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For six decades, George Jones was one of country music’s most revered vocalists, as well as its most infamous alcoholic. And while his personal struggles with the bottle sometimes kept “No Show Jones” from the stage, it never seemed to hurt his golden voice or his prolific recording output. And songs about drinking, including celebrations as well as laments, became a significant theme in his catalog, from the rowdy 1959 pop chart breakthrough “White Lightning” to the tragic, Jones-penned 1976 album track “A Drunk Can’t Be A Man.” He even memorialized his infamous incident of drunk driving a riding mower with the 1996 hit “Honky Tonk Song.” Whether he was drinking alone or sharing a round with Merle Haggard or Willie Nelson, here are The Possum’s greatest songs about beer, wine, and moonshine.

The most neutral adjective you could use to describe the voice of Sleaford Mods mouthpiece Jason Williamson is probably “distinctive.” His wordplay, as in the opening couplet of the Nottingham duo’s 2014 breakout track “Tied Up in Nottz”—“The smell of piss is so strong, it smells like decent bacon / Kevin’s getting footloose on the overspill under the piss station”—is impressive enough, what with the way he stitches together an in-joke about the band’s favorite grimy Hamburg hotel and a reference to everyone’s favorite Kevin Bacon movie. But Williamson’s air-hammer delivery and thick-as-marmite East Midlands accent—both front and center on the new album English Tapas—contribute hugely to Sleaford Mods’ appeal, even if some non-Limey listeners may require the use of subtitles—and probably footnotes, too.Indeed, the unabashedly regional nature of Williamson’s voice remains a rarity for any act who’s garnered international attention. The vast majority of British acts have largely stuck with the tradition instituted by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, which holds that popular music should be sung in an American accent or a close enough facsimile. While fellow British Invasion acts like The Kinks and Herman’s Hermits subverted the convention—and the ubiquitous voices of Adele and Ed Sheeran sometimes demonstrate a similar degree of latitude—it can still be jarring to get an undiluted dose of Cockney, Brummie, Manc, Geordie, Scouse or any other strain. Sleaford Mods belong to a proud counter-tradition of vocalists who not only defy the pressure to Americanize but brandish accents that have traditionally been masked as markers of low class in British society.This quality creates a fascinating connection between an otherwise disparate series of singers, poets, and shouters operating not just in the punk and post-punk styles dear to Sleaford Mods, but in folk, electronic, grime, and even sound poetry. To mark English Tapas’ release and the band’s first North American tour this spring, here’s a selection of these distinctive voices. And if it just sounds like a whole lot of British people—and a few Irish—yelling at you, just remember: You probably did something to deserve it.

George Lucas has never explained quite how the bulbous-headed musicians of Mos Eisley got hip to hot jazz. Maybe Jabba the Hutt got a hold of a hijacked cargo of scratchy 78s. Whatever happened, the players onstage — toting space-age clarinets of various sizes — sure are cooking when Luke walks into the smuggler bar where he first meets Han and Chewbacca.No matter how many times I’ve seen it, I’m always captivated by the music known as the “Cantina Theme,” perhaps because its loose-limbed vitality contrasts so sharply with the Wagnerian pomp that otherwise dominates John Williams’ scores for Episodes I-VI. As music designed for pleasure, it was a rare commodity in the dingy Republic that Luke, Leia and Han strived so hard to save.With the franchise in full swing once again, it’s high time to celebrate one of the most underappreciated facets of the Star Wars universe over the last four decades: its relationship with the dancefloor. You see, I wasn’t the only one struck by that cantina sound. A trombonist and producer who’d worked with Gloria Gaynor and Carol Douglas, Domenico Monardo was so obsessed with Star Wars and its score, he pitched the idea of a dancefloor-friendly revamp to Casablanca Records’ Neil Bogart. He also sweet-talked 20th Century Fox into green-lighting his scheme for a full-bore disco treatment, complete with 70-piece orchestra and an arsenal of synthesizers. Released under the droid-y artist name of Meco, the single supercharged both the main theme and the cantina music, and was a smash hit in 1977.Of course, Monardo wasn’t the first to fuse science-fiction tropes with earthbound grooves. Sun Ra, Funkadelic and Earth, Wind & Fire had all gotten plenty pan-galactic already. Futuristic fantasies had also become a core piece of code for electronic music, too, as evidenced by works as diverse as Bebe and Louis Barron’s score for Forbidden Planet (1956) and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s sci-fi opera Sirius (1975). But Meco’s success still ushered in a dazzling new age of space disco by American masters and European mavericks. It would also inspire similarly disco-fied themes for other movies and TV shows with starry settings and laser guns.The harder rock sound that Meco adopted for The Empire Strikes Back was a sad indication of disco’s waning potency by the turn of the decade. Yet the futuristic fantasies he sparked persist in the music that sometimes fills our cantinas. And as was the case for Monardo, sometimes they’re even sanctioned by the Lucasfilm empire, a fact that suggests there may be more going on in those rebel bases than the usual mission briefings.

