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
Browse by time · year
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
A Fish Called Wanda
Directed by Charles Crichton
1988
A Danish audiologist reportedly died laughing during a screening: Charles Crichton was seventy-seven and made the fastest farce of the decade, with four thieves who all intend to betray the others.
★ 6.2
Nervous Conditions
1988 · 304 pages
The first novel any Black Zimbabwean woman published in English opens with a girl not sorry her brother died: his death frees her for the mission school, where education costs her cousin everything.
★ 6.2
A Small Place
1988 · 96 pages
You arrive in Antigua as a tourist and Kincaid tells you what you look like to the people who live there, then turns on the empire and the government that wrecked the island.
★ 6.2
Orange Crush
1988
Stipe's father served in Vietnam, and the title nods to Agent Orange; eight weeks atop Modern Rock.
★ 6.2
Father Figure
1988
Michael muted the snare while mixing a mid-tempo dance track and, by his account, suddenly had a gospel record.
★ 6.1
You Gots to Chill
1988 · From Strictly Business
More Bounce to the Ounce plus a Jungle Boogie sample, cut in West Babylon, and EPMD sounding utterly unhurried.
★ 6.0
BuddyDe La Soul
Buddy
1988 · From 3 Feet High and Rising
A Native Tongues posse cut, Q-Tip and the Jungle Brothers guesting, the remix riding Taana Gardner's Heartbeat bassline.
★ 6.0
The Naked Gun
Directed by David Zucker
1988
The Zucker team moved their television cop parody to the big screen and improved it: Leslie Nielsen anchors a squad room where three more gags are running behind every line.
★ 6.0
My Prerogative
1988
Brown flew to New York with Gene Griffin for the aggressive song his album lacked, and new jack swing arrived.
★ 6.0
Copperhead Road
1988
Three generations of moonshine, Vietnam and the drug trade, named an official Tennessee state song in 2023.
★ 5.9
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten · 1988
A Bright Shining Lie
1988 · 861 pages
Army adviser John Paul Vann fed reporters the truth about Vietnam while the generals lied, then spent ten years insisting the war could be won. Sheehan reports his private ruin alongside the courage.
★ 5.7
Big
Directed by Penny Marshall
1988
Penny Marshall became the first woman to direct a film that made a hundred million dollars: Tom Hanks plays a thirteen-year-old in an adult body and never once winks at the audience.
★ 5.6
Rain Man
Directed by Barry Levinson
1988
Hoffman spent a year with autistic men before shooting and the film changed what most people thought autism was: two brothers, one Buick, and a drive across America neither of them wanted.
★ 5.6
Being and Event
1988 · 526 pages
Set theory, Badiou insists, is the only language that can say what being is. Truth erupts as an event in politics, art, science, or love, and a subject is whoever stays faithful.
★ 5.5
Can You Stand the Rain
1988
Jam and Lewis wrote and produced it for Johnny Gill's first New Edition album, and it topped the R&B chart.
★ 5.5
I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)
1988
Craig and Charlie Reid wrote it in an Edinburgh flat, sang it in undisguised Scottish accents, America followed in 1993.
★ 5.5
Dangerous Liaisons
Directed by Stephen Frears
1988
Glenn Close and John Malkovich play two aristocrats who ruin people for entertainment: Frears films eighteenth-century seduction as a campaign with objectives, and the wit stays lethal to the end.
★ 5.5
Foucault's Pendulum
1988 · 623 pages
Three editors, buried in crank manuscripts about the Templars, invent a secret history of the world as a joke and feed it to a computer. Then the actual occultists arrive, wanting the secret.
★ 5.5
1988 Republican convention speech · 1988