Groups that define themselves against the middle, until the middle catches up.
New York Dolls is a live-sounding debut recorded in eight days at the Record Plant in April 1973. Todd Rundgren produced it, intervened physically during sessions—including using a cowbell as a click track and plugging in the bass cabinet—but later claimed minimal involvement in the mix. Critics compared the guitar tone to lawnmowers; sales were sluggish, especially in the American Midwest.
Quadrophenia is a concept album about Jimmy, a young mod with a four-way split personality, set in 1965 London and Brighton. It features four interwoven musical themes representing each band member, layered synthesizers recorded at home, overdubbed horns, and field recordings. It was recorded using Ronnie Lane’s Mobile Studio due to delays in completing Ramport Studios. The album reached No. 2 in both the UK and US charts.
The Specials’ 1979 debut is a tightly wound, politically charged recalibration of 1960s Jamaican ska—stripped of Caribbean languor, amplified with punk’s bite, and anchored in the concrete reality of late-1970s Coventry. Produced by Elvis Costello, it foregrounds guitar, reduces horns and percussion, and uses cover versions as ideological tools. It is urgent, unified, and unapologetically functional: music built to move bodies and shift culture.
The Hissing of Summer Lawns is Joni Mitchell’s 1975 studio album that introduced Moog and ARP synthesizers to her work and featured the first commercially released sample—a looped field recording of The Drummers of Burundi on 'The Jungle Line'. Produced by Mitchell with Henry Lewy, it blends jazz, avant-pop, world music, and electronic elements, exploring women's experiences under patriarchy and the underbelly of Southern California suburbia. Backing comes from L.A. Express and The Crusaders, with guest appearances by James Taylor, David Crosby, and Graham Nash.
Produced almost entirely by RZA on a tight budget, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) turns nine distinct voices and a stack of martial-arts film samples into a single, gritty debut that reintroduced New York to the top of hip-hop.
Marquee Moon is Television's debut, recorded at A&R Recording in New York in November 1976 after the CBGB regulars spent years turning down record deals they judged wrong for them. Produced by frontman Tom Verlaine and engineer Andy Johns, it favours interlocking guitar lines and extended structures over the blunt riffs of the punk scene the band emerged from, and its influence on the rock guitar playing that followed has far outpaced its modest original sales.
Paris Is Burning is a 1990 documentary filmed over seven years in New York City, centring on Black and Latino gay and transgender participants in the city’s ball scene. Directed by Jennie Livingston and edited by Jonathan Oppenheim, it combines vérité footage of balls with intimate interviews, letting subjects define terms like ‘house’, ‘shade’, and ‘realness’ on their own terms. It documents voguing’s origins, the formation of chosen families, and the material realities of poverty, AIDS, and transphobic violence. Funded through ten separate sources and shot on 16mm, it was awarded the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary in 1991 and added to the US National Film Registry in 2016.
Susan Seidelman’s 1982 debut follows Wren, a young woman from New Jersey adrift in New York’s fading punk scene, as she prints fliers, mugs strangers, and cycles through men in pursuit of a life she cannot name. Shot in stark black-and-white, it observes her not with judgement or irony, but with forensic calm — treating identity as a series of transactions, not revelations.
Rock Band (2007) is a four-player rhythm game developed by Harmonix. It simulates rock performance using instrument-shaped controllers for lead guitar, bass guitar, drums, and vocals. Scoring depends on timing accuracy for instruments or pitch-matching for vocals. It launched across Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, and Wii—with feature parity highest on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Post-launch, Harmonix supported PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 with weekly downloadable songs.
NBA Street is a deliberate departure from EA Sports’ simulation ethos. It trades authenticity for attitude, structure for swagger, and time limits for point thresholds. Its design insists on expression before execution—and rewards repetition, not mastery.
Skate 2 is a 2009 skateboarding game developed by EA Black Box and published by Electronic Arts. Set in the fictional city of New San Vanelona, the single-player career mode follows a skateboarder released from jail five years after being arrested in the first game, Skate, who is tasked with popularising skateboarding in the city again after devastating earthquakes, avoiding security guards hired by the company 'Mongocorp' who have bought most of the city's property.
A compact, student-oriented bass built for immediacy — not depth, not versatility, not power.
The Fender Mustang is a solid body electric guitar introduced in 1964 as the basis of a major redesign of Fender's student models. It was produced until 1982 and reissued in 1990. It features two single-coil pickups, an unusual pickup switching configuration, and a unique vibrato system. It was originally available in two short scale lengths: 24 inches and 22.5 inches. It has two angled single-coil pickups, each with an adjacent on-off-on switch, and a master tone and volume control. It introduced the Fender Dynamic Vibrato tailpiece, which together with a floating bridge forms the Mustang vibrato system.
