Recently in Chuck Eddy Category

"It's intriguing that so many of the best metal albums this year were the ones with no metal in them, by which I mean no guitars." I wrote that eight years ago, at the end of 2003, apparently impressed by certain gothic and/or ambient and/or keyboard-obsessed bands (whom I can no longer identify offhand) who'd taken their heaviness in a rather unexpected direction, to say the least. What I wrote then is certainly not true of metal albums now: my three favorite albums below are absolutely committed to overweight guitar riffs, as metal has been since the very dawn of time. Further down the list, though, there's still plenty of evidence of bands moving their music way beyond the genre's high-volume constrictions and into a territory that — on entire albums in some cases and just a few tracks in others — might make sense as relaxing background music on certain underworld elevators. So: a new age or an old one? Your choice.

Listen now: Metal Roundup, November 2011


1. The Gates of Slumber
The Wretch
This is the sort of Brobdingnagian power-plod you never imagined could come from Indianapolis: super-sized melodies set to wobbling walrus-blubber doom riffs straight out of Saint Vitus, with downcast vocal howls sometimes stumbling into La Brea Tar Pits of reverb or making way for strange Moog-y electronic breaks. Gates of Slumber have no problem going the hard-charging NWOBHM route ("Coven of Cain"), but more often prefer to keep things depressive and nocturnal, as in the 10-ton suicide note "Day of Farewell" and "Iron & Fire," an even heftier album closer that lasts almost 13 minutes. [Chuck Eddy]

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Metal has been around for more than 40 years (or at the very least, since Black Sabbath's original lineup got together the first time), and by now it's hauling around its own canon of what are generally assumed to be classic, world-shaking albums—some of which are every bit as great as people claim, others of which (as with any other genre) aren't.

But this mixtape isn't about those. Nope—these are bands you probably never even heard about, or (if you did) forgot about, or maybe you heard their names and wondered about them but most likely never got around to checking them out, or (in the case of the more familiar names) maybe they started out way more metal than you ever figured. Or at least more "heavy rock"—once upon a time, the two genres were synonyms. That would've been back in the '70s, which takes up a healthy chunk of this playlist. Thought there's plenty from the '80s, too—especially the first third or so of that decade, when thrash and hair metal hadn't quite fully gelled yet, and lots of bands were somehow unknowingly predating both at the same time, all while the New Wave of British (though also often Non-British) Metal was somewhere between a rumor, a mystery and a myth.

To keep things current, this playlist does eventually wind its way into the '90s and '00s, but that stuff's kept to a minimum, since it really hasn't been around long enough to get lost in the dustbin of history quite yet. Whatever. These 50 songs rock your socks off at the school of hard knocks, as Black N Blue used to say. A few are even about eating the rich—or about anarchy, the police, war heroes and stuff. (Occupying Metal, if you will!) Two are shrieked in sexy romance languages; another (by Krokus) concerns a long stick going boom. Plus, five artists —Vandenberg, Heavy Metal Kids, Wild Dogs, Axe and Pat Travers—chronicle what's happening out on the street, or at least claim to in their song titles. And what is happening out there? A knock-down, drag-out rock 'n' roll party, of course! So what are you waiting for?

Click here to hear my Friday Mixtape: Metal That Fell Through the Cracks playlist.

You provide the eggnog and mistletoe (or dreidel and menorah); we'll provide the tunes. That's how holidaze work around here. Of course we've got all the eternal carols and trusty standbys about winter wonderlands, sleigh rides, jingle bells, frosty snowmen, drummer boys, feliz navidads, Santa Claus coming to town and/or Mommy kissing him, God resting merry gentlemen, and chestnuts roasting on open fires — many of them harmonized by legendary girl groups or Motowners or recent rock/pop/R&B stars. And we've got all your favorite ubiquitous seasonal standards of less antiquated vintage, too — from John & Yoko and The Beach Boys and The Waitresses and Mariah Carey and Run-D.M.C. Heck, we even have Neil Diamond deadpanning Adam Sandler's timeless Chanukah hymn.

But we've also stuffed your playlist stocking full of yuletide cooltides you definitely don't hear every year: forgotten goodies from folks like Kurtis Blow, Spinal Tap, Slade, SHeDAISY, August Darnell and Ying Yang Twins; holiday hipster bait from The Raveonettes, Vandals, Smashing Pumpkins, James Chance and Sarge (covering Wham!); and vintage historical performances from Clarence Carter, The Moonglows, Solomon Burke, Dean Martin, Mel Torme and two jovial and jumpable guys named Louis (Jordan and Prima.) Not to mention — last but far from least, given an economy that, once again, may not be conducive to heavy gift-giving — plenty of empathetic examples of income-inequity-and/or-dysfunctional-family-spurred seasonal affective disorder, both sociological (Was [Not Was], David Banner, The Fall, Merle Haggard, Ry Cooder, Montgomery Gentry) and psychological (Sparks, Alan Vega, Cristina, a few bleak midwinter goth bands, Aly & AJ). Which might seem kinda depressing, but those are all perfect party songs too, honest!

Scrooges and Grinches who could totally live without December deserve to celebrate too, right? Bah humbug? No, that's too strong. So deck those halls, trim those trees, raise up cups of Christmas cheer, surprise your secret Santa, gobble fruitcake and get down. Just don't spend so much time around the office-party wassail bowl that you wind up doing that sitting-on-the-Xerox-machine thing, OK? Ho ho ho.

Listen now: Ultimate Holiday Party Playlist

A quarter-century after its release (feel old now?), it is somewhat amusing, amazing and perplexing to remember that, way back then, Bon Jovi's 1986 album Slippery When Wet was actually considered a metal album — if not necessarily by metalheads themselves, then definitely by the rest of the rock world. Even in the realm of hair metal — certainly compared to bands like Guns N' Roses and Mötley Crüe — Bon Jovi just seem so doggone wholesome, at least in retrospect. Still, the power chords were there, and so, to some extent, were the visual trappings: on the backside of the cover, Bon Jovi the band may not look like they'd drowned in a vat of pink mascara and eyeliner, but their hair is pretty teased. Jon Bon himself has the obligatory-for-the-epoch scarf around his neck, and drummer Tico Torres is even wearing tight leopard-skin trousers.

Really, what a few fellas in the band almost look like — given their rhinestone cowboy boots and pants — is a modern regional Mexican group: all they need is fancy cowboy hats! On a steel horse they ride, don'cha know. And they still look Western-ish enough to have inspired Nashville country music since then; seriously, listen to Brantley Gilbert sometime. Heck, Chris Cagle and Montgomery Gentry have even covered "Wanted Dead or Alive" in the past decade. And of course there was also Bon Jovi's own 2006 No. 1 country duet with Jennifer Nettles, "Who Says You Can't Go Home." It all adds up now, right?

Anyway, back to metal. The cover of Slippery When Wet, as all fans know, was originally going to be a buxom lady with her topside stuffed into a drenched T-shirt with the album's title on it. Japan got that one, apparently, but in the U.S. the cover was much less brazen and more modest (and less metal): just the words on what is said to be a rain-soaked Hefty bag. Still, the inner sleeve did show the mostly shirtless band having a charity car wash with lots of skimpily clad models. Warrant were taking notes, no doubt.

A few notable trends in this latest Metal Roundup: (1) More loud rock you might actually hear on the radio than usual, including a couple albums with songs you might even be able to dance to, other than moshing and banging your noggin even, if you were so inclined. (2) A few bands dead-set on reviving the speed-thrash of the '80s — and they all come from the U.S.A., of all places. (3) A few instances of screamo masquerading as anything but. (4) Two albums (by Saviours and Danava) that end with songs about walking into death's tunnel of light. And finally, and perhaps most intriguingly: (5) Releases from three-count-'em-three bands with the word "Earth" in their names. Talk about your global movements! Are heavy metal bands ecologically minded or what? Or maybe they just like that "Earth" was Black Sabbath's original name.

After reading up on the albums below, be sure to check out my Metal Roundup, Late October 2011 playlist.


1. Saviours
Death's Procession
Though they claim to be inspired by speed metal's early giants and flaunt the negative production values to prove it, these Oakland, Calif., throwbacks rarely keep their tempos fast for long — not even in the drumrolled "God's End," which enters whiplashing like 1983 Metallica. But they can stomp. "The Eye Obscene" and the instrumental "Earth's Possession & Death's Procession" are seven-minute wonders of moon-cave ooze; "To the Grave Possessed" tops hearty '70s rock riffs with a manly chorus. Then "Walk to the Light" finishes it all by scaling Power Metal Mountain. [Chuck Eddy]

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"Hipster metal" is not so much a style of music as a state of mind. And we're not necessarily talking about the minds of the musicians themselves, who in most cases will deny the classification entirely. The phrase has probably been around for only a few years, and like similar accusations in other genres ("hipster rap," for instance), it's at least partially a pejorative — implying, as it does, that these aren't Real Metal Bands Listened to by Genuine Honest-to-Satan Metalheads, but rather acts marketed to (and, in some cases, at least tentatively embraced by) theoretically gullible indie rock twerps. Who'll fall for anything, after all, right? And even if they don't, taking an end-run shortcut around metal's troo fan base seems rather unseemly. Or at least, that's what some metal magazines would say — though, to be honest, if those mags weren't at least a wee bit hip themselves, they might not know of such bands at all.

So how do you figure out which bands qualify as hipster metal, anyway? Well, there's an awful lot of guesswork involved, but some reliable telltale signs might include: (1) putting out albums on Matador or Jagjaguwar; (2) having parody song titles; (3) regularly getting booked as the token metal band at festivals conspicuously lacking in metal; (4) sporting ironic-seeming '70s-porn mustaches; (5) having no members who aren't underweight; (6) having members who used to be in Dinosaur Jr.; (7) coming from Brooklyn or Austin; (8) stringing riffs reminiscent of classic metal bands end to end but opting not to have a singer; (9) regularly getting hyped as "psychedelic" or "eclectic"; and/or (10) getting called "metal" by people who don't know any better, despite sounding more like the White Stripes or the Flaming Lips.

Not all of the 25 bands below score high points on that checklist — in fact, a couple might even be considered hipster metal just because they're too rock 'n' roll not to be (plus, there's definite overlap with "stoner rock" and "doom" in certain cases). In fact, a few might even stretch the definition outright. But which ones? You tell us.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Cheat Sheet: Hipster Metal

With Halloween fast approaching, it's hugely appropriate that Rocktober opens with a veritable harvest of scary new metal releases — by big names (Opeth, Mastodon, Alice Cooper, Anthrax) alongside bands you've probably never heard of; by veterans like Anvil taking stock of their hard-luck careers and coagulated upstarts like Elks trying to chart heavy new directions; by proggers and doom goths and boogie dogs and death worshippers and Satanic sailors and ironic cutters-and-pasters; by Swedes and Norwegians and Greeks and Italians and Poles and Canadians and Americans and even some old dudes from Ohio who were their own kind of alt-metal way back in the mid-'70s, when punk was still glam. If you can't find an album to pump your fist to among this high-decibel 15, you might just need a new fist.

After reading-up on the albums below, be sure to check out my Metal Roundup, October 2011 playlist.


1. Opeth
Heritage
The Swedish progressive metal band's first album since 2008 — and the last to feature keyboard player Per Wiberg — opens with a plaintive solo piano piece courtesy of Wiberg before launching into "The Devil's Orchard," which may as well have been written by Yes at the very height of their powers. That's a good thing. The similarities with classic Yes continue through "I Feel the Dark." In an era when all rock music essentially is run through Pro Tools and made soulless, these highly intelligent beings have put out a record as alive as anything released in the '70s — another good thing. — Michael McGuirk

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It's 1983. MTV's still all foofy fake New Wave pop crap from England, and you're stuck in the middle of nowhere in your acid-washed jeans and Quiet Riot-patched denim jacket and greasy zits and hockey hair, bored out of your teenaged mind behind a locked door in your mom's house, and you just wanna rock \m/!! These are lonely times to be a hesher — decent AC/DC and Alice Cooper and Van Halen albums are already seeming like a distant memory (Diver Down?? Who the heck were they fooling with that one?), and speed metal and hair metal have barely even started to stir, much less split the world in two. So if you want good metal, you'll have to hunt for it — and maybe even settle for the occasional Journey or Night Ranger (or Pat Benatar or Joan Jett, for that matter) song. Which is cool, 'cause they kinda rock too, right? At this point, Survivor's not that far from Dokken! But what you really crave is the real stuff, and you're gonna find it even if you have to spend paper-route money on a Kerrang subscription to learn what "NWOBHM" spells. Today's your lucky day, 'cause we're here to help. This playlist piles on 50 — count 'em, 50 — tunes from the era: couple AOR ringers, maybe, but mainly heavy Chevy Novas to boost your metal health. Metal on metal, as Anvil put it. Because dudester, your mullet deserves to bang.

Click here to listen to our entire playlist: Senior Year, 1983: Fast Times at Hesher High.

