10 Best '90s Movie Soundtracks

To be clear, this list wasn't easy to assemble. There were some hard cuts made, because the '90s was possibly the peak of movie soundtracks. In any case, each of these movies embodies the spirit of '90s soundtracks in a way that can't be ignored. And that will have readers revisiting each of these movies ASAP. And more than that, finding their soundtracks online and giving them a spin in their own right.

10 Things I Hate About You

Standout Tracks: "One Week" By Barenaked Ladies; "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" Performed By Heath Ledger

Music plays a pivotal role in 10 Things I Hate About You. The classic teen rom-com's tone is set from its very opening frames with two crucial musical cues. The movie starts with iconic Barenaked Ladies track "One Week," but as a convertible full of preppie girls pulls up to a stoplight blasting the song, it is drowned out by the more dissonant, but equally iconic, Joan Jett track "Bad Reputation."

Music is an essential part of Julia Stiles Kat Stratford as a character, and live music factors into some of the movie's most unforgettable scenes. There's the Letters to Cleo gig, about 35 minutes into the movie. Toward the end, ska band Save Ferris plays the school's prom, before Cleo returns, delivering an A+ covers of "Cruel To Be Kind" by Nick Loew add Cheap Trick's "I Want You To Want Me." And, of course, there's Heath Ledger's character Patrick Verona serenading Kat on the high school football field with "

Letters to Cleo are described as Kat's "favorite band" in the movie, and Patrick namedrops the Raincoats and Bikini Kill to impress her. Further, Kat's goal of becoming an indie rock musician herself is a recording character beat in the film. The rest of 10 Things features an array of memorable tracks, and the soundtrack notably spent nearly two months on the Billboard charts in 1999.

Airheads

Standout Tracks: Motorhead's "Born To Raise Hell", "Unsatisfied" By The Replacements

1994's Airheads was an early starring role for its three leads, Brendan Fraser, Adam Sandler, and Steve Bushemi. It was also a clear sign of the times: hard rock and punk had officially fully gone mainstream. Airheads was a box office bomb at the time, but went on to become a cult classic. In large part thanks to its soundtrack.

It's really simple: there's no way a movie that managed to work a song by '80s punk band Reagan Youth into its plot, by having its fictional band the Lone Rangers perform it, wasn't going to make this list. Especially when the movie's cover of "Degenerated" is legitimately solid. Throw in tracks by The Replacements, Primus, Motorhead, the Ramones, and more, and the result is an underrated iconic movie soundtrack, which elevates Airheads from a good to great flick.

Belly

Standout Tracks: "Top Shotter" By DMX, Sean Paul, & Mr. Vegas, "Grand Finale" By DMX, Nas, Ja Rule, & Method Man

The 1990s was the era of hip-hop movies. Like punk rock, hip-hop completed its arc from counterculture, to subculture, to culture in the '90s. Belly was part of the genre's takeover of Hollywood. The movie stars legendary '90s rappers Nas and DMX. T-Boz Watkins and Method Man play supporting roles, and artists including Ghostface Killah and AZ cameo in the movie.

More than that, hip-hop suffuses the style and tone of the movie. It is an essential part of Belly's vision. Both lead actors contribute to the soundtrack, which also features Jay-Z, members of Wu-Tang, and more mainstays of East Coast hip-hop in the 1990s. The Belly soundtrack, produced by Def Jam, was notably a bigger hit than the movie itself. While Belly was a modest box office success, its soundtrack surged to #5 on the Billboard charts and was a certified Gold record in 1999.

Clerks

Standout Tracks: "Panic In Cicero" By The Jesus Lizard; Bad Religion's "Leaders And Followers"

Kevin Smith's directorial debut Clerks was part of the early 1990s indie film revolution, right there alongside Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. (Which, spoilers, also makes this list.) Yet while Clerks is praised for its sub-$30,000 budget, and Smith's signature dialogue, the movie doesn't get nearly enough praise for having an iconic punk and alternative soundtrack.

Which fit the movie perfectly, because its raw aesthetic and DIY production give Clerks punk rock DNA. And, of course, it was a practical decision: non-mainstream bands and their laels licensed their music for cheaper. Which meant bands like Tommy Stinson's post-Replacements group Bash & Pop, noise rockers The Jesus Lizard, and heavy metal act Corrosion of Conformity are all heard in the movie.

Clerks is also noteworthy for being the first movie to license a Bad Religion song, which was a big deal in 1994. An even bigger deal was the film' big splurges, Alice in Chain's "Got Me Wrong" and Soul Asylum's "Can't Even Tell," which Kevin Smith actually directed the music video for.

Dazed and Confused

Standout Tracks: "Sweet Emotion" By Aerosmith; "Slow Ride" By Foghat; Bob Dylan's "Hurricane"

All the movies we've looked at so far are modern classics that were on the cutting edge with their soundtracks. Movies that captured the "now" of the 1990s through musical selections. Dazed and Confused took viewers to a different time and place: 1976. Released in 1993, Richard Linklater's film transported viewers back 17 years, and more than anything the characters said, did, or wore, what they were listening to defined the era as Linklater portrayed it.

Linklater's original pitch for Dazed and Confused was actually about a group of friends listening to the same record on a loop: ZZ Top's "Fandango." The concept eventually evolved beyond that into the portrait of overlapping social circles in a small Texas high school that viewers know and love today.

