Bands That I Like

 128 Grateful Dead   Grateful Dead The Grateful Dead became such a larger-than-live social phenomenon that it would be easy to overlook their music, or simply dismiss it as self-indulgent noodling for stoned hippies. But the Dead's music occupies a unique niche; their open-ended approach to songs and sound was unprecedented in rock. Their emphasis on live performance and their self-sufficiency- in effect the band became a self-contained music industry- fathered the jam-movement that flourished in the '90s with Phish, the Dave Mathews Band, Blues Traveler and the countless others that have followed. All forged lucrative careers built on the Dead's lead: Music mattered more than image, tours counted for more than slickly crafted studio albums, and concerts were improvised in the moment, assuring that no two would ever be alike.    The Dead began as the house band for the acid tests in mid-'60s San Fransisco, making the transition from a jug band to garage-blues rockers...

 126 Grandmaster Flash   Grandmaster Flash  Grandmaster Flash helped invent both an art form, the hip-hop sound, and a type of artist, the turntablist DJ. When the 16-year-old Flash (born Joseph Saddler) got into Bronx street parties in 1973, he discovered he had no skills as a break dancer, but he did have a passion for music and tinkering with electronic equipment in his bedroom. Adored, party-throwing DJs such as Kool Herc, Pete DJ Jones, and Grandmaster Flowers inspired Flash to combine the sharpest parts of their acts into something better and strong. During 1974-75, Flash perfected a way to incoporate and extend break beats on the beat, so that dancers could just keep rolling on with the funky bits he selected. He could also assemble pieces of records into complete new workouts, something everybody takes for granted today. This was so innovative back then that it called for a new style of MC, or rapper, to put it across to an audience The Furious Five, who were up t...

 125 Grandaddy   Grandaddy His falsetto as forlorn as Neil Young's, Jason Lytle emanates the wry pessimism of a guy who only sulks reluctantly into town when he needs new guitar strings. The band's first release was a self-released cassette from 1994 titled Complex Party Come Along Theories . Other than an EP in '96 (of mostly songs already released on the cassette) it wasn't until Under the Western Freeway that we got the proper debut album from these Modesto, California, indie rockers. Grandaddy's music is a hidden fortress of hot-wired Casios and antique drum machines, with an uneven acoustic strum at its foundation and dissonant guitar fragments looped around like chicken wire. The regrets yelped in lyrics like " Everything Beautiful Is Far Away " are both callow and moving, as if the feeble protests spray-painted on the Northern California overpasses of I-5 had been composed by the world's smartest teenage burnout. The Sophtware Slump could be...

 124 Gorillaz Gorillaz Not the first band in history to evoke the response, "So, what exactly is this, again?" Gorillaz doesn't make confusing music; it just has a confusing pedigree, and technically, as a band, doesn't exactly exist. They are an animated band. A conglomeration usually attributed to Blur 's Damon Albarn, this hip-hop-rock concept includes musicians like Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads and Cibo Matto's Miho Hatori, Afro-Cuban musician Ibrahim Ferrer, Dan "the Automator" Nakamura and his Deltron 3030 pose- Dell tha Funkee Homosapien and Kid Koala- as well as comic artist Jamie Hewlitt, who conceptualized Gorillaz as an animated troupe of manga-style slacker zombies. What all this means for the music is not as fascinating as how all this looks on TV, where the cryptic, zoned-out horror show " Clint Eastwood " enjoyed a juicy run on MTV (back when that was a thing) in short-format video form throughout 2001. I s...

 123 Gnarls Barkley   Gnarls Barkley What happens when you take the best rapper of Goodie Mob and combine him with the D.J./producer who was genius enough to make a mixtape of Jay-Z's The Black Album and The Beatles' White Album ,- thus giving birth to The Grey Album ; or in other words: What happens when CeeLo Green (one of the best singers) & DangerMouse (one of 21st century's greatest producers) start a band? You get some gnarly music and one of the freshest & most consistent bands, getting their namesake from L.A. Laker Charles Barkley: I'm talking about Gnarls Barkley! I was first introduced to the band when " Crazy " blew up on the charts & this side of the Atlantic. The single blew up in the U.K. first before it made its way over here & let's be honest: with a song this catchy it was only a matter of time before it was a worldwide smash. The good news is that this band kicks ass; the bad news is they only have two albums: 2006's...