Artists

Saying Wu-Tang owned ‘90s hip-hop is a slight overstatement—Dre, B.I.G., Pete Rock, Mannie Fresh, and dozens of other legendary figures also chipped in—but it’s also inaccurate to say that they completely fell off thereafter. Yes, they never reached the heights of their initial 1993-97 run, but they remained one of the most talented and idiosyncratic groups in rap. In the aughts, there was at least one classic album (Supreme Clientele), a couple near-classics (Fishscale, Only Built for Cuban Linx II), and several underrated jewels (8 Diagrams, No Said Date,Legend of the Liquid Sword) tucked into their catalog, and even their lesser, disappointing releases (Birth of a Prince, Wu Massacre, Tical 0) usually contained a banger or two. We’ve highlighted our 36 favorite of these, using Spotify, into one playlist. But, before we get into the the list, a few disclaimers:* GZA’s Grandmasters, RZA’s Digi Snacks, and the Wu-Tang’s 8 Diagrams are not available on streaming, so we have not included any of those tracks here.* We are not including tracks that the Wu-Tang guested on (hence no Kanye tracks).* In the interest of including as broad a selection of tracks from the Wu-Tang Clan, while still remaining honest to the concept, we didnt include eight tracks from Supreme Clientele. With those qualifiers, enjoy the list and subscribe to the playlist right here.36. “Meth Vs. Chef 2”, Meth + Ghost + Rae, Wu Massacre, 201035. “Silent”, GZA, Legend of the Liquid Sword, 200234. “Wu Tang,” U-God ft. Method Man, Dopium, 200933. “Ill Figures,” Wu-Tang Clan, Chamber Music, 200932. “All Natural,” Masta Killa, Selling My Soul, 201231. “Pioneer The Frontier,” Wu-Tang Clan, A Better Tomorrow, 201430. “Biochemical Equation,” RZA ft. Wu-Tang Clan and MF DOOM, Wu-Tang Meets Indie Culture, 200529. “Sound the Horns,” Wu-Tang Clan, Chamber Music, 200928. “9 Milli Bros,” Ghostface Killah ft. Wu-Tang Clan, Fishscale, 200627. “Keep Watch,” Wu-Tang Clan, A Better Tomorrow, 201426. “City High,” Inspectah Deck, The Movement, 200325. “When I’m Writing,” Killah Priest, Black August, 200324. “If Time is Money,” Wu-Tang Clan, The Saga Continues, 201723. “The Glide”, Method Man, 4:21...The Day After, 200622. “Ghost Showers,” Ghostface Killah, Bulletproof Wallets, 200121. “Grab the Microphone,” Masta Killa, No Said Date, 200420. “Uzi (Pinky Ring),” Wu-Tang Clan, Iron Flag, 200119. “Must Be Bobby,” RZA, Digital Bullet, 200118. “Colombian Ties,” GZA, Pro Tools, 200817. “Got to Have It,” Method Man, 4:21...The Day After, 200616. “Shakey Dog,” Ghostface Killah, Fishscale, 200615. “Pop Shots,” Ol Dirty Bastard, Osirus, 200514. “The Sun,” Ghostface, Bulletproof Wallet outtake, 200113. “Grits,” RZA, Birth of a Prince, 200312. “Pyrex Vision”, Raekwon, Only Built for Cuban Linx 2, 2009.11. “Run,” Ghostface, The Pretty Toney Album, 200410. “We Pop”, RZABirth of a Prince, 2003In the end, the Wu-Tang sound—stringy hip-hop minimalism with Memphis soul samples and crusty, boom bap beats—had little lasting impact on hip-hop. By 1996, rap had moved on to the jiggy beats of Diddy and the Trackmasters, and, shortly thereafter, the pumped-up Orleans bounce of Mannie Fresh; and by 1997, so had the Wu, unleashing their own variants on their signature template. On this track from 2003s Birth of a Prince, RZA tries to catch up to the rap mainstream by taking a page from G-Unit, unleashing bronzed-out F-funk over a paean to popped champagne bottles, “hoes in different areas,” and “the bass shake in the club.” It really shouldn’t work, which makes this earworm semi-hit all the more remarkable.9. “Holla”, Ghostface KillahThe Pretty Toney Album, 2004“I’m from a place where fish was made,” Ghostface rasps on this track’s opening line, and, like many of Ghost’s best lyrics, it means absolutely nothing and everything. The song is alternately tough-as-nails and unimaginably fragile, from the quivering strings of the The Delfonics “La-La (Means I Love You)” to Ghostface’s taunt brag, “Like, an angry, cripple, man, dont push me!” Ghost isn’t constructing meaning here as much as he’s conjuring mood, and, as such, there’s no real production on here to speak of; the Delfonics track is left as-is—no loop, chop or cut—as Ghost raps over the broken boombox beat, channeling a time and place that is bitterly, sweetly nostalgic. 8. “Pass the Bone (Remix)”, Masta KillaMade in Brooklyn, 2006In the aftermath of World War II, there were stories that pockets of Japanese soldiers remained stranded on deserted islands. Isolated, and without any news of Shigemitsu’s surrender, they fought on for many years after that war had ended.* Masta Killa is the Wu’s version of that. He was a disciple of GZA who was only sparingly featured on Wu tracks during the group’s glory years, and, as other members were trying to update their sound (see RZA’s “We Pop”) or disappearing into their own aesthetic (pretty much any Ghostface record), Masta Killa made two classic albums (2004’s No Said Date and 2006’s Made in Brooklyn) anchored by his dense lyricism and crusty breakbeats. These late-period jewels sounded like they had been delivered to the 2000s from Wu headquarters circa ‘96 in a hazy time machine. “Pass The Bone,” a highlight from Made in Brooklyn, is rap as cinema verité, conjuring loose Saturday nights, coughed-up blunts, random hook-ups, and stoop conversations over a straightforward soul loop.