Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Directed by Michel Gondry
2004
No romance this century has come close: Kaufman's premise, that you could pay to have someone erased, turns out to be the most honest thing anyone has said about breakups.
★ 8.9
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2004
Showing 137 works across all media from 2004
The College Dropout
2004
Kanye recorded one of the songs with his jaw wired shut after a car crash, which is exactly what it sounds like.
★ 8.4
Before Sunset
Directed by Richard Linklater
2004
Very little else works the way this does: eighty minutes of two people walking around Paris talking, in close to real time, and it is over far too soon.
★ 8.0
99 ProblemsJay-Z
99 Problems
2004 · From The Black Album
Rick Rubin's first rap production in years, a Billy Squier drum break, and a second verse about a traffic stop.
★ 8.0
Jesus Walks
2004 · From The College Dropout
A marching ARC Choir sample, Rhymefest's co-write, and a label convinced nobody would play a rap record about God.
★ 7.9
Gasolina
2004
A dembow riddim from Luny Tunes, an uncredited hook from Glory, and a place in the National Recording Registry.
★ 7.7
Gilead
2004 · 247 pages
John Ames, an old preacher in Iowa, is dying and sets his life down for the seven-year-old son who will not remember him. Robinson makes an ordinary afternoon feel like grace.
★ 7.7
Mr. Brightside
2004 · From Hot Fuss
Flowers wrote it after a bad night at a Vegas bar; Britain has kept it charting past 500 weeks.
★ 7.6
Drop It Like It's Hot
2004 · From R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece
The Neptunes built it from tongue clicks and almost nothing else, and it gave Snoop his first number one.
★ 7.6
Since U Been Gone
2004
Pink passed on it and Duff couldn't hit the notes, so Clarkson asked for heavier guitars and won a Grammy.
★ 7.5
Take Me Out
2004 · From Franz Ferdinand
Two songs welded together, the tempo dropping a minute in, and a sniper film lending Kapranos his double-edged title.
★ 7.5
Float On
2004
Brock wrote it in the final days of tracking, fed up with darkness, and built indie rock's warmest chorus.
★ 7.3
All Falls Down
2004 · From The College Dropout
Denied the Lauryn Hill sample, West had Syleena Johnson sing the part, and got his first solo top ten.
★ 7.3
Maps
2004 · From Fever to Tell
Zinner's looped riff, twenty minutes of writing from Karen O, and a video where the tears are real.
★ 7.3
Dirt Off Your Shoulder
2004 · From The Black Album
Timbaland's beat is all snap and space, and in 2008 a presidential candidate borrowed the shoulder-brush on a Raleigh stage.
★ 7.0
Million Dollar Baby
Directed by Clint Eastwood
2004
Eastwood spends an hour making you love a boxing underdog story and then does something else entirely: nothing in American film is tougher than where it ends up.
★ 6.9
The Notebook · 2004
Sideways
Directed by Alexander Payne
2004
It measurably dented cheap merlot sales and sent pinot noir soaring: two middle-aged men drive through wine country, one about to be married and one unable to move on.
★ 6.9
Reptilia
2004 · From Room on Fire
Nigel Godrich's sessions got scrapped, Gordon Raphael came back, and the descending twin-guitar riff turned everything into a sprint.
★ 6.8
If I Ain't Got You
2004
Aaliyah's death in 2001 clarified what mattered, and Keys answered with piano, gospel restraint and a Grammy-winning vocal.
★ 6.8
Chronicles
Volume One
2004 · 293 pages
Dylan refuses the story everyone wants. He writes instead about borrowed couches in Greenwich Village in 1961 and a New Orleans studio in 1989, in prose as good as his songs.
★ 6.7
Shaun of the Dead
Directed by Edgar Wright
2004 · United Kingdom
A zombie comedy that works as an actual zombie film: Wright plants every joke twice, so the second half pays off setups you laughed at an hour earlier without noticing they were setups.
★ 6.7
Downfall
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
2004
Bruno Ganz plays Hitler as a man rather than a symbol, and Germany argued about the film for a year: the last twelve days in the bunker, filmed without comment or consolation.
★ 6.7
Howl's Moving Castle
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
2004 · Japan
Miyazaki's most beautiful machine is a walking house held together by magic and bad temper: underneath the wonder is an angry anti-war film, made while he watched the invasion of Iraq.
★ 6.6
Boulevard of Broken Dreams
2004 · From American Idiot
Armstrong wrote the lyrics alone in an East Village apartment, and that loneliness won Record of the Year.
★ 6.6
All These Things That I've Done
2004 · From Hot Fuss
Gospel choir the Sweet Inspirations, a bassline Flowers traced to Bowie, and a refrain built for arenas.
★ 6.5
Somebody Told Me
2004 · From Hot Fuss
Flowers called it the story of trying to meet someone in a club; Keuning's hook does the flirting.
★ 6.3
Mean Girls
Directed by Mark Waters
2004
Tina Fey adapted a parenting book about teenage girls into the most quoted comedy of its decade: the anthropology is accurate, and the cruelty is presented as a system rather than a person.
★ 6.3
Friday Night Lights
Directed by Peter Berg
2004
High-school football is the surface; the subject is a town with nothing else: Odessa, Texas in 1988, filmed handheld and close, where a losing season is a civic emergency.
★ 5.9
Evil
2004 · From Antics
Charlie White's video put an animatronic puppet through a real emergency room, six puppeteers digitally erased; fans named it Norman.
★ 5.8
How to Save a Life
2004
Slade wrote it after mentoring a troubled teenager at a Denver camp, and Grey's Anatomy did the rest.
★ 5.8
Whiskey Lullaby
2004
Two verses, two voices, and Jerry Douglas's Dobro; Bill Anderson and Jon Randall wrote country's bleakest modern ballad.
★ 5.8
I Miss You
2004
Cello, upright bass and brushed drums, roughly seventy acoustic tracks, and Hoppus and DeLonge trading verses about missing someone.
★ 5.8
American Idiot
2004
Someone stole the master tapes for the album they had just finished, so Green Day started over and wrote a punk rock opera instead.
★ 5.7
Ocean Breathes Salty
2004
Recorded at Sweet Tea in Oxford, Mississippi, and it turns a hard look at mortality into something close to serene.
★ 5.6
Such Great Heights (Iron & Wine)Iron & Wine
Such Great Heights (Iron & Wine)
2004
Beam slowed Gibbard's synth-pop into hushed acoustic guitar for a Sub Pop B-side, then Garden State put it everywhere.
★ 5.5
1, 2 Step
Ciara and Missy Elliott
2004
Jazze Pha built the beat on an Akai MPC3000, and Missy Elliott cut her verse before ever meeting Ciara.
★ 5.5
Somewhere Only We Know
2004
Rice-Oxley hammered it out on piano after "Heroes", and Keane proved a rock band could skip guitars entirely.
★ 5.5