4. Simon Johns, Stereolab (1997-present)

When Duncan Brown left Stereolab after 1996’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup, I was a bit unsure if The Groop could find a suitable replacement that would augment their unique sound the way he was able to. Simon Johns most certainly did not disappoint on Dots and Loops (1997), his official release as a full-time member. Since then, Johns has navigated through elaborate jazz chord progressions, baffling time signatures, and the band’s trademark bubbly grooves with fluidity and ease. Along with mainstay timekeeper Andy Ramsay, he also developed the rhythm section into one of the most distinctive in modern music: by plucking each note with a heavy pick while muting the strings with the underside of his palm, Johns gets a thick, chunky sound out of his bass that’s irresistably enthralling and funky as hell to boot. His lines can be incredibly difficult to play, but they never feel labored or crowded with ideas. It’s impossible to imagine the band now without his input.

“Vonal Declosion,” from Margerine Eclipse (2004), is Stereolab’s finest album kickoff since “Metronomic Underground,” chiefly because of Johns’ insistently propulsive bass lead. When the chorus arrives at 0:28, he resists the urge to alter the groove and simply moves the pattern to the root of each chord, giving the already busy production a more rigid sense of uniformity; it’s deceptively effective. The only occasion for variation is at the start of the bridge at 1:30, where Johns advances the rhythm in simple three-note increments, allowing plenty of room for the skittering dual-mono drums and Lætitia Sadier’s vocals. There are plenty of ‘Lab songs that display a wider range of his capabilities on the instrument, but few capture the essence of his “sound” better than this track.

“Vonal Declosion” – Stereolab 3:33 (Margerine Eclipse, Elektra 2004)

3. Colin Moulding, XTC (1979-1992)

Known in the early days of the group as “the cute one,” Colin Moulding’s day as the most underrated bassist of his generation will likely go unnoticed, but not before I shout his praises from every avenue available. XTC’s quirky and abstract approach to constructing pop songs would have lost half of its impact and appeal were it not for Moulding’s brilliantly inventive bass playing. Regarless of what Andy Partridge obsessives might say, he was the chief ingredient in their sound, whether he was imitating the nonsensical lyrics with his bassline (”Helicopter”), sculpting the song into a dense, hypnotic groove (”Jason and the Argonauts”), or replicating the analog-compressed thump of late-’60s psychedelia (”Bike Ride to the Moon”). Instead of taking a back seat to Partridge and Dave Gregory’s scurrying guitar leads and arpeggios, Moulding joined right in on the fun, stretching and forming his basslines with a seemingly whimisical carelessness, yet somehow remained locked in with Terry Chambers‘ drumming perfectly. He principally played with a pick before making the gradual transition to his fingertips in the mid-’80s, eventually achieving some of the most deliciously fluid basslines in pop music on Oranges & Lemons (1989).

“Roads Girdle the Globe” is one of the most bizarre songs in the band’s oeuvre. Under a batch of dissonant guitar chords, Moulding starts the track with a croaking, bouncing bassline that should be grossly inappropriate, but it somehow works. Listen to the way he guides the way through those sticky guitar clusters beginning at 0:17, countering their fretwork with complex figures of his own and repeatedly jumping down the neck as the progression descends, prompting the question: How in hell would he think to do that? Moulding continues to spring around each bar during the verses, and 2:29 he settles on a playful line that nestles cozily under the guitars. This is easily one of the most creative applications of bass guitar that I’ve ever heard in a song.

“Roads Girdle the Globe” – XTC 4:51 (Drums and Wires, Virgin 1979)

2. Andy Rourke, The Smiths (1984-1987)

Don’t let the quiff fool you. Andy Rourke had more far more funk flowing through his fingers than any other pasty white boy from Manchester before or since. Often outshined by Johnny Marr’s songwriting genius and Morrissey’s overall notoriety (for lack of a better word), I would venture to guess that less than five percent of all conversations about The Smiths involve Rourke’s contributions. This is absolutely, obscenely unacceptable. It’s shameful enough that he was alloted a measly fraction of the band’s royalties for years, considering that his bass playing was often the most engaging part of the song; not to slight Morrissey and Marr, but “Barbarism Begins at Home,” to cite an example, wouldn’t come close to resembling the masterpiece it is without Rourke’s blessing.

