He may be called Oneman, but his tastes are legion: dubstep, hip-hop, grime, U.K. funky, garage, all tussling and tumbling over one another. In contrast to the linear, single-tempo mixes that are the norm from most DJs, Oneman's sets are like many-vectored tugs-of-war played out over constantly shifting terrain — a group sport as choreographed by MC Escher.

In his sets at clubs like London's DMZ, FWD, and Fabric, and in his Sunday-night broadcasts on Rinse FM, Oneman (Steve Bishop) has earned a reputation as one of the most versatile selectors in dance music. All the hand-wringing about DJs just pushing play, or just playing the same 10 pop-dance crossover hits as everyone else — that doesn't apply to him. Even within the dubstep scene, he's known for having deeper crates than most, and for his willingness to span decades in the course of a single set. "Oneman is a dubstep DJ who plays records that are neither dubplates nor even new," wrote Martin Clark in 2008, singling him out as an exception to U.K. club music's "newer = better" mantra. At the time, Clark noted the way that Oneman's knack for mixing current dubstep with decade-old garage tunes was helping to push the dubstep scene in a surprising new direction. Four years later, as "bass music" has slowed its tempo, incorporated elements from house and electro, and reconnected in a big way with its 2-step roots, Oneman's idiosyncratic style now looks positively prophetic.

Oneman's new mix CD, FabricLive.64, doesn't encompass every facet of his musical personality; intended as a snapshot of one of his nights at Fabric, it sticks pretty closely to peak-hour cruising tempos, with ambient bookending from Mark Pritchard and Burial to help sculpt its overall shape. Within those parameters, though, he ranges widely, taking in classic grime (Youngstar's "Pulse Y Remix"), recent house and funky (Grievous Angel's "Move Down Low," Boddika's "Soul What," Pearson Sound's "Untitled"), and choice morsels of vintage garage (Steve Gurley's remix of Basement Jaxx's "Red Alert," Dem 2's "Club Lonely" remix, even a Tuff Jam rework of CeCe Peniston's "Somebody Else's Guy"). There's a method to his mélange, though, and he works his way through the set as through traversing a series of mountainous switchbacks, often with a single tone providing the pivot point.

I spoke to Oneman about his fondness for garage, his voracious musical appetite, and his preference for playing over producing. Read on for the full interview, and watch for his FabricLive.64 when it comes out on July 16. Fabric hosts Oneman's CD launch party on Friday, August 3, with Oneman, Magnetic Man's Artwork, Kode 9, Loefah, and Jon Rust with Reecha in Room 2; Pearson Sound, Pangaea, Jackmaster, Mix Mup and Kassem Mosse, Randall, Joe, dBridge, and SP:MC round out the other two rooms.

Hi, let's start with your new Fabric mix. What did you want to do with it?
I wanted it to be the representation of a typical thing that I would have done at Fabric over the last four years. That's the approach I went for, rather than going down the avenue of a typical Rinse set that I'd do, or a Boiler Room show. I wanted to distance the Fabric style I do from everything else.

What room do you usually play when you're at Fabric?
Usually I play in Room 2. That's actually my favorite room in there, because of the sound and the darkness and the placement of the booth.

How do the particularities of the venue affect the type of set you'll play?
My Rinse show is a Sunday night, at the end of a weekend, so it's more of a chill-out session for me — ost of the time. I do get into a bit of a harder thing on Rinse, as well, but I kind of treat that as my laid-back dance-music show. My Boiler Room showcases are more hip hop mixed with house, mixed with grime and dubstep. And a Fabric set would be more house and garage, a little bit of 140 [BPM] stuff at the end. That would be a typical club set for me in the U.K., and across Europe and at festivals. The Fabric CD would be a general sort of representation of what you'd probably see out at a club, rather than on the radio or at Boiler Room.

How many takes did it take you to record the mix?
Over two or three weeks, probably about 10 or 12 different takes. There's one split in the middle of the mix, where it's split into two, sort of — a cut-and-paste job — but yeah, it's a nice flow all the way through, and it didn't take me too long. No Ableton; it's all done live off decks and a mixer and some audio software.

I noticed that you tend to get in and out of tracks quite fast: you use just a little bit of Doubleheart's "Salsa" before going into Pearson Sound's "Untitled," and there's just a tiny sliver of the Bok Bok and Tom Trago track — just enough to give listeners a flicker of recognition before you move on.
Yeah, right. I guess the style that I play in a club would be a bit quicker than an average house or techno DJ, who would play maybe four minutes of a track. I feel like the U.K. scene is more driven towards 16-bar loops or 32-bar loops, having a slight hint of 64-, 96-bar melody flashing through it. But there's never really that much to hang on to that keeps the dance music that I play interesting enough. I feel like a lot of the tracks coming out now are getting shorter and shorter because of that exact reason. There are a lot of DJs that don't even get to the second drop now. Which is a shame, but at the same time, you've got to keep the set moving.

But then you've got tracks like the new stuff on Hessle and Hemlock, which are these eight-minute epics.
Exactly. The Untold stuff, even a lot of the Pearson [Sound] tracks, are like five, six minutes long. There's a lot of the U.K. stuff now, especially since the funky scene sort of took over, I think a lot of the tracks became a lot shorter, in terms of what was actually going on. My favorite music from growing up and being in school was eight-bar grime. It was that constant switch-up. You'd hear, like, 32 bars of an eight-bar grime track, and then the DJ would mix it into another one. That sort of style of mixing heavily influenced me, as much as the house DJs did, or a DJ like DJ EZ with the garage style of mixing everything together, which is kind of where I got my main grounding. But I think I've adapted a lot of different styles, not just the quick mix.

Something I noticed, listening back to the Rinse CD, is that you're not too precious about your mixes. Part of your sense of flow seems to be a willingness to change course pretty abruptly, like when you go from Martyn's "Acid Bells" remix into Geeneus and Ms. Dynamite's "Get Low."
Yeah, I think it's having the balls to actually try things like that. I think a lot of DJs are quite safe in that respect. I dunno, I think it keeps you on your toes, and it keeps you and the crowd excited, to do things like that — like mix a beatless track into a heavy, driving track. Switching the vibe in a club is something I'll always do. In the middle of a set, I could just drop a really slow R&B track out of something really hectic. A lot of the time, I've found that a lot of people in the club will actually stop dancing and listen to a track, rather than mindlessly be dancing to something. You can actually break their night up a little bit by playing something they'll actually listen to, and then you kind of bring them back in, back up again. A set's all about going up and down for me, like a rollercoaster. I never want to be in once place the whole time. I get really bored easily.