* If you don’t believe me, there’s a Gilligan’s Island’s episode dedicated to this.7. “Animal Planet”, GZALegend of the Liquid Sword, 2002GZA was always Wu-Tang’s most accomplished technician. Where Method Man or ODB’s lines contained a visceral velocity, crushing coal to near-perfect lyrical diamonds in split seconds, GZA’s rhymes seemed as if they were written in tomes over the course of decades, revealing calculated phonetic associations and delicately crafted allusions. “Animal Planet” abstracts the violence and politics of the streets into a jungle metaphor; the tarantula is the “hype man” and chimps “sling in trees” with “elephants for security,” while everglades were “controlled by the gators” before they were “crashed by the crocs who came years later.” The conceit is anchored by a lush beat and the simple, half-whispered chorus—“it’s a jungle sometimes”—that appropriates Grandmaster Flash’s classic line from “The Message.”6. “Nutmeg”, Ghostface KillahSupreme Clientele, 2000The best art teaches you how to see it, writing its own rules and daring viewers to decipher the lines, hues, and figures on its own terms, and not according to your preconceived notions of how it should be. Metaphorically speaking, that’s exactly what Ghostface did on 2000’s Supreme Clientele, bending nouns to verbs (“watch me Dolly Dick it”), building up a thick lattice of NYC esoterica (Scotty Woody, Clarks, Optimo), and tilting towards the undecipherable (sample lyric: “Dancing with Blanche and them bitches, flicking deuce pictures/ Kick down the ace of spades, snatch Jack riches”). “Nutmeg” was produced by Ghostface’s barber, Black Moes-Art—which is as perfect and makes as much sense as anything else on Ghostface’s wacky masterpiece.5. “Black Widow, Pt. 2,” Bobby DigitalDigital Bullet, 2001It only lasts a little over two minutes—not including the ponderous outro—but this song is terrifying, sonically and morally. For the second time in his career, RZA samples Wendy Rene’s “After Laughter (Comes Tears),” but where his previous flip on “Tearz” emphasized the track’s hardwon soul—contrasting the source track’s anachronistic strings and vocal harmonies against some of the toughest drums RZA ever produced—“Black Widow, Pt. 2” strips the sample to the bone, focusing on Rene’s scream—a primal, sensual, terrifying plea that loops over and over, building a screeching house-of-trap horrors, backlighting the moment where ODB’s sputtering, disconnected misogyny (“bitch, you belong to me”) turns to violence and the song’s female subject screams, “Dirt, I don’t want to die.” None of this is defensible—it’s morally repellent—but the best Wu was frequently ugly.4. “I Can’t Go to Sleep,” The Wu Tang ClanThe W, 2000Middle-period Ghostface—starting with 2004’s ThePretty Toney Album and lasting through 2009’s Ghostdini—found the MC trying to formulate himself as a post-crack-era Al Green, appropriating classic soul tracks verbatim (e.g., “Big Girl,” “Holla”) and rapping in a pleading, quivering voice that imbued 36 lifetimes of desire, confusion, loathing and transcendence. This track from 2000’s The W laid the groundwork for all that, building off the symphonic, proto-prog soul of Isaac Hayes “Walk on By” and chronicling the “havoc of the streets of Satan,” the murdered babies, raped women, and “crack and guns” of the “early 80s.” Even if his lyrics amount to little more than clever phonetic interlacing (sample: “Whippy got hit up with the big shit, bong bong”), Ghostface’s voice—cracked, pleading, piercing—seems to have absorbed all that. When RZA comes on the track’s second verse, translating Ghostface’s grief by making the personal political and the political historical—referencing Malcolm getting “shot in the chest” and Marcus Garvey getting deported because “he tried to spark us”—the track enters the upper pantheon of Wu Tang, regardless of the era.3. “House of the Flying Daggers,” RaekwonOnly Built 4 Cuban Linx 2, 2009By the late-aughts, Wu Tang were more or less playing hip-hop’s oldie circuit, and the prospect of them revisiting a deeply cherished album from their golden period seemed fraught, to say the least. And while Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2 doesn’t quite match the considerable heights of the original, the uneasy, propulsive “House of the Flying Daggers” is monumental. Ghost, painting in his usual loopy word spasms, threatens to “humiliate, brutalize, Ruger pop, pulverize,” as Rae requests that they “bury me in Africa with whips and spears and rough diamonds from Syria.” The production, provided by J Dilla, cyphering the dirty adrenaline of classic RZA, simply bulldozes you.2. “Cherchez LaGhost”, Ghostface KillahSupreme Clientele, 2000It’s easy to forget that the Wu-Tang didn’t have much of a imperial, decadent period. They began as an underground unit from a (very) outer-borough, cataloging the litter of broken crack vials and busted 40 ounces, and, after shortly flirting with pop success, they and their quirky, never-quite-mainstream sound quickly slid back into obscurity, foregoing the usual accoutrements of hip-hop royalty (velvet roaches, Superhead, and French vanilla Ciroc). Still, this song, couched in the cooing cocaine big-band disco of Dr. Buzzards Original Savannah Band’s “Cherchez La Femme,” feels like the party after the afterparty, the slice of euphoria before the comedown. Rarely have the Wu-Tang sounded as if they were having this much fun. It didn’t last long, but it was a good minute (or three).1. “Careful (Click, Click)”, Wu-Tang ClanThe W, 2000The unvarnished soul sample that bleeds out of the track’s opening hints at classic Wu, but this banger from The W feels utterly unlike anything that came before it, or after. As a forlorn flute slinks between the track’s hovering bassline and tight boom bap beat, “Careful (Click, Click)" doesn’t so much describe the grit and toxicity of urban life as it revels in in, recoiling in the tight spaces where brown paper bags, dirty syringes, and cocked hammers mark the dark spaces of Wu’s boarding houses/imaginary slums, bobbing with a millennial sleekness that underlines the track’s post-industrial menace, eerily evoking future trauma through Ghost’s insistence, nearly a year before 9/11, that the “boxcutter went click click.” Quite simply, this is the Wu at the height of their powers.

