Paul Oakenfold

Paul Oakenfold has been called the king of club DJs, the king of trance, and even the king of cheese. He's listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the world's most popular DJ, though ravers the world over debate the artistry of his music, which augments house music's 4/4 thump with sweeping major-chord melodics, orchestral synthesizers, and big, dramatic crescendos for the masses. Oakenfold's shamelessly populist jams have led dance music's transpotter purists to tug their beards in consternation.

The London-born Oakenfold started out in the '80s as a hip-hop head, rocking the funky beats of the day and gaining fame by signing the likes of Will Smith and Salt-n-Pepa to their first U.K. deals. Then, captured by the hippieish Balearic grooves coming out of Spain's nightclubbing paradise Ibiza, he became an advocate of England's acid-house revolution. In the early '90s, he was tapped as producer to pump up the dance-floor funk for bands like Happy Mondays, served as U2's tour DJ, and took to the decks at club and rave gigs.

Oakenfold enhanced his reputation with a series of mix CDs. Journeys by Stadium DJ features classic tracks by acid-house legends the Shamen and Oakenfold's own "Perfecto" mix of U2's "Lemon." However, Sessions V.2 and Perfecto: Perfection -- which primarily collects releases on Oakey's Perfecto label -- now sound hopelessly dated.

Bust a Groove, a.k.a. Sampladelica: The Roots of Paul Oakenfold, is a collection of dusty old-school DJ tools (discreet break beats and sounds, not songs per se). Voyage Into Trance reveals Oakenfold's early-'90s obsession with Goa (or "psy-trance"), a trippy-hippie, utopian rave sound, while Global Underground: NY combines darker grooves with more New Agey epics over two discs with, er, mixed results.

Oakenfold truly hit his stride during the late '90s. On Global Underground: Live in Oslo collection, Oakenfold stretched out, tossing some drum-and-bass grooves and chill-out ambience among the anthems. Its followup, Tranceport, is considered a classic trance record. One of the best-selling mix CDs ever, Tranceport features revised Ibiza favorites like Energy 52's "Cafe del Mar" and tracks courtesy of Oakey's superstar-DJ peers Sasha and Paul Van Dyk. Another World finds him pushing the stylistic boundaries, which lead to effective jams (his dance-floor twist on Led Zeppelin's "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" brought many nonbelievers into the fold) and pretentious excesses (the snatches of film dialogue and tracks from New Age icon Vangelis are a bit much).

On Ibiza, Oakenfold returned to his Balearic roots, mixing together surging break beats and darkly tribal New York house via John Creamer and Danny Tenaglia alongside the usual euphoric epics. Oakenfold even drops in Radiohead's "Idioteque" and a revamp of U2's "Beautiful Day" for extra diversity points.

Swordfish: The Album is a reimagined soundtrack to the awful John Travolta action movie of the same name. The album includes some anonymous incidental music used in the film, but other songs display an increased interest in hip-hop, which isn't always a good thing: His neo-electro twist on N.E.R.D.'s "Lapdance" saps the original's aggro tension, while a remix of Afrika Bambaataa's early '80s hip-hop masterpiece "Planet Rock" doesn't veer far from the original.

On Bunkka, his first album of all-original material, Oakenfold tried to break out of the "epic trance." Bunkka even scored a Top 40 hit, "Starry Eyed Surprise," a perkily saccharine ode to all-night raving with an insidiously catchy refrain supplied by Crazy Town singer Shifty Shellshock. Other than token trancer "Hypnotised," most of Bunkka's tracks feature Crystal Method–lite break beats (check the opener, "Ready Steady Go") with bold-faced guest vocalists Perry Farrell, Tricky, Nelly Furtado, and even Hunter S. Thompson. Bunkka epitomizes the trademark inconsistency of Oakenfold's career -- dance music for the masses mixed with stylistic leapfrogging, producing frequently listenable, often danceable, but rarely exciting results. (MATT DIEHL)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide