Artists

Thisisrnb.com is one of the best R&B fan sites on the Internet, and its recent post on Jeremih’s influences is proof. Short but sweet, these 10 tracks reveal that many if not most of the singer’s recent hits rely on samples for songwriting inspiration. It’s obvious that Whitney Houston’s deathless hi-NRG chestnut “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” informed the hook for the 2015 Jeremih smash with Natalie La Rose, “Somebody”; and that Snap!’s Euro-rave conqueror “Rhythm is a Dancer” led to his chorus on “Don’t Tell ‘Em.” But did anyone know that he copied a vocal line from Shai’s sappy a cappella ballad “If I Ever Fall In Love” for the hook of his most recent chart smash, “Oui”? One can conclude from this list that the “Birthday Sex” king has grown a little derivative, but leave it to Thisisrnb.com to assess his recent creative direction more kindly. “Some writers are just naturally gifted with the ability to remix, remake or flip a set of lyrics into a different melody or copy a melody with different lyrics,” goes the post, which is unsigned. “We’d be interested to know if he has been consciously doing remakes of big hits to hopefully land another big hit, or if it’s been more organic and just came out during sessions.”

New Order may have recorded indifferent songs, but I could only think of a handful of terrors before scouring their solo careers.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Considering how young the members of the band are, its amazing just how influential Jamie XX and his crew have been in popular music in the past five years. You can hear echoes of their work in everyone from FKA Twigs to Drake. This cool playlist from Complex offers a tribute to band by Nosaj Thing, John Talabot and others.

In May 2017, LCD Soundsystem released “Call the Police," their first new music in seven years. An indulgent self-lament that morphs into a middle-aged rallying call, the song is both brilliant and heartbreaking—that is, once you finish rolling your eyes at the fact that it exists in the first place. Since the first LCD Soundsystem reunion show was announced at the start of 2016, James Murphy spent the next year doing exactly what he told everyone he wouldn’t do: cashing in on the residual fervor generated by his past success, and on the reunion economy at large. Its in this transitional period of Murphy’s career that his playlist for the Ten Songs That Saved Your Life site (he actually chose 15*) take on a new context. His list includes the obvious forebearers of traditional rock, LES post-punk, and quintessential European electronica. They are highly indicative of his own music, which has often subtly reimagined sounds already thought to have hit their apex. But keep in mind that on this mix, Murphy is not flaunting his inspiration; he’s talking salvation. So much of his music has dressed itself in sardonic humour before it sucks all the air out of the room with its unabashed honesty. It’s a skill that the best of the best share. Whether it’s coming from Roberta Flack or David Bowie, there is something both comforting and emancipatory about someone else speaking your truth better than you ever could. Perhaps this is why Murphy’s own resurgence has been so unnervingly easy to swallow. When artists are this impressive, sometimes catalyzing entire subgenres through their work, it’s difficult to argue why you shouldn’t pedestalize them. On the other hand, it makes it similarly easy to give them a pass when they get under your skin.* Some of Murphys selections are not available on Spotify and thus not included on this playlist. You can listen to his original version here.

In January 2017, 2 Chainz launched “Pretty Girls Like Trap Music,” a weekly Spotify playlist that doubles as promotion for his similarly titled upcoming album. Each list nominates a different woman to select new and recent raps: The inaugural edition showcased Karrueche Tran, and subsequent collections featured Amber Rose, Lauren London, Erykah Badu, and Nicki Minaj. Even Golden State Warriors forward Kevin Durant curated a March 19 installment, but he’s the sole outlier of the playlist’s “thirst trap” theme.While “Pretty Girls” operates under the glare of the male gaze, the lists expand beyond trap. An April 20 installment by New York radio personality and Breakfast Club host Angela Yee includes Fabolous’ Summertime Shootout series, low-denominator wavy rapper NAV, and Tee Grizzley’s school of hard knocks gem “First Day Out,” as well as customary trap selections from Migos, Future, Jeezy, 2 Chainz (of course), and, uh, Drake. Sample from this wide-ranging buffet of mainstream rap’s super-lit highs and mediocre lows.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Im not sure if Duran Duran were a minor band disguised as a major one, or vice versa, but they did have a handful of really catchy songs, and playing a saxophone on a raft is a boss move. One thing is certain though: Metro UK is a pretty minor publication, and ranking "Ordinary World" over "Rio" is complete bullshit. Still, here are a few great tracks from this these 80s kings.

