Essentials

Original photography by Tuyara Mordosova. Subscribe to the playlist here.The deceased LA artist Mike Kelly did something amazing in his art. Throughout much of his work, and most notably in his Memory Work Flats, a series two-dimensional sculptures that he created from 2001 up until his suicide in 2012, he grafted modern American bric-a-brac -- buttons, bottle caps, keys, coins, and pendants -- onto larger, wall-hung surfaces. As with the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock, the overall effect of these is initially overwhelming and cacophonic -- the viewer struggles to find a focus -- but a rhythm inserts itself eventually, and the collection of junk (there’s no other way to describe it) gains a more ethereal, transcendent form. Kelly has taken objects that ostensibly have little relationship to one another -- that were built to decay in trash dumps and street corner cracks -- and transformed them into a cohesive modern American, high-art sacrament.

In their patchwork, low-hi-art approach, Deerhunter provide a sonic counterpart to Kelly’s artwork. Over the past two decades, the Atlanta band has stitched together elements of ambient, Krautrock, shoegaze, lo-fi electro, post-punk, warped rockabilly, and classic pop for a sound that is, at turns, explosive, defuse, ugly, and ethereal. The songs are full of sex, noise, drugs, screeching feedback, Russian porn stars, wheezing vocals, detuned guitars, and tiny deaths. It’s ugly until it isn’t -- when the dissonance coalesces into melody, and the characters emerge from their chemical cocoons to search for forgiveness, redemption, or, at the very least, empathy. Like Kelly, they tend to build their own iconography from the minutiae of suburbia’s spiritual dissolution, and it’s both revolting and beautiful.

Deerhunter was formed in 2001 in Atlanta, Georgia. It included Bradford Cox, Moses Archuleta, and others who are no longer in the band. The band’s first album, 2005’s Turn it Up Faggot, is more or less unlistenable for those not attuned to the more noisey end of the punk rock spectrum, but the band quickly pivoted, bringing on guitarist and longtime Cox friend Lockett Pundt, who would serve as the band’s other primary songwriter and provide a more trad-rock ballast to Cox’s experimental, kitchen-sink approach. The sophomore album, Cryptograms, was recorded over two days in late 2005, but it took nearly 14 months for their new label, the venerable indie Kranky, to release it. When fans finally heard Cryptograms, many were taken aback. The album was a fairly drastic departure; the jagged, lacerated guitar work of the original was replaced with atonal ambient textures, dadistic pop tunes, and nods towards a Southern Gothic strain of shoegaze. Traces of their earlier, noisy sound remained though, and the overall effect was that of a e listener fine-tuning the dial of a old radio knob, slowly bringing clarity and a bit of pop refinement (if not exactly polish) to the band’s lurking, free-range noise sensibilities. 2008’s Microcastle/ Weird Era saw the group continue to focus their aesthetic. There were actual songs, for one thing. The jangly “Agoraphobia” remains one of their most catchy and tender tracks. There’s a wisp of Sonic Youth’s no wave guitar fuzz, but largely the album is dedicated to taut, post-punk jams like “Nothing Ever Happened” or the great “Never Stops.” As you’ve probably been able to pick up, Deerhunter’s career has a certain arc, beginning with noise bedroom and blog jams of their early years to the learner, more traditionally structured indie rock of Microcastle. It’s not that their more recent work is without value -- 2013’s Monomania traffics in Krautrock and psych to bleary and occasionally beautiful results; while 2015’s jangling, Southern-fried Fading Frontier is the hangover from Monomania’s ridiculous affectations -- but 2010’s Halcyon Digest remains the group’s high-water mark. It’s an album were the band finally boiled down their disparate, oftentimes contradictory influences into a sound and emotional palette that felt uniquely theirs.The album title is a bit of a put on; in Cox’s telling -- it’s meant as a dig at the temptations of nostalgia -- but, otherwise, the album is emotionally and sonically accessible. The gorgeous “Helicopters,” with it’s chiming, elegiac melodies and plees for prayer, is probably the closest the group ever got to pure pop, while “Revival” is a swamy, garage blues burner.But the album’s centerpiece is “He Would Have Laughed.” That song manages to shift movements and melodies without seeming overly cluttered or fussy, and while the lyrics and Cox’s vocal performance is dark and tinged with death -- the track is a tribute to the recently deceased garage punk icon Jay Reatard -- the track is vulnerable and mournful; at one point, Cox muses that with “sweetness comes suffering.” There’s still a whiff of the anger, neurosis, repression, and self-destruction that swirling beneath the surface, but Cox is able to synthesize this into a voice that is tender, honest and revealing. The pain is still present, but it has transformed and taken the shape of art.

