Album Review: GOAT (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Various Artists
Sony’s animated sports film gets a 17-song tie-in that needed eight. The few cuts with real grit get smothered by kid-safe fortune-cookie anthems.
Animated sports movies have always needed two kinds of music at once: warm-up records full of “we got this” and slower numbers for the scenes where a young character discovers that winning costs something. For any Various Artists package tethered to one of these films, the challenge is getting those entries to feel written by people with rent and bad knees, instead of by a committee reverse-engineering the word “believe.” GOAT (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), a 17-cut release accompanying the Sony Pictures Animation feature, mostly fumbles that assignment. It has two or three contributions that carry the residue of an actual life outside a recording booth, and a dozen others apparently drafted with a whiteboard of approved emotions and a two-and-a-half-minute timer.
A debit card gets declined at the register, rent is still owed on the first, and the couch came without real cushions. Those are the opening minutes of “Alley Oop,” and Chris Patrick might be the only person on this roster who has actually been broke. His second verse adds selling clothes on Depop and rehearsing in a closet. The post-chorus admission, “Some days I’m not sure I got too much left to give/Baby, I’m tired,” sags under its own weight, the melody barely climbing before it surrenders. Every bill preceding it has a dollar amount.
Most of the motivation numbers default to the same vocabulary. “Overtime,” by V.I.C (not the “Get Silly” rapper), runs through drills-in-my-sleep and putting-the-ting-in-overdrive without much friction, though one buried bar catches differently. V.I.C confesses that the only thing he fears “is on a dotted line,” and that flash of contract anxiety gives the workout bluster a flicker of paranoia the rest of the tune immediately smothers with ad-libs. PARTYOF2’s “Crazy” occupies the same lane with even less specificity, namechecking “bootcamp basics” and “penthouse, straight from the basement” with the staleness of a motivational Instagram caption set to 808s.
“I’m Good,” the Jelly Roll contribution, and Quinn XCII’s “Best Day” both peddle optimism, but the gap between their vocabularies is the compilation’s central problem. Writing from recent wreckage, Jelly Roll catalogues wrong highs chased to numb the lows, finding himself in the dark, making peace with broken pieces. The diction is plain, almost confessional in its recovery-meeting phrasing, and it never reaches for cleverness. Quinn XCII breezes through sugar-rush self-talk about dodging bad luck “like Shohei” and feeling “smooth like a layup,” repeating “this is the best day of my life” with the conviction of a greeting card propped open on a shelf. One could plausibly accompany a character’s genuine breakthrough; the other could accompany a yogurt commercial. They rest two slots apart, and nobody on the A&R side bothered to reconcile them.
Personality, on a compilation this cautious, arrives in flashes. On “Mamacitas,” FLO stack their verses with Cartier frames, bustdowns fresh from the salon, and a bridge where Renée insists “I was born like this” before commanding every mamacita to “walk like this,” a reference to their song with the same name. The entry stays kid-appropriate without ever feeling scrubbed. “Hooligang” by Joey Valence & Brae works from a different angle, rattling off Zoo Pals plates, Kid Cuisine, Cozy Coupes, Reeboks, and Saturday-morning nods to Megazord and Super Saiyan until the nostalgia becomes the entire argument. Valence’s opening dare (“You wanna see something cool? No? Well I’ma do it anyway”) is the one authentic kid’s voice on a roster allegedly assembled for them.
Only two contributors bother to name where they come from, and the difference is immediate. Trueno raps “Grandmaster” in Spanish from La Boca, Buenos Aires, tracing his path from street battles to packed stadiums, and his hook instructs the crowd to raise both hands at once. “El que no baila, es policía” (whoever doesn’t dance is a cop) carries a political charge nothing else here approaches, and the outro interpolation of Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” stitches Argentine bravado to Bronx hip-hop history without stopping to annotate itself. Jon Bellion and Ayra Starr’s “Brought the Family” pares its lyric to almost nothing, a chant tracing lineage back through “his father and his father and his father,” and KAIRO’s “Meets the Eye” is the only contribution that addresses children directly, telling a little boy and a little girl not to cry, then daring them with a repeated “I bet you won’t do it.” That dare, aimed at a kid who thinks growing up is the only prize, musters more real encouragement than anything the workout anthems manage.
Several cuts simply wander in from other playlists. Russ and sosocamo’s “WYA” name-drops Bentley rides through Atlanta, PJs, and ex-girlfriends who keep texting, and the petty-flex energy belongs to a completely different movie. CORTIS’s “Mention Me” plays as a K-pop-inflected brag about sold-out arenas and BMWs, none of which connect to anything the film appears to need. Bryant Barnes covers Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” faithfully but brings no new read to the material. The two in-world cast numbers, “GOAT Tears” and “That’s My Squad,” clock in at under a minute each and vanish like trailer bumpers.
Slightly Below Average (★★½☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Mamacitas,” “Alley Oop,” “Grandmaster”