The Waxonia Desk’s selection
Every genre we rank, distilled to a hundred records and ordered best first. If you only ever play one list from this site, play this one.
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Rhythim Is Rhythim / Strings of Life
No bassline, barely a kick, and it still empties a bar into a dancefloor faster than anything made since. The one record on this site nobody in thirty-eight years has argued with.
Marvin Gaye / What's Going On
A protest record that sounds like a conversation at a party. Its label tried to stop it, which is usually the sign.
Donna Summer / I Feel Love
The moment a machine takes over the rhythm section of popular music and nobody notices they have crossed a line. Everything electronic below here is downstream of it.
James Brown / Cold Sweat
The accent moves to the first beat and the chord stops changing. Eight bars that reorganise the next sixty years.
Mr. Fingers / Can You Feel It
A bassline, a hi-hat and an enormous amount of patience. House music explained in one record, and never bettered by the ten thousand that copied it.
Sam Cooke / A Change Is Gonna Come
More weight per bar than anything else in this list. The strings are almost unbearable and the restraint in the vocal is the reason.
Massive Attack / Unfinished Sympathy
A full string section over a hip-hop break, in 1991, made by people from Bristol with no permission to attempt it. Still sounds like it cost a fortune and meant it.
Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force / Planet Rock
Two German records, an 808 and a Bronx park. The most generative four minutes in this entire corpus — techno, electro and half of pop start here.
Augustus Pablo / King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown
The record that proves an engineer is a composer. Everything on this list built from the bass upward is quoting it, usually without knowing.
Public Enemy / Fight the Power
The densest production in rap attached to the least negotiable lyric. Thirty-six years on, no record has managed to be this loud and this precise at once.
Chic / Good Times
A bassline so useful that hip-hop, post-punk and pop all took it within eighteen months. Rodgers leaves gaps, and other people's careers fit inside them.
Joy Division / Love Will Tear Us Apart
The bass carries the melody, a cheap synth carries the weather, and the lyric refuses every available metaphor. Guitar music's most perfect three minutes.
My Bloody Valentine / Only Shallow
Four snare hits and then a guitar sound nobody has satisfactorily explained since. The loudest record here, and the most delicate.
Aretha Franklin / Respect
Otis Redding wrote it and then conceded it was hers. The most complete act of reinterpretation in recorded music.
Goldie / Inner City Life
Time-stretched breaks, a Diane Charlemagne vocal and an emotional register jungle was not supposed to have. The record that made an entire genre legible to outsiders.
Fela Kuti & Africa 70 / Zombie
Twelve minutes calling the army a column of unthinking bodies, answered by the state burning his compound down. Few records have been taken this seriously by their subject.
Steve Reich / Music for 18 Musicians
An hour of pulsing marimbas that converts people with no patience for the theory behind it. The most seductive thing minimalism produced.
A Guy Called Gerald / Voodoo Ray
A Manchester bedroom, borrowed equipment and a sample cut short because the sampler ran out of memory. British dance music's most beautiful accident.
Eric B. & Rakim / Paid in Full
Rakim changes what a rap verse can do — internal rhyme, conversational delivery, no shouting — and every MC after him is working from this template.
Brian Eno / An Ending (Ascent)
Four minutes that have been used to sell everything and still cannot be cheapened. The purest demonstration that music can be a place rather than an event.
Portishead / Glory Box
An Isaac Hayes loop, a broken-theremin guitar and the most desolate vocal of the decade. Grim, gorgeous, and nobody has repeated it.
Sister Nancy / Bam Bam
The most sampled record in this list by a distance, and its author was paid nothing for decades. Effortless in a way that cannot be manufactured.
Stardust / Music Sounds Better with You
One guitar figure, one filter, one line repeated until it becomes a mantra. The most perfect single-idea record dance music has, and the trio never made another.
Talking Heads / Once in a Lifetime
A looped Afro-funk bed and a man having a public breakdown on top of it. Post-punk's most joyful record is also its most panicked, which is why it lasts.
Stevie Wonder / Superstition
A clavinet riff so complete the arrangement is almost optional. One man playing nearly everything, at the exact moment that became possible.
D'Angelo / Untitled (How Does It Feel)
Seven minutes played so far behind the beat that the track feels like it might stop. A masterclass in how much tension a band can hold by simply not hurrying.
Neu! / Hallogallo
Ten minutes of one beat played perfectly. The idea that rhythm can drive without swinging is Europe's single largest export to this list.
Frankie Knuckles & Jamie Principle / Your Love
It circulated on cassette for years before anyone pressed it, which tells you what it did to a room. Still the most romantic record house has.
Dr. Dre featuring Snoop Doggy Dogg / Nuthin' but a "G" Thang
A loop, a synth whine and two people sounding entirely untroubled. Delivered so completely on the first attempt that the genre spent five years elaborating it.
