By Rob Brookman

List-making carries plenty of risks, especially for part-time pop music writers lacking big CD budgets and shipping crates full of record-label freebies. Invariably, the end of each year finds me declaiming the unimpeachable merits of my top 10, only to stumble upon one or two gems that flew under my admittedly finite radar and shake the foundations of my rock-solid best-of just weeks after it was built.

This year's interlopers turn out to have proffered my Radio Moment of 1999, although I wouldn't wind up IDing them until weeks after the calendar had already flipped to double zeros.

The story goes something like this: It was late, I was battling the street construction that's part and parcel of life in a city with an appearances-obsessed mayor and an overheated economy, and I'd just managed to grab ahold of the elusive signal from Northwestern University's underpowered student radio station. The show had all the earmarks of an undergraduate radio production: an almost willful eclecticism; a monotone, stoned-sounding DJ; and long, awkward silences after each and every cut.

A hip hop tune abruptly popped up the mix, and - aside from being the only track that didn't sound like it was performed by white twentysomething mopes with cotton jammed in their gobs - it was a stunner. It told the story of an angry young punk who offs the surrogate father who in turn had killed his mother years earlier, a yarn that struck me as both over-the-top (the instrument of the mother's murder weapon was a prosthetic arm) and totally riveting. It was titled "Me and Jesus the Pimp in a '79 Granada Last Night."

The DJ didn't offer anymore information, probably because he was eager to get back to a half-spent spliff. But thanks to a memorable song title and a well-versed clerk at the local record store, I eventually tracked down the cut and its host CD: Steal This Album by Oakland-based rap outfit The Coup (Dogday).

As remarkable as "Jesus the Pimp" is, it has plenty of company on Steal This Album. The beats are deep but spare, almost Too Short-style old-school, and the diverse, imaginative music is usually augmented by horns, harmonica or back-up singers. But it's lead Coup-er Boots Riley, his raps and his rhymes that make the LP something special.

Unlike a lot of the obsessive materialism, insular jokes and tired boasts that make a whole swath of hip-hop artists seem every bit as selfish and self-absorbed as a world-class navel gazer like Morrissey, Riley's both an avowed communist and a surprisingly sharp-witted and entertaining propagandist. His delivery is crystal clear even as it's dizzyingly verbose, so there's no mistaking his calls for armed rebellion ("20,000 Gun Salute"), his desire for a pure underclass revolution ("Busterismology") or his excoriation of several American icons ("Piss On Your Grave"). But he's funny and humane enough that you'll probably rather stay and dance than head for the hills when the uprising starts. Now those are revolutionaries even a middle-class scribe can get with.

I came to them late, but I'm happy to have made their acquaintance at all. For left-leaning hip hop fans, Steal This Album is a can't miss; lovers of the lyrical arts might find plenty to love, as well. And shoplifters, well, you can send Boots a personal thank-you note c/o Dogday Records, 4430 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, CA 94609.

On this side of the pond, news that the great Ian Dury passed away quietly in late March after a long and admirably defiant battle with colon cancer met with a befuddled shrug. Those who remembered him at all pointed to his modest (and quite unlikely) stateside hit "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll," a song that earned Dury both a permanent place in the quotation treasuries and an unshakable reputation here in the US as a novelty act.

And Dury was a novelty act, in a way; his music was singular and unreproducable, a totally personal mix of pub rock, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Captain Beefheart, among others. Lyrically, he combined the free-range anarchy of beat poetry and punk with a deft mastery of English slang (much of which the Brits themselves probably hadn't heard before) and an oddball interest in everything from early morning hard-ons to Sweet Gene Vincent.

Making matters worse, Dury wasn't much of an album artist - New Boots and Panties!! is the one to find. But his singles are plentiful and they're built to last. The Stiff Records collection Juke Box Dury is a classic and well worth the hunt, although the ever-so-slightly-less-astonishing (and more widely available) Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll will do in a pinch. Go deeper in the catalog and the consistency wanes, but you'll still find plenty of bright spots.

By all accounts, Dury had a wicked wit, and in public he never shied away from a well-placed verbal thrust or a flat-out boast. But his music - and his life's work in charity and as a challenging campaigner for the disabled - also reveal a big-hearted humanist, albeit one with a mouth like a toilet.

All the more reason to mourn him. We need more big-hearted, foul-mouthed humanists in pop music these days. And we certainly don't need the ones we do have dying at age 57.