Apocalypse Now
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1979
No production has ever gone further off the rails or shown it more clearly: Coppola's Vietnam abandons the war film for pure hallucination, and the helicopters over the trees are permanent.
★ 9.7
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1979
Showing 112 works across all media from 1979
London Calling
1979 · From London Calling
Strummer borrowing the BBC's wartime call sign to announce the end of the world, and sounding thrilled about it.
★ 9.2
Alien
Directed by Ridley Scott
1979
Giger's creature is still the most frightening thing anyone has designed for a screen: Scott fused haunted house and space opera, and put a woman at the center of both.
★ 9.0
Rapper's Delight
1979
Big Bank Hank auditioned outside the pizzeria where he worked, rapping lines borrowed from Grandmaster Caz's notebook.
★ 9.0
Comfortably Numb
1979 · From The Wall
A tranquilizer shot before a 1977 Philadelphia show gave Waters the lyric; Gilmour brought the chords and the solo.
★ 8.9
London Calling
1979
Their producer motivated the sessions by swinging ladders around the studio and pouring wine into the piano. The sleeve copies Elvis's first album.
★ 8.8
The Wall
1979
Roger Waters got the idea after spitting at a fan in Montreal and being appalled at himself. A school near the studio supplied the children's choir.
★ 8.8
Off the Wall
1979
Jackson was twenty-one and wrote the two best songs on it himself. It won a single Grammy, which he took as an insult.
★ 8.5
Highway to Hell
1979
Bon Scott was dead six months after it came out. It was the first record they made with a producer who cared about choruses.
★ 8.3
Stalker
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
1979
Nothing else in cinema moves this slowly and holds this completely: Tarkovsky walks three men into a forbidden zone for nearly three hours, and almost nothing happens.
★ 8.3
Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough
1979 · From Off the Wall
Jackson wrote it himself and steered the session; a whisper, a water-bottle rattle, then Louis Johnson's bass takes over.
★ 8.3
Good Times
1979
Edwards' bassline turned up on Rapper's Delight within months; the settlement put Chic's names on rap's first pop hit.
★ 8.1
Highway to Hell
1979 · From Highway to Hell
Mutt Lange took over production, the band cut it in London in 1979, and America finally caught on.
★ 8.0
Another Brick in the Wall Part 2
1979 · From The Wall
Ezrin sent Gilmour to the discos, and twenty-three Islington schoolchildren got forty minutes to sing themselves onto a number one.
★ 7.9
Manhattan
Directed by Woody Allen
1979
It opens with the best love letter any city has received: Gershwin over black and white Manhattan, and then two hours of people ruining their lives beautifully.
★ 7.9
Poems
1979 · 352 pages
Bishop looks at a fish, a filling station, a moose in the road, and never tells you what to feel. In "One Art" she calls losing things an art you can master.
★ 7.8
If on a winter's night a traveler
1979 · 260 pages
You buy a Calvino novel, the copy is faulty, and the hunt for the rest keeps dropping you into the opening chapter of some other book. Ten beginnings, each hard to leave.
★ 7.7
Monty Python's Life of Brian
Directed by Terry Jones
1979 · United Kingdom
Councils across Britain banned it and Norway would not show it at all: the Pythons went after zealotry rather than faith, which is exactly why it still works.
★ 7.7
Rock With You
1979 · From Off the Wall
Rod Temperton offered it to Karen Carpenter first; Quincy Jones and Jackson took it to number one.
★ 7.6
New York, New York
1979 · From Trilogy: Past Present Future
De Niro called the first theme too weak, so Kander and Ebb wrote this one in anger.
★ 7.6
My My, Hey Hey
1979 · From Rust Never Sleeps
Recorded live at San Francisco's Boarding House in 1978, and Devo's Mothersbaugh handed Young the phrase that titled the album.
★ 7.4
Message in a Bottle
1979 · From Reggatta de Blanc
Summers' arpeggiated riff, Sting's castaway pleading over it, and the first of the Police's five UK number ones.
★ 7.3
Cars
1979
By Numan's account a road-rage scare in London started it; a bass riff, a Polymoog, and a UK number one.
★ 7.2
Hot Stuff
1979
Moroder's four-on-the-floor, Jeff Baxter's rock guitar solo bolted on, and the first female rock vocal Grammy.
★ 7.2
Damn the Torpedoes
1979
Petty declared bankruptcy in the middle of making it, to get out of a contract he had signed without reading properly.
★ 7.0
Godel, Escher, Bach
An Eternal Golden Braid
1979 · 824 pages
How does a self arise from parts that have none? Hofstadter answers by braiding Godel's proof that no system can prove all its truths with Escher's staircases and Bach's canons into strange loops.
★ 6.9
The Culture of Narcissism
American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations
1979 · 320 pages
Americans stopped building selves and started managing images, Lasch argued in 1979: competence and civic obligation traded away for therapy, celebrity, and a permanent hunger to be admired by strangers.
★ 6.9
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
1979 · 228 pages
Czech propagandists airbrushed a purged minister out of a state photograph and left his fur hat on the leader's head. From that erasure Kundera builds seven stories about everything power wants forgotten.
★ 6.8
Sophie's Choice
1979 · 562 pages
In a Brooklyn rooming house in 1947, a Southern writer falls in with Sophie, a Polish Catholic who survived Auschwitz, and her violent lover. The title is now English for an impossible decision.
★ 6.8
Train in VainThe Clash
Train in Vain
1979 · From London Calling
Mick Jones wrote it overnight for an NME flexi-disc that fell through, and the printed sleeves never listed it.
★ 6.7
Brass in Pocket
1979 · From Pretenders
Honeyman-Scott's guitar lick came first, and Hynde told her producer he could release the thing over her dead body.
★ 6.7
The Postmodern Condition
A Report on Knowledge
1979 · 110 pages
Grand stories that once justified science, progress, and human emancipation have lost their credibility, Lyotard argues. His phrase for the condition, incredulity toward metanarratives, carried postmodernism from the arts into philosophy.
★ 6.6
Video Killed the Radio StarThe Buggles
Video Killed the Radio Star
1979
Sixteen national number ones, then a second life at 12:01 a.m. on 1 August 1981 as MTV's first video.
★ 6.6
One Way or AnotherBlondie
One Way or Another
1979
Harry turned a 1973 stalker into a chase song, and Nigel Harrison's riff supplies the relentless forward motion.
★ 6.5
Being There
Directed by Hal Ashby
1979
Peter Sellers chased this part for years and considered it the best work he ever did: a gardener who has only ever watched television is mistaken for a sage.
★ 6.5
Kindred
1979 · 287 pages
Dana, a Black writer in 1976 Los Angeles, is pulled to a Maryland plantation and made to keep alive the white boy who will father her line. Each return costs her more.
★ 6.4
Distinction
1979 · 640 pages
Taste is class in disguise, Bourdieu argues, and his survey of French preferences in music, food, and interiors proves it. The pure aesthetic judgment Kant called universal is a privilege of the comfortable.
★ 6.4