On Vic Mensa’s debut album, The Autobiography, the young Chicago rapper’s personal travails come sharply into view. He raps about his very public struggles with addiction, occasional troubles with the law, a complicated relationship with his hometown’s hip-hop scene, and stray thoughts about ending his life. Yet somehow, his musical identity lies just out of reach.That’s not surprising for a teenage prodigy whose first group, Kids These Days, was profiled in the New York Times when he was just finishing high school. The hip-hop/emo-pop band yielded many of the players who have driven the Windy City’s current renaissance, including trumpeter Nico Segal (a.k.a. Donnie Trumpet of The Social Experiment). Their rise preceded that of Chance the Rapper, who guested on the band’s EPs—and co-founded the SaveMoney crew with Mensa—before embarking on his own stellar career. But while Chance is now widely known as a good kid who connects a secular post-millennial generation with its spiritual potential, Vic has experimented as a solo artist, sometimes fitfully. His best single so far is arguably “Down on My Luck,” a terrific hip-house number from 2014. Like so many next-gen rappers, his work with electronic producers like Flume and Kaytranada is second nature, not a cross-genre gimmick. Yet he’s also tried to translate his industry buzz into songs with Kanye West (2015’s “U Mad”) and Gucci Mane (“What It Takes”), with little crossover success.Much of The Autobiography opts for an airy emo-rap sound typical of recent big-budget hip-hop like Logic’s Everybody and G-Eazy’s When It’s Dark Out. But Vic’s too sharp of a stylist to drown in the indistinct mainstream beats that mar some of his debut. He works real magic with Pharrell Williams and Saul Williams on “Wings,” and his collaboration with controversial South Side iconoclast Chief Keef on “Down 4 Some Ignorance (Ghetto Lullaby)” is long overdue. Then there are those diary-like lyrics, which range from comic tales like the Weezer-assisted “Homewrecker” to anguished meditations on blackness like “We Could Be Free.” Throughout, he remains an engaging performer, even if we’re not always sure where he’s leading us.

Neil Young has to be rock’s most unconventional guitar god. Nobody sounds like the guy. Instead of scorching hot licks and Keef-style riff swagger, he’s all about piercing, one-note solos, fuzzy stoner-drift, and rhythm playing slathered in distortion squall that ripples through the atmosphere like shockwaves. On top of all that, his playing is shot through with a primitive, minimalist sensibility, a quality that has inspired J. Mascis, Thurston Moore, Curt Kirkwood, and dozens of other alt-rock guitarists who worship his eccentricity. Rust Never Sleeps, from 1979, generally gets the nod as Young’s heaviest guitar album, but don’t sleep on 1991’s Weld; his tone is so dirty and gnarled it sounds as though he kicked a hole through his amplifier. While the bulk of the cuts on our playlist feature Young front and center, a handful of other guitarists pop up, including his old pal Stephen Stills, Frank “Poncho” Sampedro and the late Danny Whitten, both of Crazy Horse, and Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard and Mike McCready. Young is no stranger to the long-ass guitar jam; best to buckle in and enjoy the epic ride.

