, and the other a score. Both are extremely worthwhile, but neither is completely successful on its own; both are very different in character, although they were written by the same person; and both feature material from the film as well as material that never appeared in it, though only one is available in the United States.
It should come as no surprise that Jarmusch's 1999 pseudo-remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's fantastic Le Samourai features a terrific soundtrack. As befits his image as a New York hipster filmmaker, Jim Jarmusch's movies have always placed music in a prominent position; from the haunting, unnerving guitar wails of Neil Young that formed the basis of the soundtrack to Dead Man to the exotic, emotionally powerful jazz-funk of Ethiopian composer Mulatu Astaque that was featured in Broken Flowers, Jarmusch is one of a handful of directors -- others include Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and Sofia Coppola -- who can be counted on to take as much care with the soundtrack as they do with the film itself. After reading that Italian-American mafiosi were fond of gangsta rap, and consulting with his star Forest Whitaker, Jarmusch decided to bring in the RZA, producer and mastermind behind the hugely influential Wu-Tang Clan, to write both the score and the soundtrack to Ghost Dog. This began a collaboration between the two that became deeper and more profound than either had anticipated; the RZA ended up consulting with Jarmusch on some of the language of the street hustlers in the film, helped out with the design and costuming, and even appears briefly in the film (as do Timbo King and a handful of the Wu-Tang Killa Bees auxiliary). The movie and the music are gorgeously integrated on every level, reflecting a realness that couldn't have come about if any other director and any other musician had been behind it: scenes are perfectly broken up by the intrusion of killer hip-hop tracks (all of which the RZA wrote, produced, or both); the scenes themselves feature gorgeous nighttime driving shots of Whitaker's lethal but loyal assassin, accompanied by evocative, skeletal beats also made by the RZA.
Unfortunately, things went awry, as things often do. Epic, which then had a stranglehold of a contract on the RZA's work, saw the release of the film -- which they couldn't have cared less about -- as nothing more than an opportunity to release new RZA-penned singles to the hip-hop market. They saw no value whatsoever in the instrumental score he'd worked so hard on, and which so perfectly complemented the film. As a result, when the licensing deal was penned with Razor Sharp, the company that released the soundtrack, Epic gave them permission only to use the hip-hop songs the RZA produced, and none of the instrumental score. Eventually, an alternate version of the soundtrack -- this time featuring a number of excellent selections from the score -- was released, but only in Japan. The result is the unsatisfying split alluded to above: here in America, the only version of the soundtrack you're likely to find is the one featuring the rap songs -- which, make no mistake, are almost uniformly excellent, but suffer from a lack of completeness. If you're lucky enough to live in Japan, or shell out extra money to import the version available there, you'll get parts of the score -- at the cost of the great rap singles. So, in the end, the Ghost Dog soundtracks remain two imperfect halves of an incredible whole, and are likely to remain so as long as greed gets in the way. Or, to put it another way, forever.
BEST TRACKS: Assuming you're either unable or unwilling to get hold of the Japanese version of the soundtrack to Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, we'll assume that you're listening to the American version, illustrated above. (The score segments are replaced by rather useless "samurai code quotes" from the movie.) Don't despair, though; while you aren't hearing the whole picture, you're still getting some amazing RZA-penned hip-hop. Some of the best tracks here include the Wu-Tang's featured track, "Fast Shadow", a raw-sounding, desperate slice of urban paranoia; "Strange Eyes", a groovy, expressive effort by the Wu spinoff group Sunz of Man; and, especially, "Don't Test/Wu Stallion", an evocative, insinuating dub groove by underrated Jamaican toaster Suga Bang Bang, which slithers from one pole to another over a killer minimalist beat by the RZA, which suggests the score that you're missing.
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