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Dave Brubeck Quartet - Take Five

Aksdal, Highroad, iamnotawerewolf
Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit
Submitter Comments: Smells like Teen Spirit was Nirvana’s breakout hit, and became synonymous with the band’s grunge-core style. They only lasted for 3 more years and one more album which prevented them from developing or changing their style as many bands who remain in the spotlight for decades. HIGHROAD
Distortion, disillusionment, angst, danger, rhythm, occasional indistinguishability, energy, and era-defining greatness. IAMNOTAWEREWOLF

ReddBoiler
Vanilla Ice - Ice, Ice, Baby
Submitter's Comment: Vanilla Ice came to be defined by Ice Ice Baby. Just as the song was ripped off from a previous artist, Vanilla Ice was largely a rip off of early hip hop culture. While Ice certainly had talent, its hard to ever take him serious because of the blatant fabrication of "him."

SuqAta8
Brand New - (Fork And Knife)

DiggertheDog
Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons - Walk Like A Man
Submitter's Comment: Sound of a generation: trio/quartets with dominate vocal harmonies. This was the music culture that the rock n roll counter-culture was juxtaposed against. Rocknroll concentrated on solo vocals and musical harmonies. So I choose this Frank valli – song to show the contrast of what rock n roll developed against.

tappokone
The Kinks - Afternoon Tea
Submitter's Comment: This song encapsulates everything that made The Kinks so wonderfully distinctive during their late '60s golden era. The shuffling beat, the guitar tone, and the melody are all just lovely. The lyrics are observational, slice-of-life, and extremely British, as you would expect. Yearning for something that has been lost is a very common motif in Ray Davies's songs.

fnord_too
The Clash - Lost In The Supermarket
Submitter's Book: To begin with, I think this category is a fool’s errand because good artists span things like genres and themes and mechanisms; trying to characterize them with a single creation just doesn’t work. So I picked a song that I think is representative of some recurrences in the Clash’s music. For one thing, in the continuum of styles, this is relatively close to a lot of their songs. I would say its sound is not too far from songs like Stay Free, Spanish Bombs, Somebody Got Murdered and the like (while being pretty far from songs like Safe European Home and Guns of Brixton). Next, this falls well into a very common broad theme in the Clash’s music, one of... voids in lives for lack of a better phrase. In Straight to Hell, this theme manifests as complete disenfranchisement, in Job Opportunities it’s the lack economic hope; these themes run through much of the Clash’s music, and were still very prevalent in Big Audio Dynamite’s No. 10 Upting Street which saw a musical reunion of Mick Jones and Joe Strummer, but I digress. Anyway, to me Lost in a Supermarket is about a lack of meaning or purpose in life. The song is from the perspective of someone following what they perceive as the social norms but not being able to find any greater meaning or happiness. Finally, The Clash often use a single persons perspective to talk about a broader issue. In Straight to Hell, the tragedy of abandoned war children is personalized to one voice; in Somebody Got Murdered, violence that happens below society’s threshold of caring is explored through the death of one of these forgotten people. Similarly, angst, searching for meaning, and loneliness are widespread and rediscovered by every generation, and in Lost in a Supermarket they are explored by just one of the 8 million stories in the city. Lost in a Supermarket ties together a lot of what The Clash were about for me, though to say it characterizes them I think insults the breadth of their work.

Gabethebabe
Bronski Beat - Smalltown Boy
Awesome song - gay pop of the 80s, when being gay wasn't cool yet. Text and videoclip speak for themselves.