Most people don’t really know what a conductor does, and that’s understandable—much of a conductor’s work takes place out of the spotlight. Contrary to the belief held by some that the conductor is a largely dispensable figure who shows up, waves his or her arms for a few hours, and then takes home a big paycheck, the conductor is often the hardest-working member of the orchestra. A great conductor trains for decades to become great, usually mastering at least one instrument at the highest level. Along the way, he or she achieves a thorough knowledge of music history, a mastery of music theory, and an encyclopedic knowledge of how instruments work.Indeed, the conductor has to know each instrument’s part better than its own player does, and must understand how each of those parts can be best actualized. The conductor spends months learning 100-plus page scores, sometimes even memorizing them, in advance of orchestra rehearsals, which occur in the weeks before a performance. While studying the score, the conductor uses their years of experience and knowledge to interpret its contents, drawing from academic literature as well as recorded music to make executive decisions about phrasing, tempo, dynamics, rhythm, temporality, balance, and countless other aspects. In this sense, every performance of a work is a unique interpretation, even if, on the surface, many sound the same. Once the conductor shows up on stage on the night of the concert, he or she has spent many hours rehearsing that night’s piece with the orchestra, who will be playing, for better or worse, the way the conductor has instructed them to.Conductors are also responsible for selecting the music their orchestra plays, and the ones on this list—compiled by the BBC’s classical-music.com site—have surely been indispensable to the unfolding of music history over the past century. Mahler, for example, may never have become popular in the United States if Leonard Bernstein hadn’t obsessed over his music in the 1960s, producing the first complete recorded cycle of the composer’s symphonies. Nikolaus Harnoncourt and John Eliot Gardiner are both well-known for their important contributions not only to recorded music, but to the scholarship, advancing philosophies of historical performance practice and often insisting that their ensembles use historically accurate instruments. These two conductors seek to deliver interpretations that come from tireless academic study of both the source material and the conventions of its time period. Pierre Boulez was an austere conductor whose interpretations of modern and postmodern music cut to the chase, favoring transparency and clarity over large romantic gestures; some called him cold, while others said he was second-to-none in putting the emphasis on the musical material instead of catering to the emotions of the audience. Point being: Conductors are often (but not always!) rich thinkers who make important decisions about how, when, where, and why we hear music.We should take this list as authoritative, since the BBC polled 100 of the most important living conductors to create it, from Vladimir Ashkenazy to Michael Tilson Thomas. Fans of classical music have argued for years over the qualities and failures of this or that performance or recording, often descending into semantic insanity; however, few would argue that anyone on this list isn’t great. Use this playlist as a jumping-off point to venture forth and decide for yourself: Do you prefer Kleiber’s Brahms 4, or Harnoncourt’s? Furtwängler’s Bruckner 8, or Boulez’s? For Mahler: Bernstein or Abbado? Ultimately everyone has their own opinion of which conductor is the greatest, but the experts have spoken, and these are their selections.

Full disclosure: I contributed to this list, and while I have my quibbles with it -- "NBA Rap"? Nah -- I think its a fairly good primer on early West Coast rap. That scene is all the rage thanks to the overhyped Straight Outta Compton movie, and viewers who enjoyed that biopic will find more avenues to explore here. At the very least, its a good excuse to revisit Rodney O & DJ Joe Cooleys "Everlasting Bass." -- Mosi Reeves

We may have reached a sort of peak America on August 20, 2016. After a fit of false starts and head fakes, Ocean revealed his masterpiece, Blonde, an album that, in many ways, embodied a greater idea of what America could be: inclusive and diverse, both culturally and aesthetically; adventurous and transparent, embracing experimentations in search of an emotional honesty; and, not least importantly, fun, and filled with an overarching optimism.Things may have gone downhill since then, but we still have Frank, and he’s been particularly productive in 2017, releasing a slew of more pop-oriented singles, and, maybe just as importantly, curating his own radio show, blonded, on Apple Music. Ocean has never been particularly forthcoming in interviews—on the few occasions he’s done them—but his taste in music offers a rare and deep glimpse into his creative processes and inspirations.For many, Ocean’s music is singular, and his talent and sound seem to have emerged from a vacuum, but there are specific antecedents to each component of his music. Like many music masterminds—from Prince to Radiohead—he’s interested in genre pastiche, extracting and recontextualizing broad and seemingly disparate forms of music. Listening to these broadcasts is like watching a master chef at work in their kitchen.We’ve combined and organized selections that Frank picked for blonded, as well as previous lists he’s provided over the years and the music that he’s sampled, dividing the playlists largely along genre lines in order to provide a key for how Frank thinks about music. The main playlist here represents a megamix of all the tracks featured in the segmented playlists below. (You can access the original blonded podcast by visiting Apple Music, or subscribing to our Spotify channel, where we’re collected them as Spotify playlists.)FRANK’S AMBIENT/ELECTRONIC/GLITCH ITCH

