I first met Janelle Monàe when she was 22 years-old and opening up for the Oakland neo-soul legend Raphael Saadiq at the San Francisco venue Bimbos, a mid-size club on the outskirts of that city’s North Beach neighborhood. A few months before, she’d released her debut EP, Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase). It was an exciting, groundbreaking collection. It combined the wild, post-rap funk of Outkast and afrofuturism of George Clinton with the tech dystopianism of William Gibson and a more formalalistic, Brechtian remove. For a kid weaned on semiotics and Gang Starr, this collision was enthralling, if a bit messy. Janelle’s voice was captivating, but the songs sometimes couldn’t keep up with her energy -- the backing vocals blurred together, and the choruses weren’t always memorable. In short, I liked the idea more than her music.Regardless, she was a dynamic personality, and I was excited for the interview. About a half hour before she took the stage, her manager took me backstage, where Janelle was cloistered inside of small changing room -- more of a closet than a suite. She was already outfitted in her signature white tuxedo shirt, with her hair was bunched up into its beehive coif. She was nervous, but friendly. She offered me a water, which was nice of her. I spent the first 10 minutes of the interview trying to place her in the lineage of afrofuturism, discussing Octavia Paz and Parliament. In retrospect, it was a dumb move -- I assumed that her reading of herself was the same as mine, and didn’t allow her to speak for herself -- and the strategy bit me in the ass when, with five minutes left in my appointed interview window, she, annoyed and maybe embarrassed, declared that she didn’t know much about afrofuturism, she’d barely even heard of it. I felt shitty and a little bit disappointed. I hated that I had put her in a foul mood, and, more selfishly, I had no idea if anything in the interview was usable.But her live show that night was rapturious, a prolonged ecstatic release of energy that found her bouncing, jerking, and bounding across the stage in barely controlled dance patterns. You couldn’t take your eyes off her. And though she doesn’t make dance music, you couldn’t help but move. It didn’t matter that here hooks weren’t quite there, or that she hadn’t yet been able to name her own style, the performance was special, even singular. Since then, she’s made some jaw-dropping tracks that’ve shown immense growth and refinement, but the music, though oftentimes very very good, has never quite escaped her heavy conceptual framework. Luckily, she’s entirely catches up with herself on Dirty Computer. The album largely, though not entirely, loses the funkified Android conceit of her earlier work. It’s both more personal and more self-assured. It glides where her other music tends to churn, and the hooks are immediately catchy, and stick in your head. It’s still occasionally directive of other people’s work -- “Make Me Feel” sounds remarkably like Dirty Mind-era Prince, for example -- but she entirely makes it her own here; the sums of her influence coalesce into something much more personal and singular. It’s the best work of her career, and may end up being both the most fun and important album of 2018.The album’s two opening tracks are among the most memorable one-two punch in recent memory. Brian Wilson’s vocal remain pop’s greatest invocation, and amidst his lilting, layered , the lead-off title resurrects Janelle’s dreamy, sensual landscape. She invites us to “look closer” at the “text message caught up in the sky.” Once again, she’s identifying with hardware (a dirty computer, in this case), but the vocals are warm and human, and, soon, we hear MLK reciting the Declaration of Independence. We’re onto “Crazy, Classic, Life” now -- one of the neat tricks the front half of the album pulls off is blurring the space between songs, so that it all sounds like one, long jam -- and Janelle quickly asserts a theme that will run through the album. It’s 2018 now, and her and people like her are no longer on the margins; they’re now the “rulers” and “kings.” “Im not Americas nightmare,” she coos on the song’s pre-chorus, “Im the American dream.”In that way, it resembles Frank Ocean’s Blonde, another coronation of a queer America that was curtailed by Trump’s election a few months later. Monàe’s work contains little of Ocean’s melancholy or ambience; Dirty Computer is pure pop music, euphoric and uncluttered. “PYNK,” which features Montreal steam pop producer Grimes, is a technicolor march down the broadest boulevards of American culture. The song hems together and subverts lyrical archetypes. Witness the pre-chorus:“So, here we are in the carLeavin traces of us down the boulevardI wanna fall through the starsGetting lost in the dark is my favorite partLets count the ways we could make this last forever"Taken out of context, this could be sung by Tom Petty, Britney Spears, or any number of chroniclers of main street adolescence. That Janelle is using this in the service of an anthem to pansexuality should be subversive, but, in 2018, it seems perfectly normal. This is a victory for all of us.Monàe’s previous music has always seemed to exist in a different time. The revved-up guitar riffs and funky drummer breakdowns place her in the ‘60s, while the lyrics’ runaway-Android lover motif put her firmly in the (20)40s. But Dirty Computer feels necessarily of this time. The world caught up with her. The techno-dystopian daydream of her earlier work has become a crippling reality, and, yes, that’s unfortunate. But the sheer, self-conscious otherness of Janelle, which ten years ago was a commercial liability, is not only permissible, but is celebrated, and this album is funky testament to this new freedom.

