DE LA SOUL IS DEAD BUHLOONE MINDSTATE STAKES IS HIGH ART OFFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: MOSAIC THUMP AOI: BIONIX BEST OF... ALL TOMMY BOY They're here, though sometimes it seems they don't want to be. Run-DMC, Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest and Wu-Tang Clan have all been split, slaughtered or sidelined in hip hop's rush to world domination, but De La Soul, of all people, have stayed the course, although the album 3 Feet High & Rising may still define them. But a group who seemed doomed to be a one-hit footnote, even shooting themselves in both feet like trench veterans unable to face more fire with its follow-up, De La Soul Is Dead, have somehow become rap elders, in the middle of an album trilogy?Art Official Intelligence?that's as ambitious as anything they've done. The story told by these reissues (plus a singles-only not-really-best-of) is still one of soured hopes as much as sustained ideals. But it begins, at least, with a burst of possibility-broaching brightness which has few equals even now. When 3 Feet High & Rising was released in March 1989, De La Soul's oldest member, Trugoy the Dove (aka Dave Jolicoeur), was just 20, while fellow rapper Pos (Kelvin Melcer) and DJ Mase (Vincent Mason) were only 19. The expansive confidence of youth's first flush flows through its grooves. Listening to it now, you're also reminded how much it was part of a general reversal of '80s culture's worst traits, and helped usher in the '90s. With its swinging soul beats, pervasive laid-back horns, and samples ranging from The Turtles to Ben E King (and Steely Dan, and Hall & Oates...), it reclaimed and re-channelled the then-discredited '60s, as the Stone Roses' debut did the same year in Britain. With their Afrika pendants and flowery clothes, De La, all middle-class boys from Long Island, also revived bohemian black style in the face of the street-simple gangsta rap then starting to burgeon (N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton fought back that August; Soul II Soul's "Back to Life"-including Club Classics, meanwhile, mirrored De La's attitude in black Britain, a mere month after 3 Feet High). A new community of like-minded New York-area rappers, the Native Tongues, was also introduced here (A Tribe Called Quest and founders the Jungle Brothers being the most prominent), along with a philosophical era, the D.A.I.S.Y. Age. "DA Inner Sound, Y'all" was the nearest De La got to defining it. But play 3 Feet in 2003 and it still sounds like "the new speak" they claimed then?Pos and Trugoy rapping a little too fast, casually and lightly, in language you can't quite understand. This De La lingo's secrets rest in childhood, with the whispered schoolyard taunts of "Can U Keep A Secret", and the almost embarrassing De La fable "Tread Water" (including a rap from "Mr Squirrel"). The genuinely funny game-show sketches (beginning rap's 'skit' obsession) which link tracks, in which musical styles flash by as if producer Prince Paul is channel-hopping, show the overall spirit of easy invention. In the same year Public Enemy drilled racial schisms with "Welcome To The Terrordome", De La Soul were still, somehow, able to revive Motown's vision: a new Sound Of Young America. But then, two years later, they said it: De La Soul Is Dead. In the time between, The Turtles had sued them for their uncleared sample, and fame and industry demands had torn the Native Tongues apart, rubbing 3 Feet High's innocence away. You can hear the change in single "Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)". "Hey, how ya doin', sorry you can't get through," runs the numb showbiz-fake answerphone message that passes for a chorus. 3 Feet High's game-show skit is meanwhile replaced by a sourer framing device, as a teenager announces to his gangsta-fan friends, "I just found a De La Soul tape in the garbage," and begins to play De La Soul Is Dead. The youths act as a Greek chorus, accurately predicting audience disgust: "Stop it, stop it, I can't stand it any more!", one screams after "Ring Ring Ring", and the idea that this is rap's longest suicide note, widespread in 1991, still tempts. Like Dylan's similarly provocatively titled, pressure-dispersing Self-Portrait, though, De La Soul Is Dead no longer sounds like one long "Fuck you!" Loose, fractured and inconsistent, deliberately smashing the 3 Feet style that might otherwise have choked them, the bad temper of some tracks is balanced by wild humour, social conscience and ragged invention. It's 3 Feet High's forgotten cousin, bitter but still bright. Buhloone Mind State (1993) couldn't regain lost innocence, but used live musicians, including the JBs' Maceo Parker, to return to 3 Feet High's sunny sound. "We felt like we'd dispelled the tension", Dave Jolicoeur recalls. "Now let's just do some music". But it was on 1996's Stakes Is High that they found their true mature voice. Faced with sales declining so steeply that De La might soon really be dead, and rap's growing, gangsta-happy commercialism, they retired "the new speak" to re-engage with this new reality. Dispensing with Prince Paul for a simpler sound, the boy wonders were now street elders, railing against rap's self-harming state. "Stakes is High" itself, introduced by a homeless man's exhausted rant, saw De La address "sick" black America in apocalyptic terms over dark, pensive brass loops. Their bleakest album, it was also their biggest US hit, returning them to the mainstream from where, rejuvenated, they began AOI's trilogy. Mosaic Thump (2000) was interesting enough (and their first US Top 10 album), but 2002's Bionix was a mature masterpiece. In many ways it was a gospel record, as with "Hold On", where gravelly female vocals and churchy organs (partly drawn from Al Green's old Hi studio band) achieve a transcendence beyond its hater-dissing lyric. On the closing "Trying People", the travails of black America and hip hop are interwoven with Pos' marital strife, over cyber-choirs turning Curtis Mayfield's old promise to a question: "People, are you ready?" "Yo, Maseo, we need to hold on," Pos pleads. They still are, and that's good.

