Books, movies and records of the year

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The 1980s

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The 1980s



Record of the 1980s | Love Will Tear Us Apart | Joy Division | UK | 45 rpm single | 1980 | all time #12
"Hitting record store shelves as a 7" vinyl release not long before the band's singer Ian Curtis took his own life on May 18, 1980, Love Will Tear Us Apart became a totemic record in the aftermath of that tragedy, widely taken as the last will and testament of a riveting yet tormented frontman. Rendered coldly distant by Martin Hannett's trademark production, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook restrict themselves to repeating their personalized variations of the main melody riff on keyboard and bass, respectively, while Ian Curtis delivers half-hearted stabs of guitar throughout. Aside from Stephen Morris' ever-frenetic drum rhythms, the band sounds sapped of strength on the final recording, as if it has succumbed to solemnly accepting its fated demise. Inhabiting that ghostly, funereal production, Curtis' emotionally-numb crooning instills his words with pervading sense of regret. Curtis lays his soul bare, documenting his failings and offering no excuses, illustrating a collapsing relationship where "routine bits hard" and "ambitions are low"." (AJ Ramirez, PopMatters)

Movie of the 1980s | Raging Bull | Martin Scorsese | USA | 1980 | all time #24
"Revivals of this great film cannot come around often enough for me. This is the high-water mark of the Scorsese/De Niro partnership. De Niro plays the fanatically aggressive middleweight boxer, paranoid, driven and unhappy, who alienates everyone around him as he descends into self-loathing and loneliness. Joe Pesci and Cathy Moriarty are superb as his brother and wife. Its editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, established the movie as a classic example of her art, and the monochrome cinematography is superb. Unmissable." (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)

Book of the 1980s | Beloved | Toni Morrison | USA | 1987 | all time #41
"Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement. The book's epigraph reads: "Sixty Million and more," by which Morrison refers to the estimated number of slaves who died in the slave trade." (Publisher)


Books of the 1980s:
1 | Beloved | Toni Morrison | USA | 1987 | #41
2 | Midnight's Children | Salman Rushdie | UK | 1981 | #54
3 | The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway | Ernest Hemingway | USA | 1987 | collection | #105
4 | The Color Purple | Alice Walker | USA | 1982 | #107
5 | The Handmaid's Tale | Margaret Atwood | Canada | 1985 | #139
6 | Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West | Cormac McCarthy | USA | 1985 | #143


Movies of the 1980s:
1 | Raging Bull | Martin Scorsese | USA | 1980 | #24
2 | Blade Runner | Ridley Scott | USA | UK | 1982 | #38
3 | Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander) | Ingmar Bergman | Sweden | 1982 | #51
4 | Shoah (Shoah) | Claude Lanzmann | France | 1985 | documentary | #69
5 | Blue Velvet | David Lynch | USA | 1986 | #82
6 | The Shining | Stanley Kubrick | UK/USA | 1980 | #96


Albums of the 1980s:
1 | It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back | Public Enemy | USA | 1988 | #18
2 | The Queen Is Dead | The Smiths | UK | 1986 | #22
3 | Thriller | Michael Jackson | USA | 1982 | #25
4 | Sign "☮" the Times | Prince | USA | 1987 | #29
5 | Remain in Light | Talking Heads | USA | 1980 | #34


Songs of the 1980s:
1 | Love Will Tear Us Apart | Joy Division | UK | 1980 | #12
2 | Billie Jean | Michael Jackson | USA | 1982 | #18
3 | The Message | Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five | USA | 1982 | #24
4 | When Doves Cry | Prince | USA | 1984 | #29
5 | Blue Monday | New Order | UK | 1983 | #38


Classical works of the 1980s:
1 | The Mission | Ennio Morricone | France | Italy | 1986 | #36
2 | Violin Concerto No. 1 | Philip Glass | USA | 1987 | #43
3 | Maninyas, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra | Ross Edwards | Australia | 1988 | #45
4 | Kakadu | Peter Sculthorpe | USA | Australia | 1988 | #51
5 | Akhnaten | Philip Glass | Germany | USA | 1984 | #82
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1990

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1990



Movie of 1990 | Goodfellas | Martin Scorsese | USA | all time #77
"By the time he got around to his 1990 masterpiece GoodFellas, Scorsese had permanently graduated into high-budget studio filmmaking, but his grunt's-eye view of gangster life distinguishes the film from the more stately, luxuriant Godfather movies. Based on the memoir of mafia thug turned government witness Henry Hill, GoodFellas dazzles foremost as a piece of pure craftsmanship. In tracking Ray Liotta's Hill as he works his way up through the organization, conspires with vicious lowlifes played by De Niro and an unforgettable Joe Pesci, and suffers a precipitous fall from grace, the film's style and texture shifts with the times. Moving from the romanticized first half to the fractured, jittery closing act, Scorsese adds Hill to a long list of consummate outsider heroes, bringing the audience closer to understanding a fringe-dweller who was seduced and abandoned by "the life." (Scott Tobias, A.V. Club)

Record of 1990 | Nothing Compares 2 U | Sinéad O'Connor | UK | Ireland | 45 rpm single | all time #111
"Towards the end of the award‑winning video that was shot to promote her single Nothing Compares 2 U, tears run down each of Sinéad O'Connor's cheeks as she sings, "All the flowers that you planted, Mama, in the back yard, all died when you went away.” These, she'd later explain, were prompted by thoughts of the complicated relationship that she had shared with her late mother. Not that O'Connor had written this number about longing for a lost love. Instead, Prince had composed it for the band Family, inspired by a member who had recently split up with his girlfriend and recorded by the funk outfit for their eponymous 1985 album. Identifying with the lyrics, O'Connor imbued the song with a strikingly authentic, heartfelt intensity that, aided by the equally stark and powerful video, transported it to the top of the charts in no less than 15 countries." (Richard Buskin, Sound on Sound)

Book of 1990 | Rabbit at Rest | John Updike | USA | all time #188
"In John Updike's fourth and final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in midlife to become a working girl. As, through the winter, spring, and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live. The geographical locale is divided between Brewer, in southestern Pennyslvania, and Deleon, in southwestern Florida." (Publisher)


Books of 1990:
1 | Rabbit at Rest | John Updike | USA | #188
2 | Possession | A. S. Byatt | UK | #242
3 | The Things They Carried | Tim O'Brien | USA | #474


Movies of 1990:
1 | Goodfellas | Martin Scorsese | USA | #77
2 | Nema-ye Nazdik (Close-Up) | Abbas Kiarostami | Iran | #86
3 | Ah fei zing zyun (Days of Being Wild) | Wong Kar Wai | Hong Kong | #276


Albums of 1990:
1 | Fear of a Black Planet | Public Enemy | USA | #129
2 | Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches | Happy Mondays | UK | #355
3 | Violator | Depeche Mode | UK | #373


Songs of 1990:
1 | Nothing Compares 2 U | Sinéad O'Connor | UK | Ireland | #111
2 | Loaded | Primal Scream | UK | #332
3 | Groove Is in the Heart | Deee-Lite | USA | #336
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1991

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1991



Record of 1991 | Smells Like Teen Spirit | Nirvana | USA | CD single | all time #2
"Grunge, a form of alienated music on the border of metal and punk, had been around for a while before Cobain and two friends formed Nirvana. But Smells Like Teen Spirit, released on the band's second album Nevermind in 1991, made it an international sensation. Kurt Cobain's influences included the Pixies and, less fashionably, soft-rockers Boston; the song's elliptical lyrics ("load up on guns/ bring your friends … a mulatto/ an albino/ a mosquito/ my libido") hinted at troubled racial politics and Aids panic without ever making anything explicit. When he chorused "I feel stupid and contagious/ here we are now, entertain us" he summed up the new fin de siècle. Quiet passages alternated with rage: guitars crunched, drums crashed, Cobain howled. No doubt about it, Smells Like Teen Spirit was the quintessential grunge anthem." (David Honigmann, Financial Times)

Movie of 1991 | Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian (A Brighter Summer Day) | Edward Yang | Taiwan | all time #123
"Of his half-dozen other features, A Brighter Summer Day is, by critical consensus, the masterpiece. And it deserves that overused designation in several specific ways. In every aspect of technique — from the smoky colors and the bustling, off-center compositions to the architecture of the story and the emotional precision of the performances — this film is a work of absolute mastery. Its imaginative authority and the scale of its achieved ambition make it not just a wonderful movie but also an essential piece of modern cinema." (A.O. Scott, The New York Times)

Book of 1991 | A Thousand Acres | Jane Smiley | USA | all time #541
"Larry Cook's farm is the largest in Zebulon County, Iowa, and a tribute to his hard work and single-mindedness. Proud and possessive, his sudden decision to retire and hand over the farm to his three daughters, is disarmingly uncharacteristic. Ginny and Rose, the two eldest, are startled yet eager to accept, but Caroline, the youngest daughter, has misgivings. Immediately, her father cuts her out. In A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley transposes the King Lear story to the modern day, and in so doing at once illuminates Shakespeare's original and subtly transforms it. This astonishing novel won both of America’s highest literary awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics' Circle Award." (Publisher)


Books of 1991:
1 | A Thousand Acres | Jane Smiley | USA | #541
2 | Regeneration | Pat Barker | UK | #571
3 | Sofies verden: Roman om filosofiens historie (Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy) | Jostein Gaarder | Norway | #689


Movies of 1991:
1 | Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian (A Brighter Summer Day) | Edward Yang | Taiwan | #123
2 | La double vie de Véronique (The Double Life of Véronique) | Krzysztof Kieślowski | France | Poland | #360
3 | The Silence of the Lambs | Jonathan Demme | USA | #382


Albums of 1991:
1 | Nevermind | Nirvana | USA | #3
2 | Blue Lines | Massive Attack | UK | #37
3 | Loveless | My Bloody Valentine | UK | Ireland | #58


Songs of 1991:
1 | Smells Like Teen Spirit | Nirvana | USA | #2
2 | Losing My Religion | R.E.M. | USA | #43
3 | Unfinished Sympathy | Massive | UK | #64
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1992

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1992



Record of 1992 | Automatic for the People | R.E.M. | USA | album (CD) | all time #42
"Automatic for the People is often understood as being R.E.M.'s album about death and mourning, but it's really their meditation on living with the awareness of mortality. Stipe and the band touch on deep, elemental fears and existential dread with remarkable subtlety, while knowing enough to make the soulful anti-suicide anthem "Everybody Hurts" as direct and obvious as possible. The spectre of death hangs over every cut, but the album's most moving songs, such as the sentimental remembrance "Nightswimming" and the cautiously optimistic "Find the River," rejoice in the small moments that make life worth living. Automatic for the People is timeless and profound, and manages to be uplifting without ever seeming condescending or corny." (Matthew Perpetua, Nerve)

Movie of 1992 | Unforgiven | Clint Eastwood | USA | all time #236
"Unforgiven is a classic Western for the ages. In his 10th excursion into the genre that made him a star more than 25 years ago, Clint Eastwood has crafted a tense, hard-edged, superbly dramatic yarn that is also an exceedingly intelligent meditation on the West, its myths and its heroes. With its grizzled cast of outstanding actors playing outlaws who have survived their primes, this is unapologetically a mature, contemplative film. Final shots, which have the survivor of the climactic bloodbath riding off, not into the sunset, but into a nocturnal downpour, constitute a hauntingly poetic variation on the usual Western fadeout. Eastwood's telling of this grim, compelling tale is at least as impressive as in his best prior outings as a director — The Outlaw Josey Wales, Bird and White Hunter, Black Heart." (Todd McCarthy, Variety)

Book of 1992 | Bastard out of Carolina | Dorothy Allison | USA | all time #324
"Since its appearance, the novel has been banned from libraries and classrooms, championed by fans, and defended by critics. Greenville County, South Carolina, is a wild, lush place that is home to the Boatwright family —a tight-knit clan of rough-hewn, hard- drinking men who shoot up each other's trucks, and indomitable women who get married young and age too quickly. At the heart of this story is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a bastard child who observes the world around her with a mercilessly keen perspective. When her stepfather Daddy Glen, "cold as death, mean as a snake," becomes increasingly more vicious toward her, Bone finds herself caught in a family triangle that tests the loyalty of her mother, and leads to a final, harrowing encounter from which there can be no turning back." (Publisher)


Books of 1992:
1 | Bastard out of Carolina | Dorothy Allison | USA | #324
2 | All the Pretty Horses | Cormac McCarthy | USA | #386
3 | Jesus' Son | Denis Johnson | USA | #425


Movies of 1992:
1 | Unforgiven | Clint Eastwood | USA | #236
2 | Reservoir Dogs | Quentin Tarantino | USA | #313
3 | El sol del membrillo (The Quince Tree Sun) | Víctor Erice | Spain | documentary | #354
4 | Zendegi va digar hich (And Life Goes On..) | Abbas Kiarostami | Iran | #561


Albums of 1992:
1 | Automatic for the People | R.E.M. | USA | #42
2 | Slanted and Enchanted | Pavement | USA | #106
3 | The Chronic | Dr. Dre | USA | #127


Songs of 1992:
1 | Creep | Radiohead | UK | #130
2 | Nuthin' But a "G" Thang | Dr. Dre | USA | #199
3 | Killing in the Name | Rage Against the Machine | USA | #228


Classical work of 1992 | Antarctica, Suite for Guitar and Orchestra | Nigel Westlake | Australia | #29
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1993

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1993



Record of 1993 | Loser | Beck | USA | CD-single | all time #59
"Here's what really happened when MTV played Beck's Loser for the first time, in 1994: The culture inverted itself, weirdness was instantaneously mainstreamed, everyone stopped combing their hair, people slept more and purchased broken turn­­tables at stoop sales, dirtbags began using the word art in casual conversation, Michael Cera entered kindergarten. The Smashing Pumpkins followed Loser with the metalesque Zero, but that was self-loathing as bandwagon chic — by the fall of '95, this was simply the sentiment alt-gods were supposed to have. And Loser made that happen, it was lifestyle branding. It made a vision of unspecific, apolitical apathy appear charming and desirable. Overnight, it was so much easier for white people to be cool. All you had to do was look weird and act weirder." (Chuck Klosterman, Spin)

Movie of 1993 | The Piano | Jane Campion | New Zealand | all time #200
"The Piano plays itself with such contrapuntal richness, it resonates in you forever. Set in 19th-century New Zealand, this saga of will, destiny and passion starring Holly Hunter is an extraordinary symphony of sounds and silence, of lilting pleasure and tangled horror. There's something mystically compelling about writer/director Jane Campion's 1993 Cannes winner. On one level, it's a fairy tale for adults. But on others, it evokes powerful eroticism, sexual mustiness, emotional anguish and numerous other themes. You experience this mix of mythic and corporeal on the pinions of cinematic fancy." (Desson Howe, The Washington Post)

Book of 1993 | The Shipping News | E. Annie Proulx | USA | all time #478
"E. Annie Proulx focuses on a Newfoundland fishing town in a tale about a third-rate newspaperman and the women in his life — his elderly aunt and two young daughters— who decide to resettle in their ancestral seaside home. The transformation each of the character undergoes following move is profound. A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, The Shipping News enlightens readers to the powers of E. Annie Proulx's storytelling genius and her expert evocation of time and place. She is truly one of the most gifted and original writers in America today." (Publisher)


Books of 1993:
1 | The Shipping News | E. Annie Proulx | USA | #478
2 | The Giver | Lois Lowry | USA | #510
3 | Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha | Roddy Doyle | Ireland | #579


Movies of 1993:
1 | The Piano | Jane Campion | New Zealand | #200
2 | Schindler's List | Steven Spielberg | USA | #222
3 | Groundhog Day | Harold Ramis | USA | #240


Albums of 1993:
1 | In Utero | Nirvana | USA | #102
2 | Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) | Wu-Tang Clan | USA | #104
3 | Siamese Dream | Smashing Pumpkins | USA | #133


Songs of 1993:
1 | Loser | Beck | USA | #59
2 | Cannonball | The Breeders | USA | #269
3 | All Apologies | Nirvana | USA | #398
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1994

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1994



Record of 1994 | Grace | Jeff Buckley | USA | album (CD) | all time #54
"Jeff Buckley's voice not only has range, it has a soulful intensity that sends chills. He's capable of summoning extravagant emotion with little more than a leap to falsetto, and a few minutes into this recording — his first with a band after last year's live solo effort — he's already piercing the stratosphere. At times, Buckley indulges in posturing that recalls Led Zeppelin, but even then he can be thrilling. The music has a rolling-and-tumbling dynamic that suits the swooning vocals, the crash-and-burn of "Eternal Life" of a piece with the jazzy atmospherics of "Lilac Wine" and Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," a masterpiece that Buckley wholly inhabits." (Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune)

Movie of 1994 | Pulp Fiction | Quentin Tarantino | USA | all time #76
"Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is a film both monumental and immediately accessible, a 2 1/2-hour picture whose energy never flags. It is an exhilaration from beginning to end. It's the movie equivalent of that rare sort of novel where you find yourself checking to see how many pages are left and hoping there are more, not fewer. The tone is darkly comic in the face of almost operatic violence, though only the most squeamish of viewers will be put off. With Tarantino we get violence as part of an impish vision of life in which anything can happen — and does. Pulp Fiction is a picture that will stand up to repeat viewings. Early scenes hint at what comes later, and while a first viewing may go by like a shot, the film's intellectual underpinnings become clearer the second time around." (Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle)

Book of 1994 | Nejimakitori Kuronikuru (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) | Haruki Murakami | Japan | all time #237
"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force — and one of Haruki Murakami's most acclaimed and beloved novels. In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat —and then for his wife as well— in a netherworld beneath the city's placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II." (Publisher)


Books of 1994:
1 | Nejimakitori Kuronikuru (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) | Haruki Murakami | Japan | #237
2 | Snow Falling on Cedars | David Guterson | USA | #410
3 | Le premier homme (The First Man) | Albert Camus | France | #631


Movies of 1994:
1 | Pulp Fiction | Quentin Tarantino | USA | #76
2 | Sátántangó (Satantango) | Béla Tarr | Hungary | #103
3 | Chung Hing sam lam (Chungking Express) | Wong Kar Wai | Hong Kong | #214


Albums of 1994:
1 | Grace | Jeff Buckley | USA | #54
2 | Dummy | Portishead | UK | #59
3 | Definitely Maybe | Oasis | UK | #93


Songs of 1994:
1 | Live Forever | Oasis | UK | #131
2 | Sabotage | Beastie Boys | USA | #179
3 | Girls & Boys | Blur | UK | #265


Classical work of 1994 | Song for Athene | John Tavener | UK | #95
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1995

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1995



Record of 1995 | Common People | Pulp | UK | CD-single | all time #37
"It is one of the most witty, intelligent left-of-center pop songs to have ever achieved widespread consensus. When all readers and critics vote for it in whatever poll they are participating in on a given day, they can always rest assured they've done the right thing. Common People isn't simply a great song, it is an occasion. That synth streaking out of the sky is like the snare whack in Like a Rolling Stone, signaling that a story is about to begin, and it will hold you through every word. Pulp had made a long career up to this point representing for the outsiders. They didn't change anything to get to this point, they just got better and better, and this ageless anthem was one of those moments when the outsiders took over and everyone wanted in." (Ian King, PopMatters)

Movie of 1995 | Underground (Underground) | Emir Kusturica | Federal Republic of Yugoslavia | all time #288
"There's no need for a movie adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realist tome One Hundred Years of Solitude. It's already been made. Emir Kusturica's tragic-farce Underground may be the most important film of the last 25 years, a sweltering, morally inquisitive work of political narrative fiction that laments our propensity for auto-destruction. In a time when supposedly serious journalism fails to illuminate the horrors of the world (pop quiz: what did Milosevic do to his people and why?), films like Underground exist to make amends. "Once upon a time there was a country…" So begins Kusturica's parable of self-annihilation, a deliriously metaphorical, emotionally gut-wrenching and devastatingly funny chronicle of a death foretold." (Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine)

Book of 1995 | His Dark Materials: Northern Lights | Philip Pullman | UK | all time #422
"Northern Lights introduces Lyra, an orphan, who lives in a parallel universe in which science, theology and magic are entwined. Lyra's search for a kidnapped friend uncovers a sinister plot involving stolen children and turns into a quest to understand a mysterious phenomenon called Dust. The epic story Pullman tells is not only a spellbinding adventure featuring armoured polar bears, magical devices, witches and daemons, it is also an audacious and profound re-imagining of Milton's Paradise Lost. An utterly entrancing blend of metaphysical speculation and bravura storytelling, His Dark Materials is a monumental and enduring achievement." (Publisher)


Books of 1995:
1 | His Dark Materials: Northern Lights | Philip Pullman | UK | #422
2 | Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Blindness) | José Saramago | Portugal | #443
3 | The Blue Flower | Penelope Fitzgerald | UK | #509


Movies of 1995:
1 | Underground (Underground) | Emir Kusturica | Federal Republic of Yugoslavia | #288
2 | Heat | Michael Mann | USA | #329
3 | Toy Story | John Lasseter | USA | #469


Albums of 1995:
1 | (What's the Story) Morning Glory? | Oasis | UK | #77
2 | The Bends | Radiohead | UK | #79
3 | Different Class | Pulp | UK | #119


Songs of 1995:
1 | Common People | Pulp | UK | #37
2 | Wonderwall | Oasis | UK | #86
3 | Born Slippy .NUXX | Underworld | UK | #128

Note:
A completely British line-up both for albums and songs (for the first time) on the peak year of Britpop.
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1996

