Artists

For the most spectacular comeback of my lifetime, Tina Turner copped not an inch to the Madonna market. She sang Terry Britten and Graham Lyle’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It” from the point of view of a middle aged woman who has seen enough bullshit from young songwriters and producers, many of whom are more desperate than lovers; she has learned to live on reflex. So few popular songs take this point of view that thirty-three years later the triumph feels more earned than ever. Fortunately, Tina Turner kept going. Her best material embodies wanderlust, intrinsically and conceptually: she travels from producer to producer, like her women do for kicks, often ending up burned but with a je ne regrette rien attitude.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Replacing the beret for a skull did wonders for Tom Waits’ cred. Movie ballads, sea shanties, Keith Richards collaborations, Delta blues, eating worms for Francis Ford Coppola — he’s beat you. His voluminous catalog defeats me; I relied on the CD-R I burned in the early 2000s of the beer ‘n’ Beats stuff and have fitfully kept up with his career since he and wife/chief collaborator Kathleen Brennan released album after album of songs about brawlers, boozers, and bastards this millennium. I prize Bone Machinemost, bought in January 1993 and to my ears the peak of his clink-clank ethos whose shrewdness allowed him to issue more than a few maudlin things that attracted him to Rod Stewart (I adore his “Downtown Train” by the way). He let Marc Ribot pull Beefheart-inflected melodic noise from his guitar, allowing him the space to treat percussion like a second lead. Give him this: he found a way to fuse Flannery O’Connor, Howlin’ Wolf, and Streisand.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

In 1990 when I discovered Consolidated and Meat Beat Manifesto, Nine Inch Nails didn’t come up. Melodic, entranced by rock star poses, Trent Reznor had no patience for the happiness-in-slavery submission to beats and noise of industrial, which marked him as a star from the beginning—NIN, not Consolidated, were asked to play Lollapalooza in 1991. I’m not a fan—this kind of hysteria makes me question the idea of sex itself, for if you’re heaving and shouting and lisping and drooling so strenuously, you must be more desperate than I need at the moment. But I can’t deny Reznor’s manipulation of self-destructive zones that stop just short of demilitarized zones. His most sustained recording is Broken, when he figured out the connections between Adam Ant and Adam and Eve. I wish I had seen his 1995 tour with David Bowie, with whom he formed a poignant bond: a tour that didn’t deserve its slings, according to the clips I’ve watched.Visit our partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

The most maligned woman in rock history, Evelyn McDonnell called her, and it’s not hyperbole. Yet for studiocraft, Fly, Feeling the Space, and especially Approximately Infinite Universe deserve the scrutiny that her husband’s desultory Nixon-era albums get from Beatlephiles (she pushes her husband to new heights as a lead guitarist, too). Toss in Season of Glass and Rising and I had to stop noting the number of excellent songs written by Yoko Ono. Her influence is profound: from Alex Chilton’s pilfering the melody of “Mrs. Lennon” for “Holocaust” to the B-52’s and Sleater-Kinney. Walking on Thin Ice, a distillation of the Rykodisc Onobox, is one of the great accidental purchases of my life — at a Best Buy in summer ’96!Eight years younger than my grandmother, Yoko is still recording: I wish I’d heard Take Me to the Land of Hell, and she enjoys a thriving second life as the object of okay to excellent remixes of older material that have taken her to the top of the American dance charts.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

On their debut record, Auckland, NZ four piece The Beths channel their longtime friendship into hook-filled, energetic guitar pop with attitude. Titled Future Me Hates Me, the pessimistic, self-loathing wit is inescapable while the upbeat soundscapes juxtapose that stance nicely. Influenced by guitar-driven pop, name-checking Rilo Kiley and Fall Out Boy as influences, The Beths are creating thoughtful power pop for a jaded generation. As explained to Pitchfork, frontwoman Liz Stokes "typically writes her lyrics most when I’m upset," so when we asked her for a playlist, we werent too surprised that she honed in on that sadness to come up with this mix.Says Stokes: "I feel sad today and so it was difficult to compile a playlist of anything other than songs where I can wallow and commiserate. Of course, I like my sad songs to have a beat and a melody. It should be hard to put on a happy face when youre down and out, but sometimes its the easiest thing to do. So I feel like these are songs that can shuffle along next to me with a smile while I go about my day, without giving too much away."Listen above or go right here.

