Artists

The summer of 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of one of psychedelia’s definitive artifacts: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Pink Floyd’s first album, dominated by the mercurial Syd Barrett’s madcap weirdness, is a quintessential cult album, one that’s passed from veteran heads to young initiates as they prepare for their long voyage into rock’s deep end. Hordes of Floyd fans (you know the types I’m talking about) have never even heard the thing. For them, the album is forever consigned to the band’s impenetrably mysterious, pre-Dark Side of the Moon years.Yet here’s the thing about Floyd’s legacy: Had the British band crash-landed before the making of the stratospherically popular Dark Side, they still would’ve gone down as one of the most influential (and far-out) groups of their generation. Sure, there’d be zero platinum records, none of those classic-rockstandards, and no rivaling The Beatles and Stones for global domination. Yet those losses wouldn’t have any impact on their sweeping influence on alternative, underground, and avant-garde music (genres filled with countless musicians who prefer the earliest stuff). Exploration of their 1967 to 1972 output—from pre-Piper singles like “See Emily Play” through to the Dark Side dry-run Obscured by Clouds—reveals the building blocks for space rock, prog, kosmische musik, ambient, post-punk, shoegaze, post-rock, dream pop, experimental drone, avant-metal, and freely improvised noise, as well as too many micro-movements within electronic music to count.It’s an interesting time for Floyd, as they were a young outfit unexpectedly thrusted into an extended state of liminality. You could go so far as to say they didn’t know who they were as a band. They parted with Barrett, their de facto creative leader, just three years after their formation. Without him and his powerful, if utterly erratic lifeforce, the group were plunged back into the depths of the underground, where they were forced to reinvent themselves without compass, map, or even rudder. Yet it’s this very lack of any tools or guideposts that allowed them to drift untethered into the farthest reaches of their imaginations and pull out sounds of stunning originality (the apex of which very well could be sides three and four of 1969’s Ummagumma). And while the music contains touches of acid rock, blues, and folk-rock in spots, they’re clearly trying as hard as humanly possible not fall back on established musical languages. I know music geeks love to hail Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music as the most sonically extreme statement from a major rock artist, but hell, Floyd ventured into the atonal, freeform abyss on a nightly basis during their transitional years.To capture this aspect, I’ve done something that may rankle listeners. Instead of spotlighting studio recordings exclusively, my best-of playlist contains live versions of several pivotal songs. I know the studio takes of “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Echoes” (from Piper and Meddle respectively) are sublime. But I believe they achieve true lift-off in concert. The live “Interstellar Overdrive” found on The Early Years: 1965-1967 Cambridge St/ation explodes with third-eye aktion rock, scorching white noise, and overdriven bass swells that place Floyd closer to The Velvet Underground’s orbit than anything going on in England’s rock scene at the time. Then there’s the version of “Echoes” from Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, filmed not long before the band achieved rock stardom. Firing on all cylinders, Floyd aren’t just mapping a future for experimental music but several futures simultaneously. Pick out any three genres from those mentioned up above, and I guarantee you’ll hear them lurking inside the piece’s 25 majestically expansive minutes.But far more important, set aside your intellect and just allow yourself to bask in the seemingly three-dimensional space and textures from which “Echoes” is built. We’re talking architecture in motion, with atmosphere so sticky it clings to your skin, ethereal harmonies that slow time to a delicious crawl, and sharp electronic pings that pierce the listener’s consciousness and embed themselves in layers far below the waking. Call me crazy, but I don’t think the studio version does all this (even though it’s still one hell of a trip). I’m not going to lie: This is a long, immersive playlist. But that’s the only way to fully appreciate Floyd’s early years.