“I go on describing this place / And the way it feels to live and die.” — Mount Eerie, “Through The Trees, Pt. 2”I once heard a professor say that Robert Schumann’s music only makes sense if you’re in a certain part of Germany. I tend to disagree with those kinds of claims, but I’d also be lying if I said that Phil Elverum’s music doesn’t strongly evoke the magic, mystery, and feeling of the Pacific Northwest. And it’s not just me, it’s a common point made about his songs: it’s in the imagery of the music, between the trees and the ocean roars, through the black metal interludes, behind the Twin Peaks synths and references; his music is about space and feeling, and the spaces are particular.His early work as The Microphones was bombastic, experimental, and seriously affecting, capturing through music and lyrics exactly how it feels to be a young person and to embody a wild existence. If you’re like me and this music has been with you for a while, you probably straighten up in your seat and unfocus your eyes a bit when I mention The Glow, Pt. 2. It’s real.As Elverum transitioned from The Microphones to Mount Eerie, his songs became a little clearer, a little more adult, and a little more enveloping. His 2012 releases form a perfect snapshot of his tremendous ability to evoke all things at once: The intimate, almost trembling Clear Moon fuses airy guitars and shuffling percussion to create distinctly breezy-yet-serious tableaus, while Ocean Roar is an explosive, electronic-infused synthesis of post-rock and black metal. Taken together, these albums represent the complex essence of Mount Eerie.The initiated and uninitiated alike can prepare themselves for Elverum’s newest work, the haunting and raw A Crow Looked At Me, which deals with the tragic loss of his wife, musician/artist Geneviève Castrée, from pancreatic cancer in July 2016. In this intensely personal album, he pursues brave, new paths of truth and sound, while still sounding like classic Elverum. Get brought up to speed with this playlist of his work as Mount Eerie and The Microphones.

One of the most elusive, confrontational, and downright bizarre artists to ever grace the pages of rock history, Frank Zappa staked his entire being on messing with people. To outsiders, his music can seem both needlessly intellectual and disgustingly immature, but beneath all his crude jokes and mind-bogglingly complex compositions lies one of the first true avant-garde composers to make major waves in the rock mainstream. His cynical tirades and knotty arrangements certainly have a way of testing his listeners’ limits, yet the magic of Zappa’s music is how much fun the man clearly had designing his eccentric sounds, fusing the worlds of classical music, rhythm and blues, free-form jazz, and comedy as if they were naturally meant to be together all along.As a young L.A. guitarist gigging in the city’s ‘60s freak scene, Zappa immediately stood out from his contemporaries with his staunch anti-drug stance and utter distaste for the entire flower power movement, backing up his satirical and sarcastic music with daring, genre-defying arrangements and serious instrumental chops. Early releases like Freak Out! (1966) embodied Zappa’s sense of humor, but it wasn’t until 1969’s Uncle Meat and Hot Rats that Zappa began to fully let his compositions run wild, incorporating long sections of free improvisation with performances so coordinated and tight that it’s almost hard to believe people actually played them. Zappa’s early phase reached a zenith with his two most popular records to date, Over-Nite Sensation (1973) and Apostrophe (1974), which mixed his juvenile sensibility with a bluesy take on classic rock, making for surprisingly hooky songs that still felt like one big joke.As Zappa’s career went on, he took every possible opportunity to use his music to express his political ire, none more prominently than the filthy-funk epic Joe’s Garage (1979), which envisioned a world where the government has outlawed music. He continued to approach his music from a more serious angle in his later years, commissioning orchestras to perform his work (as on The Yellow Shark) and even pioneering computer music in the late ‘80s on albums like Jazz From Hell. But even at his most academic and studious, Zappa was never one to keep a straight face. Though he died in 1993 of prostate cancer, his sense of irony and musical dexterity has lived on to this day, inspiring everyone from Ariel Pink to Phish.Zappa’s world is certainly a peculiar one, and reconciling his jokey disposition with his outlandish music requires a certain level of patience and adventurousness on the part of the listener. But his music represents a freedom in expression that one rarely sees in the mainstream, a win for the freaks whose legacy continues to endure. To crack the code on one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most mischievous maestros, hit “play” on our mix, and hold on tight.

