Essentials

Matching guitar crosstalk with a lead singer whose pinched tones were like balsamic vinegar on the arugula-dry instrumental bits, Television remain sui generis. My introduction was their 1992 reunion album, which, I swear, deserves to be embraced as fully as their seventies work. As cool as an Old Fashioned on a terrace in January, this eponymous album puts a parched Tom Verlaine against his and Richard Lloyd’s excess; it’s the equivalent of watching Maureen Stapleton Interiors and her uninhibited red dress dancing. And Lloyd’s fiery rhythm work had just gotten a full workout on Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend. This is the sort of band that spells “glamour” with a u and comes up with solos to match; this is the sort of band whose songwriter-guitarist comes up with a phrase as piquant and lyrical as his best lead line.I included Verlaine solo tracks because they’re essential.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

For the most spectacular comeback of my lifetime, Tina Turner copped not an inch to the Madonna market. She sang Terry Britten and Graham Lyle’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It” from the point of view of a middle aged woman who has seen enough bullshit from young songwriters and producers, many of whom are more desperate than lovers; she has learned to live on reflex. So few popular songs take this point of view that thirty-three years later the triumph feels more earned than ever. Fortunately, Tina Turner kept going. Her best material embodies wanderlust, intrinsically and conceptually: she travels from producer to producer, like her women do for kicks, often ending up burned but with a je ne regrette rien attitude.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Replacing the beret for a skull did wonders for Tom Waits’ cred. Movie ballads, sea shanties, Keith Richards collaborations, Delta blues, eating worms for Francis Ford Coppola — he’s beat you. His voluminous catalog defeats me; I relied on the CD-R I burned in the early 2000s of the beer ‘n’ Beats stuff and have fitfully kept up with his career since he and wife/chief collaborator Kathleen Brennan released album after album of songs about brawlers, boozers, and bastards this millennium. I prize Bone Machinemost, bought in January 1993 and to my ears the peak of his clink-clank ethos whose shrewdness allowed him to issue more than a few maudlin things that attracted him to Rod Stewart (I adore his “Downtown Train” by the way). He let Marc Ribot pull Beefheart-inflected melodic noise from his guitar, allowing him the space to treat percussion like a second lead. Give him this: he found a way to fuse Flannery O’Connor, Howlin’ Wolf, and Streisand.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

In 1990 when I discovered Consolidated and Meat Beat Manifesto, Nine Inch Nails didn’t come up. Melodic, entranced by rock star poses, Trent Reznor had no patience for the happiness-in-slavery submission to beats and noise of industrial, which marked him as a star from the beginning—NIN, not Consolidated, were asked to play Lollapalooza in 1991. I’m not a fan—this kind of hysteria makes me question the idea of sex itself, for if you’re heaving and shouting and lisping and drooling so strenuously, you must be more desperate than I need at the moment. But I can’t deny Reznor’s manipulation of self-destructive zones that stop just short of demilitarized zones. His most sustained recording is Broken, when he figured out the connections between Adam Ant and Adam and Eve. I wish I had seen his 1995 tour with David Bowie, with whom he formed a poignant bond: a tour that didn’t deserve its slings, according to the clips I’ve watched.Visit our partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

The most maligned woman in rock history, Evelyn McDonnell called her, and it’s not hyperbole. Yet for studiocraft, Fly, Feeling the Space, and especially Approximately Infinite Universe deserve the scrutiny that her husband’s desultory Nixon-era albums get from Beatlephiles (she pushes her husband to new heights as a lead guitarist, too). Toss in Season of Glass and Rising and I had to stop noting the number of excellent songs written by Yoko Ono. Her influence is profound: from Alex Chilton’s pilfering the melody of “Mrs. Lennon” for “Holocaust” to the B-52’s and Sleater-Kinney. Walking on Thin Ice, a distillation of the Rykodisc Onobox, is one of the great accidental purchases of my life — at a Best Buy in summer ’96!Eight years younger than my grandmother, Yoko is still recording: I wish I’d heard Take Me to the Land of Hell, and she enjoys a thriving second life as the object of okay to excellent remixes of older material that have taken her to the top of the American dance charts.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