An embodiment of the ancient English law stipulating that camp is acceptable when accompanied by the poses of masculinity, Queen didn’t move me much even after the death of Freddie Mercury. I resented how high school classmates had no trouble with Mercury’s mincing but had no time for Bowie; if only the Dame had wiggled his skinny ass, strummed power chords, and shouted chants about wanting it all! Research later revealed the number of fun songs in their catalog, and I’m sure later albums conceal baubles that my tentative efforts haven’t uncovered.As readers might imagine, my list leaned toward the yearningly homoerotic and the silly. If I’m honest with myself, “Back Chat” would top this list.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Creating a playlist that attempts to rank the best Rihanna songs ever is a double-edged sword. On one hand, everyone loves Rihanna. She’s been one of pop’s most compelling singers and personalities for nearly a decade, and her ability to incorporate outre sounds with extremely addictive pop hooks is nearly unmatched. Her aggressive, sexually positive persona has both captured and anticipated a fundamental shift in how gender is performed and represented in pop culture. But you don’t need us to tell you this——thousands and thousands of words have been spilled about Barbados’ finest. And you certainly don’t need Complex to rank her greatest songs, because you (should) already know a good two-thirds of these by heart. Still, it’s a well curated list, and it’s always great to have the pretext for revisiting Rihanna.

So long as the world is home to easily offended Christians and alienated teens addicted to horror movies and loud guitar jams, that modern day manifestation of the Grand Guignol known as shock rock will continue to be a viable pastime. As a matter of fact, the past few years have been deliciously gory ones for those unleashing malevolent riffs while smothered in freaky makeup and latex (or, in the case of the Butcher Babies, very little at all). The reigning rulers of 21st-century shock rock, Maria Brink and In This Moment, have returned with in 2017 with both a new album (Ritual—more hard rock, less Warped-brand metal) and new look. (The video for “Oh Lord” lifts its cryptic religious vibes from possession flicks like The Last Exorcism and The Witch, with a dash of Gaga’sAmerican Horror Story thrown in for good measure.) There’s also Motionless in White, who are like the metalcore reincarnation of mid-’90s Marilyn Manson (a huge compliment, of course), and Ghost B.C., who admittedly may not be looking to shock anybody; it’s entirely possible they’re just earnest, card-carrying Satanists.Now speaking of alleged devil-worshipper Marilyn Manson, a good deal of the shock rock that has emerged since he had evangelicals protesting his performances steers towards the grave and graphic. After all, there simply isn’t a lot of (intended) chuckles to be found in something like the Butcher Babies’ “Mr. Slowdeath” video, which basically is the groove metal equivalent of torture porn. Older shock rockers, on the other hand, are way more campy. They embraced their roles as villains and outcasts holding a cracked mirror up to our diseased society, but they did it with a nod and wink (most of the time). Mercyful Fate’s King Diamond—who needs to be credited with kickstarting the corpse paint look eventually adopted by the black-metal tribe—wails about the occult and Satanism with a lavish, theatrical flair. And if you travel all the way back to the ’70s, you run into Kiss, who reveled in comic-book absurdism even when launching into dungeon-clanking nightmares like “God of Thunder,” and Alice Cooper, whose ambitious concerts were Broadway productions topped off with guillotines, boa constrictors, and even dance numbers. The Coop may be my favorite shock rocker of all time—and he’d be the first to admit shock rock is just good, old fashioned show biz with a bucket of blood on the side.

To imagine twenty years ago that I’d compile a twenty-song Smashing Pumpkins list in 2017 is like thinking I’d deliver Ronald Reagan’s eulogy. But the Pumpkins, whose innovation was to find hard rock wrinkles in Butch Vig and especially Alan Moulder’s shoegaze mixes, were intermittently formidable, despite Billy Corgan — in every sense. I recoil from his voice. I can’t deny how dense the Pumpkins sounded when Corgan wrote worthwhile material. “Crush” was my introduction in fall 1991, receiving airplay on my top 40 station’s Sunday evening “modern rock” Sunday shows. “I Am One” and “Rhinoceros” followed. Their breakthrough two years later came as no surprise — for all Corgan’s complaints about Stephen Malkmus and cred he kept a hawk’s eye on the marketplace. After 1998, sorry, I lost track of them. I thought twice before including “1979” because I can’t forget how he mangled a perfect hook and decent lyric with a mouth full of cotton candy.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more

