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.

“Tonight's the Night”

The lead cut and title track from this girl group's debut album, "Tonight's the Night" was written by 19-year-old bandmember Shirley Owens, who sings lead, and producer Luther Dixon. The band from Passaic, New Jersey met in high school, first calling themselves the Pequellos. The song's frank thoughts about sexual and emotional surrender was racy for the time, but that didn't stop the Chiffons from cutting a similar version immediately after the original came out. "We were the first female group to write some of our own material," band member Beverly Lee recalls. "We did have some say-so in our writing."