It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
1988
The producers used sirens, squeals and feedback as rhythm instruments, which is why it sounds less like music than like an emergency.
★ 9.0
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1988
Showing 119 works across all media from 1988
Straight Outta Compton
1988 · From Straight Outta Compton
Dre and Yella built it in a Torrance studio on almost no money, and Compton stopped being invisible.
★ 8.8
Fuck tha PoliceNWA
Fuck tha Police
1988 · From Straight Outta Compton
Structured as a mock trial with Dre presiding, and it drew a warning letter from an FBI assistant director.
★ 8.6
Straight Outta Compton
1988
The FBI wrote to their record label objecting to one of the songs, which did more for sales than any advertising could.
★ 8.5
Grave of the Fireflies
Directed by Isao Takahata
1988 · Japan
Nobody recommends this one lightly: Takahata put two children through the last months of the war in Japan, and being animated makes it harder to bear, not easier.
★ 8.4
My Neighbor Totoro
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
1988 · Japan
Children's films almost never dare to have no villain: Miyazaki made eighty minutes of pure safety out of two sisters and a forest spirit, and it became Ghibli's emblem.
★ 8.2
Die Hard
Directed by John McTiernan
1988
Hollywood spent the next decade pitching films as Die Hard on a boat, a bus, a plane: McTiernan built the action machine everyone has been copying since 1988.
★ 8.0
Battle Cry of Freedom
1988 · 952 pages
McPherson carries the whole Civil War in one volume, from the fights over slavery in the 1840s through Antietam to the surrender at Appomattox, and it reads like dispatches filed the same day.
★ 7.9
Fast CarTracy Chapman
Fast Car
1988 · From Tracy Chapman
Stevie Wonder's gear failed at the Mandela tribute, Chapman went on with a guitar, and the record went top ten.
★ 7.8
Where Is My Mind?
1988 · From Surfer Rosa
Francis traced the lyric to a fish that followed him diving; Albini taped Deal's vocal in a bathroom.
★ 7.7
Daydream Nation
1988
A Gerhard Richter candle painting on the sleeve, a double album made on almost no money, and the last thing before they signed to a major.
★ 7.7
The Thin Blue Line
Directed by Errol Morris
1988
A documentary that overturned a real murder conviction: Morris reconstructed the same killing over and over from contradictory testimony, and the case collapsed within a year of release.
★ 7.0
Parting the Waters
America in the King Years, 1954-63
1988 · 1088 pages
Branch follows Martin Luther King from the Montgomery bus boycott to Birmingham, moving between black church basements, the Kennedy White House, and the FBI, and ten years become full American history.
★ 6.9
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony · 1988
The Satanic Verses
1988 · 576 pages
Two men fall from an exploding jet and live, one sprouting a halo, the other hooves. The Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence put Rushdie underground for nine years, and his Japanese translator was murdered.
★ 6.8
Man in the Mirror
1988 · From Bad
Garrett and Ballard's demo won Quincy Jones over within hours, and the Andraé Crouch Choir carries Jackson home.
★ 6.8
Manufacturing Consent
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman
1988 · 407 pages
The press needs no censors, Herman and Chomsky argue: ownership, advertisers, official sources and the fear of blowback filter the news first. Every argument about media bias since has had to answer them.
★ 6.8
Cinema Paradiso
Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore
1988 · Italy
Morricone wrote the theme that reduces grown men to tears: a Sicilian boy grows up in a village projection booth, and the subject underneath is what movies do to a life.
★ 6.7
It Takes Two
Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock
1988
The Think break from a 1972 Lyn Collins single, and two Harlem kids made the party record of 1988.
★ 6.6
My Philosophy
1988 · From By All Means Necessary
KRS-One produced it himself over a Stanley Turrentine loop, from the first album made after Scott La Rock's murder.
★ 6.5