I wish I had recorded a version of “I’m Going Bananas” at the peak of my career too; it’s what I expect from artists in their imperial phases. Dipping into her work after 2005’s acknowledged Good Album Confessions on a Dance Floor is an enervating affair, though, so I refrained from listing post-2008 options except for inescapable stinkers. Her last acknowledged mega hit “4 Seconds,” for example, tops my list: a compendium of exhausted Timbaland sounds (synth horns), Justin cameos (Madonna would’ve been less desperate if she’d coaxed a writing credit out of him in 2000), and party-over-oops-out-of-time twaddle.It’s a testament to Madonna’s quality control that ninety percent of her singles would pass federal guidelines: attractive melodies, strong hooks, identifiable and charismatic vocal performance. I don’t care about “Material Girl,” “True Blue,” “Express Yourself,” “Rain,” or “Causing a Commotion,” but they don’t offend me. The worst of her big hits remains “Who’s That Girl,” on which she and co-writer Patrick Leonard, gasping for air, reprised the “Oriental” presets first deployed on “La Isla Bonita” and the three other Spanish words that Ms. Ciccone didn’t whisper on that same track. “American Pie” was gruesome when Don McLean sang it in the Nixon era; when Madonna invests its stale pieties with more commitment than is her wont it feels like a betrayal; she’s too smart, too modern, to believe in long-long-time-ago (whatever else she keeps Justin and Avicii’s numbers on her phone). A similar investment in superannuated melodrama sinks the early “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore.”Now for the surprises. I won’t tolerate no votes for Like a Virgin‘s “Shoo Be Doo” and “Stay.” I’ll defend 2015’s Rebel Heart as her most cohesive album since 2005; many tracks give the impression that she actually sat around a room with co-writers the old fashioned way and tossed melodies and lyrical ideas around. Finally, dig past American Life‘s first two singles and what emerges is an album of murmured weirdness unlike anything in her catalog to date. I want a sequel.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

It should surprise no one that I included a quarter of Pop, released twenty years ago to a reception less derisive than received wisdom would suggest. “Last Night on Earth” remains their direst single — four minutes of nothing. But Rattle and Hum boasts “Angel of Harlem,” Bono’s most embarrassing attempt to connect with a songwriting conceit that is supposed to be a person (don’t ever try personification again, Bono). Also, “Hawkmoon 269,” with more heavy breathing than a telephone stalker and terrible contributions from esteemed organist Bob Dylan.

