Artists

Lets face it, being sentient in 2018 is a pretty grim proposition. The Western order is collapsing. Immigrant children are being torn from their parents. Social media has turned us all into data-packets. Each and every morning we wake up and are greeted with headlines proclaiming the blowback from racism, misogyny, and environmental degradation. Our safety net is disintegrating. Truth is under segue. There’s an opioid crisis, a tariff war, and seemingly a new school massacre every freaking week. Our president is Donald Trump, and our friends are Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin. There’s even a guy running for Senate in Virginia who is an active, admitted pedophile.I get that you just came here to listen to the best music of 2018, and not read a depressing recap of 2018’s most nightmarish news, but the two things are connected. Popular music, now more so than any time in recent memory, reflects the dread and dysfunction of our public lives. You can hear it in the dark irony of Childish Gambino’s “This is America” and in the damaged hip-hop soul of Huncho Jack’s “Modern Slavery.” It’s in the narcotized nihilism of Lil Peep’s “4 Gold Chains” or XXXTENTACION’s “Sad!”, and in the clamoring industrial noise-scapes of Osheyak’s “Hidden Teeth” or the pinging rap cacophony of Jpegmafia. Even when our music is hopeful, you can still spot the shadows of our particular malaise. Janelle Monae and Kamasi Washington push the gospel of resistance, and even transcendence, both of which are empowering, of course, but it also serves to draw our attention back to our collective cancer. One really has to look to electronic music for any true relief, and new music from DJ Koze, Nico Jaar, DJ Sports, and Axel Bowman feels particularly sublime -- you need a pretty big flashlight to combat this darknessAnd while this all sounds horribly depressing, it’s also resulted in some great music. There has yet to be the single album-length masterpiece -- no DAMN! or Yeezus -- but we’re not living in the album age, and each week seems to bring some titanically awesome single, whether that’s Jean Grae and Quelle’s “Gold Purple Orange” or Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Black Snow.” And even if the public landscape looks impossibly grim, we’re undeniably lucky to live in the same world where Peggy Gou, Vince Staples, Nils Frahm, Cardi B, and Kendrick Lamar are all making music. So let’s rejoice -- it’s rally the best logical response to this ongoing shitshow.

Notice I included many songs written before 1965, years too often slighted by compilers.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

British experimental pianist Tom Rogerson is set to release his debut album on Dead Oceans, but his isn’t the only name on cover—Finding Shore is billed as a full-album collaboration with avant-rock emissary Brian Eno, who threads Rogerson’s meditative playing through pulsating, droning electronic soundscapes. Prior to the album’s arrival on December 8, we asked Rogerson to compile a playlist of his favorite Eno tracks. "Instead of trying to create an Eno Greatest Hits Ive gone for the pieces that have meant the most to me over the years, including some of the most iconic songs with which hes associated, whether because of their commercial success or their conceptual influence. Ive tried to even it out so its not too tilted towards any particular decade or style. (NB: Unfortunately, Spotify is missing some of the crucial collaborations, notably those with David Byrne and Robert Fripp.)"—Tom Rogerson

In love in 1988, I gave “The Flame” more attention than it deserved. But Robin Zander sings the hell out of this make-or-break ballad, and Rick Nielsen’s mandocello is front and center. Thus began the most reviled period of Cheap Trick’s history, during which Zander recorded a duet with a Wilson sister not even as sharp as “Almost Paradise” and they competed with Poison and Whitesnake. But I’m no fan of power pop, so classing up hair metal ballads strikes me as no different. I wish I’d been there during their live peak. I rely on my knowledge of a couple studio albums and The Essential Cheap Trick.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

