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" Illustration by Geoff McFetridge from the cover of FILTER magazine, issue 37 Can you imagine The Graduate without Simon and Garfunkel? Or Youngblood Priest making deals in Super Fly not to the bass lines of Curtis Mayfield but some sort of infomercial-ready mishmash of funk&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;greatest hits&amp;quot;? Since that heyday of the hired-gun movie score, too many filmmakers (with the possible exceptions of Hal Ashby and P.T. Anderson) have seemed to prefer their soundtracks radio-ready and all over the place. Even the most musically inclined directors (Cameron Crowe and the late John Hughes come to mind) edited out most of the songs from their &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; soundtracks, until finally Zach Braff sent the hip-guy playlist off into the post-Napster era, when any hip guy with iTunes and a Pandora account can put together enough tracks to fit a mood. And so it&amp;#039;s been a pleasure, amidst the continuing obfuscation of the music industry, to listen to the return of single-artist movie music \u2014 more score than soundtrack, more jive than jewel case. After Amy Mann&amp;#039;s work on his Magnolia outdid the Elliot Smith-heavy Good Will Hunting for Most Depressing Score of the Late &amp;#039;90s, Anderson hired Radiohead&amp;#039;s Johnny Greenwood to compose for 2007&amp;#039;s There Will Be Blood, and it&amp;#039;s been a rite of coolness for even the coolest directors and fanboy projects since.  I&amp;#039;ve been listening to the Where the Wild Things Are disc (out tomorrow, and streaming today) on repeat for most of today, and it&amp;#039;s like some kind of hour-long trailer \u2014 a setting of the mood for a mysterious film that&amp;#039;s already got a pretty gut-wrenching preview. Karen O forgoes her Yeah Yeah Yeahs hurricane growl for an untrained children&amp;#039;s chorus \u2014 and a pack of hip-guy indie rockers, sure, but they combine in soaring fashion precisely because O produced a score, not a CD. Here&amp;#039;s hoping robotic DJ kings Daft Punk take the same tack for the Tron sequel (a little techno bird told me they&amp;#039;re already at work on &amp;quot;album-worthy stuff&amp;quot;) and that even the Cameron Crowes of the world drop their egos for more rock-&amp;#039;n&amp;#039;-roll composers. In the meantime, at least Thom Yorke&amp;#039;s doing a song for that vampire movie, so we needn&amp;#039;t create another Oscar category just yet. RELATED LINKS:  THE ENDORSEMENT: Spike Jonze&amp;#039;s Trailer for Where the Wild Things Are FALL PREVIEW: Where the Wild Things Are and 56 Other Things to Get Excited About "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a6424/where-the-wild-things-are-soundtrack-review-092809/>