Raiders of the Lost Ark
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1981
Every adventure film since is measured against it: Spielberg and Lucas built a machine of chases and near misses so efficient that forty years of imitation have not worn it out.
★ 9.5
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1981
Showing 93 works across all media from 1981
Midnight's Children
1981 · 560 pages
Saleem Sinai is born at the exact midnight India becomes independent, which gives him telepathy and welds his life to the country's. Sixty years of history arrive as one unreliable, delighted confession.
★ 8.7
Under PressureDavid Bowie
Under Pressure
David Bowie and Queen
1981 · From Hot Space
Bowie lived near Mountain Studios, dropped in, and one evening's jam became a UK number one with a disputed bassline.
★ 8.4
Das Boot
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
1981 · Germany
No war film has ever been this claustrophobic: Petersen ran a camera the length of a U-boat again and again until the steel walls start pressing in on you.
★ 8.1
In The Air Tonight
1981
Padgham's talkback-microphone accident on Peter Gabriel's third album, a Roland CR-78 pattern, and pop's most anticipated drum entrance.
★ 7.7
Don't You Want Me
1981 · From Dare
Oakey thought it the weakest thing on Dare; it became Britain's best-selling single of 1981 and Christmas number one.
★ 7.6
Radio Free Europe
1981 · From Murmur
Hib-Tone pressed about a thousand copies in 1981, and Stipe mumbled lyrics he hadn't finished writing.
★ 7.5
Tainted LoveSoft Cell
Tainted Love
1981
A Northern soul flop from 1964 rebuilt on synthesizers at Advision, Marc Almond's first vocal take kept intact.
★ 7.4
The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel
1981
Three turntables, two mixers, ten to fifteen takes, and a record built entirely out of ten other records.
★ 7.4
Don't Stop Believin'
1981
Cain lifted the title from his father's advice, and the chorus stays hidden until the last fifty seconds.
★ 7.3
Ghost Town
1981
Cut in Leamington Spa on eight tracks, the flute squeezed onto full brass, number one while Britain burned.
★ 7.3
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
First Inaugural Address of Ronald Reagan · 1981
Start Me Up
1981 · From Tattoo You
Two rock takes buried under dozens of abandoned reggae versions, dug out of the vault while assembling Tattoo You.
★ 6.9
Super Freak
1981
The Temptations sang backup, and the bass line James dismissed as silly later won him a Grammy through Hammer's sample.
★ 6.8
With the Old Breed
1981 · 352 pages
Sledge fought as a Marine mortarman on Peleliu and Okinawa, then set down the mud, the maggots, and the looting of corpses. The critic Paul Fussell ranked it with the finest war memoirs.
★ 6.8
The Soul of a New Machine
1981 · 320 pages
Working nights in a Massachusetts basement, a crew of young engineers races to build a new computer in a year, and Kidder catches every argument. Nobody had made engineering a literary subject.
★ 6.8
Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
1981 · From Ghost in the Machine
Four years in Sting's drawer before The Police cut it, and Jean Roussel's piano overdubs are why it soars.
★ 6.8
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
1981 · 120 pages
Two brothers spend a morning announcing they will kill Santiago Nasar over their sister's wedding night, and nobody stops them. García Márquez reconstructs it from the witnesses who let it happen.
★ 6.8
Just the Two of UsGrover Washington Jr.
Just the Two of Us
1981
MacDonald's track came first, Withers added the words, and Washington's saxophone carried it to number two in 1981.
★ 6.7
I Can't Go For That
1981
Hall started with a Roland preset and a Korg bass line, the one Jackson borrowed for Billie Jean.
★ 6.7
Blow Out
Directed by Brian De Palma
1981
Travolta's best performance is in a thriller that flopped and spent forty years being rediscovered: a movie sound man records an accident and hears something that should not be on the tape.
★ 6.6
Our Lips Are Sealed
1981
Written by post after Wiedlin and Hall's 1980 tour romance, and it still sounds like a secret being kept.
★ 6.6
Just Can't Get Enough
1981 · From Speak & Spell
Daniel Miller sequenced it on a Roland MC-4, Vince Clarke's last single for the band and still a terrace chant.
★ 6.6
Bette Davis Eyes
1981
A DeShannon album track from 1975 until Bill Cuomo's Prophet-5 riff arrived; nine non-consecutive weeks at number one followed.
★ 6.5
You Make My Dreams Come True
1981
A rare Yamaha CP-30 supplies the riff, and Oates traced the song to Delta blues jammed against Texas swing.
★ 6.5
Greatest Hits
1981
The best-selling album in British history, with roughly one copy sold for every three households in the country. Almost every track was a single.
★ 6.4
Let's Groove
1981
A vocoder hello, Philip Bailey's falsetto, and eight weeks at the top of the soul chart.