Frank Ocean’s video performance piece Endless was a teaser “album” of sorts, released just one day before Blonde. With the visuals’ stark, high-contrast lighting, and the tracks’ broken soundscapes and fractured melodies, it was an immersive and frequently confounding experience. There were certainly songs there—the Isley Brothers/Aaliyah cover “(At Your Best) You Are Love” remains one of the most haunting tracks Ocean has released—but for the most part, the piece was focused on generating a skeletal, unsettling, and haunting atmosphere. This vibe was carried over to the creeping sounds of Blonde tracks “Seigfried” and “Futura Free.”This focus on textures over tunes is the common denominator for most of the tracks on this playlist. A beautiful, gentle piano melody emerges from the skittering beats of Aphex Twin’s “Flim.” Todd Rundgren’s 1970 proto-ambient work “There Are No Words,” meanwhile, moves like fog—eerie, otherworldly, and all-encompassing. Rundgren’s other contribution to this playlist, his 1973 track “Flamingo”—sampled on Ocean’s track “Solo”—is comparatively less whispy, with chirping birth noises fluttering around a circular synth figure. It’s no surprise to see Arca here; the Venezuelan queer performance artist and Kanye/Björk producer has been mining the same space between operatic melodrama and jarring ambient noise as Ocean did on Endless and the last half of Blonde. The tracks here do occasionally gain momentum —with French maverick Sébastien Tellier’s reflective 3 a.m. anthem “La ritournelle” in particular—but, for the most part, the music here serves as a pensive, ambient mood board.Further Listening:Decoding Endless: Frank’s Wild YearsThe Best Ambient TechnoThe 50 Best Ambient Albums of All TimeAphex Twin’s Field DaySUNDAY-MORNING HEARTBREAK AND SOFT R&B JAMS

There’s a warmth and intimacy to many of Frank Ocean’s best tracks—think of the delicate dance of “Pink + White” from Blonde, or Channel Orange tracks like “Bad Religion,” the bouncy “Monks,” or the titantic “Thinkin’ About You.” The Rhodes-driven tracks reference, of course, the classic R&B of Stevie Wonder, but they also point towards another, more modern and gentle strand of R&B that descended from neo-soul forebearers such as Erykah Badu and D’Angelo. Esperanza Spalding (who Frank included on inaugural edition of blonded radio) is a great example of this, skirting the borders of jazz, funk, and soul and paying homage to each, but carving out a singular aesthetic that’s both modern and timeless.The best tracks here are those that negotiate traditional genre boundaries with a gentle grace. Yussef Kamaal’s “Yo Chavez” interweaves vibe-laced ‘70s jazz fusion with a shuffling broken beat over airy textures that points towards the looser, groovier parts of Channel Orange. The classic boom-bap funk fuzz of the OutKast/Erykah Badu collaboration “Humble Mumble,” or the loose, euphoric glow of Kehlani’s “Undercover,” also reflects the warmth of Ocean’s “Pink + White,” while Darando’s raggedy falsetto on the forgotten ‘70s classic “Didn’t I” (originally included on installment five of blonded radio) is endlessly fragile and haunting. These are deeply intimate love songs, but most of these capture a love interrupted, deferred, or forgotten—a confessional focus that Ocean has returned to time and time again throughout his career.This is perfect Sunday morning listening, but it’s pretty damn good for any day (or time) you want to push play.Further Listening:Raphael Saadiq Behind the ScenesWhy SZA’s CTRL Is the R&B Album of the SummerUnpacked: Solange’s A Seat at the TableFRANK’S RAP TRAX