We all have our passion projects. For some of us, it’s tending a garden or collecting vinyl, while others write novels or cut vanity records. JAY Z, being JAY Z, thinks on a much larger scale. For the past two years, he has been singly focused on building his fledgling streaming service, Tidal. He’s squeezed favors from friends, spent ridiculous amounts of time and money on promoting the service, and even gotten his wife involved in the proceedings (though, it must be noted, her contribution came wrapped in a bow of marital discontent). At first, this very much seemed like a business decision. Most of us never really believed the line about him trying to empower artists with a (somewhat) more fair streaming business model. The best guesses by industry insiders was that he would build it out, and then flip it for a couple hundred million in profit. After all, he is a business, man.But, increasingly, JAY Z seems to be motivated less and less by altruism, or even business acumen, and more by hubris. This is a man who’s not used to losing, and turning his back on Tidal—either by shutting it down, or selling it for scraps—definitely feels like an L. So, here we are. JAY Z has a new album, 4:44, his first since 2013’s critically panned but commercially successful Magna Carta Holy Grail. And that album will be available exclusively on Tidal. There’s been a lotofinkspilledabout why exclusives are bad for the industry and bad for fans, and those articles seem to focus on two basic principles: 1) Forcing fans to shell out for an additional music service is fundamentally unfair, and 2) it frustrates the fans, encourages privacy, and shrinks the marketplace. We generally agree with this line of thinking, albeit with a few caveats—the streaming marketplace isn’t as frail as it once was, and there are consumers with the resources and the motivation to buy what is effectively a bigger bag of popcorn. But, ultimately, the true casualty of the exclusivity wars is the artform.Music is a living medium. It’s supposed to be heard, discussed, and reappropriated into new forms. In short, it’s a conversation between millions of fans and artists, and if you have that conversation in a closet, or behind a velvet rope, then it’s a pretty shitty conversation. The fact that The Beatles took 10-plus years to get into the subscription music marketplace, and were so protective of their online presence, meant an entire generation had limited exposure to what is undoubtedly the most influential rock group of the past half century. It’s probably not a coincidence that most of the retro-minded bands of past decade have gravitated towards the bluesy, garage rock that was championed by The Rolling Stones. It’s simply what they had exposure to, and what they heard. And while the reservoirs of Boomer Beatles nostalgia is nearly endless, the band felt largely invisible to millennials for the better part of a decade.This is not to suggest that JAY Z’s legacy is in any immediate danger—he more or less owned hip-hop in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s—but it’s also pretty clear that the release strategy for 4:44 will hurt its overall cultural impact, even if, by some miracle, it boosts Tidal’s bottom line. It certainly hurt Beyoncé’s Lemonade. That was one of the strongest albums of the decade and arguably the best of Beyoncé’s career, but its impact and cultural cachet already seem to be waning just because many people can’t listen to it.To be very selfish, The Dowsers is a magazine exclusively devoted to playlist criticism and analysis. When an important record comes out—say, SZA’s CTRL or Solange’s A Seat at the Table—we pore over its influences, samples, collaborations, and impact in an attempt to put it in a larger context and make sense of it for our readers. It’s our part of the conversation around popular music. But we can’t do that with JAY Z’s 4:44. We can’t even create a playlist around his previous albums; they’ve also disappeared from Spotify. So, instead, we’ve opted to create a playlist that focuses on his guest verses. It’s an awesome playlist, of course, but it also feels like a missed opportunity—and that’s on JAY Z.

