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
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1972
Showing 103 works across all media from 1972
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
Superstition
1972 · From Talking Book
Wonder wrote that clavinet riff for Jeff Beck, heard it back, and sensibly kept it for himself.
★ 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
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
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
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
Walk on the Wild Side
1972 · From Transformer
Herbie Flowers doubled upright and electric bass for a session fee, and Bowie's old sax teacher played the closing solo.
★ 8.1
Talking Book
1972
The Superstition riff is a clavinet, an electric keyboard with strings inside, layered several times over. Wonder had just won control of his contract.
★ 7.9
Rocket Man
1972 · From Honky Chateau
Taupin borrowed the title from a Pearls Before Swine song, and Hentschel's ARP put the loneliness in orbit.
★ 7.9
Smoke on the WaterDeep Purple
Smoke on the Water
1972 · From Machine Head
Blackmore's four notes in parallel fourths, written after a flare gun burned the Montreux Casino down during a Zappa show.
★ 7.8
Heart of Gold
1972 · From Harvest
A back injury kept Young seated with an acoustic guitar; Taylor and Ronstadt were in Nashville and sang behind him.
★ 7.7
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Directed by Werner Herzog
1972
Herzog shot it for almost nothing on a real Amazon river with a lead actor he fought with constantly: Kinski's stare and a shrinking raft do everything.
★ 7.7
Take it EasyThe Eagles
Take it Easy
1972 · From Eagles
Browne could not finish the second verse, Frey did, and Leadon's double-time banjo drives the Eagles' debut single.
★ 7.7
All the Young DudesMott the Hoople
All the Young Dudes
1972
Mott were splitting up when Bowie offered them this, written within hours of hearing the band was finished.
★ 7.5
I'll Take You ThereThe Staple Singers
I'll Take You There
1972
Al Bell lifted the bassline from a Jamaican instrumental, and Mavis Staples turned Muscle Shoals into a pulpit.
★ 7.5
The Harder They Come
1972 · From Original Soundtrack (The Harder They Come)
Cliff coined the phrase on set, Henzell made it the film's title, and the Dynamic Sounds session was filmed.
★ 7.5
Love and Happiness
1972 · From Greatest Hits
The tap opening it is Teenie Hodges counting time on a crate by his foot, and Green takes over.
★ 7.5
Tumbling Dice
1972 · From Exile on Main St.
Taylor on bass, Jimmy Miller drumming the coda, and a lyric Jagger got from a housekeeper who played dice.
★ 7.5
Superfly
1972
Mayfield watched the film and wrote songs attacking the drug dealing it made look glamorous, then sang them in a falsetto over congas.
★ 7.4
Superfly
1972 · From The Anthology 1961-1977
The soundtrack took three days at RCA Chicago; Johnny Pate arranged, Henry Gibson's rototoms set the strut.
★ 7.3
Ways of Seeing
1972 · 166 pages
Oil paintings advertised what their owners owned, Berger argues, and the nude was arranged for a man looking on. Men act and women appear, he writes, and advertising took the habit over intact.
★ 7.2
School's Out
1972
Buxton's riff, a children's chorus, a school bell fade; Cooper wanted the last three minutes of term on tape.
★ 7.1
Close to the Edge
1972
Bill Bruford finished the drums, decided he never wanted to work that hard again, and left the band before the tour.
★ 7.0
The Best and the Brightest
1972 · 688 pages
The men who walked America into Vietnam were the most credentialed in Washington, and Halberstam shows how their brilliance became the problem. He reconstructs the meetings and memos that made escalation feel reasonable.
★ 7.0
Moonage Daydream
1972 · From The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust
Bowie first threw it away on a fake band called Arnold Corns, then rebuilt it at Trident around Ronson.
★ 7.0
Old Man
1972 · From Harvest
James Taylor picked up a six-string banjo he had never played, Ronstadt harmonised, and Young's ranch caretaker got a song.
★ 6.9
Augustus
1972 · 305 pages
Rome's first emperor assembled from other people's letters: soldiers, poets, conspirators, and the daughter he sends into exile. Williams shows how a sickly boy became master of the world and what it cost.
★ 6.8
Anti-Oedipus
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
1972 · 432 pages
Desire is not lack but production, and psychoanalysis crushes it into the triangle of daddy, mommy and me. Foucault proposed retitling Deleuze and Guattari's book Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.
★ 6.7
Pink Moon
1972 · From Pink Moon
Voice, guitar, and a single overdubbed piano line, taped after eleven at night with only an engineer present.
★ 6.7
The Needle and the Damage DoneNeil Young
The Needle and the Damage Done
1972 · From Harvest
Two minutes on addiction, taped live at UCLA's Royce Hall in January 1971 and placed unchanged on Harvest.
★ 6.7
Transformer
1972
Herbie Flowers played two basses on Walk on the Wild Side, one upright and one electric, and was paid an ordinary session fee for it.
★ 6.7
Deliverance
Directed by John Boorman
1972
The outdoors has never felt this hostile on film: Boorman shot in sequence and made his actors run the whitewater themselves, and a weekend canoe trip turns into something much older.