Originally conceived by songwriter Jim Steinman as a rock opera based on Peter Pan, Meat Loaf's unashamedly excessive 1977 debut soon took on a life of its own, selling by the million and laughing wildly in the face of the then-emergent punk and new wave. And why not? This is cheese of the highest quality, enhanced in no small way by the input of one Todd Rundgren, whose lavish production and buzzsaw guitar echo that of his own sterling output of the time (see the following year's Hermit Of Mink Hollow). Loaf himself plays the lovelorn behemoth to perfection, especially on the title track and epic ballads "You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth" and "Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad". Ambitious, yes. Ludicrous, certainly. But who could get away with this nowadays?

Produced by King Crimson's Robert Fripp and conceived as part of an "MOR Trilogy" which also included his own Exposure and Peter Gabriel's second eponymous solo album, this prog-rock-soul oddity was recorded in 1977, only to be shelved by a too-timid RCA until 1980 (and deleted soon after). Time has not conspired to make the pairing seem any less bizarre, but Sacred Songs is, in fact, a true lost classic, a genuine one-off?and, along with Hall & Oates' Todd Rundgren-produced opus from 1974, War Babies, further evidence of the grit beneath the shiny surfaces. Hall's voice is predictably mellifluous throughout, while Bob's guitar runs the gamut from angular skronk ("NYCNY") to Frippertronic ambience ("Urban Landscape", "Without Tears"). Best of all is "Survive", a dignified, schmaltz-free FM rock ballad which sounds like a blueprint for Jeff Buckley's swoonsome "Last Goodbye". Radical yet tuneful, this is an album ripe for rediscovery.

In the late '60s, Trojan's Tighten Up series of cut-price reggae compilations not only showcased the label's wealth of talent but, by adopting a policy of 'stack'em high and sell'em cheap', instantly made them accessible to Jamaican youth, a demographic generally excluded from the decade's swinging prosperity. One such youth was dread auteur Don Letts, who pays tribute to this hugely influential imprint with The Mighty Trojan Sound?a natty skank through the vaults in the company of Gregory Isaacs, Lee Perry, the Heptones and many of the label's other heavy hitters.

Unlike 1996's Very Best Of, this collects all the Osmond family's US, rather than UK, hits. Thus Little Jimmy is mercifully absent, and you still get "Crazy Horses" and the sublime Wilsonian hymn to Jesus/love that is "Let Me In", but also several less unfamiliar tracks. Even Michael Jackson couldn't express teen angst and despair as grievously as Donny did on "Puppy Love" ("Someone help me! Help me, please!"), but songs like "I Knew You Well" and "Hey Girl" ("How can I EXIST without you?") go even deeper. Had The Osmonds' berserk 1973 album The Plan been better represented, this would have earned itself an extra star, as that album makes The Polyphonic Spree sound like The White Stripes. Preposterous but brilliant.