For a decade, Terius Youngdell Nash was R&B’s best producer-writer, making everyone from Rick Ross and Mary J. Blige to a young pimply Justin Bieber sound good. He has faltered in the last six years, but after the surfeit of collaborations and works for hire, who could blame him and sometime partner Christopher “Tricky” Stewart if their powder ran dry?The Prince comparisons were too on-the-nose, not when Ready for the World was eager for a Wiki link. Nash’s high, effete voice and commitment to the love-you-down wasn’t as weird as Prince’s. Give him this: like the Purple One he understood that he wrote best for women. Electrik Red’s How to be a Lady Volume 1 remains one of the fleetest and sassiest of the millennium’s R&B albums, and chances are you haven’t heard it if you’re not on my social media lists. Rihanna’s performance on 2007’s “Livin’ a Life” also needs a shout-out; in the last two years she seems to have rediscovered its distinctive empathy.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were already anachronisms when they met as jazz-obsessed teenagers in the late ‘60s and began to write the droll, harmonically complex songs that made Steely Dan one of the greatest and most unique bands of the ‘70s. So it’s not surprising that the duo who worked tirelessly to get the best performances out of skilled session players never had much interest in hip-hop and the art of sampling. They even made it difficult to clear samples; they negotiated for the entire songwriting credit and publishing for the Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz hit “Déjà Vu (Uptown Baby)” and only allowed a “Kid Charlemagne” sample on Kanye West’s “Champion” after West sent the duo a passionate handwritten letter. But even Steely Dan’s stingy attitude towards sample clearances hasn’t stopped dozens of artists from doing the necessary paperwork to obtain use of the band’s gloriously recorded jazz-rock grooves (though De La Soul may not have, which could be why one of the most famous Steely Dan samples, the “Peg” loop on “Eye Know,” isn’t available on streaming services). But while the Dan’s tightly syncopated grooves and densely detailed arrangements clearly attract crate-digging producers the most, Donald Fagen’s voice figures into a surprising number of samples, boasting “Yes, I’m gonna be a star” on Amiri’s “Star” or chanting “They don’t give a fuck about anybody else” on one of Super Furry Animals’ biggest UK chart hits. The Steely Dan songs that have been sampled by multiple artists offer a case study in how many options the band’s rich arrangements offer to beatmakers. Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz went for the obvious but irresistible opening bars of “Black Cow,” while MF Doom zeroed in on a lovely keyboard flourish that happens just once in the song’s bridge. And where Audio Bullys looped the hypnotic guitar lick from “Midnite Cruiser,” legendary Atlanta production team Organized Noize played the riff at three different speeds to create a whole new chord progression for Sleepy Brown’s solo track “Dress Up.” Becker, sadly, passed away on September 3, 2017. But his music lives on—and continues to find new audiences—through the many hip-hop, rock, and R&B tracks collected here.

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 world of metal can often be an intimidating one for those who have never found the courage to wade into its deafening, shriek-laden waters. But of all the genre’s various offshoots and sub-genres, stoner metal may be the most welcoming to the untrained ear. Though its nomenclature may imply a no-sober-listeners-allowed policy, the real heart of the genre comes more directly from a familiar source than any other branch of metal: good ol’-fashioned classic rock. The borders of what specifically encapsulates stoner metal are as up for interpretation as any other genre (the worlds of doom, sludge, drone, and psych-rock are often collected under the banner as well), but what really defines its sound is its commitment to atmosphere, tone, and thick, steamrolling riffs that work less through violent, rapid-fire assault than they do through gradual, suffocating immersion.Whether it’s in the satanic blues of stoner originators like Black Sabbath and Candlemass, the molasses-like trudge of torch-bearers like Sleep and Kyuss (pictured), or the voided-out psychedelia of boundary-pushers like Boris and Sunn O))), stoner metal’s influence is vast and unique, linking the worlds of ‘70s rock with that of ambient music, shoegaze, black metal, and more through its subsuming, hazy riffage. You don’t need to be under the influence to get sucked into the genre’s all-encompassing sound, so take a tour through our playlist and see if stoner metal is the strain for you.