When I saw Loefah play a few weeks ago, he went from playing house and U.K. funky into 20 minutes of hip-hop and classic dub reggae, before moving into 140-BPM dubstep. And when he shifted gears like that, people stopped, and they listened, and it was like a palate cleanser for what came next.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think those kind of things — you mentioned Loefah — those kind of things started at nights like DMZ, in London. Those were kind of my first clubbing experiences, at nights like DMZ and FWD. And it was DJs like Loefah and Mala and people like that who were actually doing things like that first, for me, in clubs — they were starting their sets with a dub tune, or in the middle of their set, they'd play, I dunno, a Mr. Fingers track. Things like that, just to switch the vibe up and switch people's perception of where they are and what they're doing. I really enjoy that. I really enjoy flipping people out.

I wanted to ask about garage and your musical upbringing. I take it that garage was your first musical love?
Yeah. I would have been 13 in 1999, and that's when garage started getting a lot darker and a lot funner. That's when we started listening to pirate radio a lot more. A lot of friends of mine had turntables, so I'd go around their houses and use theirs, and it kind of went from there. But yeah, it was growing up in London and being around garage that definitely got me into it first. Just hearing it all the time, everywhere you went — if you were walking down the High Street, cars would be blaring it, shops would be playing it. You'd hear it out of people's headphones, sitting on the bus. There were tapes everywhere. You couldn't get away from it. It was our culture. It was something that belonged to us. And I think, at that age, when you're looking for something new in music, it's always going to be the darkest thing. The kids would always split into factions of dark music at school. You had the goths or the garage heads or the grime heads — you always had these really dark factions of young people in school. And yeah, garage is definitely a part of that darkness for us, in South London.

Garage went from being glossy and poppy and just got darker and darker, through people like El-B and Horsepower Productions, and then it sort of morphed into grime, which was darker still.
Yeah, definitely. Grime is an example of how dark it really got. They really took the vocal aspect and darker parts of jungle MCing and even U.S. rap, and created a whole, new, totally dark style. It was just about jackin', fuckin' girls, the standard stuff, smoking weed — that dark, London life. I think that's the last sort of real dark music we had. Obviously dubstep had some dark moments after that, but grime is the real darkness for me.

You're on Rinse FM now, but it's since transitioned from a pirate into a legitimate station; did you play on pirate stations before that?
I started doing radio in 2006, on a station called React FM, which was based over in west London and was a pirate. I was there for like a year before I moved to Rinse. It was quite a quick turnaround before I got to Rinse. But they worked really hard at React, and since they were like west London station, they weren't direct competition with Rinse. They had a completely different area of coverage, so there was never any animosity leaving the station and going to the other one. It wasn't too much of a different experience, really. I think pirate radio had kind of fizzled out by then, anyway. There weren't many pirate radio stations on the FM vibe, sort of 2007, 2008. It kind of all went, mid-2005, 2006 was the end of the pirate radio thing in the U.K., which was a shame. So I never really got the excitement of pirate radio, that whole phone line thing, about being in a dark flat or a top floor in some secret location.

You never grab your generator and go running from the cops.
[Laughs] I never did any of that, I never had to put a mast on a roof.

Did you have to develop new skills, going from playing clubs to playing pirate radio?
I think it was about the same time. I always did what I did in my bedroom. Like, that's where you start practicing. So, from 10 years, or eight years of mixing in my bedroom, I was just taking what I'd done there and applied those skills to radio and clubs. I never really copied any other DJs, like, in terms of mixing styles. I would listen to my own mixes more than I would listen to another DJ, for example, because I'm more interested in what I do and bettering my own styles.

What would you be listening for?
If I listen back to a radio set of mine, I'd be listening to mixes that I wouldn't have done before that might be really good that I could use in clubs, or I could use on a CD, like a Fabric CD. I'd be listening for mixes that aren't good, so [they're] mixes I don't do again. I'd be looking at all sorts of things, I'd be thinking about other songs I could mix into that song — just trying to always develop as a DJ.

Back around 2008, Martin Clark mentioned that you were one of the few DJs who was playing garage at that time. It seems like your vision has been vindicated, given the general return of house and garage within the dubstep and bass scenes.
It looks that way! I never like to say that I was the reason for that, but I think that a lot of the records I was playing then were records that people didn't really know, or they didn't associate with garage. I think a lot of the early dubstep fans came from drum and bass, so they were more into that half-steppy, broken sound that wasn't as swung. Garage had a lot of swing in it. Not so much a dead sort of rhythm. When I was playing those garage records, I think a lot of people realized that all garage wasn't the glitzy, glamorous stuff; there was some darker stuff out there. And, yeah, I think DJs like Ben UFO really picked up on that and started playing a lot more garage. Eventually Hessle put out one of the first real 2-step tracks at the time, TRG's "Put You Down."

I think that time where I was playing garage definitely influenced a lot of what was going on then. The scene changed really quickly from then, it went really rhythmic — which is precisely what I was looking for, playing those records, because obviously I'd found something missing in mixing dubstep. That's why I brought these garage elements through — there was a rhythm element, and there was a sort of gap I could put things in. I could put hi-hats and snares in by playing these garage records. And I think those two sounds merged really well. And the sound that came out of that style of dubstep and garage together, as well, was really good. You know, the sort of Horsepower style or El-B style, but, like, made by someone from Romania, for example, which is what TRG is like. That would have never really happened before, because of how closely knit the scene was. But dubstep's really opened up — I'm talking about dubstep in terms of Digital Mystikz, Hatcha, N-Type, Caspa, da-da-da-da. I think the garage really took people again, which is nice.

And now things have slowed down so much, tempo-wise.
It all started with house and disco, and everything will come back there, at points. I don't know where it'll go next. I'm sort of happy with U.K. music as it is. I think there could be a lot more going on in the U.K. right now. I think it has slowed down a lot — not just in terms of BPM, but what's actually going on. I'm really enjoying playing a lot of hip hop-influenced stuff. I'm really enjoying what guys like Hudson Mohawke and Lunice are doing, what the LuckyMe label are doing — a lot of new stuff which isn't strictly dancey or housey or technoey or garagey. Like, for example, I can send you a set I did in Australia, and half of it was like 80 to 160 BPM stuff. That's another side of me that I still do a lot, as much as people don't hear it.

