Twice Over
Three artists, nine of our rankings. Everyone the corpus ranks in three different genres, and the records that got them in.
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Herbie Hancock / Maiden Voyage
Twenty-five years old and already writing the kind of tune other people would build careers on. This is the entry that makes the other two astonishing rather than merely eclectic: he was not a dabbler crossing over, he was a jazz composer at the top of the form.
Herbie Hancock / Chameleon
Eight years later the same man writes a bassline that funk never gave back. Jazz musicians called it a betrayal at the time, which is usually the sound of a genre boundary being crossed by somebody who could see it was arbitrary.
Herbie Hancock / Rockit
Ten years after that, at forty-three, he hands the record to a turntablist and lets the scratch be the lead instrument. Most artists get one genre. He got three, twenty years apart, and was decisive in each.
The Beatles / She Loves You
The most efficient two minutes in the ranking it sits in — a band still young enough to think the job was to make somebody scream. Nothing here predicts either of the next two entries, which is precisely why they are worth putting beside it.
The Beatles / Tomorrow Never Knows
Three years on from a handclap-and-harmony single: one chord, a tape loop orchestra and a vocal fed through a rotating speaker. The gap between this and the entry above is the shortest distance any artist here travels between two of our rankings.
The Beatles / Revolution 9
A tape collage on the best-selling record of its decade, sitting in our musique concrète ranking beside people who spent their lives in institutional studios. Whether it is good is genuinely arguable. That it is the thing itself, in the charts, is not.
Nightmares on Wax / Dextrous
Two teenagers in Leeds with a sampler, making one of the records that established what a Warp release sounded like before anyone knew that was a category. The narrowest and hardest of the three entries here.
Nightmares on Wax / Les Nuits
Ten years later, the same act, and the sampler is being used to make something warm rather than something skeletal. It is the single most recognisable record in our trip-hop ranking and it was made by a bleep techno producer.
Nightmares on Wax / Sueño
Released the same year as the entry above and filed by us in a different ranking again, which is the whole argument of this list compressed into one twelve-month span. Three genres, one person, no change of name.
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