Rhoads was an auteur guitar player—one who forced songs to bend to his will rather than subsuming himself into the entrenched paradigm. And when we’re talking about riffs as iconic as those in “Iron Man” and “Paranoid,” that’s really saying something.

The the film’s striking monochrome visuals, art deco set design, formal attire, and omnipresent cloud of low-rolling cigarette-smoke really helps sell the dramaturgy of the music, like a wine pairing that brings out the full flavor of a gratuitously overpriced steak.

In the mid-‘80s, just as Ginn’s iconic Hermosa Beach hardcore combo Black Flag started to peter out, the punk auteur was in the process of carving out a fourth option: that of garage-stoner-metal’s answer to Frank Zappa—a move that was punk, but not always “Punk.”

Certainly one of the last artists you’d ever describe as punk is Aretha Franklin, the Memphis-born powerhouse whose pyrotechnic voice is the instrument against which all capital-V “Vocalists” are judged. But to call something “punk” is to identify it as raw, shaggy, and fast.

Maybe Folsom’s administrators were understandably in thrall to Cash’s celebrity. Or that they felt an obligation extend an invitation, after he had raised the penitentiary’s profile via the 1955 Sun Records smash “Folsom Prison Blues.” But do prisons even need to be marketed?

When the Dead emerged, there had never been anything remotely like them before. They invented an entirely new paradigm and in doing so, created the closes thing pop music has to a real religion. And the benefit of the Grateful Dead’s religion is that there’s no shortage of primary text documents to refer back to.

Apollo, of course, is widely considered one of the best—if not the best—live album ever made, one whose content has been covered extensively in other venues. Specifically: how this is seductive, gutbucket soul music delivered by an impressively ragged-voiced pop auteur who at times seems almost lost in a gospel reverie.

Live at Leeds is the fucking Platonic ideal of rock ‘n roll, preserving in amber a show that simultaneously highlights the group’s exacting pop acumen even as its individual players all seem like they could fly off the rails at any moment.

One of the hardest things to perfectly nail as a music fan is to catch a band live at their apex. Seeing bands before they break or as legacy acts can be fun. But the best is seeing an artist at the absolute height of their relevance. I never got it together to see Wilco in the mid-aughts, but there’s at least Kicking Television.

Reggae was a truly modern form of music—minimalist even, with enough empty space left hanging in the air inside each song that the music felt almost elemental. There’s room for nature in reggae, but also for community and assembly. Which is what makes it good party music, but extremely good protest music.

During this latest listen of Sings Live! I responded most intensely to the album’s more pensive, transcendental material: “Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect,” “The Gymnast, High Above the Ground,” “On the Bus Mall”—anything, basically, that called to mind the image of the outline of a human head, framed by a canopy of twinkling stars.

MTV Unplugged in New York is as seminal a work as any of Nirvana’s three studio albums. It’s at once an end and a beginning. In a more generous alternate timeline, a sobered-up 50-year-old Kurt Cobain is getting ready to embark on yet another solo acoustic theater tour.

In the studio, Cooke was a skillful pop crooner, voice pouring out onto the mic like melted caramel. But onstage in Miami, Cooke’s instrument is exquisitely ragged, like a guitar with just enough distortion piled on to make its amplification palatably masculine. The Cooke on Harlem Square is recognizable, but also simultaneously degraded and improved.

The album technically contains just 12 songs, the shortest of which clocks in at five minutes and longest of which stretches out over half an hour. But there are way more than just 12 different musical ideas at work here. Every song is divisible into multiple subsections, sub-subsections, and wild tangents—including a few dead ends.

The first thing that leaps out is just how clean the recording sounds. You can practically hear every string. The band is incredibly tight, and the songs—a collection of Ventures originals, surf favorites, and covers of then-current pop tunes—charge ahead with punk rock hyperactivity.

Hendrix himself was never a huge fan of Gypsys. The record is an imperfect grab bag of improbable guitar pyrotechnics and off-the-cuff creative experimentation capturing one of the signature rockers of the 1960s making a productive—if ultimately doomed—pivot toward the 1970s.

That Staley mustered enough courage to put himself on display like this—and kill it, frankly—is bonkers. When a clearly buoyant Staley says, “I have to say: this is probably the best show we’ve done in three years,” the words glow like rays of sunshine. Kinney then points out, “Layne, it’s the only one.”

The difference between good artists and great artists is this: good artists make what they do look hard; great artists make what they do look easy. Ant The Ramones all but singlehandedly invented one of pop’s most enduring subgenres with little more than the E5 power chord and a quick “1-2-3-4!”

As a discursive statement full of moments both epic and intimate, Newport ’63 is a wonderful document of a singular musical talent. And pretentions aside, this is music worth listening to for its own sake. No highballs, turtlenecks, or chin-only goatees required.

The Oxford eggheads are fucking great at conjuring atmosphere, using dense soundscapes and atypical song structures, along with nonspecifically ominous word-salad nonsense lyrics, to summon an all-encompassing vision of nerdy, numbed-out dystopia.