Playing live is the natural habitat of the Tulsa king of laid-back boogie, yet surprisingly we've never had a live album from JJ Cale. Then last year, Classic Pictures released on DVD a long-lost film of a live session recorded in Los Angeles in 1979. Now comes the audio version, as Cale shuffles his way through 20 songs, including "Cocaine", "Crazy Mama", "After Midnight" and "Call Me The Breeze". Leon Russell, that other pillar of the Tulsa sound, guests on keyboards. Cale's voice and guitar are immaculately understated and it's a joy to hear musicians who know how to roll as well as how to rock.

If it hadn't been for the current Australian rock revival, chances are Sydney's You Am I would have been erased from rock history. Yet they rank as one of their homeland's most influential bands (just ask The Vines or The Sleepy Jackson), while further afield they've garnered a fan base that includes Queens Of The Stone Age, Sonic Youth (Lee Ranaldo produced their first two albums) and The Foo Fighters. Rounding up their career from 1993 to 2001, this primer is a pretty decent showcase for their gnarly brand of guitar thrash and Replacements-tinted melodies, though the absence of "Adam's Ribs", "Rumble" and "Dead Letter Chorus" robs it of extra power.

Scratch Perverts BADMEANINGOOD BOTHWHAO AnotherLateNight has been reborn as LateNightTales, and this time round George "Nightmares On Wax" Evelyn mixes up a superbly eclectic set list taking in Ian Brown, Quincy Jones, Dusty Springfield, Focus and the now-obligatory cover version?in this case, Nightmares On Wax's take on Cymade's "Brothers On The Side". The fourth BadMeaninGood?compiled by the Scratch Perverts?is a much more aggressive affair, blending classics by Lalo Schifrin and The Specials with edgier cuts by DJ Shadow, Gang Starr and Kool G Rap.

There was a time between Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde On Blonde when Bob Dylan was not so much an artist as a piece of art in himself. Every time he opened his mouth, it seemed a stream of surreally brilliant jive poetry poured forth. An album of any other '60s rock star?even Lennon?yakking on for 78 minutes without playing a note would be a ticket to terminal tedium. With Dylan, it's gripping. What we get are two press conferences held in LA and San Francisco in December 1965 and a lengthy?and surprisingly thoughtful?interview for Canadian radio in February 1966. It's not an authorised release, but neither is it an illegal bootleg, for Dylan's words are apparently public domain. The press conferences offer great entertainment as Dylan jousts memorably with his inquisitors. "Do you regard yourself as a singer or a poet?" someone asks. "Oh, I think of myself as a song and dance man," he replies. "What poets do you dig?" "Rimbaud. WC Fields. The trapeze family in a circus. Smokey Robinson. Allen Ginsberg. Charlie Rich." Then up pops Ginsberg himself to ask, "Do you think there will ever be a time when you'll be hung as a thief?" But the radio interview is no less fascinating. Dylan, for once, comes across as sincere and cooperative and his answers are genuinely insightful, particularly on how "Like A Rolling Stone" began life as "a long piece of vomit, about 20 pages long". But even when he's in such responsive mood, he can't resist playing games. The long explanation of how he took his name from his mother's side of the family, who he claims spelt it "Dillon" is, of course, a complete fabrication. Yet it is delivered with such conviction that even the FBI's most sophisticated lie-detecting machine would surely be fooled. Priceless.

An often overlooked document of punk's brief period of violent flux is Mark Perry's Sniffin' Glue?the first punk fanzine. While the DIY ethic of punk rock was often derailed by injections of major label cash, Sniffin' Glue was the real deal, a xeroxed missive from the sputum-soaked frontline, assembled by people who really did "mean it, maaaan". At the other end of the spectrum to Malcolm McLaren's sly opportunism, Perry and co's manifesto has arguably had the greater influence, embodying the utopian, democratic principles underlying punk's boredom and nihilism and inspiring the fanzine culture which thrives today. This album (accompanied by a single-volume reprint of Sniffin' Glue's entire run) is compiled by Perry himself, and it's a lean and comprehensive collection of three-chord wonders. Fan-turned-participant Perry's sincerity is evident from his choice of tracks. The 'pubbier' end of punk is represented by tracks from The Hot Rods, Chelsea and Sham 69, and there's a fair smattering of classics here ("White Riot", "Anarchy In The UK" and "New Rose" are all present), but the real joy derives from observing rock being deformed, defaced, detoured. Tracks like the Voidoids' "Blank Generation", ATV's "Love Lies Limp" (Perry's own, early premonition of The Streets' bullshit-free adolescent heartache) and X-Ray Spex's "Oh! Bondage! Up Yours!" introduced elements previously alien to rock?how about indifference, reggae and feminism, for starters??while cerebral selections from The Pop Group and Wire constitute the first flowerings of the more experimental post-punk. Shorn of context, the motorik momentum of this compilation?pretty much hard'n'fast all the way from "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue" to "12XU"?adds up to a hypnotic, near-psychedelic experience. A headlong rush through days of speed.

