The Kinks were an English rock group formed in 1963 by lead singer-songwriter Ray Davies, his brother, lead guitarist and vocalist Dave Davies, and bassist Pete Quaife. The band's early hard-driving singles set a standard in the mid-1960s for rock & roll, while albums such as Face to Face, Something

Baroque, Brit-pop, Classical, Clever, Contemplative, Cool, Dreamy, Funny, Ironic, Joyful, Lyrical, Melancholy, Oldies rock, Pioneering, Playful, Pop, Pristine, Quirky, Self-reflection, Smart, Smarty arty pop, Whimsical, Witty

Michael Jackson was unquestionably the biggest pop star of the '80s, and certainly one of the most popular recording artists of all time. In his prime, Jackson was an unstoppable juggernaut, possessed of all the tools to dominate the charts seemingly at will: an instantly identifiable voice, eye-popp

Bombast, Bright, Clean, Glamour, Grand, Kinetic, Melancholy, Pioneering, Rhythmic, Sensual

Sonic Youth was one of the most unlikely success stories of underground American rock in the '80s. Where contemporaries R.E.M. and Husker Du were fairly conventional in terms of song structure and melody, Sonic Youth began their career by abandoning any pretense of traditional rock & roll conventions

Atmospheric, Composed, Contemplative, Cool, Deconstructive, Dissonant, Distorted, Dreamy, Eclectic, Elegant, Expansive, Experimental, Fuzzy, Hallucinatory, Intense, Layered, Lyrical, Pioneering, Political, Pop, Psychedelic, Punk, Quirky, Rhythmic, Rough, Sensual, Slangy, Smart, Sophisticated, Sprawling, Subtle, Tense, Trippy, Urban

The Sex Pistols may have provided the shock-value dynamite for the punk explosion in 1970s Britain, but it was the Clash who channeled the energy of that explosion into a discrete form of music. Or rather, they channeled it into several forms simultaneously; they diversified the space of punk. The Cl

Bombast, Pioneering, Political, Punk, Slangy