Miss Sharon Jones, who passed away from pancreatic cancer on November 18, 2016, may have not briefly conquered pop like the late Amy Winehouse, who famously used Jones’ band the Dap-Kings to make Back in Black. But unlike most of the unsung soul-blues world from which she emerged in 1996, when musician and producer Gabriel Roth plucked her out of a Lee Fields recording session, Jones eventually soared as an international headliner. Songs like “100 Days, 100 Nights” appeared on film and TV soundtracks and commercials. Her “Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects” became a holiday perennial. She became the subject of an inspirational, award-winning documentary about her fight against cancer, Miss Sharon Jones! And she collaborated with Lou Reed, David Byrne, and many others. Jones served as an influential rejoinder to an increasingly formulaic and electronic pop and R&B environment, and led a small revolution subsequently called “retro soul.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Adele, Aloe Blacc, Joss Stone, Leon Bridges or any other revivalist flourishing without the woman whose first Desco 7-inch preceded Back in Black by a decade, mentored fellow soul shouter Charles Bradley, and is Daptone Records’ biggest star. Sharon Jones may have been taken from this world too soon. But she got her due.

The release of Partynextdoor’s third album, PX3 or Partynextdoor 3 has been greeted by a growing realization that this Canadian singer is a bona fide R&B star. After all, it was only three years ago when critics derided the Toronto singer’s debut as a Faustian cataclysm of Future’s croon, the Weeknd’s anomie, and Drake’s suburban blues. Yet partly thanks to Drake’s cosign, each of his albums have performed better than the last, with his recent “Come and See Me” single being the first to crack the pop charts. His music fits snugly into the genre’s taste for what has been described as “woozy” R&B, a electronic conceit that once seemed like an innovation with the Weekend’s 2010 trio of EPs and Miguel’s “Adorn” smash, but which, over five years later, now looks like an artistic cul-de-sac. However, unlike other genres, tastemakers don’t determine the course of R&B – the audience does. Twitter trolls may love to crack jokes about Bryson Tiller’s overly familiar blend of screwed rap&B, but his album still went platinum. And Drake’s continued dominance needs no unpacking here. Like it or not, the electronic, synthesized “wooz” of post-millennial R&B clichés seems like it will be with us for the immediate future.

Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.It’s difficult to name another hip-hop musician who has stayed relevant as long as Q-Tip. He launched his career in 1988 with a verse on the Jungle Brothers’ “Black is Black.” But it’s his underrated talents as a producer, not as a rapper, that holds the key to his continued relevance. Alongside DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad, he produced most of the beats for the group’s first three albums, including classics like “Bonita Applebum” and “Electric Relaxation.” He devised several tracks for Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, worked with Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, and briefly served as part of Kanye West’s GOOD Music team, resulting in numerous contributions to Kanye and Jay Z’s Watch the Throne. This year, he has continued to land production credits on major albums like Solange’s A Seat at the Table. However, the recent surprise release of A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got It From Here…Thank You for Your Service is a reminder that Q-Tip is best known as one of the greatest ensembles in the genre’s history.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Long Island rapper and producer Roc Marciano hails from a late-‘90s era when thug talk was the vernacular in New York hip-hop. His sound, along with that of contemporaries such as Ka and Westside Gunn, has been described as a revival of dusty-fingered, sample-heavy, old-school boom bap. Roc Marciano was a product of Busta Rhymes’ Flipmode Squad and later formed his own group, the U.N., with help from Pete Rock.But by the time he started dazzling critics and crate-digger aesthetes with his 2011 solo debut Marcberg, his music didn’t quite resemble the rotten apple rap of the ’90s. His softly confident, matter-of-fact tone sounds like he’s speaking to you from the driver’s seat of a plush Cadillac, and he often crafts his own beats using drums sparingly, resulting in music with a spacey, opiate-like haze. It’s boom bap 3.0, filtered through the weed-crusted psychedelic influence of beatmasters like Madlib and The Alchemist, both of whom he’s worked with; in particular, with The Alchemist on the one-off project Greneberg.But if his friend Ka is the Brooklyn clocker-turned-basement mystic, then Roc Marciano is the OG braggart teaching grasshoppers about real hustlers. He lays out the game in vivid detail on his latest album, the revelatory Rosebudd’s Revenge, a title that pays homage to the totem of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. The lyrics are full of pimps, big booty girls, and fine threads, but more important is the aura he projects—this is music that transports you to a film in your mind, whether it resembles Super Fly or something else entirely.The selections on this playlist include tracks from his three solo albums and mixtapes like The Pimpire Strikes Back, plus cameos like last year’s appearance on De La Soul’s And the Anonymous Nobody.

