The Mix

Listen along to this post with our Source Material: Living Colour, Vivid playlist.

The heyday of hair metal might seem, in retrospect, a strange time for a major label like Epic to push an all-black hard rock band merging funk with Rush-type prog -- especially when the band's guitarist was a slumming New York bohemian previously most notable for playing on harmolodic avant-jazz records while moonlighting as a rock critic. We're talking 1988 here: a couple years before comparably pretentious metal from outfits like Jane's Addiction and Faith No More conquered MTV. Then again, six years after "Beat It," four after Purple Rain, and two after Run-D.M.C. ran away with "Walk This Way," perhaps rock of color suddenly seemed to have commercial potential.

Living Colour were hardly the first corporate attempt to sell music by African Americans to an '80s hard rock crowd. You might remember Fishbone or even the Bus Boys, but other names have long been lost to the sands of time: Sound Barrier, Da Krash, Jon Butcher Axis, Mazarati, Xavion, Kagny & the Dirty Rats. Living Colour had a more original sound than most of those, though, and it probably didn't hurt that they also had connections. Vernon Reid didn't only bang guitar for Ronald Shannon Jackson, he was on a first-name basis with Mick Jagger too. Singer Corey Glover had just come off a major acting role, in Oliver Stone's Vietnam flick Platoon. And drummer William Calhoun had put his Berklee degree to use with Harry Belafonte and Jaco Pastorious. The nonprofit Black Rock Coalition, which Reid helped start, actually spawned the band. Hardly your typical metal pedigree, then or now.

Somehow Living Colour actually managed to break the color barrier of album-rock radio, which -- give or take old Hendrix songs (and Thin Lizzy, if Phil Lynott counts) -- had been pretty much impermeable since the pre-Disco Sucks mid-'70s of Stevie Wonder and War. (In my recollection, even "Beat It," "Walk This Way" and Prince had trouble sneaking onto AOR in the '80s -- no matter what revisionist historians tell us.) Vivid, Living Colour's first album, went Top 10 and triple platinum; the rhythmically twisted protest (against something or other) "Cult of Personality" was a No. 13 pop hit, and the poppier, Mick Jagger-produced follow-up single, "Glamour Boys," reached No. 31. The band got more critical acclaim later -- 1990's Time's Up placed fifth in the Village Voice's definitive Pazz & Jop poll, up from No. 23 for Vivid -- but commercially, Living Colour never came close again to the popularity of their debut LP.

Hence, almost a quarter-century later, here's a roundup of music that most likely inspired Living Colour's aesthetic -- some seminal noisy fusion jazz, some black punk, some tough '80s Stones, a 1987 Public Enemy album that Reid guested on (in "Sophisticated Bitch") before Chuck D and Flavor Flav returned the favor (in Vivid's "Funny Vibe"), Talking Heads and Clash albums with songs that Living Colour wound up covering (on Vivid and a later expanded reissue version, respectively). Plus plenty of rock-leaning funk and funk-leaning rock, to help the walls come down.

Source Material: The Shape of Punk to Come

Listen along to this post with our Source Material: Refused, The Shape of Punk to Come playlist.

Refused have come back with a vengeance in 2012, after 14 years of inactivity. It's been an exciting return not just for fans but maybe even more so for the hardcore Swedes themselves, who last performed in 1998 to a crowd of about 40 in a basement in Virginia. That same year, the band released what would become their swan song (at least for the time being) with their third album, The Shape of Punk to Come.

"How can we expect anyone to listen, if we're using the same old voice/ We need new noise!" Dennis Lyxzén bellows on the screaming manifesto "New Noise." He ain't kidding -- this is not the punk your parents pogoed to. Sure it's shrill, sharp and seething, hard, heavy and firmly defiant, but The Shape of Punk to Come bombards with an array of styles your average punk band could not pull off: hardcore punk, avant-metal, prog, jazz, classical, electronic. For Refused, it was not only about making a statement through words (which they do, often, and right from the get-go: "I got a bone to pick with capitalism and a few to break/ Grab us by the throat and shake the life away/ Human life is not commodity, figures, statistics or make-believe"), but also through a rich and varied brew of sounds. Even if you're not fully on board with the band's leftist politics and straight-edge lifestyle, you've got to at least respect their musicality.

Refused's biggest influences came straight out of the American hardcore scene of the late '80s and early '90s, from the nation's capital to New York. D.C.'s Nation of Ulysses' anarcho-aggression and condemnation of everything from sugar addiction to stupid adults to the wussiness of rock 'n' roll was an obvious inspiration for the Swedes. (NoU had a song called "The Sound of Jazz to Come" -- sound familiar? -- and they also threw touches of shrieking jazzy brass into their sound.) More of Refused's straight-edge and political ideologies can be traced back to seminal bands like Born Against (the title "Refused Are F*cking Dead" sounds a little like "Born Against Are F*ckin' Dead," don't it?), Minor Threat (who coined the term "straight edge"), Gorilla Biscuits (back in February 1992, Refused covered a few of their songs at their first show in Sweden) and metalcore purveyors Earth Crisis and Ink & Dagger (I&D's guitarist Don Devore even played bass during Refused's final American tour in 1998).

Listen along to this post with our Source Material: Janis Joplin, Pearl playlist.

In 1970, Janis Joplin was 27 going on 57. Catapulted to rock stardom just two years earlier, she was quickly buckling under intensely deleterious drug abuse. Moreover, her once-preternatural howl had devolved into a ragged, shredded cry: still expressive, mind you, but the damage was apparent. As detailed in Myra Friedman's 1973 biography Buried Alive, alcohol and drugs were Joplin's way of coping with the insecurity and anxiety lurking just beneath her got-it-covered swagger and persona as the groovy, party-hard Queen of Psychedelic Soul.

She was also at a crossroads artistically. Though Cheap Thrills (recorded with Big Brother & The Holding Co. in '68) was both a critical and commercial success, there were many in the rock scene who believed Joplin had yet to release a studio album that captured her fiery genius as a live performer. I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, her first record post-Big Brother, exemplified this. The performances are rather stiff, the horn-based arrangements decadent and unnatural-feeling. Part of the issue was Joplin herself -- or, more to the point, the inconsistent and erratic behavior that inevitably accompanies substance abuse.

But equally problematic was the fact that she was, as an artist, an extreme proposition in the late '60s. The Texas-born powerhouse was a radically new mutation in rock 'n' roll's evolution: a woman with the banshee wail of Tina Turner specializing in heavy-ass groove music soaked in post-garage feedback and distortion. When you really think about it, Joplin was (along with Jim Morrison) the prototype for the blues-soaked, hard-rock screaming frontmen of the '70s: Robert Plant, Paul Rodgers, Bon Scott, Rusty Day, etc. She just arrived a couple years too soon. As a result, Columbia Records, and in particular label boss Clive Davis, had trouble capitalizing on her singular talent.

Despite this mountain of obstacles, Joplin entered the studio one last time in the fall of '70 (a month before her death on October 4) and recorded what would be her finest album, the posthumously released Pearl. Influenced by the back-to-roots movement The Band and The Rolling Stones helped spark a couple years prior, the singer assembled The Full Tilt Boogie Band in an attempt to reconnect with her love of earthy rock, soul, blues and even country. No psychedelic excesses, no overbearing brass charts, just her and a fantastic rock band that could swing electric ("Move Over") just as adroitly as they could strum acoustic (the timeless rendition of Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee").

Listen along to this post with our Source Material: Mariah Carey, Daydream playlist.

More than 20 years ago, Mariah Carey came into our lives as an exciting young singer with a sprawling, rafters-shaking range and the ability to sing the guts out of some serious adult-contemporary pop. And she could have kept doing just that: after all, even if some critics called it a Whitney Houston impersonation, it was a wildly successful one (and arguably one that out-Whitney'd Whitney).

Instead, Mimi began to chafe at the restraints placed on her by her label, that label's leader (her then-hubby Tommy Mottola) and that shiny but square vocal-pop sound. In 1995, after toying with bits of R&B and hip-hop on earlier albums, she made her intentions to take a dramatic step in that direction crystal clear with her fifth album. Daydream featured production work by Jermaine Dupri and Puffy, cameos from Boyz II Men and (on the remix to "Fantasy") Ol' Dirty Bastard, and a distinctively urban aesthetic -- all of which Mimi had to do battle with Columbia over. But the experiment paid off: "Fantasy" and "Always Be My Baby," both steeped in contemporary R&B, became two of her most career-beloved songs, while "One Sweet Day" became the longest-running No. 1 song in U.S. chart history.

