Brock sent me this link to Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music.

If you've spent any real time in any part of electronic music--from Brian Eno to garage, gabber, jungle, ambient, breaks, microhouse, Detroit techno, and virtually any permutation or point inbetween or beyond--head over there and pepare to spend a solid hour or more having fun.

It's arranged as a kind of timeline lesson along seven major tributaries, but I'm not sure how well it succeeds as an actual primer. It works better as a funny, irreverent, sometimes contentious trip down memory lane.

Don't get too worked-up about the sometimes ridiculous sub-sub-sub-genre names. He's made some of them up. The commentary is great. Often funny, and often quite right, and its remarkably inclusive, making space for just about everything you could think of, with looped samples to boot.

Disregard the fact that on the home page he's got a 'mentasm' labeled a 'hoover.' Totally wrong on that count, but so what. The site's so damned fun, it'll get you all misty over stuff you didn't even think you liked back whenever.

I never thought I could hear some crappy prog-trance anthem from 96 and find even a speck of redeeming value in it, but last night I did.

The broader your tastes and involvement were or are, the more you'll enjoy it. If you're a hardcore junglist, or Nu-Skool breaks fan, or garage purist, or chinstroking Stockhausen fan at the expense of everything else, its appeal will probably be more limited.

It's because of that site last night that I've gone and hunted down a whole bunch of music I've not listened to in a while, from borderline cheesy to sublime to cerebral. Today's listening has included Plastikman, The Future Sound of London, Uberzone, Run DMC, Whodini, UTFO, Speedy J, The Jungle Brothers, an old acid house mixtape, an early (good) trance mix, a funky desert west coast whatever breaks mix, Neotropic, Aphex Twin, and also, accidentally, in a nod to yesterday's paean to punk, an ultra exclusive live tape of 7 Seconds and Youth of Today from probably 1985, of which only one copy exists.

Needless to say, that wasn't what got my blood pumping. Run DMC did.

Man that first album was brilliant. What a wake-up call.

There was always an underreported connection between rap and punk. It wasn't that unusual to see some punk kid wandering around outside the Cathay or Olympic with a ghetto blaster blasting Run DMC or Grandmaster Flash or Kurtis Blow. The Beastie Boys weren't quite the total anomaly that probably a lot of people outside of punk thought they were. To some of us inside it, it was an obvious thing to do. My best friend through most of high school and I played in the same band; a punk band. But we got to a point where an awful lot of our time spent listening to music was spent listening to rap. When I got my first drum machine, and later a computer, we tried to sound like The Dream Team and Doug E Fresh. He rapped, I did the beats and recorded it on my four track. We were awful, but we had a stupid amount of fun. Somewhere, a tape of that still exists. Maybe I'll find it, and in what will surely be the truest test of guts ever, maybe I'll encode it and post it.