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