★ 6.4
The Look of Love
1981
Trevor Horn's desk, Anne Dudley's strings, and Fry making his own jilting sound like the most glamorous thing available.
★ 6.3
Palace of Dreams
1981 · 208 pages
Clerks in an Ottoman ministry collect the dreams of every subject and sift them for the one that foretells the empire's fate. Albania's dictatorship banned it within months, after twenty thousand copies sold.
★ 6.3
After Virtue
1981 · 286 pages
Modern moral argument never ends, MacIntyre says, because we speak in fragments of a tradition we have forgotten. He sent philosophy back to Aristotle's virtues and made ethics a fight about character again.
★ 6.2
Jessie's Girl
1981
A Pasadena stained-glass class, a friend's girlfriend, and Neil Giraldo's guitar turning ordinary envy into a number one.
★ 6.2
Deep Blues
1981 · 310 pages
Palmer traces the blues from Mississippi Delta plantations through Memphis to Chicago's South Side, and he hears exactly what Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters were doing on the strings.
★ 6.1
Dare
1981
Singer Phil Oakey found two of his backing vocalists dancing in a Sheffield nightclub and put them on stage within weeks. Neither had sung professionally.
★ 6.1
Irony of the Negro Policeman
1981 · Private collection
Basquiat was twenty-one and two years out of graffiti. His figure in a policeman's cap is penned in by a grid and scrawled words.
★ 6.1
So Long a Letter
1981 · 96 pages
Widowed after thirty years, a Senegalese teacher writes to her closest friend about the husband who took her daughter's teenage friend as a second wife. It won the first Noma Award.
★ 6.1
There is only one question which really matters: why do bad things happen to good people?
When Bad Things Happen to Good People · 1981
Down Under
1981
Greg Ham played the flute hook as a joke; it carried Hay's tale to number one in seven countries.
★ 5.9
Chariots of Fire
1981
Vangelis scored the film alone on synthesizers, won the Oscar, and needed twenty-two weeks to reach number one in America.
★ 5.8
Physical
1981
Written for Rod Stewart, declined by Tina Turner, and parked at number one for ten weeks by Newton-John.
★ 5.8
The War of the End of the World
1981 · 568 pages
In the Brazilian backlands a wandering preacher gathers thousands of the destitute, and the young republic sends four armies to wipe them out. Vargas Llosa grants every fanatic in it his own reasoning.
★ 5.8
The Breaks of the Game
1981 · 400 pages
One collapsing season with the Portland Trail Blazers, three years after their title, and Halberstam turns it into an anatomy of how television money and race were remaking professional basketball from the inside.
★ 5.6
Thief
Directed by Michael Mann
1981
Michael Mann's first theatrical feature, with Tangerine Dream on the score and real ex-burglars advising: a safecracker who has planned his whole future on a diner napkin tries to buy his way out.
★ 5.5
Reds
Directed by Warren Beatty
1981
Beatty tracked down dozens of surviving witnesses and cut their interviews straight into the film: the Russian Revolution seen through two American radicals who cannot stop arguing.
★ 5.5
Sixty Stories
1981 · 451 pages
A balloon settles over forty-five blocks of Manhattan and New Yorkers read meanings into it. Barthelme's deadpan collages taught two generations of American writers that a story need not make ordinary sense.
★ 5.5
Kiss On My List
1981
Written with Janna Allen and kept as the demo take; by Hall's account Van Halen borrowed its synth for "Jump".
★ 5.4
Pornography: Men Possessing Women · 1981
Who Can It Be Now?
1981
Hay wrote the music in a Bermagui treehouse, and Greg Ham's saxophone hook does the rest.
★ 5.1
Endless LoveLionel Richie
Endless Love
1981
Nine weeks at number one, from vocals Richie and Ross cut around three in the morning in Reno.
★ 5.0
Working for the Weekend
1981
Dean found an empty beach midweek and wondered where everyone was; Reno turned waiting for the weekend into working.
★ 4.9
Get Down On It
1981
Deodato's production strips it to bassline and handclaps, and J.T. Taylor asks the only question a dancefloor needs.
★ 4.9
A Good Man in Africa
1981 · 342 pages
Morgan Leafy, a British diplomat in a fictional West African state, must bribe an incorruptible Scottish doctor, conceal a venereal infection, and remove the maid lightning killed before the Duchess arrives.
★ 4.7
Escape from New York
Directed by John Carpenter
1981
John Carpenter turned Manhattan into a prison on a shoestring and it still looks right: Kurt Russell plays a convict given twenty-two hours to retrieve the president, and enjoys none of it.
★ 4.6
867 5309 Jenny
1981
Alex Call says there was no Jenny, just a backyard afternoon, four chords and seven digits America dialed for decades.
★ 4.3
Duran Duran
1981
John Taylor's bass carries the tunes the way a lead guitar normally would, which is what separates this from the synth-pop around it.
★ 4.0