Saying Wu-Tang owned ‘90s hip-hop is a slight overstatement—Dre, B.I.G., Pete Rock, Mannie Fresh, and dozens of other legendary figures also chipped in—but it’s also inaccurate to say that they completely fell off thereafter. Yes, they never reached the heights of their initial 1993-97 run, but they remained one of the most talented and idiosyncratic groups in rap. In the aughts, there was at least one classic album (Supreme Clientele), a couple near-classics (Fishscale, Only Built for Cuban Linx II), and several underrated jewels (8 Diagrams, No Said Date,Legend of the Liquid Sword) tucked into their catalog, and even their lesser, disappointing releases (Birth of a Prince, Wu Massacre, Tical 0) usually contained a banger or two. We’ve highlighted our 36 favorite of these, using Spotify, into one playlist. But, before we get into the the list, a few disclaimers:* GZA’s Grandmasters, RZA’s Digi Snacks, and the Wu-Tang’s 8 Diagrams are not available on streaming, so we have not included any of those tracks here.* We are not including tracks that the Wu-Tang guested on (hence no Kanye tracks).* In the interest of including as broad a selection of tracks from the Wu-Tang Clan, while still remaining honest to the concept, we didnt include eight tracks from Supreme Clientele. With those qualifiers, enjoy the list and subscribe to the playlist right here.36. “Meth Vs. Chef 2”, Meth + Ghost + Rae, Wu Massacre, 201035. “Silent”, GZA, Legend of the Liquid Sword, 200234. “Wu Tang,” U-God ft. Method Man, Dopium, 200933. “Ill Figures,” Wu-Tang Clan, Chamber Music, 200932. “All Natural,” Masta Killa, Selling My Soul, 201231. “Pioneer The Frontier,” Wu-Tang Clan, A Better Tomorrow, 201430. “Biochemical Equation,” RZA ft. Wu-Tang Clan and MF DOOM, Wu-Tang Meets Indie Culture, 200529. “Sound the Horns,” Wu-Tang Clan, Chamber Music, 200928. “9 Milli Bros,” Ghostface Killah ft. Wu-Tang Clan, Fishscale, 200627. “Keep Watch,” Wu-Tang Clan, A Better Tomorrow, 201426. “City High,” Inspectah Deck, The Movement, 200325. “When I’m Writing,” Killah Priest, Black August, 200324. “If Time is Money,” Wu-Tang Clan, The Saga Continues, 201723. “The Glide”, Method Man, 4:21...The Day After, 200622. “Ghost Showers,” Ghostface Killah, Bulletproof Wallets, 200121. “Grab the Microphone,” Masta Killa, No Said Date, 200420. “Uzi (Pinky Ring),” Wu-Tang Clan, Iron Flag, 200119. “Must Be Bobby,” RZA, Digital Bullet, 200118. “Colombian Ties,” GZA, Pro Tools, 200817. “Got to Have It,” Method Man, 4:21...The Day After, 200616. “Shakey Dog,” Ghostface Killah, Fishscale, 200615. “Pop Shots,” Ol Dirty Bastard, Osirus, 200514. “The Sun,” Ghostface, Bulletproof Wallet outtake, 200113. “Grits,” RZA, Birth of a Prince, 200312. “Pyrex Vision”, Raekwon, Only Built for Cuban Linx 2, 2009.11. “Run,” Ghostface, The Pretty Toney Album, 200410. “We Pop”, RZABirth of a Prince, 2003In the end, the Wu-Tang sound—stringy hip-hop minimalism with Memphis soul samples and crusty, boom bap beats—had little lasting impact on hip-hop. By 1996, rap had moved on to the jiggy beats of Diddy and the Trackmasters, and, shortly thereafter, the pumped-up Orleans bounce of Mannie Fresh; and by 1997, so had the Wu, unleashing their own variants on their signature template. On this track from 2003s Birth of a Prince, RZA tries to catch up to the rap mainstream by taking a page from G-Unit, unleashing bronzed-out F-funk over a paean to popped champagne bottles, “hoes in different areas,” and “the bass shake in the club.” It really shouldn’t work, which makes this earworm semi-hit all the more remarkable.9. “Holla”, Ghostface KillahThe Pretty Toney Album, 2004“I’m from a place where fish was made,” Ghostface rasps on this track’s opening line, and, like many of Ghost’s best lyrics, it means absolutely nothing and everything. The song is alternately tough-as-nails and unimaginably fragile, from the quivering strings of the The Delfonics “La-La (Means I Love You)” to Ghostface’s taunt brag, “Like, an angry, cripple, man, dont push me!” Ghost isn’t constructing meaning here as much as he’s conjuring mood, and, as such, there’s no real production on here to speak of; the Delfonics track is left as-is—no loop, chop or cut—as Ghost raps over the broken boombox beat, channeling a time and place that is bitterly, sweetly nostalgic. 8. “Pass the Bone (Remix)”, Masta KillaMade in Brooklyn, 2006In the aftermath of World War II, there were stories that pockets of Japanese soldiers remained stranded on deserted islands. Isolated, and without any news of Shigemitsu’s surrender, they fought on for many years after that war had ended.* Masta Killa is the Wu’s version of that. He was a disciple of GZA who was only sparingly featured on Wu tracks during the group’s glory years, and, as other members were trying to update their sound (see RZA’s “We Pop”) or disappearing into their own aesthetic (pretty much any Ghostface record), Masta Killa made two classic albums (2004’s No Said Date and 2006’s Made in Brooklyn) anchored by his dense lyricism and crusty breakbeats. These late-period jewels sounded like they had been delivered to the 2000s from Wu headquarters circa ‘96 in a hazy time machine. “Pass The Bone,” a highlight from Made in Brooklyn, is rap as cinema verité, conjuring loose Saturday nights, coughed-up blunts, random hook-ups, and stoop conversations over a straightforward soul loop.