More or less invented and/or exhumed (by a band called Death, naturally) in the sweltering swamps of Florida in the mid-'80s — though perhaps anticipated by any number of violently thrashing ensembles in Switzerland, Germany, the north of England and the San Francisco Bay before then — death metal takes ugliness to an extreme. Since its inception, it has occasionally got a smidgen more melodic, technical or grindcorelicious, yet it is still primarily comprised of bands named for autopsies, carcasses, obituaries and deicides. They growl like scary monsters (and not so you can make out many lyrics) about toxic garbage, bloody gore, internal bleeding, broken hands, dehydration and all manner of great green gobs of regurgitated monkey guts. And oh yeah: suffocation! Lots and lots of suffocation. Death-metal bands love that! Here are some to know.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Cheat Sheet: Death Metal

So anyway: the extremely sore arm came first. Was initially scared it might be carpal tunnel. Googling suggested otherwise. Was relieved to learn that it being on my right side was good news. (Left can be a sign of heart failure!) Doctor prescribed exercises and ointments and ice packs. Very weird, since I don't play tennis, but so be it.

Then, just as that was starting to heal, my stomach started hurting. A lot. After a couple days — longer than heartburn's ever lasted before — it got unbearable, so I got concerned. CAT Scan said acute appendicitis (which, hey, beats kidney stones or an ulcer), so I went to the emergency room and they took it out and I slept at the hospital for a night. And the thing about your appendix is, once it's gone, it's gone — didn't need the thing in the first place! Tummy's fine now; arm's still sore, just not as much.

All of that happened in the past couple months, so naturally I constructed a playlist of music that helped me through. Most of the songs don't relate directly to said medical conditions, though at least two prominently feature pills (and one a hospital bed), and several concern trying to pay bills when there are more than enough of them to go around. But usually they're not too depressing about it. (Well, maybe once or twice.) There are two consecutive, highly boisterous songs about the economic difficulties of being an all-woman band on the road, which may well have nothing to do with the topic at hand, but you never know. There is also a song about assembly lines followed by a song about grocery lines followed by a song about unemployment lines — which happened entirely by accident, I swear! Genres include vocal jazz, country, arena prog, funk, New Wave, didgeridoo soul-rock, gospel, Italo disco, and plenty of hard rock and metal, not necessarily in that order. Hey, whatever works, right? Can't vouch for you, but these worked for me.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Songs to Recover from Acute Appendicitis and Tennis Elbow With

We all reacted to the horrible events of September 11, 2001, in our own ways — wherever we were, whatever we were doing, whichever CD or radio station or fizzy pop single we first reached for to help us cope. Here, Rhapsody's editors offer their own musical perspectives, from saber-rattling country to hopeful worship music, from pop-punk bromides to plaintive protest songs, from the momentary tentativeness of comedy to the fieriness of hip-hop to the transcendence of jazz. As Sonny Rollins put it, "Maybe music can help. I don't know, but we have to try something." Here's what we tried.

Sifting Through the Ashes in New York City

I was in Park Slope, Brooklyn, that morning, about to board the subway for work in Lower Manhattan, when my roommate told me I should turn the TV on. After the second plane hit, I went up to the roof of our apartment building and watched the smoke. Cars were dusted with ashes as far south as where I lived. I spent the day switching between staring at TV news and trying to drown out the hell in my head (and the fear that the Army might call me back up) with desolate ambient doomsday metal: Neurosis, My Dying Bride, Amorphis droning about mushroom clouds.

It's been one hell of a summer — tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, nonstop rain or nonstop drought, temperatures at or above the global warming range. Plus riots on several continents, wars that won't quit, and governments and media succumbing to scandal and ineptness and inertia. Really does feel like end times, sometimes.

Looks like a job for … heavy metal! Which of course has been warning us of such dire conditions for decades. Maybe that conversation is not carried on by all these key doom metal, death metal, thrash metal, black metal, power metal, pirate metal, folk metal, ambient metal, stoner rock, noise rock and plain old hard rock albums from recent months. But they're deadly even when they don't.

While reading, check out my companion playlist: Metal Roundup: Dog Days Of Summer 2011


1. Gentlemans Pistols
At Her Majesty's Pleasure
James Atkinson is an efficiently howling he-man, but what makes these Brits exciting is their playing — especially when drum breaks get funky like metal hasn't in eons, in hard-swingers like "The Ravisher." They open at a Sabbath/Free midnight-crawler midtempo, structuring concentric riffs into tough stomps. But before long they're racing into Thin Lizzy tromp-and-roll overdrive in "Your Majesty," tripping out like '71 Alice Cooper in "Into the Haze" and conjuring Dust's scorched prehistoric street-boogie in "Sherman Tank." "Lethal Woman," finally, ends it all with a jam taking flight. — Chuck Eddy

So first off, welcome to the '90s! Even if it still kind of feels more like the last gasp of the '80s: hair metal is almost over but doesn't know it yet, so it's still all over MTV, with songs about cherry pie (RIP Jani Lane) and unskinny bopping and staying up all night and sleeping all day and living in a house of pain, about girls named Michelle and Janie and Jayne. Then there's Jane's Addiction and Faith No More (with their exploding piano and flopping fish) and that new band King's X, whose singer is black and Christian and 40 years old — if you think about it, loud rock's starting to get a little odd and arty again. Maybe everyone's just weirded out that Nelson have the best hair.

Unless Vanilla Ice does, that is, with his rag-top down so his hair can blow. (Except not really — that pompadour's at a standstill!) But take heed, 'cause he's a lyrical poet, killing your brain like a poisonous mushroom and neck-and-neck with MC Hammer in the contest for America's Favorite Rapper. (Hammer's definitely the better dancer, though.) Worst Hair honors may actually go to Sinéad O'Connor, who doesn't have any, and dances sorta clumsy, to boot. As for who has the better smash ballad named "Hold On," Wilson Phillips or En Vogue — it's a toss-up.

But either way, the decision's in your hands. Every weekday, just call your votes in to 1-800-DIAL-MTV toll-free on your parents' landline, then sit down with a New Coke and watch the Top 10 requests. Who's it gonna be? Bell Biv Devoe? Jane Child? Roxette? Snap? Enuf Z'Nuff? You gotta tune in to find out. Most songs in the playlist below probably placed sometime during the year, for better or worse. It's in your face but you can't grab it. U can't touch this, but nothing compares 2 U.

Click here to listen to our entire playlist: Senior Year, 1990: Dial MTV After School.

Obits for Warrant's Jani Lane, who was found dead in an L.A. Comfort Inn the evening of Thursday, August 11, will tell you he fronted a band that defined rock's Sunset Strip hair-metal era and the hedonistic "excesses" thereof, with silly sex songs like "Cherry Pie" and power ballads like "Heaven." Lots of them will mention the alcohol and drug abuse and drunken driving he'd fallen into, and most will say something about his hair, which in his prime was as pretty as pretty-boy hair comes. But there's lots more to know.

So some cannier obituaries might go even further, and cite a surprisingly impressive and formative autobiographical essay Lane wrote for his own website, sometime in the last few years. In it, he talked about being born in Akron in 1964 to two mourning JFK fans who originally named him John Kennedy Oswald ("no joke") but got harassed for it, and how his 13-year-older and one-time Joe Walsh sideman brother turned him on to Rubber Soul and the drums. About how Jani was a Pop Warner quarterback whose long-hair-hating ex-Marine high school coach moved him to strong safety, how he fell "deep in love with musical theater" in high school and played the lead in everything from Oklahoma to Arsenic and Old Lace, how by his teens he was already drumming in college bars near Kent State that featured seasoned members of Devo and The Pretenders and The Raspberries. About how high SAT scores placed him in the top-three percentile, how he grew up loving Bowie and disco and funk (and especially "THE BEATLES") as much as '70s hard rock, how after a cover-band stint in Florida, he and a couple pals were inspired by the MTV success of Ratt and Motley Crüe to move to Hollywood and try their hand at the '80s glam-metal thing. About how he had a physical falling-out with his dad, but wound up writing "Heaven" ("I don't need to be a superman as long as you will always be my biggest fan") for him years later, after the tire-making German-American Democrat, Buckeyes/Browns fan and published spirit-writing author who'd fathered Jani was on life support. About how (as everybody knows) Warrant came together and boomed during the hair-metal era, only to bust when the masses turned to grunge, how "Cherry Pie" was a last minute late-Aerosmith imitation written overnight at the urging of a Columbia exec, how two marriages and the band broke up, and Jani was subsequently responsible for two daughters and two solo albums -- only one of which has ever seen the light of the day, at least so far.

Old heavy metal doesn't go away; it just bubbles back to the surface several years later. Well, OK, actually, some chemistry PhDs out there might well argue otherwise. But the recent releases below could certainly be used as supporting evidence for the hypothesis. All of these albums came out (or came out again) in 2011, but were almost entirely recorded anywhere from a few years to a few decades ago — onstage in about half the cases, in the studio in the other half. In the cases of both Ozzy Osbourne albums, all three Queen ones, and the Death one, original versions have been augmented with all sorts of bonus tracks and alternate renditions sure to induce further cranium-banging.

Between the Buried and Me
The Best Of
This North Carolina crew has been active since 2000; at the time of this collection, they had six studio albums under their belts, with the 15 songs here making the case that Between the Buried and Me are the Mars Volta of metalcore. From opener "Mordecai" (off 2003's The Silent Circus) to the stylistic curveball of acoustic love song "Shevanal Take 2," they prove themselves true experimentalists with a proclivity for prog rock. — Mike McGuirk

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There aren't too many genres where you can pinpoint one particular album as the precise starting point, but with the extreme-metal sub-style long known as "grindcore," there's not much room for argument. Napalm Death's debut album, Scum, was 28 songs recorded nine months apart by two almost entirely different lineups of the British band (only common denominator: inhumanly rapid-fire blastbeat-popularizing drummer Mick Harris, who is said to have given grindcore its name). The album was then released in 1987 to punters who couldn't quite tell if this was a novelty act pulling their leg. On the first side — which followed on the heels of six N.D. demos dating back to 1982 and which was originally slated to be half of a split LP with another band — one of the 12 tracks lasts almost four minutes, but the last one, "You Suffer," checks in at a mere 1.316 seconds, making the Guinness Book of World Records for its brevity. The 16 cuts on Side 2 range in length from 16 seconds ("Common Enemy") to a comparatively almost symphonic 1:34, for "M.A.D."

When you've written about music for as many decades as I have, and you're as addicted as I am to constantly hearing more of it, let's just say that things pile up: all formats, from all manner of dollar bins and thrift stores and garage sales, along with whatever comes in the mail. But that's my problem; as a Rhapsody subscriber, you don't even need to dig through crates, because I've already done it for you! Hence, this all-encompassing playlist of stuff I've been listening to in all physical and digital walks of life lately, its title inspired by the Fall's 2010 album Your Future, Our Clutter, whose leadoff (and sort-of title) cut is included, along with four '80s r&b songs at the beginning, four '70s hard rock songs at the end, and 32 other selections of multifarious genres and vintages in between (a veritable top 40!), including a scattered handful from 2011, early Huey Lewis and Ice-T cuts that sound more like Thin Lizzy and Run-D.M.C., and two funky numbers about wearing wigs on the dance floor. Enjoy it, employ it, shake it but don't break it.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Friday Mixtape: My Clutter, Your Future

Metal, as always, is detonating in several directions at once. But one encouraging trend seems to be a return to a certain songfulness — as if, after two decades-plus of metal mainly aiming to be "extreme" at the expense of musicality, the most forward-looking headbangers are suddenly beginning to realize that incomprehensibly thrown-up vocals (for instance) became a cliché eons ago, and having memorable songs doesn't automatically make you less heavy.

Which means, paradoxically, that the most forward-looking bands also frequently tend to be the ones looking backward — to the power-thrash mid-'80s, the NWOBHM early '80s, the biker-boogie '70s, and even the acid-rock late '60s, back before metal was called metal. Not exactly a brand-new development in all cases, but it seems to be picking up steam. It doesn't apply to all 15 of the notable 2011 albums tallied below, but it might apply to most. None of them are for everybody, but all of them are for somebody.

Back in their early days, Motörhead sure seemed like an anomaly in the heavy metal world. Thrash, aka speed metal, hadn't been born yet, and metal had been bloating itself into irrelevance since at least the mid-'70s. In fact, if we're talking about loud rock music that actually managed to exhibit over-the-top energy, punk (and eventually, to some extent, its descendants hardcore and oi!) had dang near supplanted metal — which probably explains why Motörhead reportedly tended to fare better with live crowds when they shared bills with, say, The Damned or The Adverts than when they opened for an increasingly decrepit Ozzy Osbourne.

In retrospect, some other metal had begun to speed up and strip down (somewhat) at the time — at least, by the early '80s, certain grassroots small-label British bands recording on poverty budgets. But those groups were even harder to hear about, certainly in the States, than Motörhead. And it might not matter anyway, since Lemmy Kilmister has long insisted that Motörhead were never even a metal band in the first place — and he may well have had a point. As far as he was concerned (and not unlike his Aussie fellow travelers in AC/DC), he was just in a rock 'n' roll band. He barked through gravel and leather and grime about motorbikes, gambling, amphetamines, customs offices and outrunning the law, not about Vikings, goddesses, wizards and ancient mariners.