Daydream isn't a simple 180, however. Rather, it's very much a transitional album, one that cozies Mariah's past sound right up to her present and showcases the range of styles she's capable of. Hip-hop and contemporary R&B alternate with quiet storm and adult contemporary, heartfelt gospel breakdowns and satiny boudoir jams, girl-group soul and, um, Journey covers. In other words, it's a testament to the myriad, interconnected influences and inspirations that have colored Mariah's entire career. We broke them down for you in this Source Material guide to the gamut-spanning pop reverie that is Daydream.

Source Material: Kelly Pickler, 100 Proof

Listen along to this post with our Source Material: Kellie Pickler, 100 Proof playlist.

On her third album, January's excellent 100 Proof, Kellie Pickler eschews country-flavored pop for a more traditional sound, and her distinctive Southern twang has never commanded so much attention.

Pickler's fondness for country music dates back to her childhood. Raised by her grandparents in Albemarle, N.C., the spirited singer grew up listening to classics from Patsy Cline, Hank Sr., Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. These artists formed her musical backbone and informed the repertoire she reached for when performing in talent shows, auditions and even on American Idol.

From the first few notes to the last, 100 Proof is soaked in classic country; even the sepia-toned artwork lends an air of dusty, weathered twang. Pickler's go-to staples can be heard in the album's arrangements, the instrumentation, even her vocal inflections. So let's break down the key tracks here and isolate her biggest influences.

Listen along to this post with our Source Material: Miles Davis, Bitches Brew playlist.

Some 40 years after its release, Miles Davis' Bitches Brew still seethes with revolutionary energy, at once sinister and stony. A groundbreaking intellectual exercise to divorce the trumpeter from his '60s work, this opus, released in 1970, ironically became his most popular recording to date. As Davis plugged in and careened headlong into his most controversial period, he allowed funk and psychedelic rock records to influence his writing, challenged the standards of instrumentation (two bass players? electric piano? distorted guitar?), and defined the sonic textures of the next decade's fusion movement.

Historians have pinned some of Davis' newfound interest in the rock charts to then-girlfriend and soon-to-be second wife Betty Mabry (later Betty Davis). In addition to having a career as a soul singer herself, she had also been a teen model who dated Hendrix and Sly Stone.

Whatever his motivation, much of the magic in Bitches Brew comes from Davis' bold vision and the fluid interchange of its personnel. He included several rising talents in the session, including bass clarinetist Bennie Maupin (later a member of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters), keyboardist Joe Zawinul (who later founded Weather Report with longtime Davis collaborator Wayne Shorter) and electric bassist Harvey Brooks. The recording also features the debut of then 19-year-old drummer Lenny White. Over just three days in August 1969, Davis and his band tracked six tunes that would forever change jazz. Here's where the music came from.

Listen along to this post with our Source Material: Madonna, Madonna playlist.

Madonna's debut album was a foundational moment for popular music. Released in 1983, it stands at the turning point between the '70s and '80s, functioning as a kind of gateway drug between disco and synth-driven dance pop. It also stands at the crossroads where the various strains of '80s pop culture met: New Wave, freestyle, R&B and dance pop (often drawn from gay and African American communities) cut through with pop-ified punk aesthetics, the excess of the late '70s and the material girlishness of the '80s -- all taboo-challenging material in an era of increasingly conservative politics. No, seriously, that's all there in "Borderline."

Beyond its sociocultural impact, however, Madonna was also foundational for the lady herself, of course. Not only was it her debut full-length, it was an introduction to her persona: a stubbornly ambitious (and, yes, fairly cocky) artist who wasn't afraid to keep pushing until her ideas took hold in (or perhaps got a choke hold on) American pop culture. A voracious cultural consumer with her finger on the pulse of hot and just-under-the-radar trends (and no shame about reclaiming those trends as her own). A dynamic performer with more than enough sheer persona to balance out her sweet but limited voice. A singer who wanted to get her audience dancing. A woman both poised to be massively well known and constantly on the verge of reinventing herself (by the time of her debut, she'd already tried on "dancer," "club siren" and "New Wave-ish hipster" personas.

Flash back to the album that started it all -- and the music that inspired it -- with our Source Material guide to Madonna.

Listen along with our Source Material: Guns N' Roses, Appetite for Destruction playlist.

The controversy surrounding M.I.A. and her flipping of the bird during this year's Super Bowl Halftime Show really cracked me up. Is that all it takes for a pop star to offend folks these days? Not to sound like a grizzled old geezer, but when I was in junior high in the late '80s (early '90s, too), pop music was far more obscene. Forget the bird. We were cranking the latest cassettes from N.W.A., Eazy-E and Geto Boys. Our girlfriends were lewdly shaking their rumps to "Me So Horny" and "Boom Boom (Let's Go Back to My Room)" at school dances. The skaters and metalheads were getting into the act as well with all the gore-stained thrash and death metal they worshipped. That stuff was insane: Obituary's Slowly We Rot? Society's slide into perversion, immorality and antisocial criminality was upon us!

Then there were Guns N' Roses. They kinda-sorta looked like hair metal rockers Mötley Crüe and Ratt, but they were different: more vile and intense. The kids flipped for them. Their videos dominated MTV, and just about everyone owned a copy of 1987's Appetite for Destruction (28 million copies sold to date -- jeez). The tape didn't leave my Walkman for months. Every day, while delivering newspapers in my neighborhood, I listened to Axl unleash expletive-laced harangues about smack, booze, womanizing, pornography, paranoia, S&M and violence (plus, the moaning chick in "Rocket Queen").

Listen along to this post with our Source Material: Fiona Apple,Tidal playlist.

"I have never been so insulted in all my life/ I could swallow the seas to wash down all this pride/ First you run like a fool just to be at my side/ And now you run like a fool but you just run to hide and I can't abide."

This is how the world was introduced to an 18-year-old Fiona Apple, a svelte, pouty-mouthed, badass beauty, frighteningly wise beyond her years, with a voice reckless and raw yet undeniably refined, and a way with words that could break bones harder than any proverbial stick or stone could conceive of. Tidal, Apple's debut album, came out in the summer of 1996. The music world was already well versed in scornful sirens: Alanis Morissette was still riding high on the overwhelming success of Jagged Little Pill, while P.J. Harvey and Tori Amos were receiving similar amounts of praise, both critically and commercially, and chicks like Ani DiFranco and Liz Phair were exhaustively working the underground circuit. This was the predawn of the Lilith Fair. And while all these women helped blaze the feisty female trail, there was something different about Apple.

Maybe it was her age. Let's face it: adolescent girls are frightening. There's nothing, nothing that can compare to the dangerous brew of hormones and fearlessness that fuels a teenager. Maybe it was her looks -- that barely legal, Calvin Klein-model, heroin-chic poise she so perfected in the video for "Criminal." Maybe it was her questionable emotional stability -- that infamous "This world is bullsh*t" speech at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards. Maybe it was her haunting back story -- she was raped at the age of 12, a subject alluded to in songs like "Sullen Girl" and "The Child Is Gone." Or maybe it was really just her talent, as a singer, a songwriter and a young woman willing to hold nothing back.

Unlike many of her peers, Apple was merging some very disparate forms of music -- the modern edge of alternative rock, the confessional poignancy of singer-songwriter blues and the traditional elegance of vocal jazz -- and somehow making it onto MTV in between silly Foo Fighters Mentos parodies and silly Spice Girls faux-feminism pep rallies. Sure, Apple was pinned as the angry girl, the dangerous seductress, but Tidal proved she had a lot more to give: the delicate twists and turns in her vocals that flowed with the grit and grace of Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald. The fighting instincts in her lyrics that rolled off the tongue with the prowess of Pattie Smith and Laura Nyro. The imagery conveyed through her words ("My feel for you boy, is decaying in front of me/ Like the carrion of a murdered prey") as vivid as anything by songwriting greats like Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen.

Listen along to this post with our Source Material: Kanye West, Graduation playlist.

When Kanye West's third album, Graduation, was released in August 2007, the audience response was muted. That statement needs to be qualified, however. The album's two predecessors, 2004's College Dropout and the following year's Late Registration, had earned rapturous reviews, particularly the latter, which got a perfect five-star rating from both Rolling Stone and XXL magazine, and was nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy. Graduation was well received, too, but not as passionately, because it initially struck listeners as gaudy and superficial. Nevertheless, it may be West's most important album.