With a slim oeuvre for which my colleagues have made grand claims, D’Angelo has used writer’s block as a kind of incubator: for thirteen years he watched as Brown Sugar and Voodoo matured into R&B touchstones, unsullied by mediocre contractual follow-ups. At the turn of the century I preferred other Soulquarian releases like Mama’s Gun and Things Fall Apart, not to mention his fellow mononym, the crucially Sade-besotted Maxwell; what they lacked in accretive density they compensated with forthrightness. A dumb binary, I realized later, especially when the accretive density was as tasty as devil’s pie without the addictive qualities.Speaking of “Devil’s Pie” — it inspires D’Angelo’s ambivalence. Not lyrically — he’s an example of why submission to the eddies of his bass lines and the silt of his harmonies produces useful tensions. The moment in that track when hand claps joins the scratching and granitic groove laid down by Questlove as D’Angelo repeats the title hook reveals the potency of devil’s pie as an aphrodisiac, mephitic and deadly. 2014’s Black Messiahreached new heights of studio craft: the stentorian piano of “Another Life”; yet another tumbling opening of a groove in “The Charade”; the sitar as bridge joining East and West, engaged in diplomatic back channel communications with Roy Hargrove; the mumbled imprecations meant as prayers but, despite their unguent qualities, sharpened with menace.Still, I reach for Brown Sugar most in 2017—the impishness with which he scrubs a metaphor of Mick Jagger’s eros-inspired sensationalism.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

This playlist was curated by our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum—go there for more great lists, commentary, and more.

The genius of Definitive Jux can be traced to an idea stolen from Ghostfaces song "The Grain," off 2000’s Supreme Clientele. Overtop a beloved breakbeat, Ghost and RZA forbid rappers from going against the grain of classic hip-hop tenets—while making a thoroughly surreal, topsy turvy masterpiece that went against the grain of classic hip-hop tenets. Each landmark indie-rap release from Def Jux was rooted in a similarly simple but rebellious idea: What if the most awe-inspiring rap gods of the ‘80s and ‘90s never conformed to industry demands and kept swimming farther away?Before Run the Jewels, El-Ps beats paid homage to Marley Marl, Ced-Gee, Paul C, and the Bomb Squad, the most revered knob turners in 80s rap; he just eschewed James Brown samples for prog guitars and John Carpenter synths. Aesop Rock followed his Long Island mentors De La Soul, the original distorters of vocab, by replacing daisies with art-house darts laced in code that never relented. RJD2 imagined early DJ Shadow albums not shaded strictly gray. Mr. Lif lifted the cool monotone delivery of Guru with the fiery political fury of Public Enemy. C Rayz Walz was the only son of Ol Dirty Bastard and Cappadonna. Murs and 9th Wonder made a one MC/one producer album in the golden-age vein of Gangstarr and Pete Rock & CL Smooth. Hangar 18 was Souls of Mischief in a drunken cypher outside Fat Beats.Oddly, Def Jux were loathed by the purist rappers and conservative hip-hop consumers who gobbled up all the classic aesthetics that the Jukies were reimagining in the era of iPods, 9/11, and the booming market of internet rap. But no other collective of rappers and producers soundtracked the dread and fear of the early 2000s, all the while staying true to their roots of graffiti, b-boy-friendly beats, and telling the government and other MCs alike to kiss their ass.But 10 years since the one-two punch of El-Ps Ill Sleep When Youre Dead and Aesop Rocks None Shall Pass, and seven years after the label shut its doors with Camu Taos posthumous 2010 album King of Hearts, you can still see the influence of the acclaimed New York based indie-rap label that was sued by Def Jam before they even dropped their first full length release. On 2014’s So It Goes, RATKING emerged as the logical extension of Cannibal Ox, young dwellers of a post-apocalyptic New York where gentrification did more damage than Giuliani. Milo, Elucid and billy woods have continued the ethos of Jux for Bandcamp kids who missed the original dynastic run. Danny Brown wrote Aesop Rock lyrics by hand while in jail. Camu Tao begat his fellow hometown off-kilter crooner Kid Cudi. Party Fun Action Committee wrote the blueprint for The Lonely Island. RJD2 soundtracked Mad Men and dozens of commercials. Adult Swim head honcho Jason Demarcos love for the label led to the union of El-P and Killer Mike. And Cage helped us all see how truly insane Shia LeBouf could be.Since Def Jux shut down at the dawn of the streaming age, much of its back catalog isn’t available on Spotify—however, a handful of its key releases have surfaced thanks to reissues. We’ve collected the best tracks from those albums in the playlist above, and mixed them with a selection of cuts from the contemporary hip-hop artists they’ve inspired. And for a deeper dive into the Def Jux discography, check this YouTube playlist:

