Taking their live-band magic from the stage to studio, these beat, rhyme, and acoustic-bass virtuosos proved the funk was in their ears, not their tour cases. This is hip-hop as art music, street-jam, and sound — not just methodology — worthy of mastering like a Hendrix solo or a Monk head, solid enough to be expanded by avant-saxophonists, not diluted. The first record since The Low-End Theory to find bebop in boom-bap, and vice versa. CHRIS NORRIS
Monumental dance music compilations come out less often than Ellen DeGeneres, and a few capture sense and sensibility as grandly as British DJ L.T.J Bukem's double-CD history of the "intelligent" side of drum'n'bass. If Goldie's Metalheadz are soulful worrywarts, Bukem's Good Looking Records posse — PFM, Peshay, et al. — are metaphysical graffiti artists, investing every synth shimmer with a hope even Ecstasy hangovers can't kill. SIA MICHEL
Tartly anthemic and convulsively sung, this Olympia, Washington trio offers the Riot Grrrl of wised-up women; the only "riots" incited here are nasty but invigorating dialogues between received history and the dream of independence. In other words, the album wants/mocks rock'n'roll with as much gorgeous ambivalence as Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, only it's ten times more candid regarding the gender implications. TERRI SUTTON
Back when the cocktail-nation was still drinking Schlitz, Stereolab's cosmic Moog Muzak linked John Cage, Martin Denny, and ABBA. And just when their cerebral drone-pop was starting to sound hopelessly sterile, they discovered the groove — slinky trances like "Metronomic Underground" please just as well in the clubs as in any space-age bachelor pad. Mao more than ever, they realize it's not a revolution if you can't dance to it. S.M.
R&B's reigning writer-producer Babyface summons all the reigning black divas — Whitney, Aretha, Chaka, TLC, Toni Braxton, Brandy, Mary J. Blige — and fashions for them enough love potions to ship seven million albums. Rubber soul? Try elegance personified, more skillfully than the movie managed. And when you hear, and adore, Houston's shoops a few years on, you'll wonder why you even questioned at all. ERIC WEISBARD
These days it seems everybody's decked out in that dubwise skitter-skatter drum'n'bass readywear. So what has suddenly made these erstwhile swingers very necessary must be the execution. Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn begin to map out the infinite depth of space opened by techno and dub. They dance out into it, reckless and lost, voluptuous and tinny. "I mean a lot," muses Thorn. "I mean a little." Club tracks as Buddhist koans. T.S.
Even now, listening, I get that flush, like remembering something really stupid I did and can never undo, straining against the memory. This live touchback, spanning a career that never became a career, centers on that emotional lurch, proves it was there all along in Nirvana's reddest seizures, their rocking out clarified nothing, dispelled nothing — just said come on over and do the twist. E.W.
Something made her very angry: a love gone mean, a promise unkept. So Tori Amos rendered her bitterness mythical. Wild imagination led her into ancient legend, intimate memory, and a dreamland where only she could read the signposts. She returned with a map: these songs, poetic in structure, ultra-vivid in tone, many rendered in the harpsichord's arcane language. A great leap in her expedition through uncharted areas of the feminine. A.P.
DJ Shadow, a quiet college kid from Northern California, obsessively cuts, pastes, and meditates on discarded rhythms like Ornette Coleman blowing the B-boy blues. Sampled dialogue (in lieu of an MC) suggests a link between today's ghetto despair and Cold War suburban paranoia (I think). Regardless, Endtroducing opens up like a funky old philosophy textbook hidden right before our eyes — whoa, hip-hop, what a concept! CHARLES AARON
Isn't it nice when aneurysms have a happy side? Smack in the grimmest of their 16 years, alt-rock's star workaholics go and make a tour album: a ghostly, raucous, and lovely reverie on motion (both physical and vehicular), full of zithers, angst, Mellotrons, and even jangly guitars. Michael Stipe has never sounded this heartfelt; nor R.E.M. so confident being R.E.M. C.N.