Slayer, Reign in Blood (1986) The wicked ibex of the netherworld is carried through his kingdom by his priestly minions as flames tickle his hooves and damned bodies decorate the walls, way down there a mile below earth with all those newly discovered Halicephalous Mephisto nematodes the journal Nature has been raving about lately. Slayer had already lowered metal cover art to the next sizzling sub-basement with 1985's Hell Awaits in '85, but Reign in Blood was a record-breaking heatwave that's yet to be equaled. Still, what with global warming and all, who the hell knows what's in store? Temp: 3400ºC / 6140ºF. Metal melted: Tungsten.
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Therion, Symphony Masses: Ho Drakon Ho Megas (1993) I don't know Swedish, but judging from this record's scorching cover art, "drakon" probably means "fire-breathing dragon," "megas" means he's really really huge, and "hos" are "zombies playing violin while Stockholm bakes." This weekend's ski trip has been hereby cancelled! Temp: 3025ºC / 5477ºF. Metal melted: Osmium.
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Deicide, To Hell With God (2003) Lots and lots of skeletons (at least 15, but it's kind of hard to count given that there also seem to be heads on sticks, which look aggravatingly similar) surrounding some fellow on top of a mountain with hands outstretched to the sun. And not only is the entire landscape a towering inferno, so is the band's logo! Temp: 1770ºC / 3220ºF. Metal melted: Platinum.
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Death, The Sound of Perseverance (1998) Simple but effective image: a giant pointy cave o' fire, ready to swallow you up like it's a brick oven and you're a pizza. When you come from Florida, heat is just a fact of life. Temp: 1670ºC / 3040ºF. Metal melted: Titanium.
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Heaven & Hell, The Devil You Know (2009) In which ancient metal geezers (Ronnie James Dio again, Tony Iommi, Vinny Appice and Geezer Butler himself) beat almost all those church-burning young bucks at their own game — well, at least on the cover, which depicts a lamprey-lipped Lucifer speaking with three forked tongues and sporting a pair of barbed and thorny horns and a serpent-wrapped scepter. That the crucifix behind him is withstanding the flames may be a miracle, of sorts. Temp: 1536ºC / 2797ºF. Metal melted: Iron.
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Behemoth, Zos Kia Cultus (2003) Interesting thing about this trio of blackened-death-metal Poles: all their other album covers (they have several) seem to be gray, black or midnight blue, as their dusky subject matter may well require. But this one is red red red all the way — with a large demonic goat-man sitting on his throne, basking in the helter-skelter swelter. He's got two saber-toothed fangs worthy of a carnivorous walrus, four much-tattooed arms and a couple spear-like weapon thingamajigs. Don't want to rush to judgment, but I'll take a wild guess that he's up to no good. Temp: 1510ºC / 2750ºF. Metal melted: Stainless steel.
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W.A.S.P., Babylon (2009) A colleague recommended these flunk-like-a-beasters' 1984 debut for this competition, but though that one sure does feature some unhealthy dungeon torture, W.A.S.P. didn't actually release their hottest-looking album 'til a quarter-century later. Maybe their best album, too, but what matters here is those four horsemen of the apocalypse riding their trusty steeds over the smoldering coals of the underworld. Of course, if they were really brave, they'd walk. Temp: 1453ºC / 2647ºF. Metal melted: Nickel.
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Morbid Angel, Blessed Are the Sick (2003) Sneaky one, this: looks like just a river of goop. Glowing tangerine-colored goop, but still. Yet reportedly, it's actually a reproduction of Satan's Treasures, an 1895 Belgian symbolist painting by Jean Delville wherein, in Wikipedia's words, "the artist depicts Satan with a wild, fiery head of hair and huge red tentacles instead of wings. Scarlet waves surround his left arm, as he presides over a river of unconscious men and women." Honestly, it still just looks like a river of goop to me, but I guess I'll take their word for it. Temp: 1063ºC / 1945ºF. Melted melted: Gold.
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Holy Grail, Crisis in Utopia (2010) Know that Black Sabbath line about "Satan laughing, spreads his wings"? Cool, what about that Meat Loaf line about "a bat out of hell"? Well, this album cover cleverly combines both images, except the Satan-bat is more like a pterodactyl, and there's sticky stuff dripping off his wings onto a skeleton in an orange-ashen, bonfire-ravished graveyard with a city skyline in the background. But the city, oddly, does not appear to be in flame, with rock 'n' roll or otherwise. Temp: 961ºC / 1760ºF. Melted melted: Silver.
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Death Angel, Relentless Retribution (2010) Have to hand it to these veteran Filipino American Bay Area thrashers: where other metal bands have long settled for just one devil goat, here there's a whole pile of 'em, stacked up like kindling on a campfire, with blazes billowing skyward. Not as frightening as it looks at first, but yo dude, who cares: awesome barbecue weather! Temp: 930ºC / 1710ºF. Metal melted: Brass.
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Dio, Lock Up the Wolves (1990) Confusing title, since usually when metal bands tell you to lock up somebody, it's your wives and daughters; are the wolves actually in danger here? What, does Dio have Sarah Palin and Rick Perry (coyote, same difference) in his band? Anyway, on the cover, two wolves are pulling a dogsled of sorts, driven through the fire-not-snow by a caribou-like creature with several hundred tree branches for legs. Okay, that's confusing, too, but scalding nonetheless, and it's about time reindeers got their revenge. Temp: 640ºC / 1180ºF. Metal melted: Plutonium.
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Cradle of Filth, Nymphetamine (2004) Just in case whoracles aren't sexist enough for you, here's Cradle of Filth to the rescue. Presumably that's Ms. Nymph herself there amid all the flaming combustion — which, curiously, doesn't seem to faze her much. Not sure about the "amphetamine" part: maybe she's just burning up really really fast? Temp: 419.5ºC / 787ºF. Metal melted: zinc.
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In Flames, Whoracle (1997) This one definitely gets ridiculous-album-title points. Also, said "whoracle" has several octopus-style appendages: always a plus. But the fire is merely raging behind her — so far, it has avoided the abandoned-looking medieval-architectural structure in which she's wailing. So she's not quite "in flames." Yet. Temp: 327.5ºC / 621ºF. Metal melted: Lead.
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Celtic Frost, Into the Pandemonium (2003) Ominous painting of an arsoned Dark Ages village at night, with somebody climbing ladders on one of the old buildings. Penalized, though, due to the fact that the ladder-climber might be a fireman, and because the art for their previous record, the aforementioned To Mega Therion, while less hot, looked a whole lot scarier. Temp: 321ºC / 610ºF. Metal melted: Cadmium.
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Hellmouth, Gravestone Skylines (2010) A vulture feasts on cadavers amid roasted-red ravishes of war as patrolling soldiers in nuclear suits charge through: not chilly by any means, but despite the band's bad-breath-reminiscent name, too earth-bound to seem truly hellish. Temp: 232ºC / 449.4ºF. Metal melted: Tin.
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Lamb of God, As the Palaces Burn (2003) Perhaps a castle is indeed cooking somewhere in this picture — they managed the proper vermillion tint, at least — but if so, it looks more like just a big hunk of meat. A delicious rack of lamb, perhaps! But a medium-rare one, at best. Temperature: 97.83ºC/208ºF. Metal melted: Sodium.
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Heavy metal may well be the Viking soundtrack to an endless tundra of ice and snow and darkness, but the genre's also obviously always been obsessed with interminable conflagration amid Dante's nine steamin'-hot circles of Hell. Seriously: if you want a really excellent suntan all year 'round, metal's where to go. Google "kneecap burning sensation," as this writer did recently, and the No. 3 possible cause (right behind "patellar bursitis" and "peripheral neuropathy") is "heavy metal exposure" — true fact! So in honor of metal's "Eternal Summer" (as apparent Beach Boys fans Celtic Frost humorously put it in a song title on 1985's To Mega Therion, which bore impossibly evil-looking H.R. Giger cover art depicting Jesus in Satan's slingshot), we decided to take the temperatures of some of metal's most Hades-blazing album covers. Time to fire up the grill, slap on some Coppertone and stretch out on a lounge chair. It's getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes. Or, as Beavis would put it, "Fire! Fire! Fire!"

As a bonus, here's a playlist of metal songs about summer and/or extreme heat: Hotter Than Hell: Heavy Metal's Eternal Summer.

Click here to see the first album: Lamb of God, As the Palaces Burn

You had a job waitin' after your graduation — 50 thou a year would buy a lot of beer. You were doin' all right, gettin' good grades; future was so bright, you had to wear shades! A growing economy, inflation down, employment up, Reagan midway through his second term, Top Gun in theaters — triumphalism all around! The music biz's future looked slightly less certain, but there was hope in new technology: "Annual record sales continue to fall," noted a 1986 Detroit Free Press piece, "while CD sales climb faster than the industry expected." The future wasn't punk kids buying Metallica/Beastie Boys/Run-D.M.C. vinyl, no way: it was upwardly mobile grown-ups who could afford shiny discs by Dire Straits or Robert Palmer, or Paul Simon's Graceland. So the music got super tasteful, almost always using the same antiseptic cocaine-studio drum pulse, even in Van Hagar's hard rock. "With CD production due to catch up to consumer demand in 1987, and with hardware prices continuing to drop," Richard Harrington wrote in the Washington Post, "just about anybody can be a yuppie, at least in terms of sound." Or, to put it another way, "Pick a habit, we got plenty to go around," as L.A. duo David and David sang in "Welcome to the Boomtown," their era-defining, lone Top 40 hit. "All that money makes such a succulent sound."


So here's a playlist full of truly succulent sounds for the young 1986 Distributive Education Clubs of America marketer, entrepreneur and/or middle manager on the rise. Your MBA is mere years away, and it might require a couple all-night cram sessions between frat parties, but like Billy Ocean says, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." Or, for even more inspiration, recall Peter Gabriel in "Big Time": "I'm on my way to making it ... I'll be a big noise with all the big boys/ There's so much stuff I will own." It's a highway to the danger zone, and we don't need another hero, but we're livin' in America and lovin' every minute of it. So be good to yourself. And above all, don't forget to heed the Pet Shop Boys' excellent advice: "You've got the brawn/ I've got the brains/ Let's make lots of money."


Click here to listen to our entire playlist: Senior Year, 1986: Junior Yuppie Business Club.

Truth be told, heavy metal and prog rock have been intertwined since both genres were born. My friend Frank, who is a few years older than me, remembers confusing Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" with King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man" in 1970, when both songs were new. (Interestingly, both were also referenced on Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy 40 years later — coincidence?) And as different as Crimson and Sabbath might sound to us today, what's still clear is that both moved rock away from blues-based rhythms and toward more European concert-hall structures: Sabbath by way of horror-movie soundtracks, maybe — but nonetheless. Of course, compared to most contemporary metal, Sabbath might as well be Muddy Waters.

That's partly because, around the turn of the '80s, bands like Iron Maiden subtracted even more of early metal's R&B groove, and later most thrash bands and their descendants finished the job. In the '70s, being that devoid of African American influence is something only bands like Yes and E.L.P. would've copped to. So Maiden, in fact — from Bruce Dickinson's Shakespearean-actor declamations about ancient mariners and flights of Icarus on down — might just as well be considered a really loud prog band, and maybe would've been had they emerged a few years earlier.

Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell smoke in the auditorium. You know the culprit: Put a tack on teacher's chair, tied a knot in Susie's hair. Always writing on the wall, always goofing in the halls, always throwing spitballs. Walks into the classroom cool and slow, calls the English teacher Daddy-O. And being such a funny fellow (destined to be inducted into the Animal House upon soon entering college no doubt), we can assume that our jokemeister loved plenty of funny songs, right? (National Lampoon High School Yearbook parody writeup on Herbert Leonard "Wing-Ding" Weisenheimer: "knows the real lyrics to 'Louie Louie'.")

Well, in-depth research has indicated that 1958 was probably the funniest year for funny songs ever; even if The Coasters wouldn't hit with "Charlie Brown" until a year later, "Yakety Yak" was still pretty much a laugh riot. As were plenty of other vocal-group R&B smashes and — even more so — teen exploitation beep-beep-short-short-splish-splash novelty numbers that weren't even real rock 'n' roll at all. David Seville's "Witch Doctor" was the No. 1 song in the country for three weeks in the spring; Sheb Wooley's "The Purple People Eater" was No. 1 for six weeks in the summer. "Yakey Yak," The Silhouettes' "Get a Job," The Everly Brothers' "Bird Dog" (first line: "Johnny is a joker, he's a bird, a very funny joker"), and The Champs' "Tequila" — class-clown favorites all — topped the pop chart during '58 as well. The Big Bopper did a song with both the Witch Doctor and Purple People Eater in it, and rockabilly juvenile delinquents were still raving; Eddie Cochran wanted a job almost as much as the Silhouettes did.

Anyway, these trends and more — including a couple numbers that'd probably be deemed politically incorrect today, so be forewarned — are reflected in the playlist here. If our class clown was truly familiar with Louis Prima, I guess he must've had hilarious parents as well.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Senior Year, 1958: Class Clown

Heavy metal was always about technology (as in Iggy and the Stooges: "watch out honey 'cause I'm using technology"). The genre largely emerged out of factory towns like Birmingham, England, and Detroit, Mich., at the turn of the '70s, and its distortion and feedback were obviously dependent on electrical energy and mechanical appendages. Guitars, amps, pedals, fuzzboxes, Mellotrons: an electric funeral pyre, as Black Sabbath put it.

