2003
Showing 165 works across all media from 2003
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Eleven nominations and eleven wins, a clean sweep no film has bettered: Jackson closed a decade-long gamble with battles at an unattempted scale and an ending that earns its farewells.
Seven Nation Army
A guitar pitched down to fake a bass, and the seven-note riff every stadium on earth now sings.
Crazy in Love
Rich Harrison looped a Chi-Lites horn fanfare; Jay-Z turned up at three in the morning and improvised his verse.
Toxic
Minogue passed on it; Bloodshy and Avant hung a Bollywood string sample over surf guitar for Spears's only Grammy.
Lost in Translation
Almost nothing happens and it stays with people for years: jet lag, neon, a Tokyo hotel bar, and two people awake at the wrong hours keeping each other company.
Memories of Murder
Bong made a serial killer film in which the police are the problem: it is based on a real case, and rural Korea itself ends up looking like the suspect.
Speakerboxxx / The Love Below
It is really two solo albums in one box, and the two of them barely appear on each other's halves.
In Da Club
Dre's beat was offered to D12 and Rakim before 50 Cent wrote to it and held number one nine weeks.
Finding Nemo
It became the highest grossing animated release to that point and pushed what animation could render: an ocean of light and current, and a frightened father crossing it.
Oldboy
Korean cinema broke through in the West on the strength of this: fifteen years locked in a room without explanation, and a corridor fight staged in one take.
Elephant
Recorded in eight days on equipment made before 1963, with no computers. The bassline everyone knows is a guitar pushed down an octave.
The Black Album
Every track has a different producer, which he did on purpose. He announced his retirement, held a farewell concert, and came back three years later.
Ignition (Remix)
A remix that swallowed its own original: number two in America five weeks, four at Britain's top.
The Way You Move
Eight weeks stuck at number two behind Hey Ya!, then Big Boi's live Atlanta horns finally took the top.
Touching the Void
You will not believe it is true and it is: two climbers in the Andes, one broken leg, and a decision that neither man has ever fully stopped explaining.
Kill Bill
Tarantino built it out of every film he ever loved: kung fu, spaghetti westerns, anime and samurai pictures, and the House of Blue Leaves fight tops all of them.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
No film has put an audience inside a wooden warship this completely: Weir's frigate is a working machine of rope and rank, chasing a faster enemy across the bottom of the world.
Persepolis
Satrapi was a schoolgirl in Tehran when the Shah fell and fourteen when her parents sent her alone to Vienna. She draws the revolution, the war and her exile in black and white.
The Known World
Henry Townsend was bought out of slavery by his father and came to own more than thirty slaves himself. Jones wrote the novel that forced American fiction to hold Black slaveholders in view.
Such Great Heights (The Postal Service)
Tamborello sent instrumental DATs to Gibbard, who added vocals and shipped them back; his first happy love song.
Mystic River
Eastwood's bleakest film: three boys from one Boston block grow into three men, and a murder pulls them back to the afternoon that separated them, with no interest in comforting anyone.
Get Rich or Die Tryin'
50 Cent had been shot nine times two years earlier, and the bullet still in his jaw is part of why he sounds like that.
Numb
Twelve weeks atop the modern rock chart, and Bennington turning somebody else's expectations into a chorus millions shouted back.
Galang
M.I.A.'s second song ever, built on a Roland MC-505 and written for Elastica; dancehall never sounded so homemade.
Get Low
Crunk's breakthrough, produced entirely by Lil Jon, stalled at number two and drove the album past two million copies.
Get By
Kanye West built the beat from Nina Simone's "Sinnerman", and Kweli turned survival into his commercial breakthrough.
Rubicon
The Roman Republic destroyed itself, and Tom Holland tells it at the pace of a thriller. Caesar reaches the Rubicon with a single legion, knowing crossing it means war against his own state.
School of Rock
Linklater cast children who could really play and let them: Jack Black gives the performance his whole career was building toward, teaching a class of ten-year-olds the history of rock.
Milkshake
A darbuka drum, finger cymbals, and almost nothing else; the Neptunes' emptiest beat became Kelis's biggest hit.
The District Sleeps Alone Tonight
Tamborello mailed the beats to Gibbard on discs, who wrote this over a breakup with someone who moved to Washington.
Transatlanticism
Gibbard watched goodbyes at Heathrow; the band used Weezer's Only in Dreams as the map for that closing climb.
Heartbeats (Jose Gonzalez)
One classical guitar, no drums, and the Knife's synth-pop single reduced to a whisper that reached UK number nine.
