Fight the Power
1989 · From Fear of a Black Planet
Spike Lee asked for a defiant anthem, and the Bomb Squad answered with layered samples and Branford Marsalis's saxophone.
★ 9.0
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1989
Showing 155 works across all media from 1989
Paul's Boutique
1989
It uses well over a hundred samples, which would be unaffordable to clear today, and it sold so badly the label gave up on them.
★ 8.5
Like a Prayer
1989 · From Like a Prayer
Patrick Leonard co-wrote it, Prince played the intro guitar, and Pepsi pulled its five million dollar ad but paid anyway.
★ 8.5
3 Feet High and Rising
1989
They sampled so freely that the Turtles sued them, and the case helped make sample clearance the expensive business it has been ever since.
★ 8.2
Do the Right Thing
Directed by Spike Lee
1989
No American film has been braver about refusing to resolve: one Brooklyn block on the hottest day of the year, and Lee will not tell you who was right.
★ 8.2
The Remains of the Day
1989 · 245 pages
Driving across England in 1956 to see the housekeeper he worked beside, a butler remembers the Nazi sympathizer he served with pride. What he cannot bring himself to say is the whole novel.
★ 7.7
Disintegration
1989
Robert Smith turned thirty, decided he was finished, and made the biggest record of the band's life about it.
★ 7.7
Personal Jesus
1989 · From Violator
Priscilla Presley's memoir gave Gore the idea, Flood cut it in Milan, and Cash later called it evangelical.
★ 7.6
Free Fallin'
1989 · From Full Moon Fever
Two days of writing with Jeff Lynne, Mike Campbell's twelve-string, and Ventura Boulevard turned into the whole San Fernando Valley.
★ 7.6
Rockin' in the Free World
1989 · From Freedom
Sampedro joked about the free world after a Soviet tour collapsed, and Young debuted the song in Seattle unrehearsed.
★ 7.5
Me, Myself and IDe La Soul
Me, Myself and I
1989 · From 3 Feet High and Rising
Prince Paul flipped Funkadelic's Knee Deep; De La Soul resisted the beat, then got their only R&B number one.
★ 7.3
When Harry Met Sally
Directed by Rob Reiner
1989
Every romantic comedy since has been trying to write this conversation: two people argue for twelve years about whether men and women can be friends, and Ephron's dialogue wins.
★ 7.2
Express Yourself (Madonna)
1989 · From Like a Prayer
Madonna and Stephen Bray built it on horns and handclaps; Fincher's Metropolis video cost a reported five million dollars.
★ 7.2
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1989
Casting Sean Connery as the father was the best idea the series ever had: the bickering carries a treasure hunt that would otherwise just be a rerun.
★ 7.1
Love Shack
1989
Don Was suggested welding a fifteen-minute jam to a shouted chorus, and Cindy Wilson's tin-roof ad-lib stayed in.
★ 7.0
Monkey Gone to Heaven
1989 · From Doolittle
Gil Norton brought in two cellos and two violins, and Black Francis rhymed ocean pollution with borrowed numerology.
★ 7.0
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Directed by Woody Allen
1989
Allen's most serious film, and his only one that asks whether anyone is watching at all: a respected doctor is cornered by a woman he cannot pay off.
★ 7.0
When Harry Met Sally... · 1989
Pictures of You
1989 · From Disintegration
A house fire left Smith with photographs of Mary salvaged from his wallet, and one became the single's sleeve.
★ 6.9
I Won't Back Down
1989 · From Full Moon Fever
Harrison on acoustic guitar and harmonies, Lynne producing, and Petty answering the arsonist who burned his house down.
★ 6.9
The Killer
Directed by John Woo
1989 · Hong Kong
Woo shoots gunfights the way other directors shoot musical numbers: two pistols, slow motion, doves, and underneath it a straight-faced story about honor between a hitman and the cop hunting him.
★ 6.8
Glory
Directed by Edward Zwick
1989
The Civil War film that finally noticed who else was fighting it: the 54th Massachusetts fights for boots, for pay equal to white soldiers, and for permission to be used at all.
★ 6.7
Runnin' Down a Dream
1989 · From Full Moon Fever
Mike Campbell's fuzz riff, then a closing solo of nearly two minutes he nailed in a single take.
★ 6.7
The Dance
1989
Tony Arata's lyric works as a breakup song or an elegy, and Brooks' video chose the elegy.
★ 6.6
Just a Friend
1989
Freddie Scott's "(You) Got What I Need" rebuilt on piano, with Markie singing the hook himself, flat and irresistible.
★ 6.6
Here Comes Your Man
1989 · From Doolittle
A teenage demo the band mocked as their Tom Petty song, until Gil Norton talked it onto Doolittle.
