Yame Intro

Alexander O'Neal almost achieved the breakout he needed for crossover success with his second album. It cracked the Top 30 on the pop album chart, earned a gold record, and included O'Neal's two strongest uptempo tunes, "Fake" and "Criticize." Jam and Lewis linked the material with "party" dialogue and patter, providing their finest and tightest production for any O'Neal record. The beats were catchy, the songs hook-laden, and O'Neal's voice alternately explosive, sensitive and bemused. This 2 CD set, packaged in a sumptuous casebound book, contains the lyrics and newly-authored liner notes by A. Scott Galloway, and features additional remixes and alternate versions of the singles.

Born in Chicago in 1949, Gil Scott-Heron became one of the inspirators of Rap Music. With very much of a political viewpoint, Gil became a mouthpiece for the Black Person in America during the Seventies and Eighties. Gil was the son of a Jamaican professional soccer player and a college graduate mother who worked as a librarian. His father played for the Scottish football side, Celtic. Both parents divorced whilst Gil was still a child and he was despatched off to his grandmother in Lincoln, Tennessee. His grandmother helped Gil musically, however, early racial tensions at school, in Jackson, led him to relocate again to the Bronx during his adolescent years to live with his mother and he later moved again to the Spanish neighbourhood of Chelsea.

At the age of 13, Gil had already written a book of poetry. Gil attended college in Pennsylvania and then left to concentrate on writing his first novel entitled 'The Vulture' in 1968. It was at college he met Brian Jackson, who was later to be a long time musical collaborator.
He released his debut album, 'New Black Poet: Small Talk at 125th and Lennox', in 1970, the title of which was influenced by a piece of poetry written by his mentor, Bob Thiele. The album contained the powerful 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised', a damning political attack on the media and the treatment of Black People in the U.S.

1987's R.I.P. album represented a pretty inconspicuous start for Swiss trio Coroner – one whose modest ambitions they would quickly outdistance on their way to morphing into one of thrash metal's all-time most adventurous bands…

Tom Waits' first two albums, 1973's Closing Time and 1974's The Heart of Saturday Night, documented his estimable strengths as a songwriter, but they didn't always give much of a sense of the personality that came through in his live performances. In front of an audience, Waits transformed himself into something resembling a minor character from a Jack Kerouac novel, a witty but bedraggled hipster from the seedy side of Los Angeles. His third album, 1975's Nighthawks at the Diner, was designed to show off Waits as an entertainer as well as a tunesmith; producer Bones Howe set up a nightclub facsimile in a recording studio, paired Waits with a solid band of jazz-inclined studio musicians, brought in an audience, and recorded what was in essence his first live album…