I was happy to learn while watching tabloid television recently that a new wave of freak dancing was ensnaring teens, but I immediately though how sad it was that Roger Troutman wasn't around to enjoy it – he was shot dead by his brother in a tragic 1999 murder-suicide. Troutman was responsible for "More Bounce to the Ounce," which for my money is the greatest freak dancing tune ever recorded.

Equipped with a squishy synth bass line, a deadly hand-clap track, and the now-famous voice-boxed vocals, "Bounce" is a song created for the sacral region. Troutman reworked the formula on tunes like "Dance Floor" and "So Ruff So Tuff." Those two cuts, while not possessing the epochal power of their predecessor, still are a few dozen sweat glands above most other post-P-Funk stuff put out in the '80s. West Coast hip-hoppers treated the song like a revelation, turning "More Bounce" samples into a g-funk cliché.

But as deadly as that tune is, it still doesn't explain how, prior to "California Love" – his smash hit collaboration with Dr. Dre – "More Bounce" came to define Troutman's entire career. It is a monster jam, for sure, but it wasn't his only hit. And Troutman was anything but a one-dimensional funkster.

Start with his multi-instrumental facility – he's credited in the liner notes of this anthology with playing seven instruments. And like most artists who came up in the '80s, he had a serious technology jones. His well-documented, Stevie Wonder-inspired vocoder work could at times be brilliant. He also liked guitar synths, like the Maxx Axe, and his fondness for the drum machine shows up on tunes like "Girl Cut It Out."

Troutman learned the art of hand-clap tracking from the master, George Clinton. "Cosmic Roundup" not only borrows "Atomic Dog" 's cowboy refrain but also shows Troutman's fluency with the Clintonesque approach to an extended jam: motifs (such as a synth banjo) dance over the locked-in beat, while sweet vocal harmonies state and restate the hook.