I’m not paralyzed with fear, but sometimes I wonder if I ought to be. Mostly, it’s the little things I obsess over: the worsening signs of global decline and potential extinction-level events already upon much of the world, but filtered through my bubble of North American privilege. It’s petty stuff, like wondering how much longer my five-year-old daughter will get to eat her favorite food of shrimp tempura, as she may be among the last people on Earth to enjoy seafood before warmer waters and climate change decimate the food chain. Or figuring out how realistic it is for my wife to keep pursuing her lifelong dream of visiting the Maldives, as the island nation may be underwater in our lifetimes, as well as Miami, New Orleans, and more than 400 other American cities and towns soon after.I know these preoccupations are silly and useless given the wretched circumstances and challenges already facing the overwhelming majority of humankind. I ought to see how good I’ve got it, what with my ready access to food, fresh water, fuel, and free Wi-Fi. Sure, every generation believes it’ll be the last, and millennial cults have yet to get the right date for the end times. But it feels like we’ll finally be the ones to make good on all those visions of apocalypse: whether it’s famines, fires, bee-population collapse, or other environmental crises; a viral plague or rampaging superbug; or a nuclear war sparked by rising tensions in North Korea, Iran, or Pakistan. My fears about the future are so huge and unwieldy that the only responses I can manage are pitifully small and solipsistic.But there’s another response, which is anger. How else to react to the Trump administration’s attempts to erase the already too-modest moves by its predecessor to address the climate crisis? Thankfully, it remains to be seen whether Trump can actually gut the Clean Power Plan or pull America out of its commitment to policy change in the Paris Agreement, given the resistance by many industries that have already adjusted to new realities and to the efforts of the Obama team to bulletproof changes in legal terms. It’s ironic how much the President is willing to sacrifice his nation’s economic supremacy and superpower status to the country he loves to bash so much: China is understandably eager to find clean-energy solutions now that so much of the country’s air is unbreathable.I know there are more positive and productive responses than my neurotic ones. Nevertheless, the road ahead is still filled with fear and despair, the same emotions that color the songs on this playlist, which ponder our distressing present and ever so uncertain future. The next Earth Day is April 22, and with Tom Waits in mind, I wonder if it would get more attention if we renamed it The Earth Dies Screaming Day. It couldn’t hurt.

Digging for jewels in a mountain of crap is no tiny task. When you start making your way through some of music history’s most notoriously awful albums hoping to uncover a hidden treasure, you’ve got to wade through a lot of unsavory stuff. More often than not, albums with rotten reps got them for a good reason, especially where major artists are concerned. It’s no big event when an artist of little renown discharges a stinker, but once you start diving into the nitty gritty of infamous career-killers like The Clash’s Cut the Crap or Blondie’s The Hunter, there’s nary a redemptive moment to be found.But just because great songs on awful albums are a rarity, that doesn’t mean they’re non-existent. And when you do come across them, their anomalous quality only makes them seem all the more special. Sometimes, you’re dealing with low-hanging fruit; it’s no mystery why “Under Pressure” is the only track 99.9 percent of the planet knows from Queen’s otherwise unsalvageable Hot Space, for instance.It take a lot more fortitude to find the real under-the-radar moments on wretched records. For the most part, the forbidding confines of albums like Bob Dylan’s double-length clunker Self Portrait or The Velvet Underground’s sad swan song, Squeeze (featuring zero original members) are enough to make the hardiest soul long for sudden deafness. But then you come across Bob’s own unhinged version of “Quinn the Eskimo,” best known by Manfred Mann’s cover version, or the Lou-less VU’s “Louise,” which could sit comfortably on a late-’60s Kinks album. And suddenly, the world seems a little sweeter for your valiant sonic spelunking.But just so you don’t have to go trawling through the refuse yourself, we’ve done the heavy lifting for you here, exposing estimable moments from albums that otherwise ought to be swiftly forgotten. Just don’t try this at home.