So when industrial noisemakers, disco producers, and hip-hop DJs put synthesizers and beatboxes to abrasive percussive use in the late '70s and early '80s, it's no shock that certain wonky metal gear geeks were taking notes. The first major industrial metal mergers actually came, oddly enough, from a side of the fence then deemed "post punk" — I'm mainly talking Killing Joke here. But before long, K.J.'s hefty, clangorous, doomsday trance-dance inspired any number of rebellious upstarts in Chicago (Ministry, etc.) and Germany (KMFDM, etc.) and the U.K. (Godflesh, etc.) to put dub in their din and vice versa. Before long, Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie were taking the shtick multiplatinum, begetting copycat scrungers in small prairie towns who hit the thrift stores for sequencers and samplers of their own. Somewhere in there, digital hardcore and crabcore happened. This rundown of 20 landmark albums charts industrial metal's history: the good, bad and proudly ugly.

Things ain't what they used to be, and this ain't the Summer of Love. By 1968, the drugs were getting uglier, the draft was still in full swing, bikes were getting badder, and music was growing heavier by the minute.

It wasn't quite metal yet, though that was right around the corner just like Altamont, but acid-rock for sure. And the kids most likely to blast such stuff were also the scariest guys in the whole school, the ones who enjoyed senior year so much they were doing it for the third or fourth time; the ones who maybe didn't talk a whole lot but carried a mean ratchet wrench, and knew how to fix coal-black fuel-injected 283-horsepower-engine '57 Chevies or both of your kneecaps with it. Other popular hobbies: Hertz donuts, Indian rope burns, swirlies, pink bellies, purple nurples, atomic wedgies, royal flushes, creating mouths full of bloody Chicklets. All tactics that necessitate a soundtrack that's not full of flowers and bunnies, so here's a playlist of the darkest, heaviest, most threatening grease-monkey music 1968 had to offer — proto-metal, post-garage, frat rock, biker boogie, loud psych, even a Spaghetti western film theme and two country hits about going to prison. Which maybe your bullying master of industrial and automotive arts will soon, if you're lucky. And if Vietnam or the Hell's Angels don't get to him first.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Senior Year, 1968: Shop-Class Thugs Waiting Behind the School to Beat You Up

Whether the genre is still evolving in any significant way remains to be seen — and may not be clear until we can look back with decades of hindsight, truth be told — but 2011 is certainly already shaping up as a productive year for heavy metal. Below, with three months down, behold a lucky 13 of the year’s more visible releases so far, ranging from hardcore crossovers to hair-metal holdovers to Satanic ambiance to Gothic atmosphere to numerous dark and diverse shades of heaviness and metallurgy in between.


Between the Buried and Me
Best Of
This North Carolina metalcore unit has been active since 2000. At the release of this collection, the band has six studio albums under its belt. The 15 songs on Best Of make the case that Between the Buried and Me are like the Mars Volta of metalcore. From opener "Mordecai," off 2003's The Silent Circus, to the stylistic curveball of acoustic love song "Shevanel Take 2," the band proves itself true experimentalists, with a proclivity for prog rock. — Mike McGuirk

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Led Zeppelin were four singular, superhuman musicians with such an iconic, gigantic sound that any rock band ripping it off is basically setting itself up for failure. Or rather, iconic, gigantic sounds, I should say — as Robert Plant put it when I interviewed him for Creem magazine way back in the late '80s, "some of it was dance music, some of it was music for folk clubs, some of it was music to play in hippie bookshops." Not to mention Celtic-via-Appalachian-via-Mississippi blues, earth-shattering metal, heavy swinging funk, even a pinch or two of rockabilly and reggae and Ritchie Valens, sometimes all at the same time, and rarely within the capabilities of mere mortals. Another thing Plant did a lot of in that interview was make fun of David Coverdale. And yet Coverdale's band Whitesnake — and Kingdom Come, The Cult, Soundgarden, Jane's Addiction, Billy Squier, Heart, U2 and several decades' worth of other bands you may never have heard of — went ahead and tried to Zep things up regardless. Some of them pulled it off better than others.

Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime occupies a singular niche in the history of heavy metal. In 1988 — at the outset of that strange little window between the MTV reigns of hair metal and grunge — a band who on its previous album had totally looked like new-romantic fops decides to trade in the cross-dressing for deep thinking. So they make a complicated, convoluted concept album about, well, all sorts of important stuff, but the sinister side effects of changing technology (almost a decade before OK Computer by their fellow Pink Floyd fans Radiohead) certainly figures in big-time. As, apparently, do conspiracies of the wealthy, brain control, prostitutes disguised as nuns, and revolutionaries setting fire to the White House.

It would take record companies a few more years to take the phenomenon into account in their marketing endeavors, but one neat thing about New Wave at the dawn of the '80s was that if you didn't consider yourself one of the popular kids in your class — and were too much a square peg to identify with your older brother's hard rock and disco — it suddenly felt like there was music for you out there.

Before Devo/Talking Heads/Elvis Costello/Joe Jackson/Lene Lovich/The B-52's/The Buggles (or even Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen), there weren't exactly a whole lot of rock stars who looked like they could've been on the debate team. So if your idea of a good time was, say, betting on which washing machine would finish first at the local laundromat, you now had your own musical niche — one that would (down the line) just maybe make you cooler than the jocks and burnouts after all. Meanwhile, perhaps you and your nerdy friends were discovering The Rocky Horror Picture Show (technically a few years old, but it sure didn't seem like it), or finding out about Weird Al on Dr. Demento's radio show, or starting to wear skinny ties. (How about a pair of pink sidewinders, and a bright orange pair of pants?) A year later, MTV went on the air, and video would start killing radio stars for real. But in 1980, the secret was still yours.

If you want to get more specific, the boys' room we're talking about here probably would have been somewhere in the upper Midwest, out in the suburbs. And the boys smoking in the stalls at the moment (after "checkin' out the halls, makin' sure the coast is clear," as Brownsville Station put it) would've been the kind who regularly watched Don Kirshner's Rock Concert and Midnight Special (which had both started airing in 1973), and read Creem magazine.

And come to think of it, it could just as well be a girls' room — people were known to smoke in those too, y'know. Or a designated smoking area (are those even allowed anymore?), outside near the industrial arts end of the school. So we're probably talking burnouts, sure, but the truth is, the jocks and geeks and cheerleaders might've listened to much of the same music — and smoked much of the same vegetation, for that matter. Hey, it was the '70s, dude! So the teenage laments in question are hard rock, mostly: sometimes leaning toward prog and glam, but mostly stuff that's got boogie to it. Don't get caught!

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Senior Year, 1974: Smokin' in the Boys' Room

Heavy metal is, in many ways, a music of tradition — it has by now accumulated more than 40 years of baggage, after all. So artists and fans alike have always been eager to pay homage to giants and dinosaurs who trod the earth in days of yore. In recent years, bands from all geographic and stylistic corners of the metal universe have taken to recording albums consisting entirely or primarily of cover versions, presumably as a way to highlight their inspirations — i.e., artists whose vinyl they wore holes through before becoming stars themselves. It's also an easy way to get new product on the streets, without having to bother writing new songs. So here's a stack of such albums — many with selections that may well surprise you.

The past few years have been better than average in terms of African Americans scoring in country music. First there was Cowboy Troy, the six-foot hick-hop rapper who put out a couple albums after first showing up as a sideshow under Big & Rich's big top in the mid-'00s, and Rissi Palmer, whose 2007 hit "Country Girl" was the first country-charting single by a black woman in two decades. A year later, ex-Blowfisher Darius Rucker put out his first country album, which exploded; he's had four No. 1 country singles so far, making him easily country's most commercially successful black artist since the career of ex-Negro League baseball player Charley Pride started falling off in the early '80s. When you've accounted for Ray Charles — who played in a hillbilly band known as the Florida Playboys before he was a star, and whose 1962 Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music topped Billboard's album chart for 14 weeks — you've probably covered the extent of what most music fans knows about black people in country. But actually, the story goes back further than the genre itself. And all along, country and black American music (blues, jazz, gospel, soul) have never stopped interbreeding.

Heavy metal, descended as it was from the deep and dark despair of mid-'60s garage-verging-on-psych bands like The Yardbirds, initially sounded doomy more often than not. Since Black Sabbath only had a couple of fast songs, and since so many of the genre's great early '70s bands (Uriah Heep, Sir Lord Baltimore, etc.) were more or less variations on the Sabbath template, there wasn't much need to distinguish "doom metal" in the old days. But as tempos picked up and thrashed out (say, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple to Ted Nugent and Aerosmith to Van Halen and Motörhead to Metallica and Slayer), slowness went out of style; by the '80s, doom-ridden bands like Saint Vitus, Trouble, and Pentagram were unfashionable anomalies and needed a genre designation of their own. Hence, doom metal, which has since subdivided on its own into substyles as varied as stoner rock (meat-eating bands who worship green herbs and wish they were born in the '70s so they could get played in Camaros) and dark metal (bands from the coldest corners of Europe who get depressed a lot and dream of being Joy Division or the Swans), not to mention countless other shades of sludge, drone and ambient dirge. Herewith, a rundown of some representative and recommended albums from all corners of the frown-soaked doom universe.


Agalloch
Ashes Against the Grain
This third full-length from dark ambient quartet Agalloch embarks on a meandering journey layered with crystalline guitars, rolling crescendos, serene and entrancing melodies, raspy black-metal vocals and understated, clean singing. More focused on electric instruments than previous acoustic-based recordings, Ashes Against the Grain is in no way lacking atmospherics, as tracks like "Falling Snow" and "Fire Above, Ice Below" feature moody, neo-folk doom alongside majestic imagery. It's a mix only a post-metal coven at one with nature could achieve. — Jen Guyre

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Before your favorite rock, rap, pop and country stars were famous, they were just … people. Which, chances are, also means they were struggling and striving musicians or singers who probably spent time in bands that never hit big, and that you may have never even heard of. Some of those bands recorded actual albums, or at least singles — many of which just happen to be available on Rhapsody. Here's a pile to check out.

Moving Sidewalks
These sun-fried late '60s blues banditos were best known for the love-in-the-elevator nugget "99th Floor" — a radio chart-topper for over a month in Houston, not so much anywhere else. Guitarist Billy Gibbons later made his name with ZZ Top.

The Vagrants
The Vagrants were soul-garagers who attended the same Forest Hills, Queens, high school as sundry future Ramones; the group featured hefty guitarist Leslie West before he moved on to form '70s hard-rocking boogie bunch Mountain.

The Mynah Birds
This Toronto R&B outfit recorded sundry tracks under different lineups in the mid-'60s — notably "It's My Time" and "Go On and Cry," which Motown didn't release at the time, though they showed up on a box set four decades later, after ex-Mynahs Rick James and Neil Young had become household names.

In his 1988 book, The Death of Rhythm & Blues, Nelson George talks a lot about how, starting in the late '70s, crossover of white artists compromised the role of black radio. An old R&B disc jockey named Jack Gibson, who'd worked in radio since the '40s, started a tip sheet called Jack the Rapper, battling the trend. "Black stations should not play any white records," Gibson told George. "Every time they do, they take airplay away from a black artist." He did name one exception, though. And that exception was Teena Marie.

Gibson's logic was partly that Teena, who died at age 54 on December 26, 2010, "works for a black-owned and -operated company, Motown." By the mid-'80s, though, she'd already fled that label for Epic and sued Motown for unpaid royalties (resulting in "a clarification of California law," Ben Sisario wrote in his New York Times obituary, "that made it much more difficult for record companies to keep an act under exclusive contract" — which basically makes Teena the music world equivalent of baseball's Curt Flood). And long after she left Motown, Teena's devoted fans were still, overwhelmingly, a black audience. She only had one real "pop" hit — 1985's "Lovergirl" — and she had to cross over from black radio to get it. Has any other white artist, ever, been able to make that claim?

Yet Teena Marie was no R&B purist. In fact, in the past three decades, music has seen no less "pure" performer. Her music left nothing out, and held nothing back. Here she is, in 1981's "Square Biz," which combined rap and R&B before anybody else thought to: "I like spirituals and rock/ Sarah Vaughan, Johann Sebastian Bach/ Shakespeare, Maya Angelou, and Nikki Giovanni just to name a few." The excellent album containing that song, It Must Be Magic, was dedicated to John Lennon, two Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., at the end of a typically lengthy and florid cover poem that noted how "art is long and life is short." From another poem, on the cover of 1980's Lady T, which pictured Teena in glamorous eveningwear on the front and as a baseball-playing tomboy on the back: "I am upper suburbia and I am Venice Harlem/ I am one million contradictions to my complacent life." Later: "I have been persecuted and labeled just like you/ Aah but you label Campbell Soup cans … not people!" Teena Marie could not be pinned down.