On West's first two albums, he carefully nurtured his backpacker, voice-of-the-people credentials. He modeled himself as a humble braggart, a star shining too bright to finish college, yet he balanced his growing arrogance with socioeconomic insights on low-wage employment ("Spaceship"), shopaholics ("All Falls Down") and thug rap as a reflection of the precarious state of the working-class black community ("Crack Music"). He wanted to be the post-millennial version of Pete Rock. But with Graduation, he largely dispensed with the "conscious" raps and narrowly focused on his desire to achieve "stadium status" despite his increasingly disastrous personal life. It was the birth of the Kanye West that we know, love and are often annoyed by today.

Listen along to this post with our Source Material: Adele, 21 playlist.

You know the songs by heart. You cheered her on as she won all those Grammys. You've sobbed your guts out to "Someone Like You" more times than you care to admit. But how well do you really know 21? Adele's sophomore album has been a smashing success for many reasons, not the least of which is the young lady herself -- her ability to speak so frankly and beautifully to so many people through her songs, and that gut-grabbing, rafters-shaking voice of hers.

Almost as important, however, is the album's distinctive style, a rich palette equal parts vintage and contemporary, soul and rock 'n' roll, vulnerability and fierceness. In other words, it's ripe for a little Source Material mining, and that's just what we've done here, taking a deep dive into the musical world that made 21 -- and Adele -- the magnificent creatures they are. Join us!

Listen along with our Source Material: Ministry 'Psalm 69' playlist.

What Figures on a Beach were to Detroit, what Book of Love were to Philly, what Information Society were (a few years later) to Minneapolis, Ministry were to Chicago -- at first, anyway. (Say, starting around 1983 or so.) That is to say, a rather fey and effete American Anglophile answer to synthesized early-MTV-era British haircut pop.

But then, everything changed. In 1986, Ministry hooked up with British dub genius Adrian Sherwood for an album called Twitch -- sort of a missing link to where they wound up, but also a sonic outlier in their catalog and maybe the most rhythmic thing they ever did. Then, two years later, with barbarian-come-lately mastermind Al Jourgensen seemingly inspired by certain big and black swine-fornicating post-hardcore outfits from the onetime Hog Butcher of the World, Ministry found both their metal and mettle.

The Land of Rape and Honey, from 1988, and 1989's more or less interchangeable The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste charted higher in the U.S. than Twitch (Nos. 164 and 163 compared to 194, respectively), if not as high as 1983's wimpy With Sympathy (No. 96), but unlike that debut, those records both eventually went gold. The real breakthrough, though -- for Ministry and for "industrial metal" in general -- was 1992's Psalm 69, aka KEΦAΛΞΘ (boy, that was fun to type!), which peaked at No. 27 on the Billboard 200. It sold a million copies (a first and last for the band) on the shoulders of two Top 20 alt-rock radio hits, the novelty-ish "Jesus Built My Hotrod" (featuring Butthole Surfer Gibby Haynes) and the protest-ish "N.W.O." (ostensibly a blast at Bush the Elder). Ministry never really had another hit after that, unless 1995's middling dance-charter "The Fall" counts.

They also never made another particularly memorable album. In fact, there's a sense in which Psalm 69 itself reduced their mechanistic shock tactics and noise terrorism and pissed-off perversion, devoid of meaning in the first place, to over-considered self-parody. But this record did manage to open a door that kinder and gentler disciples like Nine Inch Nails (starting with Broken, two months later) and Marilyn Manson -- not to mention, uh, Stabbing Westward and Gravity Kills and Static X -- could sashay right through. So, while Psalm 69 didn't come close to inventing industrial metal (even for Ministry themselves), it was instrumental in popularizing the form. As for where this record got its own ideas, read on.

Listen along with our Source Material: Van Halen, 1984 playlist. And don't forget to also check out this one: Van Halen: Their Greatest Hits With Diamond Dave.

If asked to list the ultimate '80s albums -- those that I most closely associate with the decade (even if I didn't necessarily listen to all of them) -- 1984 would sit at the top of the list next to Thriller, She's So Unusual, Purple Rain, Born in the U.S.A., the Top Gun soundtrack, Like a Virgin and The Wrestling Album.

Yet I must confess: I wasn't a big fan.

Listen along with our Source Material: Skrillex, 'Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites' playlist.

Skrillex, it seems, was made for memes. From Hipster Runoff to the self-explanatory Tumblr blog Girls That Look Like Skrillex, the electro-dubstep upstart -- or at least the version imagined by snarks and Cheeto-munching forum monkeys -- leads a vibrant second life in avatar-land.

The latest viral emanation from planet Skrillex happened in December, when the man born Sonny Moore posted a YouTube clip of Aphex Twin's "Flim" to his Facebook page, accompanied by the note, "my favorite song of all time fyi." (Gotta love that "fyi," especially coming from a guy who's never worked an office job in his life.) His evangelism clearly had an effect: since then, the post has accrued 8,325 comments (and counting). A few listeners, though, felt like there was something missing from Aphex Twin's chiming electronic balladry, as indicated in comments like these:

"i was hoping for a drop."
"Still waiting for the drop.......no?"
"I was waiting for a drop that never happnd lol"
"i didnt even here a nice drop-___-....i thought it was suppose to have atleast a good drop?????"

The drop, as any fan of today's super-sized stadium rave could tell you, is the moment in a dance track, right after the breakdown (a tension-building passage, often beatless, characterized by whooshing white noise), when the bass and drums return with supersonic impact, a brick wall of sound that contorts faces and jumbles guts. That roller-coaster path from extreme to extreme defines much mainstream club music right now, and many listeners, it would seem, don't ever want to get off the ride.

Some wag cut and pasted all the drop-related comments into a single thread, making it look like Skrillex fans are nothing more than thrill-seekers with tin ears. Some of them surely are; you find them everywhere. But that's not (entirely) Skrillex's fault.

Whatever your feelings about the result, the guy seems genuinely dedicated to introducing his fans to the music that inspired his own. In interviews, he's bigged up not just obvious touchstones like The Prodigy and Nine Inch Nails, but also Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and even Autechre. Using his 2011 EP, Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, as a launching pad, we've fleshed out his list of influences and listed a few more records without which Skrillex might never have gotten his bumper car out of the gate.

Listen along with our Source Material: Beck, 'Odelay' playlist.

Perhaps the finest and weirdest sonic collage of the '90s, Beck's Odelay pierced its way into the hearts of alternative, hip-hop and pop kids alike when it came out in 1996. By then, he'd convinced the world he was a loveable "Loser" -- which also meant many had him pegged as an inevitable one-hit wonder. But with what was actually his fifth album, he proved himself a master of smart, genre-smashing songwriting, thanks in part to The Dust Brothers, the production team behind The Beastie Boys' iconic Paul's Boutique.

How to explain this album? It ain't easy. It's got funk, punk, folk, jazz, country, bossa nova, hip-hop, pop and rock; it's got a mix of Beck's irony-tinged monotone and all-out guttural yells, plus his metaphorical musings, witty commentary and occasional nonsense talk -- and we're just talking about the first few songs here. But most noteworthy is the sampling: Beck and The Dust Brothers did some serious crate digging, excavating beats from Pretty Purdie; riffs from Them; funk grooves from Sly & the Family Stone, Mandrill, Rare Earth and Freedom; sound clips from Mantronix ("I got two turntables and a microphone") and The Frogs ("That was a good drum break"); even a symphonic snippet from Franz Schubert in "High 5 (Rock the Catskills)." Beck also nods to experimental troubadour Gary Wilson ("Let the man Gary Wilson rock the most") and Musical Youth's "Pass the Dutchie," for starters, in "Where It's At," whose video included a quick shot of him impersonating Captain Beefheart.

These, of course, are just a few of the influences behind the weird, wild and wonderful Odelay. Below, dig into the artists and albums Beck sampled, referenced or likely just adored during the making of this classic.

The Who's Live at Leeds is considered by many rock nerds out there to be the greatest live album of all time; it might be the most brutal and bombastic as well. The music is hard rock, (proto) punk and heavy metal all wrapped into one viciously LOUD assault. Over the course of the 1970 album's six tracks (2001's deluxe edition contains 33), the band kicks your head in as though you were a seedy Rocker on the Brighton pier in need of a savage beating.