FACT’s “Greatest Horror Soundtracks” playlist is long, exhaustive, and at times unremittingly dark. But it also works — really, really well. There’s a core reason for its success: Instead of overwhelming listeners with a back-to-back onslaught of classic terror moments (see Bernard Herrmann’s staccato stabs in Psycho), they employ a DJ’s sense of pacing. Thus, those peak terror moments burst forth from stretches of smoldering dread and droning unease. Another standout quality is the sheer breadth of the composers spotlighted. All the giants we know and love are included, from John Carpenter to Goblin to Krzysztof Komeda. But FACT also includes many newer works, like Mica Levi’s unnerving music for director Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and the Climax Golden Twins’ creeping transmissions in 2001’s Session 9, an underrated gem of psychological horror.

This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you.Kendrick Lamar witnessed his first murder at age five. "It was outside my apartment unit," Lamar remembers. “A guy was out there serving his narcotics and somebody rolled up with a shotgun and blew his chest out. Admittedly, it done something to me right then and there. It let me know that this is not only something that Im looking at, but its something that maybe I have to get used to.”Three years later, Kendrick would see his second murder. This time it was at the Tam’s Burgers on Central and East Rosecrans, just six blocks from where Kendrick grew up. Though it’s now closed, it was an iconic Compton hangout spot known for its cheeseburgers. For the opening of his Reebok commercial, Kendrick is standing on its rooftop, and he also calls it out on “Element” from DAMN.: “I be hangin out at Tams, I be on Stockton/I dont do it for the Gram, I do it for Compton.”

It’s also notorious for being the spot where Suge Knight plowed down and killed Terry Carter in 2015, and, like most things that have to do with Compton, its memory is bittersweet for Kendrick. "Eight years old, walking home from McNair Elementary. Dude was in the drive-thru ordering his food, and homey ran up, boom boom—smoked him," Kendrick says.Kendrick is a supremely gifted craftsman and storyteller. He is perhaps the greatest hip-hop lyricist of his generation, and his songs touch on universal themes of dislocation, spirituality, and personal integrity. But Kendrick is also a product of a specific time and place, a city and era where violence was commonplace and the degree of poverty was nearly unimaginable for most of us. It’s amazing that Kendrick didn’t succumb to this. These experiences have shaped him, and his power—both as an artist and as a human—is tied into this narrative.“Everyone know Kendrick Lamar for who I am now,” Kendrick offers. “They feel like I have a whole bunch of insight, but, in order to gain that insight, I had to come from this place of loneliness, darkness, and evil. Nobody knows that.”

The roots of this violence are very deep. His family’s gang affiliations stretched back even before they moved to Compton from Chicago in 1984, three years before Kendrick was born. Kendrick’s father, Kenny Duckworth, was raised in Robert Taylor Homes, a public housing project on the south side of Chicago that was notorious for its gang violence and poverty. During the 1970s, rival gang members would throw objects from the top floor of the buildings, intending to hit their rivals but frequently striking children. And, at one point, 95 per cent of its residents were unemployed.[caption id="attachment_10827" align="alignnone" width="450"]

