OK Computer
1997
Recorded in a fifteenth-century mansion the band rented from an actress, with one track narrated entirely by the computer voice on a Macintosh.
★ 9.4
Browse by time · year
1997
Showing 138 works across all media from 1997
Life After Death
1997
It came out sixteen days after Biggie was shot dead in Los Angeles, a double album he had finished and titled beforehand.
★ 8.6
LA Confidential
Directed by Curtis Hanson
1997
Modern film noir does not get better than this: three Los Angeles cops with nothing in common, and a plot so tightly wired people rewatch it to follow the connections.
★ 8.5
Karma PoliceRadiohead
Karma Police
1997 · From OK Computer
Named for a tour joke about people behaving badly, with Greenwood's piano circling and a delay unit eating the ending.
★ 8.0
Princess Mononoke
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
1997 · Japan
It held the Japanese box office record until Titanic arrived: Miyazaki staged a war between an iron town and the forest gods and refused to name a villain.
★ 8.0
Titanic · 1997
Bitter Sweet Symphony
1997
Built on an Andrew Oldham Orchestra recording of a Stones song; Jagger and Richards returned the credit in 2019.
★ 7.8
The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)
1997
Timbaland flipped Ann Peebles into stuttering space, and Hype Williams shot Elliott in an inflated suit through a fisheye.
★ 7.8
Paranoid AndroidRadiohead
Paranoid Android
1997 · From OK Computer
Four sections in six minutes, named for Douglas Adams's depressed robot, cut in a sixteenth-century manor near Bath.
★ 7.8
Boogie Nights
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
1997
Anderson was twenty-seven and announced himself completely: a San Fernando Valley porn crew who treat each other like family, filmed with far more warmth than the subject suggests.
★ 7.8
Everlong
1997
Drums by Grohl, Hawkins not yet in the band, and Louise Post's backing vocals sung down a phone from Chicago.
★ 7.7
American Pastoral
1997 · 423 pages
Seymour Levov has a glove factory, a beauty queen wife, and the whole postwar American promise, until his stuttering daughter plants a bomb in 1968. Roth takes a decent man apart.
★ 7.7
Hypnotize
1997 · From Life After Death
Herb Alpert's Rise looped into a strut, released five days before Wallace was killed, number one within weeks.
★ 7.6
No Surprises
1997 · From OK Computer
Radiohead cut version after version and kept the first take, glockenspiel and all, a lullaby about suburban despair.
★ 7.5
Around the World (Daft Punk)
1997 · From Homework
One lyric repeated 144 times over a synth bassline, and Gondry's video giving each instrument its own dancers.
★ 7.4
Titanic
Directed by James Cameron
1997
For twelve years no film made more money anywhere on earth: Cameron built the ship, sank it more or less in real time, and made a generation cry in public.
★ 7.2
Good Will Hunting
Directed by Gus Van Sant
1997
Two unknown actors in their twenties wrote it for themselves and it worked: a janitor at MIT can solve anything except himself, and Robin Williams sits opposite him.
★ 7.1
Ruff Ryders' Anthem
1997
DMX turned the beat down for sounding too rock; his uncles talked him into it, and Swizz Beatz arrived.
★ 6.9
Song 2
1997
Two minutes and two seconds, track two, number two in Britain, and a whistle on the demo became that woo-hoo.
★ 6.9
Into Thin Air
1997 · 332 pages
Krakauer climbed Everest on assignment for Outside magazine, summited on May 10, 1996, and came down through the storm that killed eight climbers. He is hardest on his own conduct.
★ 6.8
Criminal
1997 · From Tidal
Apple wrote it in forty-five minutes to give the label its hit, then took a Grammy for the vocal.
★ 6.8
Guns, Germs and Steel
1997 · 528 pages
A New Guinean politician asked why white people had so much cargo and his people so little. Diamond answers with barley, cattle, and smallpox, and historians have been writing rebuttals for a generation.
★ 6.7
The God of Small Things
1997 · 333 pages
Twin brother and sister in Kerala watch their divorced mother fall in love with Velutha, a carpenter of the untouchable caste. Roy hands you the catastrophe first and then makes you understand it.
