More proof it was all better before you were born

The Stone Roses, The Very Best of the Stone Roses (Silvertone) The Roses scripted modern Britpop (supreme arrogance + Olympian drug use + Beatles-biting + acid house/rock crossbreeding) on their self-titled 1989 debut. Then a contract dispute shut them down for five years, and by 1994’s Second Coming, they’d essentially lost the map. This set is built around the killingest cuts from The Stone Roses, but it’s worth a burn for forgotten singles like “Sally Cinnamon,” not to mention “Fools Gold,” the source of that funky-drummer, rave-rock rush Noel Gallagher’s been trying to re-create ever since. The first time is always the best, dude.

Various artists, Rolling Stones: Artist’s Choice (Hear Music/ Virgin) Holy crap--it’s the best Stones record in 30 years! Okay, they don’t actually play on this compilation of profound blues grinds (Muddy Waters’ “Still a Fool”), rock blueprints (Little Richard’s “The Girl Can’t Help It”), and burn-’em-for-your-own-mix oddities (Andre Williams’ “Jail Bait”). But the old duffers did pick and annotate every song. Brought to you by Starbucks, which at this rate could turn out to be a better record company than most. Scary.

Bad Brains, Banned in D.C.:Bad Brains’ Greatest Riffs (Caroline) Words can’t do justice to the sight/sound of four Rasta punks alternating blitzkrieg hardcore punk onstage with molten dub reggae, and, truth be told, neither can records. The Brains were basically the hardest hardcore band ever, which is why D.C. punks, the Beastie Boys, and the Chili Peppers all revered them. Front-loaded with their filigreed, precision-tooled punk metal, this comp is a solid intro. But be warned: It’ll make your current faves sound pretty weak.

Fugees, Fugees Greatest Hits (Columbia) The cover depicts them looking heavenward. But in the mid-’90s, this Jersey trio had their eyes on the streets--Pras smokin’ bidis, Wyclef bitchin’ about chicken thieves, Lauryn eating sushi in her Mitsubishi, crewmate John Forté programming beats instead of trying to hawk a solo LP from lockdown. This skimpy retrospective cheats a little--bleeping the “cheeba-cheeba, y’all”s from “Nappy Heads” is revisionism at its rankest. But the good stuff reminds us that (a) hip-hop had a lot of golden eras and (b) you can screw with formula and still sell kajillions.

Soundmurderer, Wired for Sound (Violent Turd) From the hottest outlaw mash-up-mix label going (see Kid 606’s The Action Packed Mentallist Brings You the Fucking Jams and DJ/rupture’s amazing Gold Teeth Thief) comes a brain-frying comp of ’90s dancehall/ragga/jungle atomized and accelerated to warp speed by a -laptop-wielding, Detroit-bred madman. One disc, three mixes, more than 60 songs (Barrington Levy, Cutty Ranks, Shy FX & T-Power, Squarepusher), and roughly 16,907 beats.