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By Mary-Louise Parker

1. Records by any act whose name is of a Greek or Latin etymology, i.e. Styx, Megadeth, Yanni.

2. Any recording of Carousel, original Broadway cast or national tour.

3. Any recording by an act or artist who owns a copy of any recording of Carousel.

4. Any soundtrack involving earnest undersea creatures who sing or play drums as they struggle to find their way home.

5. The soundtrack or singles from any aerobics movie featuring Olivia Newton-John or John Travolta.

6. Any album containing a pop song with recordings of whales or dolphins in the background.

7. Any album by Paul after

George died, any album by George after John died, and any album by Ringo after Elvis died.

8. Any of the volumes of Lilith Fair: A Celebration of Women. The DVD is equally, if not more, unacceptable.

9. Any album released between 1984 and 1988 by men wearing unitards or kimonos. Except Boy George.

10. Any tracks or bootleg recordings of the Kiss: Alive II tour. Unless you are twelve.

Sex Education Correspondent

When it comes to sex, you need to make sure you set the scene for the session. And what better way to do so than by using music to enhance the sexual experience?

The kind of music you opt for is entirely up to you, but most guys (and women) will agree that death metal is out of the question. So, depending on the kind of sex you'd like to have, choose your music accordingly.

But rather than opt for an album by a single artist, I recommend opting for compilation albums -- i.e. soundtracks and what have you. For now, here are some suggestions you might want to keep in mind the next time you happen into a music store.

R&B
The great thing about R&B music is that it usually comes with lyrics, so if there's something you want to tell her without actually saying it, you can say it with song. And if not, then let the men and women of this genre help you seduce her.

My suggestions:
Tha Down Low
Let's Get It On

Electronica
If you like to chill out and go through various speeds and tempos while doing the deed, then this music will serve to give you and your girl exactly what you're looking for. This music, along with a good bottle of wine, can turn your session into something hypnotic.

My suggestions:
Cafe Del Mar Volumen Once
Paris Under A Groove - Stylistique Vol. 1

Dance
Considering you're doing your own horizontal dance, listening to some soft, original dance music will serve to make her sway her hips more so on your penis. Personally, I think this is the best kind of music to have sex to.

My suggestions:
Beautiful Tomorrow - Blue Six
Nude Tempo 1 - Muguel Migs
Penetrate Deeper (Reis) - Deep Dish
Addictive Beats - Saeed & Palash

Ethnic
If you're the type of guy (or couple, rather) who enjoys trying out new things every so often, why not put on some bellydancing beats or soft Greek rhythms and let her show you what she's made of? If the music makes her feel sexy, she will proceed to show you exactly how sexy. Not to mention, penetration will definitely feel a little spicier.

You can always start out the foreplay by dancing together and then you can, oops!, accidentally end up inside her.

My suggestions:
Immortal Egypt - Phil Thornton, Hossam Ramzy
Buddha Bar VI

Jazz
If you're in the mood to take things slowly up the foreplay department and move into penetration with ease, then jazz is the kind of music you might want to try out.

My suggestion:
Better Sex Video Series: Indulgence - Sensual Rhythms
Verve Remixed

Bossa Nova
If there's one kind of music that can get any woman in the mood, it's bossa nova. The Brazilian voices and eclectic music will leave any woman feeling happy and perhaps horny, and she'll be enjoying her orgasm in no time. As will you.

My suggestions:
Bossa Nova For Lovers
Getz/Gilberto - Joao Gilberto, Stan Getz, Antonio Carlos Jobim

play that funky music

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Opera started in Italy at the end of the 16th century (with Jacopo Peri's lost Dafne, produced in Florence around 1597) and soon spread through the rest of Europe: Schütz in Germany, Lully in France, and Purcell in England all helped to establish their national traditions in the 17th century. However, in the 18th century, Italian opera continued to dominate most of Europe, except France, attracting foreign composers such as Handel. Opera seria was the most prestigious form of Italian opera, until Gluck reacted against its artificiality with his "reform" operas in the 1760s. Today the most renowned figure of late 18th century opera is Mozart, who began with opera seria but is most famous for his Italian comic operas, especially The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, as well as The Magic Flute, a landmark in the German tradition.

