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A Tommy Hilfiger production, with co-sponsorship from Condé Nast and Estée Lauder, it made you feel like you'd dreamed your way into a Vanity Fair ad supplement and would never wake up.

7) Randy Weeks "Madeline" on "Madeline" (Hightone)

The composer of Lucinda Williams' "Can't Let Go" digs himself into a very dark, very convincing seduction song in a town where there's nothing else to do. Weeks' voice isn't strong enough to make the recording stand up for long, but while it lasts there's a cruel, alluring shadow of Larry Clark's "Tulsa" in the background.

8) Hillary Clinton at Riverside Church, New York (March 5)

What's disarming about Hillary Clinton is the way she stands up in front of a crowd and speaks at length in paragraphs, without notes, without seeming to have memorized anything, simply as if she knows her own mind. She's that organized and that fierce. But this day, addressing the not-guilty verdict in the trial of the police who shot Amadou Diallo without mentioning it, she was, one by one, reading the sort of words ("To hunker down instead of reaching out. To shut doors instead of opening them.") nobody speaks without counting the cost of each.

9) Chloë Sevigny Gets Lucky in Love in "If These Walls Could Talk 2" (HBO, March 5)

After getting HIV in "Kids" the first time she has sex, V.D. in "The Last Days of Disco" the first time she has sex, falling in love with a man who turns out to be a woman and then gets shot in front of her in "Boys Don't Cry," it's about time. Interesting music, too -- faraway, smoky soul -- as opposed to the horrifying washing-machine melodies of the Ellen DeGeneres/Sharon Stone episode.

10) Washington Phillips "I Had a Good Father and Mother" on "Storefront and Streetcorner Gospel (1927-1929)" (Document, Austria)

A heavy-set, unsmiling man in his 30s, Phillips had a sense of humor ("Denomination Blues," a deadpan account of the endless antipathies Christian orders find in a message of love). He played, and was apparently the only person ever to record with, the dolceola, a kind of dulcimer that sounded like an electric zither run through a Leslie speaker cabinet, showing you a heaven populated by ghosts. In 1929, at his last recording session, just a year before he was committed to the insane asylum where he would spend the few years that remained of his life, he sang the saddest song in the world, thanking his parents for putting him on the right path. You listen and you know the world is poorer because he is not in it.
salon.com | March 20, 2000

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