Well, Big Chill takes you back to those times. Way back before "iTUNES," "iPODS," and "iHAVE NO IDEA WHY I'M LISTENING TO JUSTIN BIEBER!" Remember when your biggest concerns were your music, your hair, and whether or not your car would start? One evening, at the Trade Winds in Chicago, the club owner said to me, 'You’re going to have to put some makeup on, we can’t see her from the rear of the club, get some makeup on that girl!' So now I wear a little makeup, but I still feel like a natural woman.Do you remember waiting for the release of that awesome new album by your favorite rock band? I was just very natural and happy with that. As she told Vogue, "When I first came into the business in the early ’60s out of the church, I didn’t wear makeup or anything like that. Nonetheless she had her own way of identifying with the lyrics (by Carole King and Gerry Goffin). "Natural Woman" is one of a few Franklin songs - "Respect" and "Think" are a couple others - that became anthems of strong femininity, although Franklin said she wasn't thinking about it in that way at the time. This tune is not only sultry and romantic, but the message is that Harold will help complete Meg’s role as a woman by getting her pregnant. As Meg and Harold go off to make love, Aretha Franklin’s megahit from 1967, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” plays. In the end, Sarah offers her own husband, Harold (Kevin Kline). The two women discuss which men in the group would make good surrogate fathers. When the old friends reunite in The Big Chill, one of the women, Meg (played by Mary Kay Place) confides to Sarah (played by Glenn Close) that she is desperate to get pregnant but her husband, Nick (William Hurt) is sterile. Within a few years, we would see advertisers latch on to this hit for marketing purposes, notably Levi's jeans and the California Raisin Advisory Board. A re-recorded version by the "California Raisins" (singing raisins with arms and legs, depicted using claymation) made for one of the most popular ads of the 1980s. The song spent seven weeks at the top of the chart. Radio DJs discovered the song and began playing it anyway, pushing Motown to release it as a single. Motown founder Berry Gordy didn't think Gaye's version was strong enough to be a single, but included it as a track on Gaye's 1968 album Special Occasion. Marvin Gaye wasn't the only Motown artist to record "I Heard It Through The Grapevine " in fact, in 1967, the version by Gladys Knight & The Pips had been a #2 hit on the Billboard pop chart. The catchy tune immediately sets the mood of The Big Chill snags the attention of its baby boomer audience. This opening scene, in which the credits roll, is used to gather old college buddies from their different lives after receiving the news of their friend’s death. The montage opening of The Big Chill features Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine,” a hit from 1968. Let’s look at some of the best hits from the Big Chill soundtrack. The producers of The Big Chill not only evoked that feeling of nostalgia with the sixties songs they included in the film, but they did so is such a masterful way that the songs blended into each scene. The big chill soundtrack movie#After the movie came out, more and more companies used 1960s songs in their advertising commercials and used nostalgia as a sales tactic. In fact, The Big Chill soundtrack was so popular and inspired so much nostalgia that it sparked a marketing trend. Ten tracks of soul-soothing soul, buy it on cassette and pop it into the tape deck in your Saab or Volvo, turn it up louder after you've dropped the kids off at school - that was a good time. Well, that's true of the characters in the movie (who, in the movie, also listen to the songs on the soundtrack), if not every individual listener. The Big Chill soundtrack seemed to be just what they needed to take them back to a simpler time when, perhaps, they felt better about themselves. Many of them were old-ish yuppies, participating in the materialism of the '80s that seemed at odds with the ideals of their youth. They were, like the characters in the film, Baby Boomers.
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