Essentials

Cool cant be trained and it cant be manufactured. Guys like Archy Marshall, a.k.a. gutterpunk angel King Krule, are simply born with it. Or in Marshall’s case, born into it: His mom, a screenprinter, outfitted Prince Be of PM Dawn for the “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” video; his uncle played in a ska band called the Top Cats; his godfather was in punk band The Ruts. Marshall grew up a school-ditching, music-loving rabble-rouser, immersed in London’s wildly progressive art world. No wonder then that he began writing songs and making beats as a teenager.Now 23, Marshall has applied his inherent cool to two King Krule LPs, both of which feature an inimitable postmodern pastiche of blues, dub, lounge, hip-hop, jazz, downtempo, and experimental noir. His latest, The OOZ, is an itchy, bleary smear of atmosphere and attitude, swinging on saxophone and laden with songs about marginalized Bohemian existence, sung in Marshalls tongue-swallowing Cockney twang.Before he anointed himself streetwise royalty, Marshall ran under a slew of other names, some of which he still adopts depending on his mood, including Zoo Kid, DJ JD Sports, Pimp Shrimp, and Edgar the Beatmaker. He’s collaborated with now-disbanded Manhattan rap crew RATKING and London soundscapers Mount Kimbie. He even recorded an album under his own birth name.Given his lifelong exposure to off-the-radar music, it’s no surprise that Marshall’s stated influences—and the less obvious ones—comprise a sonic roadmap through the global underground. From ’80s New York no wave to golden-era hip-hop to mid-century country crooners to Jamaican classics to of-the-moment indie agitators, King Krule has swallowed it all and spit out something wholly unique and utterly captivating. Here’s your tour through the Kingdom of Krule.

It’s hard to describe exactly what it is that composer Daniel Lopatin pulls off under the ever-shifting guise of Oneohtrix Point Never. From his early days of programming minimal, evocative vistas of synthesizer dystopia to his newer interests in the gnarly, Kornier sides of our culture, Lopatin has managed to reinterpret his own vision time and time again without losing the essential, prickly feeling one gets from listening to his music. At the heart of all the uncanny manipulation of sound is a concept of the individual — disenchanted yet wide-eyed, obsessed with the psychedelic while hopelessly plugged into the minutiae of the day-to-day, the kind of mind that is restless even when surrounded by the dewiest, most calming of new-age tones. It’s ambient music made for headbanging, both frustrated and perverted and drenched in a nostalgia that always manages to keep its gaze toward the future. For all of the formalist structure that Lopatin imposes over his own chopped-up aesthetic, what he taps into in his work reaches beyond the realm of critique; it is a spiritual music of the self, relentlessly undergoing transformation, and attempting to discern exactly what it is.

The Melvins—Buzz “King Buzzo” Osborne, Dale Crover, and the hordes of badass musicians to have passed through their ranks—occupy space in no less than three major trees in the genre forest: heavy metal, alternative rock, and experimental music. Not bad for a band who began life not knowing if they were hardcore punks or headbanging heshers—so they opted to smash the two together and out popped sludge, doom, and grunge. This ability to upend genre, redraft borders, and confound expectations has been a constant throughout their discography (including their 2017 full-length, the crazy catchy A Walk With Love and Death). Where 1991’s “Boris” represents one of the defining moments in down-tuned dirge, the Dada-like “Moon Pie,” from 2000’s The Crybaby, helped lay the groundwork for all the weirdo cross-pollination that has occurred between metal, electronic music, and industrial since the turn of the century.Yet these accomplishments, however impressive, only represent half the story. When you ponder the sheer number of side projects and bands to have shared members with the Melvins, their stylistic reach becomes all the more staggering. King Buzzo has twiddled knobs for dark ambient composer Lustmord, jammed with Mexican art punks Les Butcherettes, and re-imagined Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me theme as a member of the wonderfully oddball Fantômas. Crover, meanwhile, pounded drums on a handful of Nirvana jams from the Bleach days, did some twangy shit-kicking with borderline insane outlaw Hank Williams III, and portrayed a young Neil Young in the “Harvest Moon” video (what?).Possibly even more impressive is the C.V. of former bassist Joe Preston. So vital to the genesis of 1992’s Lysol, one of the Melvins’ most far-out recordings, the cracked visionary helped invent drone metal with the mighty Earth, electronic avant-metal under the alias Thrones, and electronic noise-rock as a member of Men’s Recovery Project. Of course, I could rattle off a half dozen more names, yapping about Jared Warren and Karp (one of post-hardcore’s most eccentric outfits), as well as Steven McDonald and Redd Kross. (Their 1987 power pop/proto-grunge masterpiece Neurotica has aged so damn well.) But you get the picture: It’s the Melvins universe, and we’re just living in it. Crank this thing.