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1996



Record of 1996 | Odelay | Beck! | USA | album (CD) | all time #51
"Beck is no loser, baby, just because he treats pop music like a giant garage sale. In fact, it's his greatest strength. Whimsical, downright Seussian in his wordplay, Beck Hansen has met his match in the Dust Brothers, the sonic architects of Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. The Dust Brothers fully grasp Beck's jump-cutting passion for 60 years' worth of music, from back-porch acoustic blues and plaintive country laments to bring-the-noise Sonic Youthisms and scratch-and-burn hip-hop. All of those sonic touchstones are embraced on Odelay, which may strike initiates to the Beck universe as bewilderingly chaotic. But virtually every one of Beck's odes to the weirdness comes wrapped in a giant hook that'll have you bobbing your head, singing in the shower or scrambling to turn up the volume knob. In a word: Fun." (Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune)

Movie of 1996 | Breaking the Waves | Lars Von Trier | Denmark | all time #195
"Courting and sometimes winning ridicule, daring to fuse true love with lurid exploitation and pure religious faith, the Danish director Lars von Trier has created a fierce, wrenchingly passionate film about the struggles of a shy young woman who is goodness personified. Truly, bells ring in heaven for a heroine like this. With a plot that owes as much to the Marquis de Sade as it does to higher-minded sources, von Trier begins his film as a powerfully carnal love story and eventually leaves it, by his own description, "treading on the verge of kitsch." A narrative path leading from the sincere to the ludicrous, and culminating in a final image of flabbergasting transcendance, gives Breaking the Waves its surprising power." (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)

Book of 1996 | Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace | USA | all time #403
"A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the pursuit of happiness in America. Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human — and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do." (Publisher)


Books of 1996:
1 | Selected Stories | Alice Munro | Canada | collection | #261
2 | Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace | USA | #403
3 | A Game of Thrones | George R. R. Martin | USA | #708
4 | Bridget Jones's Diary | Helen Fielding | UK | #815


Movies of 1996:
1 | Breaking the Waves | Lars Von Trier | Denmark | #195
2 | Fargo | Joel Coen | USA | #198
3 | Nun va Goldoon (A Moment of Innocence) | Mohsen Makhmalbaf | Iran | #419


Albums of 1996:
1 | Odelay | Beck! | USA | #51
2 | Endtroducing..... | DJ Shadow | UK | USA | #76
3 | If You're Feeling Sinister | Belle and Sebastian | UK | #195


Songs of 1996:
1 | Firestarter | Prodigy | UK | #226
2 | Where It's At | Beck | USA | #434
3 | No Diggity | Blackstreet (featuring Dr. Dre) | USA | #737
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1997

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1997



Record of 1997 | OK Computer | Radiohead | UK | album (CD) | all time #8
"The end of the 90s will be seen as the end of the album. The rise of MP3 technology and file downloading returned pop music consumption to collective pre-Beatles mindset, where songs are judged as singles. The resurgence, and arguable final entrenchment, of manufactured Pop Stars by their handlers over supposedly more artistic fare —and more importantly the acceptance of such common pleasures by critics— razed the significance of the complete album. Which is why OK Computer eternally top these polls: somehow we doubt we'll ever see their like again. Any arguing or defending of the record seems pointless and redundant. OK Computer sounds crystalline and liveable — a true, enterable aural landscape packaged with press-delivered mythology describing its creation. OK Computer simply is the anxious, self-important, uncertain, technologically overwhelmed 1990s." (Brent DiCrescenzo, Pitchfork)

Book of 1997 | American Pastoral | Philip Roth | USA | all time #154
"Philip Roth's masterpiece provides a piercing look into the promises of prosperity, civic order and domesticity in twentieth century America. 'Swede' Levov is living the American dream. He glides through life cocooned by his devoted family, his demanding yet highly rewarding (and lucrative) business, his sporting prowess, his good looks. Until the sunny day in 1968, when the Swede's bountiful American luck deserts him. His adored daughter, Merry, has become a stranger to him, a fanatical teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism that plunges the Levov family into the political mayhem of sixties America, and drags them into the underbelly of a seemingly ascendant society. Rendered powerless by the shocking turn of events, the Swede can only watch as his pastoral idyll is methodically torn apart." (Publisher)

Movie of 1997 | Lost Highway | David Lynch | USA | all time #358
"Bill Pullman stars as a jazz saxophonist whose fiery solos grant him a passion and eloquence he seems incapable of anywhere else. At home, he and wife Patricia Arquette share awkward silences, fumbling sex, and mutual distrust. Shortly after meeting a creepy, white-faced man, Pullman is arrested for murdering Arquette, an accusation that baffles him in spite of overwhelming evidence of his guilt. The Lynch themes of voyeurism, obsession, unsettling sexuality, and the modern echoes of film noir flow without a filter. Lost Highway is a disquieting, disorienting film that doesn't just improve with repeat viewings, it practically requires them. Typical of Lynch, it commands attention while stirring the impossible desire to look away." (Keith Phipps, A.V. Club)


Books of 1997:
1 | American Pastoral | Philip Roth | USA | #154
2 | Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone | J. K. Rowling | UK | #200
3 | Cold Mountain | Charles Frazier | USA | #437


Movies of 1997:
1 | Lost Highway | David Lynch | USA | #358
2 | Chun gwong cha sit (Happy Together) | Wong Kar Wai | Hong Kong | #362
3 | Ta'm e guilass (Taste of Cherry) | Abbas Kiarostami | Iran | #461


Albums of 1997:
1 | OK Computer | Radiohead | UK | #8
2 | Homework | Daft Punk | UK | France | #142
3 | Homogenic | Björk | UK | Iceland | #190


Songs of 1997:
1 | Paranoid Android | Radiohead | UK | #58
2 | Bitter Sweet Symphony | The Verve | UK | #63
3 | Song 2 | Blur | UK | #146
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1998

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1998



Record of 1998 | The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill | Lauryn Hill | USA | album (CD) | all time #124
"Hill doth protest too much at times, but the beauty of the album lies in her ability to make her self-righteousness more than tolerable. In her hands, sanctimony can be ravishing. Hill produced and wrote most of the album, and like past black-pop giants Marvin Gaye and Gamble and Huff, she knows the benefit of couching even the harshest rhetoric in mesmerizing grooves. "Doo Wop (That Thing)" is wrapped in gorgeous, intertwining street-corner vocalese. Using a rhythmic snippet of Marley's "Concrete Jungle," "Forgive Them Father" sways with island-lilt harmonies. Messianic, finger-pointing raps in "Lost Ones" and "Everything Is Everything" give way to fluidly sung choruses. Every cut, even the apolitical ones, presents a new and unexpected twist, both musically and emotionally." (David Browne, Entertainment Weekly)

Movie of 1998 | The Thin Red Line | Terrence Malick | USA | all time #212
"After directing two of the most extraordinary movies of the 1970s, Badlands and Days of Heaven, American artist Terrence Malick disappeared from the film world for twenty years, only to resurface in 1998 with this visionary adaptation of James Jones's 1962 novel about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal. A big-budget, spectacularly mounted epic, The Thin Red Line is also one of the most deeply philosophical films ever released by a major Hollywood studio, a thought-provoking meditation on man, nature, and violence. Featuring a cast of contemporary cinema's finest actors —Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas, and Woody Harrelson among them— The Thin Red Line is a kaleidoscopic evocation of the experience of combat that ranks as one of the greatest war films ever produced." (The Criterion Collection)

Book of 1998 | The Poisonwood Bible | Barbara Kingsolver | USA | all time #397
"Barbara Kingsolver's acclaimed international bestseller tells the story of an American missionary family in the Congo during a poignant chapter in African history. It spins the tale of the fierce evangelical Baptist, Nathan Price, who takes his wife and four daughters on a missionary journey into the heart of darkness of the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them to Africa all they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it —from garden seeds to the King James Bible— is calamitously transformed on African soil. Told from the perspective of the five women, this is a compelling exploration of African history, religion, family, and the many paths to redemption." (Publisher)


Books of 1998:
1 | Collected Fictions | Jorge Luis Borges | USA | Argentina | collection | #47
2 | The Poisonwood Bible | Barbara Kingsolver | USA | #397
3 | Birds of America | Lorrie Moore | USA | #564
4 | Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives) | Roberto Bolaño | Spain | Chile | #683


Movies of 1998:
1 | Histoire(s) du cinéma | Jean-Luc Godard | France | documentary | #155
2 | The Thin Red Line | Terrence Malick | USA | #212
3 | The Big Lebowski | Joel Coen | USA | #219
4 | Festen (The Celebration) | Thomas Vinterberg | Denmark | #374


Albums of 1998:
1 | The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill | Lauryn Hill | USA | #124
2 | Moon Safari | AIR | UK | France | #130
3 | In the Aeroplane Over the Sea | Neutral Milk Hotel | USA | #242


Songs of 1998:
1 | Music Sounds Better With You | Stardust | France | #448
2 | The Rockafeller Skank | Fatboy Slim | UK | #469
3 | Teardrop | Massive Attack | UK | #565
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1999

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1999



Record of 1999 | The Soft Bulletin | The Flaming Lips | USA | album (CD) | all time #111
"Though more conventional in concept and scope than Zaireeka, The Soft Bulletin clearly reflects its predecessor's expansive sonic palette. Its multidimensional sound is positively celestial, a shape-shifting pastiche of blissful melodies, heavenly harmonies, and orchestral flourishes; but for all its headphone-friendly innovations, the music is still amazingly accessible, never sacrificing popcraft in the name of radical experimentation. But what's most remarkable about The Soft Bulletin is its humanity — these are Wayne Coyne's most personal and deeply felt songs, as well as the warmest and most giving. Coyne pours his heart and soul into each one of these tracks, poignantly exploring love, loss, and the fate of all mankind." (Jason Ankeny, Allmusic)

Movie of 1999 | Beau travail (Beau travail) | Claire Denis | France | all time #154
"Claire Denis's film is a mesmeric, masculine ballet whose beauty and confident power, manifested in lugubrious scenes which suspend the normal rules of narrative procedure, simply go beyond conventional ideas of transgression or homoeroticism. She choreographs various exercises and drills for Galoup and his comrades to act out; some of these are normal workouts, but in a kind of hallucination or noonday mirage, they seem to become dance sequences and exotic tableaux. What is really remarkable about Denis's film is the way she succeeds in fusing the real and the dreamlike, the naturalistic and the figurative, into one visual conceit. Never for one moment does this shimmering, simmering emotional desert storm of a film relax its grip on your senses." (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)

Book of 1999 | Disgrace | J. M. Coetzee | UK | South Africa | all time #446
"At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding. David's visit becomes an extended stay as he attempts to find meaning in his one remaining relationship. Instead, an incident of unimaginable terror and violence forces father and daughter to confront their strained relationship and the equality complicated racial complexities of the new South Africa. Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression." (Publisher)


Books of 1999:
1 | Disgrace | J. M. Coetzee | UK | South Africa | #446
2 | One Hundred and One Poems | Paul Verlaine | USA | France | collection | #484
3 | Waiting | Ha Jin | USA | #671
4 | Livläkarens besök (The Visit of the Royal Physician) | Per Olov Enquist | Sweden | #867


Movies of 1999:
1 | Beau travail (Beau travail) | Claire Denis | France | #154
2 | Magnolia | Paul Thomas Anderson | USA | #251
3 | The Matrix | The Wachowski Brothers | USA | #290


Albums of 1999:
1 | The Soft Bulletin | The Flaming Lips | USA | #111
2 | Ágætis byrjun | Sigur Rós | Iceland | #224
3 | 69 Love Songs | The Magnetic Fields | USA | #233


Songs of 1999:
1 | Windowlicker | Aphex Twin | UK | Ireland | #267
2 | My Name Is | Eminem | USA | #423
3 | No Scrubs | TLC | USA | #477
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The 1990s

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The 1990s



Record of the 1990s | Smells Like Teen Spirit | Nirvana | USA | CD single | 1991 | all time #2
"Grunge, a form of alienated music on the border of metal and punk, had been around for a while before Cobain and two friends formed Nirvana. But Smells Like Teen Spirit, released on the band's second album Nevermind in 1991, made it an international sensation. Kurt Cobain's influences included the Pixies and, less fashionably, soft-rockers Boston; the song's elliptical lyrics ("load up on guns/ bring your friends … a mulatto/ an albino/ a mosquito/ my libido") hinted at troubled racial politics and Aids panic without ever making anything explicit. When he chorused "I feel stupid and contagious/ here we are now, entertain us" he summed up the new fin de siècle. Quiet passages alternated with rage: guitars crunched, drums crashed, Cobain howled. No doubt about it, Smells Like Teen Spirit was the quintessential grunge anthem." (David Honigmann, Financial Times)

Movie of the 1990s | Pulp Fiction | Quentin Tarantino | USA | 1994 | all time #76
"Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is a film both monumental and immediately accessible, a 2 1/2-hour picture whose energy never flags. It is an exhilaration from beginning to end. It's the movie equivalent of that rare sort of novel where you find yourself checking to see how many pages are left and hoping there are more, not fewer. The tone is darkly comic in the face of almost operatic violence, though only the most squeamish of viewers will be put off. With Tarantino we get violence as part of an impish vision of life in which anything can happen — and does. Pulp Fiction is a picture that will stand up to repeat viewings. Early scenes hint at what comes later, and while a first viewing may go by like a shot, the film's intellectual underpinnings become clearer the second time around." (Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle)

Book of the 1990s | American Pastoral | Philip Roth | USA | 1997 | all time #154
"Philip Roth's masterpiece provides a piercing look into the promises of prosperity, civic order and domesticity in twentieth century America. 'Swede' Levov is living the American dream. He glides through life cocooned by his devoted family, his demanding yet highly rewarding (and lucrative) business, his sporting prowess, his good looks. Until the sunny day in 1968, when the Swede's bountiful American luck deserts him. His adored daughter, Merry, has become a stranger to him, a fanatical teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism that plunges the Levov family into the political mayhem of sixties America, and drags them into the underbelly of a seemingly ascendant society. Rendered powerless by the shocking turn of events, the Swede can only watch as his pastoral idyll is methodically torn apart." (Publisher)


Books of the 1990s:
1 | Collected Fictions | Jorge Luis Borges | USA | Argentina | 1998 | collection | #47
2 | American Pastoral | Philip Roth | USA | 1997 | #154
3 | Rabbit at Rest | John Updike | USA | 1990 | #188
4 | Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone | J. K. Rowling | UK | 1997 | #200
5 | Nejimakitori Kuronikuru (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) | Haruki Murakami | Japan | 1994 | #237
6 | Possession | A. S. Byatt | UK | 1990 | #242


Movies of the 1990s:
1 | Pulp Fiction | Quentin Tarantino | USA | 1994 | #76
2 | Goodfellas | Martin Scorsese | USA | 1990 | #77
3 | Nema-ye Nazdik (Close-Up) | Abbas Kiarostami | Iran | 1990 | #86
4 | Sátántangó (Satantango) | Béla Tarr | Hungary | 1994 | #103
5 | Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian (A Brighter Summer Day) | Edward Yang | Taiwan | 1991 | #123


Albums of the 1990s:
1 | Nevermind | Nirvana | USA | 1991 | #3
2 | OK Computer | Radiohead | UK | 1997 | #8
3 | Blue Lines | Massive Attack | UK | 1991 | #37
4 | Automatic for the People | R.E.M. | USA | 1992 | #42
5 | Odelay | Beck! | USA | 1996 | #51


Songs of the 1990s:
1 | Smells Like Teen Spirit | Nirvana | USA | 1991 | #2
2 | Common People | Pulp | UK | 1995 | #37
3 | Losing My Religion | R.E.M. | USA | 1991 | #43
4 | Paranoid Android | Radiohead | UK | 1997 | #58
5 | Loser | Beck | USA | 1993 | #59


Classical works of the 1990s:
1 | Antarctica, Suite for Guitar and Orchestra | Nigel Westlake | Australia | 1992 | #29
2 | Song for Athene | John Tavener | UK | 1994 | #95
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The 20th Century

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The 20th Century



Book of the 20th Century | À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) | Marcel Proust | France | 1913 | all time #1
"Swann's Way, the first part of À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust's seven-part cycle, was published in 1913. In it, Proust introduces the themes that run through the entire work. The narrator recalls his childhood, aided by the famous madeleine; and describes M. Swann's passion for Odette. The work is incomparable. Edmund Wilson said "[Proust] has supplied for the first time in literature an equivalent in the full scale for the new theory of modern physics." Swann's Way tells two related stories, the first of which revolves around Marcel, a younger version of the narrator, and his experiences in, and memories of, the French town Combray. Inspired by the "gusts of memory" that rise up within him as he dips a madeleine into hot tea, the narrator discusses his fear of going to bed at night. He is a creature of habit and dislikes waking up in the middle of the night not knowing where he is." (Publisher)

Movie of the 20th Century | Citizen Kane | Orson Welles | USA | 1941 | all time #1
"The source book of Orson Welles, and still a marvellous movie. Thematically less resonant than some of Welles' later meditations on the nature of power, perhaps, but still absolutely riveting as an investigation of a citizen —newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst by any other name— under suspicion of having soured the American Dream. Its imagery as Welles delightedly explores his mastery of a new vocabulary, still amazes and delights, from the opening shot of the forbidding gates of Xanadu to the last glimpse of the vanishing Rosebud (tarnished, maybe, but still a potent symbol). A film that gets better with each renewed acquaintance." (Tom Milne, Time Out)

Records of the 20th Century:
- Album of the 20th Century | Pet Sounds | The Beach Boys | USA | album (vinyl LP) | 1966 | all time #1
"Recorded and released in 1966, not long after the sunny, textural experiments of California Girls, Pet Sounds, aside from its importance as Brian Wilson's evolutionary compositional masterpiece, was the first rock record that can be considered a "concept album"; from first cut to last we were treated to an intense, linear personal vision of the vagaries of a love affair and the painful, introverted anxieties that are the wrenching precipitates of the unstable chemistry of any love relationship. This trenchant cycle of love songs has the emotional impact of a shatteringly evocative novel, and by God if this little record didn't change only the course of popular music, but the course of a few lives in the bargain. Nobody was prepared for anything so soulful, so lovely, something one had to think about so much. It is by far the best album Brian has yet delivered, and it paradoxically began the decline in mass popularity that still plagues this band." (Stephen Davis, Rolling Stone, 1972)
- Song of the 20th Century | Like a Rolling Stone | Bob Dylan | USA | 45 rpm single | 1965 | all time #1
"Released in July of 1965, Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone was, in many ways, the dividing line between the past and the future of rock and roll. The lyrics, the mood, the ramshackle rock and roll sound… it was the way forward. Issued as a single and the lead track on the Highway 61 Revisited LP, it ran for a then-unprecedented six minutes. With Like a Rolling Stone, Dylan would make the ultimate 'folk rock' statement, closing one door and opening another at the same time. Poetry was now as much a part of the arsenal for young musicians as the electric guitar. Musically, that crack of the snare drum that sets Like a Rolling Stone in motion is the shot heard round the world. Mike Bloomfield's sharp-as-nails guitar and Al Kooper's hammond organ give the song mighty wings. This is rock and roll as it was meant to be: Raw, literate, exciting, challenging and above all, memorable as hell. It can be said that Like a Rolling Stone was not only the pinnacle of Dylan's career, but it may also have been the crowning achievement of the genre." (Ultimate Classic Rock)


Books of the 20th Century:
1 | À la recherche du temps perdu, tome 1 : Du côté de chez Swann (In Search of Lost Time, Volume One: Swann's Way) | Marcel Proust | France | 1913 | #1
2 | Ulysses | James Joyce | France | UK | 1922 | #3
3 | The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | USA | 1925 | #4
4 | Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) | Gabriel García Márquez | Argentina | Colombia | 1967 | #9
5 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | France | USA | 1955 | #15
6 | The Catcher in the Rye | J. D. Salinger | USA | 1951 | #20
7 | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | USA | 1929 | #21
8 | To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf | UK | 1927 | #22
9 | Nineteen Eighty Four | George Orwell | UK | 1949 | #25
10 | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | USA | 1961 | #29


Movies of the 20th Century:
1 | Citizen Kane | Orson Welles | USA | 1941 | #1
2 | Vertigo | Alfred Hitchcock | USA | 1955 | #2
3 | 2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley Kubrick | UK | USA | 1968 | #3
4 | La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) | Jean Renoir | France | 1939 | #4
5 | Tôkyô monogatari (Tokyo Story) | Yasujirô Ozu | Japan | 1953 | #5
6 | 8½ (8½) | Federico Fellini | Italy | 1963 | #6
7 | The Godfather | Francis Ford Coppola | USA | 1972 | #7
8 | Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans | F.W. Murnau | USA | Germany | 1927 | #8
9 | The Searchers | John Ford | USA | 1956 | #9
10 | Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai) | Akira Kurosawa | Japan | 1954 | #10


Albums of the 20th Century:
1 | Pet Sounds | The Beach Boys | USA | 1966 | #1
2 | Revolver | The Beatles | UK | 1966 | #2
3 | Nevermind | Nirvana | USA | 1991 | #3
4 | The Velvet Underground & Nico | The Velvet Underground & Nico | USA | 1967 | #4
5 | Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | The Beatles | UK | 1967 | #5
6 | London Calling | The Clash | UK | 1979 |#6
7 | What's Going On | Marvin Gaye | USA | 1971 | #7
8 | OK Computer | Radiohead | UK | 1997 | #8
9 | Exile on Main St. | The Rolling Stones | UK | 1972 | #9
10 | Blonde on Blonde | Bob Dylan | USA | 1966 | #10