ZZ Top's "Tush," the most iconic song from "Fandango," did make it into the movie, but the soundtrack expanded to include Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan, Ted Nugent, Nazareth, Lynyrd Skynyrd, KISS, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and many more. Essentially, a "who's who" of the best '70s rock. For people enchanted with that era, it makes Dazed and Confused one of the most valuable cultural artifacts there is.

Empire Records

Standout Tracks: "Til I Hear From You" By The Gin Blossoms; "Liar" By The Cranberries

Empire Records is in the conversation for the greatest theatrical flop of all time. The movie cost $10 million dollars to make, and got a box office return of less than half a million. That wasn't the movie's fault; the studio fumbled its release. Yet the presence of stars like Liv Tyler and Renée Zellweger, and memorable character actors like Rory Cochran (from Dazed and Confused) gave the film an afterlife on home video. It helps that it is a perfect music movie.

Like High Fidelity five years later, Empire Records is set in a music store. Except instead of a few music nerds behind the counter, the store employees are a bunch of young adults with wide-ranging musical tastes. The result is an eclectic soundtrack where punk bands like Suicidal Tendencies and Pegboy co-exist with AC/DC and The The.

Throw some GWAR, some Cranberries, and some Gin Blossoms into the mix, and the end result is an all-time jammable movie playlist. 30+ years after the movie's disastrous release, it is a monument to the convergence of different genres in America's 1990s musical landscape, making it a must-watch.

New Jersey Drive

Standout Tracks: Outkast's "Benz Or Beamer", Naughty By Nature's "Collections"

Before there was Belly, there was New Jersey Drive, a sleeper hit 1990s crime movie. The thriller about car thieves in Newark, New Jersey is propulsively driven by its soundtrack, which includes appearances by KRS-One, Biggie, the Lords of the Underground, Heavy D, Queen Latifah, Coolio, Biz Markie, and many other hip-hop icons.

New Jersey Drive's soundtrack was so sprawling that it received a two-volume release. Vol. 1 went gold, and climbed to 22 overall on the Billboard charts. Vol. 2 didn't fare quite as well, but still, both are indicative of American culture's full-blown obsession with hip-hop by 1995.

Like Juice and Boys in the Hood and other '90s rap-dominated soundtracks, New Jersey Drive helped set the template for the varying ways that the genre would be used on screen over the next 30 years. If there's a hip-hop needle drop in a movie today, just know that music selection was made possible by these pioneering films.

Pulp Fiction

Standout Tracks: "You Never Can Tell" By Chuck Berry; The Statler Brothers' "Flowers On The Wall"

Pulp Fiction is such a deeply revered movie, with such a profound impact on American cinema, that it's hard to convey how wild it must have been for audiences the first time they saw Uma Thurman and John Travolta boogying to a Chuck Berry tune in the middle of this crime thriller. Or what early viewers felt as Urge Overkill's "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon" led directly into Mia Wallace's overdose.

Nobody makes movies quite like Quentin Tarantino, and that includes his unique ear for music. His debut feature Reservoir Dogs made that clear, and Pulp Fiction took it to the next level. Tarantino curated a collection of great songs, but more than that, it's impossible to imagine substituting any of the musical cues in the movie, because each is synonymous with its accompanying scene.

SLC Punk!

Standout Tracks: "Sex And Violence" By The Exploited; Fear's "I Love Livin' In The City"

SLC Punk! is the greatest punk rock film of all time. It's a flawed portrayal of punk as a subculture, and a mindset, but like a messy punk song itself, that's actually part of the charm. The 1998 film, starring Matthew Lillard in his biggest starring role, takes the angsty, self-destructive image of punks in pop culture that had formed over the preceding 20 years and riffs on that.

But while it's debatable whether Stevo and Heroin Bob and their friends are "real" punks, there's no question about the soundtrack's authenticity. Like Dazed and Confused, SLC Punk! is a period piece. It is set in 1985, and features period-appropriate punk song selections, from the Dead Kennedys' "Kill the Poor" to Generation X's "Kiss Me Deadly."

Part of what makes SLC Punk! important was its timing. A generation of punks raised in the early 2000s discovered the film on home video and airing on cable. And in those early internet days, where fledgling punks still had to do legwork to discover new music, SLC Punk! helped introduce them to a stacked soundtrack of classics.

Space Jam

Standout Tracks: "Space Jam" By Quad City DJs, "Fly Like An Eagle" By Steve Miller

Space Jam is up there with Wild Wild West for the best '90s movie title track. But where the rest of the Will Smith western's soundtrack levels something to be desired, Space Jam delivers. It's full of classics in different genres, as well as other original songs created for the movie, such as "Hit 'Em High (The Monstars Anthem" featuring Busta Rhymes, Method Man, LL Cool J and more.

For kids of a certain age in the mid-1990s, Space Jam was effectively their introduction to the concept of "cool." If nothing else, it explains '90s kids irrational love of "Fly Like An Eagle." The long-awaited Space Jam sequel tried to recapture this magic in 2021, but it's fair to say it didn't quite hit the same in the music category.

Sound off, '90s music fans. What other movies deserve to be on this list?