Just before his death in 1991, Miles Davis teamed up with rapper Easy Mo Bee to make a jazz/hip-hop album called "Doo Bop." This wasn't the first time Davis had done something utterly new -- his entire career was devoted to jazz-faring exploration. Playing with such supernovae as Charles Mingus

Bebop, Classical, Composed, Cool, Cool jazz, Electronic, Elegant, Expansive, Fusion, Fuzzy, Hard bop/post-bop, Improvised, Intimate, Loose, Lush, Mathematical, Minimal, Open-ended, Quiet, Sexy, Sincere, Spare, Subtle, Trippy

From an early age, Joyce disdained what he saw as the shabby Philistinism of his birthplace, Dublin, rejecting the Catholicism that dominated Irish culture in favor of a literary faith and a rebel's stance. Absolutely convinced of his genius, Joyce left for self-imposed exile in Europe in 1904, and b

Composed, Excessive, Expansive, Formless, Layered, Modernist literature, Moody, Playful, Postmodern fiction, Profane, Religious, Sprawling, Subtle

Laurie Anderson trained as a violinist, art historian, sculptor, and more recently, as a poet. For those familiar with her work, the mere mention of her name is enough to start a multimedia memory extravaganza. Anderson embraced multiple technologies before "multimedia" became an unhyphenated wor

Cd-rom, Collage, Composed, Electronic, New musical hybrids, Political, Repetitive, Smarty arty pop, Technology, Trippy, Witty

Although Ligon is famous for his text-oriented explorations of African American history, much of his recent art is like a tabloid TV show, exposing a secret world of interracial gay sex. Ligon's work, which spans several mediums, calls out the difficulties of growing up black and gay in middle-class

Composed, Deconstructive, Homoerotic, Modern sculpture, Political, Rebel