Empire Records (1995) Might’ve Been the Peak of Cinema’s Soundtrack Era

Hello reader! A quick heads up: If you love Empire Records and want to hear me chat with my dear friends Gareth Jones and Craig Ceravolo about it, tune in to Sleep In Cinema tomorrow (Saturday) morning at 9:00 CT on Substrate Radio! All you have to do is head to substrateradio.com and press play, or even better, download the app and press play. Then hop in the Substrate Radio Discord server and chat with us about it! I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Rex Manning Day. Hope y’all enjoy it!

It may seem paradoxical, but I do my best to keep this newsletter about decades-old movies relatively topical—all while maintaining my Friday morning posting schedule.

Christmas and Thanksgiving are givens, of course. But even beyond that, whenever a holiday or a significant event falls on a Friday, I try to embrace it as a theme. Two years ago this week, I wrote about April Fool’s Day. Last year, I finally wrote about Friday the 13th after skipping a few earlier opportunities.¹ And last week wasn’t the first time I celebrated the beginning of baseball season.

But in 2022, I made a huge mistake. I didn’t celebrate Rex Manning Day, the day that Empire Records is centered around due to the sexy but corny crooner’s in-store visit. And now, thanks to the next leap year, April 8th won’t fall on a Friday again until 2033. Will this newsletter still exist in 2033? Will the internet even exist by then? Who’s to say?

So we’ll have to celebrate Empire Records a few days early. (I’ve been listening to a lot of Gin Blossoms lately, so this was inevitable.)

Empire Records is the sort of film that could’ve only existed in the ‘90s for a few reasons. It’s a comedy with a decent budget despite very little star power, a thing that feels almost extinct by now. It’s a studio movie, though it feels like a concept crafted to take advantage of the emerging indie film boom, aiming firmly at a young, hip audience.² And perhaps most obviously, it fully embraced the aversion to “selling out” that percolated throughout all pop culture in the ‘90s. It’s a film about a small music business that’s in danger of being bought out by a giant record store chain—even though both versions of that similar thing would be an endangered species less than a decade later.

But what I love most about Empire Records is that it’s a prime example of one of my favorite ‘90s cinematic trends: the soundtrack movie.

Keep in mind: A movie with a popular soundtrack isn’t necessarily a “soundtrack movie.” There were plenty of soundtracks moving units in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Saturday Night Fever was accompanied by an iconic album that sold a reported 40 million copies. A decade later, Dirty Dancing experienced a similar phenomenon with its soundtrack, which went on to sell a reported 32 million copies. And then the soundtrack for The Bodyguard reported a whopping 50 million in sales and became the third-highest-selling album of all time.³

There are countless other examples of film and album combinations with symbiotic relationships. But the ‘90s was a beautiful time when films didn’t have to be successful to have a popular soundtrack. Hell, in my younger days, I owned soundtracks for films I’d never even seen.⁴

Variety actually called Empire Records “a soundtrack in search of a movie” in their review, which is a pretty negative thing to say, even though they had a point. To paint a picture for you, there are three needle drops before the opening credits are finished. But music supervisor Mitchell Leib didn’t take it as a slight. As he said in an interview years later, his job was “to have hit singles and a giant soundtrack that was supposed to not only enhance the playability of the movie, but also was supposed to act as a marketing asset and launch the film.”

That launch…didn’t go so well. Weeks before Empire Records was set to be released in theaters, the studio had already written it off as a lost cause. As a result, the film scraped together less than $275,000 at the box office and was left for dead at video stores across the nation.

Warner Bros. didn’t do their job, but Leib sure as hell did. So well, in fact, that the Empire Records soundtrack shipped three million copies and sold at least two million. And it’s a really good soundtrack, folks. There are some essential ‘90s bands like The Cranberries, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Cracker, and Better Than Ezra. There are also some bands that don’t seem to exist beyond this soundtrack like the Ape Hangers and The Meices.

But the soundtrack’s secret weapon, of course, was the Gin Blossoms. Warner Bros. wanted them involved so badly that they rerouted the soundtrack from Atlantic Records (one of their affiliates at the time) to A&M Records, who had the Gin Blossoms on their roster. This partnership paved the way for “Til’ I Hear It From You,” which wound up being the band’s first top 10 hit on the Billboard charts, peaking at 9.⁵

Gin Blossoms frontman Robin Wilson even called it a highlight of the band’s tenure: “Empire Records is a classic film that only a handful of people really saw, but it definitely made an impact on that generation. …It was the peak of our career…a once in a lifetime experience, really.”

It’s funny that Empire Records has been remembered because of a fake musician.⁶ So we will give credit where credit is due and celebrate Rex Manning Day accordingly. But I will always appreciate the way that one of the most underrated bands of the ‘90s helped immortalize one of the most underrated films of the ‘90s.

Empire Records is now streaming on Hulu, Paramount+, and Showtime, and it is available to rent elsewhere.

1. It finally landed in October. There was no way I wasn’t celebrating the hands-down spookiest non-Halloween day of the year.

2. I’m sure Carol Heikkinen wrote her screenplay before seeing Linklater’s film, but it’s no coincidence that Empire Records came out almost exactly two years after Dazed and Confused. They even have Rory Cochrane in common.

3. The Bodyguard was a huge box office hit, raking in more than $400 million. But it doesn’t have much of a legacy three decades later. I think it could be argued that it became a soundtrack movie over time.

4. I bought the soundtrack to a film called Godmoney that I knew nothing about other than the long list of punk bands that got involved. Godmoney is such a soundtrack movie that the bands are listed on the actual poster. I have still never seen this film and I don’t really want to.

5. The film really milks the song too, featuring it a total of three times: near the very beginning (heard diegetically through a car radio), in the romantic climax of the film, and minutes later in the closing credits.

6. Decidedly not funny, though, is the reason why the film takes place on April 8th. Hard to believe it’s been 30 years.