Declaring that you are your own “business” — as Jay-Z famously did on the “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” remix — cuts both ways. On the one hand, it’s the ultimate hip-hop/hyper capitalism boast. You’ve transcended the station of mere worker, and are your own private cottage industry. But, on the other hand, you’re a business: cold, calculating, and corrupt. Not to be trusted, basically. And since Jay-Z uttered that now infamous line (full quote: “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man”), he’s gone out of his way to transition from a lowly humanoid to a fully functioning multi-national corporation. He bought a basketball team, started a talent management agency, and captained a digital streaming service. So it’s no wonder that the playlist that he created in conjunction with his inclusion into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame feels awfully transactional. There’s a smattering of old school hip-hop (Grandmaster Flash, Eric B & Rakim, Public Enemy), a few tracks from his friends/collaborators/labelmates (Kanye, Eminem, Nas), and some tasteful socio-conscious tracks (Mos Def, OutKast, 2Pac). He’s developed his own canon, and that canon is a lot like almost every other fair-minded hip-hop canon. It’d be hard to argue that “Stan,” “Ms. Jackson,” or “Fight the Power” aren’t Mt. Rushmore rap, but this playlist feels like a missed opportunity. In interviews and in song, Jay-Z has displayed a more idiosyncratic taste in rap, championing everyone from Big L to Jay Electronica. There is none of this on this seemingly raked-over, corporatized playlist. Sure, if you want to hear all the hits one more time, and delivered to you by one of the genre’s most talented and transitional figures, this is great, but it’s also not particularly interesting. And, hey, where’s the Memphis Bleek?

This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you.By 2007, Kendrick was already on his way to becoming a hip-hop star. He had signed with Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE), released two mixtapes—2003’s Y.H.N.I.C. (Hub City Threat: Minor of the Year) and 2005’s Training Day—and he even managed to perform his first show, which was also the first concert he ever attended.“When I went on tour with The Game [and Jay Rock, in 2006]—that was my first show,” Lamar remembers. “[Going to shows] cost money. Gas money. Me being on stage was me fulfilling two different things—performing and getting to enjoy it like the people were enjoying it.”But violence was never far behind, and, just after midnight on June 13, 2007, officers from the LAPDs Southeast Division responded to a domestic-violence call on East 120th Street, about five minutes from Lamars house. There, they found his good friend D.T. allegedly holding a 10-inch knife. According to police, D.T. charged, and an officer opened fire, killing him."It never really quite added up," Kendrick says. "But heres the crazy thing. Normally when we find out somebody got killed, the first thing we say is Who did it? Where we gotta go? Its a gang altercation. But this time it was the police—the biggest gang in California. Youll never win against them."If Kendrick’s childhood was about survival—finding a way to live amidst the pervasive gang and political violence that consumed his community—then his late-adolescence and young adulthood was about escaping that reality through his music. Kendrick was always talented, but, from 2005 to 2011, he would dramatically grow as an artist, and he would go from being an obscure Compton rapper to a globally recognized, award-winning superstar. The reasons for this growth are both obvious—he’s a preternaturally talented rapper and an extremely hard worker—and more nuanced. Over the years, Kendrick allowed himself to grow; he learned from his mistakes, embraced his artistic ambition, and constantly struggled to mold a singular and honest voice.“What you going to do?” Kendrick asks. “You going to find something you love to do and have a passion for, or you going to stay mingling in the streets till something major happens. So the moment when I defined myself and freed myself was the time that I locked myself in the studio and said I need to do music.”Kendrick’s first release, Y.H.N.I.C., is very much the product of a 16-year-old hip-hop fan. The production is scattershot, largely lifted from early-’00s hip-hop beats—Lloyd Banks’ “Work Magic,” Lil Wayne’s “Go DJ,” Snoop’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot”—while Kendrick’s lyrics are a similarly generic hodgepodge of cliched machismo (“I might Ken Griffey ya bitch/ But wont buy her shit/ Not even a small bag of chips”) and vague truisms. Still, despite the debut’s shortcomings, you can hear a confidence and focus in his voice, and, ultimately, the mixtape served its purpose.“We put [Y.H.N.I.C.] out on a local scale in Compton and built a buzz in the city and eventually got to this guy named Top Dawg, he had his own independent label. And I’ve been with them since and we’ve just been developing my sound,” Kendrick remembers.Shortly thereafter, in the summer of 2004, Kendrick was also courted by Def Jam Records. Though not much is known of this, and it didn’t result in any recorded music, it allowed Kendrick to meet one of his idols, Jay-Z.“I don’t think even Jay remember that. This was when I was like first turned 17,” Kendrick says. “And I remember coming out here for a meeting and I was too excited, man. And all I remember was Jay walking in the room, ‘Yo, what’s up?’ And walked back to the elevator and we was like, ‘Damn, that’s Jay.’ So he doubles back, goes back to his office next door and he’s playing my music… that was just one of those situations where I wasn’t ready.”

