Elliott Smith’s best album, Either/Or, is 20 years old now, and it’s safe to assume that a whole new generation who got hip to it through Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blond could use a primer on Smith’s music (“Seigfried” quotes Smith’s “A Fond Farewell,” and Smith is named as a contributor in the accompanying Boys Don’t Cry magazine/liner notes). But when you want to explore the music of Elliott Smith, you have to decide which road you want to head down.After moving to Portland, Oregon from Texas in his teens to live with his psychiatrist dad, Smith formed the rock band Heatmiser in the early ‘90s before going solo with a stark acoustic approach, creating wondrous worlds in dank houses. He played acoustic guitar perhaps more elegantly than anyone else in his era, mixing it with beautifully delivered yet emotionally messy vocals. The combination worked. His music became more layered and elaborate as recording locations shifted to L.A. and London, but his songs could always be reduced to voice and guitar. His music is often calming and church-like. Occasionally, it’s angry. It has a reputation for being sad.In some ways, Smith’s trajectory paralleled Kurt Cobain’s. They were both brilliant male feminist rockers from the Pacific Northwest. Both also abused drugs and committed suicide. And they’re both canonized today as scraggly fallen angels, which is like a cartoon version of who they really were. What’s most important is that, in both cases, the music transcends their tragic backstories. And with Smith, there’s more than enough—there are four sides to the story.VOICE AND GUITAR(See playlist at top right)Click here to follow this playlist on SpotifyThis is how Elliott Smith started, and it’s where you should too. Voice and guitar were his building blocks: Early Smith albums were recorded on one microphone in a basement, and when your essential skills are of such high quality, that’s all you need. His lo-fi canon consists of Elliott Smith (good), Roman Candle (great), and Either/Or (masterpiece). But Smith would return to stripped-down recordings all the way to the end, and one of his best is “Everything Reminds Me Of Her,” from 2000’s Figure 8.About that voice: You’ll notice it sound heathery; it’s the soft side of the human voice. Listen to “Say Yes” and hear how his approach can sound vulnerable and sweet and then powerful with overdubbing—Smith was a master at tracking his own voice. On “Angeles,” hear how he uses a quiet tone but can also summon a battered toughness. Smith was also a great actor.About that guitar: He played rhythm well but was especially skilled at coming up with lead lines, figures he would repeat throughout a song. Notice how the intro on “No Name #1” foreshadows the verse in a folksy way. This is Smith, the guitarist, showing off his great songwriting skills. On “Everything Reminds Me Of Her,” the opening figure is delicately bent, something to stare at. This is Smith, the guitarist, as an ornamental player, who is great at adding curlicues and embellishments.EXPLORING THE SPACE

Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify“Miss Misery” (on our first playlist) was nominated for an Oscar, which Smith lost to Celine Dion. Smith signed to a major label and his music opened up, incorporating many more instruments. He always played drums, bass, piano, and guitar—often, he was the only player on his albums—and the full range of his skills can be heard on 1998’s XO.“Baby Britain” recasted Smith as a solid piano man with a certain barroom jauntiness, while “Bled White” introduced a new, fuller sound, with multiple guitars and keyboards. He indulges in his George Martin and Brian Wilson fantasies with the wall of vocals in “I Didn’t Understand,” one of his prettiest recordings.STUDIO DECADENCE

Click here to follow this playlist on SpotifyBy 2000, Smith was living in L.A., doing drugs irresponsibly and eating ice cream for every meal. On Figure 8, the music is lovely and less heartbreaking than before, but the songs seem more like formal exercises with wild instrumentation and arrangements than statements from the gut. The harpsichord on “Junk Bond Trader” and the cinematic plod of “Happiness/The Gondola Man” suggest that Smith would make a great film scorer, as does “Everything Means Nothing To Me,” which thrillingly descends into a blown-out drum loop. Smith emulates Brian Wilson here, mental instability and all.POSTHUMOUS RELEASES

Click here to follow this playlist on SpotifyAfter he took his own life in 2003, we got the unfinished From a Basement on a Hill, which shows that the experimentation on Figure 8 was only the beginning. He was plotting his Pet Sounds, and it’s just as messy and smart as his finest work, but also kind of… not. We don’t need “Ostrich & Chirping,” but we do need “A Fond Farewell”—proof that Smith could still turn out an “Elliott Smith song” no matter what. We also got New Moon, a polar opposite kind of recording, lo-fi, humble, and intermittently excellent, particularly “Whatever (Folk Song In C).”After he died, we learned that Smith was prone to vacillating between these two modes: bare and lush. And we learned that his music went through a lot of iterations before he felt like he nailed it. In retrospect, he did.