You mentioned Hudson Mohawke and Lunice — you mean the TNGHT record?
Yeah, yeah! That sort of sound, as well — what is that, like, 75 to 80 BPM, really hip hop-influenced stuff…

But also really grimy.
[In unison] Grimy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, really grimy! The synth sounds they use, I love the gloopiness of it. That sort of Zomby style, as well. I am a DJ at the end of the day. I play music that I like. I'm not like a house DJ or a garage DJ or da-da-da-da. I am a DJ, and I enjoy mixing. I enjoy trying to find relations between different kinds of music.

Are you still exclusively a DJ, or are you also making tracks now?
I mean, I've been playing around with Logic for five years. I'm not producing, no. I'm not making beats, finishing beats to play out. I might get to that stage, but I'm just messing around at the moment. I'm still exclusively a DJ.

Do you simply prefer playing records to making them?
Yeah, totally, totally. Every time I try and make a record I end up just getting on the decks. I much prefer that. I think a lot of people will think the FabricLive CD, is, like, that's my style. It was really hard to just break off and do one thing, but I felt it was important to do that. If people have never heard of me before and they like it, and they research me, they'll find that I do other stuff as well.

Are you still playing Serato?
Yeah, that's my main way of DJing, even though my laptop died a few days ago. I'm DJing this weekend, and it's going to be an all-vinyl set, which I'm actually quite looking forward to.

Why did you choose Serato — so you could stick with Technics, instead of CDJs?
Yeah, because I was slowly playing a lot more stuff I was getting sent online, so I was burning a lot of CDs, and I don't really enjoy using CDJs as much as Technics. I like the way that it moves, I like the big pitch [fader]. Everything's bigger, and it's more comfortable. That's what I've learned on. The Serato software with timecode vinyls, for me, is perfect. It's one of the best things that's happened to DJing.

Did shifting to Serato affect your playing style at all?
Yeah, I think it did. I think it made a lot of my mixes shorter, which is something I've sort of had to think about. I think I've slowly gotten over that. It was the garage and the dubstep I was mixing together that was really capturing the long-mix thing for me. I wasn't getting that so much with a lot of the house stuff I was playing. It did kind of change the mixing style. And then doing back-to-backs with people, as well, it changes what records you play, because you're not limited to anything. You've got your whole digital record collection on a hard drive. You're not limited to a box of records that has, I dunno, a maximum of 60 records in it. If you're limited to that, you're going to think more about what tracks you're going to play and how long you're going to play them for. If you've got a hard drive full of 12,000 tunes, and you've got an hour-long set, and you know you want to play, fucking, 100 of those tunes, or at least fucking 40, you're going to mix a lot quicker. I think that's what it comes down to — how much of a selection you've got on the night.

Have you had trouble keeping your digital music organized? For me, the biggest shift in going from vinyl to Traktor has been figuring out how to sort my collection. Mainly, I create playlists by BPM.
Yeah, I've had the same problem, and it's one of the questions I get asked the most — how do you create playlists or crates. I don't really do that. I might do one for a night I play out, or for a radio show, and then skip through them if I'm at a party, but mainly I'll do what you just said — tag the BPM and then sort all my tracks by BPM, so I can look through them that way. I guess that's kind of the closest you're going to get to a box of records. That way it's as randomized as you can get it — just filtering through BPM, and then you've got all the tracks that are, say, 124 to 128, and you can figure out what will work. I think a random-track feature on Serato would be great: You press the button, and it just creates this random crate for you. That'd be really cool.

What's going on with 502 Recordings?
Yeah, I'm still doing that. The last release was Desto in December, so it's been sort of slow. I haven't really done anything this year. But I've got a mixtape from Teeth that's gonna come out this year, very soon. We're just sorting the logistics of that out now. And then there's a Fist-T double-pack. He did "Night Hunter," our first, and he's got a new double-pack coming out. And another new Jay Weed 12-inch soon; it'll be the same camp. I think there's one new signing from Australia which will be sorted out soon. But it'll be the same camp, really. Keep it that sort of family vibe.

I just listened to a promotional mix you did for SRSLY in Italy; you did an all-night set for them, right?
Yeah, that was on the 11th of the 11th, 2011, and I played from 11. So it was all ones, basically, for Oneman.

How long did you play?
Five hours? Four hours? But that's easy for me, as long as you give me enough drink. As long as I've got enough alcohol in, I'm rolling.

I thought you were going to say 11 hours, just to round out the numerical theme.
That would've been great. I could probably do that, if I prepared.

Unlike the movie industry, which churns out one blockbuster hit after another all summer long, the video game biz saves its big guns for the holiday shopping season later in the year. But that doesn't mean your summer has to be game-free, and these are the new releases we've been playing instead of wasting our time enjoying the warm, sunny weather.

Spec Ops: The Line
2K Games
Dan: I'm a sucker for literary allusions in games, such as the Ayn Rand influences in BioShock or frequent nods to Asimov in the Mass Effect series. This military shooter works as a modern retelling of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (the 1902 novel that was the basis for Apocalypse Now), going so far as to name the seemingly rogue officer you're searching for Colonel Konrad. Beyond that, the game's pacing is excellent, with frenetic shootouts, hostage rescues, and tension-filled sneak attacks. The setting, a near-future Dubai half-buried by epic sandstorms, gives it an original look, and it's a nice change of pace from the usual warehouses, dungeons and spaceships.

Skyrim: Dawnguard
Bethesda
Libe: Skyrim was already my favorite game of 2011, with a wide-open sword-and-sorcery world that felt like a sandbox for freeform adventuring. This downloadable expansion is a bit different than the new level or new character add-ons for other games. What Dawnguard does is plunk a massive fort down on the game's existing map (already packed with dozens of square miles of towns and dungeons), and populates it with heroic vampire hunters who need your help to go all Abe Lincoln on a bunch of bloodsuckers. I especially liked how well the new content is integrated into the game. Download the $20 software update and load your most recent Skyrim game save. Shortly, a mysterious messenger will tap you on the shoulder and deliver an invitation to join the vampire hunters. It's all handled very organically, without breaking the continuity of the existing game narrative.

Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes
WB Games
Libe: A perfect mash-up of childhood memories, the LEGO-plus-X formula has worked for LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Harry Potter and LEGO Batman, among others. The caped crusader and his tights-wearing pals (a big chunk of the DC Comics roster turns up) are back in a sequel that feels, perhaps counterintuitively, a bit more more grown-up. That means you have a big chunk of Gotham City to wander around and explore freely, although the major story missions still take place in set locations. And, unlike earlier games, which featured mute characters miming and mugging for the camera, LEGO Batman 2 has a full script and voice actors (many from the various animated Batman cartoon shows), More importantly, it has an irreverent sense of humor about its self-serious crime fighters, highlighted by Batman and Superman engaging in an ongoing swagger-off about who's the most super of the heroes.

Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock
BBC Digital Entertainment
Dan: Nerd confession time: I'm a huge Doctor Who fan. But this nearly 50-year-old series has inspired only a handful of lame video game spinoffs, despite winning massive new audiences (especially here in the US) with its modern-day revival. The Eternity Clock, available as a downloadable PlayStation 3 game, isn't quite the epic time travelling adventure we've been waiting decades for, but it does manage to capture the quick-witted humor of the source material with a wordy, jokey script performed brilliantly by TV series actors Matt Smith (the 11th Doctor) and Alex Kingston (sidekick River Song). The game itself is mostly running, jumping, and puzzle solving, but the style is a 2D throwback — you can move forwards and backwards only, much like old-school games such as Super Mario Brothers. The Eternity Clock is trapped by the conventions of its side-scrolling mechanics, but worth a playthrough from fans for the as-good-as-TV writing and voice acting.

Also of note: If you liked The Walking Dead video game as much as we did, the second of five short-form episodes is available now to download for the Xbox 360, PC/Mac, and PS3.

Above the Law's KMG the Illustrator, who died on Saturday, begins "Murder Rap" from the West Coast group's 1990 debut Livin' Like Hustlers with some Flavor Flav-like words of encouragement for his rhyming partner and producer, Cold 187um: "Yo, Cold 187, they tryin' to give you a murder rap / And you ain't even like that / Yo, serve the niggas, cause they deserve to get dissed." KMG often played the tough-guy cheerleader to Cold 187's swaggering quarterback, though those times when he does rap more extensively, he earns his moniker "The Illustrator."

From Livin' Like Hustlers' title track: "KMG, the number-one mack daddy / Eatin' chicken like a motherfucker, rollin' in my caddy / With my brim cold bent to the side, I bump and slide / Go mack in the back, 187 to the side / Street pilgrims, pioneering the land / Above-the-law status, with a gat in my hand." Those first few lines are, well, pretty damned illustrative, presenting a clear and cogent picture of blaxploitation badassery, rendered with quiet confidence and colloquial regular guy-ness (the boast of eating lots of chicken is an added, low-rent bonus) and aided by a sneaky, relaxed flow that's the opposite of gangsta rap's tendency to Incredible Hulk its way through boasts and sound-offs. Referring to hustlers and dealers as "street pilgrims" is just good writing. It suggests the single-minded, risk-filled spirit of hustling, and if you want to be all Howard Zinn about it, well, it indirectly invokes the damage done by criminals and drug dealers to their community, not unlike the pilgrims' arrival and subsequent violation of what they would all call America. Boasting “above-the-law status” is, besides invoking the name of the group, a more delicate way of saying, "Fuck the police."

And that's KMG — the quiet, wizened half of a very underrated, mostly forgotten group (if you're just a little baby, you may know "Murder Rap" from the film Pineapple Express). Standing back quietly, waiting for the right moment, he'd dropkick his way through with an eminently quotable verse. Inspired by his buddies in N.W.A (Livin' Like Hustlers was released on Eazy E's Ruthless Records), KMG formed the G-funk attitude as much as Cold 187um helped co-found the sound with mentor Dr. Dre, always figuring out a more refined, smoothed-out way to deliver reality raps. He will be missed.

Heads up to anybody who was entertained by my interview a few months back with underground comics dude and Lil B cover artist Benjamin Marra. His latest comic book, Lincoln Washington: Free Man, is now available to purchase, via Traditional Comics. Like Marra's Gangsta Rap Posse, it's a pulpy, often absurd satire in the guise of a revenge tale that's not for the squeamish or easily offended. Marra's one of the few guys in comics really pondering race in a way that is brave and dicey. He isn't just doing, say, what New Yorker-approved graphic novelists like Chris Ware or Daniel Clowes do when acknowledging America's history of racism — directly tying it to just how horrible everything seems to be. Instead, he's digging in, basing this comic book around a black hero, but not shying away from harsh racist language or the visceral thrills of violence in comics (a slavemaster gets his spine pulled out Mortal Kombat-style). Check my friend Matt Seneca's review for a more cogent explanation.

Meyhem Lauren, feat. AG Da Coroner, Heems & Riff Raff "Juevos Rancheros"
What's great about this pretty good, fairly derivative NÜ-New York hip-hop scene on the rise is not that NYC is finally "back," but that the music's just overflowing with singular personalities again. It feels less like a bunch of dummies hiding in their borough and keeping the real world at bay by pretending it's 1993, than a clump of dudes with a few things in common bringing their own weight and weirdness to the table. There are probably a few guys like Meyhem Lauren in every city, but stick this guy over bougie boom-bapper Harry Fraud's Bernard Herrmann-on-speed beat, and team him up with Riff Raff (whose gimmick is that he could actually be a good rapper if he proofread his rhymes), Das Racist's Himanshu (who keeps getting better), and some guy named AG Da Coroner (who sounds just like Meyhem Lauren) and it feels fresh. I mean, this discordant mess of voices, all under one umbrella, was was what made New York rap so important way back! Not the long tradition of on-point lyrics and finely crafted production, but that every once in a while, some grunting oddballs would poke through all the artful MCing, muck it up, and make it a little more interesting.

Prodigy "Award Show Life"
Why is Mobb Deep's Prodigy talking about Hollywood glitz and glamour like he's at its epicenter? It doesn't make much sense, but this not quite a celebration (he boasts he's front row with Bieber) and kind of a critique (he calls himself a "publicity whore") of TMZ culture cleverly plays on his persona as a hardheaded, scrapping street dude, twisting the same dunny slang once used to describe Queensbridge, to take on a the big ugly invasive media: "US Weekly and TMZ don't slip, nah." It's tempting to read "Award Show Life" as a diagnosis of fame in the 2010s from a rapper who sees through it all, but there are some pointed details from Prodigy's life (advice from Biggie, an aversion to black-tie events) that suggest he's trying to convince us that US Weekly is actually following him around. Nevertheless, the lesson here is that mega-fame is just as cold and heartless as the streets and still leads to a life of hustling: "My son growing up, he think he's Chris Brown / My little daughter need that college money, no doubt / I must, bust my ass, continue to shine." Like much of H.N.I.C. 3, for every interesting thing you get out of it, there's twice as much that's incomprehensible. Still, it's an odd rap song illustrating an old head looking at a new world pass him by. I'm just not sure Prodigy realizes that's what the song is about.

