Beloved
1987 · 360 pages
Sethe escaped slavery years ago and cannot escape the daughter she lost, who comes back to the house as a young woman. Morrison writes American history's worst chapter with unbearable tenderness.
★ 9.4
Browse by time · year
1987
Showing 162 works across all media from 1987
Sign "O" the Times
1987
It was meant to be a triple album and the label refused. Some of it is sung by a sped-up alter ego called Camille.
★ 8.8
Appetite for Destruction
1987
It sold almost nothing for a year until MTV agreed to play Welcome to the Jungle once, at four in the morning. Then it never stopped.
★ 8.7
Sweet Child O' Mine
1987 · From Appetite for Destruction
Slash was goofing through a warm-up he called a circus melody; an hour later the band had this.
★ 8.7
The Joshua Tree
1987
Where the Streets Have No Name took so long to record that Brian Eno considered wiping the tape to force them to start again.
★ 8.4
Welcome to the Jungle
1987 · From Appetite for Destruction
Slash's riff, McKagan's breakdown recycled from his old punk band, and roughly three hours from nothing to finished song.
★ 8.4
Where the Streets Have No Name
1987 · From The Joshua Tree
Eno reckoned half the album's sessions went into it and nearly wiped the tape; the Edge's delay does the rest.
★ 8.4
Full Metal Jacket
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1987
The first half is the most quoted boot camp ever filmed: Kubrick found a real Marine drill instructor, let him write half his own material, and made basic training terrifying.
★ 8.3
With or Without YouU2
With or Without You
1987 · From The Joshua Tree
The Edge was sent a prototype Infinite Guitar by Michael Brook, and U2 had their first American number one.
★ 8.0
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
1987 · 838 pages
At a London crossing in 1933 a physicist grasps how a chain reaction could work. Rhodes follows the idea to Los Alamos and Hiroshima, making the physics clear and the human cost unbearable.
★ 7.9
Paradise City
1987 · From Appetite for Destruction
Written in a rental van home from San Francisco, and the final two minutes simply double the tempo.
★ 7.8
Just Like Heaven
1987 · From Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
Smith traced it to a day at Beachy Head with Mary Poole; Williams sped the tempo, adding the opening fill.
★ 7.7
Bad
1987
Prince was supposed to sing the title track with Jackson and turned it down. Five singles from it went to number one anyway.
★ 7.7
Fairytale of New York
1987
Two years in the making, with MacColl finally singing the woman's part, and it still stalled at number two.
★ 7.7
Bring the Noise
1987 · From It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
First released on the Less Than Zero soundtrack, it opens with Malcolm X and never stops arguing rap's case.
★ 7.6
Smooth Criminal
1987 · From Bad
Jackson took the chorus line from a CPR dummy named Annie, and the anti-gravity lean later earned a patent.
★ 7.6
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
1987 · From The Joshua Tree
A jam demoed under the title The Weather Girls became a gospel hymn about doubt, and U2's second American number one.
★ 7.6
I Wanna Dance with Somebody
1987 · From Whitney
Walden thought the demo too country, funked it up, and Houston cut it while shaking off a bronchial infection.
★ 7.5
Paid in Full
1987 · From Paid in Full
Coldcut took 700 pounds for the remix, added Ofra Haza, and Rakim's minute-long verse reset how rappers rhymed.
★ 7.5
Wings of Desire
Directed by Wim Wenders
1987 · Germany
Wenders filmed a divided Berlin two years before the Wall came down and caught something nobody could stage again: angels listening in on what the people below are thinking.
★ 7.5
The Princess Bride
Directed by Rob Reiner
1987
It barely registered in cinemas and built its whole following on video: pirates, giants, a six-fingered man, and a grandfather reading to a boy who does not want the story.
★ 7.5
Bad
1987 · From Bad
Scorsese shot eighteen minutes in a Brooklyn subway station, and the brass hits point straight back at James Brown.
★ 7.4
FaithGeorge Michael
Faith
1987
A church organ quoting Wham!'s Freedom, then Hugh Burns's Bo Diddley rhythm, and four weeks at number one.
