Music » R&B & Soul Music

Assignment: To write 100 words on 56 songs by the greatest artist the '80s produced. Even with single edits substituting for full-length versions in a handful of cases, The Hits/The B-Sides is a mighty testament to the man we once called Prince. (For that matter, we still do.) In addition to most of his singles, from "I Wanna Be Your Lover" to "Thieves in the Temple," from "When Doves Cry" to "7," this triple-CD set throws in some worthwhile new music and a full disc of the fantastic flips that made buying 7- and 12-inches a must even when you already owned the A-side. "You can be the side effect," he mutters herein. "I'd rather be the dope." Witness some of the funkiest pharmaceuticals around. --Rickey Wright

No Description Available
No Track Information Available
Media Type: CD
Artist: 80'S POP HITS
Title: 80'S POP HITS
Street Release Date: 08/21/2001
Domestic
Genre: ROCK/POP COLLECTIONS

4 CD Set.

That the most famous garage-rock record of all time, the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie," is buried on the last CD of this four-disc box is very much in keeping with the spirit of the (often) one-hit wonders that people Nuggets. Here, "Louie Louie" is just another great song. An elaboration on the 1972 double LP, which is included in its original sequence, this set piles on dozens more great moments of inspiration, guts, chutzpah, and sometimes sheer commercial calculation. How else to explain the advice "Look at yourself" from the likes of the Strawberry Alarm Clock, whose idea of mind expansion seems limited to putting together two very vaguely related nouns--"Incense and Peppermints"--so their swinging Farfisa-led track will have something, anything, for verbal content? There's loads of such wisdom on display here, prefab and otherwise, usually delivered as rabidly as possible. (Try the Remains' "Don't Look Back," Mouse and the Traps' "Maid of Sugar--Maid of Spice," or the Music Machine's "Talk Talk," which was actually a hit.) And remember: "The sky is falling / The ocean is calling / The world ... is spinning 'round ... and 'round." For sure. --Rickey Wright

Release Date: 2002-10-01, Audio CD, Sony Cmg Mkt Group

Lavish 11 inch x 11 inch CD box set housed in a hard-back book from classic Universal artists featuring around 100 pages of essays, beautiful photographs and memorabilia. This repackaged box set, which spans the years 1962-96, features 70 classic hits, album tracks and rarities spread across four CDs from the immortal Stevie Wonder. Universal.

Motown did so many things well in the '60s and early '70s that this overview of the label's smashes (and some lesser-known classics) practically demands four CDs. It gets them, too, filling them with single mixes of more than 100 tracks. That the running order begins with Barrett Strong's statement of purpose "Money (That's What I Want)" and ends with Marvin Gaye's statement of concern "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" says a lot about how far the company moved in its golden decade--but no more so than what the same two cuts' differences in sound get across. The company was able to blend the smooth and the harsh in ways that few other pop entities have ever mastered, thereby getting over not only to the feet and the wallet, but to the heart. --Rickey Wright

No Description AvailableNo Track Information AvailableMedia Type: CDArtist: HENDRIX,JIMITitle: JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCEStreet Release Date: 09/12/2000

Steve Winwood's 3 CD The Finer Things kind of runs out of gas somewhere around the two-hour mark, but, hey, that's inevitable: The guy got way too popular for his own good. The best stuff here is the drug-addled early Traffic stuff, though one wishes they'd have found a spot for the live versions of "Dear Mr. Fantasy" and "Gimme Some Lovin'" from the poorly-recorded but quite inspired Welcome to the Canteen. --Steven Stolder

Of course The Funk Box is kick-ass party music--put "Sex Machine," "Brick House," "One Nation Under a Groove" and "Hollywood Swinging" in the same set, and that pretty much goes without saying. But its chronological survey of funk's evolution through the '70s also frames the dialectical struggle between the music's two main schools--the James Brown style (hard, sharp, built around drum-and-guitar polyrhythms) and the P-Funk style (goofy, squishy, putting all its weight behind ultraheavy bass)--along with the way both schools dealt with the emergence of disco. The set also reveals how the party-time atmosphere of the earliest funk hits gradually evolved into the social consciousness of Cymande and the O'Jays, and then back to the hedonism of Fatback and Zapp. All the big funk stars are here, but the compilers have mercifully gone for as many lesser-known floor-fillers as warhorses: Rick James is represented by "You and I" instead of "Super Freak," George McCrae by "I Get Lifted" instead of "Rock Your Baby." The set also includes a lot of forgotten wonders and DJs' secrets--when's the last time you heard "The New Birth" or "Pleasure"? You can treat The Funk Box as an introduction to funk, as a textbook on how popular music reflects mass culture, or even as the source material for pretty much every hip-hop sample ever. Or you can just put it on and dance your brains away. --Douglas Wolk