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The soundtrack for 1995’s Clueless, now celebrating its 30th anniversary alongside the movie, is a classic of the genre on so many levels: For one, it does a beautiful job of accurately capturing the spirit of writer/director Amy Heckerling’s Emma remix, while heavily representing the actual music featured on screen. For another, it crafts a true portrait of the time period in which it originated, bringing together a wild collection of artists including Radiohead, Beastie Boys, Jill Sobule, and Coolio.
“it’s your favorite directors making a mix tape for you,” a wise man named Ben Wyatt once said about movie soundtracks, an increasingly lost art in the Spotify age. Still, there’s such a rich legacy of these albums going back decades, bringing together eclectic but thematically linked artists for an album of music meant to represent a whole cinematic journey. Buying the soundtrack on vinyl, cassette tape, or CD was a way of understanding a film on a whole other level: You might have heard the song in the movie, sure, but in a time before the Shazam app, the soundtrack was how you knew what it was.
Like a great mix tape, soundtracks at their peak were powerful not just as an alternate revenue stream for the studios, but as a way for audiences to be introduced to new artists. If you were, perhaps, a dumb young X-Files geek in 1995, Clueless soundtrack album producers Tim Devine and Karyn Rachtman were instrumental in exposing you to some great alternative music of the era.
Prominently credited on the back of the CD case — good for them! — Devine and Rachtman managed to bring together almost all of Clueless’s most important needle drops for this soundtrack; the only major omission feels like end credits song General Public’s “Tenderness.” (Which at least hasn’t been forgotten by history — it just popped up in The Bear Season 4.)
The Cranberries also don’t make the cut, despite Elton (Jeremy Sisto) trying to serenade Cher with “Away,” and No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” was omitted as well. In the case of “Just a Girl,” maybe its omission was for the best, as that’s honestly a bit too on the nose. As for the songs that did make the cut, it’s worth noting that they aren’t all hugely important to the story of spoiled high school icon Cher (Alicia Silverstone) giving herself a “make-over of the soul” — like, you hear maybe 30 seconds of the album’s Luscious Jackson selection in the movie, as it’s the techno track Christian (Justin Walker) dances to while a party dies around him.
What’s curious is that there are songs the soundtrack includes that, in the context of the movie, feel like they were selected not for their musical value, but as a pointed jab at some particular character. For example, it’s not that Counting Crows was considered the lamest band in 1995, having just broken out with 1993’s “Mr. Jones.” But when Josh (Paul Rudd) gives a stranded Cher a ride home, “The Ghost in You” on the car stereo feels like a nod to Josh being slightly older and lamer than the movie’s younger, hipper counterparts.
Okay, earlier in the movie Josh is the one playing Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” in the house — or, as Cher refers to it, “the maudlin music of the University station, waa, waa, waa.” In retrospect, was Josh secretly the coolest character in this movie? His musical taste definitely holds up the best.
The soundtrack’s eclectic nature takes on an almost meta power, considering how many of its chosen selections represent a specific subculture of Beverly Hills High, as explained by Cher and Dionne (Stacey Dash) as they give new student Tai (Brittany Murphy) a prototypical example of the “clique tour” trope. At that point in the movie, Cher holds herself as separate from anyone outside of her chosen circle, largely looking down on them; a huge part of her growth as a character comes from her engaging with those who are different from her, and learning to embrace those differences.
If you listen to the Clueless as a proper album, the ordering has nothing to do with when the song appears in the movie. It’s instead driven by what tracks flow best into each other, with some unexpected but fun choices: Coolio following Mighty Mighty Bosstones? Why not? And that’s exactly the kind of acceptance this soundtrack represents, bringing together such a wide range of styles and genres that all work in harmony together — much like the community Cher constructs for herself by the end of the film.
The producers couldn’t have picked a better closing track, too, one that really encapsulates the movie’s spirit, perhaps more sharply than one might realize at first glance. Jill Sobule’s “Supermodel” plays midway through the movie as the accompaniment to Tai’s big makeover montage, but as an album-capper it’s bright, it’s poppy, and it’s much smarter than you might think on first listen. Much like Clueless itself, and the very specific ’90s vibe it keeps alive to this day.
Stream Clueless now on Paramount+, Kanopy, and Hoopla or on VOD via Apple TV and Amazon.
English (US) · 