Release date: Holiday season, 1999
Description: Here’s the press release! https://web.archive.org/web/20001119064600/http://www.musicmatch.com/about_us/press_releases.cgi?PRESS=22
It’s a lime green disc like 4.0, but it (and the box) have a tall, narrow, OCR-type font it uses to spell “MP3.” That makes it stand out from the other MMJBs.
This is the one I owned as a teenager, the one that got me started collecting all of these in 2020…and, naturally, the one that took the longest to show up on eBay. Getting it was not only the completion of the discs; it was a reconnection with my younger self. So this is the one that has personal meaning to me.
Does it have the best songs? Hard to say; it turns out I’d deleted a lot because they were foul-mouthed. (Back then, you had to save hard drive space whenever you could.) But that feeling of songs your brain remembers but can’t recall…when they rush back, it’s like nothing else I know.
The songs
MusicMatch had three song suppliers this time, for a total of 50 songs. The Epitonic folder was my favorite, and as I’ve since learned from the site’s founders, a lot of its contents were just their own bands or bands of their friends. (The long-defunct Epitonic site barely has anything up, but it still has 30-second samples of all its free songs. That helped me ask a lot of the right questions moving forward.)
So here are the songs sorted by supplier (besides the 15-second demo of Carey Bell’s “That Spot Right There”:
eMusic.com (20 songs)
| Artist | Song | Notes |
| The Apples in Stereo | Strawberryfire | A Beatles-esque psychedelic jam. |
| The Bouncing Souls | Fight to Live | Shouty punk. |
| Buddy Guy | Try to Quit You Baby | Old blues. |
| Bugs | About You | Distinctive trip-hop with a triplet thing going through it; this is one of the most memorable songs of the group. |
| Fiver | Horse Pill Vectors | |
| Francisco Aguabella | Agua de Cuba | One of multiple MMJB mambos. |
| John Lee Hooker | Tupelo | |
| Johnny Blas | Mambo 2000 | Also a mambo. I remember it better, for whatever reason. |
| Johnny Blas | Picadillo (Carl Craig Breakdown Mix) | I love Carl Craig, but…nothing happens in this song. |
| June and the Exit Wounds | Highway Noise | |
| Karry Walker | Fillmore | |
| Lightnin’ Hopkins | Gambler’s Blues | |
| Lonely Kings | What If? | |
| Mark Pistel | Skin Up | Bleepy Detroit techno with a really tight snare fill at the end of most measures. Shows up in 3 MMJBs, so it’s the right first guess if someone’s trying to remember an electronic song off here. |
| Pucho and His Latin Soul Brothers | El Nino | |
| Otis Rush | Double Trouble | |
| Professor Shehab and Robert Musso | Avatar | Professor Shehab was also in the next band in this compilation. |
| Qaballah Steppers | Quarrel of Toys | The gem of the eMusic collection. A strange mix of dub and drum and bass that has influenced my musical outlook a great deal. |
| Voodoo Glow Skulls | Left for Dead | Ska-punk! From 1999! This fits! |
| Willie Dixon | New Way of Lovin’ | So many old blues artists here. |
Epitonic (15 songs)
| Artist | Song | Notes |
| Atombombpocketknife | Fly Vultures Fly | The discordant guitars are memorable, and I like this song. |
| China, the Beautiful | …And the Fishes Invaded the Land | China, the Beautiful was largely Nyles Lannon, who was also in Reizoko. So he got four songs in here! (He was so tickled I remembered China, the Beautiful that he gave me all his old songs after tracking down the hard drive. BUT… |
| China, the Beautiful | Tornado Princess | …he doesn’t have this song! He’s also told me it wasn’t his favorite song. But I feel megahipster owning more songs from a band than the band does.) |
| Eltro | Storm Cloud of the Century | Another huge influence on me and one of my favorite songs of all-time. It’s shoegaze but without a lot of fuzz somehow, and Diana Prescott’s vocals are lackadaisically wonderful. This song’s worth tracking down. |
| Eltro | Some Vital Function | |
| Erector Set | Chromosoma | Epitonic’s archive seems to be the only remaining record that this band existed. This is the song I remembered for years, but only really the first bit, which sounded industrial-cool but then gave way to screamo stuff. Turns out the rest of the song is just that sound repeated a lot. |
| Erector Set | Scrapegoat | Great song name! |
| Film School | Song for Your Big Day on the Green | |
| Jettison Flammable | Easy Tiger | |
| Lenola | Frukus | Gauzy fast shoegaze. I like it. |
| Lenola | Jet Row | A stately acoustic number that is one of my MMJB favorites. |
| PFD | Interrupt | Drum and bass that is too sparse to do much good. |
| Reizoko | The Bird Is Heard | This song is shown in the packaging for MMJB 5.0 as being in someone’s playlist. But the song’s on 4.3, not 5.0. |
| Reizoko | More Efficient Code | |
| The Marinernine | Sweet Pea |
Rolling Stone (15 songs)
| Artist | Song | Notes |
| Asher Love | Inspire | |
| Bawston Strangla | Shamrocks and Glocks | |
| Ben Wakeman | Resonate | |
| Mental Flux | ClokWorx | |
| Da Avengers | Illuminati Killer | |
| Flatline | Feel My Pain | |
| Glory Hole | Let Down | |
| Halley DeVestern | I’ll Light Myself on Fire | |
| Land of the El Caminos | Mech Man | This song’s pretty good in a punk way. Pitchfork reviewed the album after this one and gave it a 1.2. First, why bother? Second, what is bringing the 0.2 to that? |
| Mickey Dean | Big Rigs | A surprising country/trucker song in the middle of a LOT of rap that isn’t suitable for children. “Burnin’ diesel and gainin’ speed…” |
| Neintown Still | Headlights on Airplanes | It sounds a bit like “Not About Us” by Genesis, if you like slow and generally reflective acoustic things. |
| Randy “Redtop” Cohen | Highsteppinmama | I don’t want one of these even if it’s three words. |
| Roy Ashen | Beautiful | |
| Seeds of Labor | Spanish Harlem | |
| Yanni Difranco | Ed McMahon | Pretty entertaining, as punk songs on these compilations go. They strain-sing “Ed McMahon” a lot. |
Next: MusicMatch Jukebox 5.0
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