There are some styles of music that get codified early on, and then musicians play by certain rules in order to fit in with a group of artists and succeed in their genre’s community. But that’s not the case with black experimental music, where it’s best to surrender to your musical intuition instead of relying on a definition. I, for one, listen for creativity, off-kilter sounds, and anything and everything that veers away from popular aesthetics. Sure, it’s possible for black experimental musicians to cross over to the mainstream—like Funkadelic, Outkast, Erykah Badu, and even Kendrick Lamar—but that popularity doesn’t deter those artists from continuing to shun musical norms and cultivate music from their own imagination.The way I became a vocal proponent of black experimental music was by loosening my own reins as a music critic. Experimental music reveals itself to the world—it finds you and pulls you in. Those nuances of strangeness—the tiny surprises of beats, reverbed whispers, overlaid vocals, and sounds that don’t quite make sense—call out to you, and these artists ask you to listen on a deeper level. This Black Experimental Mixtape Series exists for that purpose. I’m not here to tell you what I know, but to share the sounds that come out of the deepest recesses of black artists’ psyches and creative inner worlds.

Most people take the apocalypse as an article of faith, but what exactly the apocalypse entails is in the eye of the beholder. Will the universe dissolve and all matter cease to exist, or will the pillaging be more localized? Perhaps the sun will explode. Or, more specifically (and likely), the oceans might rise and drown large swaths of humanity Or maybe the opposite is true, and we’ll simply run out of water like in Mad Max? There are also health issues to consider. What if we develop a mutation that makes a certain portion of society both resistant to death and hungry for human flesh? This seems like a very popular (if scientifically) scenario. Or perhaps it’s a more mundane: maybe we’ll just stop producing babies. Or maybe we’ll slip into a computer-generated virtual reality simulation, with our robot overlords overseeing out inert sleeping bodies. Honestly, I don’t really know how it all will end, and I haven’t given it that much thought, to be honest. But I know someone who has: Bob Dylan. Over the course of his nearly 60 years career, Dylan has written very extensively about extinction events, though his take is always evolving. Initially, Dylan seem to look at the upside of the end of the world. “A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall” is at-times terrifying in its depiction of the dire aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, but it also left room for the emergence of a visionary poet who would serve as a sortof bohemian Moses to lead his people out of the wilderness (spoiler: the poet is Dylan). The track “When the Ship Comes In” sounds downright celebratory as it imagines a post-racial society, until you realize that this society exists in the ashes of traditional Western civilization. During the mid-‘60s, as Dylan forsook folk for fock n’ roll, the bard imagined the apocalypse as a weird mash-up of Cold War terror, religious zealotry, and pop culture schizophrenia. Tracks such as “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” and “Highway 61 Revisited” are gleeful, language-melting odes our impending dome. They imagined a society standing on the precipice of mass confusion. In the context of the chaos of the ‘60s social upheaval, these songs were considered prophetic.As the ‘60s wore on, his vision of the apocalypse grew at turns mournful (“All Along the Watchtower) and menacing (“Wheels on Fire”), but it was never far from his mind. In the time sense, he bends the apocalyptic to help further his own pet projects and theories. Doomsday provided great grist for the mill when Dylan was a fire-and-brimstone preached in the late-70s and early 80s. And, when Dylan released a string of brilliant mid-life-sad-sack records in the late 90s and early aughts, apocalyptic imagery helped illuminate the full range of his personal malaise.

