Various
Basketball Diaries: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Island)
by Marc Hirsh
Various
Basketball Diaries: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Island)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in the Public News, May 17, 1995
I haven't seen Jim Carroll's biopic The Basketball Diaries or read the book upon which it was based, but I plan on it. A listen to the soundtrack makes me feel like I have to.
Most soundtracks are just happy to throw together a bunch of completely unrelated songs that weren't really good enough to be on the performers' proper albums. Basketball Diaries takes a different approach. It wants to convey some meaning.
There's no story told in the songs, or, if there is, it's not entirely clear. But the songs themselves play off one another in a way that many single-artist albums fail to do. The glue holding it all together is Carroll. He's on a third of the album in some capacity or other. We're treated to an old recording of his, a new recording and several bits of him reading excerpts from the book.
It's the spoken word parts that make the album great. Actually, that's not true; it's the spoken word parts that prepare the album to be great. Hearing the old Jim Carroll Band tearing through "People Who Died" is welcome enough, but prefacing it with Carroll's somber reading of the same story gives it a phenomenal punch that it didn't have before. This is catharsis for Carroll, and maybe for us.
Other songs similarly benefit. The Posies' "Coming Right Along" is saved from the mediocrity of their Frosting on the Beater album and becomes transformed into the foreboding dirge the band probably wanted it to be all along. The Doors' "Riders on the Storm" is finally where it belongs. And PJ Harvey's "Down by the Water" would've been hard to sink regardless of the company it kept. Luckily, and somewhat astoundingly, it has to fight for attention.
Not all of the highlights are previously released songs in a new context. Flea's plaintive "I've Been Down" shows that the Chili Peppers' bass player/resident wildman might have been holding back all this time. The new Soundgarden tune isn't the throwaway that it easily could have been, either. And as damn near the only light relief, Green Apple Quick Step lets a touch of cheer slip through the cracks with their "Dizzy," a dandy power pop tune.
You'd think that soundtrack albums with some sort of thematic unity would be obvious, but for some reason they're hard to come by. Basketball Diaries takes a small but important step of rectifying that.