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
Browse by time · year
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
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
1979 · 285 pages
Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass and Arthur Dent escapes in his bathrobe. It sold 250,000 copies in three months and put 42 into everyday speech.
★ 6.3
Oliver's ArmyElvis Costello
Oliver's Army
1979 · From Armed Forces
Steve Nieve's piano lifts its shimmer from "Dancing Queen," and Costello's biggest UK hit smuggles Belfast into a singalong.
★ 6.2
Cruisin'
1979
Tarplin handed over the guitar melody, and Robinson spent years finding words sensual enough to deserve it.
★ 6.2
Apocalypse Now · 1979
The Joys of Motherhood
1979 · 230 pages
Nnu Ego's value is measured in sons, and she spends herself raising them in colonial Lagos while her husband launders clothes for an English family. Emecheta counts every cost the title conceals.
★ 6.0
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
1979 · 920 pages
An asthmatic Manhattan boy remakes himself as a Dakota rancher, a Rough Rider, and the youngest president in American history. Morris swept the major prizes for this volume alone.
★ 6.0
Mad Max
Directed by George Miller
1979 · Australia
Made in Australia for four hundred thousand dollars and held a record for return on investment: George Miller was an emergency room doctor, and the crashes look like things he had seen.
★ 5.9
The White Album
1979 · 222 pages
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," the title essay begins, then takes the story apart: the Manson trial, a Doors session going nowhere, and a psychiatric report on Didion herself.
★ 5.9
Dancing BarefootPatti Smith
Dancing Barefoot
1979 · From Wave
Written with Ivan Kral and dedicated to women like Jeanne Hebuterne, Modigliani's mistress; Rundgren produced and played the bass.
★ 5.9
The Right Stuff
1979 · 448 pages
Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier with two cracked ribs hidden from the flight surgeon. Wolfe named the code such men flew by, and America still tells the space race in his words.
★ 5.9
The Bloody Chamber
1979 · 176 pages
Carter opened the old fairy tales and took out what was always inside: appetite, blood, and women who want things. Her Bluebeard is a French Marquis, and her Beauty walks toward the tiger.
★ 5.8
Breaking Away
Directed by Peter Yates
1979
No sports film is sweeter, and the sport barely matters: an Indiana teenager pretends to be Italian because he loves bicycle racing, and the town's class divide does the rest.
★ 5.7
Escape from Alcatraz
Directed by Don Siegel
1979
Shot on the actual island, in the actual cells: Don Siegel films a 1962 escape as pure method, spoons and paint and papier-mache heads, and explains nothing to anyone.
★ 5.6
What I Like About You
1979
Jimmy Marinos sang it from behind the drum kit; the single stalled at 49 and never went away.
★ 5.5
Kramer vs. Kramer
Directed by Robert Benton
1979
Meryl Streep rewrote her own courtroom speech because she thought the script had the mother wrong: a custody fight filmed at kitchen-table level, where the child is the only honest party.
★ 5.5
When the working day is done Oh girls, they wanna have fun Oh, girls just wanna have fun
Girls Just Want to Have Fun · 1979
Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 · 1979
Honesty
1979 · From 52nd Street
Number twenty-four on the Hot 100, and still a Song of the Year nominee; Ramone cut it at A&R.
★ 5.0
Goodbye Stranger
1979
Davies wrote and sang it, Hodgson answered in falsetto, and that Wurlitzer figure runs the whole drifter's farewell.
★ 4.9
Working My Way Back to You
1979
A 1966 Four Seasons song rebuilt as a medley, John Edwards out front, and two weeks at British number one.
★ 4.7
Nobel Prize Lecture, Nobel Prize Lecture, 1972 · 1979
Sail On
1979
Richie handed a funk band a country ballad, rode it to number four, and re-cut it with Tim McGraw.
★ 4.2
Norma Rae
Directed by Martin Ritt
1979
Sally Field took Best Actress and the union organizing is filmed as actual work: a North Carolina textile mill, a hired organizer from New York, and a millhand who starts asking questions.
★ 4.1
The Jerk
Directed by Carl Reiner
1979
Steve Martin's first starring role opens with him claiming to have been born a poor black child, and never stops that far from the line: pure stupidity performed with total commitment.
★ 4.1
If you wanted to join the P.F.J., you'd have to really hate the Romans.
Monty Python's Life of Brian · 1979
Please Don't Go
1979
Casey and Finch's first ballad after a run of dance hits, and the first American number one of the 1980s.
★ 3.7
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy · 1979