Greil Marcus, in his review for Rolling Stone, wrote that he believed the music's primal fury represented a regression for the group: "The Music itself is not nearly so fine. It has aged, and while the time for the album is right, the time for the music has passed, for the band, and perhaps for us as well." The track list was definitely dated for the time. It consists of three covers ("Young Man Blues," "Summertime Blues" and "Shakin' All Over") and three Pete Townshend originals ("My Generation," "The Magic Bus," and "Substitute") that date back to the mid-1960s. Though these recordings were made on the band's supporting tour for Tommy, released just the previous year, that music is for the most part absent from the original version of Live at Leeds. In the middle of a 15-minute "My Generation," they break into "Listening to You" and "See Me, Feel Me" for a spell. But that's just about it. Thus, the progressive Who, the one rapidly gaining popularity for their sweeping rock operas about deep philosophical issues and pinball, is nowhere to be found; for the moment they're just four sonic Neanderthals pulverizing their instruments.

The irony is that Live at Leeds is just as conceptual as Tommy, just in an entirely different way. Rock was evolving at an accelerated clip in the late 1960s. While The Who got all heady and arty on The Who Sell Out and Tommy, a new generation of hard rock bands had emerged that were taking the concept of heavy, a concept The Who had originally helped pioneer, to new extremes: Mountain, Humble Pie, Free, MC5, Black Sabbath, Cactus, Ten Years After and, of course, Zeppelin. The myth is that Live at Leeds was The Who's sonic rebuke to all these upstarts, particularly Zep. They wanted to remind rock fans that they were the real Kings of Heavy. In order to achieve this, they very cleverly edited the live recordings (made at the University of Leeds on February 14, 1970), cutting the Tommy material while stitching together the concert's hardest-rocking moments. As a result, the original Live at Leeds doesn't capture an actual performance; it's more like a simulation of what the heaviest, loudest live performance possible might sound like -- according to The Who.

Source Material: Smashing Pumpkins, Gish

Director and former rock journalist Cameron Crowe opens his new Pearl Jam documentary PJ20 with a fantastic riff about moving to Seattle in the mid 1980s and encountering the city's burgeoning grunge movement. "I became aware of a whole scene of musicians that really worked together to create their own world of influences and bands and community," he says, reflecting on bands like Green River, Mother Love Bone and Soundgarden. "I immediately realized how much this was different from the places I grew up in and the music I listened to in Southern California. This is music that came from guys who stayed indoors a lot. They had a lot of time to play and a lot of time to listen. And they listened to everything: hard rock, hair metal, glam, R&B, soul, disco, blues. All of it Cuisinart'd together into this majestic mix of great, melodic hard rock."

Though Billy Corgan's Smashing Pumpkins hail from the Midwest, another region in this country whose harsh weather traditionally spawns a lot of indoor activity, their music has very much been a parallel manifestation. It's not grunge per se, but definitely, in the words of Crowe, "a majestic mix of great, melodic hard rock." This is particularly true of the group's debut album, Gish, originally released in 1991 and just reissued as a deluxe edition packed with bonus material. The record's alternative influences are obvious: Bowie, The Cure's doom-n-gloom, the mighty Dinosaur Jr., Hüsker Dü and the Pixies' brash blister-pop, Sonic Youth, Jane's Addiction's Zep-stained art metal and all the wonderful wall-of-sound indie from the U.K. (The Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine in particular).

With breezy, swinging panache, Vince Guaraldi pulled off something nearly impossible with his 1965 score to A Charlie Brown Christmas: he issued a record that instantly expanded the overstuffed Christmas canon. The formula was unusual, to say the least. The pianist's lightly swinging trio brought a fresh, sophisticated air to dreary holiday standards like "O Tannenbaum," captured several cute (if somewhat tuneless) kids' sing-alongs, and turned out a few nimble originals--"Skating," "Christmas Time Is Here," "Linus & Lucy"--that became standards in their own right.

Getting under the surface of A Charlie Brown Christmas requires a musical trip back to the genre-bending, transformational West Coast jazz scene of the 1950s. Guaraldi grew up in San Francisco and found himself returning to the city after serving in the Korean War. In college, he was fascinated by boogie-woogie piano players like Meade "Lux" Lewis, Albert Ammons and Jimmy Yancey, and eventually took an interest in straight-ahead jazz. He sat in at San Francisco clubs like the Blackhawk, and eventually landed a gig adding to the shimmering, Latin-influenced grooves of Cal Tjader.

Guaraldi's first major recordings were with Tjader's outfit in 1951, and he'd keep that association going throughout his career, eventually playing on about a dozen of the bandleader's records. Guaraldi cut his first solo sessions in 1955, and eventually shaped a career that ranged far beyond his dalliances with Charlie Brown and Snoopy. His melodic, grounded playing simultaneously imbibed Dave Brubeck's trained compositional sensibility and swinging elements of piano greats like Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum. More than anything, he had a fierce ear for melody as both a composer and an improviser.

When Good Girl Gone Bad first dropped in 2007, it re-introduced the world to Rihanna in several different ways. Already an up-and-coming pop-R&B star, the Barbadian 20-year-old morphed into a megawatt hit machine as the album spawned smash after smash, starting with the ubiquitous "Umbrella." Despite her youth, it also introduced her as a mature force to be reckoned with, an all-grown-up pop diva capable of holding her own against whatever heavyweight producers like Timbaland and Tricky Stewart threw at her.

But finally, Good Girl introduced us to a stormier Rihanna comfortable using both sexuality and vulnerability as languages of independence. Not only did her turn to the dark side pave the way for Riri's future experiments with the fine line between eroticism and emotion, it also placed her in a long line of fierce "bad girls" in the history of pop music. Retrace her musical and emotional excavation with our Source Material guide to Good Girl Gone Bad (the 2008 "reloaded" version).

Listen along with my playlist:

Source Material: Rihanna, Good Girl Gone Bad

A quarter-century after its release (feel old now?), it is somewhat amusing, amazing and perplexing to remember that, way back then, Bon Jovi's 1986 album Slippery When Wet was actually considered a metal album -- if not necessarily by metalheads themselves, then definitely by the rest of the rock world. Even in the realm of hair metal -- certainly compared to bands like Guns N' Roses and Mötley Crüe -- Bon Jovi just seem so doggone wholesome, at least in retrospect. Still, the power chords were there, and so, to some extent, were the visual trappings: on the backside of the cover, Bon Jovi the band may not look like they'd drowned in a vat of pink mascara and eyeliner, but their hair is pretty teased. Jon Bon himself has the obligatory-for-the-epoch scarf around his neck, and drummer Tico Torres is even wearing tight leopard-skin trousers.

Really, what a few fellas in the band almost look like -- given their rhinestone cowboy boots and pants -- is a modern regional Mexican group: all they need is fancy cowboy hats! On a steel horse they ride, don'cha know. And they still look Western-ish enough to have inspired Nashville country music since then; seriously, listen to Brantley Gilbert sometime. Heck, Chris Cagle and Montgomery Gentry have even covered "Wanted Dead or Alive" in the past decade. And of course there was also Bon Jovi's own 2006 No. 1 country duet with Jennifer Nettles, "Who Says You Can't Go Home." It all adds up now, right?

Anyway, back to metal. The cover of Slippery When Wet, as all fans know, was originally going to be a buxom lady with her topside stuffed into a drenched T-shirt with the album's title on it. Japan got that one, apparently, but in the U.S. the cover was much less brazen and more modest (and less metal): just the words on what is said to be a rain-soaked Hefty bag. Still, the inner sleeve did show the mostly shirtless band having a charity car wash with lots of skimpily clad models. Warrant were taking notes, no doubt.

Rhapsody named Radiohead's Kid A its No. 1 album of the '00s. Released in late 2000, the album now reveals itself as a sort of ominous oracle pointing us toward a future of technological dependence, where words lose meaning in binary code and digital devices serve as conduits of emotion.

Radiohead started to deconstruct this sort of Brave New World mentality with 1997's OK Computer. Ironically, that album's acclaim only made them feel further alienated. So instead of going the way of raw sentiment (i.e. "Creep") for their next round in the studio, the band took the opposite approach, breaking down pain, passion and paranoia into digitized sound manipulations -- even tweaking Thom Yorke's schoolboy wails into android chatter and spectral purrs. Yorke's lyrics themselves came from a place partially detached from human consciousness; he was influenced by Dadaist poetry, which involves writing one-liners, putting them into a hat and drawing them out at random. The result of all this is an album that sounds beamed in from the insular surface of the moon. Its opaque textures glisten with twinkling music boxes, bustling horns, fanciful harp, crystallized hums, dissonant reception and plenty of unidentified flying clatter.