Captain Beefheart - Don Van Vliet, born in 1941 and now dead of multiple sclerosis, just one month short of his 70th birthday - was as much behind his time as he was ahead of his time. And then he wasn't. Almost definitely the greatest "outsider" artist in the history of rock 'n' roll (maybe the only great outsider artist, in a semi-popular/alternative-culture world that he unwittingly helped inspire that now makes pointless film documentaries out of every talentless trumped-up footnote), he was musically, in a lot of ways, a throwback - to Delta blues, Howlin' Wolf, maybe free jazz, although he was known to deny it. (In 1980, he told Lester Bangs that Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman didn't move him - at least not as much as a goose, "the way they blow their heart out for nothing like that.")

Delta blues, as anybody who has ever listened to Charley Patton knows, was avant-garde music, not necessarily on purpose. And though he had no qualms about exploding Robert Johnson's "Terraplane Blues" into "Tarotplane" for almost 20 minutes, it was never easy, or even possible, to come close to figuring out what Beefheart's purpose was: He growled about Dachau and ashtray hearts and tropical hot dog nights and multi-coloured Caucasians, and he was clearly concerned about the state of the ecology, but he denied his songs were political allegories; he was just painting in colors, and the words were a canvas.

The two best new albums I heard in 2010 came from young women born in 1987 and 1989. They both debuted at No. 1 in Billboard, though the one that came out in January sold just 152,000 copies in its first week (but has racked up a couple million since). The one that came out in October finished its first week around the 1,047,000 mark. Each singer put more or less five singles in the Top 10 of the pop chart this year, but only the less respectable singer topped that chart for 10 weeks. The artist considered "country" grew up as part of a nuclear family in the southeastern Pennsylvania exurbs with a grandma who sang opera, and almost every soccer mom across the land thinks she's a perfect role model for kids. The artist not considered country moved from L.A. to Nashville when she was four and grew up fatherless there with a mother who wrote country songs, and almost every soccer mom across the land hopes her kids never meet anybody like her. So, on the surface, Taylor Swift and Ke$ha are exact opposites, right? Wrong. To me, they're two sides of the same coin, with a whole lot in common. Such as:

• They both do vicious revenge songs, aimed at people of both genders. But Taylor does more. On Speak Now, I count the title track (the most compelling parts of which are directed at a bride's "snotty little family," not the groom Taylor's trying to steal away), "Dear John," "Mean," and (most explicitly, since it's where she claims retaliation is her specialty) "Better Than Revenge." On Ke$ha's Animal, there's "Kiss N Tell" ("I hope you cry!") and "Backstabber," though maybe you could also count the swipes she takes elsewhere at dirty old men and rich people and guys' ugly girlfriends. Not to mention maybe at least three songs on her late-year 10-song add-on mini-album Cannibal (title cut, "Grow a Pear," Fannypack tribute "C U Next Tuesday"), where she chews up and spits out clingy males who outwear their welcome. (Taylor dumps a guy in "Back to December," too, but regrets it.)

Three decades into hip-hop's recorded lifespan, in this time of Auto-Tune and ringtone hooks and hashtag rhymes, R&B is a music addicted to newness — to not sounding "dated." So it's refreshing that, every now and then, an artist from soul music's distant past will still find his or her way onto R&B stations. Quite often, the catapulting factor seems to be a younger star who's always been a fan and who sets out to champion an inspirational legend's comeback, perhaps to pay off a debt for having been influenced in the first place. Below are a whole bunch of old-schoolers — singers born, say, in the mid-'50s or earlier (before Prince and Michael Jackson in 1958, at least) — who've charted in the current era.


Smokey Robinson was born in 1940; his first charting single with The Miracles, "Bad Girl," came at the tail end of the '50s. He now records for his own label, RobSo Records. But his most recent album, Time Flies When You're Having Fun, reached the Top 10 of the R&B chart in 2009; its single, "Love Bath," reached No. 83 and did even better on Billboard's Hot Dance Club Play chart.


 

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Punk rock, as theoretically invented in 1976 (even though it had technically been around for years before that), came off as a fairly artistic proposition from the get-go — plenty of high-minded academic theory involved, not to mention guys and gals who'd flunked out of art school and cared as much about their look as their sound. Also, lots of it pretty much just sounded like '70s metal played faster, but with fewer chops, and brutish soccer hooligans thought it a bloody good soundtrack for beating up strangers. So inevitably, as the decade wound down, some of punk's more thoughtful practitioners decided to branch out beyond those primal three chords and attempt to re-invent rock 'n' roll from scratch — or at least from ideas about noise, dub, doom, gloom, funk, feminism, communism, anarchism, amateurism and even old-school European art-rock eccentricity that could no longer be mistaken for mere greaser nostalgia. Hence, "post-punk." England (home of 13 of the 15 bands below) was inarguably the hotbed, but there was action on American and Australian peripheries as well. Some of it worked better on paper than in practice; most of it sold out by the time MTV went on the air. But it was really exciting while it lasted.


Au Pairs
Sense and Sensuality
On their second album (released in 1982), the post-punk/New Wave politics of the group's debut gave way to more reflective songs about genuine emotion (hence the album's title), but there's still an underlying jittery syncopation to tracks like "Sex Without Stress." Overall, this album really pushes the exploration of rhythm and sound within post-punk's borders. — Jon Pruett

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You may have heard that sundry surviving members of Michael Jackson's extended family are up in arms about vocals on his current posthumous "Breaking News" single and imminent Michael album. They're convinced the voice isn't genuinely his (a hypothesis the Sony corporation denies). But it's worth noting that this is hardly the first instance in history in which people making records were rumored (or, in some cases, confirmed) to not be the artists whose names were on the record jacket. Herewith, a short history of (maybe) pulling a fast one.


The Drifters
This gets confusing, but basically, after original lead singer Clyde McPhatter went solo in 1955, these R&B gods went through a bunch of replacements. But then in 1958, their manager, an old jazz trumpeter named George Treadwell, fired the whole group and gave The Drifters name to a Ben E. King-led group that until then was The Five Crowns. The new pseudo-Drifters wound up with piles of hits, but concert ticket-buyers were not initially amused.
 

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Long before they started studying Buddhist nonviolence and taking themselves way too seriously and regularly rhyming words back on themselves, Mike D, MCA and King Ad-Rock conquered and changed the world with a suburban saturnalia of swirlies and Wiffle ball bats and stolen bicylcles, Colonel Sanders and Rice-A-Roni, Ed Norton and Phyllis Diller, Budweiser and Thunderbird wine, hip-hoppin' and body-rockin' and doin' the do, beer-drinkin' and breath-stinkin' and sniffin' glue. More than any other album, the Beastie Boys' late-'86 Licensed to Ill ensured once and for all that hip-hop would become the predominant music for rebellious white teenagers — even ones who loved metal. It was totally original, in a sense, but also pure pastiche. Samples and song quotes from everyone from AC/DC and Led Zeppelin to Jimmy Castor and Trouble Funk, the theme songs of "Mr. Ed" and "Green Acres" all served as cultural signposts. So when it comes to music that paved the way to illness, the list below barely scratches the surface. But it's a start — and for a much more extensive survey, feel free to refer to this funky playlist.

Alice Cooper gets credit for putting shock-horror into rock, and there's no question he perfected the idea — especially as his music got cheesier and more theatrical, starting with Welcome to My Nightmare in 1975. But the truth is, creepy-crawly spooky-ooky stuff had been a part of rock all along, which comes as no surprise given that the exact same teens who loved rock 'n' roll in the '50s had been buying comic books full of ghouls, graveyards and greasy grimy gopher guts (until the Comics Code killed that concept in 1954), and '50s drive-ins were loaded with body-snatcher and mummy exploitation flicks. So it was only natural that somebody like Screamin' Jay Hawkins would come along, once so many radio stations banned his moaned-and-groaned drunk-in-the-studio 1956 recording of "I Put a Spell on You" for alleged cannibal tendencies, and start rising from a coffin in concert while brandishing a skull. Rockabilly crazies, meanwhile, yelped about zombies (Billy Taylor), bones (Ronnie Dawson), vampire women (future country star Bobby Bare) and hanging dates' chopped-off heads on the wall to prevent hot-dog consumption (Hasil Adkins). And then two big hits in 1958, and one in 1962, made horror rock safe for the wee ones.

Hair metal, if memory serves, wasn't particularly called "hair metal" much during most of its heyday. Even circa 1987-88, when mascara and eyeliner dominated MTV, if you'd picked up a rock magazine you likely would've seen "pop-metal," "glam-metal," "false-metal," "shag-metal" or "Nerf-metal" at least as often. In retrospect, of course, the genre didn't seem to have much to do with "metal" at all. Even early on, the '70s acts it took as inspiration -- New York Dolls, Aerosmith, KISS, Slade, Sweet, Bay City Rollers, Generation X -- leaned more toward "hard rock" or glitter, even bubblegum or punk.

L.A. is where the hair exploded, which makes sense because L.A. is where Van Halen had figured out how to present metal as concise upbeat radio-ready party pop in the late '70s. But L.A.'s not really where the best stuff came from -- even there, bands like Poison and singers like Axl Rose were hicks displaced from mid-America, and frequently, that's what they sang about. Or, say, about good-girls-gone-bad doing exactly the same thing: running away to the sleaze of Hollywood was hair metal's great subject. But hair metal was also the last commercially successful rock music to feel like a celebration, and no evidence yet suggests that distinction's going to change in our lifetime. Below, Rhapsody writers highlight 10 landmarks of the genre -- half of which, it should be noted, come from bands who started out in the middle Atlantic. Heck, one even came from Finland!

Packing 25 songs — many of them even longer than the artist's out-of-control hermit-of-the-woods hair — onto two discs (the "black" one theoretically more despondent, the "white" one theoretically more redemptive), Jamey Johnson's country-chart-topping The Guitar Song presented itself as a major work right out of the gate. From Rolling Stone (a rarely precedented 4 ½ stars out of 5) to Billboard (speculation about this being "the most important country album in a decade") on down, few in the media argued. Which makes sense, because it's an excellent record. You could maybe trim a handful of cuts, but the cuts you'd exclude might not be the same ones I would. Johnson was no doubt advised to start clearing mantel space for a pile of Grammys right away, and come 2020, the album will probably show up on a few best-of-the-'10s lists. Which is one reason to clear up a couple of fairly predictable misconceptions about it right off the bat: First, that Johnson and The Guitar Song represent some kind of extreme left turn back to "traditional" country and have nothing to do with the rest of what's gone down in the rest of Nashville in recent years; second, that the country he draws on is mostly of the "outlaw" variety. Not that he lacks old-school or outlaw leanings; they're in there, sure. But so is other stuff, some of it not even country at all. Here's a rundown of the sorts of music Johnson seems to draw on.

Generalizing about age is a fool's game, but in some fields of American endeavor — music might be one, music criticism maybe another (and sports? parenting? accounting? Guess it depends) — the late 40s can be a weird time. Assuming you've stuck around that long, to life's midway point more or less, there's a chance you've had some success at your game. But if so, there's also a good chance the pinnacle of that success is now behind you. So maybe you're coasting, possibly even resting on past laurels to an extent. But if you care about your craft, you want to keep doing quality work regardless, and once you've let go of the pressure that comes from staying at the very top of the heap, you might find yourself freed up to challenge the persona people came to know you by. Or not. Anyway, 14 non-Christmas studio albums in, seems like that might be where Toby Keith is on Bullets in the Gun.

No matter how sexy some girl thought his tractor was once upon a time, Kenny Chesney has never really seemed like the sort of guy you'd find working the fields at the farm; for years, he's instead been country's answer to Jimmy Buffett, wasting away lazily in his own private Margaritaville, at least 'til he made his way back to Cleveland like in "Anything but Mine." Check the cover photos on his best and usually biggest albums (2002's No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems, 2003's When the Sun Goes Down, 2007's Just Who I Am: Poets and Pirates) and Kenny's not behind any plow; he's on the beach. Same goes for 2004's blatantly introspective, Zen-titled, hit-single-free Be As You Are: Songs from the Blue Chair; what with that tide rolling in, seems like the chair might've been too moldy for proper meditating. At any rate, that '04 set was also Chesney's official coming out as a thoughtful confessional singer-songwriter — something more than "just" country, whether he ever came out and said so or not. Six years later, he's now got an album called Hemingway's Whiskey. So let's just say he has some literary ambitions.

Throughout the '70s, while as-yet-unrecorded hip-hop was evolving up in the South Bronx, a comparably funky new dance music was emerging in the black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C (or, as the title of Parliament's 1975 album put it, Chocolate City.) Instead of DJs and rappers, go-go's rhythm came from big bands — especially drummers. Lots of drummers. Chuck Brown, who'd come up playing jazz guitar and turned 40 in 1976, led a funk band called the Soul Searchers. But the mid-'60s stint he'd spent in the Latin cover combo Los Latinos inspired him to fortify the drum kit with Afro-Caribbean timbales, congas and other percussion; he also took brass charts from jazz and call-and-response — plus go-go's signature underlying drum syncopation — from the Pentecostal gospel church. And he thought like a DJ and cheer-led like an emcee, so he'd keep the party rolling for hours with improvisatory nonstop-segued medleys of original tunes and fragmented remakes, many dating back to the swing or jump blues eras: Duke Ellington, Louis Jordan, "Harlem Nocturne." Other local bands were experimenting with extended rhythm jams around the same time, and by the late '70s go-go was a distinctive genre.

