Saving Private Ryan
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1998
War films look different since the first twenty minutes of this one: Spielberg put the camera in the surf at Omaha Beach and veterans left cinemas unable to speak.
★ 8.8
Browse by time · year
1998
Showing 139 works across all media from 1998
Aquemini
1998
Rosa Parks sued them over the song named after her, and the case ran for a decade. The record itself goes everywhere at once.
★ 8.7
The Big Lebowski
Directed by Coen Brothers
1998
It underwhelmed in cinemas and then grew a festival, a religion and a vocabulary: the Coens built a Chandler plot around a man whose only ambition is getting his rug replaced.
★ 8.1
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
1998
Hill recorded much of it in Bob Marley's old studio in Kingston, and the classroom scenes between songs use actual schoolchildren.
★ 7.9
Doo-wop (That Thing)
1998 · From The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Hill wrote and produced it herself, aimed one verse at women and one at men, and debuted at number one.
★ 7.8
...Baby One More Time
1998
Max Martin built it at Cheiron in Stockholm after TLC and the Backstreet Boys passed, and Spears was sixteen.
★ 7.7
The Savage Detectives
1998 · 592 pages
Two young poets calling themselves visceral realists vanish into the Sonoran desert hunting a woman who published a single poem decades earlier. Forty voices over twenty years piece together where they went.
★ 7.7
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
1998
Jeff Mangum wrote it after reading Anne Frank's diary, played a musical saw on it, and then more or less disappeared for a decade.
★ 7.6
Mezzanine
1998
The three of them fell out badly making it, and Elizabeth Fraser sang Teardrop while grieving for Jeff Buckley, who had just drowned.
★ 7.6
The Truman Show
Directed by Peter Weir
1998
Psychiatrists named a delusion after it: a man begins to suspect his whole town is a set and everyone in his life is paid, and 1998 had no idea.
★ 7.6
Teardrop
1998 · From Mezzanine
Mushroom sent the demo to Madonna, got outvoted, and Elizabeth Fraser sang it over harpsichord and a Les McCann loop.
★ 7.3
Are You That Somebody?
1998
Timbaland built the beat around a baby coo lifted from a sixties sound-effects record, and Aaliyah glides over it.
★ 7.3
My Name Is
1998 · From The Slim Shady LP
Dre and Eminem finished it in an hour, over a Labi Siffre interpolation, and Slim Shady existed.
★ 7.3
Hard Knock LifeJay-Z
Hard Knock Life
1998 · From Vol. 2...Hard Knock Life
The 45 King looped an Annie showtune, and Jay-Z cleared it with a letter he admitted was a lie.
★ 7.2
The Thin Red Line
Directed by Terrence Malick
1998
Malick came back after twenty years and made a war film about grass, light and the voices in men's heads: Guadalcanal, filmed as though the island were the subject.
★ 7.2
Rosa Parks
1998 · From Aquemini
Andre 3000's stepfather, Reverend Robert Hodo, plays the harmonica breakdown; the woman in the title sued.
★ 7.1
Changes (2Pac)
1998
Recorded in 1992, shelved, then remixed after his death over Bruce Hornsby's piano; a posthumous Grammy nomination followed.
★ 7.1
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
1998
Williams spent six years on it, scrapped a finished version, and fell out with two producers before she would let anyone release it.
★ 7.0
Statement of the World Islamic Front · 1998
In the Aeroplace Over the Sea
1998 · From In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Julian Koster's singing saw over double-tracked acoustics, cut in Denver with Robert Schneider, and a chorus that faces death smiling.
★ 6.9
Holland, 1945
1998 · From In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Every instrument distorted at Schneider's Denver studio, and Mangum turns an elegy for Anne Frank into pure forward momentum.
★ 6.8
Ray of Light
1998
Madonna had trained her voice for a year to play Evita, which is why she suddenly sounds like she can sing. William Orbit did the rest.
★ 6.8
Titan
The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
1998 · 832 pages
Rockefeller controlled ninety percent of American oil refining by the time he was forty, tithed to his church weekly, and saw no contradiction. Chernow makes him legible without absolving him.
★ 6.7
Seeing like a State
How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
1998 · 464 pages
States can govern only what they can see, so they flatten society into maps and census rows, then plan from the flattening. Scott traces Soviet collectivization and Tanzanian villagization to that one mistake.
