Khyam Allami, Ola Saad, and 47Soul are just some of the names associated with a rising generation of rockers, singer-songwriters, and electronic producers creating alternative music in the Middle East and North Africa. While Western news headlines tend to focus on the struggles of Syrian refugees and the protracted fight against ISIS, the past decade in the region has seen a paradigm shift in the fields of art and music. From Cairo to Tehran, artists have looked beyond borders and mass-market media sources, adopting wifi, social media and home production programs like Pro Tools to establish new networks of collaboration and distribution.Among the talents are the band 47Soul, who capture the spirit of Arab youth culture and speak to their Palestinian roots with their analog synthesizers, political lyrics, and Levantine dabke rhythms. There’s Khyam Allami, an artist of Iraqi descent who runs the influential label Nawa Recordings, who made avant-garde punk on the soundtrack for the 2015 Tunisian indie film As I Open My Eyes/À peine jouvre les yeux and explores the boundaries of Arabic oud with the avant-garde group Alif (which features members from Egypt and Lebanon). And there’s producers like Ola Saad, who engages with her surroundings through provocative ambient electronic music and sound art.There’s a long tradition of cross-cultural collaboration and avant-garde exploration in the Middle East and North Africa, but this music today is fundamentally unique — reflecting a time of conflict and global division but also of trans-national enrichment and creative possibility.

Oh, I’m tired of looking for homeAnd asking about my loved onesMy soul is woundedSo the Syrian singer Omar Souleyman cries on “Mawal,” the penultimate track off his 2017 album, To Syria, With Love. After six years of war in his home country, the man known among Westerners for his dabke jams, for his laments to heartsickness, and for his ubiquitous keffiyeh and sunglasses can hold in his feelings no longer—he misses home.The war in Syria has spurred a global refugee crisis, stoked xenophobic and Islamophobic fears across Europe and America, and prompted U.S. president Donald Trump to add the Levantine nation to his list of countries thrown onto a controversial travel ban. But Syria’s musical traditions offer a much-needed escape from the horrors of war. Indeed, as this playlist shows, there is much to explore, from honey-voiced pop stars like George Wassouf and Assala Nasri to classical and folk traditions championed today by the likes of Ibrahim Keivo and the Orchestra or Syrian Musicians (members of whom performed a much-heralded concert last year in London with Damon Albarn and other guests as part of the musical collective Africa Express).Even before the war, Syria was never given a good rep in Western media representations; talk was all about Bashar al-Assad and the “axis of evil.” But in the Middle East, this country is famed for its rich traditions of art, music, and culture. Indeed, the capital Damascus contends as one of the oldest cities in the world, while the major city of Aleppo was famed as a center for sacral chants and the poetic and musical form called mowashah, preserved for centuries among Sufi and Christian musicians. Today, the situation may be incredibly dire for millions of Syrians, but there’s still the music, helping us heal from yesterday to today.