Bob Marley & The Wailers / No Woman, No Cry
Seven minutes of a man consoling a room by describing a yard. The most widely loved record here, and it earns every bit of that.
Shy FX & UK Apache / Original Nuttah
A ragga vocal over an Amen break at 170 BPM, with nobody involved thinking the combination needed explaining. Britain's two inheritances, fused without ceremony.
This Mortal Coil / Song to the Siren
Almost nothing behind the voice but a treated guitar, and it is still overwhelming. A cover version that has effectively replaced the original.
James Brown / Funky Drummer
Twenty seconds of Clyde Stubblefield alone, and then thirty years of other people's records. The most consequential drum break in existence.
MFSB / Love Is the Message
Not a song so much as a structure that DJs spent a decade learning to use. The Paradise Garage closed on it, which is the highest recommendation available.
Dizzee Rascal / I Luv U
Made at sixteen on a school computer, and nothing in British music had sounded that unmediated before. A row between two teenagers, and the beat sounds like the row.
Jeff Mills / The Bells
Four elements, no development, total inevitability. The most recognisable DJ tool in techno, built out of very nearly nothing.
Basic Channel / Phylyps Trak
One chord, a filter and eleven minutes, and it establishes that a techno record can consist almost entirely of the space around its own decay.
Aphex Twin / Windowlicker
An R&B pastiche processed into something inhuman and sold as a pop single. Proof that he could do the thing he spent a career refusing to do.
Public Image Ltd / Public Image
A resignation letter from punk delivered as a single: dub bass, ringing guitar, and no interest whatsoever in the audience that came for the last band.
Nas / N.Y. State of Mind
A twenty-year-old writing at a level most novelists never reach, over a piano loop that never resolves. The best-written record in this list.
The Stone Roses / Fools Gold
An indie band's biggest single is a groove with some singing on it, and a whole country followed them across the floor. The hinge record of British music.
Kraftwerk / Trans-Europe Express
A wistful song about trains that Bambaataa turned into hip-hop and Detroit turned into techno. No other record here has been quite so productive for people who misheard it.
Lauryn Hill / Ex-Factor
A Wu-Tang sample, a gospel structure, and a lyric with no interest in protecting anyone's dignity. The most covered song of its era and nobody has improved on it.
Skream / Midnight Request Line
A riff simple enough to hum over a bassline that only fully exists on a large rig. That combination is why an entire scene got out of South London.
Steve Reich / Come Out
One phrase from riot testimony, looped on two tapes drifting apart until the words become rhythm. Devastating, and the origin of phasing.
Sly & the Family Stone / Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)
A bass technique invented to cover for a missing drummer, and the most cheerful record ever written about being ground down.
Omni Trio / Renegade Snares
Jungle's prettiest record and its most technically alarming, at the same time. The breaks are chopped past the point of sense and the piano does not care.
Double Exposure / Ten Percent
Walter Gibbons invents the job of remixer on the first commercially released twelve-inch. Extend, strip, delay the payoff — all of it is already here.
My Bloody Valentine / Soon
A dance beat under a guitar sound that will not hold still. Eno called it the vaguest music ever to have been a hit, approvingly.
Fela Kuti & Africa 70 / Water No Get Enemy
A proverb, a horn line, and Tony Allen playing the most relaxed complicated drum part imaginable. The way in for anyone who finds the politics forbidding.
New Order / Blue Monday
A guitar band making a club twelve-inch on sequencers, in packaging that lost money per copy. Five years early and the reason so much else was possible.
Cajmere / Percolator
One bleeping figure repeated until it became a city's shared vocabulary. Thirty years of Chicago records quote it and a whole category is named after it.
Burning Spear / Marcus Garvey
History lessons delivered over a rhythm that barely moves, and they land like prophecy. The most severe great record in this tradition.
Aphex Twin / Xtal
A wordless vocal over a break that has been degraded until it sounds remembered rather than played. Ambient's most-loved record by someone who denies making ambient.
Wu-Tang Clan / C.R.E.A.M.
A four-bar piano loop, two verses, and a hook that became a proverb. RZA proved that the cheapest possible production could carry the heaviest possible writing.
Artful Dodger featuring Craig David / Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)
A pop record about a DJ's device, sung by a teenager who then became the biggest star in Britain. Garage's moment of complete confidence.
DJ Rolando / Underground Resistance / Jaguar
The riff a major label tried to buy and the Detroit underground refused to sell. Politics aside, the most physical string line techno has.
Ice Cube / It Was a Good Day
A list of ordinary things not going wrong, over an Isley Brothers loop. Rap's most affecting record achieves it entirely by describing an absence.
Klein + M.B.O. / Dirty Talk
Italians make a record that Chicago plays until the grooves go, and house music turns out to have been specified in Milan. Stark, cold and enormously influential.
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Massive Attack / Teardrop
A harpsichord, a heartbeat and Elizabeth Fraser singing about grief. Proof the Bristol formula was a language rather than a trick.