★ 6.7
My Name Is Red
1998 · 417 pages
The dead man narrates his own murder, and so do a coin and a tree, in the Istanbul of 1591 where painting a face as the eye sees it is treated as blasphemy.
★ 6.7
Rushmore
Directed by Wes Anderson
1998
Wes Anderson's style arrives fully formed here, and so does the melancholy Bill Murray everyone loves: a prep-school boy who runs every club and fails every class declares war on a millionaire.
★ 6.7
Wide Open Spaces
1998 · From Wide Open Spaces
Gibson wrote it on her first trip home from forestry school, and Lloyd Maines knew it belonged to his daughter.
★ 6.6
Respiration
1998
Hi-Tek loops Don Randi's "The Fox" under a Style Wars monologue, and three MCs read the city at night.
★ 6.5
Definition
1998
Hi-Tek loops Boogie Down Productions while Mos Def and Kweli revive KRS-One's demand that the violence stop.
★ 6.4
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
1998 · 353 pages
Seven nights on a Caribbean luxury liner, where the pampering drives Wallace to despair. He also traces how television swallowed the irony American novelists invented, and why that irony became a trap.
★ 6.3
Iris
1998
Rzeznik tuned every string but one to D, wrote it for City of Angels, and owned airplay for eighteen weeks.
★ 6.1
That Don't Impress Me Much
1998
Twain and Lange built it on three men who fall short, and that hooded leopard print did the rest.
★ 6.0
The Boy Is MineBrandy
The Boy Is Mine
1998
Brandy got the idea from a Jerry Springer love triangle, and Darkchild's clipped beat held number one thirteen weeks.
★ 6.0
American History X
Directed by Tony Kaye
1998
Edward Norton added thirty pounds of muscle for it and Tony Kaye tried to take his own name off the finished cut: a former neo-Nazi leaves prison and finds his brother following him.
★ 6.0
You Get What You Give
1998
Alexander buried a celebrity taunt in the last verse to prove the press would ignore the politics; it worked.
★ 6.0
Life is Beautiful
Directed by Roberto Benigni
1998 · Italy
Benigni argued that a comedian could make a film about the camps, and half the critics said he was wrong: a father convinces his small son the whole thing is an elaborate game.
★ 6.0
The King of Carrot Flowers, Part 1
1998 · From In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Schneider got the fuzz from tube preamps and compression, not pedals, and Mangum sings childhood into two minutes flat.
★ 5.9
Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997
1998 · 273 pages
Forty years of poems that begin with an ordinary question and end somewhere you never agreed to go. In "Cat in an Empty Apartment," a cat waits for the owner who has died.
★ 5.9
Stalingrad
1998 · 493 pages
Beevor follows the German Sixth Army from conquest through encirclement to starvation and surrender in a city ground to rubble, the Soviet defenders alongside. He made military history a bestselling genre.
★ 5.9
Archangel · 1998
King Leopold's Ghost
A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
1998 · 416 pages
A Liverpool shipping clerk noticed ships leaving the Congo loaded with rubber and arriving with only guns and chains. Hochschild pulls that thread into Leopold's private slave state and its millions of dead.
★ 5.8
Clandestino
1998 · From Clandestino
Recorded on portable gear while Chao roamed Latin America, an undocumented migrant's lament carried by the lightest guitar.
★ 5.8
All I NeedAir
All I Need
1998
Two Frenchmen, an American singer they shared Montmartre with, and the softest thing on Moon Safari.
★ 5.5
You're Still the One
1998
Written as a reply to everyone who doubted her marriage to Mutt Lange, and it won two country Grammys.
★ 5.4
Vol. 2...Hard Knock Life
1998
Jay-Z sampled children singing from the musical Annie for the title track, an idea nobody around him thought would work until it did.
★ 5.4
Moment of TruthGang Starr
Moment of Truth
1998 · From Moment of Truth
Premier's beat under Guru facing a gun charge, cut at D&D Studios and delivered as a sermon on perseverance.
★ 5.3
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
Directed by Guy Ritchie
1998 · United Kingdom
Guy Ritchie raised the money out of favors and cast a professional footballer who had never acted: four London friends owe half a million pounds by Friday, and five plots collide getting it.
★ 5.2
Gone Till November
1998
A hustler's goodbye scored by the New York Philharmonic, Sonny Kompanek conducting, with Bob Dylan cameoing in the video.