Pusha T, feat. Kanye West "New God Flow"
The newest single off the upcoming G.O.O.D. Music album Cruel Summer, first teased by Kanye at the BET Awards, and what Shea Serrano declared "the most anticipated song of this whole past week." Starting with a sample from Ghostface's "Mighty Healthy" and based around a sample of what that song samples (Melvin Bliss' "Synthetic Substitution"), "New God Flow" seems to be a response to this nutty anti-God/Illuminati idiocy that's been flying around Kanye for awhile now. Here, he's connecting his brash raps to a long history of MCs calling themselves "God," making a case that it's a tradition as old as, well, it's as old as sampling Melvin Bliss. Pusha T is finding his footing again, no doubt because he once again has a target and an underdog purpose to a clearly joyless life: Steadily protecting the throne of real street rap. And though that only kind of makes sense since he's on a label led by Kanye West, it's nice to hear Pusha dropping the good kind of groaner punchlines ("They love a nigga's spirit like Pac at the Coachella"). I'll even forgive him for calling it "the Coachella" like my grandmother.

Trina, feat. Gunplay & Iceberg "Beam"
Hey, someone should let Trina actually release an album! I'm looking at you, Mad Decent. She's doing these retro-future party-rap tracks like last year's Mr. Collipark-does-Uncle Luke production, "Long Heels, Red Bottoms," and this new one, "Beam," which shuffles and bounces like the maximalist A.D.D. dance all the kids are into these days. But the most important part of this song is Gunplay, creator of furious, steroidal bangers, going all-out and singing. No, this isn't a major-label concession now that he's on Def Jam's roster (for the simple fact that his rap name is Gunplay, he cannot get on the radio or TV; it's not unlike calling your band the Fucking Champs), and it's tempting to almost see it as some kind of caricature of Miami pop-rap rambler Pitbull, but it's probably better to not think very hard about it. Gunplay's sung verse is as weird and decadent as his raps, and it's made even more absurd by the "Maybach Music" drop that usually announces the arrival of his rhymes. But no, he's just going to sing and holler with the help of some Auto-Tune like he's at karaoke doing a Gloria Estefan song over a shuffling Miami Sound Machine-meets-Santa Esmeralda horns and cocaine synth beat. It's ridiculous.

Yelawolf "Father's Day"
Heart of Dixie, Yelawolf's freebie mixtape released on the 4th of July, is better than Radioactive, but that isn't saying much. Coming just a week or so after Yela basically said what every major-label rapper who sells out and gets nothing in return wants to say, it is, at least, anice step in the right direction. And along with the icky X-Files episode directed by Gaspar Noe with a touch of SpaceGhetto video for "Growin' Up in the Gutter" he seems to be trying hard, maybe too hard, to resurrect his rowdy, underground reputation. So yes, here is a heartfelt song called "Father's Day," which is exactly the kind of emotive, poor-whiteboy-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder ish he should be doing (especially because meth-rap never took off like crack-rap, which is a shame). M16's beat has a hint of Clams Casino in it, thanks to a sample of Saint Savior's "This Ain't No Hymn," and that lets Yela get serious and properly corny as he exposes the contingencies of the working class: "If you don't get back to work on time / They tax you for that month's break," he explains with disgust. Verse two, where he tells his absentee dad to fuck off, is a winner.

M83 are about to join the distinguished list of musicians honored with a sneaker that's always had a close tie to rock'n'roll, the Converse Chuck Taylor All Star. The band is partnering with the shoe giant for a contest tied to last year's excellent Hurry Up, We're Dreaming: Fans are being invited to submit original drawings, paintings, and photos inspired by the album or any specific track. Pair your creation with a few sentences and submit it as a .jpg file 2MB or smaller to M83Contest@Converse.com (you can also submit via Instagram using the hashtag #M83Converse). M83 will pick the three winners, who will get the above customized M83 All Star and see their designs appear on the band's posters. One hundred of each victory poster will be up for sale at Anthony Gonzalez and Co.'s show at New York's SummerStage on August 8, which means this contest is on, like, now (entries are accepted today through July 31).

Full details are available on Converse's website, where you can also pick up a pair of the sneakers for yourself for cash money instead of creative energy.

Don't miss our amazing live shots of M83 onstage in Austin!

Coming back from vacation means catching up on promos, collecting all the mail-order packages that arrived in my absence, and, why not, dropping whatever remaining cash I have in record shops around town. Serves me right for leaving town precisely when the summer release schedule is hitting its peak — not to mention Joy Orbison finally dropping "Ellipsis," one of the most eagerly awaited tunes of the past year. So, with no further ado, here are five of the records that jumped out of the pack.

Joy Orbison "Ellipsis" (Hinge Finger)
Orbison's 2009 single "Hyph Mngo" came out of nowhere and turned the bass-music scene upside down. Rumors of his new single "Ellipsis," on the other hand, have been swirling for a year and a half, making it one of the most anticipated tracks in the underground. (It first surfaced January 20, 2011, on YouTube, ripped from a Boddika mix on Benji B's BBC Radio 1 show.)

So, yes, "Ellipsis" is a big track, but not in the way that "Hyph Mngo" was a big track. In terms of drama — breast-beating, face-pulling, arms-thrown-wide-to-the-heavens drama — "Hyph Mngo" surely rated 11 on a scale of one to 10; "Ellipsis," on the other hand, goes for a more laid-back vibe. It's got a quick, garage-influenced skip to its step, but the muted chords and faded colors lend a more contemplative air. If "Hyph Mngo" seemed to describe, in glowing detail, the feeling of coming up on ecstasy, the ravey pianos at the climax of "Ellipsis" feel like a wistful memory of coming up for the first time.

The song is thick with nostalgia. In fact. It's overlaid with a looped sample taken from an interview with the jungle producers Source Direct: "We just used to, like, do our own thing; we just used to like" — and there there's an edit, before he continues — "and all that sort of thing." I've been trying to figure out just why I find the sample so affecting. Part of it, surely, is its face-value meaning: He's talking about independence, free-spiritedness, ideas bound to trigger deeply seated responses in most of us. And then there's the part that's left unsaid. We just used to, like, do our own thing — and then, what? What changed? What got lost? The chords' ethereal, melancholy air surely lends to this secondary, more subliminal reaction. Beyond all that, I'm charmed by the speaker's brooding tone and seeming inarticulateness — the hemming and hawing, the "like"s, the weird non sequitur at the end. In the context of the original interview — see around 1:28 in this clip — it turns out that the phrase is hardly as weighty as all that; he's just talking about throwing parties and youthful hijinks. But realizing that doesn't detract from the sense of gravitas that Orbison manages to conjure out of some smoky chords and a cleverly placed loop point.

