20th century AD

ArtForum, Dec, 1999

3. X-102 (Rings of Saturn) This stands for Detroit techno as the best electronic music of the decade; for Sun Ra's influence; and for Jeff Mills's genius.

4. Timbaland (Tim's Bio: From the Motion Picture: Life From da Basement) The best crossover beat of the decade. What Prince was for the '80s.

5. Son of Bazerk (Bazerk! Bazerk! Bazerk!) A project unfortunately abandoned at the decade's outset: to confront James Brown, Led Zeppelin, and Sam & Dave.

6. Gas (Zauberberg) You asked for Germany? Here are Thomas Mann, Wagner, and Schoenberg combined in the medium of cushioned delirium.

7. Red Krayola (Fingerpainting) The reconstruction of the incomplete avant-garde lashes with the force of negative dialectics against the attempt to reconstruct neue Musik as sacred object.

8. Prefab Sprout (Andromeda Heights) Does almost the same thing, but with a music one can cuddle up to.

9. Pere Ubu (Ray Gun Suitcase) Main point: Side effects.

10. The Melvins (Honky) Their never-ending history of heavy metal as high Conceptualism remains open-ended.

SIMON REYNOLDS

1. London Pirate Radio Rallying the city's "vibe tribe" with patois chants and Dada sound-poetry, pirate MCs surf the DJ's turbulent flow and together conjure a Hakim Bey-style "power surge" against Babylon.

2. Public Enemy (Fear of a Black Planet) Militant hip-hop's last blast, before gangsta/playa/thug rap's still-unbroken reign of false consciousness.

3. Saint Etienne ("London Belongs to Me") Britpop's dub-hazy pinnacle, four years before a pipe dream was realized as a ghastly hegemony of nostalgia and parochialism.

4. Beltram ("Energy Flash") Techno's "Raw Power," although Joey was aiming for "Iron Man."

5. Nirvana ("Smells Like Teen Spirit" video) Rebel rock's glorious valedictory blowout.

6. Castlemorton Common Rave (1992) Anarchy in the UK's rural heartland, this 40,000-strong illegal party actually provoked legislation to ensure nothing like it happened again--top that, punk rock!

7. Aphex Twin (Selected Ambient Works Volume II) Less lovely than Volume I, but deeper.

8. Aaliyah ("One in a Million") Produced/written by Timbaland and Missy Elliott, the hypersyncopated ballad that revolutionized R&B.

9. Pilldriver ("Apocalypse Never") Rave crusader Marc Acardipane's career zenith, this gabba blitzkrieg feels like surging through a nebula cloud of flame, limbs slipstreamed with incandescence.

10. Herbert (Around the House) Spongy pulses, texturhythmic voluptuousness, and exquisitely jazzed vocals reveal the myriad mood shades contained in the platitude "House is a feeling."

STEPHEN PRINA

1. Rodney Graham ("Verwandlungsmusik") The provisional expanded to the scale of a monument.

2. Cortical Foundation Especially its 1998 "Beyond the Pink" festival, which included works by Yves Klein, Emmett Williams, La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, and others.

3. My Bloody Valentine (The Roxy, LA, 1992) When the locked-groove cadential chord of the penultimate number approached the duration of twenty minutes, it was clear that a new genre of popular music had been invented that evening.