Afrobeats is the sound you heard on pop radio for much of 2016. It’s not to be confused with Afrobeat, the funk-based form that Fela Kuti made famous in the 1970s. (It’s a common error that even a New York Times story recently made.) Afrobeats emerged from Lagos, Nigeria and Accra, Ghana in the mid-to-late 2000s, and serves as an African response to post-millennial hip-hop, electronic music, Jamaican reggae and dancehall, and R&B. There are tracks that rely on familiar tropes—Auto-Tuned vocals, English-language lyrics about partying and sex—as well as build upon distinctive traditions like highlife and Afrobeat, resulting in songs that could only be African. It has informed some truly sublime music, like Maleek Berry’s sensuous, hip-swaying “Kontrol,” and WizKid’s “Ojuelegba,” a mesmerizing striver’s anthem about scraping together an existence in Lagos. The latter was featured on The Fader’s best tracks of 2015 list, a sign that Western tastemakers are keen on African pop.Much of what the U.S. mainstream has heard of Afrobeats so far are watered-down, chart-topping approximations like Drake’s “One Dance,” and Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself.” However, it thrives online, gathering hundreds of millions of YouTube views, and turning artists like Yemi Alade (whose “Johnny” has accumulated 75 million views thanks to its colorfully frenetic video), Mr. Eazi, DaVido, and others into virtual cult artists. WizKid has toured with Future, and his most recent album, Sounds from the Other Side, yielded a modest hit in “Come Closer,” a collaboration with Drake. D’banj’s new album, King Don Come, includes a number with Gucci Mane, “EL CHAPO,” that gives Southern trap form a distinctly Nigerian twist. It’s anyone’s guess whether the rise of Afrobeats results in African musicians cracking the Billboard Hot 100, or turns out to be a fad that burns brightly and dissipates. Regardless, it’s a sign of how global music has returned to prominence in America—as if Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” hadn’t proved that already—opening up a new world of Afrobeats to discover.

I add not a letter to the obituary that The Quietus published almost four years ago. These days I’m kinder towards Transformer and listen to Ecstasy a couple times a year (listen to the widescreen canvas given to “Big Sky” by Hal Willner).Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

