Their old jogging buddy tricky may have been the one who used Pre-Millennium Tension as an album title, but no one captured the creeping dread of the 1990s better than the Bristol, England, group Massive Attack. Slowing hip-hop's funk down to a crawl, delivering dyspeptic raps in raspy whispers and texturing their tracks with the crepuscular film of heavy dub, Daddy G, 3D and Mushroom defined the trip-hop sound. Disc One is piled with crucial cuts from their four albums, none better than "Five Man Army," where over an Al Green/Willie Mitchell rimshot drum loop the ghostly moaning of reggae legend Horace Andy freezes time. Among Disc Two's ten rare and reworked recordings, "I Want You" casts mature mom Madonna as an icy seductress, and the pistol-grip funk of "I Against I" finds Mos Def rhyming, "Only one of us can ride forever/So you and I can't ride together." The bonus DVD's sixteen videos make this a superior, welcome collection.

“(We're Not) The Jet Set”

George Jones and Tammy Wynette were still married when they recorded the tongue-in-cheek "(We're Not) The Jet Set." The lyrics, written by Nashville songwriter Bobby Braddock, who also penned Wynette's "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" and Jones' "He Stopped Loving Her Today," make fun of the good life by declaring, "We're not the Jet Set/We're the old Chevrolet set." Braddock recalled that while writing the song, he needed the name of a city that evened out the rhyme he had with "Riviera" and "Missourah." “I got out a Rand McNally atlas," he said. "In the first part are the maps. The last part is an alphabetical listing of cities. I wanted a rustic, small-time sound. I went to the listing for Missouri. And I found 'Festus.' I loved the sound of it."