While box offices around the country had to wait until May 10 to see Baz Luhrmann’s new film, “The Great Gatsby,” the soundtrack for the movie was released three days earlier May 7.

The music for the film is not the typical 1920s jazz that the literature crowd would have anticipated. Instead, Luhrmann gave the soundtrack a hip-hop feel to help today’s audience connect to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story.

“Fitzgerald coined the phrase, ‘the Jazz Age,’ and I think we’re living in the Hip-Hop Age,” said Luhrmann during an interview with MTV.

Once Luhrmann decided on the sound for the soundtrack, he turned to Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Jay Gatsby, to discuss what to do next. It was actually DiCaprio who introduced Luhrmann to Jay-Z.

Once Jay-Z signed on to produce the soundtrack under the Interscope label, the work began.

“We had to find a way to make jazz blend with hip-hop,” said Luhrmann.

Jay-Z was one of the first people to see a rough cut of the film to try and get a feel for what Luhrmann wanted in the soundtrack. After collaborating together, the two decided to enlist the help of the top recording artists in the industry to get the job done. The soundtrack features not only Jay-Z’s wife, Beyonce, but also Andre 3000, Lana Del Rey, Will.i.am, Fergie, Gotye, Kanye West and Florence + The Machine.

Some of the songs on the soundtrack already resonate with fans of the film, even if they haven’t yet seen it, due to the fact that the soundtrack has been instrumental – no pun intended – in the success of “The Great Gatsby” trailers. Lana Del Ray’s “Young and Beautiful” immediately invokes the image of Daisy, played by Carey Mulligan, lying on her white couch revealing just her face to the camera. The same is true for Beyonce and Andre 3000’s rendition of “Back to Black,” and Jay-Z and Kanye West’s  “No Church in the Wild,” both of which were used in trailers for the film.

Other noteworthy tracks on the album include famous lines from Fitzgerald’s novel. The famous line, “I like large parties, they’re so intimate,” plays before Fergie’s contribution to the soundtrack, “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody.” In the same fashion, the famous Gatsby quote “Can’t repeat the past? Well of course you can,” plays before Gotye’s “Hearts a Mess.”

This soundtrack has been highly anticipated by fans of both Jay-Z and the film, resulting in the album being leaked before its official release date. While the soundtrack has only been out for a brief time, the overall reviews have been positive.