Songs of the 20th Century:
1 | Like a Rolling Stone | Bob Dylan | USA | 1965 | #1
2 | Smells Like Teen Spirit | Nirvana | USA | 1991 | #2
3 | A Day in the Life | The Beatles | UK | 1967 | #3
4 | Good Vibrations | The Beach Boys | USA | 1966 | #4
5 | (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction | The Rolling Stones | USA | UK | 1965 | #5
6 | Johnny B. Goode | Chuck Berry | USA | 1958 | #6
7 | Be My Baby | The Ronettes | USA | 1963 | #7
8 | I Heard It Through the Grapevine | Marvin Gaye | USA | 1968 | #8
9 | What's Going On | Marvin Gaye | USA | 1971 | #9
10 | My Generation | The Who | UK | 1965 | #10


Classical works of the 20th Century:
1 | Koncert dlja fortepiano s orkestrom № 2 do minor (Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor) | Sergei Rachmaninoff | Russia | 1901 | #7
2 | Cello Concerto in E minor | Edward Elgar | UK | 1919 | #10
3 | The Lark Ascending | Ralph Vaughan Williams | UK | 1920 | #14
4 | The Planets | Gustav Holst | UK | 1918 | #19
5 | Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis | Ralph Vaughan Williams | UK | 1910 | #20
6 | Concierto de Aranjuez | Joaquín Rodrigo | Spain | 1940 | #22
7 | Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the mirror) | Arvo Pärt | USSR | 1978 | #30
8 | Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) | Richard Strauss | UK | Germany | 1950 | #33
9 | Rhapsody in Blue | George Gershwin | USA | 1924 | #36
10 | Koncert dlja fortepiano s orkestrom № 3 re minor (Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor) | Sergei Rachmaninoff | USA | Russia | 1909 | #37
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2000

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2000



Record of 2000 | Kid A | Radiohead | UK | album (CD) | all time #38
"The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax. It's an album of sparking paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes. It will cleanse your brain of those little crustaceans of worries and inferior albums clinging inside the fold of your gray matter. The harrowing sounds hit from unseen angles and emanate with inhuman genesis. When the headphones peel off, and it occurs that six men (Nigel Godrich included) created this, it's clear that Radiohead must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who. Breathing people made this record!" (Brent DiCrescenzo, Pitchfork)

Movie of 2000 | Faa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love) | Wong Kar-Wai | Hong Kong | all time #44
"Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-wan (Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Cheung) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite — until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. With its aching musical soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past decade of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong's redoubtable career." (The Criterion Collection)

Book of 2000 | White Teeth | Zadie Smith | UK | all time #152
"This may be the first novel ever written that truly feels at home in our borderless, globalized, intermarried, post-colonial age, populated by "children with first and last names on a direct collision course." Published when Smith was just 24, White Teeth follows the friendship of two Londoners, a pub-going working-class bloke named Archie and a Muslim from Bangladesh named Samad. The overlapping fates of Smith's characters seem to trace the new structures of 21st-century life and test their sturdiness as framework for peace and happiness. Both deeply Dickensian and playfully post-modern, White Teeth doesn't quail before the rampantly ramifying novelistic complexities of a multicultural world. It revels in them." (Lev Grossman, Time)


Books of 2000:
1 | White Teeth | Zadie Smith | UK | #152
2 | The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay | Michael Chabon | USA | #226
3 | Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth | Chris Ware | USA | #433


Movies of 2000:
1 | Faa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love) | Wong Kar-Wai | Hong Kong | #44
2 | Yi yi (Yi Yi) | Edward Yang | Taiwan | #127
3 | Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies) | Béla Tarr | Hungary | #363


Albums of 2000:
1 | Kid A | Radiohead | UK | #38
2 | Stankonia | OutKast | USA | #125
3 | The Marshall Mathers LP | Eminem | USA | #180


Songs of 2000:
1 | Ms. Jackson | OutKast | USA | #249
2 | Stan | Eminem feat. Dido | USA | #270
3 | Idioteque | Radiohead | UK | #272


Classical works of 2000:
1 | Dawn Mantras | Ross Edwards | Australia | #49
2 | The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace | Karl Jenkins | UK | #68
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2001

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2001



Record of 2001 | Is This It | The Strokes | UK | USA | album (CD) | all time #36
"Few bands have packaged themselves as brilliantly as the Strokes on their debut. Before Is This It even came out, New York's mod ragamuffins were overnight sensations, jumping from Avenue A to press hysteria and the inevitable backlash, all inside a year. Julian Casablancas, guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr., bassist Nikolai Fraiture and drummer Fabrizio Moretti were primed for star time, updating the propulsion of the Velvet Underground and the jangle of Seventies punk with Casablancas' acidic dispatches from last night's wreckage. They inspired a ragged revolt in Britain, led by the Libertines and Arctic Monkeys, and reverberated back home with the Kings of Leon. And for the bristling half-hour of Is This It, New York's shadows sounded vicious and exciting again." (Rolling Stone)

Movie of 2001 | Mulholland Dr. | David Lynch | France | USA | all time #60
"Fashioned from the ruins of a two-hour TV pilot rejected by ABC in 1999, Lynch's erotic thriller careens from one violent non sequitur to another. The movie boldly teeters on the brink of self-parody, reveling in its own excess and resisting narrative logic. This voluptuous phantasmagoria is certainly Lynch's strongest movie since Blue Velvet and maybe Eraserhead. The very things that failed him in the bad-boy rockabilly debacle of Lost Highway —the atmosphere of free-floating menace, pointless transmigration of souls, provocatively dropped plot stitches, gimcrack alternate universes— are here brilliantly rehabilitated. Mulholland Drive is thrilling and ludicrous. The movie feels entirely instinctual. The rest is silencio." (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)

Book of 2001 | Atonement | Ian McEwan | UK | all time #137
"Ian McEwan's symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose. On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her too is Robbie Turner who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever, as Briony commits a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone." (Publisher)


Books of 2001:
1 | Atonement | Ian McEwan | UK | #137
2 | The Corrections | Jonathan Franzen | USA | #164
3 | Austerlitz (Austerlitz) | W. G. Sebald | Germany | #219


Movies of 2001:
1 | Mulholland Dr. | David Lynch | France | USA | #60
2 | Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away) | Hayao Miyazaki | Japan | #188
3 | A.I. Artificial Intelligence | Steven Spielberg | USA | #522


Albums of 2001:
1 | Is This It | The Strokes | UK | USA | #36
2 | The Blueprint | Jay-Z | USA | #141
3 | White Blood Cells | The White Stripes | USA | #173


Songs of 2001:
1 | Get Ur Freak On | Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott | USA | #72
2 | Last Nite | The Strokes | UK | USA | #141
3 | Can't Get You Out of My Head | Kylie | UK | Australia | #200


Classical work of 2001 | Lord of the Rings | Howard Shore | USA | Canada | #90
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2002

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2002



Record of 2002 | Yankee Hotel Foxtrot | Wilco | USA | album (CD) | all time #75
"So does Yankee Hotel Foxtrot justify the controversy, delay and buzz? Everyone, I think, already knows that the answer is yes; all I can offer is "me too" and reiterate. And after half a year living with a bootleg copy, the music remains revelatory. Complex and dangerously catchy, lyrically sophisticated and provocative, noisy and somehow serene, Wilco's aging new album is simply a masterpiece; it is equally magnificent in headphones, cars and parties. And as anyone who's seen the mixed-bag crowd at Wilco shows knows, it will find a home in the collections of hippies, frat boys, acid-eating prep schoolers, and the record store apparatchiks of the indiocracy. No one is too good for this album; it is better than all of us." (Brent S. Sirota, Pitchfork)

Book of 2002 | Middlesex | Jeffrey Eugenides | USA | all time #229
"Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City and the race riots of 1967 before moving out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic." (Publisher)

Movie of 2002 | Cidade de Deus (City of God) | Fernando Meirelles/Kátia Lund | Brazil | all time #309
"Run, don't walk, to the cinema is all I can say. This electrifying picture is part tender coming-of-age film and part gang-warfare epic from the Brazilian slum, or favela, told from the viewpoint of the children who manage to be both its underclass and its criminal overlords. It's a movie with all the dials cranked up to 11, an overwhelming, intoxicating assault on the senses, and a thriller so tense that you might have the red seat plush in front of you —or even some unfortunate's hair— gripped in both fists. Meirelles's film flashes and sweeps around you, dizzying, disorientating, intoxicating" (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)


Books of 2002:
1 | Middlesex | Jeffrey Eugenides | USA | #229
2 | Poems | Eugenio Montale | USA | Italy | collection | #540
3 | Collected Stories | Raymond Chandler | USA | UK | collection | #619
4 | Fingersmith | Sarah Waters | UK | #946
5 | The Time of Our Singing | Richard Powers | USA | #979


Movies of 2002:
1 | Cidade de Deus (City of God) | Fernando Meirelles/Kátia Lund | Brazil | #309
2 | Russkiy kovcheg (Russian Ark) | Aleksandr Sokurov | Russia | #368
3 | Punch-Drunk Love | Paul Thomas Anderson | USA | #417


Albums of 2002:
1 | Yankee Hotel Foxtrot | Wilco | USA | #75
2 | Original Pirate Material | The Streets | UK | #248
3 | Turn On the Bright Lights | Interpol | USA | #250


Songs of 2002:
1 | Losing My Edge | LCD Soundsystem | USA | #115
2 | Hurt | Johnny Cash | USA | #189
3 | House of Jealous Lovers | The Rapture | USA | #203
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Honorio
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2003

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2003



Record of 2003 | Hey Ya! | OutKast | USA | CD-single | all time #27
"Hey Ya! was the game-changing song that became a wedding disco staple and made the phrase "shake it like a Polaroid picture" part of the pop culture lexicon. At the time it was released, NME's review called it "a loophole-leaping oddity doused in the tantalising, unmistakable tang of Something Truly Unique." Andre explained to MTV: "Hey Ya! is pretty much about the state of relationships in the noughties. It's about some people who stay together in relationships because of tradition, because somebody told them, 'You guys are supposed to stay together.' But you pretty much end up being unhappy for the rest of your life. So Hey Ya! is really about saying, 'Fuck it. Live life, you know?'" Musically, the psychedelic-folk sound on the track came about when Andre strung together the only guitar chords he knew, channeling "the Ramones, the Buzzcocks, the Smiths."" (Priya Elan, NME)

Book of 2003 | The Known World | Edward P. Jones | USA | all time #306
"The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order, and chaos ensues. Edward P. Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all its moral complexities. An utterly original exploration of race, trust and the cruel truths of human nature." (Publisher)

Movie of 2003 | Dogville | Lars von Trier | Denmark | all time #352
"Lars von Trier's Dogville gives us America on a soundstage and a Rocky Mountain township rendered in chalk marks on the floor. It is Von Trier's America and Von Trier's township, and this enraged some viewers who dismissed the film as a crude, blinkered diatribe from a man too timid (on account of his aversion to air travel) to actually visit the country for himself. And yes, Dogville is crude and arguably blinkered as well. But it is also electrifying, gripping and audacious: the work of a director at the peak of his powers." (Xan Brooks, The Guardian)


Books of 2003:
1 | The Known World | Edward P. Jones | USA | #306
2 | Brick Lane | Monica Ali | UK | #480
3 | The Kite Runner | Khaled Hosseini | USA | #499


Movies of 2003:
1 | Dogville | Lars von Trier | Denmark | #352
2 | Tiexi qu (Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks) | Wang Bing | China | documentary | #380
3 | Lost in Translation | Sofia Coppola | USA | #447
4 | Elephant | Gus Van Sant | USA | #460


Albums of 2003:
1 | Elephant | The White Stripes | USA | #78
2 | Speakerboxxx / The Love Below | OutKast | USA | #297
3 | Boy in da Corner | Dizzee Rascal | UK | #339


Songs of 2003:
1 | Hey Ya! | OutKast | USA | #27
2 | Seven Nation Army | The White Stripes | USA | #36
3 | Crazy in Love | Beyoncé feat. Jay-Z | USA | #46


Classical works of 2003:
1 | Wild Swans | Elena Kats-Chernin | Australia | #39
2 | Concerto for Didgeridoo | Sean O'Boyle | Australia | #87
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Honorio
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2004

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2004



Record of 2004 | Funeral | Arcade Fire | Canada | album (CD) | all time #27
"This ten-song suite didn't spawn a new genre, nor sound like it was beamed in from outer space. The achievement here is totally musical; Funeral's essential brilliance is in how stunningly it amalgamates all that came before it. It speaks to our collective consciousness, with momentum from the ancillary building blocks of rock, dreamy storytelling, set to music that singes the synapses. Coming off immense web hype and near-mythical live shows, the resolute Canadians dropped a bombshell rife with passion and artful vigor that didn't supercede their capabilities. Call it punk in temper, worldly in vision, soul in spirit, folk at heart, grunge in force, pop in essence… at the end of the wintry Montreal day, that's all moot: the album of the decade is best enjoyed undefined: as enjoyment." (Ari Shapiro, Lost at Sea)

Book of 2004 | 2666 (2666) | Roberto Bolaño | Spain | Chile | all time #186
"Composed in the last two years of Bolaño's life, 2666 has been greeted as his greatest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters include academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student caring for her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the desert sprawl of Santa Teresa —a fictional Juárez— on the US-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared. Audacious, impassioned and profoundly inspired, 2666 is Roberto Bolaño's masterwork." (Publisher)

Movie of 2004 | Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind | Michel Gondry | USA | France | all time #223
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a title that evaporates from your consciousness almost before it's apprehended —and that's partially the point of this deft, witty, and vastly enjoyable movie. Possibly the most elaborate romantic comedy ever predicated on the gimmick of amnesia, Eternal Sunshine has a more than passing resemblance to Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, the two movies Charlie Kaufman wrote for Spike Jonze. Filled with the writer's trademark neurotic characters, grungy atmospherics, and downbeat emphasis on domestic discord, it's a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe." (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)


Books of 2004:
1 | 2666 (2666) | Roberto Bolaño | Spain | Chile | #186
2 | The Line of Beauty | Alan Hollinghurst | UK | #321
3 | Cloud Atlas | David Mitchell | UK | #358


Movies of 2004:
1 | Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind | Michel Gondry | USA | France | #223
2 | Sud pralad (Tropical Malady) | Apichatpong Weerasethakul | Thailand | #252
3 | Before Sunset | Richard Linklater | USA | #609


Albums of 2004:
1 | Funeral | Arcade Fire | Canada | #27
2 | The College Dropout | Kanye West | USA | #218
3 | Franz Ferdinand | Franz Ferdinand | UK | #225


Songs of 2004:
1 | Take Me Out | Franz Ferdinand | UK | #55
2 | Rebellion (Lies) | Arcade Fire | Canada | #219
3 | Wake Up | Arcade Fire | Canada | #309
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Honorio
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2005

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2005



Record of 2005 | Illinois | Sufjan Stevens | USA | album (CD) | all time #91
"Stevens has always been a folk singer more in theory than in practice. He routinely ditches folk's scrappy, stripped-down aesthetics, but consistently embraces its stories-of-the-people unanimity. Consequently, Illinois is less about place than spirit. Stevens dutifully celebrates and indicts all the appropriate landmarks, isolating the highest and lowest points in Illinois history, but at its best, the album makes America feel very small and very real: A boy crying in a van, a girl with bone cancer, stepmothers, parades, bandstands, presidents, UFOs, cream of wheat, trains after dark, a serial killer, Bible study. Musically, Illinois is strange and lush, as excessive and challenging as its giant, gushing song titles." (Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork)

Book of 2005 | Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro | UK | all time #204
"From the author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human. Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date." (Publisher)

Movie of 2005 | Caché (Caché) | Michael Haneke | France | Austria | all time #216
"It is what Umberto Eco calls an open work, a film that viewers are invited, indeed compelled, to engage with and contribute to. While Hidden is a gripping thriller, it is almost a moral and political enquiry into colonialism and its aftermath. The acting all around is outstanding, with Auteuil and Binoche working beautifully together as their marriage falls apart, expressing their emotional upheaval through the slight movement of an eye or the flicker of a lip. This is a movie that takes one back to the glory days of art-house films in the 1960s and 70s, when you left the cinema not in need of food and drink, but a sympathetic person to discuss the film with." (Philip French, The Observer)


Books of 2005:
1 | Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro | UK | #204
2 | The Book Thief | Markus Zusak | Australia | #340
3 | Remainder | Tom McCarthy | UK | #505


Movies of 2005:
1 | Caché (Caché) | Michael Haneke | France | Austria | #216
2 | Brokeback Mountain | Ang Lee | USA | Taiwan | #391
3 | Moartea domnului Lãzãrescu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) | Cristi Puiu | Romania | #429


Albums of 2005:
1 | Illinois | Sufjan Stevens | USA | #91
2 | I Am a Bird Now | Antony and the Johnsons | USA | UK | #275
3 | Arular | M.I.A. | UK | #331


Songs of 2005:
1 | Time to Pretend | MGMT | USA | #139
2 | Kids | MGMT | USA | #145
3 | I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor | Arctic Monkeys | UK | #148
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2006

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2006



Record of 2006 | Crazy | Gnarls Barkley | USA | CD-single | all time #50
"In this frazzled and fragmented decade, when the Top 40 broke down into squabbling niches, the idea of a universal pop hit, a song anybody could love, seemed like a sweet old-fashioned notion. Then these guys showed up. Atlanta rapper Cee-Lo and indie producer Danger Mouse gave the world Crazy. Everybody loved this song, from your mom to your ex-girlfriend's art professor. It blasted in punk clubs and Burger King bathrooms. For the summer of 2006, Crazy united us all into one nation under a groove. Gnarls Barkley packed a career's worth of genius ideas into three minutes — and then they basically disappeared. Does that make them crazy? Probably. But was this the most glorious pop thrill of our time? Totally." (Rolling Stone)

Book of 2006 | The Road | Cormac McCarthy | USA | all time #249
"A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food —and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation." (Publisher)

Movie of 2006 | Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) | Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck | Germany | all time #466
"In his feature debut as director and screenwriter, von Donnersmarck burrows into the erotic, engrossing and thoroughly nasty business of spying. The place is East Berlin, in 1984, the Wall is still up, glasnost is far off and the Stasi (secret police) don't believe in privacy. The director weaves a complex political thriller that touches an emotional chord. All the performances are top-tier —Sebastian Koch is a star in the making— but it's Ulrich Muhe who leaves the deepest impression. Playing a robot of a man astonished to find his armor pierced by humanity, Muhe crafts a portrait as mesmerizing as it is memorable. Von Donnersmarck has crafted the best kind of movie: one you can't get out of your head." (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone)


Books of 2006:
1 | The Road | Cormac McCarthy | USA | #249
2 | American Genius: A Comedy | Lynne Tillman | USA | #748
3 | What Is the What | Dave Eggers | USA | #948


Movies of 2006:
1 | Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) | Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck | Germany | #466
2 | Inland Empire | David Lynch | France | USA | #531
3 | Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth) | Pedro Costa | Portugal | #538


Albums of 2006:
1 | Back to Black | Amy Winehouse | UK | #117
2 | Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not | Arctic Monkeys | UK | #145
3 | Silent Shout | The Knife | Sweden | #292


Songs of 2006:
1 | Crazy | Gnarls Barkley | USA | #50
2 | Rehab | Amy Winehouse | UK | #125
3 | Over and Over | Hot Chip | UK | #245
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2007

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2007



Record of 2007 | Paper Planes | M.I.A. | UK | 7" vinyl single | all time #31
"Is hip-hop the opposite of folk, or its most sophisticated evolutionary development? And how can folk music's specificity continue to endure in an age of globalisation? These are two of the big questions MIA has helped us to answer. Jon Hassell had already pointed out that "In African villages, musical instruments are made from things that are closest at hand", whereas in hip-hop's urban heartland "it happens to be shards of James Brown or other cultural artefacts that are rearranged and recombined". And cultural theorist Hillel Schwartz drew out the political implications observing that "Sampling is what imperialists did when they colonised 'undeveloped' lands, calling theft 'development'". But it took Paper Planes to give this post-colonial folk/hip-hop rapprochement a human face. The fact that this goal was achieved with the help of a sample from Straight to Hell by the Clash —who'd aimed for the same ideological bull's-eye decades before but not quite hit it— was truly the spicing on the samosa." (Ben Thompson, The Guardian)

Movie of 2007 | There Will Be Blood | Paul Thomas Anderson | USA | all time #179
"With its lowering, psychotic atmosphere and its Bunyanesque surnames, There Will Be Blood is so potent and so strange that it almost seems to have been delivered here from another planet. I can only describe it as an epic portrait, running from the beginning of the 20th century to the great crash of 1929. The movie speaks of oil's savage, entrepreneurial pre-history; in one haunted man, it shows our dysfunctional relationship with capital and natural resources. This is a dark, uncompromising film, thrillingly original and distinctive, with a visionary passion. It is a movie against which all directors, and all moviegoers, will want to measure themselves. Anderson is doing something new with cinema, and you can hardly ask for more than that." (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)

Book of 2007 | The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | Junot Díaz | USA | all time #202
"Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who —from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister— dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú —a curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere —and risk it all— in the name of love." (Publisher)


Books of 2007:
1 | The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | Junot Díaz | USA | #202
2 | Varieties of Disturbance | Lydia Davis | USA | #454
3 | Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | Simon Armitage | UK | translation | #922
4 | A Thousand Splendid Suns | Khaled Hosseini | USA | #943