Delicious Vinyl put out legendary hip-hop titles between 1989 and 1995, and the Los Angeles-based classic label’s catalog of West Coast party rock and conscious rap still gets play, on radio and at functions worldwide.

Their iconic catalog includes smash hits “Wild Thing” (on Tone-Lōc’s Lōc-ed After Dark) and “Bust a Move” (on Young MC’s Stone Cold Rhymin’), as well as groundbreaking albums by Masta Ace Incorporated, which married West Coast and East Coast sensibilities, and the sensational second album from Pharcyde, Labcabincalifornia, which was responsible for launching the career of producer extraordinaire J Dilla, who contributed to six songs including the immortal “Runnin’.”All this music connects the dots between the early Def Jam sound, hip-hop’s migration to the west coast, and micro-eras of sample-based production. You’ll find sounds analogous to Rick Rubin’s booming, stark production for Run-DMC; the Beastie Boys’ record-store-in-a-blender album Paul’s Boutique; and a smoothed-out, funky angle similar to groups like Hieroglyphics.

With Craft Recordings re-releasing key Delicious Vinyl albums in summer 2018, a bunch of that music is now back in circulation, waiting for your trip down memory lane or maybe first-time listening experience.

While critically maligned during its heyday at the end of the ’00s, Atlanta snap rap has always been fun and remains influential today. Musically stripped-back, with vast separations between the bass, midrange (the raps), and treble (the repetitive keyboard figures), the music sounds gigantic in the club because of all the space in the mix. It’s slow yet steady, topping out at 80 beats per minute. You can dance to it by doing a simple or complex lean-back, coupled with a snap of the fingers.The definitive snap hit is “Laffy Taffy” by D4L (pictured). Everything else is tied for second place. Many snap anthems—like BHI, Lil Jon, and K-Rab’s 2006 cut “Do It, Do It (Poole Palace)”—have actual fingersnaps in the song, and eventually the style’s sound bled into R&B when T-Pain adopted it and, to a lesser degree, The-Dream. If you have to pin it to a place, it’s an Atlanta thing, but Mississippi and Compton have made crucial contributions with David Banner’s “Play” and Quik & The Fixxers’ “Can U Werk Wit Dat,” respectively. The most creative envisioning of the music was done by Soulja Boy, who basically invented viral dance videos with his “Crank Dat,” the template for up-and-coming stars like Ayo & Teo (Soulja Boy was a product of the YouTube era; Ayo & Teo are Instagram stars).Snap rap prioritizes dancing and downplays lyrical intellectualism, and while it isn’t the first rap subgenre to embrace those concepts, it has a strong following who have set a new norm. Modern-day adherents include Young Thug and Future, Atlantans whose music has the same tempo, and DJ Mustard, whose music is faster but still has that snap feel. In the big picture, snap is another point in the ongoing hip-hop conversation between the South and the West, without any comment from New York City. Look at California’s hyphy and jerk music and Atlanta’s crunk and snap music: It’s all part of the same swirl. New York has turned up its nose the whole time.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

One of the ugliest figures in rap is obsessed with some of the prettiest music. But we should expect nothing less from Tyler, the Creator, a self-described “walking paradox” whose music has been obscured by his public persona ever since he disrupted rap with his Odd Future crew in 2008. You could be forgiven for writing him off entirely after reading his notoriously homophobic Tweets. He’s since walked back most of that language, and has perhaps even come out as gay—or at least inhabits a gay character on his 2017 album Scum Fuck Flower Boy.As a rapper and producer, he’s been open about his influences since day one, and theyre all over the place: Pharrell’s sweet falsettos and uneasy chord progressions; the alien pop and library music of Broadcast; late ‘80s R&B (not a lot of that on Spotify, sadly); the harsh provocation and technical wizardry of Eminem; the stagey, orchestral hip-hop of Jon Brion-era Kanye West. He’s particularly into deep album cuts and soulful music with cinematic aspects.There is still nobody quite like him, even outside music, with his brightly colored fashion line and Neverland-esque penchant for throwing carnivals. And while his music has developed a capacity for gentleness over the years, he’s still a man who will shout vulgarities, if only to drive people away so he can sit at the piano alone with his jazz chords.At any rate, the most interesting paradox of Tyler, the Creator is that while he always seemed bent on fame for himself and Odd Future, he never “dumbed down for dollars” a la JAY-Z—or seemed to ever consider watering down his art in any way.