Artists

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.

It’s a slyly ironic title for a playlist, but Anohni is a sly woman. She got her start as a he with Antony and the Johnsons, whose signature elegiac chamber pop anchored a voice both soaring and fragile. There’s plenty that could’ve gone wrong on her debut solo album, 2016’s HOPELESSNESS; the production came courtesy of cubist synth maven Oneohtrix Point Never and trap king Hudson Mohawke, and the themes were overtly political. Lead single “Drone Bomb Me” was, in her words, “a love song from the perspective of a girl in Afghanistan...a 9-year-old girl whose family’s been killed by a drone bomb.” It worked on a visceral sonic level and in a deeper emotional and political sense. This Spotify playlist traces the inspirations for this weird, brilliant record. From the gothic folk of Buffy Sainte-Marie to the chilly high-concept hijinks of Laurie Anderson, Anohni’s eclecticism is on full display.

Since their 2005 debut, San Diego power trio Earthless have been pushing stoner-rock to new extremes in cosmic exploration and rhythmic intensity——and mostly without the use of vocals. However, on their upcoming release, Black Heaven (out March 16), guitarist Isaiah Mitchell steps up to the mic on a full-time basis. To celebrate his graduation to proper frontman, we asked him to curate a playlist of inspirational voices. Thin Lizzy, “Honesty is No Excuse”: Phil Lynott has one of my all-time favorite voices. His phrasing is wonderful. The longing in his voice.....Andy Irving and Paul Brady, “Lough Erne Shore”: Paul Brady has one of the most unique voices I’ve ever heard. Absolutely beautiful. I wish I could sing like that.Bad Brains, “Banned in D.C.”: H.R. is my favorite all-time punk vocalist. An incredible force of nature. Power.Charley Patton, “High Water Everywhere - Part 1”: Patton also has one of the most unique voices I have ever heard. When I close my eyes and listen to his recordings, I see an old man with a few teeth. Gritty and gravelly. Not a cooler voice in the world. Such an old sound. I wish I could sing like him, too.Freddie King, “Same Old Blues”: One of my all-time favorite vocalists and guitarists. The sound that comes out of him is one of the most beautiful voices I’ve ever heard. He sounds big because he is big. Belts it.Traffic, “40,000 Headsman”: Steve Winwood is another all-time favorite. So much soul. There’s this brassy sound to his voice that I love——like Sam Cooke.Sam Cooke, “Cupid”: One of my favorite songs of all time by one of my all-time favorite singers. Sams voice was one of the smoothest and velvetiest sounds to come out of a human.Townes Van Zandt, “Rake”: His voice, phrasing, and lyrics are unmatched. How he can keep all that together and play guitar the way he does to accompany what he has to say, I still don’t know. Another great example of Townes’ mastery of voice and guitar is “Mr. Mudd & Mr. Gold.”Warren Zevon, “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”: Warren Zevon is pretty new to my life. A good buddy introduced me to him and now I’m hooked. Just a total bad-ass. The voice and lyrics fit together just right.Muddy Waters, “Long Distance Call”: Muddy is one of my earliest heroes. Such an animated voice. One of the most imitated singers of all time.Howlin’ Wolf, “Spoonful”: Wolf is as important to me as Muddy is. Big man with a bigger voice. He was the full package on stage, playing great slide guitar and blowing harmonica, backed up by one of the greatest voices of all time.Fleetwood Mac, “Jumping at Shadows”: Peter Green is another one of my hands-down, all-time favorite voices. He bears it all.Cream, “We’re Going Wrong”: Out of all the singers I’m into and try to imitate, I think I approach my vocals with a Jack Bruce filter. It’s not obvious, but I hear his voice while singing songs I’ve written. I don’t always go the Jack Bruce route, but I’m glad the path is there when I need it.Stevie Wonder, “I Was Made to Love Her”: He gave it all. Pure joy. Arguably the greatest male voice of all time. It doesn’t need explaining.Peter Tosh, “No Sympathy”: Solid as a rock. Such a bad-ass. Preaching.The Band, “It Makes No Difference”: Rick Danko is up in my top five favorite vocalists. He sounds like he’s singing the last performance of his life and absolutely gives it everything he’s got and doesn’t hold back. Everyone on this list does that, but Danko hits me in a different way.The Four Tops, “Reach Out, I’ll Be There”: Levi Stubbs, to me, has one of the defining voices of Motown. When the verse kicks in on “Reach Out,” the power that comes through the speakers floors me every time.Sandy Denny, “Late November”: Beautiful and powerful all rolled into one. Music is the healer. You have to give in completely if you want it to heal you. She gave it all.ZZ Top, “Just Got Paid”: One of my all-time favorite bands and guitar players. Billy Gibbons has a voice that doesn’t fit with the way he looks… at least in his early days. Great lyrical content. All hail the Reverend. The real deal.Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, “City Slang”: Fred “Sonic” Smith has a voice I wish I had. Cool as hell. Deep. Another person whose sound is the epitome of cool. One of my all-time favorites.