Though 2005’s follow-up, Training Day, was a vast improvement, it was still fairly derivative. But, at least now, he’d narrowed his focus to one influence in particular. Instead of funneling Jay-Z, Pac, G-funk, and DMX, Training Day pretty squarely echoes imperial-era Lil Wayne. Like Wayne, Kendrick’s voice has a strained whisper that’s punctuated by sudden whelps, and you can map almost every flow on the album to something on Wayne’s first two Carter albums.

Kendrick even has Wayne’s tick where he deeply exhales through his teeth before the beginning of each verse. It’s uncanny, and not terribly creative, but it’s an accomplishment in its own way. After all, Wayne has one of the most intricate flows in rap. This remote, one-sided tutelage would continue for some time, and four years later, Kendrick released C4, an homage to Lil Wayne that featured many of that rappers’ beats.

C4 also contains what, by Kendrick’s own estimation, is his worst song: “Bitch, I’m in The Club.” Though not a terrible song, per se, it is a clanking, perfunctory club banger with rote, swagger-pumping lyrics and tinny production. “That was a reach,” Kendrick says. “I know the level of reach that I was doing when I wrote that record to everything that was playing on the radio to what was on TV. [Lil’ Wayne] was definitely running radio at that time.”

But rather than discourage him, Kendrick took inspiration from the song. When asked what was the moment that he realized this rap thing was for real, Kendrick replied, “I think when I made a terrible single, and that shit was just garbage. Its the real moment because, at that point youre at your lowest ... but, at the same time, I wasnt aware that that was my highest point because I got back in there and I did it all over again, and continued to push through. Thats when I realized I really wanna do this, because I aint give up when I made a terrible ass song.”It was around this time, in 2009, when Kendrick decided to change his performing name. From his time at Centennial High, Kendrick had always rapped by the name K. Dot, and while his rap career was moving forward, he felt that he’d grown creatively stagnant. He was a great writer, but he’d didn’t feel as though he’d invested himself into his stories, so he decided to be more direct.“When I stopped going by K. Dot, I think that was the moment where I really found my voice,” Lamar remembers. “Early, early on, I really wanted to be signed. And that was a mistake, because it pushes you two steps backwards when you have this concept of ‘OK, I’ve got to make these three [commercial] songs in order to get out into the world and be heard.’ So there were two or three years where I wanted to be signed so badly that I’m making these same two or three repetitive demo kinds of records, and I’m hindering my growth. The world could have got Kendrick Lamar two or three years earlier if I’d stuck to the script and continued to develop.”At that moment, Kendrick began work in earnest on good kid, m.A.A.d. city, but that project would be derailed and he instead focused on The Kendrick Lamar EP. “He actually wrote a project called good kid, m.A.A.d. city before the EP came out,” TDE president Punch relays. “The plan was for the eight-song EP to drop as a warm-up for the good kid, m.A.A.d. city he did already. In the process, he had more songs and the buzz started growing, so we dropped the EP.”While we had to wait another three years for the landmark good kid, m.A.A.d. city, the hour-long, 14-track EP was perhaps Kendrick’s first essential release, and it represented a dramatic artistic evolution for Kendrick. For one thing, it sounded like nothing he’d done in the past. TDE producer Sounwave has been in and out of the TDE camp since 2005, and he produces most of the cuts here. Tracks like “P&P” and “Celebration” feel relaxed and fluid, intercutting snippets of tinkling, jazz-inflected piano lines with rich vocal harmonies. Unlike Kendrick’s previous releases, the EP doesn’t sound like just a mixtape, but rather something fully realized and alive.Kendrick, meanwhile, sounds genuinely like Kendrick for the first time. There’s an added vulnerability in his rhymes, as on “Vanity Slaves” when he relays, “Sometimes I want to leave, sometimes I want to cry/ Sometimes I hate to bear the truth, sometimes I want to lie.” Aside from the newfound emotional honesty, the album contains many nods to Kendrick’s spirituality and to his brimming social consciousness. But, unlike other “conscious” MCs, Kendrick relays his lessons in small stories, whether it’s the self-assured black female of “She Needs Me” or the housing project kids in “Vanity Slaves” who find worth in material value.Kendrick also benefited from good timing. Hip-hop was in