Look at Miss Ohio
Welch keeps the arrangement to two guitars, and a beauty queen decides she will do right, just not yet.
Get Busy
Lenky Marsden's Diwali riddim is mostly handclaps and space, and Sean Paul rode it to three weeks at number one.
12:51
Guitars pushed to sound like synthesizers, and a Roman Coppola video that borrows its neon from Tron.
Rock Your Body
The Neptunes wrote it for Michael Jackson's Invincible; he passed, Timberlake took it, and the falsetto glides straight into disco.
Are You Gonna Be My Girl
A cough left in from the demo, a Motown-derived stomp, and a riff everyone insisted they had heard before.
The New Year
A field recording of distant Seattle freeway noise opens the album, then the guitars come crashing in behind Gibbard.
Kissing the Lipless
Cut in the basement of Mercer's Portland house, a breakup song that starts at a whisper and detonates.
Remember When
Jackson wrote it alone, a whole marriage from courtship to old age, and country radio held it at number one.
Pirates of the Caribbean
Disney executives thought Johnny Depp was ruining their film and considered replacing him: he built a pirate out of Keith Richards, and a theme park ride became a billion-dollar franchise.
I Believe in a Thing Called Love
Justin Hawkins in full falsetto, cut at Chapel Studios, on a riff Q placed among its 101 greatest guitar tracks.
Stacy's Mom
Schlesinger owned up to this one, chasing the Cars; Ocasek assumed the intro was sampled from Just What I Needed.
21 Questions
Dre objected to a love song on a gangsta album, then mixed it into four weeks atop the Hot 100.
Michigan
The first of the fifty state albums, with Stevens playing most of the instruments himself and naming songs after towns nobody writes about.
Revelations
Arbus met twins, giants, nudists and Westchester couples with the same level stare. Here are the prints with her notebooks and letters, and the argument American photography has never settled about her.
Feeling This
Hoppus and DeLonge wrote in separate rooms, choruses and verses, and Barker's beat locked them together in a day.
The Sound of Settling
Walla had to talk the band into keeping it, and Gibbard's throwaway became their singalong.
Sleeping In
Tamborello mailed beats from Los Angeles; Gibbard answered with a dream he would rather not wake from.
Carry Me Ohio
Kozelek grew up in Massillon, Ohio, and this is what he sends back: an apology set to ringing acoustic guitars.
Transatlanticism
One line repeats for eight minutes on the title track, with an instrument added at a time until the whole band is playing at once.
Moneyball
Oakland spent a third of what the Yankees spent and won as many games, buying the hitters scouts despised. Every team in baseball now runs on the arithmetic Lewis watched Billy Beane use.
Where Is The Love?
An uncredited Timberlake sang the hook to protect his solo album, and Britain kept it at number one six weeks.
Bring Me To Life
Lee wrote it at nineteen, the label insisted on a male voice, and David Campbell's string section did the rest.
It's My Life (No Doubt)
Hollis and Friese-Greene wrote it for Talk Talk in 1984, and Nellee Hooper's production hands Stefani a stadium chorus.
Title and Registration
Unhappy with the mix, Walla squashed the drums through speech-therapy hardware and rebuilt the track around a glove compartment.
American Splendor
The real Harvey Pekar appears in the film alongside the actor playing him, and they discuss it: a file clerk in Cleveland turned his ordinary life into comics, and stayed a file clerk.
Chutes Too Narrow
James Mercer, who essentially is the Shins, recorded most of it in his own basement. A film later put an earlier song in front of everybody.
It's Five O'Clock Somewhere
Brown and Rollins wrote it, Stegall cut it, and Buffett collected the first major award of his thirty-year career.
Fever to Tell
There is no bass player, just Nick Zinner's guitar and Brian Chase's drums under Karen O's yelping. Maps was written about missing someone.
Elf
The elf costume is real and so is the height difference: Jon Favreau used forced perspective rather than effects, and within five years it was a Christmas standard.
Senorita
Pharrell and Chad Hugo hand him an electric piano strut and a cowbell; Timberlake splits the room to sing back.
My Immortal
Lee and Moody wrote it at fifteen; the album kept her raw demo vocal, radio got Campbell's grieving strings.
White Flag
Her brother Rollo co-produced it, and the chorus flatly refuses to concede a relationship everyone knows is over.
Turn Me On (Kevin Lyttle)
A soca ballad cut in Saint Vincent for fifteen hundred East Caribbean dollars, later remixed into a worldwide hit.