Various Artists - Special Brew (1996)

I found a copy of this for $2 last weekend during an insane journey to four Half-Price Books stores in one day in the Chicagoland area.  (Half Price, which I hadn't been to before, is one of those places where if really good stuff doesn't get seen by the right people within about a month's time, it ends up in clearance racks...Nah, who am I kidding; "nobody listens to techno" and it would have sat there forever if I hadn't bought it.)

Finding and hearing this again just a few months before my 10-year high school reunion is very apropos, as it was seminal for me in terms of my introduction to electronic music.  (Basically it was this, The Saint soundtrack, and the Wipeout XL soundtrack.  Too bad the core products those CDs were hawking stunk so much butt.)  The artist list reads like a who's who of the '90s heyday of triphop and big beat, and features a sequence of tracks (Prodigy remixing Method Man through Underdog remixng Massive Attack) that outlined a decade's worth of musical interests for me and, I'm sure, all of the other couple of thousand (maybe?) people who heard it.  I'm kind of bummed out that the scene got so overtaken by male posturing, both in terms of dnb going dark and nerds declaring the idea of a follow-able beat passe.  We're due for a revival people.