Thicker Than Water Soundtrack

[Tea Rochlitz]

Thicker than Water is a soundtrack to Richard Cummings Jr.'s 1999 film Thicker than Water. It was released on October 5, 1999 via Priority Records and consisted of two discs of hip hop music. The soundtrack peaked at number 64 on the Billboard 200 albums chart and number 8 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. "Let It Reign" by the Westside Connection was released as a single.

The sprawling, dense, ahead-of-its-time series taught me about so much more than the American-Italian mafia. We got to know real people and their real lives, their emotions, their desires and sins and personal journeys. Of course, I was also taught so much about music. The soundtrack to The Sopranos is easily, objectively, one of the best in TV history.

For the last several months, I have been lamenting the loss of the full length surf film. It was a slow, quiet death... but the instant gratification of social media has cut the legs out from under what was once the heartbeat of surf culture.

I googled where to stream Chris Malloy and Jack Johnson's co-directed, 2000-flick Thicker Than Water, and unsurprisingly, the full film is available on YouTube. I still have the DVD in the drawer of our TV cabinet at home. Pretty sure I have the soundtrack on CD somewhere too. In the early 2000's, I bought every Malloy/Johnson/Moonshine/Brushfire film and record that came out. Listen, I get that in 2020 we're far too jaded for JJ Casual, but twenty years ago this film was like lighter fluid for my developing passion for surfing.

Skip ahead to the 19:37 mark of the film. This segment is often the first one that comes up in conversation, and many of my peers know immediately which board/scene you're talking about when you say "you know, the green board from Thicker Than Water".

Upon a rewatch all these years later, the board actually seems a little clunky and has an unusual amount of nose rocker. It's a great reminder of how far things have come in surfboard design in the last twenty years that the green singlefin was so unique and memorable at the time. Nowadays, you'd see eight boards more interesting than that just walking from your car to the waves. In the late 90's and early 00's, we were at the peak of the shortboard era, anything longer was either a "fun board" for learning or a "high-performance longboard".

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