Diamonds Are Forever

John Barry wrote the music and Don Black the words for the title song of the seventh Bond film in 1971, and Shirley Bassey sang it — her second of three. Black's lyric plays on the double meaning of the stones as both jewels and unfaithful lovers, and Barry told Bassey to sing it as though she were addressing a man rather than a diamond. The producer Harry Saltzman disliked it and wanted it dropped; Barry's colleague Albert Broccoli kept it. Kanye West sampled the recording for Diamonds from Sierra Leone in 2005.