I knew I’d joined a special place when the first act Stylus Magazine inducted its Hall of Fame wasn’t Joy Division, Talking Heads, or Brian Eno but…ELO. Tireless enthusiasts of British pop but with progressive-rock roots, Electric Light Orchestra at their best recorded pop as otherworldly as the (in)famous spaceships yet as familiar as Jules Verne. Jukebox heroes whose material absorbed the other jukebox competition.I hesitated, it’s true, before including “Evil Woman.” “Evil Hook” is more like it — damn! The chorus sung in falsetto answered by Richard Bevan’s clavinet. Misogynist, there’s no denying it, except like most dorks closeted with their addled dreams synchronized on synthesizers, they get their idea of women from other songs or their own suppressed lust. In essence, the speed and detail and delight of the music mitigates, to my ears, the dumb, received tropes; women couldn’t be evil if they inspired a love-as-lust ode as addled as “Don’t Bring Me Down.”Expert magpies (“Shine a Little Love” is Lynne doing ABBA doing disco, or perhaps ABBA heard ELO’s use of strings and thought, “Hm…”) and precise trend reflectors (“Hold Me Tight” became a hit in 1981 just as American pop music was drenched in homages to the fifties), ELO could get exhausting, especially when in a rotten mood their songs remind me of bumpers or Saturday morning cartoons from the dawn of the Reagan era. So much of Lynne’s work presaged the dork futurism of Gary Numan and Trevor Horn’s use of call and response harmonies singing at the top of their range while pianos tinkle and a singer tries keeping his equilibrium in a world intent on banishing his awful hair to obsolescence. Perhaps this explains Lynne’s alignment later in the eighties with Tom Petty and George Harrison. It had to be more than “It’s Over.” Otherwise they would have dialed the number of the dude from Supertramp.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

This Beatles acolyte learned the lesson: he imitated their eccentricity because he was a natural eccentric and a natural songsmith, not because he wanted to write Great Songs. For a while they poured out of him; he was the shaggiest, loveliest, and most self-destructive of the seventies singer-songwriters. His was a doomed project, for meshing Nelson Riddle’s orchestral pop and the American Songbook tradition it invokes with a Vietnam generation’s fetish for revelation sounded impossible then, and it hasn’t worn well. But he and Carole King should have composed more soundtracks for children’s TV — imagine sequels to “Chicken Soup with Rice” written by the author of “Cuddly Toy”!And “Spaceman” is more devastating than “Rocket Man” and “Space Oddity,” fools.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

No way in hell will I essay my own context-building, not when exemplary profiles by Philip Gourevitch and Jonathan Lethem exist. Besides, my intro to James Brown I credit to an episode of The Cosby Show in which Rudy Huxtable did her best “baby baby baby” lip syncing to “I Got That Feelin’.” What Gourevitch wrote in 2002 about “Please, Please, Please” strikes me as definitive:

The song doesn’t tell a story so much as express a condition. The singer might be speaking from the cradle of his lover’s arms, or chasing her down a street, or watching the lights of her train diminish in the night; he might be crouched alone in an alleyway, or wandering an empty house, or smiling for all the world to see while his words rattle, unspoken, inside his skull. He could be anyone anywhere. His lover might be dying. He might be dying. He might not even be addressing an actual lover. He could be speaking of someone or something he’s never had. He could be talking to God, or to the Devil…Speech is inadequate, so the singer makes music, and music is inadequate, so he makes his music speak. Feeling is stripped to its essence, and the feeling is the whole story. And, if that feeling seems inelegant, the singer’s immaculately disciplined performance makes his representation of turmoil unmistakably styled and stylish—the brink of frenzy as a style unto itself.

Facing such a statue in the park, I saw fit, more than ever, to include songs I wanted to hear again, hence the absence of “I Got You” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” On the other hand, I included a track from 1991’s forgotten post-prison Love Over-due called “(So Tired of Standing Still We Got to) Move On,” boasting some of the most ferocious rhythm lickin’ of his career — and that’s saying a lot. Also a contender is “What Do You Like” from James Brown Plays the Real Thing, designed to showcase his organ playing. He’s also responsible for one of the more galling examples of plagiarism in popular music: forget “rewriting” and use the verb “re-releasing” Bowie’s 1975 “Fame” as “Hot (I Need to Be Loved, Loved, Loved)”; it works because “Fame” is a monster and so is Mr. Lickin’ Stick.Sigh. An evening I anticipated listening to new music I’llnow spend listening to Star Time. Sigh.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.