In many ways, Frank Ocean is less invested in rap music than his R&B peers. When he listed out his favorite tracks for the Blonde magazine last year, hip-hop was absent save for an OutKast and, um, DRAM track. And while Ocean has provided guest turns on a number of tracks—and he actually raps on Earl Sweatshirt’s lazy, SoCal anthem “Sunday”—he’s not nearly as promiscuous as other singers, and, as frequently as not, he tilts the gravity of the track so that they become Frank Ocean songs. (Kanye, wisely realizing this, stripped his contribution from the end of The Life of Pablo’s “Wolves” and made it its own track, the appropriately entitled “Frank’s Track.”)Still, Frank is deeply invested in the genre, both through his Odd Future lineage and in rap’s culture, sound, and attitude. The hip-hop tracks that he’s included on blonded radio (episodes #4 and #6 focus on the genre) and beyond tend to be chart-driven singles, and remind us that Ocean is ultimately a pop artist. The hypnotic “Tunnel Vision” from Kodak Black has this year’s best use of the flute (and, really, that’s saying a lot) and matches the loopy, hall-of-mirrors vibe of many Ocean tracks. And while Frank famously called out the Grammys for giving Album of the Year to Taylor Swift over Kendrick—"hands down one of the most 'faulty’ TV moments I've seen"—that’s not the only thing linking Lamar and Ocean. Both endlessly distort and manipulate their voices: Kendrick changes registers, effects, and pitch with nearly every verse, while Ocean—on tracks like “Nikes”—uses vocal mutations to add both texture and narrative drama to his tracks. It wasn’t surprising that he included “LUST.” on installment #4 of blonded.But, more than any aesthetic linkage, these guys are his friends (A$AP Rocky), his collaborators (Future), and his idols (OutKast), and this playlist acknowledges those influences and associations.Further Listening:Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN., UnpackedFrank Ocean’s Best Guest SpotsSongs That Prove the Flute Was Always Hip-Hop’s Secret WeaponFRANK’S INDIE ROCK FIXATION

“Indie rock” is a bit of a misnomer. It always has been. It’s more of a philosophical approach or psychographic than it is an aesthetic designation, but, however you look at it, Frank Ocean has long been a rabid fan of this spectrum of music. The surf-rock guitar line that anchors “Ivy” wouldn’t have felt out of place on any number of ‘60s-revivalist rock records from the past decade, while the clamour and noise of “Pretty Sweet” sound a lot like the psych/lo-fi groups that populated the ’90s rock landscape (though, granted, the two-step/garage drum line at the end turns it into a Frank Ocean track), while the bouncy melodies and sullen vocal counterpoints owe more than a little to The Smiths.There’s been a long-standing tradition of indie-rock critics trying to project their own music onto R&B and hip-hop musicians, and that’s not what we’re trying to do here—but it’s also undeniable that Frank has focused a lot on this type of music (particularly on the fifth edition of blonded radio). Some of the selections here are exactly the songs you’d expect from someone who spends his summers headlining festivals—MGMT’s “Electric Feel,” The Flaming Lips’ “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots”—but others convey a deeper investment. Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” reflects Ocean’s own penchant for creating long-form, mise-en-scene narratives over noisy, clattering backdrops, even if Alan Vega’s tale of a down-and-out factory worker killing his family is a little more macabre than anything on Frank’s albums. The shimmering, ephemeral “Wild Thing Runs Free” from Baltimore noise-punk group Teen Suicide resembles the rambling interludes that dot Frank’s own albums. And it’s not surprising to see (Sandy) Alex G show up on the second edition of blonded—after all, he did contribute guitar work to both Endless and Blonde—and his track “Mis” is imbued with a certain shambolic majesty.We don’t want Frank to abandon custom luxury cars and glitter for stick-and-poke tattoos and dive bars, but this is a great, revealing, and fairly unexpected playlist.Further Listening:Ambient Dream Folk & Beyond Dreamy Noise Sounds: The Best of Kranky RecordsFierce and Fuzzy: The Lo-Fi Revolution

Source: John Dale, FACT Magazine21 Essential Records From Cologne’s 90s Renaissance ; Listen for free at bop.fmFACTs John Dale talks with Mouse On Mars mastermind Jan St. Werner for an excellent overview of the Cologne electronic music scene in the early to mid 90s. Music from the scene represented a confluence of kraut-rock, ambient and music concrete influences, and while their palate was eclectic, nearly every artist found freedom in the open spaces of minimalist techno. The scene would soon spawn the legendary Kompakt records. Money quote from Werner:

“I was just high from this interconnected weird archive. It was like a living archive. There were so many weird, interconnecting, absurd combinations, but they were lovely. It was this very, very special time.”