Movies of 2007:
1 | There Will Be Blood | Paul Thomas Anderson | USA | #179
2 | No Country for Old Men | Joel Coen/Ethan Coen | USA | #549
3 | Stellet Licht (Silent Light) | Carlos Reygadas | Mexico | #580


Albums of 2007:
1 | In Rainbows | Radiohead | UK | #85
2 | Sound of Silver | LCD Soundsystem | USA | #115
3 | Untrue | Burial | UK | #172


Songs of 2007:
1 | Paper Planes | M.I.A. | UK | #31
2 | All My Friends | LCD Soundsystem | USA | #93
3 | Umbrella | Rihanna feat. Jay-Z | USA | Barbados | #170
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2008

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2008



Record of 2008 | Third | Portishead | UK | album (CD) | all time #235
"Third is not a pleasant experience. Even Mezzanine and Maxinquaye, perhaps the only other two records to have come from Bristol's stable that come close to this in terms of foreboding aura, seem like twinkly children's albums by comparison. Both ancient and futuristic, a mildewed signal from a more advanced culture that failed to survive the ice age, Third doesn't make you pay attention to its desolate contours, but rather stare out of the window, creeping panic causing your mind to dart in a million dark directions at once. This is not a nice record. It is music without a time, a place or a context. Inertia, solitude, suffocation. Third isn't so much mourning, as dead." (Nick Southall, Drowned in Sound)

Movie of 2008 | WALL•E | Andrew Stanton | USA | all time #389
"Many will attempt to describe WALL-E with a one-liner. It's R2-D2 in love. 2001: A Space Odyssey starring The Little Tramp. An Inconvenient Truth meets Idiocracy on its way to Toy Story. But none of these do justice to a film that's both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate —and, for a good long while, absolutely bereft of dialogue save the squeals, beeps, and chirps of a sweet, lonely robot who, aside from his cockroach pet, is the closest thing to the last living being on earth. Reverence for movie history in general and sci-fi in particular is vital to the story, because it's what ultimately gives WALL-E its wow factor and its weight —this reinvigoration of the past on the way to the future of filmmaking." (Robert Wilonsky, The Village Voice)

Book of 2008 | The Hunger Games | Suzanne Collins | USA | all time #714
"In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the other districts in line by forcing them to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight-to-the-death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her impoverished district in the Games. Acclaimed writer Suzanne Collins delivers equal parts suspense and philosophy, adventure and romance, in this stunning novel set in a future with unsettling parallels to our present." (Publisher)


Books of 2008:
1 | The Hunger Games | Suzanne Collins | USA | #714
2 | The White Tiger | Aravind Adiga | India | Australia | #852
3 | Home | Marilynne Robinson | USA | #945


Movies of 2008:
1 | WALL•E | Andrew Stanton | USA | #389
2 | The Dark Knight | Christopher Nolan | USA | #611
3 | Synecdoche, New York | Charlie Kaufman | USA | #678


Albums of 2008:
1 | Third | Portishead | UK | #235
2 | Fleet Foxes | Fleet Foxes | USA | #261
3 | Vampire Weekend | Vampire Weekend | UK | USA | #312


Songs of 2008:
1 | Blind | Hercules and Love Affair | USA | #412
2 | Viva la Vida | Coldplay | UK | #455
3 | White Winter Hymnal | Fleet Foxes | USA | #524
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2009

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2009



Record of 2009 | Empire State of Mind | Jay-Z feat. Alicia Keys | USA | digital file | all time #157
"Keys' hook swings for the upper decks and subsequently the gut, working that "bright lights, big city" angle that appeals to the bridge-and-tunnel set as effectively as it does to people who've never actually visited NYC. And Jay, working with an almost exact approximation of his flow on Run This Town, plays the nonchalant tour guide, pointing out landmarks to fill space even as his train of thought begins to break up. Times being what they are, the need for this "unifying" type of hit becomes more apparent, acting as a tiny reaffirmation of a collective self that's becoming easier and easier to lose sight of completely. And when such a song is as heartening and well-crafted as Empire State of Mind is, it can work its magic even in the face of such divisive infield politics." (Zach Kelly, Pitchfork)

Book of 2009 | Wolf Hall | Hilary Mantel | UK | all time #260
"England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph? In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is a darkly brilliant reimagining of life under Henry VIII." (Publisher)

Movie of 2009 | Das weiße Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon) | Michael Haneke | Germany | Austria | all time #425
"Michael Haneke's period political epic tells the lacerating saga of collective brutality and guilt in a northern-German village two decades before Hitler came to power. The town is troubled by seemingly random acts of violence on animals, property and a few local children. The film is both draining and enthralling, sternly minimalist and beautifully filmed (in black and white). Working with the skill of an autopsy surgeon, Haneke depicts a town where the adults' passions have soured into prejudices, yet children are so desperate to please their parents, they often burst into tears. The White Ribbon is as epic as any Tolkien or Rowling movie adaptation, but it's also an epic tragedy: of the monstrous evil that corrupts and destroys ordinary folks." (Richard Corliss, Time)


Books of 2009:
1 | Wolf Hall | Hilary Mantel | UK | #260
2 | The Little Stranger | Sarah Waters | UK | #548
3 | D'autres vies que la mienne (Lives Other Than My Own) | Emmanuel Carrère | France | #970


Movies of 2009:
1 | Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon) | Michael Haneke | Germany | Austria | #425
2 | Avatar | James Cameron | USA | Canada | #737
3 | Un prophète (A Prophet) | Jacques Audiard | France | #1010


Albums of 2009:
1 | Merriweather Post Pavilion | Animal Collective | USA | #193
2 | xx | The xx | UK | #226
3 | Veckatimest | Grizzly Bear | USA | #434


Songs of 2009:
1 | Empire State of Mind | Jay-Z feat. Alicia Keys | USA | #157
2 | My Girls | Animal Collective | USA | #191
3 | Two Weeks | Grizzly Bear | USA | #325
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The 2000s

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The 2000s



Records of the 2000s:
- Album of the 2000s | Funeral | Arcade Fire | Canada | album (CD) | 2004 | all time #27
"This ten-song suite didn't spawn a new genre, nor sound like it was beamed in from outer space. The achievement here is totally musical; Funeral's essential brilliance is in how stunningly it amalgamates all that came before it. It speaks to our collective consciousness, with momentum from the ancillary building blocks of rock, dreamy storytelling, set to music that singes the synapses. Coming off immense web hype and near-mythical live shows, the resolute Canadians dropped a bombshell rife with passion and artful vigor that didn't supercede their capabilities. Call it punk in temper, worldly in vision, soul in spirit, folk at heart, grunge in force, pop in essence… at the end of the wintry Montreal day, that's all moot: the album of the decade is best enjoyed undefined: as enjoyment." (Ari Shapiro, Lost at Sea)
- Song of the 2000s | Hey Ya! | OutKast | USA | CD-single | 2003 | all time #27
"Hey Ya! was the game-changing song that became a wedding disco staple and made the phrase "shake it like a Polaroid picture" part of the pop culture lexicon. At the time it was released, NME's review called it "a loophole-leaping oddity doused in the tantalising, unmistakable tang of Something Truly Unique." Andre explained to MTV: "Hey Ya! is pretty much about the state of relationships in the noughties. It's about some people who stay together in relationships because of tradition, because somebody told them, 'You guys are supposed to stay together.' But you pretty much end up being unhappy for the rest of your life. So Hey Ya! is really about saying, 'Fuck it. Live life, you know?'" Musically, the psychedelic-folk sound on the track came about when Andre strung together the only guitar chords he knew, channeling "the Ramones, the Buzzcocks, the Smiths."" (Priya Elan, NME)

Movie of the 2000s | Faa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love) | Wong Kar-Wai | Hong Kong | 2000 | all time #44
"Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-wan (Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Cheung) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite — until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. With its aching musical soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past decade of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong's redoubtable career." (The Criterion Collection)

Book of the 2000s | Atonement | Ian McEwan | UK | 2001 | all time #137
"Ian McEwan's symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose. On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her too is Robbie Turner who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever, as Briony commits a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone." (Publisher)


Books of the 2000s:
1 | Atonement | Ian McEwan | UK | 2001 | #137
2 | White Teeth | Zadie Smith | UK | 2000 | #152
3 | The Corrections | Jonathan Franzen | USA | 2001 | #164
4 | 2666 (2666) | Roberto Bolaño | Spain | Chile | 2004 | #186
5 | The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | Junot Díaz | USA | 2007 | #202


Movies of the 2000s:
1 | Faa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love) | Wong Kar-Wai | Hong Kong | 2000 | #44
2 | Mulholland Dr. | David Lynch | France | USA | 2001 | #60
3 | Yi yi (Yi Yi) | Edward Yang | Taiwan | 2000 | #127
4 | There Will Be Blood | Paul Thomas Anderson | USA | 2007 | #179
5 | Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away) | Hayao Miyazaki | Japan | 2001 | #188


Albums of the 2000s:
1 | Funeral | Arcade Fire | Canada | 2004 | #27
2 | Is This It | The Strokes | UK | USA | 2001 | #36
3 | Kid A | Radiohead | UK | 2000 | #38
4 | Yankee Hotel Foxtrot | Wilco | USA | 2002 | #75
5 | Elephant | The White Stripes | USA | 2003 | #78


Songs of the 2000s:
1 | Hey Ya! | OutKast | USA | 2003 | #27
2 | Paper Planes | M.I.A. | UK | 2007 | #31
3 | Seven Nation Army | The White Stripes | USA | 2003 | #36
4 | Crazy in Love | Beyoncé feat. Jay-Z | USA | 2003 | #46
5 | Crazy | Gnarls Barkley | USA | 2006 | #50


Classical works of the 2000s:
1 | Wild Swans | Elena Kats-Chernin | Australia | 2003 | #39
2 | Dawn Mantras | Ross Edwards | Australia | 2000 | #49
3 | The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace | Karl Jenkins | UK | 2000 | #68
4 | Concerto for Didgeridoo | Sean O'Boyle | Australia | 2003 | #87
5 | Lord of the Rings | Howard Shore | USA | Canada | 2001 | #90

Note:
Second case of a tie on Record of the Decade (on the 1960s we had a tie at #1). And we also had a tie on Record of the Year on 1959. This time we have "Funeral" as the #27 album of all-time and "Hey Ya!" as the #27 song of all time.
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2010

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2010



Record of 2010 | My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy | Kanye West | USA | album (CD) | all time #64
"Kanye West: douchebag, enemy of the state, incurable gobshite who's annoyed more American presidents than Fidel Castro. A man with a head so unfeasibly smooth, it looks like he's slowly evolving into a Madame Tussauds effigy of himself. For better or worse, he's also the pop star for our morally implicated times; an instinctive consumer with a mouthful of diamonds and furtive bad conscience, a performer who lives the American dream to its fullest with a creeping sense of the spiritual void at its heart. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy captures that essence in full. It's an utterly dazzling portrait of a 21st-century schizoid man that is by turns sickeningly egocentric, contrite, wise, stupid and self-mocking." (Alex Denney, NME)

Movie of 2010 | Loong Boonmee raleuk chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) | Apichatpong Weerasethakul | Thailand | all time #433
"Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Thai movie has a cumbersome title, but it is a gloriously worthy winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes film festival. This is a visionary film in the director's characteristic style: mysterious, dreamlike, gentle, quiet, magical. It has elements that are at first glance absurd, and at second or third glance, too, come to that. But they are beguiling and beautiful as well: the extended, wordless opening sequence in which a water buffalo appears to break free from its rope and roam the plains and forests of north-east Thailand at dusk is superbly filmed. Uncle Boonmee offers pleasure and heartbreak in equal measure." (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)

Book of 2010 | Freedom | Jonathan Franzen | USA | all time #613
"Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul —the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time." (Publisher)


Books of 2010:
1 | Freedom | Jonathan Franzen | USA | #613
2 | How Should a Person Be? | Sheila Heti | Canada | #685
3 | A Visit from the Goon Squad | Jennifer Egan | USA | #695


Movies of 2010:
1 | Loong Boonmee raleuk chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) | Apichatpong Weerasethakul | Thailand | #433
2 | Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light) | Patricio Guzmán | France | Chile | documentary | #699
3 | The Social Network | David Fincher | USA | #1081
4 | Inception | Christopher Nolan | USA | #1102


Albums of 2010:
1 | My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy | Kanye West | USA | #64
2 | The Suburbs | Arcade Fire | Canada | #178
3 | Teen Dream | Beach House | USA | #287


Songs of 2010:
1 | Runaway | Kanye West feat. Pusha T | USA | #209
2 | Rolling in the Deep | Adele | UK | #217
3 | Odessa | Caribou | Germany | Canada | #440
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2011

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2011



Record of 2011 | Let England Shake | PJ Harvey | UK | album (CD) | all time #170
"Let England Shake is a lush, well-constructed, and passionate open letter to her home country of England —a rare outward focus rather than her usual inward, personal, and biting focus. One thing that I was amazed by —the timeless quality the album has already. All the war images, and the graphic deaths, not only are tied closely to World War trench war fare, but also invoke modern images and battle footage of Vietnam, the Middle East, riots in the streets, any conflict of humans killing humans. Harvey has spot-on nailed the hopeless expanse of war and death in the name of progress. As she says in "On Battleship Hill": "Cruel nature has won again." It’s a theme that runs throughout the albums more battle-centered songs, and she has put it forward with deft skill and genius artistry." (Nick Freed, Consequence of Sound)

Movie of 2011 | The Tree of Life | Terrence Malick | USA | all time #239
"Terrence Malick's mad and magnificent film descends slowly, like some sort of prototypical spaceship: it's a cosmic-interior epic of vainglorious proportions, a rebuke to realism, a disavowal of irony and comedy, a meditation on memory, and a gasp of horror and awe at the mysterious inevitability of loving, and losing those we love. This film is not for everyone, and I will admit I am agnostic about the final sequence, which suggests a closure and a redemption nothing else in the film has prepared us for. But this is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison." (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)

Book of 2011 | The Sense of an Ending | Julian Barnes | UK | all time #287
"This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about —until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he'd left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he'd understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes's oeuvre." (Publisher)


Books of 2011:
1 | The Sense of an Ending | Julian Barnes | UK | #287
2 | The Last Books of Hector Viel Temperley | Héctor Viel Temperley | USA | Argentina | collection | #587
3 | There But For The | Ali Smith | UK | #676
4 | L'amica genial (Neapolitan Novels: My Brilliant Friend) | Elena Ferrante | Italy | #686


Movies of 2011:
1 | The Tree of Life | Terrence Malick | USA | #239
2 | A torinói ló (The Turin Horse) | Béla Tarr | Hungary | #418
3 | Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (A Separation) | Asghar Farhadi | Iran | #478


Albums of 2011:
1 | Let England Shake | PJ Harvey | UK | #170
2 | James Blake | James Blake | UK | #317
3 | Bon Iver, Bon Iver | Bon Iver | USA | #387


Songs of 2011:
1 | Midnight City | M83 | France | #192
2 | Video Games | Lana Del Rey | USA | #289
3 | Niggas in Paris | Jay-Z & Kanye West | USA | #509
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2012

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2012



Record of 2012 | channel ORANGE | Frank Ocean | USA | digital file | all time #154
"Amid the gentleness of Frank Ocean's major-label début, channel ORANGE, there are moments of intensity and grim wisdom that could make a writer reach for a cliché like "Nothing can prepare you for…" But the past two years in R&B have been ample preparation for Ocean's revision of the form. Male R&B is now less about dancing and more about emotional clarity —a trend that owes more to Ocean than to anyone. If R&B was once the main mode of dissembling attractively and seducing openly, it is now America's confessional booth. The scenarios in Ocean's songs display a combination of decadence and spiritual ache similar to Prince's: the singer is surrounded by everything that popularly represents pleasure, and none of it has any effect on him." (Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker)

Book of 2012 | NW | Zadie Smith | UK | all time #303
"A boldly Joycean appropriation, fortunately not so difficult of entry as its great model. Set in northwest London, Zadie Smith's brilliant tragicomic novel follows four locals —Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan— as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. In private houses and public parks, at work and at play, these Londoners inhabit a complicated place, as beautiful as it is brutal, where the thoroughfares hide the back alleys and taking the high road can sometimes lead you to a dead end. Depicting the modern urban zone —familiar to city-dwellers everywhere— NW is a quietly devastating novel of encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself." (Publisher)

Movie of 2012 | Amour (Amour) | Michael Haneke | Austria | all time #723
"Cinema feeds on stories of love and death, but how often do filmmakers really offer new or challenging perspectives on either? Michael Haneke's Amour is devastatingly original and unflinching in the way it examines the effect of love on death, and vice versa. It's a staggering, intensely moving look at old age and life's end, which at its heart offers two performances of incredible skill and wisdom from French veteran actors Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. Among so many other things, this is a film about loyalty and being true to your word. Amour is a staggering, highly intelligent and astonishingly performed work. It's a masterpiece." (Dave Calhoun, Time Out)


Books of 2012:
1 | NW | Zadie Smith | UK | #303
2 | Gone Girl | Gillian Flynn | USA | #460
3 | Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk | Ben Fountain | USA | #686


Movies of 2012:
1 | Amour (Amour) | Michael Haneke | Austria | #723
2 | The Act of Killing | Joshua Oppenheimer | Denmark | USA | documentary | #1002
3 | Holy Motors (Holy Motors) | Leos Carax | France | #1020
4 | Tabu (Tabu) | Miguel Gomes | Portugal | #1115


Albums of 2012:
1 | channel ORANGE | Frank Ocean | USA | #154
2 | good kid, m.A.A.d city | Kendrick Lamar | USA | #160
3 | Lonerism | Tame Impala | Australia | #361


Songs of 2012:
1 | Pyramids | Frank Ocean | USA | #234
2 | Oblivion | Grimes | Canada | #368
3 | Climax | Usher | USA | #747
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2013

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2013



Record of 2013 | Get Lucky | Daft Punk | France | digital file | all time #106
"An evergreen slice of pop magic, that is perfectly summed up by Robot #1 Thomas Bangalter in an interview in 2013. "The whole point of this record was not to go back to the past; rather, it was to try and bring the timeless quality of the past into the present." Get Lucky continues to operate outside the traditional time and space barriers of music. It still feels just as right in a sweaty club as it does sat in your back garden, and as welcome at the start of the night as it does as the close. But that's exactly what the song's immortal hook is all about: "we're up all night to get lucky." It's the sound of the party that you're always chasing, and though it hasn't come —you feel like next time will be your night." (Thomas Smith, NME)

Book of 2013 | Americanah | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | Nigeria | all time #654
"A powerful, tender story of race and identity by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun. Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion —for each other and for their homeland." (Publisher)

Movie of 2013 | Under the Skin | Jonathan Glazer | UK | all time #1007
"Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer's first film since 2004's Birth, is special because it's hard to pin down. It doesn't move or feel like most science fiction movies—like most movies, period. It's a film out of its time. Its time, I think, is the 1970s, when directors like Alexander Jodorowsky and Nicolas Roeg made viscerally intense features with subjective visuals and sound effects and music and dissociative editing. Is it perfect? Probably not. It might be too much of something, or too little of something else. Time will sort out the particulars. But I do know that the movie's sensibility is as distinctive as any I've seen. Under the Skin is hideously beautiful. Its life force is overwhelming." (Matt Zoller Seitz, Roger Ebert.com)


Books of 2013:
1 | Americanah | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | Nigeria | #654
2 | The Flamethrowers | Rachel Kushner | USA | #782
3 | The Goldfinch | Donna Tartt | USA | #857


Movies of 2013:
1 | Under the Skin | Jonathan Glazer | UK | #1007
2 | L'inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake) | Alain Guiraudie | France | #1311
3 | La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty) | Paolo Sorrentino | Italy | #1466


Albums of 2013:
1 | Modern Vampires of the City | Vampire Weekend | USA | #227
2 | Yeezus | Kanye West | USA | #354
3 | Settle | Disclosure | UK | #388


Songs of 2013:
1 | Get Lucky | Daft Punk | France | #106
2 | Royals | Lorde | New Zealand | #266
3 | Reflektor | The Reflektors | Canada | #450

Note:
First case of three female writers on the Top 3 of the Book of the Year. In fact female writers got more acclaim during the 2010s than the male writers, with 6 of 9 books of the year written by women.
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2014

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2014



Record of 2014 | Seasons (Waiting on You) | Future Islands | USA | 7" vinyl single | all time #196
"Seasons (Waiting on You) has a theme that is most remarkable for its simplicity: it's about when we should cut our losses in a relationship that's not working out. It's not this message, though, but the delivery of it that transforms Seasons (Waiting on You) into a great pop song. Over a strident, simple bass pattern, Herring's voice pulls and strains and wavers at all the crucial moments, from emotive peaks to deep baritone lows, flecked with grit and gravel. His sheer unfashionable sincerity, as he conveys feelings of hope and disenchantment that rise and fall with the undulating wash of synthesiser, is notable for how much it stands out from current pop trends." (Tim Jonze, The Guardian)

Book of 2014 | Outline | Rachel Cusk | UK | Canada | all time #738
"Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner and discourse. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss. This is Rachel Cusk's finest work yet, and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years." (Publisher)

Movie of 2014 | Adieu au langage (Goodbye to Language) | Jean-Luc Godard | Switzerland | all time #1452
"Mr. Godard has a habit of blending gravity with whimsy. His latest film, a 70-minute 3-D visual essay called Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage), exhibits the formal and philosophical mischief that has been his late-career calling card. It is baffling and beautiful, a flurry of musical and literary snippets arrayed in counterpoint to a series of brilliantly colored and hauntingly evocative pictures — of flowers, boats, streets, naked bodies and Mr. Godard's own dog, a mixed-breed scene-stealer identified in the credits as Roxy Miéville." (A.O. Scott, The New York Times)