Metalheads / Terminator
Time-stretching discovered and immediately weaponised. The technical leap that turned hardcore into jungle, audible as it happens.
Marshall Jefferson / Move Your Body
Subtitled the house music anthem, and it earned the definite article. The piano that opened the genre up to everybody who was not already in the room.
Otis Redding / Try a Little Tenderness
Two minutes of restraint and then the roof comes off. The best available argument that soul is a technique for controlling release rather than avoiding it.
Arthur Mafokate / Kaffir
A dance record built around a plea not to be called a slur, and the first real argument of the new South Africa. Half a million copies, and a genre given its subject.
Boards of Canada / Roygbiv
Two minutes of detuned warmth imitated for twenty-five years without once being equalled. An entire strand of electronic music descends from this tape hiss.
Mandoza / Nkalakatha
A kwaito record adopted by rugby crowds and townships alike, which nothing else in the country's music had managed. The closest post-apartheid South Africa came to a shared anthem.
Gang of Four / Damaged Goods
A guitar used as a percussion instrument that mostly stays silent. The politics are in the arrangement, which is what separates this band from everyone who copied them.
D'Angelo / Brown Sugar
A Rhodes, a hip-hop drum feel and a vocal arrangement borrowed from Marvin Gaye. Nothing on radio in 1995 sounded this unhurried, and a movement followed it.
Curtis Mayfield / Move On Up
Nine minutes of unbroken forward motion. Optimism is the harder thing to write and this is the most durable example anyone has managed.
SL2 / On a Ragga Tip
Number two in the national charts with a Jamaican vocal sample and a hoover bass. British pop has rarely been this directly a dispatch from a field off the M25.
Can / Halleluhwah
Jaki Liebezeit holds one figure for eighteen minutes while the band comes apart around him. The strongest case that repetition is drama's cheapest fuel.
Warren G & Nate Dogg / Regulate
A Michael McDonald sample, a story told in alternating verses, and hooks nobody else could have sold. Perfect construction, beginning to end.
The Orb / Little Fluffy Clouds
A Rickie Lee Jones interview, a Steve Reich pulse and a Pat Metheny sample, assembled into something oddly moving. Ambient house begins and mostly ends here.
Focalistic featuring Vigro Deep / Ke Star
Sepedi rap over a piano loop, and the record that made amapiano continental. The bassline does almost nothing, which is exactly why it works.
The Bug featuring Killa P & Flowdan / Skeng
Dancehall toasting welded to a bassline that sounds actively corroded. The point where British bass music stops being polite about its inheritance.
Sweet Female Attitude / Flowers (Sunship Remix)
The remix, not the original, and everybody knows it. Two-step's warmest record, and a reminder that garage's canon is largely other people's rebuilds.
Wayne Smith / Under Me Sleng Teng
A Casio preset becomes a rhythm hundreds of records are built on. The moment Jamaican music goes digital, and the template for every riddim scene since.
Alan Braxe & Fred Falke / Intro
Six minutes that only go upwards, with a string line that never resolves down. The record DJs still reach for when a room needs lifting off the floor.
808 State / Pacific State
A saxophone and birdsong over an acid bassline, which should not work. Proof that this music could be pretty without becoming polite.
The Jesus and Mary Chain / Just Like Honey
A Ronettes drum pattern buried in feedback, with a love song underneath that nobody expected these people to have written. The template for the decade that followed.
Sueño Latino / Sueño Latino
An entire record built by looping somebody else's hour-long guitar improvisation and adding birdsong. Absurd, beautiful, and the bridge from kosmische to the dancefloor.
Roni Size / Reprazent / Brown Paper Bag
A double bass line, a breakbeat and a Mercury Prize. Drum and bass at its most musical without giving up an inch of its rhythmic difficulty.
Yellowman / Zungguzungguguzungguzeng
A melody so contagious that half of hip-hop borrowed it without discussion. An unpronounceable title attached to dancehall's most recognisable hook.
Slum Village / Guess Who
J Dilla programming drums audibly out of time and grooving harder for it. The single most imitated piece of programming of the last thirty years.
No verified video yet · not in the queue
Incredible Bongo Band / Apache
A session-band cover of a Shadows instrumental, and the break on which hip-hop was physically assembled. Included for consequences rather than for intentions.
Basic Channel / Quadrant Dub
The rhythm dissolves into delay returns and never quite reassembles. Thirty years on it still sounds mastered underwater, deliberately.
Tyler ICU & Tumelo ZA / Mnike
Number one at home and unavoidable everywhere else within a month. A loop, a chant and a bending bass note — the oldest recipe in this list, working again.
DJ Shadow / Midnight in a Perfect World
Built entirely from other people's records and yet unmistakably one person's. The high point of sampling as a compositional discipline rather than a shortcut.
Manuel Göttsching / E2-E4
One hour, one sequence, one guitarist, one take. Ends this list because it is where half of it accidentally began.