The summer of 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of one of psychedelia’s definitive artifacts: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Pink Floyd’s first album, dominated by the mercurial Syd Barrett’s madcap weirdness, is a quintessential cult album, one that’s passed from veteran heads to young initiates as they prepare for their long voyage into rock’s deep end. Hordes of Floyd fans (you know the types I’m talking about) have never even heard the thing. For them, the album is forever consigned to the band’s impenetrably mysterious, pre-Dark Side of the Moon years.Yet here’s the thing about Floyd’s legacy: Had the British band crash-landed before the making of the stratospherically popular Dark Side, they still would’ve gone down as one of the most influential (and far-out) groups of their generation. Sure, there’d be zero platinum records, none of those classic-rockstandards, and no rivaling The Beatles and Stones for global domination. Yet those losses wouldn’t have any impact on their sweeping influence on alternative, underground, and avant-garde music (genres filled with countless musicians who prefer the earliest stuff). Exploration of their 1967 to 1972 output—from pre-Piper singles like “See Emily Play” through to the Dark Side dry-run Obscured by Clouds—reveals the building blocks for space rock, prog, kosmische musik, ambient, post-punk, shoegaze, post-rock, dream pop, experimental drone, avant-metal, and freely improvised noise, as well as too many micro-movements within electronic music to count.It’s an interesting time for Floyd, as they were a young outfit unexpectedly thrusted into an extended state of liminality. You could go so far as to say they didn’t know who they were as a band. They parted with Barrett, their de facto creative leader, just three years after their formation. Without him and his powerful, if utterly erratic lifeforce, the group were plunged back into the depths of the underground, where they were forced to reinvent themselves without compass, map, or even rudder. Yet it’s this very lack of any tools or guideposts that allowed them to drift untethered into the farthest reaches of their imaginations and pull out sounds of stunning originality (the apex of which very well could be sides three and four of 1969’s Ummagumma). And while the music contains touches of acid rock, blues, and folk-rock in spots, they’re clearly trying as hard as humanly possible not fall back on established musical languages. I know music geeks love to hail Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music as the most sonically extreme statement from a major rock artist, but hell, Floyd ventured into the atonal, freeform abyss on a nightly basis during their transitional years.To capture this aspect, I’ve done something that may rankle listeners. Instead of spotlighting studio recordings exclusively, my best-of playlist contains live versions of several pivotal songs. I know the studio takes of “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Echoes” (from Piper and Meddle respectively) are sublime. But I believe they achieve true lift-off in concert. The live “Interstellar Overdrive” found on The Early Years: 1965-1967 Cambridge St/ation explodes with third-eye aktion rock, scorching white noise, and overdriven bass swells that place Floyd closer to The Velvet Underground’s orbit than anything going on in England’s rock scene at the time. Then there’s the version of “Echoes” from Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, filmed not long before the band achieved rock stardom. Firing on all cylinders, Floyd aren’t just mapping a future for experimental music but several futures simultaneously. Pick out any three genres from those mentioned up above, and I guarantee you’ll hear them lurking inside the piece’s 25 majestically expansive minutes.But far more important, set aside your intellect and just allow yourself to bask in the seemingly three-dimensional space and textures from which “Echoes” is built. We’re talking architecture in motion, with atmosphere so sticky it clings to your skin, ethereal harmonies that slow time to a delicious crawl, and sharp electronic pings that pierce the listener’s consciousness and embed themselves in layers far below the waking. Call me crazy, but I don’t think the studio version does all this (even though it’s still one hell of a trip). I’m not going to lie: This is a long, immersive playlist. But that’s the only way to fully appreciate Floyd’s early years.