I could go on: There's the whole question of the track's title, which I read as a kind of metonym for all the things that get left unsaid. There's the song's lopsided, elliptical motion — surely a pun of my own making, but, once it occurred to me, I couldn't shake the idea. (I even hear the song's hi-hat figures trailing away in streams of triple-dots, like some Morse Code message streaming off into infinity.) We shouldn't forget Shed's Head High remix on the B-side, beefed up with rolling triplets that sound like nothing so much as heavy metal blast beats. And, finally, I love the fact that now that the record is finally out, more than a year since it first surfaced — several lifetimes, in Internet-music years — "Ellipsis" hasn't lost one iota of its urgency. For a tune so misty-eyed about things back in the day, it sure does make living in the present feel pretty awesome.

Markus Enochson Machinists 01 (Machinists)
"It's a techno label, for want of a better word," says Ewan Pearson of Machinists, the new label he has launched along with Moodmusic's Sasse Lindblad. "But I guess I mean in the sense that it's contemporary, tougher dance-floor stuff with an emphasis on analogue nerdery. Strictly no old-school revivalism!" The label is also, he says, "deeper and weirder than anyone will expect from something I'm connected with." That's certainly true of the label's inaugural release, a three-track EP (the digital release, out in a few weeks, contains a digital bonus) from Sweden's Markus Enochson. While Pearson's rep as a DJ, producer, and remixer is predicated upon his expansive touch — uniting pop, disco, house, and techno in idiosyncratic but totally intuitive ways — Enochson's EP is happy to narrow its gaze on a single point in the dark corner of the dance floor. True to the label's name, the music is deeply machine-like in feel, grinding and shuffling at a slow, steady clip, and suffused with smoky atmosphere. Hypnosis is big on the agenda, with long, slow builds, tweaky blips and almost subliminal repetition; in "Boy," the titular word is looped until it loses all meaning — a tiny kernel of nonsense that casts everything around it in a newly surreal light.

Members Only The Muzic Box Vol. 1 EP (Members Only)
Chicago's Jamal Moss (a.k.a. Hieroglyphic Being, the Sun God, IAMTHATIAM, et al.) makes some of the strangest club music out there, but this new 12-inch from his Members Only project is far out even by his standards. Following his 15-volume Historical Archives, a series of esoteric house and disco edits, The Muzic Box pays tribute to the Chicago club of the same name and the deconstructed disco of its legendary resident DJ, Ron Hardy, with three outlandish reel-to-reel fantasias. "Slamming the Box," sounding like a gamelan orchestra encrusted with barnacles, is an unbroken churn of triplet snares, jittery bell tones, and the mantra-like chant, "Pump, pump, pump it up"; its rhythms dangerously out of phase, it continues this rock-tumbler spin for 16-and-a-half minutes before ending, unceremoniously, in mid-beat. By all rights, it ought to be the ultimate "fuck you" in lo-fi nonchalance. but to me, it sounds unmistakably joyful.

Not so the B-side's "Jack the Floor," an 80-beats-per-minute dirge (given its half-time feel, it parses more like 40 beats per minute) that sounds like a cross between Dead Can Dance and Afrika Bambaataa's Death Mix, with a little Crispy Ambulance thrown in for good measure. I know everyone's doing dark music these days, but I doubt you'll hear a gloomier, more fucked-up track this year. "Whistle On & On" takes the lysergic vibes to nail-biting extremes with a dysfunctional robo-disco bass line, erratically rising and falling in tempo, and a nagging loop of a rave whistle. A woman's spoken "Hey! Welcome" makes it feel even more psychotic, like some Groundhog's Day incident where the club's entrance has been replaced with a revolving door that leaves you spinning forever on the threshold.

(I can't find audio on SoundCloud or YouTube, but you can hear samples at all the usual retail outlets.)

Nor'Easter & DJ Qu Tri-State EP (The Corner)
You know what there's not enough of? Records that bring together hip-hop tracks and house or techno on the same piece of vinyl. I don't mean David Guetta or Flo Rida style "urban"/dance crossover; I mean a single with a house jam on one side and a boom-bap burner on the other. You used to get that more often, when DJs tended to range more widely in style and tempo. New York's Anthony Parasole brings back the tradition with the first release on his new label, the Corner. For most listeners, DJ Qu's "Times Like This" will be the centerpiece here; originally featured on Levon Vincent's Fabric 63 mix, the swirling, percussive cut offers further proof of the Underground Quality chief's hypnotic powers. But Qu's track is buried on the A2: The first thing you hear when you drop the needle on the record are the dusty breaks and pianos of Nor'Easter's "Cuttin Heads," a Spartan hip-hop track in the tradition of DJ Premier. (The first time I heard it, it sent me down a YouTube wormhole of Jeru the Damaja videos.) "Tri-State," the lone B-side cut, stakes out a position somewhere between the two extremes, with a pitched-up hip-hop break bumping along beneath sad, cinematic techno chords.

Amir Alexander Gutter Flex EP (Argot)
Last up, the debut release from Argot, a new label run by Little White Earbuds editor Steve Mizek. Mizek launched his first imprint, Stolen Kisses, last year with a pair of records from Chicago's Hakim Murphy and London's BNJMN; Argot, termed "the adoptive parent label" of Stolen Kisses, is to focus explicitly on domestic artists. Amir Alexander has been releasing records since at least 2008, and the four tracks on his Gutter Flex EP suggest an artist deeply schooled in classic American house and techno; they're muscular, machine-centric, and devoid of digital frills, but imbued with melodic and harmonic sensibilities that set them apart from more rudimentary jack tracks. Each cut has its own character — muddled, sensual, brooding — but a mercurial, slightly elusive vibe predominates, flashing like the play of sunlight through fast-moving clouds.

Microsoft is making tablets now, so why shouldn't Google? The company behind the Android phone/tablet operating system (plus the Chrome web browser, Gmail and a pretty big search engine) is jumping into the hardware game with the Nexus 7, a seven-inch touchscreen tablet that will sell for $199.

Dan: With a 7-inch screen, the Nexus 7 isn't really competing against the 9.7-inch iPad, though rumors of a 7-inch iPad are rearing their head again. This is aimed at the Amazon Kindle Fire and, to a lesser extent, the Barnes & Noble Nook tablet. These are all 7-inch tablets that cost $199, and each ties in with a big movie, music, and book ecosystem.

