The soundtrack for one of my favorite movies, The Big Lebowski is a real genre-bender and of interest to anyone who knows there's a lot more going on in this movie than the casual fan may notice. The cult-classic status of the film continues to grow over the years, an unlikely entry in the Coen Brothers repertoire. Admittedly I only grabbed the soundtrack because I liked the song "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)" by a much younger Kenny Rogers and his band, The First Edition. However, I ended up enjoying most of the tracks, even though pretty much every artist featured doesn't show up anywhere else in my collection other than Captain Beefheart (and even that didn't join the collective until much later).
The first three songs are fairly standard enough: Bob Dylan, a tame Captain Beefheart song, and Elvis Costello. Things take a sharp turn right after that, with the first half rounded out by the likes of Yma Sumac, Moondog, and others. This makes a weird Kenny Rogers song seem downright normal, but it too is then followed by a mish-mash of genres, from opera to Townes Van Zandt covering the Rolling Stones' "Dead Flowers", plus the compilation's only original song, "Technopop" by the Coens' music maestro Carter Burwell - something for everyone, I suppose!
The only really shocking omission (many songs from the movie aren't here....like "Pictures from an Exhibition" for starters) is "I Hate You" by the Monks. It drove me crazy for years not being able to figure out what that song was and stumbled on it completely by accident many years later.
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