So long as the world is home to easily offended Christians and alienated teens addicted to horror movies and loud guitar jams, that modern day manifestation of the Grand Guignol known as shock rock will continue to be a viable pastime. As a matter of fact, the past few years have been deliciously gory ones for those unleashing malevolent riffs while smothered in freaky makeup and latex (or, in the case of the Butcher Babies, very little at all). The reigning rulers of 21st-century shock rock, Maria Brink and In This Moment, have returned with in 2017 with both a new album (Ritual—more hard rock, less Warped-brand metal) and new look. (The video for “Oh Lord” lifts its cryptic religious vibes from possession flicks like The Last Exorcism and The Witch, with a dash of Gaga’sAmerican Horror Story thrown in for good measure.) There’s also Motionless in White, who are like the metalcore reincarnation of mid-’90s Marilyn Manson (a huge compliment, of course), and Ghost B.C., who admittedly may not be looking to shock anybody; it’s entirely possible they’re just earnest, card-carrying Satanists.Now speaking of alleged devil-worshipper Marilyn Manson, a good deal of the shock rock that has emerged since he had evangelicals protesting his performances steers towards the grave and graphic. After all, there simply isn’t a lot of (intended) chuckles to be found in something like the Butcher Babies’ “Mr. Slowdeath” video, which basically is the groove metal equivalent of torture porn. Older shock rockers, on the other hand, are way more campy. They embraced their roles as villains and outcasts holding a cracked mirror up to our diseased society, but they did it with a nod and wink (most of the time). Mercyful Fate’s King Diamond—who needs to be credited with kickstarting the corpse paint look eventually adopted by the black-metal tribe—wails about the occult and Satanism with a lavish, theatrical flair. And if you travel all the way back to the ’70s, you run into Kiss, who reveled in comic-book absurdism even when launching into dungeon-clanking nightmares like “God of Thunder,” and Alice Cooper, whose ambitious concerts were Broadway productions topped off with guillotines, boa constrictors, and even dance numbers. The Coop may be my favorite shock rocker of all time—and he’d be the first to admit shock rock is just good, old fashioned show biz with a bucket of blood on the side.

Atlanta’s Black Lips belong to a long and winding lineage of garage rockers and twang-infused punks from the South, and continue that tradition with the new release of their eighth album, the Sean Ono Lennon-produced, Satan’s Graffiti Or God’s Art? In addition to hugely influential labels like Goner, the region has coughed up a slew of the genre’s most notable pioneers. With “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” Lone Star State psychonauts The 13th Floor Elevators created what may very well be the single most important song in the mid-’60s merger of garage and psychedelia, while the lo-fi bash and screech of Memphis heavyweights Jay Reatard and Oblivions are central to the evolution of modern garage punk (with each spawning a slew of projects, spotlighted in our playlist).It should come as no surprise that a good chunk of Southern garage rock soaks up the region’s more renowned flavors: blues, soul, gospel, and rockabilly. The Moving Sidewalks, Billy Gibbons’ pre-ZZ Top outfit, blend orange sunshine-fueled fuzz with the kind of greasy R&B swing heard in East Texas juke joints; Alex Chilton’s “My Rival,” from his 1979 cult classic, Like Flies On Sherbert, is a brain-blasted concoction of ’50s boogie and eccentric New Wave that has more in common with Swell Maps than Big Star. Seratones are another telling example—the young band from Shreveport, Louisiana, have in AJ Haynes a powerful singer equally inspired by gospel and distortion-caked punk.But there are plenty of garage rockers in the South who aren’t the least bit rootsy. Nots, one of the hardest and hottest bands to emerge from Memphis’ always fertile scene, are cold, brittle, and jagged, just like old-school post-punks on Rough Trade (Kleenex, Delta 5, and Stiff Little Fingers). In contrast, Nashville’s JEFF The Brotherhood devote a lot of their creative energy to cutting garage with hook-littered power pop, glam, and shambolic indie rock. But enough chatter, people—it’s time to press play and lose yourself in a whole mess of Southern-fried snarl and reverb.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