★ 6.7
Time Out of Mind
1997
Dylan had not released an album of new songs in seven years, and recorded these in Miami with a dozen musicians playing at once.
★ 6.7
Between the Bars
1997 · From Either/Or
A lullaby melody hiding a song about alcohol, and one of three Either/Or tracks in Good Will Hunting.
★ 6.5
Dammit (Growing Up)
1997
Hoppus turned bumping into an ex into four chords, a Trombino production, and pop punk's great shrug at adulthood.
★ 6.5
Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)
1997 · From Nimrod
Armstrong wrote it in 1993 about a girlfriend leaving for Ecuador; Cavallo added the strings while the band played foosball.
★ 6.4
The Proper Study of Mankind
1997 · 672 pages
Freedom from interference and freedom to become your true self are different things, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin warned, and tyrants prefer the second. His Tolstoy essay divides all thinkers into hedgehogs and foxes.
★ 6.4
Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone
1997 · 326 pages
Letters arrive for the boy in the cupboard under the stairs: he is a wizard and Hogwarts wants him. Rowling built that school so completely that the series has sold 600 million copies.
★ 6.3
My Heart Will Go OnCeline Dion
My Heart Will Go On
1997
Cameron resisted a pop song entirely, then kept Dion's demo vocal, one take, in the finished film.
★ 6.3
Dora Bruder
1997 · 119 pages
A missing-person notice from December 1941 sends Modiano into Paris archives after Dora Bruder, a Jewish fifteen-year-old who fled her convent school. He recovers her addresses and the date she was deported.
★ 6.1
Either/Or
1997
Smith doubles his own voice on almost every song, which is why it sounds like two people whispering the same thing slightly apart.
★ 6.1
Semi-Charmed Life
1997
An answer song to "Walk on the Wild Side," mistaken for a summer hit; its real subject is addiction.
★ 6.0
You Make Me Wanna...
1997
Seven weeks at number two in America and a straight-in number one in Britain, all from Dupri's Atlanta studio.
★ 6.0
Honey
1997
Puff Daddy shaping the hook, the Ummah programming the drums, Carey's third record to debut at number one.
★ 6.0
Miss Misery
1997 · From Good Will Hunting (Original Soundtrack)
An earlier version with different lyrics sat unreleased until Good Will Hunting sent Smith to the Oscars in white.
★ 5.9
Africa
A Biography of the Continent
1997 · 816 pages
Reader runs from the first hominids to apartheid, showing how Africa's exhausted soils and its diseases kept a vast continent thinly peopled, then how the slave trade turned people into its chief export.
★ 5.8
Brick
1997
Written on guitar rather than piano, cut live in a bedroom on a few microphones, and unbearably calm.
★ 5.7
Dry The Rain
1997
Six minutes that drift, then lift; the track Rob plays in High Fidelity to sell five copies on the spot.
★ 5.7
Your Woman
1997
Mishra cut it in his bedroom on an Atari ST, sampling a 1932 muted trumpet, and topped the UK chart.
★ 5.5
Candle in the Wind 1997Elton John
Candle in the Wind 1997
1997
Taupin rewrote his Marilyn Monroe lyric for Diana, George Martin added strings hours after the funeral, and 33 million sold.
★ 5.5
Still Not a Player
1997 · From Capital Punishment
Knobody flipped a Brenda Russell record, Joe sang the hook, and Pun became the first solo Latin rapper certified platinum.
★ 5.4
Homework
1997
Made in a bedroom on borrowed equipment and never meant to be an album, just a run of tracks that kept getting finished.
★ 5.4
I'll Be Missing YouSean Combs
I'll Be Missing You
1997
An uncleared Police sample handed Sting the royalties; Faith Evans and 112 turned mourning into eleven weeks at number one.
★ 5.2
Rose Parade
1997 · From Either/Or
Smith recorded Either/Or in Portland friends' houses and mixed this one himself, a parade watched through sour eyes.
★ 5.2
The History of Jazz
1997 · 608 pages
Gioia plays jazz piano and writes criticism, and both show in the single history worth owning, which runs from the New Orleans brass bands through bebop and Coltrane to what is played now.