When SoundCloud launched in 2007, it was initially populated by DJs who posted hours-long sets, like the much-missed collective East Village Radio. It was the new MySpace, a service where Flying Lotus posted workshop demos, and labels like Warp and Ninja Tune posted advance singles of upcoming albums. Some of the service’s earliest legal battles were against major labels that objected to DJs mixing their tracks without legal consent, as well as musicians that posted their material without proper clearance. Eventually, it turned into a YouTube-style service where people uploaded “freeleases” in search of internet buzz. Bryson Tiller, Kehlani and, most famously, Chance the Rapper are just a few who uploaded their mixtapes to SoundCloud.Before SoundCloud rap was a phenomenon feted by Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Complex, and dozens of lesser trend-hunter publications, there was Tumblr rap, the nickname briefly given to buzzy acts like SpaceGhostPurrp and Antwon; and MySpace rap, which yielded “hipster rappers” like the Cool Kids, Uffie, Pase Rock, and Amanda Blank. (Before he signed with Lil Wayne’s Young Money and went supernova, Drake was one of MySpace’s most popular unsigned artists.) SoundCloud rap may be useful today to describe a gaggle of rappers that share sonic traits: lo-fi production, hooky chants, emphatic lyrics that are usually talk-sung, and vague shock tactics that are as punk rock as Billy Idol. But at the end of the day, SoundCloud is just a service.With that in mind, SoundCloud rap sounds like an extension of a thread that arguably began in 2010 with Odd Future (whom some publications compared to the Sex Pistols). As the genre of rap becomes more notional than actual—lyrics are harmonized and sung in barely recognizable hip-hop cadences, and beats are reduced to murky approximations of a boom-bap tempo—MCs trade form for texture, and professionalism for bellicosity. SoundCloud rappers are representative of the genre’s post-regional phase, when it’s no longer uncommon for a Philadelphia hook-man like Lil Uzi to sound like a trapper from Atlanta, a Texas melodicist like Post Malone to sound like a rapper/singer from Chicago, or a Florida bedroom producer like SpaceGhostPurrp to sound like a gangster from Memphis. In the whirlpool of internet culture, everyone is a digital representation of Chris Anderson’s “long tail” theory.This doesn’t mean that SoundCloud rap isn’t responsible for vital work. Those aforementioned stories are motivated by controversial upstarts like XXXTENTACION, Tay-K (both of whom are facing serious criminalallegations) as well as Lil Pump, Lil Peep (RIP), Wifisfuneral, Smokepurrp and a handful of others landing on Billboard’s streaming-enhanced Hot 100 charts. Smokepurrp’s drawling “Audi”—with its chants of “lean, lean, double cup” and pummeling trap bass drums—is as vital as any 2 Chainz single this year, and Rico Nasty’s loopy nursery chant “Hey Arnold” replicates Lil Yachty’s charm. (In fact, the latter eventually appeared on a “Hey Arnold” remix.)Still, much of SoundCloud rap’s entrée into the 2017 Zeitgeist can be credited to its successful atomization. There are dozens of rappers who fit into the rubric, and it’s unlikely that you’ll remember most of them five years from now. But it’s fun while it lasts.

Here’s to the greatest album artist of the 2000s: the most consistent and startling long players, in the old school sense. I can’t think of another artist who has recorded albums as rewarding as Supreme Clientele, Bulletproof Wallets, The Pretty Toney Album, and Fishscale — all immersive in the best sense. I’m sorry I lost track after 2010’s Apollo Kids, a quickie that predated a series of soundtracks for a graphic novel series.In the following list, I’ve cheated: “Winter Warz” is a Wu-Tang track in name only, but “Shadowboxin” appeared on GZA’S Liquid Swords and it’s the best Method Man appearance; and “Wu-Gambinos” has Ghostface’s best classic Wu-era rap but it’s on Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