Libe: I’m an unapologetic iPad fan, but in terms of the more affordable tablets, I’ve always preferred the Kindle Fire. That’s not because of the hardware or tech specs, but because Amazon has a superior book and magazine selection in the Kindle Book store, plus Amazon Instant Video and the Amazon MP3 store. It’s the closest you can get to the Apple online shopping experience without spending more than twice as much for an iPad.

The Google Play store, which is the multimedia backbone of the Nexus 7, comes close to mimicking the Apple and Amazon experience. You can find a decent selection of movies, music, and books, but at this point, people are more likely to have a big investment in Apple or Amazon for content, which may work against Google in the long run.

Dan: On the other hand, the big advantage the Nexus 7 has is that it's a pretty stock Android tablet (unlike the Kindle and Nook, which force you into a proprietary storefront view), it's easy to find and install apps such as Netflix or games. I think the ability to install and run a much wider range of apps, much as one would on an iPad, is really going to sell this over the other 7-inch tablets.

Libe: Apps as the big selling point? Really? Only major tech nerds are really into finding and installing apps. I’d argue that the majority of people are just looking a basic web reader or movie player, and any of these 7-inch tablets will work fine for that. All of these tablets also pretty much look the same: glossy screen, thin body, black bezel. You know, like an iPad. The Nook looks a little more toy-like, but I bet that'll change in the next version.

Dan: That's why it's so important for people to give devices like this a hands-on test drive before buying. At least you can try the iPad and Nook in stores easily. When I got a chance to play with the not-yet-released Nexus 7 tablet, the thing that really jumped out to me was how responsive the touch screen was. Using a Kindle Fire, for example, there's just the tiniest amount of lag, which really made it feel sluggish compared to an iPad.

The Nexus is the first 7-inch tablet I've tried that feels just as fast, and that's because it has a much better CPU and graphics system (Nvidia's quad-core Tegra 3, if you're into specs) than other 7-inch tablets, and a higher resolution screen. Put another way, this is probably the most advanced technology you can buy for $199 right now.

The Google Nexus 7 is available for pre-order now. The 8GB version is $199, the 16GB version is $249. Both are expected to ship in late July.

There is an Internet niche for everything, so who even knows what "slept-on" means anymore. Here, my definition here leans towards those releases during the past three months that seemingly came and went with little to no fanfare, or were met by a majority of websites and blogs with a shrug or an, "Eh, pretty good." It's my experience that a lot of "pretty good" records turn out to be masterpieces that need to sit there and really stick in your craw, and that often, the appeal of those amazing-from-first-listen records decreases exponentially. There's "good" and then there's good, and sometimes you have to slow down to appreciate an album, and very few of us have that kind of time. Or, we've convinced ourselves we don't have that time. Below are five picks for records to return to if you dismissed them, or to check out for the first time if they got lost in your RSS feed.

Homeboy Sandman, Chimera
Highlights: "I Do Whatever I Want," "Hold Your Head"
RIYL: Lil B's Rain In England, Terrence Malick's Tree of Life
I wouldn't recommend hearing Homeboy Sandman's EP, Chimera, under the conditions that I first heard it — on the day of its release, driving to a funeral for a friend who took his own life — but it was a strangely ideal way to experience this little, ambitious EP. The beats here are clots and gurgles of synthesizer that could soundtrack the birth of the earth or its steady falling apart, or both, like something melting back into the ground only to be resurrected as something else entirely later on. It put me in this cheesy but helpful, maybe even necessary, "circle of life" mood. And Sandman's pretty much doing spoken word here. If you're old enough to recall the crazy conversational flow Common had on a lot of the album cuts from Resurrection, where you don't even realize the words he's speaking actually rhyme, well Chimera's a lot like like that, with an unimpeachable ethical point of view and open-hearted empathy to boot. The whole thing seemed to be talking to me and pulling me out of my own skull, recalibrating my senses to realize it's bigger than one dead guy and a sad guy driving to his funeral. See what it can do for you.

Ice Burgandy, Progress Involves Risk Unfortunately
Highlights: "PMBB," "Purp," "Shout Out"
RIYL: 808 Mafia, Kurupt, Meek Mill
In the past month or so, Chicago shouter Chief Keef and Maybach Music maniac Gunplay have signed major-label deals. Why they went and did that, I'm not sure. See, street rap is under attack. This year, more than any other, has been all about sucking the menace out of rap music by way of the ongoing EDM-pop-rap threesome, Justin Bieber doing his "Rack City" flow on "Boyfriend," and Kitty Pryde and plenty of other viral Internet leeches. So, enter Ice Burgandy, a Brick Squad member with a bendy, elastic flow that out-Guccis Gucci Mane (from "PMBB": "Smokin' purple in my circle, sippin' on this yellow Sprite/ First we will hurt you, then we'll come and murk you, rock your ass goodnight / On my Harley, higher than Chris Farley"), and an ear for beats a little outside of the post-Lex Luger wheelhouse. Thirteen of Progress Involves Risk Unfortunately's 20 tracks were produced by Purrps, the most sonically diverse member of 808 Mafia, who can slip a soulful sample in the mix, or will just say, "screw it," and put the whole instrumental in reverse for a little while.

LE1F, Dark York
Highlights: "Mind Body," "Gimme Life," "Gayngsta"
RIYL: Masamune Shirow, The platonic ideal of #SEAPUNK, Jobriath
LE1F is an out-of-the-closet rapper more than willing to move his homosexuality to the forefront of his raps. Sure, there are subcultural nods via Masters at Work's house-turned-vogue house classic "The Ha Dance" murmuring through "&Gomorrah," and Lil Jon's Gangsta Grillz scream and a line from OutKast's "Return of the G" gets flipped on "Gayngsta," but there's also an intense focus on sex and desire, every bit as explicit as hundreds of straight male MCs who pen raps about how much head they get and girls gobbling their balls and all that other rah-rah male idiot stuff (though LE1F's rhymes are more clever and obtuse). He seems to be world-building here, as if "Dark York" is some futuristic version of New York City; like something from a William Gibson novel or the Manhattan of the distant future found in Paul Pope's slacker sci-fi comic book 100%. Rarely does something actually sound on the bleeding edge, but Dark York bounces by in a blur of words and fractured beats, and everyone whining about how the vocals are mixed weirdly kind of miss its moody point: This is about atmosphere and feeling.