Last year's Ten Of Swords was one of the finest debuts of recent times, pulling off the enviable feat of lacing together classic English psychedelia and driving power pop without leaving the join. All Wrongs Reversed, serving as a stopgap until the follow-up proper, has its moments (the choppy fuzz-punk of "Patterns"; countryish lament "Nobody's Child") but overloads the pop at the expense of the trippy stuff. That said, "Mr Wilson" and his take on "Gates Of Eden" have both earned the thumbs-up from Brian and Bob themselves. So who are we to argue?

Martha Johnson of the Muffins is one of the new wave's great lost sex symbols. And this reissue of her group's only significant UK album banners the injustice of their where-are-they-now status. "Echo Beach" and that's it, yeah? Well, no. This is plinky-plonky pose-by-numbers art-pop of the kind that Americans thought was just so punk in 1980, but which for Brits was, and still is, the musical equivalent of Space Invaders. But, as with underrated contemporary Stateside outfit The Models, this is more appealing and less risible than America's attempts at real punk rock. A committed little band trying to impress rather than shock, and doing it rather well.

Less austere than the template offered by Uncle Tupelo's No Depression a year later, The Jayhawks were a simpler, more open-hearted revival of Gram Parsons' spirit. Mark Olson's rich, almost wryly yearning voice almost cracks into open laughter on "Martin's Song", the nearest he gets in phrasing and lyric leaps to fellow Minnesotan Dylan at his most easygoing. The relaxed power of The Jayhawks' playing suits Olson's world of small-town, languorous hedonism (in comparison to the small-town claustrophobia of Tupelo's Jay Farrar). "Two Angels", though, has Townes Van Zandt's true country mystery, too.

At a time when every emergent garage-rock wannabe cites the Medway scene as pivotal, The Prisoners are finally taking their turn on the podium. Originally issued in 1982 and understandably rough at the edges, A Taste Of Pink! is bone-juddering fare. The central pairing of guitarist/blue-eyed soul screamer Graham Day and valve-compressed organist James Taylor drag '60s R&B and US basement squall into the post-punk era. Though subsequent offerings Wisermiserdemelza (1983) and In From The Cold (1986) harnessed their powers to more riveting effect, the inclusion here of nine previously unissued tracks (including outtake "Baby Come Alive" and 1981's three-piece demos) make this essential for diehards.

This two-disc set surveys a career spanning 53 years (1949-2002). Chosen by Brubeck himself from 24 albums, the 31 tracks follow his development from his early years as one of the founders of the West Coast "cool" style, through his 1958-67 stint with the famous quartet featuring Paul Desmond, Eugene Wright and Joe Morello, to his lesser-known later output with a variety of collaborators. Although they'll own most of this already, the main interest for Brubeck fans will be engaging with the man's personal view of his music. Beginners should start with '59's classic Time Out.

Despite having been fingered as one of the culprits of Britpop, Luke Haines is probably closer in spirit to Throbbing Gristle's Genesis P Orridge or even playwright Dennis Potter than Damon, Noel or Jarvis. The man behind The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder exhibits a similar fascination for the gristle of British life behind the twitching curtains, albeit aided by tunes your mum could sing. Haines has rightly decided to throw his talent for melodic unpleasantness into sharp relief with this collection of string-assisted re-recordings spanning his career so far, from 1992's Auteurs debut New Wave to 2001's solo outing The Oliver Twist Manifesto. He renegotiates these songs (including "Lenny Valentino", "Unsolved Child Murder" and "Future Generation") skillfully, the string arrangements wringing out all the grandeur of the originals, Haines' whispered vocals as unnerving as ever. The new songs, "Satan Wants Me", "Michael Powell" and "Bugger Bognor", are brutally beautiful. Hard to love, but then the old curmudgeon probably wouldn't have it any other way.