Books of 2014:
1 | The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 | Derek Walcott | USA | Saint Lucia | collection | #611
2 | Outline | Rachel Cusk | UK | Canada | #738
3 | Dept. of Speculation | Jenny Offill | USA | #793
4 | A Brief History of Seven Killings | Marlon James | USA | Jamaica | #860


Movies of 2014:
1 | Adieu au langage (Goodbye to Language) | Jean-Luc Godard | Switzerland | all time #1452
2 | Boyhood | Richard Linklater | USA | 21st Century #40
3 | The Grand Budapest Hotel | Wes Anderson | USA | 21st Century #97


Albums of 2014:
1 | Lost in the Dream | The War on Drugs | USA | #238
2 | St. Vincent | St. Vincent | USA | #320
3 | Run the Jewels 2 | Run the Jewels | USA | #334


Songs of 2014:
1 | Seasons (Waiting on You) | Future Islands | USA | #196
2 | Two Weeks | FKA twigs | UK | #235
3 | Can't Do Without You | Caribou | USA | Canada | #533

Note:
2014 and 2015 were the last years with a movie included on the TSPDT all time Top 2000, the rest of the movies included on the following years will come from TSPDT's 21st Century list.
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2015

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2015



Record of 2015 | To Pimp a Butterfly | Kendrick Lamar | USA | album (digital file) | all time #138
"Anguish and despair rightfully earn more Grammys, Emmys, Tonys, and Pulitzer Prizes than sweetness and light ever do, but West Coast rapper Kendrick Lamar is already on elevated masterwork number two, so expect his version of the sobering truth to sound like a party at points. He's aware, as Bilal sings here, that "Shit don't change 'til you get up and wash your ass," and don't it feel good? The sentiment is universal, but the viewpoint on his second LP is inner-city and African-American, as radio regulars like the Isley Brothers, George Clinton, and Dr. Dre put the listener in Lamar's era of Compton, just as well as Lou Reed took us to New York and Brecht took us to Weimar Republic Berlin." (David Jeffries, All Music)

Book of 2015 | The Sellout | Paul Beatty | USA | all time #816
"Fuelled by injustice and the general disrepair of his down-trodden hometown, our narrator initiates a course of action—one that includes reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school—destined to bring national attention. These outrageous events land him with a lawsuit heard by the Supreme Court, the latest in a series of cases revolving around the thorny issue of race in America. The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the most sacred tenets of the U.S. Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant." (Publisher)

Movie of 2015 | Mad Max: Fury Road | George Miller | Australia | all time #1048
"Mad Max: Fury Road is a stunningly effective post-apocalyptic fable, a chilling and yet exhilarating daytime nightmare pitting blindly loyal and bloodthirsty half-humans against implausibly beautiful people clinging to their sense of morality while doing whatever they can to stay alive. In an action movie world dominated by cartoonishly over-the-top CGI effects and rapid-fire quick cuts, it's exhilarating to see so many set pieces and battle sequences filmed in unbroken tracking shots, some breathtaking wide angle views and visceral, gritty close-ups. The result is an action movie so much better than most, it almost qualifies for its own genre." (Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times)


Books of 2015:
1 | The Sellout | Paul Beatty | USA | #816
2 | Preparation for the Next Life | Atticus Lish | USA | #859
3 | The Sympathizer | Viet Thanh Nguyen | USA | #861


Movies of 2015:
1 | Mad Max: Fury Road | George Miller | Australia | all time #1048
2 | Carol | Todd Haynes | UK | USA | 21st Century #84
3 | Inside Out | Pete Docter/Ronnie Del Carmen | USA | USA/Philippines | 21st Century #191


Albums of 2015:
1 | To Pimp a Butterfly | Kendrick Lamar | USA | #138
2 | Carrie & Lowell | Sufjan Stevens | USA | #220
3 | Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit | Courtney Barnett | Australia | #429


Songs of 2015:
1 | Let It Happen | Tame Impala | Australia | #259
2 | Hotline Bling | Drake | Canada | #264
3 | King Kunta | Kendrick Lamar | USA | #338
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2016

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2016



Record of 2016 | ★ [Blackstar] | David Bowie | UK | album (CD) | all time #179
"To say that David Bowie's final album was coloured by his death two days after its release, and the revelation that he recorded it beneath the terminal shadow of cancer, would be an understatement. It was flooded by it. Few albums have ever been subjected to so much exegesis so quickly. Was the central image, coming from the author of "Starman" and multiple ruminations on stardom, an act of self-erasure? Were the lyrics of "Lazarus" ("Look up here, I’m in heaven") not just a reference to the lead character in Bowie's confounding stage musical but a loaded farewell? Blackstar is a self-contained world. He struck out for the fringes, the dark corners, the shadowlands, looking for one last new way to be David Bowie — one final incandescent flare of creativity." (Dorian Lynskey, The Guardian)

Book of 2016 | The Needle's Eye: Passing Through Youth | Fanny Howe | USA | all time #982
"Fanny Howe's The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth is a sequence of essays, short tales, and lyrics that are intertwined by an inner visual logic. The book contains filmic images that subvert the usual narrative chronology; it is focused on the theme of youth, doomed or saved. A fourteenth-century folktale of two boys who set out to find happiness, the story of Francis and Clare with their revolutionary visions, the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston, the poet George Oppen and the philosopher Simone Weil, two strangers who loved but remain strange, and the wild-child Brigid of Ireland: all these emerge from multiple directions, but always finally from the eye at the end." (Publisher)

Movie of 2016 | Moonlight | Barry Jenkins | USA | 21st Century #75
"To describe Moonlight, Barry Jenkins's second feature, as a movie about growing up poor, black and gay would be accurate enough. It would also not be wrong to call it a movie about drug abuse, mass incarceration and school violence. But those classifications are also inadequate, so much as to be downright misleading. It would be truer to the mood and spirit of this breathtaking film to say that it's about teaching a child to swim, about cooking a meal for an old friend, about the feeling of sand on skin. Moonlight is both a disarmingly, at times almost unbearably personal film and an urgent social document, a hard look at American reality and a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces." (A.O. Scott, The New York Times)


Books of 2016:
1 | The Needle's Eye: Passing Through Youth | Fanny Howe | USA | #982
2 | What Belongs to You | Garth Greenwell | USA | #986
3 | Ghost | Jason Reynolds | USA | #1239


Movies of 2016:
1 | Moonlight | Barry Jenkins | USA | 21st Century #75
2 | Toni Erdmann (Toni Erdmann) | Maren Ade | Germany | 21st Century #102
3 | La La Land | Damien Chazelle | USA | 21st Century #191


Albums of 2016:
1 | ★ [Blackstar] | David Bowie | UK | #179
2 | A Moon Shaped Pool | Radiohead | UK | #327
3 | Skeleton Tree | Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds | Australia | Australia/UK | #368


Songs of 2016:
1 | Formation | Beyoncé | USA | #236
2 | Ultralight Beam | Kanye West | USA | #394
3 | Cranes in the Sky | Solange | USA | #430
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2017

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2017



Record of 2017 | DAMN. | Kendrick Lamar | USA | album (digital file) | all time #188
"Kendrick Lamar has already taken hip-hop to the outer galaxies of style, sound and resonance. Seemingly exhausted with the burden of constantly pushing hip-hop forward into concept operas, electric Miles explosions and Flying Lotus electronic burbles, Damn. seemingly takes a classicist route to rap music. If To Pimp a Butterfly was the best rap album in 2015, Damn. is the platonic ideal of the best rap album of 1995, a dazzling display of showy rhyme skills, consciousness-raising political screeds, self-examination and bass-crazy-kicking. Kendrick has many talents — pop star, avant-garde poet, lyrical gymnast, storyteller. But here he explores what we traditionally know as a "rapper" more than on any of his albums to date." (Christopher R. Weingarten, Rolling Stone)

Book of 2017 | The Hate U Give | Angie Thomas | USA | all time #990
"Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life." (Publisher)

Movie of 2017 | Get Out | Jordan Peele | USA | 21st Century #126
"Guess Who's Coming to Dinner meets The Stepford Wives in Get Out, in which a white girl brings her black boyfriend home to meet her parents, whose superficially warm welcome masks an unthinkably dark secret. Blending race-savvy satire with horror to especially potent effect, this bombshell social critique from first-time director Jordan Peele proves positively fearless — which is not at all the same thing as scareless. In fact, from the steady joy-buzzer thrills to its terrifying notion of a new way that white people have found to perpetuate the peculiar institution of slavery, Get Out delivers plenty to frighten and enrage audiences. But it's the fact that Peele doesn't pull a single one of his punches that makes his Blumhouse-backed debut a must-see event." (Peter Debruge, Variety)


Books of 2017:
1 | The Hate U Give | Angie Thomas | USA | #990
2 | All Grown Up | Jami Attenberg | USA | #992
3 | Her Body and Other Parties | Carmen Maria Machado | USA | #1300


Movies of 2017:
1 | Get Out | Jordan Peele | USA | 21st Century #126
2 | Call Me by Your Name | Luca Guadagnino | Italy | 21st Century #178
3 | Lady Bird | Greta Gerwig | USA | 21st Century #212


Albums of 2017:
1 | DAMN. | Kendrick Lamar | USA | #188
2 | American Dream | LCD Soundsystem | USA | #410
3 | Melodrama | Lorde | New Zealand | #419


Songs of 2017:
1 | HUMBLE. | Kendrick Lamar | USA | #194
2 | Green Light | Lorde | New Zealand | #268
3 | DNA. | Kendrick Lamar | USA | #421

Note:
For the first time we have three African American artists (Kendrick Lamar, Angie Thomas and Jordan Peele) at the top of the three categories. And again three female writers on the Top 3 books of the year. It seems that, finally, times have changed. Better late than never…
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2018

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2018



Book of 2018 | Asymmetry | Lisa Halliday | USA | all time #796
"A singularly inventive and unforgettable debut novel about love, luck, and the inextricability of life and art. Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. Two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda. A stunning debut from a rising literary star, Asymmetry is an urgent, important, and truly original work that will captivate any reader while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself." (Publisher)

Movie of 2018 | Roma (Roma) | Alfonso Cuarón | Mexico | 21st Century #129
"Alfonso Cuarón dives into his Mexican boyhood with this absorbingly rich tribute to the resilient women who raised him. With his white-knuckle sci-fi thriller Gravity, Mexican auteur Alfonso Cuarón extracted an intimate character study from the vastness of outer space. Now he goes in reverse: In his deeply personal black and white marvel Roma, Cuarón unhurriedly observes the smallest parts first, before expanding to gradually reveal the social and political canvas of 1970s Mexico City. In his personal journey down memory lane (occasionally lightened by humorous anecdotes about a family dog and an extra-wide Ford Galaxie that barely fits in the driveway), Cuarón retroactively examines Cleo's (Aparicio) life in respectful tribute, not guilt-ridden apology. A richly textured masterpiece, Roma is cinema at its purest and most human." (Tomris Laffly, Time Out)

Records of 2018:
- Album of 2018 | Dirty Computer | Janelle Monáe | USA | album (CD)
"A unique coming-out record by a black, queer woman and a state-of-the-nation treatise on American identity in 2018. A day prior to its release, Monáe came out as pansexual in Rolling Stone, dedicating her new record to anyone who felt "ostracised" or "bullied." As such, there's a vital message of self-acceptance at the core of Dirty Computer. It's also a record about womanhood, and black womanhood in particular. "Remember when they used to say I look too mannish?" Monáe asks on "Django Jane," a song that celebrates "black girl magic." Monáe explained her former love of artifice in the Rolling Stone interview, revealing that she had created an alter ego so she "didn't have to talk about the Janelle Monáe who was in therapy." In letting it go, she has created her best work yet." (Hannah J Davies, The Guardian)
- Song of 2018 | This Is America | Childish Gambino | USA | digital file
"In This Is America, Gambino shows us everything that's wrong with our own moral breadth as a community and how easy it is for us to lose focus. In this work of art there's a constant display of culturally prominent dance moves in the foreground, while horrific instances of injustice occur in the background. Like most, I had to watch the video twice until I picked up on the imagery in the background — and this is exactly the message Glover was trying to get across. Gambino does a great job at revealing how limited our focus can be. We, as a community, have chosen entertainment over justice. To put it simply, I can name every member of the Wu-Tang Clan, but I struggle to name one victim of the Charleston church shooting." (Reda Zarrug, Shifter)


Books of 2018:
1 | Asymmetry | Lisa Halliday | USA | #796
2 | Red Clocks | Leni Zumas | USA | #980
3 | The Largesse of the Sea Maiden | Denis Johnson | USA | #1001


Movies of 2018:
1 | Roma (Roma) | Alfonso Cuarón | Mexico | 21st Century #129
2 | Beoning (Burning) | Lee Chang-dong | South Korea | 21st Century #237
3 | The Favourite | Yorgos Lanthimos | Ireland | Greece | 21st Century #296


Albums of 2018:
1 | Dirty Computer | Janelle Monáe | USA
2 | Double Negative | Low | USA
3 | Joy as an Act of Resistance. | IDLES | UK


Songs of 2018:
1 | This Is America | Childish Gambino | USA
2 | Make Me Feel | Janelle Monáe | USA
3 | I Like It | Cardi B, Bad Bunny & J Balvin | USA | USA/Puerto Rico/Colombia

Note:
There is not really a tie for the record of the year, simply the results of 2018 has not still been included on Acclaimed Music all time list. When we have a new update I will edit this post. I suspect that the record of the year will be the song instead the album, I think "This Is America" had more consensus among the critics. Only Henrik knows…
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2019

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2019

This post will be edited in a few months when the three web pages update their lists with the 2019 books, movies and records.
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The 2010s

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The 2010s



Record of the 2010s | My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy | Kanye West | USA | album (CD) | 2010 | all time #64
"Kanye West: douchebag, enemy of the state, incurable gobshite who's annoyed more American presidents than Fidel Castro. A man with a head so unfeasibly smooth, it looks like he's slowly evolving into a Madame Tussauds effigy of himself. For better or worse, he's also the pop star for our morally implicated times; an instinctive consumer with a mouthful of diamonds and furtive bad conscience, a performer who lives the American dream to its fullest with a creeping sense of the spiritual void at its heart. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy captures that essence in full. It's an utterly dazzling portrait of a 21st-century schizoid man that is by turns sickeningly egocentric, contrite, wise, stupid and self-mocking." (Alex Denney, NME)

Movie of the 2010s | The Tree of Life | Terrence Malick | USA | 2011 | all time #239
"Terrence Malick's mad and magnificent film descends slowly, like some sort of prototypical spaceship: it's a cosmic-interior epic of vainglorious proportions, a rebuke to realism, a disavowal of irony and comedy, a meditation on memory, and a gasp of horror and awe at the mysterious inevitability of loving, and losing those we love. This film is not for everyone, and I will admit I am agnostic about the final sequence, which suggests a closure and a redemption nothing else in the film has prepared us for. But this is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison." (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)

Book of the 2010s | The Sense of an Ending | Julian Barnes | UK | 2011 | all time #287
"This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about —until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he'd left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he'd understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes's oeuvre." (Publisher)


Books of the 2010s:
1 | The Sense of an Ending | Julian Barnes | UK | 2011 | #287
2 | NW | Zadie Smith | UK | 2012 | #303
3 | Gone Girl | Gillian Flynn | USA | 2012 | #460
4 | The Last Books of Hector Viel Temperley | Héctor Viel Temperley | USA | Argentina | collection | #587
5 | Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk | Ben Fountain | USA | 2012 | #686
6 | The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 | Derek Walcott | USA | Saint Lucia | collection | #611
7 | Freedom | Jonathan Franzen | USA | 2010 | #613


Movies of the 2010s:
1 | The Tree of Life | Terrence Malick | USA | 2011 | #239
2 | A torinói ló (The Turin Horse) | Béla Tarr | Hungary | 2011 | #418
3 | Loong Boonmee raleuk chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) | Apichatpong Weerasethakul | Thailand | 2010 | #433
4 | Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (A Separation) | Asghar Farhadi | Iran | 2011 | #478
5 | Melancholia | Lars von Trier | Denmark | 2011 | #523


Albums of the 2010s:
1 | My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy | Kanye West | USA | 2010 | #64
2 | To Pimp a Butterfly | Kendrick Lamar | USA | 2015 | #138
3 | channel ORANGE | Frank Ocean | USA | 2012 | #154
4 | good kid, m.A.A.d city | Kendrick Lamar | USA | 2012 | #160
5 | Let England Shake | PJ Harvey | UK | 2011 | #170


Songs of the 2010s:
1 | Get Lucky | Daft Punk | France | 2013 | #106
2 | Midnight City | M83 | France | 2011 | #192
3 | HUMBLE. | Kendrick Lamar | USA | 2017 | #194
4 | Seasons (Waiting on You) | Future Islands | USA | 2014 | #196
5 | Runaway | Kanye West feat. Pusha T | USA | 2010 | #209

Note:
Probably there will be some changes on this list when the end of the decade list begin to come. I will edit this post in a few months. Particularly on the movies department, the TSPDT all time Top 1000 does not include movies premiered after 2012.
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The 21st Century

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The 21st Century



Records of the 21st Century:
- Album of the 21st Century | Funeral | Arcade Fire | Canada | album (CD) | 2004 | all time #27
"This ten-song suite didn't spawn a new genre, nor sound like it was beamed in from outer space. The achievement here is totally musical; Funeral's essential brilliance is in how stunningly it amalgamates all that came before it. It speaks to our collective consciousness, with momentum from the ancillary building blocks of rock, dreamy storytelling, set to music that singes the synapses. Coming off immense web hype and near-mythical live shows, the resolute Canadians dropped a bombshell rife with passion and artful vigor that didn't supercede their capabilities. Call it punk in temper, worldly in vision, soul in spirit, folk at heart, grunge in force, pop in essence… at the end of the wintry Montreal day, that's all moot: the album of the decade is best enjoyed undefined: as enjoyment." (Ari Shapiro, Lost at Sea)
- Song of the 21st Century | Hey Ya! | OutKast | USA | CD-single | 2003 | all time #27
"Hey Ya! was the game-changing song that became a wedding disco staple and made the phrase "shake it like a Polaroid picture" part of the pop culture lexicon. At the time it was released, NME's review called it "a loophole-leaping oddity doused in the tantalising, unmistakable tang of Something Truly Unique." Andre explained to MTV: "Hey Ya! is pretty much about the state of relationships in the noughties. It's about some people who stay together in relationships because of tradition, because somebody told them, 'You guys are supposed to stay together.' But you pretty much end up being unhappy for the rest of your life. So Hey Ya! is really about saying, 'Fuck it. Live life, you know?' Musically, the psychedelic-folk sound on the track came about when Andre strung together the only guitar chords he knew, channeling "the Ramones, the Buzzcocks, the Smiths."" (Priya Elan, NME)

Movie of the 21st Century | Faa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love) | Wong Kar-Wai | Hong Kong | 2000 | all time #44
"Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-wan (Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Cheung) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite — until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. With its aching musical soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past decade of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong's redoubtable career." (The Criterion Collection)

Book of the 21st Century | Atonement | Ian McEwan | UK | 2001 | all time #137
"Ian McEwan's symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose. On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her too is Robbie Turner who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever, as Briony commits a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone." (Publisher)


Books of the 21st Century:
1 | Atonement | Ian McEwan | UK | 2001 | #137
2 | White Teeth | Zadie Smith | UK | 2000 | #152
3 | The Corrections | Jonathan Franzen | USA | 2001 | #164
4 | 2666 (2666) | Roberto Bolaño | Spain | Chile | 2004 | #186
5 | The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | Junot Díaz | USA | 2007 | #202
6 | Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro | UK | 2005 | #204
7 | Austerlitz (Austerlitz) | W. G. Sebald | Germany | 2001 | #219
8 | The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay | Michael Chabon | USA | 2000 | #226
9 | Middlesex | Jeffrey Eugenides | USA | 2002 | #229
10 | The Road | Cormac McCarthy | USA | 2006 | #249


Movies of the 21st Century:
1 | Faa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love) | Wong Kar-Wai | Hong Kong | 2000 | #44
2 | Mulholland Dr. | David Lynch | France | USA | 2001 | #60
3 | Yi yi (Yi Yi) | Edward Yang | Taiwan | 2000 | #127
4 | There Will Be Blood | Paul Thomas Anderson | USA | 2007 | #179
5 | Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away) | Hayao Miyazaki | Japan | 2001 | #188
6 | Caché (Caché) | Michael Haneke | France | Austria | 2005 | #216
7 | Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind | Michel Gondry | USA | France | 2004 | #223
8 | The Tree of Life | Terrence Malick | USA | 2011 | #239
9 | Sud pralad (Tropical Malady) | Apichatpong Weerasethakul | Thailand | 2004 | #252
10 | Cidade de Deus (City of God) | Fernando Meirelles/Kátia Lund | Brazil | 2002 | #309


Albums of the 21st Century:
1 | Funeral | Arcade Fire | Canada | 2004 | #27
2 | Is This It | The Strokes | UK | USA | 2001 | #36
3 | Kid A | Radiohead | UK | 2000 | #38
4 | My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy | Kanye West | USA | 2010 | #64
5 | Yankee Hotel Foxtrot | Wilco | USA | 2002 | #75
6 | Elephant | The White Stripes | USA | 2003 | #78
7 | In Rainbows | Radiohead | UK | 2007 | #85
8 | Illinois | Sufjan Stevens | USA | 2005 | #91
9 | Sound of Silver | LCD Soundsystem | USA | 2007 | #115
10 | Back to Black | Amy Winehouse | UK | 2006 | #117