For the past three years, I’ve been impressing people—hell, impressing myself—with the fact that I’ve been to Tom Petty’s house. I’d gone to Malibu to interview him for UNCUT magazine about Hypnotic Eye. Admirably raucous and rancorous, it proved to be his final studio album with the Heartbreakers, the band that he fronted for the better part of 40 years. So that album’s mostly what we talked about in a room next to his studio, which he’d built next to the rambling, Spanish-style, and thoroughly unpretentious home he bought after an arsonist set fire to his place in Encino in 1987. This one nearly burned down too, thanks to the massive wildfires in the area in 2007—as we chatted before sitting down, he pointed out the window to the spot a little higher up the hill where the fires stopped short of his property and the Pacific Coast Highway just below. The house is where he was found unconscious and not breathing after his cardiac arrest early Monday morning. I remember the room in the studio as homey—I could imagine Bob Dylan here with his boots up on the sofa, checking out the tasteful black-and-white framed photos on the walls. (Tom was onstage with his hero Roger McGuinn in one; with his fellow Wilbury Roy Orbison in another.) Petty served us coffee from a big stainless steel urn into oversized southwestern-style mugs that I imagined he washed himself because he didn’t want the pottery to get fucked up in the dishwasher. Throughout the interview, he puffed on a vape pen before rewarding himself at the end with a genuine smoke from a pack of American Spirit. Sporting a big bushy beard along with his usual straggly blond hair, Petty had the tanned and weathered face of an old Florida beach bum, but his bright blue eyes made him look younger by 15 years. He was friendly and a little crotchety—in other words, he was as cool as you could’ve hoped. We were supposed to have an hour but he gave me two. Then he walked me back to the front of the house and got on with his day.So that’s the scene I’ve been replaying in my head since I heard the news. Somehow, our afternoon together—and its complete lack of the audience-with-a-rock-star bullshit you might expect—speaks to the Everyguy/no-bullshit/scrappy-kid-from-Gainesville thing that Petty always exuded. He was a man of the people in a way that Dylan and Springsteen couldn’t be, because they just seemed too oversized, too mythic, too huge from the get-go. Like the characters he tended to write about, Petty was always somewhere between underdog and self-made outcast. Yet the chip on his shoulder was the rare and beautiful kind that seemed to make him more empathetic to people rather than less so. Anyway, that’s what I hear in the songs that I go back to most—some are hits and others are deeper in albums that didn’t quite get as much love as they should’ve (like the Heartbreakers’ final two albums, Mojo and Hypnotic Eye). Petty’s pair of albums with the reconstituted version of his proto-Heartbreakers band Mudcrutch proved that the man never lost his songwriting chops even if the snarling, punk-ass Petty of 1978’s You’re Gonna Get It and 1979’s sublime Dawn the Torpedoes was always gonna be hard to outdo.When we spoke, Petty talked about his plans to do an expanded version of his Rick Rubin-produced solo masterpiece Wildflowers from 1994. He didn’t get a chance to realize that ambition but in 2015, he did a preview of sorts by putting out a previously unreleased song from the sessions called “Somewhere Under Heaven.” A deceptively simple vignette that movingly portrays the bond between a “working-man” dad and the daughter who’s too young to know how bad the world can be, it’s arguably as fine as anything he ever wrote. In the last verse, the father has this to say to his little girl: “One day you’re gonna fall in love/ One day you’re gonna pay the rent/ Hold on to what love you find/ You’re gonna need all you can get.” Feels like good advice right now for all kinds of reasons.

When I was a 13-year-old girl completely oblivious to the immense power of femininity, Tori Amos "God" struck something within me. "God sometimes you just dont come through / Do you need a woman to look after you?," she trills with a mix of steeliness and sass. Perhaps its the blatant heresy she so coolly savors, but that line continues to sting so good, as long as religion and patriarchies continue to dominate our existence. Over two decades and some 15 albums later, we expect nothing less from Amos, who keeps writing, recording, and touring relentlessly; slipping in and out of personas; and crafting her art on cosmic concepts that intricately break down life here on Earth in all its bliss and terror.Amos is a carefully constructed contradiction: a classically trained musician and provocative pop star; a ministers daughter with an angelic voice and a wildly wicked sense of humor; an independent woman who respects tradition as much as she subverts it. For this Family Tree feature, we honor her musical lineage, whose roots stretch back to Lennon and Led Zeppelin, then branch out to Fiona Apple and PJ Harvey, and continue to flourish through artists like St. Vincent and Lorde.