An interior photograph of Robert Taylor Homes[/caption]As a young man, Duckworth was reportedly running with a South Side street gang called the Gangster Disciples, a Chicago gang led by Larry Hoover, the legendary Midwestern gangster who Rick Ross immortalized in his 2010 song “B.M.F.” Hoover is currently serving six consecutive life sentences. “My parents don’t come from the Black Panther side of Chicago,” Kendrick says. “They believe in certain things, but they were just trying to manoeuvre through the cracks.”Sensing that the threats, Lamar’s mom, Paula Oliver, issued Kenny an ultimatum. "She said, I cant fuck with you if you aint trying to better yourself," Kendrick recounts. "We cant be in the streets forever."They stuffed their clothes into two black garbage bags and boarded a train to California with $500. "They were going to go to San Bernardino," Kendrick says. "But my Auntie Tina was in Compton. She got em a hotel until they got on their feet, and my mom got a job at McDonalds."[caption id="attachment_10826" align="alignnone" width="455"]

Kendrick and Paula[/caption]For the first couple of years, Paula and Kenny slept in their car or motels, or in the park when it was hot enough, both working a series of disposable jobs at fast-food joints. "Eventually, they saved enough money to get their first apartment, and thats when they had me," Kendrick says. Though they had fled Chicago so that Kenny could escape the gangs, that lifestyle found the family again in Compton. Kenny started dabbling in street life again, two of Kendrick’s uncles were locked up on robbery charges, and his Uncle Tony was shot in the head at a burger stand. “My whole family is Crips and Pirus,” Kendrick states.There’s a context for this. Violence was endemic during that period in Compton. In 1995, when Kendrick was eight, the murder rate in Compton was 81.5 out of 100,000 people. By comparison, New York City, with a murder rate of 2.2 per 100,000 people in 2015, looks like a playground. Even Chicago, which is the current strawman for violent crimes in modern America, only had a murder rate of 8.52 in 2015. It’s not as bad in Compton as it once was, but it’s also not particularly great. The per capita income is still just a little above $13K, a fraction of the $58,030 US average.For Kendrick, the violence was at times unrelenting. At the age of 15, he would be beaten down in front of his mother at the Avalon swap meet—an incident he would later relay in “Element” from DAMN. And then there was the time his mom found a bloody hospital gown among Kendrick’s clothes. Kendrick was initially cagey, but he eventually admitted that it was from being in the ER with "one of his little homeys who got smoked."Or there was the time Paula found him curled up and crying in the front yard, and figured he was sad about his grandmother’s death. "I didnt know somebody had shot at him,” she said. And then, one day, the police knocked on their door, claiming he was behind a neighborhood incident. His parents promptly kicked him out for two days.

Kendrick’s childhood home, 1612 137th St. Compton, CA.It wasn’t just gang violence that Kendrick had to worry about. One of Kendrick’s first memories was of the ’92 riots, which began after the acquittals of four police officers who had assaulted Rodney King. The chaos lasted six days—from April 29 to May 4—and resulted in 63 deaths, 2,383 injuries, and over 12,000 arrests. Over 3,700 buildings were burned, either partially or completely destroyed, and damages totalled over $1 billion. Eventually, the national guard was shipped in to restore order, but those six days would scar the community, in both big and small ways, for decades to come.Kendrick was four when it went down. "I remember riding with my pops down Bullis Road, and looking out the window and seeing motherfuckers just running," he says. "I can see smoke. We stop, and my pops goes into the Auto-Zone and comes out rolling four tires. I know he didnt buy them. Im like, Whats going on?"Years later, Kendrick would reference this story in the good kid, m.A.A.d. city bonus track, “County Building Blues.” The second verse almost exclusively captures Kendrick’s impressions of the riots: “Couple stolen TVs and a seat belt for my safety/ Played the passenger I think it’s five years after ’87/ Do the math, ‘92, don’t you be lazy.”All of this nearly broke Kendrick. "We used to have these successful people come around and tell us whats good and whats bad in the world,” Kendrick says. “But, from our perspective, it didnt mean shit to us, because youre telling us all these positive things, but, when we walk outside, we see somebodys head get blown off. And it just chips away at the confidence. It makes you feel belittled. The more violence youre exposed to as a kid, the more it chips away at you. For the most part, the kids that I was around, it broke them. It broke them to say, Fuck everything, Im gonna do what Im gonna do to survive … Before I let it chip away at me 100 per cent, I was making my transition into music."The seeds for Kendrick’s music career were also planted very early. Kendrick was born Kendrick Duckworth on June 17, 1987. As his parents drove him home from the hospital, his father played a track from the legendary old-school rapper Big Daddy Kane. “[My mom] was telling him, ‘Cut that music down, that shit too loud,’” Kendrick recalls. “And he was like, ‘Don’t worry about it. He gonna be listening to music when we get home, when he grow up, and forever.’”As a child, his father would take him to the Compton Swap Meet at North Long Beach Boulevard and Orchard. “As a kid, thats where I used to get all my cassettes, all my CDs,” Kendrick says. “My pops, too—hed buy music. Id get my Nikes there. You might see Suge Knight, other folks from Compton."But it was one time in particular that proved to be foundational for a young Kendrick. In 1996, he watched Dr. Dre and Tupac film their video for the remix of “California Love” at the swap meet. Just a few months later, Tupac would be killed, gunned down on the streets of Las Vegas, but at the time he was the world’s biggest hip-hop star. “When Tupac was here, and I saw him as a 9-year-old, I think that was the birth of what Im doing today,” Kendrick says. “From the moment that he passed, I knew the things he was saying would eventually be carried on through someone else. But I was too young to know that I would be the one doing it.”