The emergence of a viable rap scene in Seattle didn’t happen overnight. Even as Macklemore & Ryan Lewis briefly took over the pop airwaves with “Thrift Shop” in 2012, less-celebrated artists were determining the future of the Northwest city’s sound. In fact, much of the Seattle rap underground resembles other U.S. homegrown scenes that formed in the wake of indie rap icons like Lil B and Odd Future: The music is amorphous and electronic, the lyrics tend toward chemically enhanced streams-of-consciousness, and there are enough sonic quirks to make you want to crawl down a SoundCloud wormhole.Shabazz Palaces’ surreal, Afrocentric-inspired treatises are a touchstone, as are Blue Sky Black Death’s cloud rap symphonies. The latter worked with Nacho Picasso, who then formed the Moor Gang collective with Jarv Dee and Gifted Gab. Shabazz Palaces’ Black Constellation crew attracted THEESatisfaction and Chimurenga Renaissance—who coined the popular event and meme “Black Weirdo” before disbanding in 2016—and influenced avant-rap artists like Porter Ray and Tay Sean. Then there’s Thraxxhouse, a crew formed by Mackned and Key Nyata who take inspiration from internet oddities like Florida’s Raider Klan.Unfairly or not, there’s some lingering resentment in the city toward Macklemore, whose huge successes have overshadowed the city much as Sir Mix-A-Lot did with “Baby Got Back” in the ‘90s. (We declined to include all the diss songs aimed at the rapper on this playlist.) No one seems capable of ascending to the same commercial heights, although Eighty4 Fly has earned over 1 million streams on SoundCloud with his 2012 trippy smoker tune “Kush High.” But maybe that’s the status quo the Emerald City prefers: a micro-scene dictated by industrious talents instead of pop novelty.

Snoop Dogg is a rapper who will collaborate with anyone for the right price. But unlike, say, Gucci Mane, his tossed-off verses appear on more than miscellaneous cuts by random regional street rappers. Snoop’s musical promiscuity has led to surprisingly unlikely songs like “Lavender,” a track he made with Canadian jazz band BadBadNotGood and producer Kaytranada. Earlier this month, their video generated national headlines by depicting Snoop pointing a toy gun at a Donald Trump impersonator, resulting in an angry tweet from the president himself.

“Lavender” may be the most prominent example of how Snoop Dogg has extended his reach beyond the confines of urban pop. He’s delved into L.A.’s indie funk and electronic scenes by working with Dâm-Funk—on 2013’s underrated 7 Days of Funk—Adrian Younge, and Flying Lotus, appeared on Run the Jewels’ willfully bizarre remix project Meow the Jewels, and worked with adult soul veterans like Goapele and Kindred the Family Soul. On most of these tracks, the 40-something rapper genially plays the Uncle Snoop role, a celebrator of fine women and good smoke, while tactfully avoiding the vocal aggression that occasionally creeps up in his street-rap cameos (his “Lavender” verses against the president are a notable exception). He can come off as corny but he knows how to fit in, as memorable songs like his duet with Gorillaz, “Sumthin Like This Night,” prove.Among Snoop’s generation of late-‘80s/early-‘90s solo rap stars, there are precious few who still release commercially viable work: E-40, Too $hort, Dr. Dre, Nas, and JAY Z come to mind. Amidst that increasingly short list, Snoop’s role as West Coast ambassador for everyone, and not just the pop music industry in particular, is important. And the fact that he’s used his position to make intriguing digital funk gems like Flying Lotus’ “Dead Man’s Tetris” is a big plus.Click here to add to Spotify playlist!

As President Barack Obama’s historic term in office winds to a close, his legacy remains unsettled, and so does his presence within hip-hop culture. When he emerged in the mid-2000s as a talented Illinois senator, Chicago rapper Common rapped on Jadakiss’ “Why” remix with eerie prescience, “Why is Bush acting like he trying to get Osama/Why don’t we impeach him and elect Obama?” Four years later, as Obama capped a historic run to the White House, he became a pop culture meme celebrated on Jeezy’s “My President is Black” and Nas’ “Black President.” But there was also an emerging leftist critique against the Democratic president– see Mr. Lif’s “What About Us” and dead prez’ “Politrikks” – and that criticism only increased as he battled with an implacable Republican Congress, failed to prosecute Wall Street executives responsible for the 2008 economic recession, struggled to extricate the country from wars in the Middle East, and tried to bring the country out of an economic recession.Only time will tell which image resonates the most: the pop icon from Jidenna’s “Long Live the Chief” who shifted the country towards steady but incremental progress, or the establishmentarian whose policies resulted in insubstantial trickle-down gains for the working class, leading African-Americans like Ice Cube to declare that “Everythang’s Corrupt.” The arrival of his Republican successor, real estate tycoon Donald Trump, only muddies the waters of how we’ll eventually perceive this historic figure. As YG raps on “FDT,” “[Trump] got me appreciating Obama way more.”

