Various Artists: Super Bass: Original Old School Booty Shakers

At the root of any music that values rhythm over melody is the story of bass culture—a sprawling narrative that touches on everything from the rumble of marching bands and the quaking earth of reggae to the street-swell of hip-hop and the gut-punch of jungle. The enigmatic element that fixes such distant mutations into an evolutionary whole, bass has been the common muse of countless sonic scientists (King Tubby, DJ Premier, Dillinja) whose technological advances have largely been defined by the potent allure of the "boom." Even if their sole ambition was to make certain parts of the female anatomy jiggle in all the right ways, the artists on Super Bass, a collection of classic '80s Miami bass music, deserve their place alongside the giants who made sound-system engineering a fundamental key to musical progression. Lyrically, Miami bass is some of the most mindless music ever made, best suited for those who find 2 Live Crew a bit too cerebral. Super Bass is packed with such fist-pumping choruses as "We like the cars, the cars that go boom" and "The bass, the bass, the bass is too strong," all cooked up by acts with time-capsule names like Romeo Black & The Awesome Force, Gucci Crew II, and Bass Dominators. The mix's obsessively crafted bass tones, however, prove worthy of such single-minded fetishism. Disorienting on stereo and downright nauseating on headphones, the limitless depths and sickly resonant sub-bass frequencies manufactured by Maggotron, MC Fresh C, Gigolo Tony, and Krush 2 would go on to inform every car-rocking, dance-floor-punishing producer in their wake. Spliced together in a continuous mix by DJ DXJ, Super Bass documents an infectious, fertile meeting of early hip-hop, electro, and Jamaican dancehall, with bass exerting a gravitational pull that would have had Isaac Newton chanting, "Boom, I got your girlfriend," while throwing apples at all the booty-deficient haters.