Music From and Inspired by the Big Chill
Lots of movie soundtracks made fortunes repackaging currently popular music (Easy Rider, FM, Saturday Night Fever) or older popular music (American Hot Wax, American Graffiti) before The Big Chill. But baby boomers liked this particular big statement about selling out so much that they bought several gazillion albums, as if to say, “We’re never going to dance to anything except Motown and the Stones ever again.” But since the Stones are stingy about allowing their hits in anyone’s anthology but their own, and Motown never met an anthology it didn’t like, we have this thing, consisting of many danceable songs from Detroit in the Sixties interspersed with inexplicable crap like Spanky and Our Gang. Will this deluxe edition, which combines the original soundtrack with More Songs From The Big Chill, be a milestone of marketing again? No. Are there any great songs that aren’t available elsewhere in a cheaper collection in a Virgin Megastore’s oldies section? No. Can you play it as is at a party? No, because it’s not arranged to build momentum with five or six fast songs interrupted by one slow song. The new liner notes quote some character saying, “There is no other music.” No, again.