Country music in Texas has been a world of its own, suspicious of and often downright hostile to "Nash Vegas" slickness, at least since the outlaw '70s, if not the Western swing '40s. These days, muscle-bound singer-songwriter stoicism, redneck hippie wanderlust and no-nonsense cowboy blues add up to what some folks call "red dirt," a scene that actually bubbled over from southern Oklahoma. A couple of the recent releases below fall under that particular regional umbrella, but all of them demonstrate why the Lone Star State sets itself apart.

Ryan Bingham & the Dead Horses: Junky Star
Fresh off a most impressive Oscar win, Ryan Bingham doesn't use his time in the spotlight to write catchy, upbeat songs to expand his fan base. Instead, he lays out a sepia-toned world of down-and-out characters, desperate souls gone astray by design or circumstance. Producer T Bone Burnett creates a crisp, uncluttered musical path for Bingham's gritty voice to wander. As Bingham introduces us to his set of characters, he weaves an intoxicating spell of desperation and heartache that sucks you in and changes your mood, making Junky Star an oddly powerful release. — Linda Ryan

"Lady Antebellum is like the hillbilly Fleetwood Mac," inebriated host Kid Rock opined from Nashville's CMT Music Awards stage back in June. "Except I suspect they don't do drugs or sleep with each other." Ba dum-bum. Except maybe Kid could've added that the trio also doesn't sound much like Fleetwood Mac ever did, unless the mere fact of relying on male-female harmonies, plus a certain vague throwback mellow-gold atmosphere and architectural production touches (some of which are quite beautiful), count. Truth is, they're not even the most Mac-like act on the country charts (and not just because the Dixie Chicks had a No. 2 country hit with a cover of "Landslide" eight years ago). But more on that later.

Put to tape in just a few days, in T Bone Burnett-produced mono, on antique mid-'50s equipment, in musically historical locales across the South (Sun Studios, North America's oldest black church in Savannah, a hotel room in San Antonio where Robert Johnson recorded), John Mellencamp's new No Better Than This culminates Indiana's favorite son's now decades-long quest for authenticity. It's a journey he's been on at least since Scarecrow in 1986, and maybe since "Great Mid-West" on the first album he charted with, 1979's John Cougar. A decade later, on Big Daddy, he confessed that he "never wanted to be no pop singer, never wanted to write no pop songs." So ever since, he's basically been a folkie. And last month, he put out an ambitious retrospective box set, overwhelmingly favoring that side of his persona.

Editor's Note: Listen to a selection of the songs mentioned here on a playlist at the end of this post, or click through to listen to all of the artists listed here on Rhapsody. If you're not a member, click here and listen to all of your favorite music as much as you want — whenever and wherever you want!

The Stooges have traditionally been talked about as a beginning — of punk rock, maybe heavy metal. But though they managed to come off as Cro-Magnon wild men from the rust belt, cheetahs walking through riot-torn Detroit streets with hearts full of Vietnam napalm, they were really conscious artists from a college town (Ann Arbor, Mich.). They synthesized all sorts of influences, many of which Iggy Pop has enumerated over the years: this column's format doesn't leave room for Link Wray, the Bar-Kays, Eddie Cochran, lots of others. And focusing it around The Stooges' most unhinged album (1970's Funhouse) rather than their most primal (1969's The Stooges) or heaviest (1973's Raw Power) — both of which peak with greater songs — is somewhat instinctual, if not arbitrary. You might also want to check out the pile of archival live and outtake sets that have just been made available. That said, here are some predecessors that made their noise possible.

Editor's Note: Listen to a selection of the songs mentioned here on a playlist at the end of this post, or click through to listen to all of the artists listed here on Rhapsody. If you're not a member, click here and listen to all of your favorite music as much as you want — whenever and wherever you want!

Loveable country lug Trace Adkins has been on quite a roll lately. His albums used to be really inconsistent, but 2006's Dangerous Man was a keeper (high point: an ode to a curmudgeonly grandpa called "The Stubborn One"), and 2008's X was his strongest full-length ever. It managed to balance trashy boogie humor ("Hauling One Thing," "Marry for Money"), smoldering Southern soul sex ("Let's Do That Again"), baptismal gospel ("Muddy Water") and spooky seriousness ("I Can't Outrun You," "Til the Last Shot's Fired.")

For a few years now, Adkins has been inching toward music that, if it came from any city other than Nashville, would be acknowledged as butt-rock in the great motorcyclable BTO/Foghat/Molly Hatchet tradition. And on his ninth and newest album, Cowboy's Back in Town, his big bam boom gets even bigger, with plenty of near-metal riffs to make honky-tonking badonkadonks shake: witness, for instance, barn-sex stomp "Brown Chicken Brown Cow" (where farm animals observe some hot hay-rolling), Crimson Tide shout-along "Ala-Freakin-Bama" (where Adkins declares himself a Bear Bryant fan to impress a Juicy Fruit-chomping Southern belle), and mean fisticuff warning "Whoop a Man's Ass" (where he comes out swinging at creeps who hit women and curse at kids). "Hold My Beer" (about taking a break from the brewskis to get hitched) and "Hell, I Can Do That" (in which a clueless couch potato swears he can outdo the athletes and leading ladies' men on his flat screen) demonstrate excellent comic timing, to boot.

The new album's middle goes maybe a bit too heavy on lovey-dovey slow jams, none of which can come close to Adkins' greatest slow one ever (and one of the best country singles of the past decade), 2001's devastatingly spare divorced-dad hit, "I'm Tryin'." But he's still got one of the richest male voices of our time, and his soul-and-Western baritone in, say, "Cowboy's Back in Town" (about a working woman's secret weekend flings) and the bouncy "Don't Mind If I Don't" manage to keep even the mushier stuff sufficiently manly. In a power ballad called "Break Her Fall" near the end, Trace reflects back on being 18, and deflowering a tragic angel in the backseat of "the best Plan B that Detroit made" while she's "humming that old Tom Petty song." Seems like he should mean "Free Fallin'," but that wouldn't make sense; Trace turned 18 in 1980. So, "Refugee" maybe? Anyway, then he closes the album by opening his can of whoop-ass, and in both songs he brags about having long hair. Long may it wave.

Editor's Note: Listen to a selection of the songs mentioned here on a playlist at the end of this post, or click through to listen to all of the artists listed here on Rhapsody. If you're not a member, click here and listen to all of your favorite music as much as you want — whenever and wherever you want!

Rock music -- metal to indie -- started giving up on blues chords at least three decades ago. But some bands still make hard rock that'd be recognizable as such to folks old enough to remember the '70s. Lately there's even been a minor deluge of the stuff: new Buckcherry, The Black Crowes, and Gov't Mule albums, for instance, all in the same week! Here's a rundown of recent releases, followed by a playlist with a few selections.

Buckcherry, All Night Long (Eleven Seven)
In a nutshell: Having returned from radio oblivion when the strip-clubbing "Crazy Bitch" and apology ballad "Sorry" made their 2006 album 15 their biggest ever, these L.A. sleazers-for-life aren't about to chance another whiff like 2008's Black Butterfly.
For those who like: Tattoos, rebellious couples on the run, "My Generation" quotes, token protest songs, late-period AC/DC, occasional lovey-dovey ballads. — C. Eddy

Editor's Note: Listen to a selection of the songs mentioned here on a playlist at the end of this post, or click through to listen to all of the artists listed here on Rhapsody. If you're not a member, click here and listen to all of your favorite music as much as you want — whenever and wherever you want!

Every year, a select bunch of albums monopolize media attention, while countless other bunches of albums disappear beneath the release-date-obsessed radar. And sometimes, the ones being slept on are a lot better than the ones that aren't. Nearly seven months in, here are 10 from 2010 that don't deserve to fall through the cracks.

Sheryl Crow has been mixing snippets of old-school R&B into her music for years, maybe since the beginning. But until her new 100 Miles from Memphis, she's never made a whole album referencing soul music. The set suggests she defines the genre widely: Stax horns, reggae lilts, country gospel, quiet storm, Supremes quotes, cover versions of oldies born 18 years apart. That said, here are six albums from the past that might provide a context for hearing her new one.

No matter how we feel about the state of the nation the other 364 days of the year, we Americans have no choice but to be glad to be from the U.S.A. when the 4th of July rolls around — if only because it means a rare day off work (if you've actually got a job) and plenty of barbecue (if you still know somebody who can afford some). Not to mention softball, beer, bike parades, pool parties, fireworks and the freedom to run wild around your neighborhood without your parents noticing if you're 13. This summer, there's maybe even an added impetus, if declaring independence from British Petroleum counts. That said, here are a few songs to celebrate with.

Rufus Thomas, "Walking the Dog" (1963); The Holy Modal Rounders, "The Cuckoo" (1964)
Definitive versions of two oft-recorded American standbys that talk about how the 4th of July is a day to wait for all year: in the case of ageless Memphis R&B vaudevillian Thomas, for a fence-jumping elephant to return from the sky; in the case of equally nutso beatnik-folk lunatics The Rounders, for a wobbly bird to holler out her name.

Heartland heroes Tom Petty and John Mellencamp both have new collections out — Mojo and the quadruple-disc box set On the Rural Route 7609, respectively. Last year, Petty put out his own big box, The Live Anthology; later this summer, Mellencamp's got a new album called No Better Than This scheduled. Neither troubadour ever went away. But over the past two decades, especially, they've both slowed down considerably — or at least their tempos have. Their music has grown moodier, stodgier, more dour, more like a long and winding road. If the punchy riffs and smart-alecky hard-pop hooks of Damn the Torpedoes or Uh-Huh live on, it's not on their own records, but rather on country radio.

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Summer festivals are wonderful, sure, but they're also too big and frequently expensive, and if you're not still a kid the crowd'll make you look old. Even more importantly, you won't find much old-school R&B for grown folks at them: maybe Sharon Jones, but that's about it. Thing is, especially if Sharon Jones' brand of throwback is your idea of a party, there are lots of awesome alternatives out there. For black audiences over 40 and under the Mason-Dixon Line, the Southern Soul Blues and Chitlin' Circuit still rules the road like it has for a half-century or more; in fact, some singers have been at it for just that long, and they'll probably be doing it 'til the day they die. Between now and midsummer, you can catch them if you know in which hamlets to look — and if you're lucky, there might be a crawfish boil involved. Here's a week-by-week rundown, through Independence Day.

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Stone Temple Pilots are lucky suns of guns — who'd have ever thought they'd be releasing a self-titled sixth album in 2010, nine years (not to mention occasional Scott Weiland legal infractions and a couple ignorable Velvet Revolver records) since their last one? But they're also a very catchy rock band who've gotten a bum rap over the years, ever since early accusations that they didn't qualify as "real" grunge, as if being real grunge was ever something to be proud of. Here's Gina Arnold, in the Spin Alternative Record Guide from 1995: "S.T.P. lack many of Pearl Jam's virtues, most notably [Eddie] Vedder's sincerity and the incredible rhythm section of Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament; S.T.P. also lack roots, authenticity, and even the slightest vestige of punk rock cred." The rhythm-section claim is just plain baloney — Pearl Jam's sodden mush never matched S.T.P.'s bazookafied bounce, and never will. And as for the rest … whoopty doo, y'know?

The music of The Fall, The Hold Steady and Titus Andronicus is yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Those who can’t sing, talk. But then again, so do those who just have a lot to talk about, as rappers have been reminding us for three decades now. Nonstop rock talkers are rarer, but date back at least to Bob Dylan. And recently hatched albums by Manchester’s The Fall, Brooklyn’s The Hold Steady, and New Jersey’s Titus Andronicus suggest they don’t plan to shut up anytime soon — though sometimes they might muffle the words a little.

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Chely Wright, as even people who never heard of her before know by now, came out as a lesbian to People magazine last week. And the first thing to point out is that, contrary to much clueless reportage since, this is not a case of a "major country artist rolling the dice on her career." Just the opposite. It's the case of a former minor star who had one No. 1 hit 12 years ago — and who hasn't hit the country Top 20 since 1999 or the Top 40 since 2004 — suddenly getting her name and picture in People, The New York Times, and everywhere else the same week she released both a new album and a book. If the announcement shocked some folks who had liked her soul-grooved signature song "Single White Female" in 1998, no big deal; they haven't been buying her last few indie-label records anyway. And country radio hasn't been playing them, either. But now, Wright's in the public spotlight like she never was before, even when she was scoring hits. Many fans — not necessarily country ones — will probably be interested in her for the first time, kind of like k.d. lang in 1992. In other words, there's no way that coming out could possibly hurt. And the timing is perfect.

Cowboys and B-boys both love their wheels and guns, and both like bragging about their chosen outlaw subcultures, so it's no surprise that hip-hoppers and hillbillies increasingly cross boundaries. For instance, 300-pound ex-pro-golfer Colt Ford has charted on both Billboard's country and rap charts. On his new Chicken & Biscuits, ignoring the fact that nobody understands C.B. radio slang anymore, he does a hick-hop version of C.W. McCall's trucker-country "Convoy," which topped the pop chart in 1976. As a service to future rapnecks, here are a few more potential crossover suggestions.

