The
Los Angeles Times reports on a soon to be released film, "The Wackness," based around a hip hop fan from the mid-90s. In the article, they highlight a widget released by the people behind the film that features "Party & Bull****" by The Notorious B.I.G.
Back in March,
The Playlist reported that "The What" by Biggie featuring Method Man, "Can't You See" by Total featuring Biggie, "You Used to Love Me" by Faith Evans and "Flava In Ya Ear" by Craig Mack, were slated to be on the soundtrack to the film.
The L.A. Times article also features an interview with director Jonathan Levine.
You're dealing with some prime catalog, such as Notorious B.I.G.'s "The What." Was it tough to secure these tracks?
We reached out to the Biggie estate early and were able to clear it. But my editor was the one who put A Tribe Called Quest in the movie, and I said you guys are all nuts. I didn’t think I could get a Tribe Called Quest song with a Lou Reed sample, but we were.
It was crazy. But I think the great thing about it is that not a lot of people are using this type of music. Hopefully, this will be the first of many movies that license early ‘90s hip-hop. I don’t think there was much demand for it, and people were just happy to contribute their songs to a movie. Also, we got [Sony BMG] behind us, and they were able to hook us up.
He also gave an interview to
FirstShowing.net back in January where he, again, mentioned Biggie.
Can you talk about the music choices as well, because I think that's another really key thing that defines the movie. There are so many great elements to it, but the music as well…
Levine: The music for me, that's what I grew up with, and most of it was even written in the script and we brought a music supervisor on really early. Biggie was such an important part of the script that we got in touch with the Wallace estate and we were able to get that Biggie stuff in there and they were very gracious to us. It was just, that was really important to having that soundtrack and luckily we got all the stuff we wanted. It wasn't easy because a lot of them have samples that are difficult to clear, or also the fact that that very few movies have used that type of music meant that a lot of the artists and the labels were really excited about the opportunity to put it in a movie. You don't see Nas or Wu-Tang or all that stuff in a movie very often, especially not their old stuff.
Check out the movie site for more.
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