The first third of the 19th century saw the highpoint of the bel canto style, with Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini all creating works that are still performed today. It also saw the advent of Grand Opera typified by the works of Meyerbeer. The mid to late 19th century is considered by some a golden age of opera, led by Wagner in Germany and Verdi in Italy. This "golden age" developed through the verismo era in Italy and contemporary French opera through to Puccini and Strauss in the early 20th century. During the 19th century, parallel operatic traditions emerged in central and eastern Europe, particularly in Russia and Bohemia. The 20th century saw many experiments with modern styles, such as atonality and serialism (Schoenberg and Berg), Neoclassicism (Stravinsky), and Minimalism (Philip Glass and John Adams). With the rise of recording technology, singers such as Enrico Caruso became known to audiences beyond the circle of opera fans. Operas were also performed on (and written for) radio and television.

European music is largely distinguished from many other non-European and popular musical forms by its system of staff notation, in use since about the 16th century. Western staff notation is used by composers to prescribe to the performer the pitch, speed, meter, individual rhythms and exact execution of a piece of music. This leaves less room for practices, such as improvisation and ad libitum ornamentation, that are frequently heard in non-European art music (compare Indian classical music and Japanese traditional music) and popular music.

The term "classical music" did not appear until the early 19th century, in an attempt to "canonize" the period from Johann Sebastian Bach to Beethoven as a golden age. The earliest reference to "classical music" recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from about 1836.

Given the extremely broad variety of forms, styles, genres, and historical periods generally perceived as being described by the term "classical music," it is difficult to list characteristics that can be attributed to all works of that type. Vague descriptions are plentiful, such as describing classical music as anything that "lasts a long time," a statement made rather moot when one considers contemporary composers who are described as classical; or music that has certain instruments like violins, which are also found in other genres. However, there are characteristics that classical music contains that few or no other genres of music contain.

Internationally known merengue singers and groups include Miriam Cruz & Las Chicas Del Can, Joseito Mateo, the aforementioned Angel Viloria, El Ciego de Nagua, Juan Luis Guerra, Los Hermanos Rosario, Wilfrido Vargas, Sergio Vargas, Johnny Ventura, Bonny Cepeda, Kinito Mendez, Ravel, Jossie Esteban y la Patrulla 15, Pochy y su Cocoband, Fernando Villalona, Cuco Valoy, The Freddie Kenton Orquestra, Ramon Orlando, Sandy Reyes, Rasputin, Peter Cruz, Alex Bueno, Aramis Camilo, Jochy Hernandez, El Zafiro, Dioni Fernandez, The New York Band, Anibal Bravo, Los Toros Band, Conjunto Quisqueya, Olga Tañón, Gisselle, and Grupomanía.

Other artists popular in the Dominican Republic as of 2006 include Omega y su Mambo Violento, Julian, Cherito, El Jeffrey, Toño Rosario, Aguakate, and Amarfis. Milly Quezada is known as the Queen of Merengue. The popularity of Merengue is growing fast in Venezuela. Venezuelan merengueros include Roberto Antonio, Miguel Moly, Natusha, Los Melodicos. The merengue produced in New York has become very popular among the lovers of this rhythm. Some of the New Yorkers who produce this new merengue sound are Malafe, Henry Jimenez, and Aybar.

North Africa is the seat of the Mediterranean culture that built Egypt and Carthage before being ruled successively by Greeks, Romans and Goths and then becoming the Maghreb of the Arab world. Like the musical genres of the Nile Valley and the Horn of Africa (sky-blue and dark green region on map), its music has close ties with Middle Eastern music.

East Africa and the offshore islands in the Indian Ocean have been slightly influenced by Arabic music and also by the music of India, Indonesia and Polynesia. However, the region's indigenous musical traditions are primarily in the mainstream of the sub-Saharan Niger Congo-speaking peoples.

Southern, Central and West Africa are similarly in the broad sub-Saharan musical tradition, but draw their ancillary influences from Western Europe and North America. The music and dance forms of the African diaspora, including African American music and many Caribbean and Latin American music genres like rumba and salsa, were founded to varying degrees on the music of African slaves, which has in turn influenced African popular music.

