If you’re familiar with the films of Baz Luhrmann at all, you know that music is an integral part of his work. The long-awaited adaptation of The Great Gatsby will be no exception: The initial promos for the Jazz Age period piece featured Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild” and Jack White’s “Love is Blindess,” harkening back to the anachronistic exuberance of previous Luhrmann movies Moulin Rouge and Romeo+Juliet.
That Jack White recording will be included on the Gatsby soundtrack, which you can now preview on YouTube. A few songs from the previously announced track list are missing (most notably Beyoncé and Andre 3000’s cover of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black”), but the 6-minute long video provides 30-second samples of most of the movie’s tunes, ranging from Lana Del Rey to Bryan Ferry. (If you can stand it, you can also listen to “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody” in full; the Fergie/Goonrock/Q-Tip collaboration leaked yesterday.)
Taken together (and even, in some cases, individually), the songs echo most of Luhrmann’s work, blending, to occasionally jarring effect, the old-fashioned and the up-to-date. On this soundtrack, at least, it seems to work.