a transitional period during that time. Hip-hop’s old guard—Jay-Z, Nas, UGK—were still lingering around, but there was a younger generation emerging. Drake broke in 2009, and the West Coast also had a cadre of viable new talent for the first time in nearly a decade. Critics (and even some artists) called this the “new west,” and it included a broad range of styles. Rappers like Nipsey Hussle and Dom Kennedy tapped into the more traditional strands of West Coast rap, channeling the ghosts of Dre and G-funk, while “blog rap” acts like Pac Div, The Pack/Lil’ B, and Odd Future embodied a more eccentric and ironic take on the genre that was located less in a specific geographical place than a cultural one. Kendrick split the difference, embracing the ambition and irreverence of blog rap while maintaining a starkly SoCal identity. He rounded out the sound by embracing the neo-soul underpinnings and broad social commentaries of boho rappers like Mos Def and Common. It was a compelling blend, one that managed to seem vaguely familiar and also completely singular.The Kendrick EP was released on the last day of 2009, and provided an apt capper to that decade. But, in the next year, things would move forward very quickly. Overly Dedicated, which was originally imagined as a remix project for The Kendrick EP, was released in September 2010. The album is full of intimate, subtle tracks. Over the shuffling rhythm and simmering vibes, “Average Joe” crystallizes Kendrick’s persona: “Who is K. Dot? A young nigga from Compton/ On the curb writing raps next to a gunshot/ On the corners where the gangsters and the killers dwell/ The fraudulent tender scars that get unveiled/ Everyone I knew was either Crip or Piru.”But it would be another track, “Ignorance is Bliss,” that would end up being the most important track of Kendrick’s career. The song is a sly commentary on gangster rap, with Kendrick spitting out the violent cliches of the genre—“Imma back em down like Shaq with this black 2-2-3 in my hand”—before bookending each verse with the ironic, self-canceling declaration, “Ignorance is bliss.” This would be the first Kendrick track that Dr. Dre would hear.“Believe it or not, Paul Rosenberg, Eminem’s manager, is the one that put me on [to Kendrick],” Dre recalls. “I was in Detroit and he’s like, ‘You got to hear this kid from Compton.’ So I went online and the thing that really turned me on at the beginning was the way he spoke in the interview—it wasn’t even the music at first, it was the way he showed his passion for music. There was something in that, and then I got into the music, and then realized how talented he was.”Kendrick was on tour with Jay Rock and legendary Kansas City, MO indie MC Tech N9ne. When Dre called his engineer and Kendrick initially thought it was a prank. But, the next week, Dre got in touch with Kendrick’s management and invited the MC into the studio to record with him. “It came to a point where I had to really snap out of fan mode and become a professional because after we were introduced, he said he liked my music and I said that I’m a fan of his work,” Lamar remembers of the sessions. “Then he said, ‘Okay, now write to this, write a full song to this.’ Right after I said, ‘Man, Dr. Dre, you’re the greatest’ and he was like, ‘Yeah man, you’re good too, you could be something… alright now write to this beat.’ And that beat ended up being the first song I did with him and ended up on my album—‘Compton’.”It had been nearly a decade since Kendrick first started releasing material, but, at this point, he had very much arrived. Though his 2011 release, Section.80, was not the sweeping Bildungsroman Kendrick had been planning (that would come soon enough), it was an evolution of subtly introspective rhymes and jazz-tinged hip-hop soul that Kendrick had been mining on the previous two releases. Tracks such as “A.D.H.D” and “Fuck Your Ethnicity” were instant classics, and the album would eventually go gold. Critics placed it near the top of their year-end lists, and compared him to everyone from Ice Cube to Nas. Of course, the next few years would reveal that Kendrick needed no comparisons—he inhabited his own story, and told that in his own voice. But it’s not a bad way to end the beginning.Related Reading:Kendrick Lamar, Conscious Capitalist: The 30 Under 30 Cover InterviewKendrick Lamar Says "Section.80" Is Just A Warm-Up, Analyzes Work With Game & Dr. DreThe Making of good kid, m.A.A.d. city