The African nation of Ethiopia has a unique history. It was never colonized by a European power, and through much of the 20th century the country was ruled by Haile Selassie, a member of Ethiopia’s Solomonic dynasty and the spiritual hero of the Rastafari movement. After 44 years as emperor, Selassie was overthrown in 1974, and the coming years saw a surge of repression and bloodshed by the communist military junta that took over. But in the waning years of Selassie’s reign, Ethiopia become famous for producing a generation of singers and artists who reinvigorated and reinvented local popular music.As has been documented over the past decades by international labels like Buda Musique—known for its famous Éthiopiques compilation series—great artists like Mahmoud Ahmed, Mulatu Astatke, Tlahoun Gessesse, and Bzunesh Beqele came to prominence in the ‘60s and ‘70s by playing in the capital of Addis Ababa with Emperor Selassie’s Imperial Bodyguard Band and the Police Orchestra, both state-controlled outfits. The music—called adadis zefanotch, or “new songs” in Amharic—was decidedly modern, influenced in part by American funk and jazz, but also drew heavily on local rhythms, modal systems, and the folk repertoire while featuring lyrics sung in Amharic and Oromigna.One fine example is Mulatu Astatke’s 1972 album, Mulatu of Ethiopia. Recorded in New York City in between Astatke’s studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the album finds the jazz composer forging an Ethio-jazz sound by melding Latin jazz and psychedelic soul while using pentatonic melodies and 3/4 rhythms. The album is being reissued this month in a deluxe LP package via Strut Records, so to celebrate, we’ve put together a playlist that looks at his music and the music of other Ethiopian greats from that period—a body of work that still sounds revolutionary today.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.When Papa Wemba collapsed onstage at a concert in Côte d’Ivoire last April, the world lost another one of its musical giants. A bandleader, singer, and fashion icon from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Papa Wemba — who was 66 when he died — was as bold and eccentric as they come, beloved across Africa and the West for his piercing vocal style, outrageous outfits, and countless albums of infectious music, which mixed traditional Congolese and Cuban-style rhythms with intertwining electric guitars, intricate multi-part harmonies, and global influences.Born Jules Shungu Wembadio Pene Kikumba in 1949 in what was then the Belgian Congo, Papa Wemba first made a name for himself as one of the founding singers of the legendary Kinshasa soukous band Zaiko Langa Langa — sometimes referred to as the Rolling Stones of the Congo for their rebellious sensibilities and amped-up take on the rumba-inspired guitar and vocal music of previous innovators like Franco Luambo Makiadi and Sam Mangwana. After releasing numerous hit records and helping invent a dance called the cavacha, Papa Wemba broke off and started his own group, Viva La Musica. Later he relocated to Paris and teamed up with an international cast of collaborators (including “world music” champion Peter Gabriel) to explore everything from Latin music to soul/R&B to some astonishingly eccentric synth and drum machine sounds.Papa Wemba also starred in the hit 1987 Congolese film La Vie est belle, and he pioneered the dandy-ish “sapeur” style, inspiring generations of Congolese youth to stroll the streets while sporting rainbow-colored three-piece suits, furry hats, bowler caps and old-timey tobacco pipes. The songs on this playlist take in his distinct legacy — spanning his career from the early ‘70s up to some of his latest releases, like his well-received album from 2010, Notre Pere Rumba.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.Don’t be misled by the megawatt smile of Algerian singer-songwriter Khaled. Known as the king of raï, his songs are as provocative as they are joyful. Raï (which means “opinion” or “point of view” in Arabic) first blossomed in the 1970s and ’80s in the rowdy cabarets of Oran, a port city on the coast of the Mediterranean. As the music gained in popularity, a pioneering record producer named Rachid Baba-Ahmed started bringing local stars to his studio in the northwestern city of Tlemcen to record pop-oriented tracks featuring synthesizers, guitars, and drum machines. This “pop raï” sound was documented on the iconic 1988 compilation Rai Rebels, which put raï on the map and helped lay a foundation for international superstars like Khaled — then known as Cheb Khaled, an honorary title meaning “Young Man.” As he gained in popularity, Khaled dropped the “Cheb” from his name and toured the globe. In 1999, the genre’s renown was fully cemented as singer Cheb Mami teamed up with Sting to record the hit “Desert Rose” — which made it into the Top 20 on the U.S. Billboard charts — while Khaled paired with fellow raï stars Rachid Taha and Faudel for the much-celebrated live album 1, 2, 3 Soleils. By now raï hits were fully globalized affairs featuring Western-style song structures, universal themes, and some of the most sentimental pop hooks known to man. But the genre remained controversial back home, where a civil war was consuming Algeria whole. The singer Cheb Hasni and the producer Baba-Ahmed were both assassinated by Islamist militants in 1994 and 1995, and many artists had to flee, no longer able to safely sing music that dealt with controversial matters like drinking and forbidden love. The war in Algeria ended in 2002 and today raï continues to evolve, with younger artists fusing it together with genres like R&B. And of course, Khaled scored another hit in 2012 with his club banger “C’est la vie.” It just goes to show how powerful the genre is, encapsulating the drastic extremes of life itself.

