The most maligned woman in rock history, Evelyn McDonnell called her, and it’s not hyperbole. Yet for studiocraft, Fly, Feeling the Space, and especially Approximately Infinite Universe deserve the scrutiny that her husband’s desultory Nixon-era albums get from Beatlephiles (she pushes her husband to new heights as a lead guitarist, too). Toss in Season of Glass and Rising and I had to stop noting the number of excellent songs written by Yoko Ono. Her influence is profound: from Alex Chilton’s pilfering the melody of “Mrs. Lennon” for “Holocaust” to the B-52’s and Sleater-Kinney. Walking on Thin Ice, a distillation of the Rykodisc Onobox, is one of the great accidental purchases of my life — at a Best Buy in summer ’96!Eight years younger than my grandmother, Yoko is still recording: I wish I’d heard Take Me to the Land of Hell, and she enjoys a thriving second life as the object of okay to excellent remixes of older material that have taken her to the top of the American dance charts.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Here’s to the greatest album artist of the 2000s: the most consistent and startling long players, in the old school sense. I can’t think of another artist who has recorded albums as rewarding as Supreme Clientele, Bulletproof Wallets, The Pretty Toney Album, and Fishscale — all immersive in the best sense. I’m sorry I lost track after 2010’s Apollo Kids, a quickie that predated a series of soundtracks for a graphic novel series.In the following list, I’ve cheated: “Winter Warz” is a Wu-Tang track in name only, but “Shadowboxin” appeared on GZA’S Liquid Swords and it’s the best Method Man appearance; and “Wu-Gambinos” has Ghostface’s best classic Wu-era rap but it’s on Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

By 1998 Public Enemy were history if not, in the words of “Brothers Gonna Work It Out,” his-story, especially in the year when Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliott were writing and producing their own hits. No less than reading The Devil Finds Work, my listening to Fear of a Black Planet gained from a culture’s sense of its canonicity and from the manner in which it distinguished itself from the Puff Daddy and RZA era of hip hop multiplatinum.Too black, too strong, Public Enemy’s work through 1994 mashed bewildering verbal dexterity and an ever-permutating instrumental bed that chopped up two decades’ worth of R&B and scored it to the symphony of tea kettle whistles. They’re exhausting records; listening to Public Enemy is difficult. Their albums don’t work as background music. I’m grateful to Chris Weingarten’s entry in the 33 1/3 series, a book devoted to It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, for the reasons mentioned above an album too abrasive and, well, historical to reach younger ears, as I’ve learned in recent years. Thanks to an ethos that prizes brothers working it out, the core of Chuck D, Flavor Flav, and intermittent collaborator Professor Griff don’t give much cop to women (“She Watch Channel Zero?!” misunderstands women and TV; deserves appreciation anyway) and sneer at faggots (“Pollywanacraka”). But “Pollywanacracka” unfurls as a polyphony: spoken-word cross-gender arguments over James Brown, Rufus Thomas, and Diana Ross samples that take at least a half dozen plays to suss out — and recontexualize. “All the associations that a listener may have with an existing piece of music are handed down to the new creation,” Weingarten wrote.I’m sorry to say that after He Got Game my concentration waned until 2007’s spare, contained How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul?, which I admired long before “Harder Than You Think” became the highest charting single in England as a result of 2012 Summer Olympics exposure. I’ll take any early Bush II era recommendations.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

A charmer, also a dick. Critics love the idea of Justin Timberlake: white boy leaves best-selling boy band, “matures,” gets better haircuts, etc. I bet he even smells good! The boy band’s singles were solid to excellent, though, and for a while I didn’t hear a difference between end times N Sync jams like “Girlfriend” and “Gone” and the first couple Justifiedsingles. I can’t deny he’s recorded more than a dozen bangers, and now that pot smoking has sanded down his unbearable falsetto he’s become a decent ballad singer — I have a fondness for his Inside Lleweyn Davis number. His singles have a way of sneaking up on me too. Corporate retreats and elementary school talent shows have shown the sinister nature of “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” but its rictus grin of joy got hypnotic with each play. I haven’t quite forgotten the deviousness with which he slinked away from Janet Jackson after 2004’s so-called wardrobe malfunction during the Superbowl, nor the general ignorance of a promotional circle that didn’t understand why naming a pussyhound anthem “Take Back the Night” was a dreadful mistake.We’ll be dealing with this guy for the rest of our lives.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

Clad in a T-shirt and basketball jersey, Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott looked like no other MTV fixture in the late Clinton era. Whether she’s gay is of no account: her clattering aluminum beats, declaration of appetites, camp ethos, and fascination with banality denotes a queer sensibility regardless. Every one of her albums released between 1997 and 2005 — an era that encompassed boom times and end times — is essential; This is Not a Test! has the most bangers and good album tracks, Da Real World still curiously forgotten, but Supa Dupa Fly still sounds like strange voices from another star, for which she deserves more credit than Timbaland. Souping up guys like won-ton, swaying on dosie-do like you loco, making you hot like Las Vegas weather, she reminded artists that before hip hop developed a social consciousness and was known as rap, it was an excuse to fling fly rhymes over dope beats. “‘Look, it’s very simple,” John Lennon once said to David Bowie in a fictional conversation. “‘Say what you mean, make it rhyme, and put a backbeat to it.’” What else is there?Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

