It’s been 20 years since Wilco’s Being There seduced me in my roommate’s Ford Escort. This happened in the fall of 1996, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, just two hours northeast of Chicago. So yeah, the place was crawling with Midwestern college students all earnest and modest and way into Wilco, Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, The Jayhawks and any other artist camping out halfway between alternative and rootsy. A fan of noisy underground rock, I tended to dismiss these bands — that is until I started borrowing Rob’s Escort to run errands: laundry, the bank, record stores, Smirnoff. The super generous dude said I could take it anytime, and I did. (I also devoured a lot of his groceries — sorry, man.) Why exactly I began listening to his copy of Being There — which had been out only a few weeks — and not one of the dozen other CDs strewn across the floor has been lost time. I’d love to say that I started the ignition one day and became instantly intrigued once the gargantuan, Flaming Lips-like feedback of the opener, “Misunderstood,” drenched the car. But that would be the kind of apocryphal crap music critics love foisting upon readers. Nevertheless, I started listening to the record and gradually became obsessed. It’s never left me. I know it forwards and backwards. I can recite the track list from memory. I appreciate other Wilco albums, but none even come close to blowing my mind like their second.From the little I’ve read about the album (I’m not lying when I say I haven’t read much about Wilco), Jeff Tweedy, Jay Bennett (RIP), and the rest of the crew harbored lofty themes about the complex relationship between rocker and fan when they began recording the sprawling double album in late 1995. You can hear them grapple with this idea on “Misunderstood,” written from the perspective of a fan, as well as “Sunken Treasure” and “The Lonely 1.” I didn’t know any of this when I first formulated my take on Being There, which is this: It’s an overly self-conscious rock album made by an overly self-conscious rock a band about rock, both its awesomeness and suckitude. It’s about how rock is totally weary, spent, and repetitive, yet at the same time utterly inescapable for those addicted to it. And since there is no escape, we might as well drink from that repetition — revel in it. As Tweedy sings on “Someone Else’s Song,” a slowly rolling folk number with a melody reminiscent of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” “I keep on singing/ You’re eyes they just roll/ It sounds like someone else’s song/ From a long time ago.”Wilco take the notion of singing someone else’s song as a license to wear their influences on their sleeves in a way that most bands would be too embarrassed to ever attempt. Many of these — early Little Feat, Neil, Gram, The Replacements, Big Star — are baked deep into the grooves. Others, in contrast, are shoved in listeners’ faces. Not only does “Misunderstood” lift The Lips’ uniquely groaning feedback, it actually contains lines — “Take the guitar player for a ride/ You see he ain’t never been satisfied/ He thinks he owes some kind of debt/ Be years before he gets over it” — lifted almost verbatim from Rocket From the Tombs’ proto-punk ballad “Amphetamine.” The rocker “Monday” boasts Keith Richards’ guitar tone from Let It Bleed and blaring horns from Exile On Main St. On the blurry-eyed ballad “(Was I) in Your Dream,” Tweedy sounds like a drunken Dr. John impersonator, while over the course of the fiddle jam “Dreamer in My Dreams” he mimics the raspy hellraising of Tex-Mex legend Doug Sahm (who recorded with Uncle Tupelo, incidentally).In addition to blatant plagiarism and mimicry, Tweedy works in all manner of historical references, some obvious, others oblique. In the folksy love ditty “Far, Far Away,” he slips in the phrase “on the dark side of the moon.” You can tell from his hesitant delivery that he totally knows what fans will be thinking when they hear him nick a phrase from Floyd. “Hotel Arizona” has to be a nod to “Hotel California” because the song doesn’t actually contain the phrase in the lyrics. Tweedy sings “hotel in Arizona” but not actually “Hotel Arizona.” Being There contains an “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” as well as an “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)”; both are basically different versions of the same song, just like how The Beatles included slightly different renditions of the title track on the art pop classic Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Ditto for Neil on Tonight’s the Night.)I freely admit that many of my references are wholly my own creation, and Tweedy probably would roll his eyes if he ever read this. Like a nutty conspiracy theorist with a wall full of photographs, pins, and yarn, I’ve constructed a map of the different rock coordinates that I’ve projected onto . The whistling closing out the richly melodic “Red-Eyed and Blue” is a nod to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream.” “The Lonely 1,” a syrupy ballad about the rock ‘n’ roll life, is Wilco’s “Beth,” itself a syrupy ballad about the rock ‘n’ roll life. And best of all, the playfully walking piano chords opening “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)” are a secret love letter to the influence that “Sesame Street Theme” exerted on Tweedy as a child.Being There totally invites this kind of fanaticism, however delusional, from its fans. After all, only fellow rock fanatics — the kind that spent their teenage years picking apart every last lyric, riff, and fill on their favorite albums — could’ve recorded a set so absurdly referential. This is music by obsessives for obsessives. What started as a fling in a Ford Escort in the mid ’90s turned into a fascination spanning decades.