While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady. Reggae is based on a rhythmic style characterized by accents on the off-beat, known as the skank. Reggae is normally slower than ska but faster than rocksteady. Reggae usually accents the second and fourth beat in each bar, with the rhythm guitar also either emphasising the third beat or holding the chord on the second beat until the fourth is played. It is mainly this "third beat", its speed and the use of complex bass lines that differentiated reggae from rocksteady, although later styles incorporated these innovations separately. Although strongly influenced by traditional African and Caribbean music, as well as by American rhythm and blues, reggae owes its direct origins to the progressive development of ska and rocksteady in 1960s Jamaica. Ska music first arose in the studios of Jamaica over the years 1959 and 1961, itself a development of the earlier mento genre.

Ska is characterized by a walking bass line, accentuated guitar or piano rhythms on the offbeat, and sometimes jazz-like horn riffs. Aside from its massive popularity amidst the Jamaican rude boy fashion, it had gained a large following among Mods in Britain by 1964. According to Barrow, rude boys began deliberately playing their ska records at half speed, preferring to dance slower as part of their tough image.

By the mid-1960s, many musicians had begun playing the tempo of ska slower, while emphasizing the walking bass and offbeats. The slower sound was named rocksteady, after a single by Alton Ellis. This phase of Jamaican music lasted only until 1968, when musicians began to slow the tempo of the music again, and added yet more effects. This led to the creation of reggae.

Salsa is essentially Cuban in stylistic origin. though it also has styles mixed with pop, jazz, rock, and R&B. Salsa is the primary music played at Latin dance clubs and is the "essential pulse of Latin music", according to Ed Morales, while music author Peter Manuel called it the "most popular dance (music) among Puerto Rican and Cuban communities, (and in) Central and South America", and "one of the most dynamic and significant pan-American musical phenomena of the 1970s and 1980s". Modern salsa remains a dance-oriented genre and is closely associated with a style of salsa dancing.

The term has subsequently had a number of shifts in meaning. In the early 1950s and beyond, the term "rhythm and blues" was frequently applied to blues records, for instance, John Lee Hooker's "I'm in the Mood" became number-one on Billboard R&B Music Charts. Starting in the 1960s, after this style of music contributed to the development of "rock and roll", the term "R&B" became used - particularly by white groups — to refer to music styles that developed from and incorporated electric blues, as well as gospel and soul music.

By the 1970s, the term "rhythm and blues" was being used as a blanket term for soul and funk. Since the 1990s, the term "Contemporary R&B" has been used to refer to a modern version of soul and funk-influenced pop music.

When hip hop music began to emerge, it was based around disc jockeys who created rhythmic beats by looping breaks (small portions of songs emphasizing a percussive pattern) on two turntables, which is now more commonly referred to as sampling. This was later accompanied by "rapping" (a rhythmic style of chanting or poetry more formally in 16 bar measures or time frames) and beatboxing, a vocal technique mainly used to imitate percussive elements of the music and various technical effects of hip hop DJs. An original form of dancing and particular styles of dress arose among followers of this new music. These elements experienced considerable refinement and development over the course of the history of the culture.

The relationship between graffiti and hip hop culture arises from the appearance of new and increasingly elaborate and pervasive forms of the practice in areas where other elements of hip hop were evolving as art forms, with a heavy overlap between those who wrote graffiti and those who practiced other elements of the culture.

The term "rock and roll" now has at least two different meanings, both in common usage. The American Heritage Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary both define rock and roll as synonymous with rock music. Conversely, Allwords.com defines the term to refer specifically to the music of the 1950s. For the purpose of differentiation, this article uses the latter definition, while the broader musical genre is discussed in the rock music article.

In the earliest rock and roll styles of the late 1940s and early 1950s, either the piano or saxophone was often the lead instrument, but these were generally replaced or supplemented by guitar in the middle to late 1950s. The beat is essentially a boogie woogie blues rhythm with an accentuated backbeat, the latter almost always provided by a snare drum. Classic rock and roll is usually played with one or two electric guitars (one lead, one rhythm), a string bass or (after the mid-1950s) an electric bass guitar, and a drum kit.

The massive popularity and eventual worldwide view of rock and roll gave it a widespread social impact. Far beyond simply a musical style, rock and roll, as seen in movies and on television, influenced lifestyles, fashion, attitudes, and language. It went on to spawn various sub-genres, often without the initially characteristic backbeat, that are now more commonly called simply "rock music" or "rock".