
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Modern Hollywood begins here: Lucas told the oldest story there is inside a universe that looked used and lived in, and the blockbuster has run the business ever since.

Modern Hollywood begins here: Lucas told the oldest story there is inside a universe that looked used and lived in, and the blockbuster has run the business ever since.

Barry Gibb's falsetto over a drum loop so metronomic that paramedics still use it to time chest compressions.
Moroder's pulsing synth track, Summer floating above it, and the record Eno reportedly called the sound of the future.

Two couples in the band were breaking up while they recorded, and kept writing songs about each other that the other had to sing.
Recorded beside the Berlin Wall, Fripp's feedback howling while Bowie sings himself hoarse over a single defiant day.
Nicks wrote it in a black velvet studio room at Sausalito's Record Plant; it remains the band's only US number one.

The romantic comedy has never recovered from it: Allen talks to the camera, walks into his own memories, drops subtitles over small talk, and breaks every rule the form had.
Felder demoed it on a four-track in Malibu, and his Les Paul duels Walsh's Telecaster through the outro.

Becker and Fagen ran seven guitarists through the solo on Peg before they kept one, and worked the rest of the record the same way.

Sid Vicious barely plays on it, and a record shop was taken to court over the word bollocks and won.

Buckingham aimed Mick Fleetwood at the Street Fighting Man groove, then sang a breakup line Nicks demanded he cut.

Hunting gold in the South, a rich man's bored son finds his family's history instead, hidden in a song children sing. Morrison turns it into myth: an African ancestor who flew home.
Written as "No Future," banned by the BBC, and stuck at number two amid loud suspicion of chart rigging.
A 1965 Studio One ska tune rebuilt for Exodus, with Mayfield credited to keep the borrowing legal.

May came home from a Stafford gig where the crowd sang back, and built a chorus from stomps and claps.

Kraftwerk's rhythm rode a train across Europe, name-checked Bowie and Iggy Pop, then turned up inside Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock.

The two guitars never play the same part, and the singer, Tom Verlaine, refused to double-track anything, so you hear what happened in the room.

Spielberg made the rare first-contact film that treats the aliens as something to hope for: an ordinary man starts building a mountain in his living room and cannot say why.

Mercury wrote it with audience participation in mind, and a 2011 study named it the catchiest song in pop.