Kendrick quickly immersed himself in hip-hop culture. When Pac died, he gravitated to DMX. Like Pac, DMX was a supremely conflicted character, with songs that threaded the line between hardscrabble machismo and stark vulnerability. “That’s the first album that got me writing,” Kendrick says of DMX’s seminal 1998 album, It’s Dark and Hell is Hot. “That album inspired me to be a rapper.”While DMX inspired Kendrick from a distance, there were important people closer to home. “I was in seventh grade, I had an English class and a teacher by the name of Mr. Inge and he would give us these poetry assignments, and there was one particular homework assignment that I didn’t do and I said to myself, ‘When I get to school I’m going to write it as fast as possible’, and I did,” Kendrick remembers of his time at Vanguard Learning Center. “I had like 10 minutes until I had to turn it in, so I did it and I turned it in. Later that day, he was passing out the grades and I was looking at my friends going, ‘Man, I got a D, I got a C,’ and I looked at it and it was an ‘A.’ From that moment on, I knew I had a gift to put words together and draw my inspiration out on a piece of paper.”[caption id="attachment_10825" align="alignnone" width="636"]

Vanguard Learning Center[/caption]The hobby quickly turned into a passion, to the surprise of Kendrick’s parents. “We used to wonder what he was doing with all that paper," his dad says. "I thought he was doing homework! I didnt know he was writing lyrics.""I had never heard him say profanity before," recalls his mom. "Then I found his little rap lyrics, and it was all Eff you. D-i-c-k. Im like, Oh, my God! Kendricks a cusser!"Soon, Kendrick began attending Centennial High School. The school is firmly considered “Blood territory,” with a graduation rate lower than 60 precent. (Federal-government guidelines for high school graduation rates dictate that all schools should be at 83 per cent.) But it’s also a school with some notable alumni, including the legendary G-Funk producer DJ Quik and, most significantly, Dr. Dre.