Kid A ultimately became a prototype for the electronic experimentation and cross-pollination of genres that would influence and define much of the music released in the '00s. But it didn't completely come out of nowhere. Radiohead did their research: those blips, bleeps and ambient drones were inspired by the innovative work coming out on British indie label Warp Records in the '90s, including music from Aphex Twin, Autechre and Boards of Canada; another U.K. label, Mo' Wax, brought fragmented trip-hop and jazz-tinged hip-hop to the attention of the band through artists like DJ Krush and DJ Shadow. That storm of brass sweeping through "National Anthem" has its roots in the free jazz stylings of Charles Mingus. Those tripping motorik beats and scattered loops bear the fingerprints of Krautrock kings Can, Neu! and Faust. And the piece of gear known as an Ondes Martenot was inspired by the pioneering work of French composer Olivier Messiaen -- one of the first electronic instruments, its sound is like a cross between a deranged string quartet and a shivering theremin, and Jonny Greenwood's experimentations with the Ondes on tracks like "Kid A" and "How to Disappear Completely" helped rocket Radiohead's sound into the farthest of galaxies.

"I got my toes in the water/ Ass in the sand/ Not a worry in the world/ A cold beer in my hand," begins Zac Brown Band's mega-hit "Toes." That Brown finishes his ode to dropping out with a serene "life is good today" makes it all the more appealing — pure escapism in these tough economic times. And judging by his sales, millions have been willing to buy into that philosophy and escape for a while, even if just for the hour-plus it takes for Brown's second studio album, You Get What You Give, to play from start to finish.

Georgia native Zac Brown was the 11th child in a family of 12. His guitar-playing father exposed the clan to a variety of music, and the young songwriter really hunkered down with his siblings' record collections — especially that of his oldest brother, 21 years Zac's senior. He thus absorbed singer-songwriters, country and bluegrass, pop, and rock without prejudice.

When Brown entered college, he formed a band to help pay his tuition. The band sort of drifted in and out of status, but the events of September 11, 2001, inspired Brown to quit school and concentrate on music full time. Christened The Zac Brown Band, he and his cohorts racked up an amazing 200 gigs their first year, playing anywhere that would have them, be it country clubs or jam festivals. All of these experiences have shaped their somewhat country, singer-songwriter-ish, yacht-rock-meets-slightly-hippie-dippy sound.

And while that sound is difficult to pin down, their influences are a bit easier to spot. So let's peel back some layers and divine the influences of 2010's platinum-selling You Get What You Give. If you want to cut right to the music, this playlist includes both Z.B.B. songs and their direct influences. The rest can read on.

Click here to listen to our accompanying playlist:

Source Material: Zac Brown Band, You Get What You Give

With their mix of sweet harmonies, fluid craftsmanship and signature noodly guitar jams, The Grateful Dead are one of the biggest influences on modern-day jam bands — The Zac Brown Band included.

When Beirut burst (OK, shuffled quietly) onto the scene in 2006, Zachary Condon's rotating crew wowed fans and critics alike with both his precocious songwriting and the globe-trotting, youth-belying range of stylistic sources he employed. As the legend goes, the New Mexico native dropped out of school as a teenager and went bumming around Europe, where he discovered and thoroughly absorbed folk and pop music traditions from French musette to Balkan brass to (especially) Roma/Gypsy folk. Back home, he wove his sonic discoveries into the tapestry of his debut album, along with bits and pieces of other influences, like the mariachi music he often heard while growing up in Santa Fe, the inclinations of his fellow globally inclined American singer-songwriters, and, of course, a lot of indie rock and pop. Then he filtered it all through a sweet, pensive haze that constituted both a gesture toward Roma music's palpable sense of yearning and his own take on the tradition.

In short, Gulag Orkestar was a remarkable (and remarkably mature) debut for a young singer-songwriter who has gone on to live up to the hype (and continue his sonic globe-trotting) on subsequent albums, including this year's The Rip Tide. Join us as we retrace Beirut's steps and take a deep dive into that debut album's roots and routes; your ears can follow along with this playlist:

Source Material: Beirut, Gulag Orkestar.

Wilco's Being There is one of those albums that was tailor-made for The Mix's Source Material treatment. The double-disc set is a ramshackle song cycle about all things rock 'n' roll: rock fandom, growing up on rock, rock as livelihood and so on. Even when Jeff Tweedy — using as he does that deadpan croon that makes you think he's either bored or stoned or both — rhapsodizes on the struggles of love and romance, he views them through the prism of ... the rock.

A big part of this hyper self-awareness is the way Being There wears its influences on its sleeves. The thing is littered with lyrical allusions and sonic references, as if it's a kind of Masonic Bible for rock 'n' roll: if decoded properly, it will open up a secret history. This is something I discovered not long after the record dropped in the fall of '96. I was a senior at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo back then. I was also a record store clerk "in the middle of awkward musical transitions," according to old pal and author Bryan Charles (who chronicled our college days in his Wowee Zowee book for Continuum's 33 1/3 series — Wilco are also mentioned). Moreover, I had "disowned the traditional in favor of screeching free-form noise." Thus, Being There's American rock vibe was the last thing my antennae were attuned to at the time.

But two other close friends, Steve and Rob, big Wilco fans whose tastes I genuinely dug, got me hooked regardless. As the autumn turned into one of the Midwest's harshest winters in decades, I used Rob's Escort GT to run errands quite a lot, and the discs were always in the car. Every time I borrowed it I worked on this decoding process: the lines in "Misunderstood" were lifted from punk icon Peter Laughner's "Amphetamine" ("Take the guitar layer for a ride ..."); there was a nod to Pink Floyd in "Far, Far Away" ("... on the dark side of the moon"); and "Hotel California" had turned into the "Hotel Arizona," where they made the band "wanna feel like stars." This process has never stopped, in fact. Through the years I've discovered more, like the way the fiddle jam "Dreamer in My Dreams" is surely a brazen reimaging of the Sir Douglas Quintet deep cut "Funky Side of Your Mind," or how "Kingpin" and Bert Jansch's "Open Up the Watergate (Let the Sunshine In)" share the exact same slinky groove.

In the process of putting together this source material, I attempted to track down as much music writing on Aerosmith — and on Rocks especially — as time permitted. I focused my query on the 1970s: Robert Christgau reviews, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, Lester Bangs, Creem, etc. A lot of what I read was positive. In another lifetime, decades before Aerosmith embarrassed themselves with a Super Bowl jig accompanied by a brood of 21st-century pop tarts, they were genuinely liked by rock's cognoscenti.

What I read can also be boiled down to a basic premise: Aerosmith are sleaze-ball bar-rockers from Boston who will slay you with their raw take on Rolling Stones boogie. That nails the band's m.o. through the decades, yet the nerdy rock 'n' roll clinician in me has always heard more in their sound. Let's begin with ground-zero influences. Steven Tyler's juicy lips don't lie: he grew up worshiping Mick Jagger. But his piercing shriek also contains hints of Robert Plant and Janis Joplin, whom I've always believed is the template for heavy metal frontmen of the 1970s. (Considering the voluminous machismo packed inside the pants of such swaggering beasts, I find it a delicious piece of irony that said beasts copped so many vital moves from a woman.)

Calle 13 have long been reggaeton's resident rebels. Never content to simply swagger around a straight-up reggaeton beat or cop a cocky attitude, Puerto Rican stepbrothers René Pérez (aka Residente) and Eduardo Cabra (aka Visitante) have made a name for themselves challenging the boundaries of their genre with border-jumping beats, clever (and often pointedly critical) lyrics and an overarching aesthetic of playful innovation. But for 2008's Los de Atrás Vienen Conmigo, they pulled out all the stops: Residente burned up the musical purists with his scorching lyrics and breathless, runaway-train flow, while Visitante roped in dazzling beats from both the farthest and most familiar (but unexpected) corners of the world — and as always, they managed to ground it all in pure reggaeton soul. So you know digging into their source materials is going to be crazy fun, right? Right. Let's get started.

Tego Calderon
The Underdog/El Subestimado
Calle 13's spiritual partner in crime, Tego Calderon started employing the "hey, let's take reggaeton and do it really well and come atcha really hard — but also just kind of mess with it" model just a couple years before Residente and Visitante's debut. Like them, Calderon started a bit more straitlaced, but has only gotten more experimental (and more brilliant) over time, releasing this genre-jumping masterpiece just a couple years before Los de Atrás.

Don Omar
The Last Don
Don Omar represents the mainstream wing of reggaeton, a wing Calle 13 do not often visit. His debut bristles and swaggers (he ain't called Don for nothing), its beats sticking close to reggaeton's traditional tripping strut, laced with gunshots and other ominous sounds. But it's as painstakingly crafted as any of Calle 13's quirks — and besides, if there weren't a mainstream, there couldn't be an alternative, right?