I didn’t linger too long in front of the theater. A sign posted by the front door warned that the street was under surveillance, and I didn’t want to arouse suspicion. But I stayed long enough to take in the beauty and whimsy and power of it all: The hulking size of the building. The bright colors of the exterior, evoking a Moulin Rouge-esque festivity. The letters doing a merry jig above the front door: BATACLAN.It was early April and I was on a 13-hour stopover in Paris while on an overseas trip back to Los Angeles. For all of its romance and history, the French capital has never been one of my bucket-list travel destinations. But now that I had a chance, the first place I wanted to see (aside from the Eiffel Tower) was the 1,500-capacity Bataclan theater, site of the 2015 terrorist attack where ISIS gunmen killed 89 people during an Eagles of Death Metal concert.In front of the building, I thought back to the day when it all went down. I remembered driving my car around sunny Los Angeles, listening with growing panic and horror as news of the coordinated Paris attacks unfolded in real-time on NPR. Terrified reporters and witnesses were giving reports while barricaded inside restaurants as shooting went on mere blocks away. French president François Hollande was broadcast live giving a statement calling the attacks an act of war.Terrorism is a heavily symbolic gesture—it’s a spectacle meant to spill blood and cause carnage, but also to generate waves of confusion and panic, to undercut our sense of safety, elevate our sense of doubt, and make us feel ill at ease wherever we are. Now, in recent years, as a music journalist and longtime music lover, I’ve felt more and more so that my own community has become a target. There was the attack on the Bataclan. There were the jihadis aligned with Al-Qaeda who violently banned music in northern Mali in 2012—a region that has long enjoyed a rich overlap between religion and song. There was the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last year, and the New Year’s Eve attack at a club on the Bosphorus in Istanbul.And then there was the bombing at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester on May 22. The bombing killed 22 people, including an eight year old girl, and I struggle to imagine how far gone a militant must be, how many atrocities they’ve already committed, how deep they’ve sunk into their own numb and dead-eyed worldview, to be capable of carefully plotting out an attack like this: Targeting the fans of an artist whose songs are so expertly crafted that they always have a way of hitting right on the pleasure centers of your nervous system, an artist whose very name—“Grande”—speaks to the enormity of her personality and the power of her voice in conveying joy and release and love.The point of these attacks, of course, is to destroy lives and destroy what we love. To make us think twice about going to our next show. To make us look for the emergency exit signs every time we walk into a venue, instead of focusing on the great music unfolding onstage. But music is one of the most resilient human expressions, and this playlist—featuring Ariana Grande and Eagles of Death Metal, Mali’s Khaira Arby and Vieux Farka Touré, a release off Turkish label Drug Boulevard, as well as some classic Manchester bands—stands as a testament to the way music keeps us coming together even in the face of hatred.

The vast swathes of the Sahel and Sahara regions in West Africa may not look like much from a map, but for centuries they’ve been criss-crossed by trading caravans and pilgrims, creating unique migration patterns and allowing for the exchange of food, language, and ideas. So it’s no surprise that today this sandy and arid region is home to multiple generations of musicians who’ve embraced the key instrument of American and European rock ’n’ roll.From Timbuktu to Agadez, singers and songwriters have embraced the guitar as a mode of expression and musical reinvention. The instrument is believed to have distant roots in the Sahara region, as West Africans taken to North America during the transatlantic slave trade brought with them songs and dances that went onto inform the music of future bluesmen like Robert Johnson. The blues were reinvented again by Ali Farka Touré, the Malian singer and songwriter famed for his mesmerizing guitar style. But there’s also Tuareg bands like Tinariwen, who first picked up guitars in the 1980s as a way to articulate the struggles and sadness of their generation, as the Tuareg people were beset by displacement, drought and later took up arms in rebellions against the governments of Niger and Mali.Today, the recording industry and international festival circuit is packed with now-familiar names from the Sahara region, including younger generations of artists like the Sahrawi singer/songwriter Aziza Brahim and the electric guitar virtuoso Mdou “Bombino” Moctar from the frontier city of Agadez in Niger. This playlist reflects the many talents who come from this rich modern tradition.

Let’s be blunt: Southern California is the perfect place to get high. The skies are sunny year-round and the beaches are beautiful and plenty. There’s the bountiful surf of Malibu, the craggy rocks and gnarled trees of Joshua Tree, and the sweeping canyons and mellow vibes of San Diego; the landscape is the stuff of myth. Inspiration can be found all around, so perhaps it’s no surprise that so many great artists, all from the region but from different genres, sing marijuana’s praises.The list of artists is seemingly endless: In Los Angeles alone there’s The Mamas & The Papas, who were definitely thinking about lighting up when they sang “Safe In My Garden”; there’s Sublime, who made their interests obvious enough when they covered The Toyes’ reggae classic “Smoke Two Joints”; and of course there’s Cypress Hill and Snoop Dogg, the latter who has built a whole brand as the champion of weed smokers. These are just some of the obvious picks, of course, but put your finger practically anywhere on the SoCal map and you’ll find tendrils of smoke and pleasant sounds rising up, from Kyuss out in Palm Desert to Wavves’ Nathan Williams, who got his start recording tunes like “Weed Demon” at his parent’s house in San Diego.In honor of the release of Wavves’ latest album, You’re Welcome, out May 19 via Ghost Ramp, we’ve put together a playlist of SoCal stoner classics. Taking this in is sure to lighten any social engagement involving a bubbler, spliff, or vape pen, but it also offers a little slice of SoCal history and legacy through the bloodshot eyes of some of its greatest talents.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.