There is only one dude in rock who has Miley Cyrus, Tame Impala, Yoko Ono and Lightning Bolt all on speed dial, and that is Wayne Coyne. His long list of BFFs and partners in crime is just as phantasmagoric and unpredictable as the psychedelic murals splashed across the façade of The Womb, The Flaming Lips’ art space in Oklahoma City. One would think a playlist featuring such a motley assortment of musicians would yield to musical chaos, but that’s not the case at all. It doesn’t matter if he’s crafting high-polish chart pop with Kesha or unleashing noise-rock tantrums with Yoko — the trippy, alt-rock messiah has a way of drawing those around him deep into his Day-Glo surrealism and candy-coated, kaleidoscopic wondrousness. You will be, too, after hitting play.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!First things first: While jamgrass certainly is progressive bluegrass (a form of it, at least), not all progressive bluegrass is jamgrass. More than a few music critics, and even fairly serious fans, tend to use the tags interchangeably, but there exist key differences in their attitudes toward experimentation. Even at their most outré, progressive bluegrass’ core outfits—Nickel Creek are a prime example—still retain a string-band flavor that, however faint, reaches back to the genre’s more traditional iterations. This isn’t the case with jamgrass acts, who, in addition to pouring their improvisational chops into extended workouts, think nothing of cutting their ’grass with funk grooves, bouncy ska, swinging jazz, Indian microtonality—even polka accordions!This certainly is the case with The String Cheese Incident’s latest full-length, Believe. In keeping with the band’s mischievously anarchic spirit, the music hops across Irish-kissed folk rock, porno disco, reggae, and riff-crunching power pop. Half the time they don’t even remotely resemble front-porch pickers and grinners. Jamgrass’ other key outfits are equally audacious: Where Railroad Earth can follow up a down-home mountain ballad with Phish-style funk, Greensky Bluegrass have been known to insert Bruce Springsteen and even Michael Jackson covers into their live shows. Leftover Salmon are so maddeningly eclectic, they’ve come up with their own genre tag: polyethnic Cajun slamgrass.Obviously, the neo-hippie jam band movement—Phish, Col. Bruce Hampton and The Aquarium Rescue Unit, Blues Traveler, Widespread Panic, et al.—looms large over jamgrass. But a more direct lineage leads back to the highly influential Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, who, in the ’90s, used bluegrass instrumentation to create what essentially is acoustic-based jazz fusion and world music. Fleck, in turn, built his sound upon innovations made by bluegrass-based groups orbiting around the Grateful Dead in the ’70s and ’80s—Old & In the Way and the clutch of other collaborative albums released by Jerry Garcia and mandolinist David Grisman are notable for sure. But it’s the latter’s other project, The David Grisman Quintet, who are the most vital. The blend of virtuoso picking, hot jazz, and folk music documented on their 1977 self-titled debut is the tree that would go on to seed all future jamgrass.

If you’re hoping for a historically astute overview of grunge’s evolution, you’re listening to the wrong playlist. You won’t encounter a single song from Green River (who kickstarted the movement), and the only Mudhoney tune is “Suck You Dry,” from their (gasp) major label debut. Oh, and another thing: not one but two Stone Temple Pilots songs, “Sex Type Thing” and “Plush,” make the cut, inclusions that are sure to piss off those Sub Pop-era grunge fans steadfast in their dismissal of STP as corporate knockoffs.Why all this sonic sacrilege? Because this playlist (put together after Chris Cornell’s death got me thinking about his crazy-intense impact on my youth) reflects how I encountered grunge as an early-’90s teenager. Growing up among the dying factories of Syracuse, New York, I wasn’t a skate punk or alt-rock kid. Independent record labels like Sub Pop and SST were not anywhere near my radar. I was a classic-rock fan who discovered the music through videos on MTV, four in particular: “Man in the Box,” “Alive,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and “Outshined.” And let me tell you, they blasted my worldview into smithereens. The widely held belief that the grunge revolution overthrew hair-metal dominance overnight is more myth than reality (the shift was, in fact, gradual), but goddamn, it sure as hell felt like it. Kids one day were sleepwalking through life to a soundtrack of Bon Jovi and Firehouse hits, and the next they were stage-diving at Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains concerts. It was heady.The radical cultural upheaval that grunge unleashed was maybe more important than the music itself. Though the movement barely lasted three years (1991 to 1994), it transformed me, my friends, and a shit-ton of folks my