Joel Ford and Daniel Lopatin might seem like an odd pairing. Ford's group Tigercity makes terse, danceable rock with elements of both The Rapture and The Strokes; Lopatin, as Oneohtrix Point Never, crafts trippy electronic fantasias with an evident debt to '70s synthesizer music. Together, however — first operating under the name Games and now simply as Ford & Lopatin — they turn their attentions to the richly emotive electronic pop of the mid- to late '80s.

This is not, of course, a particularly original idea. But no matter how thoroughly that decade would seem to have been mined for inspiration, Ford & Lopatin reveal hitherto untapped veins. They seem less interested in what consensus deems the "cool" side of the '80s — underground New Wave and post-punk, electro and acid house — than in its oft-derided overground manifestations. Anyone who grew up on Top 40 radio in the mid-'80s will recognize its DNA here. With their gleaming digital synths and crisp detailing, Ford & Lopatin's songs evoke the hyper-drive radio pop of acts like Mike & the Mechanics, Chris De Burgh and Jan Hammer.

It's a bold move, the musical equivalent of busting out a given style of clothing at precisely the moment of its fashion nadir. But their spirit of bricolage goes well beyond mere provocation. If we've come to expect a certain amount of historical fealty in our retro, this album does away with any kind of period-appropriate behavior. The opening "Softscum" is a good indicator of what's to follow, spinning like a radio dial through fragments of untethered synths, bird song and soft rock before collapsing into downpitched hip-hop vocals; "Break Inside" applies their rose-tinted aesthetic to contemporary R&B, in a sort of reverse of the maneuver by which Kanye sampled Mike Oldfield. Ambient experiments like "Green Fields" rub shoulders with perfect pop songs like "Joey Rogers."

You already know the story: two decades ago, Seattle, Sub Pop and grunge became regular topics of conversation among music geeks, rock writers and those most fickle consumers of all, teenagers. It can be argued Nirvana were not the first to do whatever it is "grunge" did. They weren't the first to bring alternative music to pop radio. They weren't even the first to have a naked baby on their album cover. But firsts don't really mean a damn in the scheme of things (nor do charts, necessarily: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" never even cracked the top five of Billboard's Hot 100), and Nirvana are rightly credited as the straw that finally broke the 1980s' sleek and well-coiffed back, ultimately reinventing pop radio in 1991.

When Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, Dave Grohl (plus former drummer Chad Channing, whose work on "Polly" made the final Nevermind cut) and producer Butch Vig bridged two extremes of outsider music — self-deprecating indie rock and embittered punk rock — they didn't expect or even intend to kick Michael Jackson off his throne and revolutionize pop music. But soon their mugs were all over MTV, and even the most remote 13-year-old kid suffering through raging hormones and a growing distrust of authority knew something pretty cool was happening.

Beyond its indelible place in pop culture history, though, Nevermind is simply an incredible album. Try, try listening to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Breed" without feeling your body boil in a rush of anarchic adrenaline, or "In Bloom" and "Territorial Pissings" without uncontrollably flailing your hair and unironically wondering whatever happened to moshpits, or "Come As You Are" and "Lithium" without cranking your mouth into a sinister sneer, or "Something in the Way" without sensing Cobain's uncomfortably numbed pain.

Recently, I scoured the song catalogs for the video games Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Both contain gobs of questionable selections, including indie fluff by The Strokes and even teen pop from Aly & AJ. What I didn't find is a single Funkadelic tune. Maybe I'm overreacting, but I feel like this means mainstream rock fans no longer consider them to be top-tier rock gods. Tell me I'm wrong. Please!

For me, as well as so many rock fans who grew up in the 1970s, '80s and early '90s, Funkadelic were considered one of music's most badass groups, and Eddie Hazel one of the all-time great guitarists. When I first got into classic psychedelia and hard rock, sitting down and cranking Maggot Brain, particularly the mind-melting 10-minute title track, was a rite of passage every bit as fundamental as blasting Paranoid, Led Zeppelin II and Machine Head. It didn't matter one bit if their music was considered funk by some, or that they weren't the same color as most other bands. They rocked.

It's hard to imagine pop culture or, well, life in general without Katy Perry, but our little Teenage Dream Girl only dropped into our lives back in 2007 or so. Now, just a few short years later, she's gone from kissing girls to getting hitched, wowed us with wigs in every color of the rainbow, ridden everything from a banana to a cloud to Russell Brand (sorry), and released not one but two smash albums. In fact, the second one, last year's Teenage Dream, just helped Ms. Perry set a new record: she's the first-ever female singer (and only the second-ever artist, after Michael Jackson) to have five No. 1 singles from one album.

Teenage Dream takes its subject matter seriously: like teenagerdom in general, it is angsty, dramatic, hormone-ridden, at times annoying, near-universal and, oh yeah, a lot of fun. Perry's retrospective on adolescence and its attending aesthetics of emotional theatrics, colorful vibrancy, neo-jailbait vixenry and head-cheerleader camp are mined from a wide array of sources. In other words, peppermint candy-bras (and Russell Brand) notwithstanding, the girl's got surprisingly good taste. So dig in — and listen up! — to our exploration of the roots and routes that led to the record-breaking Teenage Dream. Katy lovers and haters alike will find plenty of favorites — and surprises — here! Be sure to also check out our

Source Material: Katy Perry, Teenage Dream playlist.

Months after its release, I still have trouble entirely wrapping my head around Gang Gang Dance's Eye Contact. That's not a criticism — quite the opposite. It's been awhile since I heard a record that left me so happily bewildered. That's not necessarily because the album is "experimental" or "difficult," but because of the way it mixes pop and dance music so promiscuously with fragments of noise and sunburst. (I might have been prepared had I heard the band's previous album, 2008's Saint Dymphna, an omission in my listening I have only recently, and gratefully, rectified.)

One of Eye Contact's great pleasures is the way it evokes so many kinds of music — it's a dizzy rush of references even though, more often than not, Gang Gang Dance don't really sound like anyone other than themselves. I decided to catalogue the antecedents and associations that came to mind. Read on for a track-by-track breakdown of Eye Contact's range.

When Amy Winehouse passed away from as-yet unknown causes on July 23, the trauma registered across music communities and genre barriers. Rap websites chronicled her duets with Ghostface Killah and Mos Def. Green Day and M.I.A. recorded tributes. And nearly everyone returned to the album that brought her to our attention, 2006's Back to Black.

When the album first surfaced, some listeners struggled to tune out the deafening, industry-fueled hype surrounding it, and as a result, may have underestimated its powers. It is now clear that Back to Black is an incredible piece of music. Perhaps we've reached that verdict out of sadness over her untimely demise, or an awareness of how her years-long spiral into drug and alcohol abuse imprinted her literally blood-soaked image into our minds. Only time will tell us if Winehouse the paparazzi casualty will recede beneath Winehouse the retro-soul prodigy, much as we have come to forget the tabloid follies of Kurt Cobain and many others. We shouldn't lose an appreciation of her music.

Despite looking suspiciously like Bam Margera, Jason Aldean is the hottest dude in country right now, and has been since the November 2010 unveiling of My Kinda Party, his fourth album of pop country shine expertly crossed with surly hard rock spit. He contains multitudes: fiery guitar-rock anthems, goopy Kelly Clarkson duets, strident hick-hop excursions, and tender AOR odes to various red states and the women he's lusted after while driving through or flying over 'em. Here, a look at the various dirt roads that led him to the brink of country superstardom, and the anthems he absorbed along the way.

For more, listen to my

Source Material: Jason Aldean's My Kinda Party playlist.

Colt Ford
Ride Through the Country
"Dirt Road Anthem" is far and away Party's most innovative moment, Aldean slipping semi-fly-for-a-white-guy rapped verses ("If it's broke 'round here we fix it" is well turned) between Southern-rock-anthem choruses, but the innovation isn't his. Gargantuan ex-golf pro and fellow Georgian Colt Ford first cut the tune in 2008, a far better emcee than Aldean prone to farming out his sung choruses to far better singers than himself, in this case co-writer Brantley Gilbert. The switch from the original's deft acoustic guitar and digitized drum loop to the Aldean version's power chords and stomping drums makes all the difference — kudos to Jason for recognizing a smash hit when he heard it. And if your appetite's whetted, Ford does this sort of thing for a living, hailing Southern staples both real ("Waffle House") and imaginary (the more recent and way more uncouth "Titty's Beer").