★ 7.4
Paid in Full
1987
Rakim rhymes inside his lines rather than only at the ends of them, and delivers all of it without ever raising his voice.
★ 7.2
Lethal Weapon · 1987
Hello. My name is Iñigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
The Princess Bride · 1987
Push It
1987
A B-side until a San Francisco DJ's remix reached radio, and a first rap Grammy nomination they boycotted.
★ 7.0
I Know You Got SoulEric B. and Rakim
I Know You Got Soul
1987 · From Paid in Full
A Bobby Byrd loop that sent every producer digging for James Brown, and Rakim rhyming coolly off the beat.
★ 7.0
Wall Street · 1987
Raising Arizona
Directed by Coen Brothers
1987
The Coens' funniest film and by some way their fastest: a childless couple steal one of a furniture magnate's quintuplets, and the chase never once slows down afterward.
★ 6.9
Need You Tonight
1987
A cassette demo made while a taxi idled outside, finished in Hong Kong, and INXS's only American number one.
★ 6.8
It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
1987 · From Document
A dream about a party where every guest had Lenny Bruce's initials, sped into Document's headlong disaster list.
★ 6.8
And the Band Played On
1987 · 656 pages
Shilts reconstructed the AIDS epidemic's first years and showed the deaths were a political choice, from unfunded research to blood banks that refused to screen. He learned his diagnosis the day he finished.
★ 6.8
Boyz N' Tha Hood (Eazy-E)Eazy-E
Boyz N' Tha Hood (Eazy-E)
1987
Ice Cube wrote it for a New York group who walked out; Dre pushed Eazy-E to rap it himself.
★ 6.7
The Untouchables
Directed by Brian De Palma
1987
Mamet wrote it and Morricone scored it: De Palma stages a shootout on a station staircase in open tribute to Battleship Potemkin, and turns Prohibition Chicago into pure American myth.
★ 6.6
The Way You Make Me Feel
1987 · From Bad
Cut at Westlake with Quincy Jones, a shuffle Jackson wrote himself, and Bad's third straight Hot 100 number one.
★ 6.5
RawBig Daddy Kane
Raw
1987 · From Long Live the Kane
Marley Marl on the beat, Kane's debut twelve-inch in 1987, and a rapid-fire delivery that reset the bar.
★ 6.5
Document
1987
The record where the singer, Michael Stipe, finally sang loudly enough to be understood, though the words still come far too fast to catch.
★ 6.5
Pour Some Sugar On Me
1987
Written last, on a tea break, from a riff Elliott had been jamming; it later pushed Hysteria to number one.
★ 6.4
Fierce Attachments
A Memoir
1987 · 203 pages
Gornick walks Manhattan with her widowed mother, arguing the argument they have had since the Bronx tenement of her girlhood. Writing programs teach it as how a memoir is built.
★ 6.4
Broadcast News
Directed by James L. Brooks
1987
James L. Brooks got the newsroom exactly right and predicted what television news would become: three colleagues tangled up in each other, and the one who is best on camera knows the least.
★ 6.4
The Last Emperor
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
1987
The Chinese government let Bertolucci shoot inside the Forbidden City, the first Western production ever allowed in: a child emperor is crowned before thousands and then history keeps rearranging him.
★ 6.4
It's a Sin
1987
Tennant settling scores with his Newcastle Catholic school teachers, then closing the record with the Confiteor recited in Latin.
★ 6.3
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Directed by John Hughes
1987
John Hughes wrote it in three days: two men try to get home for Thanksgiving, and John Candy turns what starts as a comic irritant into the most devastating performance of his career.
★ 6.2
The One I Love
1987 · From Document
Buck wrote the riff on his porch, Stipe found it too brutal to sing, and America mistook it for romance.
★ 6.2
(I've Had) The Time Of My Life
1987
Medley said no repeatedly until Warnes signed on, and the two finished the vocal in about an hour.
