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
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1976
Showing 78 works across all media from 1976
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
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
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
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
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
Anarchy in the UK
1976 · From Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols
Lydon picked anarchist because it rhymed with antichrist; EMI dropped the band six weeks later and punk was loose.
★ 8.2
Network
Directed by Sidney Lumet
1976
Written as satire in 1976 and now indistinguishable from television: Chayefsky imagined a network that would put a man's breakdown on air for ratings, and got everything right.
★ 8.2
All the President's Men
Directed by Alan J. Pakula
1976
Every journalism film gets held up against this one: two reporters chase Watergate through phone calls and parking garages, and verifying a single fact becomes unbearably tense.
★ 7.9
Somebody to Love (Queen)
1976 · From Greatest Hits
Mercury wrote it at the piano, then three voices were multitracked into something the size of a gospel choir.
★ 7.4
Isn't She Lovely
1976 · From Songs in the Key of Life
Wonder cut it for his newborn daughter Aisha, harmonica and all, and refused to shorten it for a single.
★ 7.3
Zombie
Fela Kuti and Africa '70
1976
Horns and drums lock into one riff and hold it for minutes before Fela sings a word, which is how he built nearly every track.
★ 7.3
More Than a FeelingBoston
More Than a Feeling
1976 · From Boston
Five years in Scholz's basement, a hundred-dollar Yamaha twelve-string on the intro, and Delp stacking harmonies over the top.
★ 7.3
(Don't Fear) the Reaper
1976
An irregular heartbeat diagnosis sent Dharma writing about mortality and lasting love, and the cowbell did the rest.
★ 7.3
RoadrunnerThe Modern Lovers
Roadrunner
1976
Richman borrowed two chords from Sister Ray and turned Route 128 after midnight into the happiest song about driving.
★ 7.1
The Boys are Back in Town
1976
Gorham and Robertson's twin leads on a track the band nearly left off Jailbreak; Kentucky radio saved it.
★ 7.0
Disco Inferno
1976
Jimmy Ellis over eleven minutes of Philadelphia rhythm, a flop in 1976 until Saturday Night Fever made it a hit.
★ 7.0
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
1976 · 240 pages
In our family, Maclean writes, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. Two brothers and their minister father on the Big Blackfoot, and a love that cannot save anyone.
★ 6.9
The Face of Battle
1976 · 364 pages
Keegan asked what a battle feels like to the man standing in it, and answered through Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. He put the reader inside the ranks and remade military history.
★ 6.9
The Cheese and the Worms
1976 · 224 pages
A sixteenth-century Italian miller told the Inquisition that the world formed as cheese forms from milk, and the angels were worms in it. From that file Ginzburg reconstructs an entire peasant mind.
★ 6.8
Rocky
Directed by John G. Avildsen
1976
Stallone wrote it himself and would not sell the script unless he could star: a club fighter from Philadelphia is handed a title shot as a publicity stunt, and takes it completely seriously.
★ 6.8
Night MovesBob Seger
Night Moves
1976 · From Night Moves
Seger walked out of American Graffiti with a story of his own, and took six months finding the words.
★ 6.8
Carry On Wayward Son
1976
Kerry Livgren's last-minute addition to Leftoverture opens a cappella, then hands Kansas their first top forty hit.
★ 6.7
History of Sexuality, Volume 1
1976 · 168 pages
Victorian society did not silence sex, Foucault argues. It talked endlessly, until sodomy stopped being an act and the homosexual became a species. Queer theory has worked inside that claim for fifty years.
★ 6.6
The Outlaw Josey Wales
Directed by Clint Eastwood
1976
Eastwood fired the director and took over, and the union wrote a rule to stop it happening again: a Missouri farmer rides out after the war and keeps collecting strays he never wanted.
★ 6.5
William Eggleston's Guide
1976 · 110 pages
Eggleston shot a child's tricycle from ground level and suburban Memphis in dye-transfer color. The critic Hilton Kramer called the 1976 exhibition perfectly boring, and color photography has been art ever since.
★ 6.4
Carrie
Directed by Brian De Palma
1976
Stephen King's first novel became this, and no adaptation since has been meaner: De Palma films high-school cruelty in slow motion and split screen, and the prom is a fifteen-minute held breath.
★ 6.2
The Selfish Gene
1976 · 496 pages
Genes, not organisms, are what selection acts on, and bodies are the machines genes build to carry themselves forward. Dawkins turned that inversion into how biologists think, and gave us the word meme.
★ 6.2
The Woman Warrior
Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
1976 · 209 pages
Kingston's aunt drowned herself in the family well, and no one may say her name. Out of that silence and the legend of a woman warrior, Kingston remade what American memoir could do.
★ 6.2
Fly Like an Eagle (Steve Miller Band)
1976
Miller ran a Stratocaster through an Echoplex for that staggered triplet echo, and the synthesizer drifts like weather.
★ 5.9
Rocks
1976
They recorded it in a converted warehouse they rented as a clubhouse. Slash and Kurt Cobain both named it the record that started them.
★ 5.9
Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975)
1976
It was the first album certified platinum, and for decades it traded places with Thriller as the best-selling record in America.
★ 5.8
Too Loud a Solitude
1976 · 98 pages
Thirty-five years in a Prague cellar, Haňťa crushes wastepaper and saves the banned books he is paid to destroy, wrapping each bale in an art print with a rescued volume inside.
★ 5.5
The Rubberband Man
1976
Started life as "The Fat Man", written by Bell for his teased son, and Philippe Wynne made it fly.
★ 5.5
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.
A River Runs Through It · 1976
A River Runs Through It · 1976
Get Up Offa That ThingJames Brown
Get Up Offa That Thing
1976 · From Get Up Offa That Thing
Brown put the writing credit in his wife's and daughters' names over IRS debts, then cut it live in two takes.
★ 5.3
2112
1976
The label wanted something commercial, so Rush delivered a twenty-minute dystopian suite about a banned guitar. It worked, and bought them their freedom.
★ 5.1
The Taste of Country Cooking
1976 · 310 pages
Freetown, Virginia was founded by freed slaves, including Edna Lewis's grandfather, and her cookbook is that community's year: what the farm gave in each season and the meal it made.
★ 4.7
Don't Go Breaking My HeartElton John
Don't Go Breaking My Heart
Elton John and Kiki Dee
1976
Ann Orson and Carte Blanche on the credits, a Motown duet pastiche that held British number one for six weeks.
★ 4.7
If You Leave Me NowChicago
If You Leave Me Now
1976
Parazaider heard it on the radio while cleaning his pool and assumed McCartney, not his own band.
★ 4.5
I Want You
1976
Leon Ware wrote it as his own record and Gaye liked it so much he took it. It plays as one continuous piece.
★ 4.4
Wanted! The Outlaws
1976
RCA put it together from recordings already sitting in its vaults, and it became the first country album to sell a million copies.
★ 4.2
Night Moves
1976
Half of it was cut with the Muscle Shoals house band, and the title song is Seger remembering a summer twenty years earlier.
★ 3.9
The Shootist
Directed by Don Siegel
1976
John Wayne's last film has him playing a gunfighter running out of time, which he knew he was: Don Siegel shot it plainly, and the whole genre says goodbye at once.
★ 3.8
The Shootist · 1976