If you’re a fan of excellently crafted folk-rock and you’re not spinning Bidin’ My Time, Chris Hillman’s first album in over a decade, you have to change this. Featuring fellow former Byrds Roger McGuinn and David Crosby, the nostalgia-kissed collection very much is a meditation on The Byrds’ unique legacy. When you really think about it, the breadth of recordings linked to everybody who passed through the Byrds between 1964 and 1973 is downright astonishing—in addition to those already mentioned, there’s Gene Clark, Gram Parsons, Clarence White, and roughly a half-dozen others.Crosby, for example, is a key link between the folk-rock boom of the ’60s and the following decade’s singer-songwriter movement. After all, on top of co-founding the supergroup CSN(Y), he produced Joni Mitchell’s debut, Song to a Seagull, and provided harmonies to Jackson Browne’s masterfully minimal 1972 self-titled album. At the same time, cosmic American music pioneer Gram Parsons—who helped turn The Byrds into a country-rock outfit with 1968’s Sweetheart of the Rodeo—was equally active, helming two pivotal groups in the International Submarine Band and The Flying Burrito Brothers (the latter with Hillman and original Byrds drummer Michael Clarke). He also partied hard with Keith Richards and, as legend has it, sings backup on “Sweet Virginia,” the drunken, shit-kicking anthem from Exile on Main St. Even a lesser known Byrd like Kevin Kelley—who filled the drummer’s chair for most of 1968—really got around. Before joining The Byrds, he played with the Rising Sons, an absurdly ahead-of-their-time blues-rock act co-founded by Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, while afterwards he appeared on The Yellow Princess, an album from American primitive guitarist John Fahey, and did some recording with the mystical, singer-songwriter visionary Judee Sill.As one would expect, such an expansive lineage reaches clear across the rock music spectrum, yet as our playlist captures, there are several central themes running throughout The Byrds’ universe. Revisit their original albums (even the spotty ones have moments of sheer brilliance), and what you’ll notice is the music rests upon a cluster of overlapping tensions: tradition versus futurism, earthiness versus the cosmic, simplicity versus virtuosity. After all, here is a band that within a span of 12 months in the 1968 zone explored abstract synthesizer music (“Moog Raga”) and covered The Louvin Brothers’ Southern gospel tune “The Christian Life.” Yet oftentimes these tensions can be found in a single song, like how their landmark version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” wraps pastoral folk balladeering in the crisp, soaring aesthetic of the jet age or the way the late guitar genius Clarence White shades the John Coltrane-inspired psych-rocker “Eight Miles High.” Check the live version from 1970’s (Untitled) with mind-bending solos grounded in his scorching bluegrass picking.Jump to the seemingly endless network of solo albums, projects, and guest appearances spawned by The Byrds, and the very same tensions pop up. The epic “Some Misunderstanding,” from Gene Clark’s 1976 spiritual masterpiece No Other, sounds like country-rock—if it were recorded inside a black hole. Though not nearly as dark and brooding, The Flying Burrito Brothers’ “Sin City,” one of the landmarks of cosmic American music, also achieves a sublime balance of rootsy twang and spacey splendor. And then there’s a piece like “Have You Seen the Stars Tonite” from Paul Kantner and the Jefferson Starship’s seriously underrated Blows Against the Empire; it may only be tangentially related, yet it does feature Crosby’s high, ghostly voice and ethereal strum in service of a song that uses folk-based music as jumping off point for some galactic-scale rock.Over 50 years after The Byrds first took to flight, these tensions still grip them. Simply check out the sublime version of Gene Clark’s early composition “She Don’t Care About Time” on Hillman’s Bidin’ My Time. Everything about Hillman’s version—his dusty, time-weathered voice, the simple, heartland arrangement and throwback guitar jangle—reflect a man looking back on life and embracing his mortality. And yet, if you dig into Clark’s esoteric poetry, it’s a whole other story: This isn’t a mere love ballad; it’s a near-religious meditation on the infinite and universal. Perhaps the reason why The Byrds have meant so much to us through the years is this singular ability to, however tenuously, bring the earthbound and heavenly closer together, even if only for a song.