The much-lauded second album by tUnE-yArDs (aka Oakland-based indie-rocker Merrill Garbus) has been, well, much-lauded for many reasons, not least of which is the finely tuned and widely varied sonic palette into which she dips. The creatively styled W H O K I L L has been heralded for digging into hip-hop, funk, R&B, free jazz, soul and much more — as our own Stephanie Benson put it, treating each style like "a treasure she eagerly excavated from a junkyard." But as the brilliant Sarah Bardeen, our former world music editor, pointed out, what often gets left out of the discussion of Garbus' crate-digging, style-raiding, experimentally hodgepodge approach is the global scope of that pastiche, which dabbles in European, Asian and a whole lot of African sounds. Garbus herself appears to be an avid world music fan, name-checking influences that range from Kenyan to Bulgarian. So we went ahead and took a stab at excavating the more global sources mined on W H O K I L L. Dig in! (and listen to the music discussed here on our Source Material playlist!)

There aren't too many genres where you can pinpoint one particular album as the precise starting point, but with the extreme-metal sub-style long known as "grindcore," there's not much room for argument. Napalm Death's debut album, Scum, was 28 songs recorded nine months apart by two almost entirely different lineups of the British band (only common denominator: inhumanly rapid-fire blastbeat-popularizing drummer Mick Harris, who is said to have given grindcore its name). The album was then released in 1987 to punters who couldn't quite tell if this was a novelty act pulling their leg. On the first side — which followed on the heels of six N.D. demos dating back to 1982 and which was originally slated to be half of a split LP with another band — one of the 12 tracks lasts almost four minutes, but the last one, "You Suffer," checks in at a mere 1.316 seconds, making the Guinness Book of World Records for its brevity. The 16 cuts on Side 2 range in length from 16 seconds ("Common Enemy") to a comparatively almost symphonic 1:34, for "M.A.D."

Janet Jackson's 1986 breakthrough, Control, wasn't her first album, but it was a debut on multiple levels: most importantly, it introduced the Jackson-Jam-Lewis team, a triumvirate of pop perfection that paired the dance-beat brilliance of producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis with Janet's pop persona (not to mention that family name). But despite the unavoidable shadow cast by her family's showbiz legacy, the album also presented her as an independent woman. Control was meant to mark Janet's emancipation from the family plan laid out for her, a process that had already begun when she eloped with James DeBarge at the age of 18 (the marriage was later annulled). Finally, Control is the debut of Miss Jackson as we know and love her today: a fiercely sweet woman who carefully balances ferocious independence with disarming emotion and a feather-light, cotton-candy wisp of a voice, equally prone to cooing sweet nothings and barking S&M fantasies.

No Jackson album could emerge from a vacuum, of course, and especially not one so steeped in decades of soul, funk and dance-pop stylings. Control both embraces and eschews Janet's family heritage and musical pedigree, mining a host of other sources along the way. Brother Michael's presence looms large over this album, of course, as does The Jackson Five's. But that goes without saying. So for our deep dive into the roots and routes of Control, we've decided to focus on other, equally vital touchstones. Listen in!

During its first week out, Justin Vernon's sophomore album under the name Bon Iver couldn't quite knock Adele's 21 off the top of the Rhapsody charts, but it did overpower albums by pop queens Katy Perry, Rihanna and even Lady Gaga. That says a hell of a lot for a humble Cheesehead who just a few years ago was holed up in a cabin in the dead of Wisconsin winter, lovesick and depressed as he crafted Bon Iver's celebrated 2008 debut, For Emma, Forever Ago. It also says a lot for an album that unabashedly takes cues from schmaltzy '80s soft rock and earnest singer-songwriter fare. There's certainly no glitz or glam about Bon Iver, but it's nonetheless a minor pop sensation capable of riling up people who normally wouldn't care about just another indie dude. (Though contrarians have been quick to accuse Vernon of being a bearded hipster hack, a shameless Bruce Hornsby/Peter Cetera/Phil Collins revivalist, or — gasp! — just plain boring.)

When we think of Beyoncé 's Dangerously in Love, we remember the hits. "Crazy In Love," with its brassy horn licks (courtesy of The Chi-Lites' "Are You My Woman [Tell Me So]") and funky go-go rhythms, is one of the best singles of the past decade. "Naughty Girl" oozed an aggressive sexuality that seemed more visceral than the pre-packaged showgirl struts of her previous group, Destiny's Child. And "Baby Boy" was right in tune with the dancehall revival and synonymous club anthems like Lumidee's "Never Leave You (Uh Ooh, Uh Ooh)" and Elephant Man's "Pon De River, Pon De Bank."

But Dangerously was split between those celebrated numbers and nearly a dozen torch songs. It's not an easy transition. The singles arrived early and ended quickly, and Beyoncé spent the rest of the hour on melodramatic love tunes like "Yes," "Speechless" and "Signs," the latter coyly referencing her love affair with Jay-Z: "I was in love with a Sagittarius/ He blew my mind." Some of the ballads, particularly "Me, Myself and I," aren't bad, and they gave her a chance to demonstrate her incredible, octave-scaling voice. But the uptempo songs were so incredible that they left us wanting more.

By 1998, Angelique Kidjo was already a much-heralded Afropop success story, with a sonic reputation for bridging cultures, continents and aesthetic categories, reflecting her own multicultural roots and routes. In other words, she made Afropop with both international and African appeal. But with her fifth album, Oremi, she took her gift for hybridization to the next level.

Armed with a plan to record a trilogy that explored the African roots of music in the Americas, Kidjo headed to New York, where she recorded with jazz artists (Cassandra Wilson, Branford Marsalis) as well as R&B/gospel singer Kelly Price, all while boldly re-imagining Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)." The resulting album is a graceful effort that subtly, smoothly laces together African and American music in innovative ways. An Afropop aesthetic dominates the sweet, sunny "Babalao" (a plea for the world's youth), with American soul providing nuance and adornment; for the church-choir-meets-girl-group slow-dance number "Loloye," she uses delicate African aesthetic gestures as a point of entry into American pop styles. The title track, meanwhile, offers a chicly cosmopolitan sound that more fluidly blends together hip-hop, soul, lounge music and African musical traditions.

Back in their early days, Motörhead sure seemed like an anomaly in the heavy metal world. Thrash, aka speed metal, hadn't been born yet, and metal had been bloating itself into irrelevance since at least the mid-'70s. In fact, if we're talking about loud rock music that actually managed to exhibit over-the-top energy, punk (and eventually, to some extent, its descendants hardcore and oi!) had dang near supplanted metal — which probably explains why Motörhead reportedly tended to fare better with live crowds when they shared bills with, say, The Damned or The Adverts than when they opened for an increasingly decrepit Ozzy Osbourne.

In retrospect, some other metal had begun to speed up and strip down (somewhat) at the time — at least, by the early '80s, certain grassroots small-label British bands recording on poverty budgets. But those groups were even harder to hear about, certainly in the States, than Motörhead. And it might not matter anyway, since Lemmy Kilmister has long insisted that Motörhead were never even a metal band in the first place — and he may well have had a point. As far as he was concerned (and not unlike his Aussie fellow travelers in AC/DC), he was just in a rock 'n' roll band. He barked through gravel and leather and grime about motorbikes, gambling, amphetamines, customs offices and outrunning the law, not about Vikings, goddesses, wizards and ancient mariners.

Phil Collins was at a crossroads in 1980. With Genesis dropping their most successful and accessible album to date, the pop-driven Duke, he felt secure enough to undertake a solo album, one that would find him drifting even further from his roots in British progressive rock. At the same time, his marriage to Andrea Bertorelli had crashed and burned, leaving him to gaze at the wreckage and ruminate on what went wrong. It's this peculiar mix of outward artistic confidence and inner emotional despair that steered the making of Face Value, arguably the most ambitious and determined album of Collins' career.

Sonically, Face Value is a distillation of what Collins was grooving to throughout the second half of the 1970s: jazz fusion, soul music (Motown in particular), Beatlesque melodicism and ambient-flavored atmospherics. The album's watery textures and muted colors are very much inspired by "New Music," a phrase Soundcheck host and music critic John Schaefer coined at the time to describe a slew of pioneering musicians, from Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson to Jon Hassell and Philip Glass, who were exploring the intersection of synthesizers and other electronic instrumentation, world music, modern classical, jazz and, of course, pop.

Nowadays, the thought of Collins associating himself such avant-garde heavies might seem more than a little odd, yet in the '70s he worked with some of New Music's most probing artists, among them his old Genesis mate Peter Gabriel, Robert Wyatt, John Martyn, Brand X and the aforementioned Brian Eno. Right from Face Value's opener, the ceaselessly stunning "In the Air Tonight," it's obvious he gleaned a lot from these collaborations.

