The Godfather
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1972
The summit of the American crime film: Coppola turned an immigrant family's rise and rot into the country's own epic, and made damnation look like a coronation.
★ 10.0
Browse by time · decade
1970s
1970 – 1979
Showing 1,058 works across all media from the 1970s
What's Going OnMarvin Gaye
What's Going On
1971 · From What's Going On
Party chatter, a sax that sighs, and Gaye asking the question Motown begged him not to ask.
★ 9.9
The Godfather: Part II
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1974
Coppola did what almost nobody manages, and made a sequel with a real claim to surpassing the original: two eras of one family run side by side, and the colder one wins.
★ 9.8
What's Going On
1971
Berry Gordy called it the worst thing he had ever heard and refused to release it until Gaye said he would never record for Motown again.
★ 9.8
Apocalypse Now
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1979
No production has ever gone further off the rails or shown it more clearly: Coppola's Vietnam abandons the war film for pure hallucination, and the helicopters over the trees are permanent.
★ 9.7
Taxi Driver
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1976
Travis Bickle escaped the picture and entered the language: Scorsese and De Niro made a lonely man's interior so exact that it stopped being about one man at all.
★ 9.6
Blood on the Tracks
1975
Dylan finished it, then rerecorded half the songs in Minneapolis with local musicians his brother rounded up, days before it was due out.
★ 9.5
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Directed by George Lucas
1977
Modern Hollywood begins here: Lucas told the oldest story there is inside a universe that looked used and lived in, and the blockbuster has run the business ever since.
★ 9.5
The Dark Side of the Moon
1973
They asked people around the studio questions on cue cards and used the answers. It then stayed on the American chart for fourteen years.
★ 9.5
Bridge Over Troubled Water
1970
Garfunkel's voice climbing a gospel staircase, the last verse arriving like the cavalry.
★ 9.5
Stayin' Alive
1977 · From Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack
Barry Gibb's falsetto over a drum loop so metronomic that paramedics still use it to time chest compressions.
★ 9.4
Chinatown
Directed by Roman Polanski
1974
Screenwriters still take this one apart scene by scene to see how it works: Towne and Polanski built a mystery about stolen water that ends without a shred of mercy.
★ 9.4
Born to RunBruce Springsteen
Born to Run
1975 · From Born to Run
Months of wall-of-sound overdubs poured into one getaway car, and every word still sounds like escape.
★ 9.4
Stairway to HeavenLed Zeppelin
Stairway to Heaven
1971 · From Led Zeppelin IV
Eight minutes that climb from recorders to Page's solo, never released as a single and never needing to be.
★ 9.3
I Feel LoveDonna Summer
I Feel Love
1977
Moroder's pulsing synth track, Summer floating above it, and the record Eno reportedly called the sound of the future.
★ 9.3
JoleneDolly Parton
Jolene
1973 · From Jolene
Dolly pleading with her rival rather than fighting her, written the same day as "I Will Always Love You."
★ 9.3
Led Zeppelin IV
1971
There is no title and no band name anywhere on the sleeve, just four symbols the members chose. The label thought it was commercial suicide.
★ 9.3
Songs in the Key of Life
1976
It took so long that Wonder and the band took to wearing T-shirts reading We're Almost Finished. Twenty-one songs, and no filler.
★ 9.2
Jaws
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1975
Summer blockbusters start here: the mechanical shark kept breaking, so Spielberg hid it, and accidentally proved that what you cannot see is worse than what you can.
★ 9.2
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust
1972
Bowie announced from the stage in 1973 that it was the last show Ziggy would ever play, without telling his own band first.
★ 9.2
London Calling
1979 · From London Calling
Strummer borrowing the BBC's wartime call sign to announce the end of the world, and sounding thrilled about it.
★ 9.2
Blue
1971
Mitchell was so exposed making it that she asked visitors to leave the studio. Kris Kristofferson told her to keep something back for herself.
★ 9.1
Bohemian Rhapsody
1975 · From A Night at the Opera
Six minutes with no chorus and so many vocal overdubs the tape wore transparent. Still nothing else like it.
★ 9.1
Superstition
1972 · From Talking Book
Wonder wrote that clavinet riff for Jeff Beck, heard it back, and sensibly kept it for himself.
★ 9.1
Dancing Queen
1976 · From Gold: Greatest Hits
Seventeen and gliding across the floor, the rare disco record that sounds like joy and ache at once.
