A theme · all themes
Twice Over
Three artists, nine of our rankings. Everyone the corpus ranks in three different genres, and the records that got them in.
What gets in, and what does not
The artist has to be ranked by us in at least three separate genres, and each record here has to be one of those rankings. An artist who merely dabbled elsewhere does not qualify — the other scene had to keep the record.
Every record here is already in one of our rankings — a theme re-cuts what the site has vouched for, and vouches for nothing new. These ones come from:
BalearicBleep TechnoElectroFunkJazzMerseybeatMusique ConcrètePsychedelic RockTrip-Hop
- Picks
- 9
- Drawn from
- 9 rankings
- Years
- 1963–1999
- Curator
- The Waxonia Desk
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
Listen to the whole list
Play it through here →One record after another, with the verdicts
Take 8 of 9 to YouTube → (opens in a new tab)
Opens the list on YouTube as a playlist you can save to your own account. We never see your account, and nothing is stored here. 1 of these records have no verified YouTube link yet, so they are left out rather than guessed at.
The records — selected, not ranked
Herbie Hancock / Maiden Voyage
1965 · Blue Note
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.
Also on Jazz
Herbie Hancock / Chameleon
1973 · Columbia
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.
Also on Funk, The Waxonia Desk — One Subject, The Waxonia Desk — Where the Accent Moved
Herbie Hancock / Rockit
1983 · Columbia
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.
Also on Electro
The Beatles / She Loves You
1963 · Parlophone
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.
Also on Merseybeat
The Beatles / Tomorrow Never Knows
1966 · Parlophone
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.
Also on Psychedelic Rock
The Beatles / Revolution 9
1968 · Apple
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.
Also on Musique Concrète
Nightmares on Wax / Dextrous
1989 · Warp
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.
Also on Bleep Techno, Warp
Nightmares on Wax / Les Nuits
1999 · Warp
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
1999 · Warp
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.
Who made this
The people who write the rankings on this site. We keep the lists honest, we argue about the order, and we get asked the same question more than any other: where should someone actually start. These are our answers.