The Great Gatsby’s soundtrack sparked controversy when they replaced the iconic Jazz music of the era with a modern soundtrack that consisted primarily of Rap and Hip Hop, with new tracks featuring many artists ranging from Jay Z to Fergie. Jazz was portrayed in the book because that is what was, new, exiting, and the music your parents told you not to listen to. The modern equivalent of that is Hip Hop and Rap. This timeless book would not have evoked the same feelings if it had used a jazz soundtrack. Today we associate Jazz as rustic and quaint and that would have destroyed all feelings of danger and excitement in the movie.
The director Baz Luhrmann had this to say about the soundtrack.
“[The idea] didn’t come from ‘Let’s make a great soundtrack, it came from Fitzgerald,'” Luhrmann explained to MTV News. “When he wrote that book, he was a modernist, he was in the moment, and the music of the moment was African-American street music called Jazz, and when he put Jazz music in Gatsby, everyone was like ‘What are you crazy? It’s a fad.’ And then he put Hit Parade songs, pop songs, the equivalent of Lana Del Rey singing a beautiful ballad.
“And [we tried to solve] the problem of ‘How do you reveal the book, but how do you make it feel the way it felt to read it in 1925?'” he continued. “If Fitzgerald coined the phrase ‘The Jazz Age,’ then I think we’re living in ‘The Hip Hop Age.'”
It doesn’t take a genius to make a connection between the music of Jay Z and the opulent themes of The Great Gatsby. The soundtrack added atmosphere that the film needed.