* If you don’t believe me, there’s a Gilligan’s Island’s episode dedicated to this.7. “Animal Planet”, GZALegend of the Liquid Sword, 2002GZA was always Wu-Tang’s most accomplished technician. Where Method Man or ODB’s lines contained a visceral velocity, crushing coal to near-perfect lyrical diamonds in split seconds, GZA’s rhymes seemed as if they were written in tomes over the course of decades, revealing calculated phonetic associations and delicately crafted allusions. “Animal Planet” abstracts the violence and politics of the streets into a jungle metaphor; the tarantula is the “hype man” and chimps “sling in trees” with “elephants for security,” while everglades were “controlled by the gators” before they were “crashed by the crocs who came years later.” The conceit is anchored by a lush beat and the simple, half-whispered chorus—“it’s a jungle sometimes”—that appropriates Grandmaster Flash’s classic line from “The Message.”6. “Nutmeg”, Ghostface KillahSupreme Clientele, 2000The best art teaches you how to see it, writing its own rules and daring viewers to decipher the lines, hues, and figures on its own terms, and not according to your preconceived notions of how it should be. Metaphorically speaking, that’s exactly what Ghostface did on 2000’s Supreme Clientele, bending nouns to verbs (“watch me Dolly Dick it”), building up a thick lattice of NYC esoterica (Scotty Woody, Clarks, Optimo), and tilting towards the undecipherable (sample lyric: “Dancing with Blanche and them bitches, flicking deuce pictures/ Kick down the ace of spades, snatch Jack riches”). “Nutmeg” was produced by Ghostface’s barber, Black Moes-Art—which is as perfect and makes as much sense as anything else on Ghostface’s wacky masterpiece.5. “Black Widow, Pt. 2,” Bobby DigitalDigital Bullet, 2001It only lasts a little over two minutes—not including the ponderous outro—but this song is terrifying, sonically and morally. For the second time in his career, RZA samples Wendy Rene’s “After Laughter (Comes Tears),” but where his previous flip on “Tearz” emphasized the track’s hardwon soul—contrasting the source track’s anachronistic strings and vocal harmonies against some of the toughest drums RZA ever produced—“Black Widow, Pt. 2” strips the sample to the bone, focusing on Rene’s scream—a primal, sensual, terrifying plea that loops over and over, building a screeching house-of-trap horrors, backlighting the moment where ODB’s sputtering, disconnected misogyny (“bitch, you belong to me”) turns to violence and the song’s female subject screams, “Dirt, I don’t want to die.” None of this is defensible—it’s morally repellent—but the best Wu was frequently ugly.4. “I Can’t Go to Sleep,” The Wu Tang ClanThe W, 2000Middle-period Ghostface—starting with 2004’s ThePretty Toney Album and lasting through 2009’s Ghostdini—found the MC trying to formulate himself as a post-crack-era Al Green, appropriating classic soul tracks verbatim (e.g., “Big Girl,” “Holla”) and rapping in a pleading, quivering voice that imbued 36 lifetimes of desire, confusion, loathing and transcendence. This track from 2000’s The W laid the groundwork for all that, building off the symphonic, proto-prog soul of Isaac Hayes “Walk on By” and chronicling the “havoc of the streets of Satan,” the murdered babies, raped women, and “crack and guns” of the “early 80s.” Even if his lyrics amount to little more than clever phonetic interlacing (sample: “Whippy got hit up with the big shit, bong bong”), Ghostface’s voice—cracked, pleading, piercing—seems to have absorbed all that. When RZA comes on the track’s second verse, translating Ghostface’s grief by making the personal political and the political historical—referencing Malcolm getting “shot in the chest” and Marcus Garvey getting deported because “he tried to spark us”—the track enters the upper pantheon of Wu Tang, regardless of the era.3. “House of the Flying Daggers,” RaekwonOnly Built 4 Cuban Linx 2, 2009By the late-aughts, Wu Tang were more or less playing hip-hop’s oldie circuit, and the prospect of them revisiting a deeply cherished album from their golden period seemed fraught, to say the least. And while Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2 doesn’t quite match the considerable heights of the original, the uneasy, propulsive “House of the Flying Daggers” is monumental. Ghost, painting in his usual loopy word spasms, threatens to “humiliate, brutalize, Ruger pop, pulverize,” as Rae requests that they “bury me in Africa with whips and spears and rough diamonds from Syria.” The production, provided by J Dilla, cyphering the dirty adrenaline of classic RZA, simply bulldozes you.2. “Cherchez LaGhost”, Ghostface KillahSupreme Clientele, 2000It’s easy to forget that the Wu-Tang didn’t have much of a imperial, decadent period. They began as an underground unit from a (very) outer-borough, cataloging the litter of broken crack vials and busted 40 ounces, and, after shortly flirting with pop success, they and their quirky, never-quite-mainstream sound quickly slid back into obscurity, foregoing the usual accoutrements of hip-hop royalty (velvet roaches, Superhead, and French vanilla Ciroc). Still, this song, couched in the cooing cocaine big-band disco of Dr. Buzzards Original Savannah Band’s “Cherchez La Femme,” feels like the party after the afterparty, the slice of euphoria before the comedown. Rarely have the Wu-Tang sounded as if they were having this much fun. It didn’t last long, but it was a good minute (or three).1. “Careful (Click, Click)”, Wu-Tang ClanThe W, 2000The unvarnished soul sample that bleeds out of the track’s opening hints at classic Wu, but this banger from The W feels utterly unlike anything that came before it, or after. As a forlorn flute slinks between the track’s hovering bassline and tight boom bap beat, “Careful (Click, Click)" doesn’t so much describe the grit and toxicity of urban life as it revels in in, recoiling in the tight spaces where brown paper bags, dirty syringes, and cocked hammers mark the dark spaces of Wu’s boarding houses/imaginary slums, bobbing with a millennial sleekness that underlines the track’s post-industrial menace, eerily evoking future trauma through Ghost’s insistence, nearly a year before 9/11, that the “boxcutter went click click.” Quite simply, this is the Wu at the height of their powers.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.Young Thug cemented his place as one of the most unique and exciting artists in hip-hop with his 2016 output, which included three brief but potent albums: I’m Up; Slime Season 3, the third installment in his Slime Season trilogy; and JEFFERY, a collection of odes to his personal heroes titled after their given name. Along the way, he also released essential one-offs like “Gangster Shit,” collaborated on hit singles with Usher and Travi$ Scott, and stole the spotlight on albums by Chance The Rapper and Kanye West. And through it all, he continued to twist and warp his inimitable voice into new shapes and tuck subtle wordplay into his lyrics.