All of us have our own personal soundtracks, the streams and playlists that run through our heads, especially in situations that demand a more deluxe treatment. For some, ideas about what that sound had to be was forged by obsessive viewings of the very coolest ‘80s cinema on worn and battered VHS tapes. Driven by sleek machine-made rhythms and slathered in washes of vintage synthesizers, it’s a sound that evokes the sight of neon lights reflected on rain-slicked city streets as you drive through the night in a black Maserati (though a Ford Focus will do if there’s nothing left at Hertz).That’s certainly the sound favored by Daniel Lopatin, the Brooklyn-based musician and producer better known as Oneohtrix Point Never. The sibling movie-director team of Josh and Benny Safdie tapped him to score their 2017 film Good Time, a grubby, thoroughly New York-y crime story that stars a plausibly messed-up Robert Pattinson as a small-time crook trying to take care of his mentally disabled brother during a long night of bad luck and worse decisions. While the film’s visual style evokes the grittiest ‘70s flicks of John Cassavetes, Lopatin’s music might’ve been perfect for a Michael Mann thriller. Indeed, the soundtrack demonstrates Lopatin’s love for Tangerine Dream, the German synth pioneers who famously scored Mann’s 1981 movie Thief and whose epic “Phaedra” was memorably repurposed for the Safdies’ 2014 drug-addict drama Heaven Knows What.Good Time is also part of a wider resurgence for the moody, menacing synth-rock sound that was de rigueur for movies of an earlier era. The electronic soundscapes of Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre have become touchstones for a new generation of scorers, along with Vangelis’ sumptuous music for Blade Runner and Giorgio Moroder’s more propulsive accompaniment for Midnight Express, American Gigolo, and Scarface. Of course, the god of the form—partially because he was the rare filmmaker who created his own soundtracks—remains John Carpenter. Such was the worship and influence of his minimalist synth scores in recent years, Carpenter felt compelled to begin a full-fledged music career in his seventh decade, recording two albums for Sacred Bones.Lopatin’s hardly the only contemporary musician to believe that nothing sets a movie’s mood better than a synthesizer arpeggiator. Other new masters of the aesthetic include Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein (Stranger Things), Richard Vreeland a.k.a. Disasterpeace (It Follows), Cliff Martinez (Drive), and Jon Hopkins (Monsters). It’s been further explored by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, whose mesmerizing Drokk comprises their rejected score for the 2012 sci-fi thriller Dredd, and Zombie Zombie, a French electro-garage duo with a penchant for roughing up Carpenter themes in much the same way that Lopatin sandpapers the pristine surfaces of Tangerine Dream for Good Time.So even though it’ll never be 1985 again, there’s no better time for you to get behind the wheel of the hottest car you can find and drive into the night.

Matching guitar crosstalk with a lead singer whose pinched tones were like balsamic vinegar on the arugula-dry instrumental bits, Television remain sui generis. My introduction was their 1992 reunion album, which, I swear, deserves to be embraced as fully as their seventies work. As cool as an Old Fashioned on a terrace in January, this eponymous album puts a parched Tom Verlaine against his and Richard Lloyd’s excess; it’s the equivalent of watching Maureen Stapleton Interiors and her uninhibited red dress dancing. And Lloyd’s fiery rhythm work had just gotten a full workout on Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend. This is the sort of band that spells “glamour” with a u and comes up with solos to match; this is the sort of band whose songwriter-guitarist comes up with a phrase as piquant and lyrical as his best lead line.I included Verlaine solo tracks because they’re essential.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.