★ 9.1
Rumours
1977
Two couples in the band were breaking up while they recorded, and kept writing songs about each other that the other had to sing.
★ 9.1
HeroesDavid Bowie
Heroes
1977 · From "Heroes"
Recorded beside the Berlin Wall, Fripp's feedback howling while Bowie sings himself hoarse over a single defiant day.
★ 9.1
Exile on Main St.
1972
Recorded in the basement of a rented French villa while the band were dodging British tax, in heat so bad guitars would not stay in tune.
★ 9.0
Alien
Directed by Ridley Scott
1979
Giger's creature is still the most frightening thing anyone has designed for a screen: Scott fused haunted house and space opera, and put a woman at the center of both.
★ 9.0
Rapper's Delight
1979
Big Bank Hank auditioned outside the pizzeria where he worked, rapping lines borrowed from Grandmaster Caz's notebook.
★ 9.0
Baba O'Riley
1971 · From Who's Next
That opening arpeggio is a Lowrey organ's marimba repeat function; Dave Arbus's violin sends the ending careening.
★ 9.0
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Directed by Milos Forman
1975
Nicholson against Nurse Ratched is the great screen battle of wills: a convict fakes insanity to serve his time in a hospital, and finds the ward already has a ruler.
★ 9.0
Dreams (Fleetwood Mac)Fleetwood Mac
Dreams (Fleetwood Mac)
1977 · From Rumours
Nicks wrote it in a black velvet studio room at Sausalito's Record Plant; it remains the band's only US number one.
★ 8.9
Bitches Brew
1970
Davis gave the players almost no written music, and his producer Teo Macero cut the tapes together afterward with a razor blade.
★ 8.9
Let it Be
1970 · From Let It Be
McCartney dreamed of his mother Mary telling him it would be all right; Harrison cut two different solos.
★ 8.9
The Gulag Archipelago
1973 · 704 pages
Solzhenitsyn served eight years in the camps, then gathered hundreds of survivors' accounts into a single prisoner's journey from arrest through interrogation to the labor gangs. Publishing it got him deported.
★ 8.9
The Power Broker
Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
1974 · 1246 pages
Robert Moses was never elected to anything and remade New York for forty years, throwing up bridges and expressways and flattening the neighborhoods in their way. Caro shows exactly how it was done.
★ 8.9
Hotel California
1976
The two guitars at the end of the title track were worked out note for note in advance, and have to be played identically every night.
★ 8.9
Comfortably Numb
1979 · From The Wall
A tranquilizer shot before a 1977 Philadelphia show gave Waters the lyric; Gilmour brought the chords and the solo.
★ 8.9
No Woman, No Cry
1974 · From Natty Dread
Marley credited it to Tata Ford, whose Trenchtown soup kitchen the royalties kept running; the title means woman, don't cry.
★ 8.9
Annie Hall
Directed by Woody Allen
1977
The romantic comedy has never recovered from it: Allen talks to the camera, walks into his own memories, drops subtitles over small talk, and breaks every rule the form had.
★ 8.8
London Calling
1979
Their producer motivated the sessions by swinging ladders around the studio and pouring wine into the piano. The sleeve copies Elvis's first album.
★ 8.8
Hotel CaliforniaThe Eagles
Hotel California
1977 · From Hotel California
Felder demoed it on a four-track in Malibu, and his Les Paul duels Walsh's Telecaster through the outro.
★ 8.8
Who's Next
1971
What survived an abandoned science-fiction project became this record. The keyboard figure opening Baba O'Riley was generated by a machine rather than played.
★ 8.8
The Wall
1979
Roger Waters got the idea after spitting at a fan in Montreal and being appalled at himself. A school near the studio supplied the children's choir.
★ 8.8
Layla
1971 · From Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
Clapton wanted his friend's wife; Duane Allman's slide answers every line, then Jim Gordon's piano coda changes everything.
★ 8.7
Gravity's Rainbow
1973 · 784 pages
In London in 1944 the army notices that an American officer's sexual conquests keep predicting where German rockets fall. What follows is the filthiest, funniest chase ever run across a ruined continent.
★ 8.7
Born to Run
1975
Springsteen spent six months on the title track alone and hated the finished record so much he wanted to throw it in a swimming pool.
★ 8.7
Blitzkrieg Bop
1976 · From Ramones
Tommy wanted a Bay City Rollers chant; the album around it cost $6,400 and took seven days.