Songs of the 21st Century:
1 | Hey Ya! | OutKast | USA | 2003 | #27
2 | Paper Planes | M.I.A. | UK | 2007 | #31
3 | Seven Nation Army | The White Stripes | USA | 2003 | #36
4 | Crazy in Love | Beyoncé feat. Jay-Z | USA | 2003 | #46
5 | Crazy | Gnarls Barkley | USA | 2006 | #50
6 | Take Me Out | Franz Ferdinand | UK | 2004 | #55
7 | Get Ur Freak On | Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott | USA | 2001 | #72
8 | 99 Problems | Jay-Z | USA | 2003 | #90
9 | All My Friends | LCD Soundsystem | USA | 2007 | #93
10 | Get Lucky | Daft Punk | France | 2013 | #106


Classical works of the 21st Century:
1 | Wild Swans | Elena Kats-Chernin | Australia | 2003 | #39
2 | Dawn Mantras | Ross Edwards | Australia | 2000 | #49
3 | The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace | Karl Jenkins | UK | 2000 | #68
4 | Sean O'Boyle | Concerto for Didgeridoo | Australia | 2003 | #87
5 | Lord of the Rings | Howard Shore | USA | Canada | 2001 | #90
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All Time

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All time



Best book of all time | À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) | Marcel Proust | France | 1913
"Swann's Way, the first part of À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust's seven-part cycle, was published in 1913. In it, Proust introduces the themes that run through the entire work. The narrator recalls his childhood, aided by the famous madeleine; and describes M. Swann's passion for Odette. The work is incomparable. Edmund Wilson said "[Proust] has supplied for the first time in literature an equivalent in the full scale for the new theory of modern physics." Swann's Way tells two related stories, the first of which revolves around Marcel, a younger version of the narrator, and his experiences in, and memories of, the French town Combray. Inspired by the "gusts of memory" that rise up within him as he dips a madeleine into hot tea, the narrator discusses his fear of going to bed at night. He is a creature of habit and dislikes waking up in the middle of the night not knowing where he is." (Publisher)

Best movie of all time | Citizen Kane | Orson Welles | USA | 1941
"The source book of Orson Welles, and still a marvellous movie. Thematically less resonant than some of Welles' later meditations on the nature of power, perhaps, but still absolutely riveting as an investigation of a citizen —newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst by any other name— under suspicion of having soured the American Dream. Its imagery as Welles delightedly explores his mastery of a new vocabulary, still amazes and delights, from the opening shot of the forbidding gates of Xanadu to the last glimpse of the vanishing Rosebud (tarnished, maybe, but still a potent symbol). A film that gets better with each renewed acquaintance." (Tom Milne, Time Out)

Best records of all time:
- Best album of all time | Pet Sounds | The Beach Boys | USA | album (vinyl LP) | 1966
"Recorded and released in 1966, not long after the sunny, textural experiments of California Girls, Pet Sounds, aside from its importance as Brian Wilson's evolutionary compositional masterpiece, was the first rock record that can be considered a "concept album"; from first cut to last we were treated to an intense, linear personal vision of the vagaries of a love affair and the painful, introverted anxieties that are the wrenching precipitates of the unstable chemistry of any love relationship. This trenchant cycle of love songs has the emotional impact of a shatteringly evocative novel, and by God if this little record didn't change only the course of popular music, but the course of a few lives in the bargain. Nobody was prepared for anything so soulful, so lovely, something one had to think about so much. It is by far the best album Brian has yet delivered, and it paradoxically began the decline in mass popularity that still plagues this band." (Stephen Davis, Rolling Stone, 1972)
- Best song of all time | Like a Rolling Stone | Bob Dylan | USA | 45 rpm single | 1965
"Released in July of 1965, Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone was, in many ways, the dividing line between the past and the future of rock and roll. The lyrics, the mood, the ramshackle rock and roll sound… it was the way forward. Issued as a single and the lead track on the Highway 61 Revisited LP, it ran for a then-unprecedented six minutes. With Like a Rolling Stone, Dylan would make the ultimate 'folk rock' statement, closing one door and opening another at the same time. Poetry was now as much a part of the arsenal for young musicians as the electric guitar. Musically, that crack of the snare drum that sets Like a Rolling Stone in motion is the shot heard round the world. Mike Bloomfield's sharp-as-nails guitar and Al Kooper's hammond organ give the song mighty wings. This is rock and roll as it was meant to be: Raw, literate, exciting, challenging and above all, memorable as hell. It can be said that Like a Rolling Stone was not only the pinnacle of Dylan's career, but it may also have been the crowning achievement of the genre." (Ultimate Classic Rock)


Best books of all time:
1 | À la recherche du temps perdu, tome 1 : Du côté de chez Swann (In Search of Lost Time, Volume One: Swann's Way) | Marcel Proust | France | 1913
2 | El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Sir Quixote of La Mancha) | Miguel de Cervantes | Crown of Castille | 1605
3 | Ulysses | James Joyce | France | UK | 1922
4 | The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | USA | 1925
5 | Moby-Dick | Herman Melville | USA | 1851
6 | The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark | William Shakespeare | England | 1603
7 | Vojna i mir (War and Peace) | Leo Tolstoy | Russian Empire | 1869
8 | Odýsseia (The Odyssey) | Homer | Assyrian Empire | 8th century BC
9 | Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) | Gabriel García Márquez | Argentina | Colombia | 1967
10 | Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) | Dante Alighieri | Republic of Florence | 1472
11 | Brat'ya Karamazovy (The Brothers Karamazov) | Fyodor Dostoevsky | Russian Empire | 1880
12 | Madame Bovary (Madame Bovary) | Gustave Flaubert | France | 1857
13 | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | USA | 1884
14 | Iliás (The Iliad) | Homer | Assyrian Empire | 8th century BC
15 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | France | USA | 1955
16 | Prestupléniye i nakazániye (Crime and Punishment) | Fyodor Dostoevsky | Russian Empire | 1867
17 | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll | UK | 1865
18 | Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë | UK | 1847
19 | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | UK | 1813
20 | The Catcher in the Rye | J. D. Salinger | USA | 1951
21 | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | USA | 1929
22 | To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf | UK | 1927
23 | Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad | UK | 1899
24 | Anna Karenina (Anna Karenina) | Leo Tolstoy | Russian Empire | 1877
25 | Nineteen Eighty Four | George Orwell | UK | 1949
26 | Great Expectations | Charles Dickens | UK | 1861
27 | Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life | George Eliot | UK | 1872
28 | Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships (Gulliver's Travels) | Jonathan Swift | UK | 1726
29 | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | USA | 1961
30 | Alf layla wa-layla (One Thousand and One Nights) | Various | India/Persia/Abbasid Caliphate/Syria/Egypt | 1706
31 | The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck | USA | 1939
32 | The Stories of Anton Chekhov | Anton Chekhov | USA | Russia | 1961 | collection
33 | Absalom, Absalom! | William Faulkner | USA | 1936
34 | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë | UK | 1847
35 | Der Process (The Trial) | Franz Kafka | Germany | Czechoslovakia | 1925
36 | Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | USA | 1952
37 | Mrs Dalloway | Virginia Woolf | UK | 1925
38 | Le Rouge et le Noir: Chronique du XIXe siècle (The Red and the Black) | Stendhal | Kingdom of France | 1830
39 | Aeneis (The Iliad) | Virgil | Roman Empire | 19 BC
40 | The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery | Charles Dickens | UK | 1850
41 | Beloved | Toni Morrison | USA | 1987
42 | L’Étranger (The Stranger) | Albert Camus | France | 1942
43 | Leaves of Grass | Walt Whitman | USA | 1855
44 | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | USA | 1960
45 | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | James Joyce | USA | UK | 1916
46 | The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway | USA | 1926
47 | Collected Fictions | Jorge Luis Borges | USA | Argentina | 1998 | collection
48 | Oedipus Tyrannus (Oedipus the King) | Sophocles | Athens | 429 BC
49 | Candide, ou l'Optimisme (Candide) | Voltaire | Kingdom of France | 1759
50 | The Canterbury Tales | Geoffrey Chaucer | England | 1400
51 | The Complete Stories | Franz Kafka | USA | Czechoslovakia | 1971 | collection
52 | As I Lay Dying | William Faulkner | USA | 1930
53 | The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman | Laurence Sterne | UK | 1759



Best movies of all time:
1 | Citizen Kane | Orson Welles | USA | 1941
2 | Vertigo | Alfred Hitchcock | USA | 1955
3 | 2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley Kubrick | UK | USA | 1968
4 | La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) | Jean Renoir | France | 1939
5 | Tôkyô monogatari (Tokyo Story) | Yasujirô Ozu | Japan | 1953
6 | 8½ (8½) | Federico Fellini | Italy | 1963
7 | The Godfather | Francis Ford Coppola | USA | 1972
8 | Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans | F.W. Murnau | USA | Germany | 1927
9 | The Searchers | John Ford | USA | 1956
10 | Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai) | Akira Kurosawa | Japan | 1954
11 | Apocalypse Now | Francis Coppola | USA | 1979
12 | Singin' in the Rain | Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly | USA | 1952
13 | Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) | Vittorio De Sica | Italy | 1948
14 | Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin) | S.M. Eisenstein | USSR | 1925
15 | Taxi Driver | Martin Scorsese | USA | 1976
16 | À bout de souffle (Breathless) | Jean-Luc Godard | France | 1960
17 | La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) | Carl Th. Dreyer | France | Denmark | 1928
18 | L'Atalante (L'Atalante) | Jean Vigo | France | 1934
19 | Persona (Persona) | Ingmar Bergman | Sweden | 1966
20 | Rashômon (Rashomon) | Akira Kurosawa | Japan | 1950
21 | Chelovek s kino-apparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) | Dziga Vertov | USSR | 1929 | documentary
22 | The Godfather: Part II | Francis Ford Coppola | USA | 1974
23 | Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) | François Truffaut | France | 1959
24 | Raging Bull | Martin Scorsese | USA | 1980
25 | Psycho | Alfred Hitchcock | USA | 1960
26 | City Lights | Charles Chaplin | USA | UK | 1931
27 | Andrey Rublev (Andrei Rublev) | Andrey Tarkovskiy | USSR | 1966
28 | Some Like It Hot | Billy Wilder | USA | 1959
29 | La dolce vita (La Dolce Vita) | Federico Fellini | Italy | 1960
30 | Zerkalo (The Mirror) | Andrei Tarkovsky | USSR | 1975
31 | Touch of Evil | Orson Welles | USA | 1958
32 | Au hasard Balthazar (Au Hasard Balthazar) | Robert Bresson | France | 1966
33 | Ordet (Ordet) | Carl Theodor Dreyer | Denmark | 1955
34 | Sunset Blvd. | Billy Wilder | USA | 1950
35 | Casablanca | Michael Curtiz | USA | 1942
36 | Lawrence of Arabia | David Lean | UK | 1962
37 | L'avventura (L'Avventura) | Michelangelo Antonioni | Italy | 1960
38 | Blade Runner | Ridley Scott | USA | UK | 1982
39 | Le mépris (Contempt) | Jean-Luc Godard | France | 1963
40 | The General | Buster Keaton/Clyde Bruckman | USA | 1926
41 | Rear Window | Alfred Hitchcock | USA | UK | 1954
42 | La grande illusion (The Grand Illusion) | Jean Renoir | France | 1937
43 | The Night of the Hunter | Charles Laughton | USA | 1955
44 | Faa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love) | Wong Kar-Wai | Hong Kong | 2000
45 | Modern Times | Charles Chaplin | USA | UK | 1936
46 | Playtime (Playtime) | Jacques Tati | France | 1967
47 | Ugetsu monogatari (Ugetsu monogatari) | Kenji Mizoguchi | Japan | 1953
48 | Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb | Stanley Kubrick | UK | USA | 1964
49 | The Third Man | Carol Reed | UK | 1949
50 | Chinatown | Roman Polanski | USA | Poland | 1975
51 | Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander) | Ingmar Bergman | Sweden | 1982


Best albums of all time:
1 | Pet Sounds | The Beach Boys | USA | 1966
2 | Revolver | The Beatles | UK | 1966 | #2
3 | Nevermind | Nirvana | USA | 1991
4 | The Velvet Underground & Nico | The Velvet Underground & Nico | USA | 1967
5 | Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | The Beatles | UK | 1967
6 | London Calling | The Clash | UK | 1979
7 | What's Going On | Marvin Gaye | USA | 1971
8 | OK Computer | Radiohead | UK | 1997
9 | Exile on Main St. | The Rolling Stones | UK | 1972
10 | Blonde on Blonde | Bob Dylan | USA | 1966
11 | Highway 61 Revisited | Bob Dylan | USA | 1965
12 | Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols | Sex Pistols | UK | 1977
13 | The Beatles | The Beatles | UK | 1968
14 | Are You Experienced | The Jimi Hendrix Experience | UK | USA/UK | 1967
15 | Astral Weeks | Van Morrison | USA | UK | 1968
16 | The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars | David Bowie | UK | 1972
17 | Born to Run | Bruce Springsteen | USA | 1975
18 | It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back | Public Enemy | USA | 1988
19 | The Dark Side of the Moon | Pink Floyd | UK | 1973
20 | Abbey Road | The Beatles | UK | 1969
21 | Blood on the Tracks | Bob Dylan | USA | 1975
22 | The Queen Is Dead | The Smiths | UK | 1986
23 | Horses | Patti Smith | USA | 1975
24 | Marquee Moon | Television | USA | 1977
25 | Thriller | Michael Jackson | USA | 1982
26 | Electric Ladyland | The Jimi Hendrix Experience | USA | USA/UK | 1968
27 | Funeral | Arcade Fire | Canada | 2004
28 | Led Zeppelin IV | Led Zeppelin | UK | 1971
29 | Sign "☮" the Times | Prince | USA | 1987
30 | The Doors | The Doors | USA | 1967
31 | Rubber Soul | The Beatles | UK | 1965
32 | Who's Next | The Who | USA | UK | 1971
33 | Beggars Banquet | The Rolling Stones | UK | 1968
34 | Remain in Light | Talking Heads | USA | 1980
35 | Kind of Blue | Miles Davis | USA | 1959
36 | Is This It | The Strokes | UK | USA | 2001
37 | Blue Lines | Massive Attack | UK | 1991
38 | Kid A | Radiohead | UK | 2000
39 | Ramones | Ramones | USA | 1976
40 | The Joshua Tree | U2 | UK | Ireland | 1987
41 | Let It Bleed | The Rolling Stones | USA | UK | 1969
42 | Automatic for the People | R.E.M. | USA | 1992
43 | Songs in the Key of Life | Stevie Wonder | USA | 1976
44 | 'Live' at the Apollo | James Brown | USA | 1963
45 | Closer | Joy Division | UK | 1980
46 | Innervisions | Stevie Wonder | USA | 1973
47 | Doolittle | Pixies | UK | USA | 1989
48 | Sticky Fingers | The Rolling Stones | UK | 1971
49 | Purple Rain | Prince and The Revolution | USA | 1984
50 | Forever Changes | Love | USA | 1967


Best songs of all time:
1 | Like a Rolling Stone | Bob Dylan | USA | 1965
2 | Smells Like Teen Spirit | Nirvana | USA | 1991
3 | A Day in the Life | The Beatles | UK | 1967
4 | Good Vibrations | The Beach Boys | USA | 1966
5 | (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction | The Rolling Stones | USA | UK | 1965
6 | Johnny B. Goode | Chuck Berry | USA | 1958
7 | Be My Baby | The Ronettes | USA | 1963
8 | I Heard It Through the Grapevine | Marvin Gaye | USA | 1968
9 | What's Going On | Marvin Gaye | USA | 1971
10 | My Generation | The Who | UK | 1965
11 | Respect | Aretha Franklin | USA | 1967
12 | Love Will Tear Us Apart | Joy Division | UK | 1980
13 | Born to Run | Bruce Springsteen | USA | 1975
14 | Sympathy for the Devil | The Rolling Stones | UK | 1968
15 | Anarchy in the U.K. | Sex Pistols | UK | 1976
16 | Strawberry Fields Forever | The Beatles | UK | 1967
17 | Heartbreak Hotel | Elvis Presley | USA | 1956
18 | Billie Jean | Michael Jackson | USA | 1982
19 | London Calling | The Clash | UK | 1979
20 | God Only Knows | The Beach Boys | USA | 1966
21 | Stairway to Heaven | Led Zeppelin | UK | 1971
22 | (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay | Otis Redding | USA | 1968
23 | Imagine | John Lennon | USA | UK | 1971
24 | The Message | Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five | USA | 1982
25 | God Save the Queen | Sex Pistols | UK | 1977
26 | "Heroes" | David Bowie | UK | 1977
27 | Hey Ya! | OutKast | USA | 2003
28 | You Really Got Me | The Kinks | UK | 1964
29 | When Doves Cry | Prince | USA | 1984
30 | Tutti-Frutti | Little Richard and His Band | USA | 1955
31 | Paper Planes | M.I.A. | UK | 2007
32 | Purple Haze | Jimi Hendrix Experience | UK | USA/UK | 1967
33 | Gimmie Shelter | The Rolling Stones | UK | 1969
34 | Superstition | Stevie Wonder | USA | 1972
35 | What'd I Say (Parts 1 and 2) | Ray Charles and His Orchestra | USA | 1959
36 | Seven Nation Army | The White Stripes | USA | 2003
37 | Common People | Pulp | UK | 1995
38 | Blue Monday | New Order | UK | 1983
39 | Bohemian Rhapsody | Queen | UK | 1975
40 | A Change Is Gonna Come | Sam Cooke | USA | 1964
41 | Louie Louie | The Kingsmen | USA | 1963
42 | Hey Jude | The Beatles | UK | 1968
43 | Losing My Religion | R.E.M. | USA | 1991
44 | Waterloo Sunset | The Kinks | UK | 1967
45 | Light My Fire | The Doors | 1967
46 | Crazy in Love | Beyoncé feat. Jay-Z | USA | 2003
47 | I Want You Back | The Jackson 5 | USA | 1969
48 | Whole Lotta Love | Led Zeppelin | USA | UK | 1969
49 | There Is a Light That Never Goes Out | The Smiths | UK | 1986
50 | Crazy | Gnarls Barkley | USA | 2006


