Time Capsule: Various Artists, Music from the Motion Picture Pulp Fiction

There has been no shortage of narrative lenses through which to view filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s more than three decades in Hollywood. We have the fairytale allure of a former video store clerk and movie nerd ascending to the highest echelon of contemporary filmmaking. He’s also been championed as an advocate for shooting movies on actual film, a resurrector of talents long forgotten by a fickle entertainment industry and one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation. On the B-roll, he’s caught criticism for his penchant for stylized violence, the frequent use of racial slurs in his scripts and, in the eyes of some, trivializing dark eras in human history, like the Holocaust and American slavery, in a string of popular revenge fantasies. It’s been more so in the last decade—now that the “needle drop” has become a staple of how we talk about the pairing of visual media and popular music—that the director’s use of found songs, especially in his earliest work, has been revisited. As his most celebrated film, Pulp Fiction, turns 30 this autumn, even those who may not know what Marsellus Wallace looks like can appreciate that Tarantino may very well have perfected the modern movie soundtrack.

Anecdotally speaking, movie soundtracks in the ‘90s felt similar to what toy lines were to cartoons in the previous decade: one more product to bundle and brand with the stamp of a mega franchise or popular title. Hey, I liked the movie, so I picked up the home video, original soundtrack, official poster, authorized t-shirt and hat combo and the limited-edition breakfast cereal. Most soundtracks—scores and commissioned songs excepted—were little more than hodgepodge compilations with a movie poster doubling as album artwork and maybe an original single with scenes from the film or actor cameos spliced into a music video. While some at least captured a vibe like a Spotify genre sampler, the bulk of these soundtracks made for skip-heavy, unlistenable experiences that were a far cry from being meaningful companions to their corresponding films. However, when we look back at Tarantino’s celebrated trio of ‘90s flicks—Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown—not only do we find soundtracks that spin like carefully curated playlists but also organic, functional albums that urge listeners back to the movies themselves and challenge them to consider how the songs work in tandem with what they see as moviegoers.

Music matters in Tarantino films in part because music means so much to the people and places we encounter in the cinematic worlds he creates. As we descend into these criminal undergrounds that exist right beneath our noses, we enter a realm where disc jockeys rule, smugglers have vinyl collections and hitmen listen to their favorite tunes while they drive around town with their windows down. Hell, the first scene of a Tarantino movie that most of us ever saw features six jewel thieves and their employers talking about K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the ‘70s and waxing analytical about the true meaning of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” Moreover, the musical palette Tarantino draws from in these early films becomes every bit as vibrant a brushstroke and as much a personal signature as his high-stakes dialogue or the nonlinear, fragmented style of his storytelling. Pulp Fiction and the tales of Jules, Vincent, Marsellus Wallace, Mia and Butch unravel to the sounds of a free-form radio hour where Al Green, Urge Overkill and Dusty Springfield can co-mingle while the ether that strings us along through their dark trials is surf music from a bygone era. It’s a demented brew that ultimately makes for a compelling and surprisingly coherent soundtrack listen because an unflinching Tarantino convinces us to embrace it as the musical language of this lurid world.

One of the reasons Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction soundtrack works so well is that it lets us know where in this world we are and who we are dealing with. As hitman turned apprentice shepherd Jules later assures, “That’s Kool & the Gang,” so why should he and partner Vincent, looking nothing like dorks in their suits leftover from Reservoir Dogs, enter our purview to any less funky an intro than Kool’s “Jungle Boogie?” In a more soulful vein, their boss, Marsellus Wallace, negotiates a fixed boxing match in an Inglewood strip club as R&B legend Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” wafts through the room, the mobster’s brute speech in no way softened by the soul singer’s strained lover’s plea. Basically, if we hear anything that could’ve been on Soul Train in the ‘70s, we know not to fuck with those present. Similarly, Mia Wallace lives adjacent to this cold-blooded underworld in a time machine where she can play Dusty Springfield to Vincent’s Billy Ray (“Son of a Preacher Man”) and twist to Chuck Berry (“You Never Can Tell”) and ‘50s sock hop fare between $5 shakes and trips to the restroom to powder her nose. It’s all neat and tidy with a soundtrack to match until the pulp starts to hit the proverbial fan. Cue the surf music.