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Genres don't disappear. They just move underground to smaller record labels, or change their names and haircuts. Or maybe their hair just falls out, and they start wearing a cowboy hat. That's sorta what happened to hair metal itself after grunge supposedly killed it off (a myth, by the way), but the nearly two decades since Nirvana have produced some dangerously contagious hair-metal albums nonetheless. Ratt's Infestation — their best in over 25 years — is merely the latest. Here are nine more.

• Love/Hate, Wasted In America (1992): These L.A. vermin had already twisted GnR's original template in all sorts of unheard-of directions on their 1990 debut — out-weirding grunge before it even broke. Their possibly even more unhinged follow-up proves Seattle did not dampen their teen spirit.

• Guns N' Roses, The Spaghetti Incident? (1993): Their one great collection since 1990 — either their second- or third-most-rocking album ever (see: Lies) — was this unholy stack of cover songs. The best, "Down on the Farm," came from forgotten gutterpunks U.K. Subs.

• Kix, $how Bu$ine$$ (1994): From perennial Maryland under-card goofballs, a hilariously hookful and songful latter-day exploration of crash-bang-boom. Years later, on Funny Money's excellent Stick It!, squealing Steve Whiteman was still at it.

• Cinderella, Still Climbing (1994): Back on gypsy road if no longer growing hair to the sky, Pennsylvania's most rustic glamsters fight the good fight. "They can't take the city from the boys looking pretty."

• Warrant, Ultraphobic (1995): Nobody believes this unless they've actually heard the thing, but Jani Lane and his pretty-boy pals probably made the best actual grunge album ever to come from a former hair band. Only competition: Warrant's own Dog Eat Dog, from three years before.

• Silvertide, Show & Tell (2004): Northeast Philly longhairs carry on Cinderella's cow-glam tradition and actually get three songs onto the Mainstream Rock Top 20. One of the great lost hard-rock albums of the '00s.

• Beautiful Creatures, Deuce (2005): Bang Tango's Joe LeSte, backed by a new bunch of vampires but still sliming Billy Idol-style, shows Buckcherry how it's done.

• Tesla, Real to Reel (2007): Always more tasteful than others of their ilk even back in their hitbound conflicted-about-using-machinery days, Sacramento boys-turned-men master the classic-rock repertory — from Traffic, Trower and Thin Lizzy on up.

• The Last Vegas, Whatever Gets You Off (2009): This Chicago sleaze team started out on a garage-rock indie, grinding half-learned Aerosmith riffs into the soil like pre-grunge Seattle-ites Green River used to. By decade's end, they were slicked up and touring with Mötley Crüe — who know good dirt when they hear it.

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What with Slash stepping aside from Velvet Revolver to put out a new solo album that will surely prove at least as unforgettable as those records he made with Snakepit back in the day, now's a perfect time to consider the longtime legacy of side projects by famous guitarists. Here's a whole bunch.

Angry times call for angry measures, so rock 'n' roll's Angriest Old White Man of all — Ted Nugent — is the first candidate to officially declare presidential ambitions for 2012. "The Nuge," as his bow-hunting buddies call him, will run on a hybrid True Republican/Tea Party/Michigan Militia ticket, he announced Thursday morning at O-Dark-Thirty while clad in full camouflage gear and straddling a great white buffalo on his homestead not far from the ATF-seized former Branch Dividian compound in Waco, Tex. Though his more apocalyptic supporters are pegging 2012 as the End Times, the Motor City Madman reassured them by quoting his own "Stranglehold": "Some people think they're gonna die someday. I got news; ya never gotta go."

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Ke$ha's Animal may well be the most inescapable and game-changing collection of songs to emerge so far in this spanking-new decade. After two and a half months, it's still firmly entrenched in Billboard's Top 15, and recent weeks have seen an extremely entertaining flurry of blogwise chatter about what it all means. Ke$ha's sometimes-co-songwriting ex-punk mom Pebe Sebert is probably most famous for having co-written the country standard "Old Flames Can't Hold a Candle to You" (done by Dolly Parton, Joe South, Merle Haggard, and others). But Ke$ha herself is more often compared (sometimes by yours truly) to such highly respected non-Nashville artists as Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, L'Trimm, Salt-n-Pepa, Northern State, Megan McCauley, Fan_3, Courtney Love, Scooter, Tommy James and the Shondells, the Dictators, and the Tubes. (Until now, strangely enough, she has not been likened to the Runaways, who quite possibly filled a similar skanky suburban cultural niche circa 1976 but sold fewer records from it; only time will tell whether some enterprising filmmaker will make a Ke$ha biopic in the year 2044.) At any rate, what everybody except total nincompoops acknowledges is that Animal is a really really really funny record. Here's a countdown of its most hilarious moments.

Van Morrison, Horslips and every other artist mentioned here are yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher started Ireland rocking with their respective bands, Them and Taste, back in the '60s, and the nation has kept it up through almost 50 St. Patrick's Days since. And while songs by the Cranberries and Snow Patrol that might as well be sung by actual leprechauns are obviously not unheard of, and there are occasional Bonos who'd prefer to be the Pope, the Emerald Isle's specialty is rowdier stuff that tends to go quite well with green beer. A brief primer is below; a longer playlist can be found here.

Usually we think of cover versions as tributes to songs we know already — stars or hopefuls paying homage to a time-proven classic, perhaps. But once in a while, a cover song gets to be a huge hit when almost nobody out there ever heard the original version in the first place. For some reason, this seemed to happen especially often in the '80s. For instance, there's a real good chance you know who had hits with "I Love Rock N Roll" and "Tainted Love," but you might not realize that the artists who recorded those songs first were not Joan Jett or Soft Cell. A rundown of covers you might've thought were originals is below — including a couple where the hit artist cheated by changing the title.

Elvis Presley, Prince and every other artist mentioned here are yours to listen to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

• "Hound Dog," Elvis Presley (1956); "Goin' Up the Country," Canned Heat (1968); "When the Levee Breaks," Led Zeppelin (1971): Only three of the probably scores of well-known rock songs whose initial blues versions aren't as famous. Consult Big Mama Thornton's 1953 "Hound Dog," Henry Thomas' 1928 "Bull Doze Blues" (before Canned Heat changed some words), and Memphis Minnie's 1928 "When the Levee Breaks" for evidence.

Joe Cuba, Tito Puente and every other artist mentioned in this article are yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

African American and Latin American musical influences had been commingling at least since Dizzy Gillespie hired Havana conga drummer Chano Pozo in the late '40s, and have continued to do so ever since — through fairly recent genres like reggaeton and urban bachata, for instance. But no other such hybrid has ever sounded as unhinged as the Latin boogaloo music that exploded out of New York City's outer boroughs and Spanish Harlem through the mid- to late '60s — in fact, in a decade of crazed garage rock and cold-sweating funk (both of which boogaloo absorbed), this may well have been America's wildest dance music of all. An excellent new Joe Cuba compilation on Fania, El Alcalde Del Barrio, is only the latest evidence.

Ritchie Valens, the Hold Steady and every other artist mentioned here are yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Rock 'n' roll evolved out of blues and country, largely musics of Southern Protestants. But by the late '50s and early '60s, Mexican-Americans like Ritchie Valens and Italian-Americans like Dion DiMucci entered the picture, and eventually even Irish kids like, uh, Gilbert O'Sullivan got into the game. By the '80s, with parochial school heroes Bruce Springsteen and Madonna at the top the charts, all seven sacraments were rocking. To honor Ash Wednesday (or Miercoles De Ceniza, as the great '90s Mexican rock band Caifanes call it), here's a liturgy of canonization-worthy songs, from artists baptized and otherwise. Hope you didn't give up music for Lent!

Strangely, none of the tracks on our playlist come from what official Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano just this week named history's Top 10 Pop Albums, in a surprisingly tongue-in-cheek article delivered just in time for Italy's annual San Remo festival. Those 10, for what it's worth, would be the Beatles' Revolver, David Crosby's If I Only Could Remember My Name (!?), Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Fleetwood Mac's somewhat 6th-Commandment-flaunting Rumours, Donald Fagen's The Nightfly (JFK nostalgia!), Michael Jackson's Thriller, Paul Simon's Graceland, U2's Achtung, Baby (its title perhaps a reference to Pope Benedict XVI's controversial childhood in Germany), Oasis' What's the Story (Morning Glory)? and Santana's Supernatural. None of which seem particularly Catholic themselves, oddly enough. Though it's true that, on earlier records, Simon did sing about a radical priest getting him and Julio released after whatever they were smoking down by the schoolyard, and U2's Bono was known to quote the Great Doxology, "Gloria In Excelsis Deo".

Perhaps it's understandable, not living in Brooklyn and all, that the Holy See's resident music critics never heard Separation Sunday, the Hold Steady's classic catechism-class concept album from five years back; a shame, though, given Craig Finn's status as a regular churchgoer even while on tour. ("Cathedrals make for good sightseeing destinations," he told Mojo once.) And okay, Jim Carroll Band's Catholic Boy never made much radio headway beyond "People Who Died." But why no Goth, the most flagelatingly Latin-mass-like rock genre ever? And what about the guilt-ridden "It's a Sin" by the Pet Shop Boys? A huge hit throughout Europe in 1987 (No. 3 in Italy!), and the album it's from, Actually, is often considered their best. As for Billy Joel's The Stranger, featuring both "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" and possibly the most canonical Catholic-rock song ever in "Only the Good Die Young" (unless the three men Don McLean admired most in "American Pie" count), what can be said? Dear Vatican newspaper: That stained-glass window you're hiding behind never lets in the sun.

Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye and every other artist mentioned in this article are yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Just like regular people, great musical artists sometimes get married. And just like those of regular people -- maybe even more so, given that we're talking about stressed-out celebrities in the spotlight -- those marriages sometimes fall apart. But unlike everybody else, musicians still have songs to write, which occasionally means listeners get an uncomfortable front-row seat for both the stars' wedded bliss and its potentially messy aftermath. The albums below are historical landmarks of that phenomenon -- and just maybe, object lessons on how (or how not) to get along with your funny (or bloody) valentine.

• George Jones and Tammy Wynette: 16 Biggest HIts (released 1999, recorded 1971-1980)
  Doesn't have his "The Grand Tour" or her "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," both essential texts on the subject matter. But it does chronicle the ill-fated early '70s marriage of country's most classic couple -- a pair of old sneakers, they called themselves. Not the jet set, the old Chevrolet set.

• Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks (1975)
  Separated from his wife, Sara, at the time, Dylan makes the album he's been trying to top ever since (some say he has; they're crazy), loaded with some of rock's angriest, most cracked and devastating breakup songs. He's never admitted they're autobiographical; if you're going through what his protagonists are going through, you won't mind.

• Fleetwood Mac: Rumours (1977)
  In which the bassist and keyboardist-vocalist split up after being married eight years, and the guitarist-vocalist and other vocalist can't figure out whether they want to be together or not, and the drummer finds out his wife's running around on him, and lines start criss-crossing, and it all winds up in the lyrics. California soft rock never sounded truer, or sold more.

• Marvin Gaye: Here My Dear (1978)
  The Motown Metal Machine Music, almost: a 70-minute double album of long, droning funk, mainly about how bad it was being married to Berry Gordy's older sister Anna, initiated primarily to cover alimony and child support -- while wondering why attorney fees are part of the deal.

• Ashford and Simpson: The Very Best Of (released 2002, recorded 1973-1984)
  Solid as a rock: they met at a Baptist church in Harlem and started working together as a songwriting team in 1964; composed a few big Motown hits; wed in 1974; and now live on Manhattan's Upper West Side. If you've been together as long as they have, and can answer "Is It Still Good to Ya" affirmatively, kudos.

• X: Wild Gift (1981)
  Bohemians with Catholic confession-booth tendencies, fighting and fondling and watching their love pass out on the couch while choosing to live on next to nothing in L.A.'s seedy early '80s punk underbelly, John Doe and Exene Cervenka were desperate and not quite used to it. Their marriage lasted five years -- from 1980 to 1985. This may have been the high point.

• Richard and Linda Thompson: Shoot Out the Lights (1982)
  Married a decade, schooled in Sufi mysticism, and facing a bitter end, the Fairport Convention alumnus guitar genius and his seemingly passive-aggressive British folksinger spouse slide down back streets, walk on high wires, face the wall of death, and consider pushing each other off. When they toured to support the record, minor physical altercations were not uncommon.

• Womack & Womack: Love Wars (1983)
  Sam Cooke's daughter and Bobby Womack's brother -- the soul couple who wrote "Love T.K.O." for Teddy Pendergrass -- send out all-points bulletins about mutual distrust. The title of the blues-haunted single "Baby I'm Scared of You" says more than you might want to know. Though reportedly, their marriage survived -- long enough to record several years later, in Africa with their kids.

The most relevant fact about music in the '00s was the sheer volume of it that came out, as digital technology democratized recording and distribution down toward individual-artist level. Most conservative estimates cite a figure somewhere in the 30,000-albums-per-year range in the U.S. alone, which computes to 300,000 over the entire decade. Add in countless bands who never graduated past five songs on MySpace, and the quantity turns astronomical. Given that only a tiny fraction of this music has inspired lasting adulation outside performers' immediate families, that means the overwhelming majority has long since slipped through the cracks of history. That said, here's a representative, genre-spanning sample of 10 great albums unlikely to make many other best-of-decade lists: if you knew about any of them in the first place, chances are you forgot them already. Until now.

