Bill Evans Trio · 1962 Spin it Again - Bill Evans, Scott LaFaro, and Paul Motian in a New York restaurant, February 1961, and LaFaro was dead ten days later, which is the only context you need.

Kraftwerk · 1977 Spin it Again - Four Germans in suits built the skeleton that every DJ, hip-hop producer, and synth band has been draping flesh on ever since, and most of them still haven't caught up.

Patti Smith · 1978 Spin it Again - Patti Smith screaming her way through Because the Night, a song Tom Petty passed on and Springsteen half-wrote, and somehow she ended up owning all of it.

Patti Smith · 1975 Spin it Again - She walked into a studio in 1975, opened with a line about Jesus dying for somebody's sins but not hers, and everything that came after it had to answer for itself.

Nick Drake · 1970 Spin it Again - Nick Drake in 1970, strings arranged by Robert Kirby, jazz musicians who barely knew him, and somehow that distance is exactly what makes it hurt.

Carole King · 1971 Spin it Again - Carole King sat down at a piano in 1971 and quietly made every other singer-songwriter that decade feel like they were still figuring it out.

Portishead · 2008 Spin it Again - Eleven years away and they came back sounding like a band that had decided warmth was no longer an option.

The Fall · 1980 Spin it Again - Mark E. Smith on a wet Tuesday in Salford, half-drunk and fully right about everything, cutting the dullest parts out of rock and leaving only the parts that make you uneasy.

Rush · 1980 Spin it Again - Rush figured out that seven-minute songs hit harder when the band actually knows when to breathe, and 1980 was the year they proved it.

Eric B. & Rakim · 1987 Spin it Again - Rakim figured out what a microphone was actually for, and Eric B. built the room around him, and nothing sounded quite right in the same way after 1987.

Grandmaster Flash · 1982 Spin it Again - Seven minutes of broken glass and burnt-out streetlights that made every rock critic realize they'd been writing about the wrong neighborhood for a decade.

Dave Brubeck Quartet · 1959 Spin it Again - Dave Brubeck put jazz in 5/4 time in 1959 and somehow the squares bought it, which tells you something about the song and something about the squares.

Sonny Rollins · 1956 Spin it Again - Rollins in '56, blowing past every rule the bebop guys wrote, making the tenor sound like it was thinking out loud and didn't particularly care if you were following along.

Ornette Coleman · 1960 Spin it Again - Two quartets, one session, zero agreement, and somehow Coleman made that the whole point.

Ornette Coleman · 1959 Spin it Again - Coleman walked in with a plastic saxophone and quietly ended an argument that had been going on since bebop started.

Keith Jarrett · 1983 Spin it Again - Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette found the exact tempo at which late-night piano trio jazz stops trying to prove anything.

Bill Evans Trio · 1959 Spin it Again - Bill Evans, Scott LaFaro, and Paul Motley treating silence like a fourth instrument, and nobody's been the same about piano trios since.

Bill Evans Trio · 1961 Spin it Again - Bill Evans, Scott LaFaro, and Paul Motley playing jazz like a conversation no one wanted to end, ten days before LaFaro died.

Thelonious Monk · 1957 Spin it Again - Monk wrote the title track so knotty his own band couldn't play it clean, so they spliced together two takes and called it done, and somehow that's the most honest thing on the record.

John Coltrane · 1965 Spin it Again - Coltrane in '65, past the point of needing your approval, just him and Pharoah Sanders letting something ancient and uncomfortable move through the room until it was done.