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.

It’s not easy deducing the recent shift of trap-oriented Southern rap from Dolby stereo action-movie bombast into weird, ominous electronics. When asked about their influences, current leaders like 808 Mafia and Mike Will Made-It tend to cite earlier contemporaries like Zaytoven and Drumma Boy or, if they’re feeling generous, pioneers like DJ Toomp. You can certainly chart a through-line from the swampy keyboard menace of 1997-era Three 6 Mafia and No Limit to Rae Sremmurd’s just-released SremmLife 2, the latter featuring a notable homage to early Triple Six via the Juicy J collaboration “Shake It Fast.”But where did Three 6 Mafia get its inspiration for horrorcore gems like “Where Da Killaz Hang”? That’s the premise for this speculative look into the electronic underpinnings of third-wave trap. We doubt that Metro Boomin, for example, sat around studying classic Aphex Twin tracks before he decided to layer haunted house-styled keyboard arrangements over his FL Studio drum patterns. Instead, we turn to the earliest corollary for his work on Future’s bleedy-eyed DS2: movie soundtracks, particularly when it comes to the electronic horror of John Carpenter, and the unsettling ambience of Tangerine Dream. We also think that the ongoing electro revival that sparked in the early 2000s may have a subconscious impact. Cumulatively, these sounds may be just mainstream electronica clichés, and pop culture moments symbolized by the famous scene in the recent cult classic Drive where the protagonist shifts his car over the gooey electro crush of Kavinsky’s “Nightcall.”There are a few more concrete examples to be found, too, once we take our heads out of the clouds. Fragments from 8-bit arcade games abound, especially the Street Fighter II soundtrack. Producers often rely on presets and sound libraries found in equipment like the Roland Integra-7 synthesizer. A Whosampled search reveals that Mike Will Made-It sampled Spain balladeer Camilo Sesto’s “Agua de Dos Rios” for his “Drinks On Us.” Of course, he wasn’t drawn by Sesto’s voice, but the alluring melody that kicks off the song. It seems that when it comes to this current iteration of trap music, producers will draw inspiration from wherever they can find it.

It was a weird year in American life. It was a weird year in hip-hop, too. Much of mainstream rap descended into a dark pharmacological haze that was alternately illuminating and horrifying; few embodied those twin impulses like the dead-eyed, flat-voiced rapper 21 Savage. Every major chart hit seemed to include Migos, or one of its members. Most rappers spent more time singing and harmonizing than actually rapping, whether it was Future, Lil Uzi Vert, or Kendrick Lamar. Drake entered his Aerosmith/rock-dinosaur phase—likeable enough, still one of the biggest stars, but no longer generating the kind of critical excitement and discourse he once did. And the top newcomer of the year (though technically her debut mixtape dropped last year) was Cardi B, a former Bronx exotic-dancer-turned-reality-TV-star-turned-social-media-darling who may not be a technically proficient rapper, but made up for it with a delightful mix of personality and panache.Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. was arguably the year’s best album, but it also seemed purposely muted and focused on addressing past triumphs, personal failings, and searching for a path ahead. Its defining quality may have been a surplus of hooky, memorable tunes that didn’t overwhelm intellectually like his past work. By contrast, Vince Staples’ Big Fish Theory delved into fame, disappointment, and UK beat culture in vivid yet perplexing fashion. Migos’ Culture simply offered a cavalcade of hits. Its magnificently scattershot quality was akin to a Stephen Curry highlight reel: Even the best shooters in the NBA merely average over 50 per cent makes. Playboi Carti’s self-titled debut was wonderfully ephemeral. Nothing felt like a genre-shifting achievement on the scale of last year’s Coloring Book, or 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly and DS2. But in a year when optimism about the world around us was in dangerously dwindling supply, modest artistic breakthroughs felt like small yet important steps forward.