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1975

Showing 98 works across all media from 1975

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

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

Tangled Up in Blue

1975 · From Blood on the Tracks

Dylan recut it in Minneapolis with his brother producing, then spent decades rewriting a story already told out of order.

★ 8.2

Dog Day Afternoon

Directed by Sidney Lumet
1975

Pacino turned a real 1972 Brooklyn robbery into the most electric performance of the seventies: a bank job collapses in ten minutes and becomes a street carnival.

★ 8.0

Discipline and Punish

The Birth of the Prison
1975 · 333 pages

Punishment stopped tearing bodies apart in public and became timetables and cells. Foucault explains why: constant watching disciplines better than pain, and the same technique now runs schools and factories.

★ 7.8
Give Up the FunkParliament

Give Up the Funk

1975

Bootsy Collins on bass, Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker newly arrived from James Brown, and Parliament's first gold single.

★ 7.7

Horses

1975

It opens by announcing that Jesus died for somebody's sins but not hers. Robert Mapplethorpe took the cover photograph in a friend's apartment.

★ 7.6

Nashville

Directed by Robert Altman
1975

Altman's method arrives here fully formed: twenty-four characters, overlapping microphones, and five days of country music and politics that add up to a portrait of the whole country.

★ 7.5

American Slavery, American Freedom

The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
1975 · 480 pages

Virginia's planters learned from the uprising of 1676 that poor whites and enslaved Africans might combine against them, and answered by writing racial contempt into law. Morgan makes freedom and slavery one story.

★ 6.8

Mamma Mia

1975 · From Gold: Greatest Hits

In Metronome Studio, Andersson found a marimba and gave a song about infidelity the happiest tick in pop.

★ 6.6
It Makes No DifferenceThe Band

It Makes No Difference

1975 · From Northern Lights - Southern Cross

Robertson wrote it expressly for Danko's voice, and at their own Shangri-La studio the Band gave loss room to breathe.

★ 6.1
P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)Parliament

P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)

1975

Mothership Connection opens as a pirate broadcast from space, with Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley newly defected from James Brown.

★ 5.7

Acadian Driftwood

1975 · From Northern Lights - Southern Cross

Manuel, Helm and Danko trade verses on Robertson's account of the 1755 Acadian expulsion, Byron Berline's fiddle overdubbed above.

★ 5.3

Mystery Train

1975 · 528 pages

Still the sharpest book written about rock and roll. Marcus treats Elvis, Robert Johnson, and Sly Stone as American artists on the scale of Melville, reading their records for what America is.

★ 5.1

The Painted Word

1975 · 106 pages

Modern painting had become an illustration of theory, Wolfe argued, invisible without the words. He named the three critics who ruled taste in New York, and the art world came after him howling.

★ 5.1

Gypsies

1975 · 240 pages

For a decade the Czech photographer Josef Koudelka lived among Roma families in Slovakia, waiting for his subjects to present themselves. The portraits are grave, formal, and free of pity.

★ 5.0

Love Hurts

1975

A 1960 Boudleaux Bryant song the Everly Brothers cut first, remade by McCafferty's rasp into the version everyone knows.

★ 4.6

Cooley High

Directed by Michael Schultz
1975

The Black American Graffiti, and better: Chicago teenagers in 1964 with a wall-to-wall Motown soundtrack, and Michael Schultz films a few days of hanging around as if nothing mattered more.

★ 4.1

Alive!

1975

It is billed as a live album but a good deal of it was rebuilt in the studio afterward. It saved the record label from bankruptcy.

★ 2.9