Black Rock

Everybody knows that rock 'n' roll happened when DJs started slapping active verbs onto what used to be called rhythm & blues, and what were once called "race records" became a pop phenomenon, breaking through the color barrier. But even though the first rock stars were born when Little Richard whooped, wailed, and did everything but swing from the chandeliers on "Rip It Up" and Bo Diddley pounded out his patented Afro-boogie beat while shouting out the song that bears his name, the African-American contribution to rock didn't get stuck at the starting gate. Stick around and soak up the story of black rock 'n' roll, from the psychedelic six-string sorcery of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" to the cutting-edge indie-rock explorations of TV On the Radio's "Wolf Like Me."

In Next Steps, find out what happens when punk, reggae, soul, and psych collide.

Just as R&B's forefathers took the blues to a big, bad, boogie-ing new place, black rockers have kept on crashing headlong through the walls separating one style from another, forging something fresh and fiery in the process. Bad Brains tossed Rasta sensibilities into the hardcore punk moshpit — the result: the spiritual slam and philosophical frenzy of "I Against I." Shuggie Otis took one part Hendrix-soaked psychedelic exploits, one part R&B stomp learned straight from his father Johnny Otis, shook like crazy, and poured out freaky, funky concoctions like "Oxford Gray" when he was still in his teens. And we can't even put a name on the ideas Prince combined to create the space-age love song "When Doves Cry"; we just know you can't find its kind of peacock-proud purple passion anywhere else.

Things get heavy when the punk-powered, metal-covered cuts come at you fast and hard, in Deep Cuts.

The further you follow the journey of black rockers, the deeper and more diverse it gets. The seeds sown by '40s fire-starters like Wynonie Harris, with his jump-blues basher "Good Rockin' Tonight," eventually bore every kind of fruit imaginable. The thrash-and-burn metal of gangsta-rap godhead Ice-T's black-rock rebels Body Count on "There Goes the Neighborhood," the down-and-dirty garage-rock grit of the Dirtbombs' Detroit stomp "Chains of Love," the pure punk power of Death's hammering, hell-bent "Keep On Knocking" — they're all branches grown from the same mighty tree, one that's made just about every development in pop music over the last 60 years not just a possibility, but also a reality.

Let's set one thing straight — African-American rock 'n' rollers have never needed to "take back" the music that got assimilated into the mainstream back in the '50s; it's always belonged to them, and this playlist is packed to the rafters with people who never forgot that fact. So when the Chambers Brothers throw a psychedelic soul party on "Time Has Come Today," Living Colour unleashes a weapons-grade shredfest on "Cult of Personality," or Thin Lizzy lets loose with the twin-guitar lightning and Springsteen-worthy braggadocio of "The Boys Are Back in Town," they're exercising a birthright to rock that's as undeniable as a Bo Diddley beat or a Chuck Berry riff. From metal madmen to pop princesses and beyond, we've worked up a weighty batch of world-class black rock 'n' roll Essentials, guaranteed to keep you bopping, banging, swaying, and shouting until you're sore (but satisfied).