Classical works of all time:
1 | 9. Sinfonie in d-Moll (Symphony No. 9) | Ludwig van Beethoven | German Confederation | 1824
2 | 5. Klavierkonzert in Es-Dur, "Emperor" (Piano Concerto No. 5 in E♭ major, "Emperor Concerto") | Ludwig van Beethoven | Austrian Empire | Kingdom of Prussia | 1811
3 | Sinfonie Nr. 6 F-Dur, "Pastorale" (Symphony No. 6 in F major, "Pastoral") | Ludwig van Beethoven | Austrian Empire | Kingdom of Prussia | 1808
4 | Konzert in A-Dur für Klarinette und Orchester (Clarinet Concerto in A major) | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Holy Roman Empire | 1791
5 | Messiah | George Frideric Handel | Kingdom of Ireland | UK | 1742
6 | Symfonie č. 9 9 e moll, "Z nového světa" (Symphony No. 9 in E minor, "From the New World") | Antonín Dvořák | USA | Austro-Hungarian Empire | 1893
7 | Koncert dlja fortepiano s orkestrom № 2 do minor (Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor) | Sergei Rachmaninoff | Russian Empire | 1901
8 | Requiem in d-Moll (Requiem in D minor) | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Holy Roman Empire | 1793
9 | Konzert für Violine und Orchester D-Dur (Violin Concerto in D major) | Ludwig van Beethoven | Austrian Empire | Kingdom of Prussia | 1806
10 | Cello Concerto in E minor | Edward Elgar | UK | 1919
11 | 1. Violinkonzert in g-Moll (Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor) | Max Bruch | Switzerland | German Confederation | 1866
12 | Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione: Le quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons) | Antonio Vivaldi | Dutch Republic | Venetian Republic | 1723
13 | Symphonie no 3 en ut mineur, "avec orgue" (Symphony No. 3 in C minor, "Organ Symphony") | Camille Saint-Saëns | UK | France | 1886
14 | The Lark Ascending | Ralph Vaughan Williams | UK | 1920
15 | Matthäus-Passion (St Matthew Passion) | Johann Sebastian Bach | Holy Roman Empire | 1727
16 | 7. Sinfonie in A-Dur (Symphony No. 7 in A major) | Ludwig van Beethoven | Austrian Empire | Kingdom of Prussia | 1813
17 | Klavierquintett in A-Dur, "Forellenquintett" (Piano Quintet in A major, "Trout Quintet") | Franz Schubert | Austrian Empire | 1829
18 | Klaviersonate Nr. 14, "Mondscheinsonate" (Piano Sonata No. 14 in C♯ minor "Moonlight Sonata") | Ludwig van Beethoven | Holy Roman Empire | 1802
19 | The Planets | Gustav Holst | UK | 1918
20 | Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis | Ralph Vaughan Williams | UK | 1910
21 | 5. Sinfonie in C-Moll (Symphony No. 5 in C minor) | Ludwig van Beethoven | Austrian Empire | Kingdom of Prussia | 1808
22 | Concierto de Aranjuez (Concierto de Aranjuez) | Joaquín Rodrigo | Spain | 1940
23 | Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Holy Roman Empire | 1791
24 | Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma Variations) | Edward Elgar | UK | 1899
25 | Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers) | Georges Bizet | France | 1863
26 | Messe de Requiem en ré mineur (Requiem in D minor) | Gabriel Fauré | France | 1890
27 | Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Holy Roman Empire | 1786
28 | Simfonija № 6 Si minor, "Patetičeskaja" (Symphony No. 6 in B minor, "Pathétique") | Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky | Russian Empire | 1893
29 | Koncert № 1 dlja fortepiano s orkestrom si-bemolʹ minor (Piano Concerto No. 1 in B♭ minor) | Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky | USA | Russian Empire | 1875
30 | Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the mirror) | Arvo Pärt | USSR | 1978
31 | 3. Sinfonie in Es-Dur, "Eroica" (Symphony No. 3 in E♭ major, "Eroica") | Ludwig van Beethoven | Holy Roman Empire | 1805
32 | Violinkonzert e-Moll (Violin Concerto in E minor) | Felix Mendelssohn | German Confederation | 1845
33 | Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) | Richard Strauss | UK | Germany | 1950
34 | 21. Klavierkonzert in C-Dur (Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major) | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Holy Roman Empire | 1785
35 | Miserere mei, Deus (Miserere) | Gregorio Allegri | Holy Roman Empire | 1638
36 | Rhapsody in Blue | George Gershwin | USA | 1924
37 | Koncert dlja fortepiano s orkestrom № 3 re minor (Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor) | Sergei Rachmaninoff | USA | Russia | 1909
38 | Doppelkonzert für zwei Violinen d-Moll (Concerto for Two Violins in D minor) | Johann Sebastian Bach | Holy Roman Empire | 1731
39 | Sinfonia nro 2 D-duuri (Symphony No. 2 in D major) | Jean Sibelius | Russian Empire | 1902
40 | Lebedinoye ozero (Swan Lake) | Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky | Russian Empire | 1877
41 | Carmen (Carmen) | Georges Bizet | France | 1875
42 | Streichquintett C-Dur (String Quintet in C major) | Franz Schubert | Austrian Empire | 1850
43 | 2. Sinfonie in c-Moll, "Auferstehungssinfonie" (Symphony No. 2 in C minor, "Resurrection") | Gustav Mahler | German Empire | Austro-Hungarian Empire | 1895
44 | La bohème (La bohème) | Giacomo Puccini | Italy | 1896
45 | Toccata und Fuge d-Moll (Toccata and Fugue in D minor) | Johann Sebastian Bach | Holy Roman Empire | 1704
46 | h-Moll-Messe (Mass in B minor) | Johann Sebastian Bach | Holy Roman Empire | 1733
47 | Romeo i Džulʹetta (Romeo and Juliet) | Sergei Prokofiev | Czechoslovakia | USSR | 1938
48 | Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben (Cantata 147) | Johann Sebastian Bach | Holy Roman Empire | 1723
49 | 4. Klavierkonzert in G-Dur (Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major) | Ludwig van Beethoven | Austrian Empire | Kingdom of Prussia | 1808
50 | Kanon und Gigue für 3 Violinen mit Generalbaß (Canon and Gigue for 3 violins and basso continuo) | Johann Pachelbel | Holy Roman Empire | 1694
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Best books by decade (and century)

Post by Honorio »

Best books by decade (and century)


Book of the 2010s | The Sense of an Ending | Julian Barnes | UK | 2011 | #287


Book of the 2000s | Atonement | Ian McEwan | UK | 2001 | #137


Book of the 1990s | American Pastoral | Philip Roth | USA | 1997 | #154


Book of the 1980s | Beloved | Toni Morrison | USA | 1987 | #41


Book of the 1970s | The Stand | Stephen King | USA | 1978 | #173


Book of the 1960s | Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) | Gabriel García Márquez | Argentina | Colombia | 1967 | #9


Book of the 1950s | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | France | USA | 1955 | #15


Book of the 1940s | Nineteen Eighty Four | George Orwell | UK | 1949 | #25


Book of the 1930s | The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck | USA | 1939 | #31


Book of the 1920s | Ulysses | James Joyce | France | UK | 1922 | #3


Book of the 1910s | À la recherche du temps perdu, tome 1 : Du côté de chez Swann (In Search of Lost Time, Volume One: Swann's Way) | Marcel Proust | France | 1913 | #1


Book of the 1900s | Lord Jim | Joseph Conrad | UK | 1900 | #120


Book of the 1890s | Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad | UK | 1899 | #23


Book of the 1880s | Brat'ya Karamazovy (The Brothers Karamazov) | Fyodor Dostoevsky | Russian Empire | 1880 | #11


Book of the 1870s | Anna Karenina (Anna Karenina) | Leo Tolstoy | Russian Empire | 1877 | #24


Book of the 1860s | Vojna i mir (War and Peace) | Leo Tolstoy | Russian Empire | 1869 | #7


Book of the 1850s | Moby-Dick; or, The Whale | Herman Melville | USA | 1851 | #5


Book of the 1840s | Wuthering Heights | Ellis Bell (Emily Brontë) | UK | 1847 | #18


Book of the 1830s | Le Rouge et le Noir: Chronique du XIXe siècle (The Red and the Black) | Stendhal | Kingdom of France | 1830 | #38


Book of the 1820s | The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 | James Fenimore Cooper | USA | 1826 | #504


Book of the 1810s | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | UK | 1813 | #19


Book of the 1800s | Faust. Eine Tragödie (Faust: A Tragedy) | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Holy Roman Empire | 1808 | #65


Book of the 18th Century | Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships (Gulliver's Travels) | Jonathan Swift | UK | 1726 | #28


Book of the 17th Century | El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Sir Quixote of La Mancha) | Miguel de Cervantes | Crown of Castille | 1605 | #2


Book of the 16th Century | La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel (The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel) | François Rabelais | Kingdom of France | 1532 | #80


Book of the 15th Century | Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) | Dante Alighieri | Republic of Florence | 1472 | #10


Book of the 14th Century | Decamerone (The Decameron) | Giovanni Boccaccio | Republic of Florence | 1353 | #99


Book of the 13th Century | Brennu-Njáls saga (Njáls saga) | Anonymous | Icelandic Commonwealth | ca. 1290 | #466


Book of the 12th Century | Roman de Renart (Reynard the Fox) | Pierre de St. Cloud | Kingdom of France | 1174 | #1375


Book of the 11th Century | Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) | Murasaki Shikibu | Japan | 1021 | #114


Book of the 1st Millennium AD | Metamorphoseon libri (Metamorphoses) | Ovid | Roman Empire | 8 AD | #93


Book of the 1st Millennium BC | Odýsseia (The Odyssey) | Homer | Assyrian Empire | 8th century BC | #8
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Best movies and records by decade

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Best movies by decade


Movie of the 2010s | The Tree of Life | Terrence Malick | USA | 2011 | #239


Movie of the 2000s | Faa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love) | Wong Kar-Wai | Hong Kong | 2000 | #44


Movie of the 1990s | Pulp Fiction | Quentin Tarantino | USA | 1994 | #76


Movie of the 1980s | Raging Bull | Martin Scorsese | USA | 1980 | #24


Movie of the 1970s | The Godfather | Francis Ford Coppola | USA | 1972 | #7


Movie of the 1960s | 2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley Kubrick | UK | USA | 1968 | #3


Movie of the 1950s | Vertigo | Alfred Hitchcock | USA | 1958 | #2


Movie of the 1940s | Citizen Kane | Orson Welles | USA | 1941 | #1


Movie of the 1930s | La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) | Jean Renoir | France | 1939 | #4


Movie of the 1920s | Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans | F.W. Murnau | USA | Germany | 1927 | #8


Movie of the 1910s | Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages | D.W. Griffith | USA | 1916 | #104


Movie of the 1900s | Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) | Georges Méliès | France | 1902 | #357


Best records by decade


Record of the 2010s | My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy | Kanye West | USA | 2010 | album #64


Records of the 2000s:
- Funeral | Arcade Fire | Canada | 2004 | album #27
- Hey Ya! | OutKast | USA | 2003 | song #27


Record of the 1990s | Smells Like Teen Spirit | Nirvana | USA | 1991 | song #2


Record of the 1980s | Love Will Tear Us Apart | Joy Division | UK | 1980 | song #12


Record of the 1970s | London Calling | The Clash | UK | 1979 | album #6


Records of the 1960s:
- Pet Sounds | The Beach Boys | USA | 1966 | album #1
- Like a Rolling Stone | Bob Dylan | USA | 1965 | song #1


Record of the 1950s | Johnny B. Goode | Chuck Berry | USA | 1958 | song #6


Record of the 1940s | I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry | Hank Williams with His Drifting Cowboys | USA | 1949 | song #257


Record of the 1930s | Strange Fruit | Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra | USA | 1939 | song #75


Record of the 1920s | West End Blues | Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five | USA | 1928 | song #634


Record of the 1910s | Livery Stable Blues | Original Dixieland 'Jass' Band | USA | 1917 | song #3386


Record of the 1900s | Pagliacci - Vesti la giubba | Enrico Caruso | USA | Italy | 1907 | song #6170


Record of the 1890s | Stars and Stripes Forever | Sousa's Band | USA | 1897 | song #4121
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Best classical works by decade

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Best classical works by decade


Classical work of the 2000s | Wild Swans | Elena Kats-Chernin | Australia | 2003 | #39 20th Century


Classical work of the 1990s | Antarctica, Suite for Guitar and Orchestra | Nigel Westlake | Australia | 1992 | #29 20th Century


Classical works of the 1980s | The Mission | Ennio Morricone | France | Italy | 1986 | #36 20th Century


Classical works of the 1970s:
- III Symfonia, "Symfonia pieśni żałosnych" (Symphony No. 3, "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs") | Henryk Górecki | France | Poland | #14 20th Century
- Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the mirror) | Arvo Pärt | USSR | #30 all time


Classical work of the 1960s | War Requiem | Benjamin Britten | UK | 1962 | #59 20th Century


Classical work of the 1950s | Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) | Richard Strauss | UK | Germany | 1950 | #11 20th Century, #33 all time


Classical work of the 1940s | Concierto de Aranjuez (Concierto de Aranjuez) | Joaquín Rodrigo | Spain | 1940 |#6 20th Century, #22 all time


Classical works of the 1930s:
- Adagio for Strings | Samuel Barber | USA | 1938 | #7 20th Century
- Romeo i Džulʹetta (Romeo and Juliet) | Sergei Prokofiev | Czechoslovakia | USSR | 1938 | #47 all time


Classical work of the 1920s | Rhapsody in Blue | George Gershwin | USA | 1924 | #3 20th Century, #36 all time


Classical work of the 1910s | Cello Concerto in E minor | Edward Elgar | UK | 1919 | #1 20th Century, #10 all time


Classical work of the 1900s | Koncert dlja fortepiano s orkestrom № 2 do minor (Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor) | Sergei Rachmaninoff | Russia | 1901 | #5 20th Century, #7 all time


Classical work of the 1890s | Symfonie č. 9 9 e moll, "Z nového světa" (Symphony No. 9 in E minor, "From the New World") | Antonín Dvořák | USA | Austria-Hungary | 1893 | #6 all time


Classical work of the 1880s | Symphonie no 3 en ut mineur, "avec orgue" (Symphony No. 3 in C minor, "Organ Symphony") | Camille Saint-Saëns | UK | France | 1886 | #13 all time


Classical work of the 1870s | Koncert № 1 dlja fortepiano s orkestrom si-bemolʹ minor (Piano Concerto No. 1 in B♭ minor) | Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky | USA | Russian Empire | 1875 | #29 all time


Classical work of the 1860s | 1. Violinkonzert in g-Moll (Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor) | Max Bruch | Switzerland | German Confederation | 1866 | #11 all time


Classical work of the 1850s | Streichquintett C-Dur (String Quintet in C major) | Franz Schubert | Austrian Empire | 1850 | #42 all time


Classical work of the 1840s | Violinkonzert e-Moll (Violin Concerto in E minor) | Felix Mendelssohn | German Confederation | 1845 | #33 all time


Classical work of the 1830s | Die Hebriden (The Hebrides) | Felix Mendelssohn | UK | German Confederation | 1832 | #79 all time


Classical work of the 1820s | 9. Sinfonie in d-Moll (Symphony No. 9) | Ludwig van Beethoven | German Confederation | 1824 | #1 all time


Classical work of the 1810s | 5. Klavierkonzert in Es-Dur, "Emperor" (Piano Concerto No. 5 in E♭ major, "Emperor Concerto") | Ludwig van Beethoven | Austrian Empire | Kingdom of Prussia | 1811 | #2 all time


Classical work of the 1800s | Sinfonie Nr. 6 F-Dur, "Pastorale" (Symphony No. 6 in F major, "Pastoral") | Ludwig van Beethoven | Austrian Empire | Kingdom of Prussia | 1808 | #3 all time


Classical work of the 1790s | Konzert in A-Dur für Klarinette und Orchester (Clarinet Concerto in A major) | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Holy Roman Empire | 1791 | #4 all time


Classical work of the 1780s | Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Holy Roman Empire | 1786 | #29 all time


Classical work of the 1740s | Messiah | George Frideric Handel | Kingdom of Ireland | UK | 1742 | #5 all time


Classical work of the 1730s | Doppelkonzert für zwei Violinen d-Moll (Concerto for Two Violins in D minor) | Johann Sebastian Bach | Holy Roman Empire | 1731 | #38 all time


Classical work of the 1720s | Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione: Le quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons) | Antonio Vivaldi | Dutch Republic | Venetian Republic | 1723 | #12 all time


Classical work of the 1700s | Toccata und Fuge d-Moll (Toccata and Fugue in D minor) | Johann Sebastian Bach | Holy Roman Empire | 1704 | #45 all time


Classical work of the 1690s | Kanon und Gigue für 3 Violinen mit Generalbaß (Canon and Gigue for 3 violins and basso continuo) | Johann Pachelbel | Holy Roman Empire | 1694 | #50 all time


Classical work of the 1680s | Dido and Aeneas | Henry Purcell | England | 1688 | #89 all time


Classical work of the 1630s | Miserere mei, Deus (Miserere) | Gregorio Allegri | Holy Roman Empire | 1638 | #35 all time


Classical work of the XVI Century | Spem in alium nunquam habui (Spem in alium) | Thomas Tallis | England | ca. 1570 | #87 all time

Note:
On Australian radio station ABC Classic FM there were two different polls, one about 20th Century held in 2011 and another one about all time held in 2010. That's why two decades have two different best classical works.
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Best decade

Post by Honorio »

Best decade

Doing a very very simple calculation (calculating the mean of the position of the first works of every decade) I've come with the best decades for every category.

Best decade | Mean | Most acclaimed work in the category


Best decades for books:
1 | 1920s | 17 | Ulysses
2 | 1950s | 40,6 | Lolita
3 | 1960s | 52 | Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
4 | 1930s | 57 | The Grapes of Wrath
5 | 1910s | 58 | À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time)

But if we include every decade (not only the 20th and 21st centuries) we have:
1 | 1920s | 17 | Ulysses
2 | 1860s | 24,4 | Vojna i mir (War and Peace)
3 | 1850s | 36,6 | Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
4 | 1950s | 40,6 | Lolita
5 | 1960s | 52 | Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
6 | 1930s | 57 | The Grapes of Wrath
7 | 1840s | 57,6 | Wuthering Heights
8 | 1910s | 58 | À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time)
9 | 1940s | 58 | Nineteen Eighty Four
10 | 1870s | 78,2 | Anna Karenina (Anna Karenina)



Best decades for movies:
1 | 1950s | 7,6 | Vertigo
2 | 1960s | 13,8 | 2001: A Space Odyssey
3 | 1970s | 17 | The Godfather
4 | 1920s | 26,6 | Sunrise
5 | 1930s | 27 | La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game)



Best decades for records:
1 | 1960s | 4,2 | Pet Sounds | Like a Rolling Stone
2 | 1970s | 12,7 | London Calling
3 | 1980s | 24,9 | Love Will Tear Us Apart
4 | 1990s | 34 | Smells Like Teen Spirit
5 | 2000s | 44,4 | Funeral | Hey Ya!

With minor differences separating albums and songs:
Best decades for albums:
1 | 1960s | 4,4 | Pet Sounds
2 | 1970s | 10 | London Calling
3 | 1980s | 25,6 | It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
4 | 1990s | 28,2 | Nevermind
5 | 2000s | 50,8 | Funeral

Best decades for songs:
1 | 1960s | 4 | Like a Rolling Stone
2 | 1970s | 15,4 | What's Going On
3 | 1980s | 24,2 | Love Will Tear Us Apart
4 | 1950s | 29,8 | Johnny B. Goode
5 | 2000s | 38 | Hey Ya!


And if we combine the three categories we find:

Best decades for books + movies + records:
1 | 1960s | 23,3 | Pet Sounds | Like a Rolling Stone
2 | 1950s | 59,3 | Vertigo
3 | 1980s | 59,9 | Love Will Tear Us Apart
4 | 1970s | 84,9 | London Calling
5 | 1990s | 110,4 | Smells Like Teen Spirit
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Best artists

Post by Honorio »

Best artists

Not really the best but the ones with more works qualified as the best of the year.

Artists with 4 works as the best of the year:


Joseph Conrad | book of 1900, 1904, 1907 and 1917


D.W. Griffith | movie of 1909, 1915, 1916 and 1919

Artists with 3 works as the best of the year:
Saul Bellow | book of 1956, 1964 and 1975
Charles Chaplin | movie of 1921, 1931 and 1936
Francis Ford Coppola | movie of 1972, 1974 and 1979
William Faulkner | book of 1929, 1930 and 1936
Jean-Luc Godard | movie of 1960, 1965 and 2014
Michael Haneke | movie of 2005, 2009 and 2012
James Joyce | book of 1914, 1916 and 1922
Stanley Kubrick | movie of 1964, 1968 and 1971
David Lynch | movie of 1986, 1997 and 2001
Terrence Malick | movie of 1978, 1998 and 2011
Jean Renoir | movie of 1937, 1939 and 1951
Martin Scorsese | movie of 1976, 1980 and 1990
Edith Wharton | book of 1905, 1911 and 1920
Virginia Woolf | book of 1927, 1928 and 1931

Artists with 2 works as the best of the year:
The Beatles | record of 1967 and 1969
Beck | record of 1993 and 1996
Ingmar Bergman | movie of 1957 and 1966
Luis Buñuel | movie of 1930 and 1961
Enrico Caruso | record of 1907 and 1916
Bing Crosby | record of 1932 and 1942
Carl Theodor Dreyer | movie of 1928 and 1955
Duke Ellington | record of 1927 and 1930
Federico Fellini | movie of 1963 and 1973
Louis Feuillade | movie of 1913 and 1918
F. Scott Fitzgerald | book of 1925 and 1934
E.M. Forster | book of 1910 and 1924
John Galsworthy | book of 1906 and 1921
Marvin Gaye | record of 1968 and 1971
Benny Goodman | record of 1943 and 1950
Woody Guthrie | record of 1940 and 1951
Howard Hawks | movie of 1938 and 1940
Ernest Hemingway | book of 1926 and 1940
Billie Holiday | record of 1939 and 1941
Kazuo Ishiguro | book of 1989 and 2005
Buster Keaton | movie of 1923 and 1926
Akira Kurosawa | movie of 1950 and 1954
Kendrick Lamar | record of 2015 and 2017
C. S. Lewis | book of 1950 and 1956
Thomas Mann | book of 1901 and 1912
F.W. Murnau | movie of 1922 and 1927
Vladimir Nabokov | book of 1955 and 1962
Original Dixieland Jazz Band | record of 1917 and 1918
George Orwell | book of 1945 and 1949
Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger | movie of 1943 and 1947
Prince | record of 1984 and 1987
Radiohead | record of 1997 and 2000
Sex Pistols | record of 1976 and 1977
Bessie Smith | record of 1923 and 1925
Zadie Smith | book of 2000 and 2012
Lars Von Trier | movie of 1996 and 2003
John Updike | book of 1971 and 1990

Note:
1) It's funny that none of the four that achieved a #1 of all time (Marcel Proust, Orson Welles, Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson) appear on the list.
2) 5 artists had 3 acclaimed works of three different decades, Saul Bellow, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Martin Scorsese and Edith Wharton. It's remarkable that Terrence Malick released three acclaimed works separated by almost two decades each, exactly on 1978, 1998 and 2011.
3) But the longest gap belongs to Jean-Luc Godard, appearing on the list with his very first movie (1960) and his second-to-last (2014). Simply amazing.
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Gender, race and language bias

Post by Honorio »

Gender, race and language bias

As I mentioned on the first post of this thread I wanted to analyse the differences on the bias of the critics regarding books, movies or records. I talked about the 3 main bias I can detect on the AM lists previously (see here).

Gender bias

Women represent more that half of the world population but they still struggle to achieve an equal recognition on many fields. And art is not an exception, historically male artists were more acclaimed than female artists. But let's check if there are differences between the three main lists.

If we check the movies of the year the difference between male and female directors is huge. 106 male and 3 female, one of them as co-director (Kátia Lund on "Cidade de Deus"). A tiny 2,75%



The difference is considerably reduced on the records of the year, with 18 female-fronted acts against 92 male, a 16,36%.



And the percentage increases notably when we talk about books, almost reaching the 25% (exactly 24,37%, 29 female writers against 90 male writers).