Listen, The xx are people, too. Yeah, they seem overly morose and make austere, sad tunes that got you through some rough times in college, but they have their own needs and desires. And it’s not easy to be on tour—and thats why their mix, “The xx: on the road,” is such a revelatory look into what the trio listens to throughout the good times and the bad, after the excellent shows and after the depressing gigs that bum everyone out. (If you’ve been in a band, you understand this despair.) Creating the perfect sonic zone is the key to surviving the drives between shows with your sanity intact, and this mix definitely conjures some vivid vibes.“The xx: on the road” opens with a song of their own: “I Dare You," a track that signifies confidence and, as a precursor to their favorite jams, serves as a testament to the band’s search for meaning in the musical world. It is pretty cool to see Iggy Pop’s (Bowie-produced) “Nightclubbing” and Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” on here, and it’s easy to hear how the slow-motion darkness of those songs has affected The xx over the course of their career. But while its not surprising to learn they enjoy grooving to Talking Heads and Dinosaur, it requires a little more imagination to visualize them getting jiggy to Missy Elliott and Usher.Overall, all of these tracks elicit a pretty relaxed vibe; there’s no noise music, no metal, no jazz, no classical, nothing too avant-garde. This isn’t music for pregaming a monumental event or for shotgunning beers. This is some serious, chill-the-fuck-out music. And it totally makes sense coming from The xx.