THE ROOTS

At the ripe ol age of two, Tori started playing piano. Soon, she was on scholarship at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. But she found her greatest muses in the rock records her older brother would sneak into the house. Led Zeppelins sticky, swampy pagan rock would leave an impression, especially those Robert Plant wails that effortlessly ooze with sex. So would the fabulous flamboyancy of Freddie Mercury—you can see his histrionics channeling through her when she works two pianos at once in concert. In fact, shes even claimed Mercury wrote her To Venus and Back track "Sugar" from beyond the grave. Shes said the same about John Lennon, whose ghost may or may not have helped write the Boys for Pele song "Hey Jupiter," whose chords mirror another rock god: Prince.Of course, there are plenty of rock goddesses tangled among Amos roots as well. Her most ethereal proclivities bring on constant comparisons to art-pop auteur Kate Bush, who can draw sensuality out of the steeliest synths. Stevie Nicks is another one of her spirit animals, and Tori covers her Rumours material often. But perhaps her most striking trait—her raw, vulnerable songwriting—draws from the beautifully raging poetry of Joni Mitchell and punk priestess Patti Smith.

THE BRANCHES

Tori Amos released her debut album Little Earthquakes in 1992. At first blush, her flowery, flowy piano rock seemed a far cry from the testosterone-fueled grunge blowing in from the Pacific Northwest. But her songwriting and delivery, stripped bare of pretense and posturing, shared much with that genres tortured confessionals. At the same time, her music felt like an antidote to all that muscular angst, even though anger and pain very much powered her own cathartic cries. This potent femininity would quickly seep its way into the alternative-rock consciousness through prolific artists like PJ Harvey, Liz Phair, and Ani DiFranco.Songs like "Silent All These Years" would help give voice to equally strong, immensely gifted women armed with a piano or guitar and a helluva lot of thick skin. On “Sullen Girl,” Fiona Apple channels her own trauma as a rape victim into one of pop music’s most hauntingly elegant depictions of the terror, depression, and isolation that comes with such hell. And, like Tori, her words flow so eloquently, so naturally, with every little waver in her voice holding infinite emotion. But it wasn’t just women who felt her allure. Trent Reznor was also a fan, and the two were often linked. Tori’s “Caught a Lite Sneeze” references Pretty Hate Machine, while “Past the Mission” features Mr. Self Destruct himself on backing vocals.

THE LEAVES

Twenty-five years after her solo debut, Tori continues to reinvent herself as she navigates a contemporary landscape rife with musicians influenced by her. These artists capture her passion, her freakiness, and her luminous grace in their own lucid tales that often shift and warp modern ideals of love, sex, power, and gender. The weird, snarling dance mix of Tori’s "Raspberry Swirl" could work as a rough template for St. Vincent’s wacky, whimsical compositions. Traces of her most mystical odysseys weave through the dark, eerie dream-pop of Bat For Lashes and Zola Jesus. Provocative piano women like Amanda Palmer take a bit of Tori’s unapologetic fire and let it loose themselves, too—heck, Palmer is even married to author Neil Gaiman, the subject in a few of Tori’s songs. And even some of pop’s biggest stars embrace Tori’s insatiable need to articulate the immensity of being a powerful woman. Just take it from Lorde: “I’m 19 and I’m on fire.”