I have a few comments about shoegaze, but I’ve filed a review of a certain band’s new album that recorded those comments. I’m no aficionado, though, and I didn’t listen to Isn’t Anything until a decade ago; the 2012 remaster is amazing. Nevertheless, I’m struck by my ability to remember twenty songs. I can even hum “Glider”!Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

The era when I was old enough to discover music coincided with the first peak of Morrissey’s solo career, during which he released a run of fabulous singles between 1988’s Viva Hate and 1991’s Kill Uncle* (his commercial peak wouldn’t come for another three years). My friend Greg assembled a fab mix tape that began with “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” ran through most of the marvelous first third of Louder Than Bombs, and ended with “Asleep” and “How Soon is Now?” Nudged out of uncommitted asexuality by new friends, I found the Smiths/Morrissey the ideal soundtrack, although I preferred Soho’s “Hippychick” to “How Soon is Now?” and so should you – what better way to repudiate Morrissey’s disco-baiting “Panic”? Hang the singer.This list contains of twenty-five favorites I return to with varying degrees of pleasure. Morrissey dishing is better than Morrissey moping: no “Suffer Little Children” here. As for the albums, my admiration for Meat is Murder grows. Long dismissed by, well, me, as a mausoleum for the exhausted wit of their first phase, it sounds now like a welcome run through Morrissey’s increasing confidence in the delineation of his blue balls. The self-production adds color and a sheen that makes me wonder what else John Porter obscured on the eponymous debut. And Johnny Marr’s six- and twelve-string odysseys get raunchier and more intricate: the Britfunk workout “Barbarism Begins at Home” sustains a groove and prepared the world for “The Queen is Dead.”Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

I came to Yo La Tengo late. Rob Sheffield’s lead review in Rolling Stone did the persuading. The Blue Mask? I’m there (his Lovesexy analogy crumbles though). Confident enough in its smarts to use declarative sentences, employing guitars and vibes and synths to shape sounds commensurate with the relationship it’s celebrating, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out was a good first album but a taxing one. I got I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One on the defunct Columbia House’s website; it soundtracked a summer of county wide commuting to my first journalism internship. One Saturday afternoon I got too stoned listening to “”Spec Bebop.” Summer Sun I embraced without a worry three years later: eleven miniatures, capped by a hushed version of “Take Care.” I may overrate the album because that tour was spectacular: two men and a woman switching instruments and no loss of momentum or joy in the other’s company. We liked the band enough to drive to Jacksonville in 2003, a not inconsiderable concession especially if you know the world’s dullest city. The tour for I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, which made a stop in February 2007 at the long gone Studio A, also charmed the hell out of me; the album itself was a take it or leave it deal.Take or leave my opinion. If being a fan means the demonstration of passion and the willingness to forgive mistakes or mere competence, then I’m not one. But I love these songs.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

Fortunately my generation has never had trouble accepting Sade as the origins of a well-wrought tuneful melancholy that for American fans translated as posh but fooled no one who listened to R&B radio before they joined the adult R&B lineup. Besides, it’s Sade whom we have to thank for Maxwell.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

My first experience with Kate Bush was listening to “Don’t Give Up,” her duet with Peter Gabriel: a top ten in the UK and a lesser one in America. My second experience was the Utah Saints’ ebullient sample in 1992, adapting the best lyric of her career (“I just knowthat something good is gonna hap-PEN!”) for lubricious ends. 1993 was not a good time for English eccentrics who peaked with concepts and Fairlights six years earlier, which is why I overrateThe Red Shoes. A finalist in my top ten that year, 2005’s Aerial suffers from muddled execution on its song side; “Pi” and “Joanni” sound like B-sides in search of a home and context (I love’em anyway). The second disk — a depiction of aesthetic and sexual actualization set like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves to the chronology of the tides — dawdles for fifteen minutes before “Nocturne” and the title track demonstrate how much Bush has learned about dynamics; her mastery of pitch and song form find their correlative in compositions that churn with a palpable sense of relief and release. “I feel I want to be up on the roof,” accompanied by rhythm guitar chugging, is as weird a hook as the one in “Cloudbusting,” ranking just below the part in “Get Out of My House” in which she mimics a donkey. Too bad 50 Words For Snow lacked songs for a concept. No matter: Kate Bush is worth the wait.Here are my favorite Kate Bush tracks. I wish I owned The Kick Inside and Lionheart. Her induction into Stylus’ Hall of fame inspired a few excellent appreciations, not least of which is Thomas Inskeep’s of “Experiment IV,” one of the best songs recorded expressly for a compilation (The Whole Story). I also recommend Single Jukebox colleague Katherine St. Asaph’s One Week One Band omnibus.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.