Only Quentin Tarantino would hear surf rock pioneer Dick Dale and his Del-Tones’ hang-10 version of Eastern Mediterranean traditional “Misirlou” and instantly associate those sounds with Ennio Morricone, Sergio Leone and Spaghetti Westerns. And yet, after 30 years of hearing Dale’s visceral tremolo picking and an emphatic “Ha, ha, ha” reverberating over Pulp Fiction’s titles, it’s impossible not to feel like we’re entering a wild, wild west of sorts where a different set of rules run the game. And, to take it one weird deviation further, Tarantino decided to double-down on Dale’s sound and go crate digging through old surf rock records until he landed on a de facto score. It’s an ironic choice that ultimately heightens several of the film’s most memorable sequences. We can hear the foreboding waves as Vincent shoots up and drives euphorically through the darkness to Mia’s house; the saxophones running through Butch’s conscience as he turns back to save Marsellus from a fate worse than Deliverance; and the beach bop commencing as Jules and Vincent boogie on out of the diner about 20 minutes after a SWAT team should’ve already been on site. While Tarantino gets credit for reinvigorating John Travolta’s acting career with Pulp Fiction, it’s a feat of Lazarus-type proportions that arguably the best crime flick of the ‘90s allowed a near-defunct genre and bands with names like The Centurions, The Revels and The Tornados to make waves for the first time in decades.

Apart from “Misirlou,” the other two needle drops that immediately come to mind when thinking about Pulp Fiction both involve Uma Thurman dancing. There has always been a choreography to Tarantino’s films, be it an elaborate, comically outnumbered martial arts showdown or Mr. Blonde transforming the interrogation of a cop into a torture dance. Even the way the director cuts the scene in which Mia snoops on Vincent via CCTV as “Son of a Preacher Man” plays feels like a tacit tango of sorts; however, it’s the dance contest at Jack Rabbit Slim’s that will remain an indelible part of cinematic history. In his most famous onscreen dance since Saturday Night Fever, we watch Travolta’s Vincent and Thurman’s Mia twist the night away to Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell.” Rather than interrupt the palpable cool, Tarantino lets the bulk of Berry’s teenage wedding play out as Vincent and Mia break their uncomfortable silences and slouch towards the night’s more debauched events.

Mia drops her own needle back home later that night as she and Vincent return from dinner victorious. It’s not unusual for Tarantino to let his characters be the hand on the radio dial or the one pressing play; not only do we know they can hear what we do, but it then allows the music to reveal something about them. For instance, in the following story, a naive Butch comically sings along to the bouncy country number “Flowers on the Wall” by The Statler Brothers as he rides a rush of survival adrenaline, even though he should know that fucking over Marsellus Wallace won’t be that simple.

In Mia’s case, we suspend disbelief as she spins the Urge Overkill version of “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” rather than Neil Diamond’s ‘67 original. The band is one of only two modern artists on the soundtrack but fit right in as a group that often sounded (and looked) anachronistic among their own alt-rock contemporaries. As Mia sings and thrashes rebelliously in a trenchcoat, bob and bangs and Vincent talks himself down from temptation in the bathroom, we know something has to transpire to put womanhood on hold. At night’s end, when a shaken Mia meekly says goodbye and Vincent blows her a goodnight kiss, it’s hard not to think of them as Diamond’s titular girl and misunderstood protagonist having wandered too far down a dangerous path they were lucky to return from.

Music from the Motion Picture Pulp Fiction climbed charts around the globe upon its release and has gone on to sell more than four million copies to date. Artists like Kool & the Gang, Chuck Berry and Dick Dale (not to mention the entire surf rock genre) saw renewed interest in their music, while Urge Overkill scored a career-defining hit. For Tarantino, it marked the beginning of a new writing process in which he’d often select music as he wrote or even beforehand, believing that the rhythm to a particular project could be found in his record collection. 30 years later, when we listen to Pulp Fiction’s soundtrack, we still hear an intense, inspired pop-culture collision where Tarantino’s mutual love of movies and music found a way to dance together that could give even Mia Wallace and Vincent Vega a run for their money. As Jules might say, this soundtrack’s one “bad motherfucker.”