What is the reason for this difference between these fields? Probably (IMHO) the difficulties women have historically found to be in the position of a leader of group of people. Apart of the creative matters, a movie director is the responsible of a sometimes large group of professionals (historically mostly male). The crystal ceiling that prevents women to reach to directive positions is well-known aand still present. The music recordings does not imply such a large group of people and in most of the items selected as record of the year the producer was a male, with the female artist acting as lead vocalist. In fact none of the female records of the year feature women as sole songwriters and producers.
But writing is another matter. Writing is a solitary process that don't require to lead a group of people, it's a creative process that usually begins and ends in the loneliness of your room or office. The crystal ceiling was here but mainly for edition issues, like Emily Brontë using a male pseudonym for her "Wuthering Heights" or Mary Shelley having to publish anonymously her "Frankenstein." Fortunately these days are over. Or not?


Race bias

Even if this is an issue mostly American a lot is written about the bias against black artists (I won't use the term African American here because there are some black artists on the lists coming from UK or Nigeria). Let's check if there are differences between the three main lists also including artist of Asian ethnicity.

Again (like it happened with women) the biggest difference was on the movies department, with only 3 African-American directors (2,77%). There were however a significant number of Asian directors, with names as illustrious as Akira Kurosawa, Yasujirô Ozu, Edward Yang, Wong Kar-Wai and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.



The percentage of black writers is significantly higher (10,92%), with 9 books written by African-American writers and other 4 written by black writers from UK and Nigeria.



But the big change comes with the music. 47 records of the year (the 42,72%) were released by black artists, all of them African Americans except one Jamaican, obviously Bob Marley.



The explanation here is much easier. The African American writers and filmmakers have produced a significant amount of masterpieces (if mostly in recent times), with even a book of the decade ("Beloved" by Toni Morrison). But their cinematographic and literary language, even being brilliant, is not as unique as the language of the African American musicians. The styles created by the black musicians of the USA (Jazz, Blues, Gospel, Do-Wop, Rhythm & Blues, Soul, Funk, Disco, Hip Hop, House, Contemporary R&B) defined the music of the 20th century and for sure are going to continue defining the music of the 21st century. Good black music can easily combine (even simultaneously) the rhythm and the blues, the music for the body and the music for the soul, the music for joy and the music for sorrow, Motown and Delta Blues, Funk and Deep Soul, rave parties with Chicago House and smoky clubs with Bop jam sessions. Enough said, isn't it?


Language bias

And now the most unfair of these biases (IMHO), the language. Or should I say the ethnocentrism? Most of the lists featured on the three meta-list sites comes from USA and UK sources. And even the sources from the rest of the world include mainly writers, filmmakers and musicians from English-speaking countries. I'm perfectly aware that USA (and also UK) had been the major cultural force during the 20th and the 21st centuries, tied with its geopolitical and economic pre-eminence. Probably in an hypothetical list like this one made two centuries ago French would be the dominant language (and Spanish two centuries before, and Italian two centuries before, and so on). And who knows if in the next century Chinese will be the dominant language? But let's check the differences…

The number of songs of the year sung in a language different than English is tiny, only 4 songs out of 110 (a 3,63%). Italian (2, Enrico Caruso), French (Édith Piaf) and Spanish (Lidya Mendoza) were the only languages represented.



We have a higher percentage of non-English books, a 15,12%. If we have considered the books olf the previous centuries we have had a much higher percentage but, as I told, the most significant literary works of the 20th and 21st centuries came from the English-speaking world. The other languages we can find were German (6), French (4), Spanish (3), Italian (2), Czech, Portuguese and Japanese.



But the highest percentage of this 9 graphics comes with the non-English movies. Almost half of the movies of the year (46/108, 42,59%) selected by the critics were not filmed in English. And I haven't included two Danish films (by Lars Von Trier) because the original language was English. We can find here a lot of different languages, chronologically French, Swedish, German, Russian, Italian, Japanese, Danish, Spanish, Polish, Mandarin, Serbian, Cantonese, Portuguese and Thai.



And I'm afraid but I don't have an explanation for this. Maybe the literary and music critics should make an effort and include a higher percentage of non-English works, I don't know. But the reason why the movie critics are more inclusive (in respect to "foreign" movies) than the other critics is not clear to me.


So you can see it, the literary critics got more consideration for the female writers, the music critics got more consideration for black musicians and the movie critics got more consideration for filmmakers from around the world. And a final observation, things are getting better on recents years. If we break down the lists in two parts, the final 25 years and the previous 118 years we find:
- The percentage of female writers increases from 20,21% to 40% (10/25), the percentage of black writers increases from 6,45% to 26,92% while the percentage of books not written in English decreases from 17,02% to 8%.
- The percentage of female filmmakers increases from 1,19% to 8%, the percentage of black filmmakers increases from 1,2% to 8% and the percentage of movies not in English slightly increases from 42,16 to 44%.
- The percentage of female singers/musicians increases from 15,29% to 20% but the percentage of black musicians reduces slightly from 43,52% to 40% and the percentage of records not in English goes from 4,70% to 0%.
So globally we can say that the percentage of females and blacks on these three art fields is slowly but surely increasing while the language barrier is still here…
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Pulitzers, Oscars and Grammys

Post by Honorio »

Pulitzers, Oscars and Grammys

And finally I would like to compare the lists on this thread with probably the most important awards on the three categories. The 3 meta-lists of the websites are made of votes from critics who create lists of best works of different periods (all-time, decade, years) selecting works released many years before so they surely have in mind the influence of a given work on posterior works. So they are aware of the "test of time" while end-of-year prizes don't have this kind of information. So these awards could be indicative of the contemporary acclaim. So, let's check if the winners of these prizes stood the test of time.



Pulitzer

This prize is different to the other two in the sense that is given by a jury, so after all there are critics the ones who take the final decision. So it's no wonder that the correlation with the general book lists is much higher than the other two. 39 of the 92 books (42,91%) ended in the Top 1000 of TheGreatestBooks web page. And the mean position of these 39 books was 402,2. Moreover 17 of these Pulitzer Prizes for fiction were book of the year on the list of this thread.

Here it is the whole list (the coincidences with the books of the year are bolded):
1918 | His Family | Ernest Poole | #1624
1919 | The Magnificent Ambersons | Booth Tarkington | #855
1921 | The Age of Innocence | Edith Wharton | #109
1922 | Alice Adams | Booth Tarkington | #1565
1923 | One of Ours | Willa Cather | #1624
1924 | The Able McLaughlins | Margaret Wilson | #1559
1925 | So Big | Edna Ferber | #1553
1926 | Arrowsmith | Sinclair Lewis | #387
1927 | Early Autumn | Louis Bromfield | #1637
1928 | The Bridge of San Luis Rey | Thornton Wilder | #697
1929 | Scarlet Sister Mary | Julia Peterkin | #1650
1930 | Laughing Boy | Oliver La Farge | #1640
1931 | Years of Grace | Margaret Ayer Barnes | #1657
1932 | The Good Earth | Pearl S. Buck | #262
1933 | The Store | Thomas Sigismund Stribling | #1635
1934 | Lamb in His Bosom | Caroline Miller | #1545
1935 | Now in November | Josephine Winslow Johnson | #1643
1936 | Honey in the Horn | Harold L. Davis | #1604
1937 | Gone With the Wind | Margaret Mitchell | #92
1938 | The Late George Apley | John P. Marquand | #1556
1939 | The Yearling | Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings | #645
1940 | The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck | #31
1942 | In This Our Life | Ellen Glasgow | #1645
1943 | Dragon's Teeth | Upton Sinclair | #1644
1944 | Journey in the Dark | Martin Flavin | #1601
1945 | A Bell for Adano | John Hersey | #1652
1947 | All the King's Men | Robert Penn Warren | #118
1948 | Tales of the South Pacific | James A. Michener | #580
1949 | Guard of Honor | James Gould Cozzens | #1599
1950 | The Way West | A. B. Guthrie, Jr | #1583
1951 | The Town | Conrad Richter | #1566
1952 | The Caine Mutiny | Herman Wouk | #1641
1953 | The Old Man and the Sea | Ernest Hemingway | #64
1955 | A Fable | William Faulkner | #927
1956 | Andersonville | MacKinlay Kantor | #523
1958 | A Death in the Family | James Agee | #451
1959 | The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters | Robert Lewis Taylor | #1611
1960 | Advise and Consent | Allen Drury | #1627
1961 | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | #44
1962 | The Edge of Sadness | Edwin O'Connor | #1563
1963 | The Reivers | William Faulkner | #1544
1965 | The Keepers of the House | Shirley Ann Grau | #1586
1966 | The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter | Katherine Anne Porter | #1294
1967 | The Fixer | Bernard Malamud | #1096
1968 | The Confessions of Nat Turner | William Styron | #1266
1969 | House Made of Dawn | N. Scott Momaday | #1267
1970 | The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford | Jean Stafford | #1499
1972 | Angle of Repose | Wallace Stegner | #845
1973 | The Optimist's Daughter | Eudora Welty | #1489
1975 | The Killer Angels | Michael Shaara | #265
1976 | Humboldt's Gift | Saul Bellow | #370
1978 | Elbow Room | James Alan McPherson | #1621
1979 | The Stories of John Cheever | John Cheever | #158
1980 | The Executioner's Song | Norman Mailer | #1280
1981 | A Confederacy of Dunces | John Kennedy Toole | #151
1982 | Rabbit Is Rich | John Updike | #179
1983 | The Color Purple | Alice Walker | #107
1984 | Ironweed | William Kennedy | #790
1985 | Foreign Affairs | Alison Lurie | #1631
1986 | Lonesome Dove | Larry McMurtry | #694
1987 | A Summons to Memphis | Peter Taylor | #1603
1988 | Beloved | Toni Morrison | #41
1989 | Breathing Lessons | Anne Tyler | #1497
1990 | The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love | Oscar Hijuelos | #1606
1991 | Rabbit at Rest | John Updike | #188
1992 | A Thousand Acres | Jane Smiley | #541
1993 | A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain | Robert Olen Butler | #1547
1994 | The Shipping News | E. Annie Proulx | #478
1995 | The Stone Diaries | Carol Shields | #1262
1996 | Independence Day | Richard Ford | #1085
1997 | Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer | Steven Millhauser | #1656
1998 | American Pastoral | Philip Roth | #154
1999 | The Hours | Michael Cunningham | #1360
2000 | Interpreter of Maladies | Jhumpa Lahiri | #917
2001 | The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay | Michael Chabon | #226
2002 | Empire Falls | Richard Russo | #1493
2003 | Middlesex | Jeffrey Eugenides | #229
2004 | The Known World | Edward P. Jones | #306
2005 | Gilead | Marilynne Robinson | #398
2006 | March | Geraldine Brooks | #1651
2007 | The Road | Cormac McCarthy | #249
2008 | The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | Junot Díaz | #202
2009 | Olive Kitteridge | Elizabeth Strout | #1546
2010 | Tinkers | Paul Harding | #1569
2011 | A Visit from the Goon Squad | Jennifer Egan | #695
2013 | The Orphan Master's Son | Adam Johnson | #1495
2014 | The Goldfinch | Donna Tartt | #857
2015 | All the Light We Cannot See | Anthony Doerr | #1568
2016 | The Sympathizer | Viet Thanh Nguyen | #861
2017 | The Underground Railroad | Colson Whitehead | #1373
2018 | Less | Andrew Sean Greer | #1620
2019 | The Overstory | Richard Powers | not ranked



Oscar

The Oscars are awards given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences so the prizes depend on the votes of professionals gathered in this organization (more than 8000 in 2018). So, since there are few critics included there, the correlation decreases. The percentage included in TSPDT Top 1000 is similar (35 of the 90 movies, a 38,88%). The main difference is that 34 movies do not appear on the TSPDT Top 2000 (37,77%). So there is little middle ground, almost half of the film didn't stand the test of time (particularly the movies from the 1920s to the 1940s) while especially from the 1970s on there were more coincidence with the critics. It's important to note that the criteria for including recent movies in TSPDT is quite restrictive, so many of the non-ranked movies of the last decade may show in the future. The mean position of the 35 movies was 379,54 and 7 movies of the year according to TSPDT won an Oscar.

Here it is the whole list (the coincidences with the movies of the year are bolded):
1929 | Wings | William A Wellman | not ranked
1930 | The Broadway Melody | Harry Beaumont | not ranked
1931 | All Quiet on the Western Front | Lewis Milestone | #742
1932 | Cimarron | Wesley Ruggles | not ranked
1933 | Grand Hotel | Edmund Goulding | not ranked
1934 | Cavalcade | Frank Lloyd | not ranked
1935 | It Happened One Night | Frank Capra | #331
1936 | Mutiny on the Bounty | Frank Lloyd | not ranked
1937 | The Great Ziegfeld | Robert Z. Leonard | not ranked
1938 | The Life of Emile Zola | William Dieterle | not ranked
1939 | You Can't Take It with You | Frank Capra | #1908
1940 | Gone with the Wind | Victor Fleming | #109
1941 | Rebecca | Alfred Hitchcock | #612
1942 | How Green Was My Valley | John Ford | #326
1943 | Mrs. Miniver | William Wyler | not ranked
1944 | Casablanca | Michael Curtiz | #35
1945 | Going My Way | Leo McCarey | not ranked
1946 | The Lost Weekend | Billy Wilder | not ranked
1947 | The Best Years of Our Lives | William Wyler | #206
1948 | Gentleman's Agreement | Elia Kazan | not ranked
1949 | Hamlet | Laurence Olivier | #1420
1950 | All the King's Men | Robert Rossen | not ranked
1951 | All About Eve | Joseph L. Mankiewicz | #116
1952 | An American in Paris | Vincente Minnelli | #782
1953 | The Greatest Show on Earth | Cecil B. DeMille | not ranked
1954 | From Here to Eternity | Fred Zinnemann | #1656
1955 | On the Waterfront | Elia Kazan | #153
1956 | Marty | Delbert Mann | not ranked
1957 | Around the World in 80 Days | Michael Anderson | not ranked
1958 | The Bridge on the River Kwai | David Lean | #373
1959 | Gigi | Vincente Minnelli | not ranked
1960 | Ben-Hur | William Wyler | #594
1961 | The Apartment | Billy Wilder | #54
1962 | West Side Story | Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins | #318
1963 | Lawrence of Arabia | David Lean | #36
1964 | Tom Jones | Tony Richardson | #1337
1965 | My Fair Lady | George Cukor | #1301
1966 | The Sound of Music | Robert Wise | #439
1967 | A Man for All Seasons | Fred Zinnemann | not ranked
1968 | In the Heat of the Night | Norman Jewison | #1612
1969 | Oliver! | Carol Reed | not ranked
1970 | Midnight Cowboy | John Schlesinger | #327
1971 | Patton | Franklin J. Schaffner | #1886
1972 | The French Connection | William Friedkin | #563
1973 | The Godfather | Francis Ford Coppola | #7
1974 | The Sting | George Roy Hill | #1099
1975 | The Godfather: Part II | Francis Ford Coppola | #22
1976 | One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | Milos Forman | #114
1977 | Rocky | John G Avildsen | #562
1978 | Annie Hall | Woody Allen | #89
1979 | The Deer Hunter | Michael Cimino | #162
1980 | Kramer vs. Kramer | Robert Benton | #1313
1981 | Ordinary People | Robert Redford | #1794
1982 | Chariots of Fire | Hugh Hudson | #1506
1983 | Gandhi | Richard Attenborough | #1198
1984 | Terms of Endearment | James L. Brooks | #1385
1985 | Amadeus | Milos Forman | #330
1986 | Out of Africa | Sydney Pollack | #1239
1987 | Platoon | Oliver Stone | #1172
1988 | The Last Emperor | Bernardo Bertolucci | #813
1989 | Rain Man | Barry Levinson | not ranked
1990 | Driving Miss Daisy | Bruce Beresford | not ranked
1991 | Dances with Wolves | Kevin Costner | #1284
1992 | The Silence of the Lambs | Jonathan Demme | #382
1993 | Unforgiven | Clint Eastwood | #236
1994 | Schindler's List | Steven Spielberg | #222
1995 | Forrest Gump | Robert Zemeckis | #509
1996 | Braveheart | Mel Gibson | #1572
1997 | The English Patient | Anthony Minghella | #1869
1998 | Titanic | James Cameron | #653
1999 | Shakespeare in Love | John Madden | not ranked
2000 | American Beauty | Sam Mendes | #808
2001 | Gladiator | Ridley Scott | #1026
2002 | A Beautiful Mind | Ron Howard | not ranked
2003 | Chicago | Rob Marshall | not ranked
2004 | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King | Peter Jackson | #892
2005 | Million Dollar Baby | Clint Eastwood | #818
2006 | Crash | Paul Haggis | not ranked
2007 | The Departed | Martin Scorsese | not ranked
2008 | No Country for Old Men | Joel Coen | #549
2009 | Slumdog Millionaire | Danny Boyle | #1212
2010 | The Hurt Locker | Kathryn Bigelow | #1016
2011 | The King's Speech | Tom Hooper | not ranked
2012 | The Artist | Michel Hazanavicius | not ranked
2013 | Argo | Ben Affleck | not ranked
2014 | 12 Years a Slave | Steve McQueen | not ranked
2015 | Birdman: or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) | Alejandro G. Iñárritu | not ranked
2016 | Spotlight | Tom McCarthy | not ranked
2017 | Moonlight | Barry Jenkins | not ranked
2018 | The Shape of Water | Guillermo Del Toro | not ranked



Grammys

The Grammys are very similar to the Oscars in the sense that the awards are given by the Recording Academy gathering votes from professionals of the organization. In this case the correlation decreases dramatically with a very low correlation with the Acclaimed Music lists. Only 13 songs (out of 61,a 21,31%) were included on the Acclaimed Music Top 1000. And 9 songs weren't even included on the Top 10,000 (even if "This Is America" will surely reach the Top 1000 on the next update). The mean position of the 13 songs was 407,53 and only 1 song with a Grammy for record of the year was also record of the year on Acclaimed Music ("Get Lucky").

Here it is the whole list (the coincidences with the records of the year are bolded):
1959 | Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu (Volare) | Domenico Modugno | #1807
1960 | Mack the Knife | Bobby Darin | #664
1961 | Theme from A Summer Place | Percy Faith | #6720
1962 | Moon River | Henry Mancini | #1856
1963 | I Left My Heart in San Francisco | Tony Bennett | #5207
1964 | Days of Wine and Roses | Henry Mancini | bubbling under
1965 | The Girl from Ipanema | Stan Getz and João Gilberto | #385
1966 | A Taste of Honey | Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass | bubbling under
1967 | Strangers in the Night | Frank Sinatra | #2739
1968 | Up, Up and Away | The 5th Dimension | #3063
1969 | Mrs. Robinson | Simon & Garfunkel | #651
1970 | Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In | The 5th Dimension | #2917
1971 | Bridge over Troubled Water | Simon & Garfunkel | #118
1972 | It's Too Late | Carole King | #548
1973 | The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face | Roberta Flack | #1425
1974 | Killing Me Softly with His Song | Roberta Flack | #679
1975 | I Honestly Love You | Olivia Newton-John | bubbling under
1976 | Love Will Keep Us Together | Captain & Tennille | #4582
1977 | This Masquerade | George Benson | #6097
1978 | Hotel California | Eagles | #113
1979 | Just the Way You Are | Billy Joel | #1914
1980 | What a Fool Believes | The Doobie Brothers | #1166
1981 | Sailing | Christopher Cross | #6667
1982 | Bette Davis Eyes | Kim Carnes | #1670
1983 | Rosanna | Toto | #6746
1984 | Beat It | Michael Jackson | #271
1985 | What's Love Got to Do with It | Tina Turner | #1071
1986 | We Are the World | USA for Africa | #1971
1987 | Higher Love | Steve Winwood | #3150
1988 | Graceland | Paul Simon | #1231
1989 | Don't Worry, Be Happy | Bobby McFerrin | #3682
1990 | Wind Beneath My Wings | Bette Midler | bubbling under
1991 | Another Day in Paradise | Phil Collins | #8437
1992 | Unforgettable | Natalie Cole (With Nat King Cole) | not ranked
1993 | Tears in Heaven | Eric Clapton | #1357
1994 | I Will Always Love You | Whitney Houston | #1751
1995 | All I Wanna Do | Sheryl Crow | #1932
1996 | Kiss from a Rose | Seal | #4998
1997 | Change the World | Eric Clapton | #5555
1998 | Sunny Came Home | Shawn Colvin | #8086
1999 | My Heart Will Go On | Céline Dion | #3184
2000 | Smooth | Santana feat. Rob Thomas | #1429
2001 | Beautiful Day | U2 | #782
2002 | Walk On | U2 | #8449
2003 | Don't Know Why | Norah Jones | #2492
2004 | Clocks | Coldplay | #639
2005 | Here We Go Again | Ray Charles and Norah Jones | not ranked
2006 | Boulevard of Broken Dreams | Green Day | #2401
2007 | Not Ready to Make Nice | Dixie Chicks | #2441
2008 | Rehab | Amy Winehouse | #125
2009 | Please Read the Letter | Robert Plant and Alison Krauss | bubbling under
2010 | Use Somebody | Kings of Leon | #2562
2011 | Need You Now | Lady Antebellum | #8737
2012 | Rolling in the Deep | Adele | #217
2013 | Somebody That I Used to Know | Gotye feat. Kimbra | #1083
2014 | Get Lucky | Daft Punk | #106
2015 | Stay with Me | Sam Smith | #3818
2016 | Uptown Funk | Mark Ronson feat. Bruno Mars | #1950
2017 | Hello | Adele | #1688
2018 | 24K Magic | Bruno Mars | bubbling under
2019 | This Is America | Childish Gambino | not ranked
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