When I need to bask in the genius of Bob Dylan I listen to a record; I don’t read his lyrics like a book of poetry. This is why his winning the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature doesn’t validate a damn thing. To reduce his lyrics to text is to miss the most important aspect: their delivery. Along with Jimi Hendrix’s guitar and Miles Davis’ trumpet, Dylan’s voice is one of the most immersive, soulful, and psychologically complex instruments in the history of American music. And much like Frank Sinatra, he’s shrewdly turned the wear and tear that comes with time into an advantage. When the culture-wrecking roar ‘n’ whine of the 1960s and ’70s became a physical impossibility, he reinvented himself as an ancient ghost with a deliciously sandpapered groan that can flip between ageless truth and sneering insolence at the drop of a hat. While you’ll certainly encounter a handful of classics, my playlist isn’t a greatest hits mix. Rather, I’ve pulled together a bunch of songs — some recorded live, many deep cuts, all personal faves — that I feel show off Dylan’s power, range, and utter eccentricity as a vocalist.

Justin Vernon’s 2016 full-length as Bon Iver, 22, A Million, isn’t just a career-jarring reboot of his sound; it’s a radical revision of the singer-songwriter template. Instead of the guitar-based meditations of previous efforts, the musician erects alien constructions from cyborg falsetto, Auto-Tune-smeared soul, baroque electronica, and bass drops splitting the difference between post-dubstep and modern R&B. Man and machine, nervous system and motherboard — their differences fall by the wayside with each successive cut. In hopes of deepening listeners’ appreciation of this profoundly mutant offering, I’ve put together a mix of key inspirations (Kanye West, Arthur Russell), peers exploring similar ideas (Frank Ocean, James Blake), and illuminating examples of sampled source material (Mahalia Jackson, Sharon Van Etten). Hopefully, you’ll find our playlist to be as deliciously novel and immersive as 22, A Million itself.

The erudite Brian Eno once said, “There were three great beats in the ’70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s funk, and Klaus Dinger’s Neu!-beat.” They are so great, in fact, that strains of their DNA can be detected in practically every groove-based genre of the last 35 years. These include not just hip-hop and techno, but industrial and jungle/drum ’n’ bass as well. Bringing together landmark recordings from all three, this playlist is a sprawling tapestry of densely undulating polyrhythms, purring 4/4, and ecstatic syncopation punctuated with seriously nasty breaks. The bulk of the tracks feature Kuti, Brown, or Dinger, obviously. There are exceptions, however. Kraftwerk, for instance, explored Dinger’s motorik rhythm to great effect years after the group and drummer had parted ways. Hit play and find out why Eno knows what the hell he’s talking about.

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.

Of Montreal may be nearly two decades removed from their days as Elephant 6 upstarts, yet the collective’s unmistakable blend of eccentric DIY ethos and ’60s pop hooks continues to haunt the Georgia group’s music — including 2016’s Innocence Reaches. The same holds true for indie rock as a whole. Inspect the genre’s rank and file and the dreamily melodic flavors of Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, The Apples in Stereo, and all their blissed out pals continue to exert a powerful influence. In addition to spotlighting key tracks from Elephant’s 6’s charter members, our playlist ropes in notable outliers such as neo-psych brats The Essex Green and the utterly indescribable A Hawk and a Hacksaw.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Classic rock possesses all the stubborn resilience of a cockroach . It’s the 21st century, and the technological singularity is upon us: Humans are banging in VR, autonomous cars are causing fender benders up and down the West Coast, 3-D printers are capable of creating hideous yet entirely livable homes, and indie folkie Bon Iver has gone full-blown weepy cyborg. But despite wave upon wave of civilization-disrupting futurism, young musicians totally worship the musty vinyl albums on which their grandparents rolled joints back in the ‘60s and ’70s. The Temperance Movement’s bluesy chops earned them an opening slot for The Rolling Stones in 2014; Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats have zipped up the charts thanks to the kind of high-octane rhythm ‘n’ blues that made the J. Geils Band a workhouse live act in the mid-’70s; and Deap Vally, the take-no-shit female duo from Los Angeles, lay down grooves as big and growling as anything from Cactus.Clearly inspired by The White Stripes and The Black Keys—who basically are the patron saints of what we’ll call nü classic rock—a good number of these young guns temper their nostalgia with modern touches and twists inspired by alt-rock. On Sound & Color, Alabama Shakes dress up their Southern-fried garage rock with a gauzy, shoegaze-like drift and hulking bass drops. Royal Blood, who’ve memorized the stripped down, pulverizing caterwaul of Led Zeppelin I and II, have in Ben Thatcher a drummer whose beats frequently slip into the battering-ram stutter of robotic hip-hop funk.But not every artist on this playlist is a descendent of the Jack White/Dan Auerbach lineage. Both Crobot and Sweden’s Blues Pills follow the lead of retro-everything forerunners Wolfmother and The Sword, bashing out hybridizations of bell-bottomed riff rock and vintage metal heavily informed by Deep Purple, early Rush, The Jeff Beck Group, and other eardrum-drubbing longhairs from the FM rock days. If you think Western civilization peaked with James Gang’s “Funk #49,” then this definitely is the playlist for you. Best of all, no VR goggles needed.

