Steve Earle

From hard-rockin' to straight-up bluegrass, Steve Earle is a great songwriter, roots rocker, and as close as I get to "country" music.

The Prodigy

Along with Chemical Brothers and Moby, The Prodigy really helped electronic music take hold in America.  They often got slagged off in the press, but their music really was a precursor to Grammy-winning Skrillex and giant EDM festivals that are commonplace everywhere now.

RIP Keith Flint

Abecedarians

Abecedarians were a short-lived post-punk band from L.A.

The name of the band is Talking Heads

They're from New York City, you know.

Low

Low pretty much spearheaded the "slowcore" movement - music so slow and minimalist, it was almost ambient.  But, they morphed slowly into a proper Alt Rock band, with Alan Sparhawk's scrawling guitar noise.  Lately, they've morphed again into an experimental mode, with songs being cut up into soundscapes that still maintain a deep sense of melancholy.

Nitzer Ebb

This underappreciated band definitely walked the line between industrial and new wave. "Body music" indeed.

Big Country

Big Country never got the recognition they deserved in the US but still remained a big band in the UK and Europe until the end of their career in the late '90s.   Their first 2 albums were produced by Steve Lillywhite, who also worked with U2 and Simple Minds.  Thus, they got lumped in with those two bands, as well as The Alarm, as a new wave of anthemic rock of Gaelic origins.  They were actually the most seasoned and musically proficient band of that group, right out of the gate as heard on their debut, "The Crossing."  They went on to make great albums (except No Place Like Home) for the rest of their career until lead singer Stuart Adamson's tragic suicide in 2000.