U2's Bono was one of the few real rock heroes of the 1980s, leading the Irish band to international recognition with a charged, political approach to music. The band's early efforts brought a stadium-size presence to alt-rock, with Bono's expressive …

In 2000, Coldplay emerged seemingly out of nowhere to become a worldwide smash with their debut album PARACHUTES and hit single "Yellow." They're generally lumped in with the Britpop crowd, but, like Travis, they favor a more thoughtful, melodic pop …

In the midst of the early 1990s grunge boom, Counting Crows emerged as an alternative to the heavy, alienated sounds of the Kurt Cobain crowd. The California band harked back to the classic '60s folk-rock sounds of the Band, Bob Dylan, and Van Morris…

Unbeknownst to most Nirvana fans, its drummer David Grohl was also a singer/guitarist/songwriter who wrote numerous songs during his tenure with the band. After Kurt Cobain's death in 1994, Grohl decided to head out on his own and formed the Foo Figh…

Led by depressive pop prince Robert Smith, the Cure have taken their legions of fans on a journey from post-punk to gothic to new wave to art rock, stopping only for refills of hairspray along the way. An amazing band both live and in the studio, the…

Pearl Jam strode the middle of the neo-hard rock road manfully with their angst-ridden anthemic tunes bearing echoes of 1970s riff-rock. They arrived as part of Seattle's grunge explosion, with a sound less "punk" than Nirvana and less "metal" than S…

Following in the footsteps their idols The Beatles, Oasis became a phenomenon in their home country in the 1990s. Taking the Fabs' template as a model, they added a thick wall of Pete Townshend-influenced guitars and stood at the vanguard of the mid-…

Coming out of the grass-roots Gilman St. punk scene of the early-1990s Bay Area, Green Day exploded into the mainstream with their third album, 1994's DOOKIE. The trio's punk energy and pop hooks, influenced by first-generation punks like the Buzzcoc…

Bruce Springsteen came out of New Jersey in the early 1970s sounding like a cross between Bob Dylan and early Tom Waits, backed by the rambunctious E Street Band. After toughening up his sound, Springsteen created his 1975 masterpiece, BORN TO RUN, w…

The Clash was one of the first and most important British punk bands. In the 1970s, they were the Beatles to the Sex Pistols' Stones, and went on to incorporate elements from all the roots music they loved--reggae, rockabilly, soul, blues--without ev…

Beck Hansen, the quintessential California slacker, came up among the lo-fi ranks, pushing a blend of country blues, Dylan-inspired wordplay, punk, and hip-hop. His straight-out-of-the-gate 1994 smash, "Loser," made him a star seemingly overnight. Su…

With Genesis, Peter Gabriel was the most theatrical of 1970s progressive rockers. On his own, he's been one of the most ambitious and eclectic, incorporating world music and political protest into both his pop-oriented solo albums and his more abstra…

Originally part of the early 1960s British blues/R&B scene, the Rolling Stones rapidly ascended the heights of fame with a perfect combination of hit singles and media-grabbing scandals. By the '70s, Keith Richards had become a bona fide guitar hero,…

Bob Dylan began as a Woody Guthrie acolyte, imitating the dust-bowl balladeer as faithfully as a baby boomer from Hibbing, Minnesota, could. It wasn't long before he found his own voice, spearheading the early-1960s folk revival as well as the singer…

Most alternative rock of the 1990s was based around purging one's demons over a wall of distorted power chords, but bands like Barenaked Ladies showed that tunefulness and carefree pop ditties weren't completely extinct. Hailing from Canada, this pur…

Proving you could rock despite having attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Talking Heads' innovative brand of downtown art-pop featured David Byrne's manic yelp, pointed lyrics about mundane subjects, and R&B-meets-Velvet Underground grooves, …

Their innovative rock/reggae fusion, superb songwriting, and crossover appeal put the Police light-years ahead of many of their 1980s new-wave colleagues in terms of artistic resonance. Emerging just after the punk explosion of the late '70s, the tri…

To some, the Englishman born under the name Gordon Sumner will always be known as the bassist, songwriter, and frontman of the Police. But Sting's mega-successful solo career from the 1980s into the 21st century may even overshadow his former band's …

The mercurial David Bowie is the original pop chameleon. He's been everything from inoffensive pop singer to glam icon to white soul man to art-rocker and more in the course of his long, prolific career. Although Bowie's first hit was 1969's "Space O…

Queen embodied 1970s glam rock--mixing heavy riffs and intricate vocal harmonies with a gender-bending image. Freddie Mercury's operatic voice and Brian May's guitar were multi-tracked ad infinitum to create pomp-rock in the grandest sense. In the '8…