Zion High is a celebration of the great Jamaican DJ Ranking Joe, best known as the scatting rhymer who put the “bom biddley” into dancehall’s bomp-bomp. Joe’s exuberant flows and bizarre phrases had a big impact on early-’80s reggae, influencing everyone from the teen novelties Musical Youth and the ska revivalists the English Beat to singing DJ Barrington Levy and albino superstar Yellowman.
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Since Congress declared 2003 the Year of the Blues, James Blood Ulmer should up and run for office. In lieu of that, here’s another forceful position paper. For Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions (2001), guitarist and producer Vernon Reid (Living Color) persuaded Ulmer to head into Memphis’s Sun Studio and dig for his blues roots. The act was defiant: Ulmer is a musical child of Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic jazz abstractions, and when he was a boy, his mother and Baptist-preacher father taught him to fear the blues for their evil influence. The record was a cult hit and earned him a Grammy nomination.
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Before the smoldering neo-soul of Erykah Badu, there was the smart, slow-burn funk of Meshell Ndegeocello —a bald, bold bassist-auteur who released her sexually and politically charged debut, Plantation Lullabies (1993), at the wizened age of 24. A deep-alto crooner weaned on the Washington, D.C., go-go scene, this bisexual single mom bobbed from bedroom come-ons to black-power slogans to trash talk—with tunes like “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night)” sealing her Madonna-endorsed maverick image. After three increasingly personal ambient-soul albums, she returned to hot-button songcraft on the hip-hop-flavored Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape (2002), getting her freak on while sampling Angela Davis and Gil Scott-Heron.
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Call this debut the return of the Miami Sound, circa 1975—except that the driving force behind this soul revival is a sixteen-year-old white girl from the English countryside.
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Fifteen years after the release of Techno: The New Dance Sound of Detroit, the compilation that gave the genre its name, the Motor City’s futuristic electronic music remains bewitching. Pioneering producer Derrick May’s famous description of techno—“like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator”—still defines the two poles of Detroit’s axis: on the one hand, a loose, limber hybrid of soulful funk and disco; on the other, a taut, metronomic descendant of European machine music. The result is capable of freeing both mind and ass simultaneously.
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Beth Orton began her career singing over the beats of the Chemical Brothers and Madonna’s techno enabler, William Orbit, but since then she’s stripped much of the machine rhythms out of her own albums. This remixes-and-rarities collection suggests that she’s actually two different people: Beth 1 is a plaintive folkie; Beth 2 is a plaintive electronic siren.
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Anyone who’s ever had to reconstruct the details of a car crash will recognize the narrative of Dave Matthews’s careening “So Damn Lucky.” 
Over a six-eight pulse that slides like worn tires on wet pavement, he tells of motoring along, head in the clouds, and suddenly “everything’s different, just like that.” He sounds stunned and grateful, singing in a trembling falsetto that suggests someone who’s come a bit too close to the Pearly Gates.
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The history of cool is tangled up in legend and cliché. In music, it signals distance waiting to be negotiated—the haughty allure of bossa nova, or the loneliness of Chet Baker’s voice. For women, especially singers who trip over the border between jazz and pop, cool can be a weapon of seduction, but it’s also aesthetically dangerous. Misplayed, it can easily slip from elegant to airheaded.
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Rufus Wainwright is a hopeless romantic who wants someday to read a New York Times headline proclaiming, “Life Is Beautiful.” 
The characters in his lavishly orchestrated tunes set their cellphones on vibrate in the vain hope that the wandering lover will call; pine for a locket from “the one who made me loose”; yearn for a “love that is longer than a day.” When the romance goes awry, as so often happens, they assemble into a big Busby Berkeley chorus to sing, “Why’d you have to break all my heart? Couldn’t you have saved a minor part?”
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