It was here, in 2003, that Kendrick met Dave Free, who would go on to be Kendrick’s manager and president of Top Dawg Entertainment. “Me and Kendrick go back since the beginning of 10th grade,” Free recalls. “I was the local DJ at my school and I used to have rap battles during lunch. And my boy Antonio, he was like one of the best rappers at the school. And he was telling me that he had this friend that was the craziest. I was intrigued. I set up a makeshift studio in my house… and I remember he had this line like, ‘I ship keys like a grand piano.’ And I just thought that was the most amazing line for someone his age.”“We had a little sock over the microphone” Kendrick remembers. “Did a bunch of freestyles over that little mic, gave it to his little brother who was producing at the time, and built something more than just people working together, built a friendship, built a brotherhood over the years.”Around the same time, Kendrick would have another life-changing event. As with many of the landmark events in his life, this one is rooted in violence. “It was a situation, an altercation that happened. One of the homies got popped,” Kendrick says. “And, [afterwards], we was walking the side parking lot, and this older lady walked up to us and asked us, ‘Was we saved?’ We believed in God and everything, but at the same time, we dont know what it means to actually be saved with the blood of Jesus. But… she blessed us right then and there: ‘Close your eyes and repeat after me.’ And it was said and done. And from that moment on, I knew, its real people out here that really care.”Later in 2003, Kendrick and Dave would put out Kendrick’s first release, Y.H.N.I.C. (Hub City Threat: Minor of the Year). It’s only remarkable for the the fact that it was created by a 16-year-old. The rhymes sound like rote regurgitations of a radio rap hits, but it did what it needed to. After putting it out, Dave began shopping it around, though he really only had one person in mind: TDE leader Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith.[caption id="attachment_10830" align="alignnone" width="356"]

Kendrick in a 2003 promo photo for Y.H.N.I.C.[/caption]Though just a neighborhood label, TDE was the “closest thing we knew to the industry,” according to Kendrick. But Tiffith wasn’t particularly receptive to hearing a mixtape from a 16-year-old. “I tried everything to get around the dude,” Dave says. “One time, I posed like I could fix his computer and the whole time I was playing him music and just taking apart his computer, and he started paying more attention to me. And I came over and joined the company, and brought Kendrick in, and we started grinding from there.”It was a grind that would take him to the top of the hip-hop world within a decade, but Kendrick never forgot his Compton roots. His childhood, however bleak, serves as the backdrop for his music—it’s there in nearly every song and in every interview. “What happens is it invites people in to get another perspective,” Kendrick says of the role of Compton in his music. “It brings a whole ‘nother side to the world of Compton, to this backyard and say, ‘Okay, these are actually people.’”And Kendrick also stays plugged in through much more tangible ways. In 2013, shortly after the release of good kid, m.A.A.d. city, he donated $50,000 to Centennial’s music department, and much more for the various sports and community programs. His contributions to the music department made it possible for the school to buy new instruments, and establish both string and jazz ensembles. LA Weekly recently named it one of the top music programs in America. According to its director, Manuel Castaneda, 95 per cent of participants in the music program went on to four-year colleges on full or partial scholarships—an amazing number considering that less than 10 per cent of Compton residents have a college degree.Shortly after his contribution, the California State Senate honored Kendrick Lamar for his donations, bestowing upon Kendrick a “Generational Icon Award.”

And two years later, in 2015, while shooting the video for “King Kunta,” Kendrick returned to the Compton Swap Meet, the same place where he had seen Tupac and Dr. Dre 18 years prior. “All them kids were out there looking,” he remembers. “And a good friend said, ‘You was one of those kids looking at Pac up here when he was doing that, and now they’re looking at you.”Related Reading:An In-Depth Conversation with Kendrick LamarChicago Gang History: Robert Taylor HomesVideo: Kendrick Honored On Senate FloorKendrick Lamar: “I Am Trayvon Martin. I Am All of These Kids.”Kendrick Lamar’s Guide to LABounty Hunters (Bloods)Video: Jay Rock: Only Blood in Crip High SchoolJay Rock Talks About Living in Nickerson, WattsNPR: Kendrick Lamar: I Cant Change The World Until I Change Myself FirstRolling Stone: The Trials of Kendrick LamarNoisey Bompton: Growing Up With Kendrick LamarSaveSave