Classic rock, cook-outs, and flag-waving patriotism aren’t only for right-wing yahoos who keep a copy of Cat Scratch Fever tucked next to their Beanfield Sniper Remington Sendero SF II. I know it feels that way in an age when the Nuge and Kid Rock are snapping selfies in the Oval Office. But trust me: There’s plenty of us on the left who jump at the chance to blast big, shaggy riffs and slather grub in barbecue sauce (even if the grub being slathered is veggie burgers). And it’s for you, my fellow classic-rock lefties—like the proud American down my street with the “End the War on the Middle Class” sign in his window and a pickup truck covered in union stickers—that I’ve put together what, in my humble opinion, is one hell of a Fourth of July playlist stuffed with songs fighting the good fight.A lot of the tunes you know and love, like Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (though maybe not everybody has cracked open the howling, wall-of-guitars rendition from 1975’s Rolling Thunder Revue) and Jefferson Airplane’s muddy-ass, piano-banging, Woodstock anthem “Volunteers.” (“Hey, I’m dancing down the streets! Got a revolution!!!”). And as should be expected of any patriotic playlist worth its salt, you’re bound to find some Springsteen (whose original, acoustic version of “Born in the U.S.A.” is a bloody, brooding anti-war cry that sounds more like the dread-stained “State Trooper” than the high-gloss “Dancing in the Dark”) and Seger. (If you know only the Night Moves era—which isn’t bad, mind you—then his 1969 anti-Vietnam War psych-raver “2 +2 =?” will have you burning flags by its second verse.)But listeners will also run into a bunch of obscure nuggets. Detroit’s megaton demolition of The Velvet Underground’s “Rock ’n’ Roll,” from 1971, should’ve been a massive hit for lead singer and perpetual underdog Mitch Ryder, who around the time of its recording had joined the fight to release White Panther revolutionary and all-around awesome guy John Sinclair from prison. Ditto for Relatively Clean Rivers’ “Easy Ride,” a smoothly rolling evocation of rural hippie ethos that will totally appeal to those pro-legalization types in love with Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.There’s also a ton of soul and funk to be heard, and that’s because all true lefty rock fans don’t see any difference between rock ’n’ roll and R&B. It’s all righteous people making righteous groove music to battle the forces of oppression and tyranny that now, more than ever, are bearing down on our beloved United States. On the deliriously punchy, horn-stabbing “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” Stevie Wonder rails against Tricky Dick, but it may as well be 45. Aretha Franklin’s “Spirit in the Dark” isn’t overtly political but rather serves as a gorgeous and uplifting example of the sublimely redemptive vibrations emanating from African-American spiritual music. Another powerhouse is the proto-disco “I Want to Take You Higher” recorded at Woodstock. For just shy of seven minutes, Sly & the Family Stone make good on the American dream: full equality and integration riding some of the most ecstatic funk ever laid down.So, this Fourth of July, crank these jams, eat a ton of great food, maybe even set of some explosives. But come Wednesday morning, let these songs inspire you to crawl into the trenches to fight all the anti-union, anti-universal healthcare, anti-Black Lives Matter, anti-LGBTQ, anti-climate change, anti-public education, anti-abortion, pro-corporate, pro-war, pro-Koch forces hijacking our country.