★ 8.7
A Clockwork Orange
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1971
Kubrick pulled it from British cinemas himself after the reaction, and it stayed unavailable there for twenty-seven years: a state that enforces goodness, an invented slang, imagery nobody forgets.
★ 8.7
Aja
1977
Becker and Fagen ran seven guitarists through the solo on Peg before they kept one, and worked the rest of the record the same way.
★ 8.7
The Exorcist
Directed by William Friedkin
1973
Still the one people watch with the lights on fifty years later: Friedkin shot a possession story like a documentary, and the restraint is what makes it unbearable.
★ 8.6
Kashmir
1975 · From Physical Graffiti
Page tuned to DADGAD, Plant wrote it driving through southern Morocco, and none of them had seen Kashmir.
★ 8.6
Bridge Over Troubled Water
1970
Simon wrote the title song and gave it to Garfunkel to sing alone, and spent years regretting it. They had broken up by release.
★ 8.6
Harvest
1972
Young had hurt his back and recorded much of it sitting down in a brace. The London Symphony Orchestra plays on two of the songs.
★ 8.6
Let's Stay TogetherAl Green
Let's Stay Together
1971 · From Greatest Hits
Willie Mitchell and Al Jackson handed Green a track; he reportedly had the lyric in five minutes.
★ 8.6
ParanoidBlack Sabbath
Paranoid
1970 · From Paranoid
Iommi's riff arrived as three-minute filler for the album, Butler wrote the words fast, and Sabbath had their biggest UK hit.
★ 8.5
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols
1977
Sid Vicious barely plays on it, and a record shop was taken to court over the word bollocks and won.
★ 8.5
Imagine
1971 · From Imagine
Grapefruit, Ono's book of poems, supplied the idea; Lennon supplied the piano; in 2017 she finally got the credit.
★ 8.5
Off the Wall
1979
Jackson was twenty-one and wrote the two best songs on it himself. It won a single Grammy, which he took as an insult.
★ 8.5
Physical Graffiti
1975
They did not have enough songs for a double album, so they raided outtakes from three earlier records to fill it out.
★ 8.5
Ramones
1976
Fourteen songs in twenty-nine minutes, recorded for about six thousand dollars. Nothing on it is longer than two and a half minutes.
★ 8.5
Go Your Own Way
1977 · From Rumours
Buckingham aimed Mick Fleetwood at the Street Fighting Man groove, then sang a breakup line Nicks demanded he cut.
★ 8.5
There's a Riot Goin' On
1971
Sly overdubbed most of it alone onto a drum machine at home. The title track is listed as running zero seconds and has no music.
★ 8.4
Let's Get It On
1973 · From Let's Get It On
Ed Townsend conceived it as a spiritual; Gaye kept the backing track, rewrote the lyric, and Billboard number one followed.
★ 8.4
Song of Solomon
1977 · 337 pages
Hunting gold in the South, a rich man's bored son finds his family's history instead, hidden in a song children sing. Morrison turns it into myth: an African ancestor who flew home.
★ 8.4
Invisible Cities
1972 · 165 pages
Marco Polo describes fifty-five cities that cannot exist to the emperor Kublai Khan, a page or two each, and every one of them is another way of describing Venice.
★ 8.4
Barry Lyndon
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1975
Cinematographers still study every frame: Kubrick lit interiors by candlelight alone using lenses built for NASA, and the result looks like walking through a gallery of paintings.
★ 8.4
Changes (David Bowie)
1971 · From Hunky Dory
Rick Wakeman's piano, Bowie's own saxophone, and a stutter on the title that flopped before it defined him.
★ 8.3
God Save the QueenThe Sex Pistols
God Save the Queen
1977 · From Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols
Written as "No Future," banned by the BBC, and stuck at number two amid loud suspicion of chart rigging.
★ 8.3
Lean On Me
1972
Withers bought a small piano, ran his fingers up the keys, and found the coal-town kinship he missed.
★ 8.3
Papa Was a Rollin' Stone
1972
Nearly four minutes of bass, hi-hat and lone trumpet before anyone sings, and the groove never sags.
★ 8.3
Highway to Hell
1979
Bon Scott was dead six months after it came out. It was the first record they made with a producer who cared about choruses.
★ 8.3
Innervisions
1973
Wonder played almost every instrument on it himself. Days after it came out a car crash put him in a coma for four days.
★ 8.3