The Fast & Furious movies are notable for many things. From their love of beautiful cars and a slowly shifting focus towards family and how important it is to their increasing reliance on insane action sequences that don’t feel the need to focus on what is possible or impossible, the franchise has become infamous.
However, one of the things that have stayed consistent about the franchise since its beginning over twenty years ago is the franchise's love of music. There have always been great and notable moments to every soundtrack in a Fast & Furious movie.
7 Rollin' by Limp Bizkit
Appearing in the first franchise film The Fast and the Furious, Rollin' is a song that encapsulated the early parts of the franchise. Instead of the focus on huge action sequences and families turned super spies or mega heists, the first film was all about street racing and the underground world around it.
Essentially Point Break with more motor fuel, and potentially even more testosterone, The Fast and the Furious sent Brian O’Connor undercover in Dominic Toretto’s street racer turned robber gang. Rollin' was used during one of the first high-octane chase and race scenes which the franchise would become synonymous with, and the pumping action style of music used would bleed into the sequels.
6 We Own It by Wiz Khalifa & 2 Chainz
Fast & Furious 6 was an important moment for the franchise. The fifth movie was a roaring success and elevated the entire franchise to another level of mainstream blockbuster appeal. What happened next would be massively important, but there was a lot of history to keep audiences clued-up on.
In an attempt to make this easier to do, We Own It opened the sixth film with a banger of a montage reminiscing on what the franchise had done up to that point. The song was catchy, and upbeat and fit all the exposition needed into a tight two minutes, so audiences didn’t need to feel left behind by the many films that had already come and gone.
5 Tokyo Drift by Teriyaki Boyz
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is one of those strange films that were disliked, later reviled, and then began to gain a strange cult following the longer the franchise ran. Shifting almost everything about the franchise but the cars, Tokyo Drift took place in Japan and focused on entirely new characters, leaving Dominic Toretto and Brian O’Connor in the past, or so it first appeared.
With this new location and a fresh set of faces, the music changed up as well, but as much as things change they stay the same and the Teriyaki Boyz provided this high-octane song that was perfect for the kind of racing scenes fans were used to, in spite of the hemisphere being shifted since they last saw one of them.
4 Act A Fool by Ludacris
When Ludacris signed on to play Tej Parker in 2 Fast 2 Furious, it probably wasn’t with the intention that he would continue playing the character for twenty years, but it was definitely with the intention that he would get onto the soundtrack of the film as well as starring in it.
Nominated for a Grammy and instilling everything about the franchise into its lyrics, Act A Fool is the epitome of a Fast & Furious song, and it was pitch-perfect to the point that fans almost can’t say the name of the sequel without rapping it in Ludacris’ style. His signature ATL flow drove this to the Billboard rap song chart and was just a part of the larger soundtrack for the second film which Ludacris was an executive producer for.
3 Blanco by Pitbull ft. Pharrell Williams
Fast & Furious 4 needed to go big. Bringing Dominic and Brian back after Tokyo Drift was necessary, but it had been a long time since they’d been on-screen together, and their new situation needed to be kicked off in the perfect manner. It wasn’t the last time Pitbull would bring his party anthems to the franchise either.
Blanco hit all the right spots with the audience as the new status quo, which would be introduced and never changed again, began leading the franchise to the heights it has reached today. The Cuban roots of Pitbull’s music bled through into all the tracks he made for the franchise, and this one especially, showing Dom and Letty in the Dominican Republic, felt like it had a Latin style to it.
2 Danza Kuduro by Don Omar
Fast Five is considered by many to be the best film in the franchise, and it is certainly the first one that changed the focus from street racing to a team working together on a larger mission, led by Dominic. This amalgamation of various characters from throughout the previous films started something huge, and the film introduced Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs to boot.
The final victorious moment in the heist sequence begins as the team opens the safe they’ve stolen and finds their hundred million dollars in riches inside. The montage of where they all go and what they do is set to this Portuguese-Spanish hit, and it was one of the sounds of the summer after it was released, a song recognizable today to many who never even saw the film.
1 See You Again by Wiz Khalifa ft. Charlie Puth
Furious 7 is the other film that fans argue is the best in the franchise alongside Fast Five. But instead of a party anthem, this became a huge hit for the connotations of Paul Walker’s untimely death. This song, set to Dominic and Vin Diesel’s final goodbyes to his friend, became a tear-jerker for many fans who had just watched Walker’s last, posthumous appearance in the franchise.
See You Again is a sweet song that says goodbye, but not forever, and it set the scene perfectly for a potential ending to the franchise, as doubt was thrown into the works over whether the cast would continue without Walker. This scene was undoubtedly the finest time music was used in any of the movies, and it is a beautiful moment that helped the seventh installment over the billion-dollar mark at the worldwide box office.