★ 6.5
Citizens
A Chronicle of the French Revolution
1989 · 948 pages
Violence was not the French Revolution's tragic accident but its engine, Schama argues, and the Terror merely 1789 with a higher body count. The book drew furious rebuttals from historians on the left.
★ 6.4
Barbarians at the Gate
The Fall of RJR Nabisco
Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
1989 · 563 pages
In 1988 the chief executive of RJR Nabisco moved to buy his own company and set off a bidding war that closed at $25 billion. Burrough and Helyar put you inside every meeting.
★ 6.4
Epic
1989
Bottum, Gould and Bordin had the riff before Patton arrived; the bass and that piano coda did the rest.
★ 6.3
Sex, Lies and Videotape
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
1989
American independent film became a business the week Soderbergh took the Palme d'Or at twenty-six: he made it for a million dollars, and it is four people talking about what they want.
★ 6.1
The Little Mermaid
Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker
1989
Disney's renaissance starts here: Howard Ashman and Alan Menken wrote the songs like Broadway numbers, and the studio remembered how to make an animated musical that adults would sit through.
★ 6.1
The Joy Luck Club
1989 · 288 pages
Four women who fled China met over mahjong in San Francisco, and when one dies her daughter takes the empty seat. Tan's sixteen interlocking stories carry the mothers' buried lives across.
★ 6.1
Dead Poets Society
Directed by Peter Weir
1989
Nobody who saw it at the right age has stopped quoting it: Robin Williams plays a teacher who tells boys at a 1959 boarding school that poetry is worth risking something for.
★ 6.0
Like a Prayer
1989
Pepsi paid five million dollars to use the title song, then dropped the advert within a day when the video appeared.
★ 6.0
The Best
1989 · From Foreign Affair
Bonnie Tyler recorded it first; Turner asked Holly Knight for the bridge and key change it lacked.
★ 6.0
Janie's Got a Gun
1989 · From Pump
Tyler spent nine months on the lyric, Fincher directed the video, and the Grammy went to Aerosmith's bleakest hit.
★ 5.9
Henry V (1989)
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
1989 · United Kingdom
Branagh was twenty-eight and directing himself in Shakespeare, which should have been a disaster: the long single take across the mud after Agincourt is the finest shot in eighties British cinema.
★ 5.8
The Snows of Yesteryear
1989 · 290 pages
Rezzori rebuilds vanished Czernowitz, the eastern edge of the Habsburg world, through the five people who filled his childhood. His father hunts, his mother panics, and his nursemaid teaches him about death.
★ 5.7
Liar's Poker
1989 · 310 pages
Twenty-four and ignorant of bonds, Lewis was handed millions of other people's money by Salomon Brothers. He wrote the trading floor as farce, and a generation read it as a career guide.
★ 5.6
If I Could Turn Back TimeCher
If I Could Turn Back Time
1989
Diane Warren got on her knees begging Cher to cut it; the video was shot aboard the USS Missouri.
★ 5.6
Do the Right Thing · 1989
Field of Dreams
Directed by Phil Alden Robinson
1989
They built the field on an Iowa farm and people still drive to see it: a man plows under his corn because a voice tells him to, and the last reel gets everyone.
★ 5.4
Coleridge
Early Visions
1989 · 622 pages
The finest modern life of a poet. Holmes walks Coleridge's roads and brings him back talking, from "The Ancient Mariner" and Wordsworth's company to the laudanum and the sailing for Malta.
★ 5.4
She Drives Me Crazy
1989
Cut at Paisley Park with David Z, the snare a drumhead struck with a wooden ruler under Gift's falsetto.
★ 5.3
This Boy's Life
A Memoir
1989 · 336 pages
Sent to a Cascade logging town to live with a violent stepfather, a boy who calls himself Jack lies and steals his way toward escape. Wolff renders his adolescence with merciless clarity.
★ 5.1
Batman
Directed by Tim Burton
1989
Fifty thousand people wrote to Warner Bros protesting the casting of a comedy actor as Batman: Burton and Michael Keaton made the character gothic, and Prince wrote the songs.
★ 5.1
If Tomorrow Never ComesGarth Brooks
If Tomorrow Never Comes
1989
Kent Blazy had the first verse down seconds after hearing the idea, and it gave Brooks his first number one.
★ 4.8
The Heart of the MatterDon Henley
The Heart of the Matter
1989
Campbell cut the track at home before Henley and Souther added words, and forgiveness never sounded so hard-won.
★ 4.8
Hyperion
1989 · 481 pages
The Canterbury Tales in deep space: seven pilgrims travel to the Time Tombs and the blade-covered creature guarding them, each telling the story that brought them. Simmons switches genre with every tale.
