Because Puff tried to turn everyone on his label into crossover superstars, a lot of great, hardcore acts on his label got short-changed. The LOX, Black Rob, G-Dep….all great acts who could've benefited from a more focused, nuanced label.

He co-produced it with Chucky Thompson, who I think did much of the hands-on production work.

Nah, the KLF were legitimately, intentionally subversive. Read up on their pranks and performance art. Not to mention their collaboration with crust-grind band Extreme Noise Terror at the Brit Awards that ended with blanks being fired into the audience from a machine gun.

It may be satire, but that song is still grating to me.

Beavis & Butthead's takedown of the "I Alone" video makes it hard to ever take Live seriously.

I don't know, there are a lot of really droll, snarky takedowns of terrible movies, but they never seem to get the kind-of pile-on controversy that droll, snarky takedowns of albums or songs do. I don't think music is any more snobby or angry than any other realm of pop culture.

We all have songs we really hate, and we sometimes like to use snarky humor as a way of dealing with them. I'm not sure why this is always so controversial. It can be cathartic, and the authors here are far from the kind of toxic bitterness that could've transpired.

ICP just aren't good. Like, bargain-basement hip-hop with terrible lyrics mostly geared towards folks who don't listen to any other hip-hop.

Capone N Noreaga's The War Report needs mentioning. Easily in my top five favorite albums of 1997.

The adult contemporary stations in MD even cut out Wyclef's adlibs at the beginning and end of "Killing Me Softly." Whole thing was so blatantly and weirdly racist.

Yeah, Beck's "nonsense" lyrics have an absurd charm and weird creativity to them, while Sugar Ray seemed like they were just really struggling for a rhyme.

At least Super Cat hopefully still gets some royalty checks for that. Though I hate that most of America now only knows him as the toaster on that Sugar Ray song.

I used to have Floored in middle school, and yeah, "Fly" was an anomaly, but I'd hesitate to call the other songs "good." Kinda just mediocre hard-rock and quasi-nu-metal.

His first album from 1992 as Tung Twista is vastly different from what he became famous for. It's on some quasi-boho jazz-rap thing; not very good, but a bit amusing.

The KLF were also some of the most ingeniously subversive artists of their time.

The Chemical Brothers also just seemed like some really creative guys with a strong love for the history of hip-hop and club music. It sucks that they got lumped in with the whole "electronica" and "big beat" hype since they were miles more creative and effective than whatever Fatboy Slim-knockoff appeared later on.

Shit, he made a Pharoahe Monch ghostwrite sound lame.

I'd hesitate to call Puff a "producer" since even the tracks he has production credit on are always augmented by a co-producer, who I'm positive does most of the actual legwork (see Chuck Thompson and then Stevie J). A good number of his Hitmen crew could make solid beats (Carlos Broady, D-Dot, Nashiem Myrick), so all…

And Ancient.

I agree that Flash absolutely should be honored.