Billie Jean – Michael Jackson
The bass does not introduce itself with a flourish.
Purple Rain – Prince
The organ holds a chord that already sounds like weather, and the band waits as if the room had been told a secret.
What if Nirvana finished their fourth album?
In another Seattle weather, the fourth Nirvana album left the rehearsal room with a title nobody liked and a sequence everybody argued about.
Which song spent the most weeks at number one in the UK?
Twenty-three weeks, and a record that had stood since 1953.
Heart of Glass – Blondie
The drum machine keeps a polite, glittering time, and Debbie Harry sings as if she were leaning on a bar that might not hold her.
Song 2 – Blur
The verse is almost nothing, a bass and a mutter, and then the room detonates.
Interview of Robert Plant (1990)
The 1990 conversation with Robert Plant catches him between the glare of Led Zeppelin and the sharper weather of Manic Nirvana, the solo record he had just put into the world that spring.
Intergalactic – Beastie Boys
The voice arrives already processed, a robot that has learned to brag, and the beat under it is fat enough to be a cartoon and sharp enough to be a record.
Sexy Boy – Air
The bass arrives dry, almost rude, a short phrase played on an instrument that remembers Paul McCartney and is being asked, here, to forget him.
The Smiths – Romance, riffs and English melancholy
In May 1982 Johnny Marr walked up to Steven Morrissey's door in Stretford with a proposal and a pile of records.
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