Weve spent the better part of a decade watching Tyler, The Creator grow up. On the early Odd Future mixtapes, he embodied a particular type of post-adolescent id—petulant, terrifying, frequently brilliant, and consistently offensive. He gobbled cockroaches, incited multipleriots, declared that “rape’s fun,” squabbled with LGBT activists, and, ultimately, was banned from the UK and New Zealand. Throughout these various ordeals, he used his age as both a weapon—taunting “40-year-old rappers talking about Gucci”—and as a defense, confessing, “Im not a fucking role model, I know this/ Im a 19 year old fucking emotional coaster”.This was at least somewhat tolerable because Tyler and his friends were talented, and, perhaps more importantly, it was all presented as a joke. This wasn’t the crack-era nihilism of Mobb Deep or the urban-trench warfare of Tupac. It was a lot more low-stakes than that. O.F.’s various offenses were wrapped in the detachment and filters of post-Tumblr irony. If you were offended, you didn’t get it, and, if you didn’t get it, you were old, irrelevant, etc. Yeah, Tyler was a serious person, but he was also very serious about letting us know he’s not particularly serious. The dynamic was both exhilarating and confounding, but it hit a dead end. Cherry Bomb’s mishmash of cloned, clamoring N.E.R.D. beats was nearly unlistenable, and Tyler’s shouted adolescent angst schtick was wearing thin. He was still squabbling with his critics over saying “faggot,” and there was one hackneyed line (“Im so far ahead you niggas, Im in the future”) after another (“The boys a fucking problem like turbulence, boy”). The initial shock-of-the-new transformed into the tedium-of-the-rote, and even his admirers begin to wonder if there was actually any there there.Flower Boy is supposed to be his coming-out party. This is the point where Tyler pulls off the bandages, and reveals a true(r), more mature self. And, for the most part, it works. He still has the same tools in his kit—he’s still ripping off the Neptunes, and he’s still a very self-conscious provocateur—but he does refine, expand, and, ultimately, negate his prior persona. It’s an exciting and unexpected transformation. For our corresponding playlist, weve collected the albums key tracks, as well as its influences, collaborators and sample sources.The album hits a high point with “911/ Mr. Lonely.” The song is restless, sonically and thematically, skirting between various movements and motifs. The first few seconds sound like a lark, a tongue-in-cheek riff on the sort of pleading R&B love songs that serve as a decades-spanning through-line for that genre. Over a trainwreck of stacked drums, vocalist Steve Lacey coos, “call me, call me sometimes,” before quickly adding the punchline, “911.” Then the song shifts; the drums fall into place, a lovely, melancholic piano melody peeks through the haze, and Tyler emerges to deliver one of the albums most startling lyrics: “My thirst levels are infinity and beyond.” The line is both corny and transcending, and, throughout the song, Tyler mines the space between kitsch and confession, declaring himself the “loneliest man alive,” while referencing Elon Musk, Celine Dion and Hasbro toymaker Arto Monaco. Later in the song, he’ll admit that “I’ve never been good with bitches,” because “I’ve never had a goldfish.” ScHoolboy Q briefly appears, and declares Tyler an “old lonely-ass nigga.”The track is surprising, funny, a bit unstable, and aggressively self-negating. It’s also revealing and shocking in a way that is not merely “provocative.” Tyler’s comfort with ambiguity is one of the album’s defining qualities, and Tyler uses these gray spaces to his advantage. Much has been made of Tyler’s line about “kissing white boys,” and whether or not this means that Tyler is queer. It’s what everyone is talking about, except Tyler. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter who Tyler hooks up with—he’s found new, exciting ways to make himself vulnerable, and, ultimately, Flower Boy works because it feels high-stakes. Tyler understands the old maxim that he needs to destroy in order to rebuild, and the danger inherent in that process has pushed him to create his most refined, focused, and satisfying work to date.