Subscribe to the accompanying Spotify playlist that culls the influences of Kamasi Washingtons album, Heaven and EarthMusic discovery used to be much more difficult. Growing up in rural Louisiana, many quantum leaps from any recognizable cultural hub, and a good decade before the ubiquity of the internet, the process was much more iterative and laborious. I would find certain gateway artists, who would then lead towards other artists, aesthetics, or even entire cultures, and, with time, my understanding of both the broader musical landscape and of the world at large increased exponentially. My gateway to the gateways was discovering Bob Dylan when I was 13. To give you some context, the album I bought before Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. 1 was Young MC’s Stone Cold Rhymin’, and the only reason that I even bothered with Dylan was the betrayal and anxiety that my devoutly Christian parents expressed at Dylan drifting away from his religious fundamentalism of the early ‘80s. It was an act of blatant (if soft-toned) rebellion, but I was also experiencing my own doubts about religion, and I was curious about how someone could arrive at losing their faith. This was how I came to Dylan, but I quickly discovered the other pleasure of Dylan, and the potency of his music stirred an omnivorous curiosity in me to learn more about both Dylan and the world he existed within. I quickly scarfed down Dylan biographies and essays, and then can reams of microfiche (note: a pre-internet archive of journals and magazines maintained by libraries) for articles about him. During this process, I’d keep a journal, meticulously jotting down the names of musicians, authors, painters, and politicians, and then taking that list and doing further research. This was how I discovered Lenny Bruce, Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis, Rimbaud, Allen Ginsberg, and so on, who then subsequently led me to Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, John Coltrane, and so on and so forth. It was a slow education, and I went through a lot of notebooks.Music discovery is easier now, to state the obvious, but there are still gateway artists that nod towards larger, unknown universes for their fans. For a newer generation, Kamasi Washington is that point of entry for jazz. He’s recorded extensively with Kendrick Lamar, released his debut The Epic on Flying Lotus’ label Brainfeeder, and has been extensively praised by the Pitchfork and Faders of the world. He’s done this by playing a pretty straight-up variant of a specific type of jazz -- it’s not something you have to squint and call jazz -- and this is leading his legions of fans back to discover McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Alice Coltrane, or David Axelrod. Even for someone with an intermediate knowledge of jazz, such as myself, Kamasi still opens up certain windows. After the release of his latest, Heaven and Earth, I began diving into both West Coast Jazz and the genre’s more political threads. This lead me to the relatively unknown (at least to me) LA pianist Horace Tapscott. Horace began as a trumpet player, gigging with everyone from Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman to Fletcher Henderson and Gerald Wilson, but took up piano during a stint in the Air Force in the late ‘50s, and more of less stuck with that instrument for the remainder of his career. After a particularly harrowing tour of the South as part of Lionel Hampton’s big band, he became a devoted social activist, understanding and teaching the importance of music in both community building and societal transformation. He set up Union of Gods Musicians and Ascension (Ugmaa) in Watts, which was dedicated to supporting the artist community in the Watts neighborhood, and began recruiting young musicians into his group, The Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. When the infamous Watts Riots happened in 1965, the group drove a flat-bed truck through the chaos while playing their blend of afro-futurist, post-bop spiritual jazz. Soon, the group began to receive arts funding, and Horace would go on to mentor and teach hundreds of students throughout his life. When he passed in 1999, he was primarily known as an educator.Horace was incredibly influential in building out the Leimert Park jazz scene where Kamasi got his start, and where he recently returned for the launch party of Heaven and Earth. Kamasi has even stated in interviews that his father was a big fan of Horace’s music, and that he grew up listening to him and John Coltrane. Speaking to Jazzwise Magazine, Kamasi said, “Horace is one of the most important figures in the foundation of music in LA, from both a purely musically and socially conscious perspective. My dad took me to hear [Tapscott’s] Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra many times and I played with them after Horace passed away.”But more than anything, Kamasi is repaying that debt by keeping Horace’s legacy alive, and we all benefit from that.

