What's most interesting about the way this piece now emerges from Dido Armstrong's 1999 debut album is how completely its first minute and a half -- the material sampled by Eminem on his recent "Stan" -- now seems definitively appropriated. On "No Angel," an otherwise dulled record that begins in dance clubs in London and might as well be on the beach at Ipanema by its end, you're listening to a number about a woman with a hangover. The drifting, fatalistic quality of the melody seems all out of proportion to its insistently ordinary payoff -- with an insistently ordinary melody stretched over the remaining two minutes -- which is that the singer is grateful to her boyfriend, whose love redeems bad days. This does not quite match what Eminem does with Dido; using her music to place beauty in between the pages of an awful story, he makes her into the angel of death.

2) Dick Slessig Combo, presented by Jessica Bronson, "Rock Your Baby," at the Portland, Ore., Art Museum (July 7)

Carl Bronson, bass, Steve Goodfriend, drums, and Mark Lightcap, guitar -- the Dick Slessig Combo, as in dyslexic -- were playing on L.A. conceptual artist Jessica Bronson's internally lit bandstand for the Portland opening of "Let's Entertain," a motley assemblage of glamorous art statements first staged at the Walker in Minneapolis. They were at least a half-hour into a performance that would eventually cover 90 minutes before I realized the nearly abstract, circular pattern the trio was offering as the meaning of life -- it was all they were playing, anyway -- was from George McCrae's effortlessly seductive 1974 Miami disco hit. Or rather the pattern wasn't from the tune, it was the tune, the thing itself. Variation was never McCrae's point (the big moment in his "Rock Your Baby," the equivalent of the guitar solo, is when he barely whispers "Come on"); finding the perfect, self-renewing riff was. "I could listen to that forever," I said to Bronson when he and the others finally stepped down for a break. "We'd play it forever if we were physically capable," he said. The bandstand is empty now, but a 50-minute edit of the number will be running in the air above it, over and over, through Sept. 17.

3 & 4) Billy Bragg and Wilco, "Mermaid Avenue Vol. II" (Elektra) & "'Til We Outnumber 'Em" (Righteous Babe)

"Mermaid Avenue Vol. II" is Bragg and Wilco's proof that the light touch of last year's astonishing completions of lyrics Woody Guthrie never got around to making into songs was a fluke. Compared to the blanket of piety enveloping a Guthrie tribute from a 1996 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame conference -- featuring Bruce Springsteen, Ani DiFranco, the Indigo Girls and more, every speaker droppin' his g's (never has plain-folks talk sounded more affected) -- it's Little Richard's "Ready Teddy."

5) Shalini, "We Want Jelly Donuts" (Parasol)

The singer lives in North Carolina, and you can imagine her small songs, pushed forward in a flat, conversational voice, as a fantasy of knocking the acronym made by her title off the top of her local charts, where it means "What Would Jesus Do?"

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