The Antlers' 2009 breakout album, Hospice, is so epic, so crushing, that listening to it feels like a bullet taking 50 minutes to sink into your chest. It's a gorgeous piece of work, a loose concept record that lingers long after frontman Peter Silberman's falsetto peters out. It was among the best indie albums of 2009 (amid tough competition, with Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion and Grizzly Bear's Veckatimist in the running), meaning its follow-up would be as anticipated as it was scrutinized. And here at Rhapsody, we think The Antlers did a pretty good job under the pressure.

While Silberman was the main force behind the group's previous outputs, 2011's Burst Apart is the band's first truly collaborative effort, with percussionist Michael Lerner and multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci helping to flesh out his vision. Through that collaboration, the band took the weight off Hospice's shoulders, capturing its aftermath in a slow-burning dream state that's as narcotic as it is haunting. Silberman is more introspective here, examining the fine line between loneliness and independence, and bearing a striking resemblance to Jeff Buckley on tracks like "I Don't Want Love" and the anxiety-ridden rocker "Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out." His falsetto slithers like a charmed snake as guitars echo and keyboards meander into the ether like the spacey reveries of Mercury Rev. And even when Silberman's voice isn't present, like on "Tiptoe," his poignancy resonates as a lonely horn glides through a noir film's dark alley.

To listen to Burst Apart and its Source Material, check out this playlist: Source Material: The Antlers' Burst Apart.

The dust has yet to settle on the indie-rap renaissance of the late '90s, with critics and fans fiercely divided on which albums constitute classics. One title they agree on is MF Doom's 1999 masterwork Operation: Doomsday.

Daniel Dumile has not been photographed in public without his metal mask for more than a decade. He launched his career as Zev Love X, one-third of the Long Island rap trio KMD, a group he shared with his brother, the DJ and producer Subroc. In 1991 KMD issued their memorable debut, Mr. Hood, and were quickly lumped in with such quirky post-D.A.I.S.Y. Age groups as Leaders of the New School and Black Sheep. However, KMD's second album, Black B_st_rds, was much more hard-edged, reflecting the hip-hop world's rising interest in gangster-ism. The album's sardonic tone — and particularly its controversial cover art, depicting a Sambo-like cartoon figure hanging from a noose — led to Elektra dropping the group. Just before Bl_ck B_st_rds was officially shelved in 1993, Subroc was killed in a hit-and-run accident. (The album finally got an official release in 2001.)

RCA's infamous Studio B was the place to record in the '60s, '70s and '80s, hosting a veritable Who's Who of music. Everyone from Elvis Presley to Waylon Jennings to Dolly Parton and the Everly Brothers recorded hits there. In fact, in the 1960s, the studio (and the sessions recorded there) played a large part in developing what's now referred to as the "Nashville sound."

In 1977, the studio was made available to the Country Music Hall of Fame for tours, and in 1992, it was donated to the Hall of Fame outright. Since it's a museum of sorts, Marty Stuart had to obtain special permission to record Ghost Train: The Studio B Sessions in this facility. It was a homecoming for Stuart, who, at the tender age of 13, participated in his first-ever recording session playing mandolin in bluegrass legend Lester Flatt's band.

If you're a regular reader of The Mix, then you know Rhapsody's aims with our Source Material series. It's a way for the music geeks around here to tell an album's story through words, and more importantly, music. Usually, this contextualization takes the form of a slew of records and artists that inspired and informed the featured album.

Pearl Jam's Ten, however, forced me to alter this approach.

You'll definitely find a nice selection of basic influences down below, from Neil Young and Ted Nugent to Dinosaur Jr. and The Stooges. But here's the thing with Pearl Jam: by the time Ten conquered mainstream youth culture at the end of 1992, their unique and striking sound was far more a result of the myriad bands Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, Dave Krusen, Mike McCready and Eddie Vedder had previously served time in. They were rock veterans, already. For them, the formative days — when musicians invariably ape their heroes in search of something new and exciting — had occurred several years earlier, in the mid-1980s. Ament and Gossard cut their teeth in numerous Seattle bands and side projects, including Green River and later Mother Love Bone and Temple of the Dog. McCready and Krusen also experienced their fair share of underground toil in the process of developing their respective chops. Then there's Eddie Vedder, who despite having launched a million inferior copycats over the last two decades, didn't really sound like anybody else in the early 1990s. The only singers comparable, fellow Seattle howlers Chris Cornell and Mark Lanegan, were from the same nexus of bands.

Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime occupies a singular niche in the history of heavy metal. In 1988 -- at the outset of that strange little window between the MTV reigns of hair metal and grunge -- a band who on its previous album had totally looked like new-romantic fops decides to trade in the cross-dressing for deep thinking. So they make a complicated, convoluted concept album about, well, all sorts of important stuff, but the sinister side effects of changing technology (almost a decade before OK Computer by their fellow Pink Floyd fans Radiohead) certainly figures in big-time. As, apparently, do conspiracies of the wealthy, brain control, prostitutes disguised as nuns, and revolutionaries setting fire to the White House.

Released in 1969, Crosby, Stills & Nash is one of pop music's most audacious and successful debut albums. Arguably the Woodstock generation's No. 1 soundtrack, the record also helped usher in the supergroup movement, as well as the growing intersection between country music and rock.

In terms of the music industry, the success of Crosby, Stills & Nash kick-started a massive shift in power and perception by proving that hippie music and culture -- then on the outside of society looking in -- could be packaged and sold to a mainstream pop audience, albeit a new form of mainstream pop audience, one that dug love beads and longhairs, rather than beehive hairdos and Tricky Dick.

Deerhunter's music is like the sonic translation of that hazy moment between dreaming and full consciousness. And on Halcyon Digest, Bradford Cox fittingly writes a lot about dreams and memories, and how they all end up muddling together over time. A similar idea comes alive in the music, where subtle layers develop and then fuse. Halcyon Digest was among Rhapsody's Top 10 indie albums of 2010, and has boosted Deerhunter's status to one of today's most revered indie bands. We decided to dig further into the depths of this acclaimed album and pinpoint just a few of its influences, from the noise assault of My Bloody Valentine to the ambient opulence of Brian Eno.

While reading, listen to our playlist featuring Deerhunter and the artists mentioned below.

My Bloody Valentine
Loveless
Perhaps Deerhunter's most palpable influence, My Bloody Valentine's seminal shoegazer release Loveless sets angelic melodies in a halo of pure sonic chaos. It's like beauty being entrapped by the beast, and liking it. Kevin Shields' indelible guitar work is the tipping point to which the music truly blisters; notes warily wind and wane before sonic booms leave your eardrums vibrating. Deerhunter balance beauty and chaos in a similar vein, with tracks like "Earthquake," "Sailing" and "Helicopter" starting out sparse before melting into an underwater world of bubbling guitars.

Michael W. Smith had already secured his place as Christian music's leading man and had penned several classic tunes for himself and other artists when he released his sixth studio album in 1990. Go West Young Man was still clearly a Christian release (see tracks like "Seed to Sow" and "Agnus Dei"), though it was also making a bid for mainstream attention.

Smith's good looks would later land him on People's "Most Beautiful" list, but for most outside the church this was their first look at his perfectly tousled mullet and sexy Miami Vice stubble. The public liked what it saw -- and heard -- and propelled the new disc onto the Billboard charts and platinum sales. The single "Place in This World" peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, and videos for this track and "For You" became VH1 staples. Go West Young Man would net Smith a Dove Award and a Grammy nod while laying the groundwork for the even more successful 1992 release Change Your World.

But no one creates in a vacuum. Here are some of the artists and albums that helped shape Michael W. and Go West Young Man.

Dubstep has been crossing over into pop music for a while now, but in all the potential ways the genre could have developed, perhaps the most unexpected line of flight is traced by James Blake, who started out sculpting idiosyncratic, atmospheric tracks in Burial's mold and now delivers a debut album that establishes him as a very different kind of musician. Largely leaving dubstep behind, James Blake finds the producer forging a more personal sound out of scraps of club music, ambient and R&B.

Blake's supple, expressive voice carries the day, multitracked into gospel-influenced harmonies or Auto-Tuned into a surreal warble. As a producer, he makes do with the bare minimum, running pitter-pat drum programming in loose rings around solemn piano chords. Between the album's naked emotion and guarded sound design, the contradictions only reinforce its uniqueness.