★ 6.6
Use Me
1972
Ray Jackson's clavinet vamp and James Gadson's drums; it stopped at number two, blocked by Michael Jackson's "Ben".
★ 6.5
Pusherman
1972 · From The Anthology 1961-1977
Master Henry Gibson's percussion over Lucky Scott's bass, Mayfield indicting the drug trade where the film saw only glamour.
★ 6.5
The Boys of Summer
1972 · 474 pages
Two decades after covering the Brooklyn Dodgers for a newspaper, Kahn found the same men in middle age, one paralyzed. What began as a baseball book becomes an elegy for everyone's youth.
★ 6.4
Virginia Plain
1972
Ferry lifted the title from his own art-school painting of a giant cigarette packet, Eno's VCS3 shrieking behind him.
★ 6.3
Watership Down
1972 · 476 pages
Fiver the rabbit senses blood covering the field, and others follow him out before the bulldozers come. Adams gives them their own language and mythology, then sets them against a rabbit police state.
★ 6.0
Bless Me, Ultima
1972 · 277 pages
Ultima, a folk healer, joins Antonio's family in wartime New Mexico, and the boy is pulled between his mother's church and his father's plains. Schools have taught it and banned it ever since.
★ 6.0
Pink Moon
1972
Twenty-eight minutes, recorded in two late-night sessions with nobody else playing. Drake left the tapes at his label's reception desk and walked out.
★ 6.0
Fire in the Lake
1972 · 500 pages
Americans in Vietnam were fighting a country they never tried to understand, FitzGerald argues, explaining Confucian village order and the mandate of heaven to readers whose sons were still being sent there.
★ 5.9
How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
1972 · From Let's Stay Together
Willie Mitchell let a Bee Gees ballad run past six minutes at Royal Studios, and Green sings the whole ache.
★ 5.9
The World Turned Upside Down
1972 · 448 pages
While Parliament fought the king, tinkers and soldiers were arguing for common land, free love, and no clergy. Hill recovers the Diggers, Levellers and Ranters, and the revolution that never came off.
★ 5.8
I'll Be Around
1972
Norman Harris's octave guitar riff, a B-side that DJs flipped, and five weeks atop the R&B chart.
★ 5.8
Could it Be I'm Falling in Love
1972
Thom Bell's arrangement at Sigma Sound, MFSB behind him, and Bobby Smith singing soft where anyone else would push.
★ 5.7
Sail AwayRandy Newman
Sail Away
1972
A slave trader's sales pitch set to strings and Newman's warmest melody; Bobby Darin later sang it straight.
★ 5.6
Eat a Peach
1972
Duane Allman died halfway through making it, so the band finished the rest as a five-piece. One jam runs thirty-three minutes.
★ 5.5
Peaceful Easy Feeling
1972 · From Eagles
Tempchin wrote it on a poster back while sleeping on a club floor; Leadon's B-bender guitar does the rest.
★ 5.4
Blue Sky
1972 · From Eat a Peach
Duane heard Betts's song, told him to sing it himself, and traded solos on one of his last sessions.
★ 5.3
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 · 1972
Eisentadt v. Baird · 1972
Made in Japan
1972
The band thought a live album was a waste of time and only agreed because it was for the Japanese market alone.
★ 5.0
Something/Anything?
1972
Rundgren played every instrument himself on three of the four sides, then used an actual band for the fourth, just to show the difference.
★ 4.9
You Wear It Well
1972 · From Never a Dull Moment
A letter to an ex, sung over acoustic guitar, fiddle and McLagan's Hammond, and another UK number one.
★ 4.9
Everybody Plays the Fool (The Main Ingredient)The Main Ingredient
Everybody Plays the Fool (The Main Ingredient)
1972
Cuba Gooding Sr. stepped up after Donald McPherson's death and turned heartbreak into the warmest consolation soul ever offered.
★ 4.9
Summer Breeze
1972
Larry Knechtel on piano, Jim Gordon on drums, and a chorus that arrives like the evening it describes.
★ 4.8
Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters
1972 · From Honky Chateau
Taupin's first New York, gunfire outside the hotel window, a rose borrowed from Spanish Harlem, all cut in France.
★ 4.3
Last Tango in Paris
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
1972
Pauline Kael called the premiere a landmark comparable to the Rite of Spring, and the reputation has since collapsed: Maria Schneider was nineteen and was not told the scene had been changed.
★ 4.0
Jamaica Say You Will
1972
Clarence White on acoustic guitar, and the demo that led David Geffen to found Asylum Records and sign Browne.
★ 4.0
Sleuth
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1972
Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine were both up for Best Actor, which has happened only a handful of times: a mystery writer invites his wife's lover to a country house full of games.
★ 3.8
The only substitute for an experience we ourselves have never lived through is art, literature.
Nobel Prize Lecture, Nobel Prize Lecture, 1972 · 1972
You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that.
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator · 1972
Anybody that goes to see a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined!
All in the Family · 1972