Dead Kennedys, "Soup Is Good Food"
This is the song that let me finally crack the Dead Kennedys. I think there's an adjustment, for me at least, as music gets faster and more challenging to find something you can pick out that lets you understand it. This song, as a relatively slow one and one where it's easy to understand what Jello is singing, is the one that let me kind of get what they were up to. And from there, now that I had a rosetta stone for the band, I was able to catch up to the rest of their catalog.
Photek, "The Hidden Camera"
Photek! Phew, got me going back to my shitty apartment in 1998, with a Playstation 1 game rendering clumsily on the TV while a Domino's pizza congeals in my disused kitchen. I probably played this album because it fell off a clumsy stack of CDs and I shrugged, thinking I hadn't listened to it in a while.
The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, "Wallet"
This song originally appeared on Devil's Night Out, the Bosstones' debut record, but here appears in a slightly different version on the second Mashin' Up The Nation comp, which was an important pillar in the developing ska scene in America during the early 90s. I think you could probably still do worse if you wanted to just sample some ska bands from that period.
Prince, "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker"
My scribblings here are wholly inadequate to deal with Prince.
Freeway & Jake One, "Throw Your Hands Up"
After leaving Roc-a-Fella Records, Freeway bounced around to a few places. He landed on Rhymesayers for one of those records, where he teamed up with Seattle's Jake One for his best record. Jake One's beats fit him perfectly, and he sounds really energized compared to his second Roc-a-Fella release.