This came out in 2000 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Typically, the six worst words you can find on a soundtrack album are “music inspired by the motion picture.” Roughly translated, this means “a whole buncha crap that has nothing to do with the film but sorta sounds similar and came real cheap.”
More’s the surprise, then, that the album for this biopic of boxer Rubin Carter is the rare instance when inspiration truly seems to have struck. Flitting between the ’60s, when Carter was wrongly imprisoned for murder, and the ’90s, when he finally enjoyed freedom, The Hurricane bobs and weaves from the Afrocentric grooves of Gil Scott-Heron (The Revolution Will Not be Televised) and soul of Ray Charles (Hard Times No One Knows) to new, thematically sound hip-hop from the likes of Meshell Ndegeocello (the darkly funky Isolation) and Melky Sedeck (the gospel-tinged ballad Still I Rise). And of course, you get Bob Dylan’s classic Hurricane, which still packs all the emotional punch it did 20 years ago. A knockout.