There’s a kid inside of us, no matter how decrepit we get, and the kid inside Tom Waits probably sounds a lot like the one in “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” a highlight of Waits’ gloriously ragged 1992 masterpiece Bone Machine. Given that there’s “nothing out there but sad and gloom” based on what he’s seen in the lives of the adults around him, the world of grown-ups rightly seems unappealing and bewildering. “How do you move in a world of fog that’s always changing things?” he wonders, articulating a dilemma that stymied so many of the hard-luck characters who tell their stories in the hundreds of songs authored by one of American music’s most cherished mavericks.

That question is probably still on the man’s mind as he turns 70. We like to imagine him as the coot prospector he played in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, scratching his head and grumbling, “How the hell did that happen?” in that iconic voice, which never seemed as if it could get any raspier but somehow always did.

Then again, turning 70 maybe isn’t such a big deal to a guy who tried hard to seem old before his time. When Waits first emerged in the Los Angeles club scene of the early ’70s, his clear devotion to heroes like Jack Kerouac and Thelonious Monk made him seem like a scruffy relic to listeners more hip to Jackson Browne. He styled himself as a piano-playing Charles Bukowski, tickling the ivories as he spun hard-luck tales equal parts miserable and hilarious. (Check out his 1975 live album Nighthawks at the Diner for vivid early evidence of both his storytelling chops and his ability to delight a crowd.)But anyone who figured they had him pegged would be surprised again and again by what followed in the ’80s and beyond. Once Waits found a long-sought sense of personal stability with wife and creative partner Kathleen Brennan, his creative moves grew bolder, starting with 1983’s stunning Swordfishtrombones and continuing with later triumphs like 2004’s Real Gone. The music they contained could be tender and heartbreaking or crazy and chaotic. Whatever the case, it all remained true to his reliably skewed vision of that confusing grown-up world.

In the process, he’d honor his own inspirations—Bob Dylan, Harry Partch, Mose Allison, Captain Beefheart—while inspiring countless younger artists who absorbed his profound influence on how great songs get made and sung. To celebrate the occasion of his 70th, here’s a set of 70 Waits essentials and many more songs that show his grubby fingerprints.