The work of late hip-hop musician J Dilla is particularly suited to the record industry’s strategy of releasing anything a dead icon has created, no matter how modest or inessential. When he was alive, he would hand out CDs full of beats and short instrumental loops to his friends and collaborators. After he passed away in 2006, those same discs became fodder for bootlegs like J Dilla Anthology and Instrumental Joints Volume 1.However, the recent deluge of Dilla’s posthumously released material has tested the wallets of even his most fanatic disciples. There are remastered projects that didn’t get a full airing during his lifetime, like last year’s The Diary—a proper version of his shelved and oft-bootlegged 2002 album Pay Jay—and his extended Detroit crew has repurposed his beats with fresh vocals that are “produced by J Dilla” for Rebirth of Detroit, Yancey Boys’ Sunset Blvd. (a group comprised of Dilla’s brother Illa J and Frank Nitt), and Slum Village’s Villa Manifesto. Most of all, Yancey Media Group, a label established by his mother, Maureen “Ma Dukes” Yancey, has issued official collections of his beats: Dillatronic, The King of Beats, Lost Tapes, Reels + More, Dillatroit, and much more. Perhaps overwhelmed by the thousands of beats Dilla made in his life, the label has developed an annoying, even if unintentional, tendency to reuse material on different projects—for example, track 31 on Dillatronic is the same as track 663 on Jay Dee’s Ma Dukes Collection.This playlist attempts to sift through the wellspring of Dilla’s recordings to pick out some gems. There isn’t much background information on when these tracks were made, but a knowledgeable Dilla fan can pick out some clues: The King of Beats collection seems typical of his mid-’90s jazzy hip-hop period when he worked with The Pharcyde and A Tribe Called Quest; Dillatronic reflects his early-’00s, pre-Donuts years and his techno-inflected trunk music. A handful of vocal selections from The Diary and Yancey Boys round out this primer that will prepare you for a deep dive into the world of Dilla.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

This post is part of our Psych 101 program, an in-depth, 14-part series that looks at the impact of psychedelia on modern music. Want to sign up to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. Theyll thank you. We thank you.The idea of psychedelic dance rock can be traced back to the late ’80s and early ’90s. This is when three bands in particular—Primal Scream, The Stone Roses, and the wildly eccentric Happy Mondays—started combining the neo-psychedelic jangle and reverb-stained textures of indie and New Wave with the euphorically funky grooves and ecstatic hedonism of the United Kingdom’s anarchic rave scene. Crafting a sound that both guitar freaks and club rats can appreciate, this trio of bands can be credited with setting the stage for a much larger marriage between rock and dance music that would wash over pop culture by the 21st century.In addition to featuring cuts from each of these pioneers, our playlist delivers a crash course in those artists who have proven gifted in submerging alt-rock and electronic-based dance music in trippy flavors and kaleidoscopic colors. Heavy on remixes accentuating groove, our mix includes prime cuts from Jagwar Ma, Caribou, Inspiral Carpets, Animal Collective, and LCD Soundsystem. We’ve even tossed in a few far-leftfield picks from exotic dreamers Peaking Lights and Golden Teacher, an absolutely killer project out of Glasgow that specializes in a brand of psychoactive tribalism that sounds as if it were recorded on Mars. Simply pressing play is sure to get you dosed.