During the summer of 1991, I began making mixtapes. These were pretty simple: a catalog of the songs I had heard and liked, with each side of the tape separated by month. Most importantly, these were songs I had access to, whether through my modest yet growing record and cassette collection, or my sister and mom’s stuff. In the pre-Internet days, just because I heard a song on the radio didn’t mean I could switch on a computer and download or stream it — besides, I didn’t even have a computer, and I only interacted with them sparingly at my high school in Sacramento. Trying to borrow cassettes and records from flaky friends and acquaintances was another can of worms. So my first tape, “Songs from May-June 1991,” cataloged my introverted obsessions: Morrissey’s early solo career, the Housemartins, and R.E.M. Elvis Costello was a constant, thanks to my goal of purchasing his entire catalog. He was a natural shit-talker who took gleeful aim at the world around him, and who seemed adept at encapsulating his thoughts into a pithy, memorable phrase. Yet he seemed aware that his verbal aggression couldn’t mask his bruised sensitivity, that he was just “another fool,” as he often put it. I imagined him as an idealization of the cynical and uncompromising writer I wanted to be. Eventually, my abiding passion turned to the music I heard on 120 Minutes, the Dave Kendall-hosted MTV show that brought alternative music to a nation of jaded suburbanites. It was awash in the sounds of British rock, from the Madchester jangle rock of the Stones Roses and the Charlatans; to the shoegaze trippery of Lush, Ride and My Bloody Valentine. Hearing these songs felt like being told a secret. I didn’t get the irony that I thought music being played on a nationally televised video show was worthy of cult affection. In my stifling Sacramento reality, I only knew a handful of classmates who bothered watching 120 Minutes, or went to see Ride and Lush when they played at the local all-ages venue Cattle Club. (I’m still bitter that I missed out on that show.) My absorption of Britpop coincided with my first, tentative efforts to break out of my hermetic shell, open that aforementioned “can of worms,” and befriend people who might have similar tastes. A girl in debate class offered to make copies of her Cocteau Twins collection, and soon my tape deck was dominated by the alluring and cryptic voice of Elizabeth Fraser. I became best buds with a high school dropout who collected manga from the San Francisco emporium Japantown, had a subscription to Sub Pop’s legendary “Singles Club,” and turned me on to the blissful miseries of Joy Division. (He later earned renown as an Asian pop culture expert with his own Wikipedia page.) I cataloged my newfound likes on my bi-monthly tapes. As for hip-hop? Sure, I watched BET’s Rap City and, occasionally, Yo! MTV Raps. (I thought Yo! hosts Ed Lover and Doctor Dre were annoying.) Like most kids during the late ‘80s and early early ‘90s, I zombie-d out to afternoon video shows simply to kill time and boredom. But MC Hammer, Digital Underground, and Heavy D & the Boyz were just part of the oppressive pop Zeitgeist. I liked Public Enemy, but that was like supporting a remote political figurehead that had little to do with my daily struggles at school, and my daily struggles to communicate — or not communicate — with the people around me. Britpop seemed like a more exotic world, and I interpreted its relative obscurity as proof of its superior quality. Eventually, however, I grew out of my Britpop phase and embraced the golden age of hip-hop. I arrived at college just as the “weed rap” craze was taking off, and it was more fun to smoke, drink and party to the Pharcyde’s “Pack the Pipe” and Gang Starr’s “Take Two and Pass” than Morrissey’s mopey arias. When I went to Moz’s Your Arsenal concert at the Concord Pavilion, I paid a proper farewell to that chapter of my difficult youth. -- Mosi Reeves

