As Lou Reed proclaimed in the title song of his 1976 classic Coney Island Baby, "different people have peculiar tastes," and it sums him up — in the course of his career, Lou Reed has been lots of different people, and they've all had peculiar tastes. NYC Man, thirty-one tracks selected by the man himself, shows the many strange faces of Lou Reed: the decadent Chelsea-boy punk poet of the Velvet Underground ("I'm Waiting for the Man," "Heroin"), the Seventies glam-rock ho ("Walk on the Wild Side"), the reluctantly wise gutter sage ("Street Hassle," "The Blue Mask") and the guy who took a ton of drugs ("Berlin"). "Ecstasy," from 2000, proves that Reed's creative powers remain fierce — even if his recent rock opera about Edgar Allan Poe is a lot to forgive.

“Too Close”

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'"