age. And I’m not just talking about the addition of flannel and Doc Martens to my wardrobe. All this thrillingly angry and aggressive music hit me at a time when I was beginning to question society, mainstream culture, and especially my high-school teachers and their shitty conservatism. It’s no exaggeration to say the music pushed me to become intensely sarcastic, caustic, and irreverent towards the status quo. On top of all that, there was a lot of mind-expanding exploration. When grunge pierced mainstream consciousness in 1991, I was just discovering weed; by early 1994 I was dropping acid and blasting the hellishly damaged In Utero. It, more than any other album from the time, nails the deep biting contempt I possessed for just about everything on this planet, a quality that still lurks inside me (thought largely dormant) over 20 years later.I wish I could say it was Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994, five days before my 19th birthday, that severed my ties with grunge, but it wasn’t anything that romantic. I had simply moved into the deeper corridors of indie rock. I did have a fling with Pearl Jam’s No Code, an album that possesses a meditative, post-grunge comedown vibe. But by the time of its release in 1996, I was already thinking of PJ as something from my past. Grunge, meanwhile, had become something to be rejected—which I think the musicians would’ve been fine with. The last thing a grunge band wanted was to be worshipped.Revisiting this music now, in the weeks after Cornell’s death, I’m blown away by the sheer amount of downer vibes oozing from it. Pearl Jam excluded (their lifeforce has always had some lift to it), Nirvana, AIC, and Soundgarden all released a lot of deeply painful music. “Rape Me” is absolutely chilling; so is “Down in a Hole.” Layne Staley is straight-up drowning: “Down in a hole, feeling so small/ Down in a hole, losing my soul/ Id like to fly, but my wings have been so denied.” Back in my teens, I didn’t pick up on all the fragility; I was too busy using the music as high-decibel anthems for my own alienation. As I dig deeper into my 40s, however, it’s hard to expose myself to the pain. It makes me wonder: Has there ever been a pop fad (and it most certainly was a pop fad) as depressingly fatalistic as grunge? I doubt it.At the same time, I wouldn’t swap my youth for anything. It was a thrilling time to be a rock ’n’ roll teenager (especially the concerts, which were sweaty, chaotic, and euphoric). For a brief moment, grunge actually managed to throw a monkey wrench in the gears of corporate-determined youth culture. As my friend Chloe recently said of those days, “I think the best part of the whole scene was the rejection of how things were. It was cool to be different. To be yourself. To be into whatever you wanted. To reject the corporate lifestyles we were sold.” For that we owe these artists, both surviving and fallen, a big thank you.

Neil Young has to be rock’s most unconventional guitar god. Nobody sounds like the guy. Instead of scorching hot licks and Keef-style riff swagger, he’s all about piercing, one-note solos, fuzzy stoner-drift, and rhythm playing slathered in distortion squall that ripples through the atmosphere like shockwaves. On top of all that, his playing is shot through with a primitive, minimalist sensibility, a quality that has inspired J. Mascis, Thurston Moore, Curt Kirkwood, and dozens of other alt-rock guitarists who worship his eccentricity. Rust Never Sleeps, from 1979, generally gets the nod as Young’s heaviest guitar album, but don’t sleep on 1991’s Weld; his tone is so dirty and gnarled it sounds as though he kicked a hole through his amplifier. While the bulk of the cuts on our playlist feature Young front and center, a handful of other guitarists pop up, including his old pal Stephen Stills, Frank “Poncho” Sampedro and the late Danny Whitten, both of Crazy Horse, and Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard and Mike McCready. Young is no stranger to the long-ass guitar jam; best to buckle in and enjoy the epic ride.

In terms of Western music opening itself up to global influences, the years 1976 to ’82 represent a major paradigm shift. Radical invention was everywhere, both at pop’s fringes and its center. While world renowned visionaries Talking Heads and Joni Mitchell drew African-informed polyrhythms deep into their singular visions, underground mavericks Throbbing Gristle and The Pop Group grafted clanging atonalism to tribal percussion and reverb-encrusted dub, respectively. Jazz, too, boasted its fair share of explorers. Frenetic Afro-Caribbean percussion, mesmerizing Sufi music from Morocco, exotically droning woodwinds—nothing was off limits for the likes of Ornette Coleman or Miles Davis. Not surprisingly, this playlist casts a wide net. Some cuts are as hot and humid as a rainforest; others evoke the cold, dank isolation of abandoned warehouses. Yet they’re united in their bold, ethnological innovation.