★ 5.1
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
A Memoir of Life and Death
1997 · 144 pages
A stroke left the editor of French Elle able to move one eyelid. Blinking while an assistant recited the alphabet, Bauby composed a memoir of appetite, his children, and the body holding him.
★ 5.0
Building a Mystery
1997
Eight weeks at number one in Canada, a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal, and Marchand's production glowing underneath.
★ 5.0
Out
1997 · 400 pages
Four women pack boxed lunches on a Tokyo night shift. One strangles her husband, the others take the body apart, and the invisibility that shrank their lives turns out to protect them.
★ 4.9
One Headlight
1997
Jakob Dylan wrote it at a Los Angeles kitchen table, then watched it top all three Billboard rock airplay charts.
★ 4.8
Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone · 1997
As Good as it Gets
Directed by James L. Brooks
1997
Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt both won Academy Awards for a romantic comedy, which almost never happens: he plays a novelist nobody can stand, and the film does not soften him much.
★ 4.8
Everybody (Backstreet's Back)
1997
Denniz Pop and Max Martin cut it at Cheiron in Stockholm, and Joseph Kahn's haunted-mansion video did the rest.
★ 4.7
How's It Gonna Be
1997
Fifty-two weeks on the Hot 100 for a breakup song that began with Cadogan picking up an autoharp.
★ 4.6
Sex and Candy
1997
Four in the morning, under an hour of writing, and a fifteen-week grip on the Modern Rock chart.
★ 4.6
Cash
The Autobiography
1997 · 320 pages
Cash tells it in his own voice: picking cotton in Dyess, Arkansas, the brother a saw killed at fifteen, the amphetamine decades, and the night he crawled into Nickajack Cave to die.
★ 4.6
Cod
1997 · 304 pages
One fish shaped the whole Atlantic world. Kurlansky follows cod from the Basques and their secret fishing grounds through the slave-trade economies it fed to the Grand Banks collapse of 1992.
★ 4.5
Can't Nobody Hold Me Down
Sean Combs and Mase
1997
Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" under a "Break My Stride" hook, six weeks at number one, and Mase arrives.
★ 4.5
Feel So Good
1997
Kool and the Gang's Hollywood Swinging flipped by Puffy and Deric Angelettie, and Mase's drawl making effort look optional.
★ 4.5
Jumper
1997
A bullied teenager's death behind it, and Jenkins turned the fifth single off his debut into a plea.
★ 4.5
It's Your Love
Tim McGraw and Faith Hill
1997
Six weeks at number one on the country chart for a duet McGraw cut with Faith Hill, months into marriage.
★ 4.3
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly · 1997
Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young · 1997
As Long As You Love Me (Backstreet Boys)
1997
Strep throat handed McLean's bridge to Littrell; Clive Calder heard Max Martin's demo and added it late.
★ 4.3
Coolie High
1997 · From Uptown Saturday Night
Ski built it from Janet Jackson's "Funny How Time Flies" and Skull Snaps drums; two Bronx kids talking pure seventies.
★ 4.1
How Do I Live
1997
Diane Warren wrote it for Con Air, the studio thought Rimes too pop, and her version charted 69 weeks.
★ 4.0
You Were Mine
1997 · From Wide Open Spaces
Two sisters writing about their parents' divorce, and a demo vocal that won Natalie Maines the lead job.
★ 4.0
Wag the Dog
Directed by Barry Levinson
1997
It opened a month before the Lewinsky scandal broke and eight months before Bill Clinton bombed Sudan, and the title became shorthand: a spin doctor and a producer fabricate a war.
★ 4.0
America stands alone as the world's indispensable nation.
Second Inaugural Address of Bill Clinton · 1997
This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
The God of Small Things · 1997
The Full Monty
Directed by Peter Cattaneo
1997 · United Kingdom
Made in Sheffield for just over two million pounds and it outgrossed everything in Britain that year: six unemployed steelworkers decide to strip for money, and the comedy comes out of genuine desperation.
★ 3.7
The God of Small Things · 1997
You're just a kid, you don't have the faintest idea what you're talkin' about.
Good Will Hunting · 1997
Bitter Sweet Symphony · 1997