Not even a broken leg can stop Dave Grohl from rocking out—which is exactly what happened during the Foo Fighters’ 2015 tour of Europe. After a nasty tumble from a stage in Gothenburg, Sweden, sent him to the hospital mid-show, the dude then returned, and, chair-bound and coursing with meds, played for another two and a half hours. (Note: the Foos wound up cancelling the rest of the tour, so yeah, Grohl can be stopped, but like the Red Sox, who in fact had another game to win the 1986 World Series after this, the myth is far sexier than the truth.) I know Dan Auerbach and Jack White are super busy and productive, but they’re lightweights when compared to Grohl, a quintuple-threat singer, guitarist, drummer, producer, and filmmaker whose list of bands, collaborations, cameos, and cheeky Rock Hall induction appearances has grown exponentially since he joined the D.C. post-hardcore band Scream in 1988, two years before making history with Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic.Of course, all of us are familiar with the hard-rock portion of his CV: When Grohl isn’t banging out chart-topping records with Taylor Hawkins and the Foos, he has jammed with Queens of the Stone Age, Ghost B.C., Nine Inch Nails, Slash, and Sir Paul McCartney. (Their Sound City: Real to Reel collab, the “Helter Skelter”-like “Cut Me Some Slack,” most certainly qualifies as hard rock.) He also joined forces with Zep bassist John Paul Jones and QOTSA main man Josh Homme to form Them Crooked Vultures (who seem to be on hiatus nowadays—oh well). But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Grohl pops up all along the genre spectrum. In addition to serving as a one-man rhythm section for indie singer-songwriter Cat Power, he’s gotten his (new) rave on with The Prodigy and produced jammy, heartland twangster Zac Brown Band. He’s even laid down beats for some rapper called Diddy.Grohl’s omnipresence in rock music (mixed with his perpetually smiling, nice-guy persona) has annoyed more than a few critics, bloggers, and even fellow musicians in recent years. Google “Dave Grohl” and “annoying” and some awfully viper-like (and really quite clever) diss pieces pop up calling him both a punk-rock sellout and a phony. Outside of his teenage years, Grohl never was a punk; he’s been a rocker through and through. But that’s besides the point. The fact remains that Grohl will outlive us all and survive global warming. A century from now, he’ll be like Kevin Costner in Waterworld: sporting gills, sailing the all-consuming seas in a tattered catamaran, and jamming with any and every musician he encounters.

The late Ian Fraser Kilmister lived life as fast as Motörhead’s violently charging rock ’n’ roll. Of course, many readers will assume such a statement refers to the legendary bassist’s decadent reputation. After all, his appetite for drink, drugs, and sex (as chronicled in the 2010 documentary Lemmy) was insatiable and produced no shortage of outrageous tales (some false, but many quite true). But he also lived a fast life in terms of his art and creativity. As both a musician and actor, Lemmy was damn near everywhere. When he wasn’t leading one of the world’s most influential metal bands (who, it should be noted, dropped a posthumous covers compilation Under Cöver on September 1, 2017), he racked up an absurd number of side projects and guest spots onstage, in the studio, and on screen. Whether he was leading Wayne Kramer, Michael Davis, and Dennis Thompson of the MC5 through a raspy blowout of their proto-punk jam “Sister Ann,” popping up in Boys Don’t Cry’s cheesy “I Wanna Be a Cowboy” video, busting retro-rockabilly with HeadCat, unleashing the vicious “Shake Your Blood” with Dave Grohl’s Probot project, actually joining The Damned for a spell... you name it, he did it.Of course, all this action occurred after Lemmy had started Motörhead. Here’s the crazy thing: By the time he, “Fast” Eddie Clarke, and Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor recorded the band’s thunderous, game-changing debut in the summer of 1977, he had already been in the rock ’n’ roll game for a dozen years. Most folks know he helped pioneer chugging space rock and proto-punk as a shaggy member of the mighty Hawkwind, but he also served time in two fantastic British Invasion-era outfits. In addition to playing guitar and singing in Sam Gopal (a deeply moody psych-rock outfit who released the cult favorite Escalator in 1969), he lent his services to The Rockin Vickers, a beat group unloading manic R&B rave-ups much like the early Who and Kinks. (They whipped-up a searing version of Pete Townshend’s “It’s Alright” in 1966.) And if all that weren’t enough, young Lemmy actually shared a flat with bassist Noel Redding, who helped him land a gig as a Jimi Hendrix roadie in the downtime between Sam Gopal and Hawkwind.Here’s to Lemmy—no human has ever embodied rock ’n’ roll abandon as passionately as you. Well, maybe Keith Richards. But as we all know, you were always a Beatles guy, one who just so happened to see the Fabs at the effin’ Cavern when you were 18. Insane!