It has to be tough being Nick Cave -- taking off your coal-black trench coat, lecturing your lady about the darkness in your soul, calling down a curse from the Lord on the upstairs neighbors, and shooting out the lights. But the black-hole gravity Cave cultivates gives the Australian crooner asolemn authority that recalls his idol Johnny Cash (memorialized here on “Let the Bells Ring”).

Robert Smith is bucking for a promotion from alterna-gloom standard-bearer to timeless rock god.

The not-so-secret heroes of dance music and hip-hop aren’t singers or rappers, but producers. Bold-faced beatmakers like Timbaland and the Neptunes have become stars in their own right, relegating their collaborators to the passenger seat of the Escalade.

It's a bitter irony that Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, Africa's most famous and politically potent pop musician, became a symbol of the African AIDS crisis when he died of the disease in 1997, after claiming for years that it didn't exist.