★ 4.8
Roam
1989
A rare B-52's lyric from an outsider, Robert Waldrop, and Pierson and Wilson make wanderlust sound weightless.
★ 4.8
Like Water for Chocolate
1989 · 246 pages
Tradition forbids the youngest daughter to marry, so Tita cooks, and everything she feels enters the food. Her quail in rose petal sauce sends a sister off naked with a Mexican revolutionary.
★ 4.7
Born on the Fourth of July
Directed by Oliver Stone
1989
Ron Kovic wrote the book and then the screenplay with Oliver Stone, who had been to the same war: a Long Island boy enlists in 1967, and Tom Cruise abandons his own image.
★ 4.7
My Left Foot
Directed by Jim Sheridan
1989
Christy Brown wrote and painted with one foot, and nothing here makes him saintly: Jim Sheridan films a Dublin family that treats him as theirs, loudly and without any ceremony.
★ 4.6
Drugstore Cowboy
Directed by Gus Van Sant
1989
William Burroughs turns up as a defrocked priest and somehow that is not the oddest thing here: Van Sant films a crew robbing pharmacies in 1971 Portland with no lecture attached.
★ 4.5
Roger and Me
Directed by Michael Moore
1989
Michael Moore invented a whole documentary style here, himself as the persistent nuisance: Flint, Michigan after General Motors leaves, filmed by someone who grew up in it.
★ 4.5
The Remains of the Day · 1989
We Didn't Start the Fire
1989 · From Storm Front
Joel wrote it at forty, after a twenty-one-year-old told him the fifties were dull; he has called the melody terrible.
★ 4.1
Wind Beneath My Wings
1989
A 1982 song already cut by Lou Rawls and Gary Morris before Beaches made it Record of the Year.
★ 4.1
When I Call Your Name
1989
Gill wrote it with Tim DuBois, Patty Loveless sang the harmony, and the CMA named it Single of the Year.
★ 4.0
If You Don't Know Me By Now
1989
A Gamble and Huff ballad first sung by Teddy Pendergrass in 1972, taken by Hucknall to number one in America.
★ 4.0
Another Day in Paradise
1989
The last number one of the eighties and the first of the nineties, with David Crosby singing behind Collins.
★ 4.0
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
Directed by Jeremiah Chechik
1989
Written by John Hughes, with Chevy Chase back as the same hapless father a third time: a man books two weeks off to build the perfect family Christmas out of things that break.
★ 3.9
It's amazing, you look like a normal person, but actually, you are the angel of death.
When Harry Met Sally... · 1989
Don't Know Much
1989 · From Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind
Barry Mann and Bill Medley both cut it first; Neville's tenor against Ronstadt is what finally carried it to a Grammy.
★ 3.8
Funky Cold MedinaTone Loc
Funky Cold Medina
1989
Foreigner's riff, a Funkadelic drum break, and a phrase borrowed from Flavor Flav, built into a top-three hit.
★ 3.8
No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.
Dead Poets Society · 1989
No man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive he always wants to have sex with her.
When Harry Met Sally... · 1989
The Remains of the Day · 1989
But only in their dreams can men be truly free. 'Twas always thus, and always thus will be.
Dead Poets Society · 1989
When you read, don't just consider what the author thinks, consider what you think.
Dead Poets Society · 1989
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade · 1989
You lost today, kid. But it doesn't mean you have to like it.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade · 1989
The Remains of the Day · 1989
Inaugural Address of George H.W. Bush · 1989
Dead Poets Society · 1989
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation · 1989
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation · 1989
When Harry Met Sally... · 1989
When Harry Met Sally... · 1989
Men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.
When Harry Met Sally... · 1989
The Little Mermaid · 1989
The Wonder Years · 1989
Texas v. Johnson · 1989
No One Can Do It Better
1989
He had written much of N.W.A's material, and a car crash months after this destroyed his voice permanently. He was twenty-one.
★ 3.3
Right Here Waiting
1989
Written for Cynthia Rhodes while she filmed in South Africa, turned down by Streisand, then three weeks at number one.
★ 3.2
Black Velvet
1989
Ward got the idea riding a bus of Elvis fans to the tenth Graceland vigil, and Myles won a Grammy.
★ 3.1
Inaugural Address of George H. W. Bush · 1989
Driving Miss Daisy
Directed by Bruce Beresford
1989
Jessica Tandy was eighty when she won Best Actress, the oldest ever: twenty-five years of an Atlanta employer and her chauffeur, played so lightly that people underrate what the film is doing.
★ 2.7
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade · 1989
I'm down. But, I'm down for somethin' positive in the community. Are you down for that?
Do the Right Thing · 1989