The song starts with lurching effects and percussion before segueing from riotous soca to lugubrious funk to what sounds like drunkard's take on Cuban son. The lyrics are in Catalan. The singer is Japanese. Yep—it's Deerhoof. "Qui Dorm, Només Somia," the curtain-raiser on the San Francisco art-punks' tenth studio album, is typical of the group's ADD stylings, shifting on a dime from quiet to loud, whipsawing between genres and time signatures, while Satomi Matsuzaki coos shiny melodies in an eerie pipsqueak voice. Deerhoof vs. Evil breaks no new ground; "The Merry Barracks" and "C'Moon" boast the band's signature mix of dissonance and pop tunefulness, with surreal lyrics that can be too self-consciously quirky. But in songs like "Hey I Can," there's some Sixties utopianism lurking in Deerhoof's bustling musical mix. "Love, love, love, love," Matsuzaki sings. "Fun, fun, fun, fun."

Listen to "The Merry Barracks":

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“Everyday People”

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.