1963
Showing 113 works across all media from 1963
I Want to Hold Your Hand
Handclaps, that leaping chord under "I can't hide," and five weeks later America belonged to them.
Be My Baby
Hal Blaine's four-beat drum intro is the most imitated in pop, and Ronnie Spector owns everything after it.
8.5
Fellini could not think of a film to make, so he made one about that: the result is a circus of memory and fantasy that every artist since has borrowed from.
Blowin' in the Wind
Nine questions, no answers, and the song the civil rights movement adopted whole and never gave back.
She Loves You
Lennon and McCartney started it on a tour bus after a Newcastle show; Martin thought the sixth-chord ending corny.
The Collected Poems
Frost's New England of stone walls and deep snow arrives in plain talk held to strict meter, with something much colder underneath. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening offers no comfort.
Ring of Fire
Anita Carter cut it first, her sister June wrote it with Merle Kilgore, and Cash added the mariachi trumpets.
Live at the Apollo
King Records refused to pay for a live album with no new songs on it, so Brown funded the recording himself. It reached number two.
The Making of the English Working Class
Thompson follows English weavers, artisans, and radicals from the 1780s to the 1830s and shows them making themselves into a class. He wrote to rescue them from the enormous condescension of posterity.
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Dylan was twenty-one. The cover photograph was taken on a Greenwich Village street in the snow, and four songs were pulled at the last minute.
Eichmann in Jerusalem
Reporting from the Jerusalem trial of the Nazi official who organized the deportations, Arendt found not a monster but a careerist who never thought. Her phrase, the banality of evil, still starts fights.
The Fire Next Time
Writing to his teenage nephew, Baldwin remembers preaching in Harlem and dining with the leader of the Nation of Islam. He spares white America nothing and refuses to hate it.
High and Low
Kurosawa spends the entire first hour inside one house and it is unbearable: a rich man learns the kidnappers took the wrong child and still want his money.
Louie Louie
Ely shouted on tiptoe at a mic hung overhead, and the FBI spent thirty-one months failing to decode him.
Whaam!
Lichtenstein blew a single war-comic panel up to mural scale across two canvases, Ben-Day dots, caption box and all.
Heat Wave
Holland-Dozier-Holland over a gospel backbeat, Mike Terry's baritone sax break, and Reeves hollering the Vandellas to a Grammy nomination.