Music so seamlessly seat-of-the-pants that the world dances at theirs fingertips. Sampling bossa nova, '60s French pop, Machito, hip-hop, et al., while turning Asian stereotypes into ironic shout-outs, DJ Honda reimagines downtown New York as a free zone where everyone gets a great table; then MC Hatori reads the menu like a pissed-off karaoke hostess. Taking the Yoko onus, Cibo Matto write their own recipe for the future: Shut up and eat, already! C.A.
Not as willful as Kiko or the Latin Playboys side project — let's just play the blues, they might have said. But then, real masters cover their tracks, so you barely notice how orchestrated a stomp like "Mas y Mas" is, or the barbed calm of "Life Is Good." If this musical accomplishment, so seemingly casual, were jazz, one might call it Ellingtonian — does rock have a parallel? E.W.
Of all the ways a natural rocker could break the genre's confines, who these days would choose skanky, sexy, old-school reggae? These tattooed love boys from Long Beach, California, that's who. Nourished on punk energy and dub vision, Brad Nowell and his mates captured the vibe of urban ghetto life when you're the white neighbor on the block. Too bad Nowell went out in such an un-Rasta fashion, slain by heroin before Sublime hit the stores. A.P.
They came of age when hip-hop was a revolution you didn't need to feel cynical about. But unlike, say, Beck, for whom rap stimulates the imagination, or Girls Against Boys (likewise their penises), RATM treat rap's promises like a lost call-to-arms, a means to an end. And as long as what that means is Tom Morello jimmying a world of noise out of his gut, I'll continue to overlook their sometimes dubious ends. CRAIG MARKS
Everybody who thought Tricky was here to save the world from gangsta, think again. Not only doesn't Pre-Millenium Tension transcend hip-hop, it can't even imagine a possible route out. Stripping away rap's verbal acrobatics and danceable rhythms (and taking its knack for disorienting collage to extremes), SOS calls like "Vent," and "Makes Me Wanna Die" reveal the pained heart and paranoid mind at the genre's center. JEFF SALAMON
A pathbreaking hard-rock opus that plays like one long money shot. Recasting the Fab Four as Gary Numan, Steve Albini, and Ians MacKaye and Curtis, these well-coifed tomcats flirt with everything from synths to double bass and go-go drumming, for a hip-grinding sound that's both minimalist and huge. Cocksure but not sexist, they're all about succumbing — to the ladies and the sonic vortex. S.M.
Their sugar-sweet virtues they get form indie jangle and new-wave hits. Their vices they've learned on their own. Elated on the surface, these are driving adhesive songs of innocence sucked from the marrow: B&D sexual confusion, man-boy love. Death too, just outside the frame. "I'm up to my neck in party favors pesticides and pills," Will Schwartz damply whines, trapped in the after-hours club of his life. RJ SMITH
Jarvis Cocker is an assassin whose target is your fantasy life. Flouncing like a rock star, crooning like a pop idol, he wills himself into a joke that turns back on the listener. Different Class's new-wave music hall punctures the renter class in tales of slippery money, sex as revenge, deluded romance swallowed like so much Ecstasy. Many English bands have trolled this territory, but few capture its pathos with such operatic flourish. A.P.
The questions raised by the mod squad's furious melodicism still resonate: Can black rappers proffer a less suicidal if no less apocalyptic mythology of ghetto life? What signifies white, and why? What's harder, the performance that confirms the identity of black urban males as insular, savage, and doomed, or the performance that disrupts that persona? Can music move minds, or can it only move us for a moment, hands in the air singing "oo la la la"? T.S.
He may be the sad-faced clown and li'l folkie loser who found his singular voice by studying TV commercials instead of dustbowl socialism or French poets. But he's also the alienated (yet still inspired) pen pal of '80s hip-hop — De La Soul's nursery-rhymes, Public Enemy's knotty politics, the Beastie Boys' canny chutzpah. While the Dust Brothers' funny-bone breakbeats keep 'em laughing, Beck dreams of a wordy rappinghood he'll never know. C.A.