‘American Graffiti’ (1973)

Instead of an instrumental score, George Lucas‘ retro teen comedy used wall-to-wall tracks from the late ’50s and early ’60s — 41 choice cuts — and blasted them from the car radios of his Main Street-cruising characters. The result was both an innovation in soundtrack curation and a near-perfect distillation of what the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll sounded like.