The Forrest Gump Soundtrack
Because Savannah is still so new to us my wife and I make it a point to try and explore a new corner of it every weekend. During our last excursion we found ourselves on the northern side of Chippewa Square (one of the city’s 22 beautiful parks) and thanks to a small sign learned that we were standing on the spot where Forrest Gump sits on a bench and recounts his life for a few strangers throughout the movie. We watched the movie that night since neither of us had seen it for some time and are both quite fond of it. We talked after about aspects of the film but one thing we both treasured was its soundtrack. We both owned the 2-CD set growing up. That got me thinking…
The Forrest Gump soundtrack was certified 12 times platinum in the year 2000. It’s a symphony of American pop, rock and R&B from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s, roughly the same timespan as the film itself and serves as a one stop shop for those seeking a solid overview of iconic artists and well-known radio hits from those eras. It features acts like Bob Dylan, the Doors, the Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, the Supremes, Randy Newman, Elvis Presley, Harry Nilsson, Fleetwood Mac and Willie Nelson, and many others. The Forrest Gump soundtrack is a great little collection but it also serves as a time capsule. With Spotify and similar services using algorithms to bring music the idea of the hit-studded soundtrack is left somewhat irrelevant. I believe that makes it poignant.
This type of movie soundtrack had become popular in the 1970s thanks to the likes of “Saturday Night Fever,” although there were precedents, such as “The Graduate” from the late 1960s. But by the 1980s, boosted by the rise of MTV, soundtrack compilations like “Flashdance,” “Footloose,” “Back to the Future” and “Top Gun” helped cement the industry belief that a hit movie needed an album featuring a whole bunch of new songs from artists featured within the film. Sometimes, the songs wouldn’t even be in the movie—and sometimes certain songs in the film wouldn’t be included on the soundtrack—but the general idea was that the album was a way for the viewer to relieve the experience of seeing the movie. It was like a souvenir you could listen to in the car.
But some soundtrack albums weren’t about new songs. “The Big Chill,” a film about aging Baby Boomers coming to grips with their shattered idealism, found its characters grooving to the songs of their youth, and so the soundtrack was a jukebox of those faded hits, the compilation eventually going sextuple-platinum. (The album was such a smash, a second volume, “More Songs From the Big Chill,” was released.) Baby Boomer viewers bought the record to relive their glory days, and their kids checked it out to learn a little something about Marvin Gaye, the Temptations and Smokey Robinson.
The best-selling soundtracks of the 1990s were mostly of the new-tunes variety—even in the case of “The Bodyguard,” whose most famous song was Whitney Houston’s cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”—although you also had oldies/obscurities compilations, like the ones that accompanied “Dazed and Confused” and “Pulp Fiction.” In that latter category was “Forrest Gump,” which ambitiously sought to be a wide-ranging overview of early-rock-era American music. Other such compilations weren’t nearly as expansive. “Dazed and Confused” zeroed in on ‘70s FM rock, while Tarantino luxuriated in his offbeat record collection.
Sequenced very roughly in chronological order, “Forrest Gump” felt like a comprehensive history of the American songs that were the backdrop for the country’s most culturally important moments during a turbulent time. The journey from Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” (the “start” of the rock ‘n’ roll era, if you will) to Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” (mainstream corporate Midwestern rock as disco, punk, New Wave and hip-hop were challenging rock ‘n’ roll’s primacy) encompasses the counterculture and Vietnam as much as it documents popular music’s rebellious early days and its eventual evolution into a slicker, more polished art form.
Inevitably, that also meant that “Forrest Gump” (the film and the soundtrack) would turn some of those memorable tunes into clichés. When Tom Hanks’ Forrest arrives in Vietnam, of course we hear Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” the band already well on its way to becoming a cinematic shorthand for “The Vietnam War was mentally and physically devastating for our troops.” When Forrest goes on his nationwide run, director Robert Zemeckis gets literal, pulling out Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty.” The hippies are soundtracked to “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” while “For What It’s Worth” predictably underlines Forrest’s disillusionment at serving in a senseless war.
But I don’t feel The Forrest Gump soundtrack was seeking to recontextualize these songs. Rather, the film was designed to reinforce its audience’s associations with those familiar tunes. The album grabbed tracks used in previous films and musicals—“Mrs. Robinson,” “Everybody’s Talkin’,” “Medley: Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In”—which added to the movie’s intentional feeling of déjà vu, Forrest’s strange odyssey across American history meant to replicate the viewer’s.
In a sense, the soundtrack wanted to demonstrate how songs aren’t clichés to those who lived through their emergence—in fact, they’re the very fabric of your being, the aural wallpaper for your formative memories. The album’s selections may be on-the-nose—“Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Respect” “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season),” “Joy to the World” —but to the generation that Zemeckis was catering, they were elemental, essential. They were the soundtrack to their lives—and, as a result, songs that future generations would never escape.
The album existed at a time when two-disc compilations were all the rage, an easy way to get acquainted (or reacquainted) with a particular musical style or artist. (The Beatles’ hallowed “Blue” and “Red” greatest hits, first released in the early 1970s, finally came to CD in 1993.) Best-ofs were big business—a lucrative opportunity for record labels to repackage and resell old songs—and “Forrest Gump” perfectly fit the moment. Nowadays, it would just be a streaming service playlist—maybe they’d call it Boomer Rock or Feel-Good Oldies—that would be the background music for a cookout. In the 30 years since the “Forrest Gump” soundtrack came out, its selections have been reduced to a vibe, an algorithm, a CliffsNotes of classic American rock and R&B. The songs’ individual potency—their ability to stun with their passion or originality—has been lost to time. For those in my generation, they’re now just a bunch of songs your parents or grandparents liked when they were kids. Though I don’t necessarily think that isn’t kind of the point here.
The whole point of “Forrest Gump” was how it showed American history through an earnest, sentimental prism, seeking comfort, reconciliation and hope in the wake of such traumatic years. The tunes on the soundtrack weren’t meant to challenge us—they’re there to make us feel good, bring up cherished collective memories, evoke a nostalgia for what once was.
The film mourns the passage of time, and that feeling is even more pronounced when you listen to the album now. In the iTunes/Spotify age, the notion of the album as a coherent, artistic unit has been jettisoned—even if it’s an album that’s merely a collection of disparate older tracks from a bygone era. These songs were “old” 30 years ago, and they’re even older today, with many of the artists dead or no longer recording. In a sense, the history that the “Forrest Gump” soundtrack meant to codify has been scattered to the digital winds. That history has become like that feather that floats through the air at the film’s beginning and end, meant to suggest the impermanence of everything—including the classic rock era this album strives to preserve.
I understand the irony of sharing the songs from this soundtrack in a Spotify playlist but still figured I would share it for anyone that would want to listen.