Pepper Boy, Days of Grace
Highlights: "Change Gonna Come," "My World," "Real"
RIYL: Lil Boosie, Goodie Mob, Lee Greenwood
Soulful, Internet-y street rap from Arkansas. Yes, Pepper Boy raps over the instrumental of Lil B's "I'm God" (quite well, actually), but then again Lil B rapped over Pepper Boy's "Tha Parts," first. There are also beats that sample the Art of Noise's "Moments In Love," Cutting Crew, and Phil Collins, but Pepper Boy is hard to dislike. If he's part of rap-gone-chillwave, it's because the freedom of that scene has allowed this old soul to finally sneak through. Savant-like with his honesty, he's a guy who opens his door every morning and feels the pain and the suffering of the world and then goes back inside and tries to rap it away. A hard-assed softie, he used to sell drugs but doesn't anymore, has respect for the armed forces and deeply empathizes with African child soldiers and isn't afraid to make songs about either. He's exceedingly humble like G-Side or Main Attrakionz, yet typically street like Boosie or Z-Ro, possessing that special talent to totally disarm listeners with a willingness to share his pain.

Too $hort, No Trespassing
Highlights: "Playa Fo Life," "Boss," "Da Boom Cha"
RIYL: Iceberg Slim, E-40 in Revenue Retrievin' mode, Paul Mooney
Rap is no country for old men. Legacy artists aren't really respected and consistency is looked at as the lazy way out. As much as heads bemoan how Nas never matched Illmatic and love to ponder what would've happened to Biggie or Tupac if they hadn't died, releases by worker-bee artists are seen as being "more of the same." And somehow that's a bad thing? I'd like to blame the Internet, but it started way before that. Anyway, the latest from Too $hort is more of the same: wise-old-man pimp shit, addressed to simps and hoes, over production that figures out the sound of the radio, but knows how to twist and turn it to fit this veteran's closed-circuit world. "Double Header" squeaks and squonks like Big Sean and Wale's "Slight Work" inanity, and explodes with a hook ready for Flo Rida, but it's about threesomes. Some veteran superstars like 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg sneak in and seem happy they're allowed to act up again, and E-40 strolls through "Money On The Floor," like Short Dog's fellow old-ass bachelor buddy who won't grow up and settle down. On his 20th album in 29 years, Too $hort hasn't learned anything new. There's nothing wrong with that.

You may remember K-Pop chartbusters 2NE1 from our 20 Favorite Pop Albums of 2011 or logging two albums in our 21 Greatest K-Pop Songs of All Time or for being more famous than anything right now. Well yesterday they dropped their most recent single "I Love You" and it's a stone doozy, a perfect summation of pop's present and future: those Guetta-style soccer-riot synths glowing and pulsing, ghostly background vocals creating smoke around the neon, and a stuttering Ke$ha-gone-"Stay Fly" rap in English. It's already got 240,000 views by the time I write this, so join a cultural event and listen below:

Don't miss "Seoul Trained," our journey into the Korean pop industry

It seems as though Netflix has gone from the best DVD service ever, radically changing our lives by sending us movies OVERNIGHT through the mail, to suddenly making everyone think it is just so dang tough to wait for DVDs in the mail. Why can't they just stream everything?

As much as this complaint makes you and me and everyone we know sound like the subject of that Louis C.K. joke about how everything is awesome and nobody is happy, we certainly agree that TV streamed into your home is pretty much one of the best things about our entertainment age. You know a lot of the big guns on Netflix streaming (Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Parks and Recreation), but here are 10 excellent series that you might not know are available right this very second.

1. The Twilight Zone
The original 1959 – 1964 run is one of those programs you could call the Best Show Ever Made and not seem like a complete idiot. Sure, some of the acting and storytelling seems dated to folks raised on, say, The Wire, but Rod Serling and his team of writers, including such '50s sci-fi heavyweights as Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, were devout social progressives and hardcore idea machines. Whole TV series have been spun out of concepts fleshed out on this show in a half hour and never heard from again. All five often stunning seasons here for your consideration. Pro tip: chatting about The Twilight Zone is a terrific icebreaker when interviewing Fall frontman Mark E. Smith, who named a couple of songs after episodes.

2. The Rockford Files
Of course the car chases are pretty archaic, but Rockford holds up mind-blowingly well, mostly due to excellent writing and plotting and James Garner's performance, which manages to walk this line between mannered, vintage-TV style and rumpled naturalism that's sort of dazzling to behold. As much a part of the '70s zeitgeist in its own way as the films of Robert Altman or Neil Young's “Tonight’s the Night,” most of Rockford could have been written yesterday; it's ripe for rediscovery by contemporary noir-nerds who love, say, Ed Brubaker or George Pelecanos.

3. Woody Allen: A Documentary
This two-part episode of American Masters is essential viewing for Allen fans, which really should be all of you.

4. The Green Wing
Calling it the British Scrubs isn't quite correct, but what the hell? It is just as weird and far less emo.

5. Torchwood: Children of Earth
Watch the third season of this Doctor Who spin-off. Little about the two previous seasons of Torchwood quite prepares you for the uncut, Lovecraftian terror on display here. Peter Capaldi plays the opposite of his In the Loop vulgarian as a Home Office bureaucrat placed in an impossible position. If you are in the mood for a brilliantly realized hit of cosmic despair, look no further.

6. MI-5
The premiere spy show of our era. Make sure not to get too attached to anyone.

7. Miami Vice
No television show looked like this before, no television show has looked like this since: the colors are almost psychedelic in their intensity. Don Johnson is exactly as you remember, Philip Michael Thomas is way worse (except for the pilot, in which we get to see him lip-synch and dance to Rockwell's Somebody's Watching Me), and Edward James Olmos is still the man.

8 . Caprica
As a prequel to Battlestar Gallactica, this is a great example of a show that bit off way more than it could chew, but there's some amazing stuff in here about virtual reality addiction, religious terrorism, survivor's guilt, artificial intelligence, polyamorous family dynamics and way, way too much other stuff. Would have been twice as powerful at half as dense.

9. King of the Hill
Look, it was better than the Simpsons for longer, okay? And it’s the best show about Texas ever made.

10. Star Trek: The Original Series
Not exactly an unknown quantity, it's a gift for dorks everywhere that this thing can be dialed up on a whim. Even if you've seen 'em a million times, watch it for the still-oddly-underrated-as-acting interplay between William Shatner's scene-consumption and Leonard Nimoy's bone-dry comic timing, something Zack Quinto managed to completely ignore in his reimaging.