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
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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