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Classic Recordings: Love & Basketball Soundtrack

Sixteen tracks from one of the best-curated soundtracks in film. Love & Basketball uses music the way the film uses time — to mark exactly where you are.

Love & Basketball, 2000

Gina Prince-Bythewood's debut feature tells the story of Monica and Quincy across four "quarters," from childhood in 1981 to adulthood in the 1990s, and the soundtrack is structured to match. Each era of the film gets its era's music, which means the record functions as both a soundtrack and a compressed history of Black popular music across two decades.

It was produced by Spike Lee's 40 Acres and a Mule, and the music supervision is unusually intelligent — the songs are chosen for what they meant at the time rather than for what sounds good now, which is a harder and more rewarding standard.

What to listen for

Al Green's "Love And Happiness" opens and is close to a shorthand for the whole film: joy and difficulty in the same song, with that organ intro doing an enormous amount of work.

Maxwell's "This Woman's Work" is the film's emotional peak and one of the great cover versions. The Kate Bush original is already devastating; Maxwell's falsetto reading somehow finds more.

Meshell Ndegeocello's "Fool of Me" is the other essential — a song about being made a fool of by someone you love, and one of the most quietly brutal records in her catalogue.

The period markers are where the curation shows. Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock's "It Takes Two," Bobby Brown's "My Prerogative," Guy's "I Like," Johnny Kemp's "Just Got Paid" and MC Lyte's "Lyte as a Rock" place you in the late 1980s within a bar.

Lucy Pearl's "Dance Tonight" is the contemporary one — the supergroup of Raphael Saadiq, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Dawn Robinson, formed the same year.

Marvin Gaye appears twice, and Rufus and Chaka Khan's "Sweet Thing" and Roger's "I Want to Be Your Man" handle the 1970s and 80s slow-jam duty. Simply Red's "Holding Back The Years" is the outlier and it works.

Go deeper

Watch the film if you have not. It is one of the best American romantic dramas of its era and was, for a long time, badly underrated.

Gina Prince-Bythewood's subsequent work — Beyond the Lights and The Woman King — is worth following.

For the soundtrack tradition it belongs to: Spike Lee's films generally, Waiting to Exhale, Above the Rim and Boomerang. Black American cinema in the 1990s produced a run of soundtracks that were frequently better than the films and occasionally better than any album released that year.

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