I’m old enough to remember a time before Spotify, iPhones or even the Internet. These weren’t such bad times. We all looked a little bit different -- a lot of us wore flannel shirts and our jeans were baggier -- but we slept, ate, drank and fucked pretty much the same. To discover music, we’d listen to the radio or MTV, or maybe read Rolling Stone or Spin. If we wanted to listen to something other than top 40 pop, classic rock or mainstream rap, we had to search for it. If you lived in some place like New York, Los Angeles or Seattle, this wasn’t too hard. You could go to a cool record store, or maybe check out a show at a local venue. But I didn’t live in one of those places. I spent my high school years in Charlotte, NC -- a city that was aggressively unhip. Charlotte imagined itself as the “new Atlanta,” and was a sprawl of strip malls, megachurches, and fast food restaurants. No major band had emerged from the area; there were more gun shops than there were record stores. Information trickled in, but just barely. In an article about David Bowie, I’d discovered the Velvet Underground; and from a Bob Dylan biography, I’d found Leonard Cohen and Arthur Rimbaud. I took notes and gradually began to piece together a map of a larger, more exciting world beyond the top 40 and creationist textbooks. For most of those years, this was a solitary journey. Most of my friends wanted to talk about girls or basketball or Saturday Night Live skits. They weren’t interested in Tom Waits, Tom Verlaine or even the Tom Tom Club. There was no message board that I could go to congregate with the like minded.In the 10th grade, this changed. I met a girl. She was from Atlanta, scrawny, a bit boyish and a pretty mean drunk. She smoked constantly, wore scruffy Doc Martin ripoffs and made exaggerated gestures when she sang aloud, which meant that she rarely used her hands when driving. She worked at a place called the Silk Plant Forest -- an artificial flower shop that was in a vast warehouse just south of downtown. When business was slow, we’d get high and explore the warehouse’s outer-edges, the various display rooms curated to resemble distant, exotic locales. The girl introduced me to Front 242 and Skinny Puppy, Happy Mondays and Siouxsie. But, mainly, we listened to The Smiths. It’s long been a given that Morrissey was the patron saint for misplaced teenagers, but we didn’t know that. My other friends regarded him, at best, as a curiosity -- an effeminate R.E.M. knock-off -- and my parents burst out laughing when they heard “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” We assumed that the rest of the world was like this - that The Smiths was ours alone. We’d make tapes of our favorite songs for one another. She had a soft spot for Morrissey’s first two solo releases, which I thought were garbage, and I leaned towards later-period Smiths (Strangeways Here We Come is a fave). Of course, it’s clear now that I was right about that, and that we were both wrong about nearly everything else. But it didn’t matter then; it was just nice riding in her car.

Unless you’re the prom queen or the captain of the football team, high school is generally filled with way more embarrassing moments than it is triumphant ones. Hell, even my triumphs — winning a couple debate conferences, being elected to the school senate — are pretty embarrassing. It’s fitting, then, that this playlist of 3rd wave ska and loser punk served as my soundtrack for those years. I got into ska for the same reason you get into all kinds of stupid crap in high school: because of a girl. I’d had a crush on her since freshman year, and when she started singing lead vocals for our high school’s ska band, I gleefully hopped on the bandwagon. My first real show, i.e. not Starship at the county fair, was a ska show: The Goodwin Club (my crush’s band), Nuckle Brothers, Skankin Pickle, Voodoo Glow Skulls. I stage dove for the first time at that show, which resulted in my pair of thrift-store-purchased corduroy pants being ripped from crotch to cuff. Because this was a ska show, however, there was an abundance of safety pins holding various patches to various kids’ backpacks, and a very kind random girl helped me pin my pants back together. In hindsight, I probably should have asked her out instead. Oh well. Not surprisingly, I was far from alone in obsessing over my crush. Half the guys in the ska scene wanted to date her and/or write a song about her. There are two such songs on this mix, “Martian Girl” by The Aquabats and “I Want Your Girlfriend to Be My Girlfriend” by Reel Big Fish, both written specifically about the girl in question. Said girl’s band played shows with many of the bands included here. I saw them open for No Doubt, Sublime, and Dance Hall Crashers (all favorites of mine), and I have vivid memories of driving around in the passenger seat of my crush object’s Jeep — her parents spoiled her rotten — listening to tapes by Propoghandi, The Descendents, The Skatalites, etc. Indeed, we became close friends, a situation that delighted her (who doesn’t want an obsequious fanboy at their beck and call), but destroyed me. I’ll spare you the details, which quickly reach Lifetime-movie levels of maudlin and depressing. Suffice it to say: I made it out alive. Once we got to college, my friends, my crush, and I all bailed on ska, swapping it out for various strains of trip-hop, indie rock, and, uh, jungle. There are plenty of songs from those genres that are near and dear to my heart, but nothing brings the memories back quite like a silly horn line and some offbeat guitar chords. I mean, listen to Skankin Pickle’s “I Missed the Bus.” That song is completely stupid and totally embarrassing, and I love it.