My favorite description of the way Rourke approached his bass duites is that he used to write “a song within the song” on his instrument, meaning if you stripped the track of everything but the bass, virtually an entire different tune would appear. This was the crux of his brilliance, as he explicitly understood his role as the proverbial “glue that held the rest together,” albeit an incredibly viscous and highly flexible one. Rourke had a casual, one-take method to his basslines that sharply contrasted Marr’s overdubbed perfectionism. In addition, the dichotomy between Marr’s elegant, shimmering arpeggios and Rourke’s trebly and gutteral bass tone was a delicate balance in The Smiths’ sound, but the two somehow made it work. Rourke and the guitarist were members of a local funk group before the formation of the band, and despite Morrissey’s subversive attempts to “class up” their material near the end of their career, he still retained that aggressive, groove-oriented edge.

Most folks have probably never paid attention to what Rourke is doing on the group’s classic “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” Ignore, for a moment, Morrissey’s miserable crooning, Marr’s rich, light-fingered chording, and Mike Joyce’s rock-solid drum pattern. Rourke really is playing another song underneath the arrangements - this gets me so animated that I’m going to have to break out the notation. In four bars and merely six chords of the first verse (0:16) he plays something like this:

Rourke loved to lace up his bass tracks with colorful little fills such as the ones above, and had no qualms about playing each subsequent section with slight variations; whether he was high, absent-minded about his own playing, or just plain didn’t care at the time is of little value. At 0:42 he begins blending in a sequence of thick chords to lead into a four-bar exposition by Marr, and as the intro returns at 1:32, plucks out the brief, jazzy solo he opened the song with. At its essence, “Heaven Knows” really only consists of two sections, yet Rourke makes it sound like a dozen.

“Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” – The Smiths 3:35 (Louder Than Bombs, Sire 1987)

1. Mike Mills, R.E.M. (1982-1996)

I’d be lying if my reasons for selecting Mills as the finest bassist of the last twenty-plus years weren’t somewhat sentimental. The promotional sticker affixed to the cover of Eponymous (1988) was completely accurate in my case: R.E.M. was the group I grew up with, and I distinctly remember one day, as a ten-year-old, suddenly noticing what Mike Mills (”the geeky one”) was playing. My young aspirations of a guitar god vanished instantly, substituted with the noble solitude of the rock bassist. Mills is the ultimate definition of “a bassist’s bassist,” and no one (possibly Adam Clayton) plays at the same level of dignity and composure as him. His tunefulness and sense of melody are so strong that one moment you’ll be thinking that you’re humming an R.E.M. tune, only to realize later that it was his buried bassline stuck in your head.

Truthfully, I could have picked almost any song from the era above to demonstrate the caliber of Mike Mills’ bass playing, but “Maps and Legends,” from 1985’s Fables of the Reconstruction does the job nicely. His three-note pickup is the first series of notes to appear, and his warm, slightly picked tone sounds magical under Buck’s ringing chords. The way Mills anticipates and connects each chord during the verses is truly exquisite in its simplicity. In all likelihood, he wrote his bass part in a matter of minutes, such was his inherent musicality; perhaps he spent more time arranging the song or playing the organ for more texture, a subtle touch that can be heard briefly at the very end. Mills’ early work allows me to forgive him for those asinine mod outfits he donned on stage during the mid-90’s, his full participation in “At My Most Beautiful,” his recent reliance on painfully outdated keyboard sounds, or a number of offenses that I’ve struggled to comprehend. You see, I need Mike Mills’ bass playing to make me forget the past ten years of R.E.M.’s career. It’s that good, and it’s just easier that way.