★ 6.1
I Need Love
1987 · From Bigger and Deffer
Hip hop's first successful ballad, an MC known for boasts admitting loneliness, and a number fourteen pop hit.
★ 6.0
La Bamba (Los Lobos)
1987
Los Lobos took a Veracruz wedding dance to number one, in Spanish, for the Ritchie Valens biopic.
★ 5.9
Top Billin'
1987
Milk Dee built the beat from the Impeach the President break; over 300 records borrowed it since.
★ 5.9
Predator
Directed by John McTiernan
1987
The original creature suit was so bad they scrapped it mid-shoot and had Stan Winston build another: a commando squad in the jungle slowly works out that something is hunting them.
★ 5.9
Wall Street
Directed by Oliver Stone
1987
Oliver Stone meant it as an indictment and a generation took it as a recruitment ad: Gordon Gekko's speech about greed is the most misread scene in American film.
★ 5.9
It's Tricky
1987 · From Raising Hell
Rubin co-produced, the guitar hook lifted straight from My Sharona, and Penn and Teller hustle three-card monte in the video.
★ 5.8
Withnail and I
Directed by Bruce Robinson
1987 · United Kingdom
Richard E. Grant does not drink and had to be taught to be convincing: two unemployed actors leave London for a cottage in 1969 with no money, no food and no plan whatsoever.
★ 5.8
Crossing to Safety
1987 · 335 pages
Two couples meet as junior faculty in Depression-era Madison and stay bound to each other for forty years. Stegner locates the drama of a life in devotion, illness, and one woman's will.
★ 5.5
Criminal Minded
1987
Scott La Rock was shot dead a few months after it came out, which turned the guns on the sleeve into something else entirely.
★ 5.5
Mony Mony
1987
Idol's 1981 studio take missed the Hot 100 entirely; the live 1987 version knocked Tiffany off number one.
★ 5.4
Empire of the Sun
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1987
Christian Bale was thirteen and carries the entire film: Spielberg follows an English boy separated from his parents in occupied Shanghai, and never lets the war become an adventure.
★ 5.4
The Bonfire of the Vanities
1987 · 720 pages
Sherman McCoy, a Park Avenue bond trader who calls himself a Master of the Universe, takes a wrong turn into the Bronx. A boy is struck, and Wolfe feeds him to New York.
★ 5.3
Touch of GreyGrateful Dead
Touch of Grey
1987 · From In the Dark
Cut live on a darkened Marin auditorium stage with no audience, and somehow the Dead's only Top 10 hit.
★ 5.3
Heaven is a Place on Earth
1987
Number one in both America and Britain, with Thomas Dolby on synths and Diane Keaton directing the video.
★ 5.3
Norwegian Wood
1987 · 298 pages
Hearing the Beatles song years later, a man returns to 1969 Tokyo, where his best friend's suicide left him loving two women at once. Murakami dropped the fantastic entirely, and Japan devoured it.
★ 5.3
Lethal Weapon
Directed by Richard Donner
1987
Shane Black sold the script at twenty-three and set the buddy-cop template for two decades: one cop is counting down to his pension, the other is a widower nobody trusts to be careful.
★ 5.3
The Closing of the American Mind · 1987
April Skies
1987
Gillespie had gone off to Primal Scream, so a drum machine drives the Reids' highest UK charting single.
★ 5.2
The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community · 1987
1987
Evil Dead II
Directed by Sam Raimi
1987
Sam Raimi rebuilt his own debut as a Three Stooges routine with blood: Bruce Campbell spends an entire sequence fighting his own hand, and the camera moves like something chasing him.
★ 5.0
It Must Have Been Love
1987
Written to order as a Christmas single, then reworded for Pretty Woman and two weeks atop the Hot 100.
★ 4.8
Never Gonna Give You Up
1987
Waterman handed Astley the title after hearing him talk about his girlfriend; five weeks at number one followed.
★ 4.8
You're Living All Over Me
1987
J Mascis played much of the drumming as well as the guitar, and played loud enough that the rest of the band wore earplugs.
★ 4.8