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
The Last Temptation of Christ
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1988
A Paris cinema showing it was firebombed and Scorsese needed years to get it financed: Christ imagined as someone who could refuse, with Peter Gabriel's score sounding like the actual Middle East.
★ 5.3
Every Rose Has Its Thorn
1988
By Michaels' account a bad phone call from a Dallas laundromat wrote itself into Poison's only number one.
★ 5.2
Beetlejuice
Directed by Tim Burton
1988
Michael Keaton appears for roughly seventeen minutes and the film belongs entirely to him: Tim Burton makes the afterlife a bureaucracy with waiting rooms, and the possessed dinner party is the peak.
★ 5.2
Coming to America
Directed by John Landis
1988
Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall play four characters each under Rick Baker's makeup: an African prince goes to Queens specifically to be treated like nobody, and the barbershop scenes steal it.
★ 5.0
Long Live the Kane
1988
Kane was already ghostwriting for half the Juice Crew when he made it, and Marley Marl gave him beats built from single drum hits.
★ 5.0
Midnight Run
Directed by Martin Brest
1988
De Niro is funnier here than in any comedy he tried to be funny in: a bounty hunter has to move an embezzling accountant coast to coast, and the accountant never stops talking.
★ 4.9
Straight Up
1988
Elliot Wolff wrote and programmed it alone, Fincher shot the video in black and white, three weeks at number one.
★ 4.9
A Brief History of Time
1988 · 248 pages
Twenty-five million people bought a physics book. Hawking explains black holes, the arrow of time, and whether the universe needed a beginning, carrying the argument on almost no mathematics at all.
★ 4.8
Bull Durham
Directed by Ron Shelton
1988
Ron Shelton played five years of minor league baseball and wrote what he actually saw: the mound conference about wedding presents is the funniest scene in any sports film.
★ 4.8
Tracy Chapman
1988
Chapman was busking in Boston a year before this came out. A last-minute set at the Mandela concert at Wembley sent it to number one.
★ 4.8
Matilda
1988 · 240 pages
Matilda finished Great Expectations at four, which her parents treat as an insult. Her headmistress at school throws children by the pigtails, and Matilda discovers she can move objects with her eyes.
★ 4.8
Die Hard · 1988
Adventures on the Wine Route
A Wine Buyer's Tour of France
1988 · 288 pages
A Berkeley merchant drives France cellar by cellar, buying from small growers and arguing that filtering a wine bright strips out what you want to drink. Lynch taught Americans to taste for place.
★ 4.5
Cherish (Madonna)
1988 · From Like a Prayer
Herb Ritts shot the mermen in Malibu surf, and Leonard's doo-wop bounce makes the Romeo and Juliet line land.
★ 4.4
The Sunday Telegraph · 1988
Strictly Business
1988
Both of them rap in the same flat monotone, over Zapp and Eric Clapton records, and somehow the lack of energy is the appeal.
★ 4.3
Nite and DayAl B. Sure!
Nite and Day
1988
Two producers, one vocal barely above a whisper, and new jack swing's smoothest debut single went top ten.
★ 4.2
Simply Irresistible
1988
Number two in America, three weeks atop the rock chart, and the video that closed Palmer's mannequin trilogy.
★ 4.2
If It Isn't Love
1988
Jam and Lewis rebuilt the group as grown men, Johnny Gill's first single with them, Tresvant on lead.
★ 4.1
Critical Beatdown
1988
Ced-Gee had already programmed half of Criminal Minded for Boogie Down Productions before making this, and Kool Keith raps like nobody else at all.
★ 4.0
Forever Young (Rod Stewart)Rod Stewart
Forever Young (Rod Stewart)
1988 · From Out of Order
A father's blessing written for the kids Stewart missed while touring, and similar enough to Dylan's song that they share royalties.
★ 4.0
Wild Thing (Tone Loc)
1988
Young MC wrote the words, an uncredited Van Halen sample carried them, and Tone Loc's rasp did the rest.
★ 3.9
America is great indeed. Imagine a country so free, one can throw glass on the streets!
Coming to America · 1988
Coming to America · 1988
The people have the power The power to dream, to rule To wrestle the earth from fools.
People Have the Power · 1988
Power
1988
The cover has his girlfriend in a swimsuit holding a shotgun, which got the record removed from a number of shops.
★ 3.6
Surfer Rosa
1988
Steve Albini recorded the drums in a bathroom to get the echo, taped studio chat between songs, and finished the whole thing in ten days.
★ 3.6
1988
The Last Temptation of Christ · 1988
The Wonder Years · 1988
Listen to Your HeartRoxette
Listen to Your Heart
1988
Cut at EMI Studios in Stockholm, Gessle's deliberate pastiche of overblown American FM rock, and it hit number one.
★ 3.5