I first listened to Yo La Tengo sometime in the mid-90s, slightly after the release of their 95 album Electr-O-Pura. I was living in rural North Carolina, and the idea of "indie" music was pretty new to me, and it was pretty amazing to me that there were bands creating great experimental pop music in a commercial vacuum. It seemed more "authentic" and "honest." You can laugh at those values now, but for a young person living in a small town at the south in the pre-internet era, these things didnt seem illusionary then. I was primarily drawn to the dueling aesthetics of ambience and noise in their music, especially evident on Painless and in songs like "The Evil that Men Do." I saw them in Charlotte,NC and they played 20 minute stretches of noise. Sometime after I Heard the Heart Beating as One, my musical interests had shifted, I largely abandoned guitar-based music for electronic and hip-hop. I was surprised many years later, living in San Francisco and in my mid-20s, that they had become a much quieter band, and were darlings of the latte-n-vinyl, NPR set. I wasnt sure who had changed more -- them or me -- but this is still a great playlist of the songs that theyve covered over the years. Its also great to see bands getting more involved with curation.

Its an old story, but its still amazing both how persistent and subjective the "album" experience is at this point. Young Thug Leaks and Loosies 2015 is effectively a fan-curated playlist culled from Young Thug mixtape cuts, b-sides and singles that is published on a free, user-generated playlist site that is owned by a major urban media company (Complex). Still, it has nearly 140K plays, which is more than most albums these days, and definitely more than almost any playlist on a major streaming site. I was discussing this with a friend the other day, but the album is an artificial construct, and the common, underlying logic behind either a playlist such this one, or a proper album like The Barter 6*, is that its an extended collection of songs. By this logic, albums are merely officially curated collections of artist tracks. Still, theres a (false?) expectation of coherence when it comes to an album, an expectation for the artist to make a statement, whether that be aesthetically, politically or *The caveat is that The Barter 6 isnt itself a proper album, according to Thugger himself, but a teaser for his proper album,

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.Young Thug cemented his place as one of the most unique and exciting artists in hip-hop with his 2016 output, which included three brief but potent albums: I’m Up; Slime Season 3, the third installment in his Slime Season trilogy; and JEFFERY, a collection of odes to his personal heroes titled after their given name. Along the way, he also released essential one-offs like “Gangster Shit,” collaborated on hit singles with Usher and Travi$ Scott, and stole the spotlight on albums by Chance The Rapper and Kanye West. And through it all, he continued to twist and warp his inimitable voice into new shapes and tuck subtle wordplay into his lyrics.

founder Phil Pirrone wants you to have a good time. And dammit if he isnt trying with the 2018 installment of his six-years-running fest. See, unlike some other festivals that have all but fully homogenized in recent years, Southern Californias Psych rock celebration is still uniquely its own beast, and not just because of the pinpointed approach (music thats centered on psych while exploring every corner it has to offer), but also because of the immersive experience waiting for those who take the trek out beyond LA county. While its expanding from the desert to a lake at the edge of the San Jacinto Mountains this year, headliners like Tame Impala and Warpaint ease into night 1, while full psych worship with King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Ty Segall and White Fence electrifies night 2, before the weekend closes out with shoegaze icons My Bloody Valentine on night 3. And the day line-ups are equally as impressive for anyone into this musical movement born of the Mojave desert, with highlights like Kikagaku Moyo, Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats, Wand, Earthless, Deap Valley, and now that were listing them, honestly too many to list. But as for that experience we mentioned? In between sets and before and after the shows, theres no shortage of art installations, sound baths, yoga, desert and moon teachings, films, workshops, talks and anything else you might wanna trip into.Founder Phil Pirrone has been doing this since 2012 and also operates his own psych band JJUUJJUU, so when we asked him what make for the best soundtrack to take the journey out to this year, heres what he came up with.Says Pirrone: "This playlist is for you, just like . This playlist is for having a good time, just like . This playlist will brush your teeth, just like .”Listen above or go right here. takes place October 12 - 14th in Lake Perris. Gates open noon daily with late night entertainment after the headliners. For tickets and more info, go to desertdaze.org.

Spaces are important. And for many people, the bathtub is the most sacred of all listening spaces. Amniotic water temperature, flickering candles, blissful solitude — rockin’ tunes in the tub rules. Thus, it makes sense why receiving someone’s bathtub playlist can be a truly revealing, psychological experience. Here are a few thoughts on Chance the Rapper’s bathtime playlist, titled “Yup.” First, if it were me, I would begin with something a little more relaxing, but that’s just my personality—”Harambe” is a cool choice to start off with, and Young Thug had a great 2016, so he deserves the top spot here. Then we go onto Bon Iver’s “00000 Million,” the inclusion of which 1) seems appropriate for bathing, and 2) reminds me of Rosie O’Donnell’s tweet from 2011, “i like the song perth — its good music for making dinner.” There are a lot of good hip-hop tracks on here, many of which I missed earlier in the year. I love that Chance included “Summer Friends” from <i>Coloring Book</i>—listening to one’s own music is an important experience, and the bath is a great place for reflection. Lots of Frank Ocean on here (maybe too much?), and a few things on that I’ve never heard of. Didn’t know Smokie Norful—now I do, and I like him. Even though this is a personal playlist, I feel like it should still be subject to the Playlist/Mixtape Rulebook, which clearly states that an artist not be used more than once on the same mix, and if they are, definitely not twice in a row. Penalty!