Check out Kamasi’s new tracks in the playlist above, which captures his best alongside the artists and songs that influenced his career. We’ll keep it updated as new joints drop. Subscribe to the playlist here. In 2018, it’s difficult to figure out how we want pop culture -- and music in particular -- to deal with our larger, societal malaise. Really, it’s hard to get a handle on what’s going on with society at the moment. From data harvesting and the upward mobility of neo-Fascism, to environmental collapse, the #metoo movement and transhumanism, a larger narrative seems elusive. But one thing does seem clear: things are changing, and they’re changing very quickly. It could go one way or another, but, regardless, we will be radically different once we get out the other side.In this atmosphere of deep uncertainty, it feels silly to expect musicians (of all people) to have answers, and, as with previous generations, the art that best captures these times has been ambiguous and slippery. Think of Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. We all know the nature of our condition -- we’re living under a President that lies, steals, conjules, bullies and demeans every single fucking day -- and Lamar acknowledges that, but offers up few solution. Instead, the album feels powerful because it relays something more primal and honest: anger, confusion, distrust, and uncertainty. The two new tracks from modern jazz great Kamasi Washington engage with this dark, blurry zeitgeist. Appropriately, it’s difficult to think of any modern musician who contains as many multitudes as Kamasi Washington. He’s collaborated extensively with Kendrick Lamar, releases music through Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint, and plays in front of tens of thousands at Coachella, but his music doesn’t owe that much to hip-hop, electronic or modern pop traditions. Instead, it mines a broad spectrum of classic jazz, from the big band compositions of Charles Mingus to the free jazz spiritual quests of mid-’60s Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders and on to the smoother, R&B-inflected of Roy Ayers. Washington recently released two tracks in support of his upcoming album, Heaven and Earth, and, of the two new tracks, “Fists of Fury” is the most immediate and the most explicitly political. It’s ostensibly a cover of the theme song from the classic Bruce Lee movie, but it’s a fairly dramatic departure (the lyrics have changed, for one thing). It’s a beautiful, startling track -- spacious and intricately composed, full of nuanced movements that swerve in and out of its in its nearly 10-minute runtime. Tinkling piano solos flow out of rumbling bongos, while the track’s string arrangement give a stately color to Washington’s warm tenor saxophone tones. Patrice Quinn and Dwight Trible provide aggrieved and aggravated vocals that telegraph the songs’s #woke themes of racial retribution and justice, “Our time as victims is over/ We will no longer ask for justice/ Instead we will take our retribution.” It’s great, but it feels like an outlier in Washington’s catalog. It’s not only a cover, but it’s Washington’s first explicitly political track, which is something that Washington has shied away from in the past. “Someone like Donald Trump cant control the way I show love to my brother,” Washington recently told Rolling Stone. “He cant control the way I feel about my neighbors. Im trying to make the music bigger than the politics. If you get caught up in the day-to-day, youll get lost in that." Of course, this doesn’t mean that Washington’s previous music hasn’t been engaged with the larger socio-political conversation; they have, just not in obvious ways. His 2017 EP Harmony of Difference -- and, in particular, its centerpiece, “Truth” -- was a slow, simmering burn, full of melancholic phrasing and delicate passages that gripped at the hems of the sublime. It was the perfect salve -- a perfect refuge -- to the reigning socio-culture shitshow. Washington’s other new track, “The Space Travelers Lullaby,” lives in a similar space. It’s wiry and ethereal, building off a wistful string arrangement and a spritely piano figure. It feels like a Sunday morning jog through the cosmos, or a brief sojourn to a beatific foreign world. It’s easy to put it in the lineage of afrofutustist forefather Sun Ra, but, with its cooing vocals and tickling cymbals, the song is more stately, measured, and baroque. It’s a soundtrack of itself, a cosmic journey through an endlessly dense, placid innerspace. In this ways, “The Space Travelers Lullaby” feels more appropriate for these times than the more explicitly political “Fists of Fury.” Maybe it’s because of the track’s sonic maximalism, but, “First of Fury” feels disjointed from our pop culture timeline, despite all the BLM sloganeering. It could easily exist in 1972, 2005, or 2018. “The Space Travelers Lullaby” feels both sad and celebratory in a way that is very 2018. It draws its light from the dense darkness outside, and it feels as if it’s offering an answer of sorts, or at least a pretty good suggestion, about how to proceed in a world where we, as individuals, have no control.

