Beats International

The grandfather of mash-up/bootleg culture is Beats International's debut album, and especially its dance hit "Dub Be Good to Me" -- an ingenious combination of the S.O.S. Band's "Just Be Good to Me" and the bass line from the Clash's "The Guns of Brixton." The group's mastermind was Norman Cook, who'd just spent a few years as the Housemartins' bassist and hadn't yet become Fatboy Slim. Beats International was a transitional band for him, as he started to play with making new grooves out of fragments of other people's recordings, but also wrote some splendid original songs. "For Spacious Lies" is a mournfully perky assessment of the distance between political principles and practice: "Freedom's just a song by Wham!, but we pretend." (The following year's Excursion on the Version, now out of print, is more dub-obsessed and less clever.) (DOUGLAS WOLK)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide