And to think it all started with "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell." The hip-hop jokers in Das Racist have grown into acerbic satire hustlers - they sound like Cheech and Chong, if those guys were into rhymes like, "No trustem whitefaceman like Geronimo/Tried to go to Amsterdam, they threw us in Guantánamo." The trio's first official (i.e., for profit) LP has one-liners over beats from Diplo and El-P. Their political humor is, as they say, "dark like the rainbow in a Ronnie James Dio joint." But they also love dumb wordplay ("Don King playing Donkey Kong"), video games and girls whose hair smells like Newports.

Related:
• SXSW Interview: Das Racist

“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.