There’s a kid inside of us, no matter how decrepit we get, and the kid inside Tom Waits probably sounds a lot like the one in “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” a highlight of Waits’ gloriously ragged 1992 masterpiece Bone Machine. Given that there’s “nothing out there but sad and gloom” based on what he’s seen in the lives of the adults around him, the world of grown-ups rightly seems unappealing and bewildering. “How do you move in a world of fog that’s always changing things?” he wonders, articulating a dilemma that stymied so many of the hard-luck characters who tell their stories in the hundreds of songs authored by one of American music’s most cherished mavericks.

That question is probably still on the man’s mind as he turns 70. We like to imagine him as the coot prospector he played in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, scratching his head and grumbling, “How the hell did that happen?” in that iconic voice, which never seemed as if it could get any raspier but somehow always did.

Then again, turning 70 maybe isn’t such a big deal to a guy who tried hard to seem old before his time. When Waits first emerged in the Los Angeles club scene of the early ’70s, his clear devotion to heroes like Jack Kerouac and Thelonious Monk made him seem like a scruffy relic to listeners more hip to Jackson Browne. He styled himself as a piano-playing Charles Bukowski, tickling the ivories as he spun hard-luck tales equal parts miserable and hilarious. (Check out his 1975 live album Nighthawks at the Diner for vivid early evidence of both his storytelling chops and his ability to delight a crowd.)But anyone who figured they had him pegged would be surprised again and again by what followed in the ’80s and beyond. Once Waits found a long-sought sense of personal stability with wife and creative partner Kathleen Brennan, his creative moves grew bolder, starting with 1983’s stunning Swordfishtrombones and continuing with later triumphs like 2004’s Real Gone. The music they contained could be tender and heartbreaking or crazy and chaotic. Whatever the case, it all remained true to his reliably skewed vision of that confusing grown-up world.

In the process, he’d honor his own inspirations—Bob Dylan, Harry Partch, Mose Allison, Captain Beefheart—while inspiring countless younger artists who absorbed his profound influence on how great songs get made and sung. To celebrate the occasion of his 70th, here’s a set of 70 Waits essentials and many more songs that show his grubby fingerprints.

My own personal peep into the strange and beautiful heart of Arkansas music.  Whether it’s the butter-knife slide of CeDell Davis, Pharaoh Sanders’ sheets of sound, Jim Dickinson’s irreverent approach to recording or the prepared-piano-player compositions of Conlon Nancarrow, Arkansas has always produced sounds that ignore the rules.  I left off a few of the unusual suspects in favor of curve balls like The Insect Trust whose founding member Robert Palmer not only was the first full-time rock writer for the New York Times but also grew up next door to Pharoah Sanders. I also wanted to highlight a few of the early architects of rock-n-roll like Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Louis Jordan as well as a few familiar names like Glen Campbell and Al Green.  Some entries might need a little explaining. For instance, I had somehow missed the fact that Little Rock native, Al Bell, the founder of Stax Records, was also the songwriter behind songs like Eddie Floyd’s Raise Your Hand as well as the Staple Singers smash I’ll Take You There.  One of the gifts of growing up in a state that often flies under the cultural radar is that you can let your freak flag fly and with that in mind I close out the list with incomparable Elton and Betty White.‍

Photo Credit: Bobby Fisher

The Bobby Lees’ lo-fi, high-powered punk evokes classic DIY noise while sounding urgent and vital. For their 2020 sophomore album, SKIN SUIT, the Woodstock, NY, band recruited underground punk hero Jon Spencer for production, cover Richard Hell and The Voidoids (“Blank Generation”) and Bo Diddley (“I’m a Man”), and churn out fresh, feverish riffs in a manic call to their own generation. Songs like “Move” and “Drive” are so jittery and jumpy, they almost feel claustrophobic, while vocalist/guitarist Sam Quartin’s shivers and sneers add a bluesy, breathless bombast that offers a sweet sense of catharsis. It’s just the type of energy to make you feel alive—a theme the band also embraces on this specially curated mix.

The Bobby Lees say of their playlist: “Our new record SKIN SUIT just came out on 7/17/20 on Alive Naturalsound Records. We were scheduled to be on tour most of the year, but everything got canceled, so right now we need a little extra boost to get the day going and feel all right. These songs do the trick!”