★ 5.1
Gimme Some MoreBusta Rhymes
Gimme Some More
1998
Bernard Herrmann's Psycho strings on loop, DJ Scratch behind the boards, and Busta rhyming at impossible speed.
★ 5.0
Lebanese Blond
1998
A sitar, a slow groove and Pam Bricker's voice, carried to a wide audience by the Garden State soundtrack.
★ 5.0
What It's LikeEverlast
What It's Like
1998
Everlast left House of Pain, picked up an acoustic guitar, and topped both rock charts with three street portraits.
★ 4.9
Bongo Bong
1998 · From Clandestino
A Mano Negra tune remade over a Black Uhuru groove, and the same melody resurfaces twice more on Clandestino.
★ 4.8
XO
1998
Smith had just played the Academy Awards in a white suit, in front of an audience that had no idea who he was.
★ 4.8
Flagpole Sitta
1998
Named for a 1920s pole-sitting fad, cut in Seattle in 1996, and now inseparable from Peep Show's opening titles.
★ 4.7
I Don't Want to Miss a Thing
1998 · From Armageddon: The Album
Written for Armageddon by Diane Warren after a Barbara Walters interview, it gave Aerosmith their only American number one.
★ 4.7
Fly Away
1998
Kravitz stumbled on the riff testing an amplifier, nearly buried it as a B-side, and won a Grammy instead.
★ 4.7
Crush
1998
Eight minutes on the album, four on the radio, and Tinsley learned his violin solo the day before.
★ 4.6
River of Colour
The India of Raghubir Singh
1998 · 168 pages
Serious photography meant black and white when Singh shot India in color, insisting a country this saturated demanded it. He packs pilgrims, monsoon light, and painted walls into frames borrowed from Indian painting.
★ 4.5
Capital Punishment
1998
The first solo album by a Latino rapper to go platinum. Big Pun was dead of a heart attack two years later, at twenty-eight.
★ 4.5
Angel of Mine
1998
Eternal cut it first in Britain; Rodney Jerkins rebuilt it for Monica, who held number one four weeks.
★ 4.4
All My Life
1998
JoJo Hailey wrote it thinking of his daughter, then kept it, and weddings have not let go since.
★ 4.4
San Francisco Knights
1998
Never a single, it became the duo's live staple: two Los Angeles crate-diggers immortalizing a 1996 visit to the Bay.
★ 4.2
Slide
1998
Rzeznik hid a teenage pregnancy story inside the sunniest jangle of 1998; it topped Modern Rock and Adult Top 40.
★ 4.1
The WayFastball
The Way
1998
Scalzo read about an elderly Texas couple who drove off and never came back, then wrote them a happier ending.
★ 4.0
He Got Game
Directed by Spike Lee
1998
Spike Lee scored a basketball film with Aaron Copland and cast an NBA guard in the lead: a father is released from prison for a week to talk his son into a school.
★ 4.0
Clandestino
1998
Chao recorded it on a portable eight-track while moving around Latin America, singing in five languages about people crossing borders without papers.
★ 4.0
Daysleeper
1998
Stipe found the word on a New York apartment door and gave the night shift its lullaby, post-Berry R.E.M.
★ 4.0
It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets · 1998
This Kiss
1998
Chapman, Lerner and Roboff built the hook; Hill cut it at Ocean Way and rode it to number seven.
★ 3.9
Angel (Sarah McLachlan)
1998
Piano, upright bass, a drum machine, and McLachlan writing about a Smashing Pumpkins keyboardist's overdose with startling tenderness.
★ 3.9
Rounders · 1998
The Big Lebowski · 1998
Kiss Me
1998
Sparkling cigarettes became a silver moon in the final lyric, and She's All That made it a number two.
★ 3.8
Saving Private Ryan · 1998
In this world, a man, himself, is nothing. And there ain't no world but this one.
The Thin Red Line · 1998
Shakespeare in Love
Directed by John Madden
1998 · United Kingdom
Tom Stoppard rewrote the script and you can hear him in every scene: a blocked Shakespeare finds his Juliet, and nothing else is this funny about how theater actually gets made.
★ 3.7
Hate is baggage. Life's too short to be pissed off all the time. It's just not worth it.
American History X · 1998
Armageddon
1998
When making a business decision, the only color that matters, Jesus, is green.
He Got Game · 1998
When you dance with the devil, you wait for the song to stop.
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels · 1998