Jay-Z Will Release Original Material For The Great Gatsby Soundtrack
Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 03.15.2013
New music is coming with the film...
Jay-Z will not just be executive producing the Great Gatsby sountrack; he will be releasing original material on it as well. An official statement via Reuters has confirmed that the rapper will oversee the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann's film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. The film will be released in May.
According to the statement, Luhrmann and Jay-Z were initially introduced by Leonardo DiCaprio. This turned into a collaboration in which Jay and Luhrmann worked to "capture, translate and contrast the feelings of Fitzgerald's decadent era with that of our own, using hip-hop and jazz, music contemporary and period, to bring two distinct American moments to simultaneous life."
Lurhmann said of the collaboration, "Fitzgerald was a pioneer, famed and controversial for using the then-new and explosive sound called jazz in his novels and short stories-not just as decoration, but to actively tell story using the immediacy of pop culture. He coined the phrase 'the Jazz Age'. So, the question for me in approaching Gatsby was how to elicit from our audience the same level of excitement and pop-cultural immediacy toward the world that Fitzgerald did for his audience? And in our age, the energy of jazz is caught in the energy of hip-hop. Not only is Jay-Z a great artist, full stop, but I had heard that he was a great collaborator."