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Long after MTV died, the golden age of music videos began. Freed from the constraints of corporate gatekeepers, cutting edge artists such as Kaytranada and ANOHNI crafted videos that were elegant and deeply personal, while established icons such as Gorillaz and Björk pushed technological boundaries in videos that were innovative and pleasantly disorienting.Perhaps no artist has taken such care at crafting a specific visual language as Kendrick Lamar. His videos not only function as promotional visual elements, but serve as an apocrypha of sorts, expanding and exploring the ideas put forth on his knotty, intricate tracks. A great example of this is “Alright.” Shot in stark black-and-white, and oscillating between locations in the Bay and Los Angeles, the visual maintains the loose narrative flow and spoken word interludes of To Pimp a Butterfly, but it’s most effective at playing with signifiers of a police state. Cops loom in the background, glaring out of police cars or aiming air pistols at protesters; Kendrick floats above the proceedings, seemingly hovering between transcendence and resistance. “Alright”—alongside Kendrick’s other best videos—achieve a sort of synesthesia, reflecting, both thematically and aesthetically, the MCs knotty but celebratory survey of modern blackness. “King Kunta” may be the most purely euphoric representation of inner-city life committed to video.Kendrick’s fans have responded to this approach, though Kendrick’s ascent to the top of the pop world has been a slower burn than most. As of this writing, Lamar has over two million YouTube channel subscribers and nearly 700 million overall views. While he has numerous videos that have been viewed over 50 million times, his latest clip, for Damn.’s leadoff single, “Humble,” was viewed 53 million times on YouTube in its first week. As a point of reference, it took previous singles “i,” “Alright,” and “King Kunta” months to reach this milestone, and, if projections hold, “Humble” will easily be his most successful single to date. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLemeQ5_nNS5VYdUxIWSd14cT1vIAcniBcIt’s fitting: Kendrick’s time has come, and “Humble” feels like a coronation. The video is a collection of startling, uncanny imagery. A shot of Kendrick rapping in a cathedral and dressed as a bishop segues into one of him in all black, lying on a table and surrounded by women in bras and surgical masks who count hundred dollar bills. In another shot, Kendrick, dressed in a patterned Caddyshack polo shirt, smashes golf balls atop a run-down car in a Los Angeles aqueduct. And, in perhaps the video’s most iconic shot, the MC sits at the center of a recreation of da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”It’s easy to read the video’s themes as a meditation on the role of spirituality and religion in an increasingly secular society—topics that have become increasingly prevalent in the MCs work—but the video also reflects a technical acumen, an understanding and willingness to recontextualize pop culture signifiers. Much has been made of Kendrick as an icon for a new, woke generation, but, first and foremost, Kendrick is a badass rap stylist who makes videos that are visually stunning.

Tribe Called Quest created universes by cobbling together post-bop saxophones, rolling bass lines, and hard boom bap beats, topping them off with Q-Tip’s fluid freeform rhymes that played an alto sax to the gruff, declarative blurts of Phife’s deceptively straightforward lyrics. As music nerds, we’d already digested the Velvet Underground and De La Soul, so we instantly got Tribe’s vibes and references, but blending these two opposing worlds—despondent, glamorous sleaze rock and idiosyncratic, jazz afrocentrism—was a revelation. Here’s a playlist of some of their best and most well-known samples, from RAMP to Lou Reed.

Subscribe to this playlist here.On “Suzanne,” the first song from Leonard Cohen’s debut album, Cohen positions Jesus Christ as a “broken” and “forsaken” figure who watches “drowning men” from a “lonely wood tower.” Cohen’s messiah is a cypher for longing and solitude — a totem for the lovesick and desperate. As a metaphor, it might seem bizarre, or even blasphemous, but twisting the sacred and profane into odd, interloping configurations became Cohen’s modus operandi for the next five decades. His most famous composition, “Hallelujah,” refashions the biblical story of David and Bathsheba into a tale of sexual obsession and, ultimately, spiritual transcendence; while the late-period classic “Show Me the Way” is a meditation on mortality that is addressed to either a savior or a dominatrix (or maybe both). For Cohen, faith is a complicated thing, but it’s ultimately humanistic and forgiving; it doesn’t seek to judge the transgressions of the sinner as much it attempts to understand our failures by chipping away at our ideals of divinity. It interjects tragedy into the holy order, and adds a whiff of squalor to the sacred spaces. It bridges the gap between heaven and earth. -- Sam Chennault

They reimagined not only how the genre sounded, but how it felt. They changed the rhythm, and, by embracing compositional pastiche and kitschy psychedelic, they crafted music that was deeply cerebral and personal. And while they both heavily sampled jazz and soul — the dominant source for the boom bap era producers who served as their shared stylistic avatars — their palette was more expansive and worldly, privileging obscurity over nostalgia, grainy textures over raw masculine presence.You can hear echoes of their work in some of today’s most critically lauded and commercially successful music, from the space jazz symphonies of Flying Lotus to the pan-African milieu of Kendrick Lamar, the refactored soul of Frank Ocean or the jittery, jump-cut flow of Kanye’s Life of Pablo. For this playlist, we’ve collected their best.