10. The Exploding Hearts
Guitar Romantic, 2003
The decade's most tragic rock story: on July 20, 2003, a bus carrying Oregon powerpop-punk foursome the Exploding Hearts overturned on the Interstate while returning home to Portland from San Francisco. Three members -- vocalist and guitarist Adam Cox, bassist Matt Fitzgerald, drummer Jeremy Gage -- died. Only four months earlier, the band had put out its only album: 10 songs -- seven of them less than three minutes long -- about modern kicks and modern chicks and sleeping aides and razorblades. No other album in recent memory has come so close to matching the sweet-and-sour relentlessness of the Buzzcocks' Singles Going Steady; most likely, no album ever will.

9. Skye Sweetnam
Noise From The Basement, 2004
Where pop-punk -- or at least cool old Pat Benatar chords -- lived on was Radio Disney. But where Avril reached a mass American audience, her fellow Ontario native Skye Sweetnam only crossed over to Canadians, and maybe some Cheap Trick fans in Japan. Underground tween-pop from its title on down, Noise From The Basement -- released when she was just 16 -- peaked at a humble #124 in the U.S. But that didn't make its impudence any less precocious or self-aware, from the single about skipping school to avoid Shakespeare to the subterranean homesick "Hypocrite": "Bubblegum braniac! Baby girl ultra brat! Angst schmangst! No thanks! Hope my record doesn't tank!" Sigh...

8. Wolf
Evil Star, 2004
In a decade wherein heavy metal never stopped mutating, but did so within a tighter and tighter perimeter, in increments indiscernible to most humans unschooled in the art of experimental composition, this Swedish trio stubbornly stuck to the pre-thrash leather-jacket-full-of-zippers basics: Power anthems distinguishable as actual songs, with ice-blue riffs as hooks, and words about ominous objects in the sky and werewolves going bump in the night -- all howled in a high register melodic enough for a layman to actually decipher them. And the Blue Oyster Cult and Ramones covers sure didn't hurt.

7. Collin Raye
Never Going Back, 2009
As metal and rock radio abandoned old-school blues-based hard rock, country picked up the ball -- so much that, by decades end, Bad Company riffs were even sounding stale in Nashville. So nobody much noticed when this longtime journeyman, who hadn't taken a single into the country Top 40 since early 2000, kicked off his last-year-of-the-decade album with some Grand Funk Railroad cowbell, then loaded the thing with butt-rocking couples smuggling contraband across the border and heading west for Vegas dancing jobs only to wind up on a riverboat outside Cincinnati. Plus remakes of Nilsson and Stealers Wheel classics, and Eagles-worthy ballads that frequently mention Jesus.

6. ZZ Top
Mescalero, 2003
Talk about your blues-rock journeymen making runs for the border: These ancient Texas beardos had been stuck in the boogie mud ever since their hightly lucrative mid '80s sellout-to-MTV era, then they suddenly took a sharp left turn on this largely unheard platter full of Spanish words, warped funk, screwy electronic effects, and flatulent jokes about alley-gators and intelligent quotients and punk-ass boyfriends. If a more entertaining hard rock album emerged this decade, it surely wasn't by guys in their 50s (all three born 1949!) who'd been grumbling like old men since they were in their 20s (excellent long-range business plan!) Their weirdest since El Loco in 1981, if you're keeping score.

5. Field Mob
From Tha Roota to Tha Toota, 2002
Not hard to imagine ZZ Top and Field Mob enjoying the same barbecue: This album's title refers to feasting on the entire hog, from snout to tail. And give or take Bubba Sparxxx, it's doubtful that the decade produced more countryfied rappers than these hick-town Georgians, who lyrically trace their Southernness back to the plantation their ancestors were sold and hung on. So while they revel in a comedic trickster spirit their genre mostly abandoned, it's run through with sadness -- soul, in other words, the red-clay variety, yet spiked with melodic beauty from classical Europe and the Far East.

4. Koffee Brown
Mars/Venus, 2001
And here's a path that r&b in the '00s sadly managed not to follow: From a man and woman named Fonz and Vernall, a grown-folks gender battle, in the time-tested tradition of Womack & Womack or Ashford & Simpson, "retro" only in the sense that it's not emotionally stunted by ice-queen restraint or melismatic bombast or strip-club crotch-grab. The fugue-like "Weekend Thing," setting its anticipatory upscale summer scene in beauty parlors and barbershops, gave up as warm a groove as any soul track this decade. But that single only charted #71 r&b; the duo never made another album.

3. Oneida
Steel Rod EP, 2000
Checking it at 31 minutes, this record is misnamed -- while admittedly containing only six songs including an untitled four-second closer, it's more a short album than an EP. And a half-hour is just about perfect for this dirty-twanged, keyboard-tempered breed of Brooklyn science-lab sludge, tossing Link Wray, MX-80 Sound, Pere Ubu, and Devo into the choogle-metal blender while obsessing on loaded weapons and hellbound trains. You'd have a hard time finding any other '00s guitar rock so convoluted and repetitious that also kicks so hard. In 2000, Oneida could've almost passed as Queens of the Stone Age's nuttier cousins; later on, QOTSA got more commercial as Oneida got artier. And they both kicked less.

2. Fannypack
See You Next Tuesday, 2005
"Do it now, turn around, get off like a wedding gown, people on the pitcher's mound, turn it up and lock it down, fast ball, curve ball, workin' on your nerves ya'll " -- Three impossibly sassy and accented Brooklyn girls, two hipster NYC club producers life-affirming enough to opt for freestyle jump-rope chants over electroclash bondage gear, a skit revolving around one svengali's hatred of reggae leading into a dancehall guest-spot by Mr. Vegas, what else do you need? From M.I.A. to "Chicken Noodle Soup" to Kid Sister, the '00s weren't a bad decade when it came to channelling the spirit of "Iko Iko." But nobody gave it more bounce than this oddball outfit from the 718, who seemed like a novelty but were more.

1.Various Artists
Bring It On: Music From The Motion Picture, 2000
If you need documented evidence that the decade kicked off with a great girl-group wave, look no further. Irish fiddle-gum flirts B*Witched revive Toni Basil; Left Eye discoveries Blaque get sarcastic then collaborate with an unknown named 50 Cent; fellow post-TLCs 3LW keep things light; bizarre Jersey expats Daphne And Celeste -- whose own album never even came out in the States -- inform you that you ain't got no alibi for being U-G-L-Y. Mere males like the Jungle Brothers and 95 South stay on the sidelines, leading cheers. R&B in the '00s never got giddier, teen-pop never got funkier, and where such good-natured energy disappeared to is a history that has yet to be written. If you don't miss it, you missed the boat. Or, as Liverpool's Atomic Kitten put it, "See ya. I wouldn't wanna be ya."

Ever since the early days of MTV, Flock of Seagulls haircuts, and Spandau Ballet new romanticism, it's been widely accepted that synthesizer pop is a mostly British (or at its weirdest, continental European) phenomenon: "Glitter-disco-synthesizer night school, all that noble savage drum drum drum," the band X ranted in their 1983 anti-Anglo tirade "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts." Americans were just too gritty and guitar-loving for all that silliness, right? Well, not all of them. Lady Gaga is only the latest -- and potentially the biggest -- artist from U.S. shores to re-imagine Anglo/Euro technopop, fashion sense and all. Here's a rundown of electronically inclined Americans who preceded her.

In his eight years recording, John Mayer has walked a stylistic tightrope, splitting his time between presenting himself as a sensitive heartthrob (mainly on his solo studio albums) and a serious bluesman (on the live 2005 John Mayer Trio album Try!, for instance). By now, he seems to have found a comfortable middle ground between sex appeal and chops. But he's hardly the first musicianly beefcake to balance such seemingly competing sides. Here, some hunky virtuosos who've come before.

What a week for country music lovers. Rhapsody is bringing you brand-new music from some of today's hottest, most talked-about country stars a week before you'll hear it anywhere else. No kidding: we've got big names, bluegrass names and names you'll soon be acquainted with. So sit back, relax and let's listen to some music!

Britney Spears' latest contribution to pop music's math textbook, "3," is a celebration of bedroom-floor activities involving more than two people, and I don't mean vacuuming! Though that might happen too, actually. But Britney coos naughty stuff about "Not only you and me/ Got 180 degrees/ And I'm caught between" and "Peter Paul and Mary gettin' down." (Where's Puff the Magic Dragon when you need him?) But believe it or not, Ms. Spears is not the first pop star to deal with said multipartner practice, and others have documented entirely different lovemaking activities at least as nontraditional. Herewith, an inventory of sex-obsessed songs that opt for flavors other than vanilla.

It has been said that every movie worth watching since 1939 contains some reference to The Wizard of Oz. But what about music? This week, Wu-Tanger Ghostface Killah releases his new album, Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry, the cover artwork of which features a yellow brick road extended across hottie-bedecked poppy fields toward Emerald City. And on October 3, in honor of the movie's 70th anniversary, Netflix is streaming Oz free, in a new high-definition version. Last week, to commemorate the same landmark, Jennifer Hudson, Julianne Hough, and ?Uestlove of the Roots performed songs from the movie in New York. Rock and pop have been in love with the classic for years, but there's never been a better time to count down the highlights of Oz-rock history.

Woodstock obviously featured a handful of undeniably great bands, plus the occasional world-shaking performance by B-listers (Ten Years After's "I'm Going Home.") But those were exceptions. Maybe if the lineup had more fully captured the scope of rock and pop music in 1969, the result would have been more exciting, and less a tedious snoozefest. So here's a modest proposal for an alternate roster -- with every artist replaced by somebody comparable but cooler.

In 1978, a British New Waver calling himself Elton Motello had a supremely sleazy punk-disco dance club hit called "Jet Boy Jet Girl." Almost immediately, a Belgian New Wave singer calling himself Plastic Bertrand, using both the same studio musicians and same backing music as "Jet Boy Jet Girl," turned the song into a French song called "Ca Plane Pour Moi," one of punk's greatest and silliest novelty hits. Both songs have been covered countless times over the years, sometimes by far more famous bands. The playlist below provides an overview, and tosses in other rock classics about jets and by people named JET and Jett and Jetboy that somehow, in this context, totally fit.
 

Believe it or not, the year hits the six-months-gone mark this week. And while there's no point in claiming these are the absolute best singles of the first half of 2009 (left "Boom Boom Pow" and "Poker Face" off, for instance, figuring you already know what they sound like), they're still 25 really good ones. Lots of rap, lots of country, lots of soul. Not a ton of "rock", though -- maybe because most of the non-rock rocks just fine.

When constructing this flawlessly gorgeous and heart-wrenching compendium of soft rock, I was once again reminded that much of history's mellow gold is in fact a secret depository of mental imbalance (see playlist selections by Helen Reddy and Gilbert O'Sullivan and Lobo for instance) and downright sleaziness (the ones by Mac Davis and Cher and Gordon Lightfoot, for starters.) Or at least that was the case in the singles-bar-and-suburban-wifeswap-and-pagan-teenage-drug-commune '70s; the '80s tunes below are perhaps more inscrutable -- if no more deniable.

Something nostalgia for the '70s and '80s tends to forget is how nostalgic those decades were in turn for the '50s -- from Sha Na Na to American Graffiti to Happy Days, the era of greasers and poodle skirts was more inescapable throughout the era of quaaludes and smiley faces than youngsters today might guess. And one natural byproduct -- especially when Elvis died in 1977 -- was an often covert seeping of rockabilly sounds into hard rock, glam, new wave, country, even funk. The playlist below delves beyond the Cramps and Stray Cats to explore how, and where, the '70s and '80s lit late great balls of rockabilly fire.

"Boom Boom Pow" by the Black Eyed Peas has now been the most popular song in the country for nine weeks and counting with no end in sight, making it the weirdest and most outlandish song to work up that kind of batting streak since ... what? "Hey Ya!" (nine weeks, 2003-2004)? "Macarena" (14 weeks, 1996)?? "Bette Davis Eyes" (nine weeks, 1981)??? Mighty impressive, either way, and what cannot be denied is that it is also the most shamelessly ridiculous and unabashedly catchy confection to hit the radio this year (only competition: "Poker Face"), and it's inescapable for primarily that reason.

So you know what? If you're not among the millions (if not billions) of human beings who've already surrendered to the song, you might as well. Otherwise, you'll certainly regret it 99 years from now (2108!), when you hear it on the intergalactic oldies station wired into the computer chip in your brain and it reminds you how life felt in the summer of 2009 the way no other song possibly could. And if that's not enough of a reason to embrace "Boom Boom Pow," here are 10 more.

We can argue 'til the heifers come home about whether this is a good or bad thing (correct answer: very very very good), but it can not be denied that the soon-to-over '00s have been the butt-rockingest decade in the entire history of country music since the beginning of time. In fact, it could easily be argued that country music rocked a whole lot harder in the '00s than rock did. Below are 25 magnificently loud and heavy reasons why. If you're a purist who gets nervous when country goes places it isn't supposed to, feel free to sit this one out. Otherwise, turn it up!