Jamie XX links up with Complex to give a themed favorite tracks playlist. You get a sense of the broad range of influences that goes into his own music, from the lo-fi electric blues of Love Sculptures "Blues Helping" to the skeletal proto-dubstep of Buriels "Forgive." The Walls and Steel An Skin tracks are simply sublime (Jamie samples the latter on his own "Sleep Sounds").Songs to Relax To: Love Sculpture, “Blues Helping”Songs Most Proud of Making: Radiohead, “Bloom (Jamie xx Rework Part 3)”Album that Made Him Want to Start Producing: Burial, BurialFavorite Song With Steel Drums: Steel An’ Skin “Afro Punk Reggae Dub”UK Garage Track He Cant Stop Playing: DJ Zinc “138 Trek”Album that Inspired Him While Recording In Colour: Walls, WallsTrack that Encompasses Everything He Loves About U.K. Rave Culture: Jamie XX, "All Under One Roof Raving"Favorite song from his label, XL Recordings: Roy Davis Jr. f/ Peven Everett “Gabriel”Go-to song for DJing: Bileo, “You Can Win”Song that makes Him Excited About Dance Music: C.P.I., “Proceso (Barnt Remix)”Want amazing playlist delivered to your inbox every day? Click here to subscribe to the Dowsers e-mail!

Vancouver power duo Japandroids kicked off 2017 with a big bang by releasing their biggest and boldest album yet, Near to the Wild Heart of Life, back in January. And if you caught the band on their subsequent never-ending world tour this year, then these songs may sound familiar… “For me, 2017 was a wild ride. I spent almost the entire year on tour—100 shows in 20 countries—so I was always on the move. There were highs, lows, and everything in-between, which is very typical of touring. If there was any one constant among all the craziness, it might be my pre-show playlist, which I listen to every night before we go on stage—you know, to get pumped up. I initially made this playlist in January, ahead of our first shows, and had every intention of keeping it the same throughout the year… but every so often, 2017 sent a undeniable jam my way, and thus some swapping inevitably occurred. And so while not all of these songs are from 2017, when I think back on the year in music, or at least my year in music, this is what I hear.”—Brian King of Japandroids

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?

Yeah Yeah Yeahs drummer Brian Chase is celebrating the release of Drums and Drones: Decade, a 144 page book and triple album, culminating the first ten years of his solo project, Drums and Drones. This project, which began in 2007, is initially inspired by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s legendary Dream House installation. The aim of the project is to create elaborate meditative soundscapes derived from the resonant acoustic tones of tuned drums. Drums and Drones: Decade captures the essence of the project in sound/image/text. Check out the Jazz Drummer Spotlight: 1952-66 playlist he made for The Dowsers right here, and go here for more info about the book and its three albums.Says Chase, "This playlist focuses on the drum solo in jazz from 1952-1966. What appeals here, in addition to the incredible music itself, is stylistic evolution and how the drum solo reflects its musical context at each step along the way. In listening to this playlist, an awareness is brought to how the drums ‘play’ melody, harmony, and texture, not only rhythm. Much gratitude and praise goes to these remarkable and pioneering musicians."Brief personal notes:1. “Caravan” - “Papa” Jo is a master of melodic drumming.2. “Skin Deep” - Louis Bellson’s grand drum solo is an early use of double bass drums on record.3. “It Don’t Mean A Thing…” - Max is a master at outlining melodic phrasing (i.e. using the drums to create ‘shape’ which suggests melodic line), and establishing harmonic-like patterns (i.e. ‘arpeggios’).4. “Minor Mode” - “Philly” Joe is a master of ‘melodic rhythm:’ one can sing the melody of “Minor Mode” along with the solo.5. “Swinging’ Kilts” - Three classic Hard-Bop drummers play together here: Art Blakey, “Philly” Joe Jones, and Art Taylor.6. “Folk Tale” - The playful freedom of Ornette’s soloing is beautifully reflected in Ed Blackwell’s melodies and rhythms.7. “Kid Dynamite” - Motian’s playing represents the beauty of abstraction and gesture.8. “Al’s In” - Alan Dawsons brilliant and unconventional style showcase techniques that expand the ‘vocabulary’ of the instrument.9 and 10. “Nomadic” and “Agitation” - Tony Williams, Dawson’s protege, takes center stage on these tracks. A more open and free-form playing style is on display with the drums given extended space to establish the musical scene.11. “The Drum Thing” - Elvin! As Elvin improvises he establishes new thematic ideas which continually build intensity.12. “East Broadway Run Down” - Elvin! I love in particular the long legato phrasing…13 - 15. “The Drum Also Waltzes,” “For Big Sid,” “The Drum Thing” - These are Max Roach’s drum solo masterpieces.16. “Nothing 19” - Milford Graves and Sunny Morgan, two drummers who helped establish the Free-Jazz style.17. “Free For All” - Art Blakey in his glory.