Beyonce is a national treasure. She’s not someone who requires a critical or commercial reappraisal. She’s had her missteps here and there, but we’ve all known since near the beginning that she possesses a gift that’s nearly unparalleled in modern R&B. So it makes sense that her b-sides and deep album cuts are going to be great. Al Shipley, from the blog Narrowcast, provides a really great overview of the highpoints. It’s a fun playlist that takes a reveals special moments from a very known commodity.

Sonic Youth covered a lot of ground in their career. As high-art CalArts castaways turned Downtown NYC No Wave noise pushers, they largely abandoned traditional song structure on their first releases for bursts of detuned guitar shrapnel. As the ‘80s turned into the ‘90s, and mainstream music began to get heavier and stranger, they became the curators of rock’s brief but wondrous plunge into experimentalism, and though this brief foray into the mainstream changed rock, it also changed them, and, for a brief second, they almost became the new normal. This is wild playlist, however, doesn’t even approach “normal,” and demonstrates that the experimental instinct never receded, but was channeled to the various side projects, covers and one offs that represent some of the most self-consciously weird music of the past few decades. They provide a dark, gnarly cover of Madonna’s “In the Groove” under the moniker Ciconne Youth, while YOKOKIMTHURSTON pairs Yoko Ono with the alternatives formerly lovestruck duo for atonal vocal shimmering. And who knew that Nancy Sinatra stab at a comeback included covering a Thurston Moore song? This isn’t so much a playlist you listen to -- much of it, in fact, is barely listenable -- but something marvel at, which makes it a necessity for Sonic Youth obsessives. -- Sam Chennault

Whats This Playlist All About? Bicep is the Irish electronic music duo of Andy Ferguson and Matt McBriar. Their own music is frequently funky, but also cerebral, atmospheric and spacial. It also all feels very erudite, playing with house, italo-disco and minimal tropes in ways that create a cohesive narrative out of electronic music from the past 30 years or so. This focus belies their considerable talents as curators and historians, and the duo began appearing on electronic music fans radars thanks to their blog, Feel My Bicep, which tracks their wide-ranging musical obsessions. The playlist is an extension of that blog. What Do You Get? A little bit of everything electronic, from the more celestial house sounds of Four Tet to the kitchen-sink queer dubstep of Fatima Al Qadiri and onto the ambient of Shanti Celeste. There’s really not one particular sound they mine, but, rather, a vision of electronic music as progressive, unpredictable and inclusive. If you’re a fan of modern experimental music, of you just want some music to groove to while sipping on your coffee, this playlist is a must.

If you ask Big Boi to name his favorite albums of all time, he’ll include all of his own solo LPs. He’ll also throw in the Dungeon Family album, which he contributed to, and Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid, which he both appears on and executive produced. At least that’s what he did for a Complex feature in 2013, shortly after the release of his sophomore LP, Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors. Now that Big Boi’s released Boomiverse, his first solo album in five years, we’ve compiled a playlist featuring 25 tracks from those 25 favorite albums—21 of which actually don’t include him at all.Though Big Boi showed preference towards his own work for the Complex list, he conspicuously failed to include any of OutKast’s albums. Perhaps that’s because the duo was still a year out from their eventual reunion at the time of publication. Still, Big Boi discussed how many of the albums he chose influenced him and Andre 3000 during various recording sessions. He claims Bootsy Collins’ Ahh…The Name Is Bootsy, Baby! and Funkadelic’s Cosmic Slop helped form the funk experimentation of Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. He also recalls the “mutual respect” OutKast had with Mobb Deep around the time the duos released ATLiens and The Infamous, respectively.The rest of Big Boi’s favorite albums are—as to be expected of the innovative producer and rapper—eclectic. He claims Bob Marley and Kate Bush are “his favorite artists of all time,” citing two albums by the latter. He lists Tom Petty, Phoenix, and John Frusciante alongside A Tribe Called Quest, N.W.A., and the Boomerang soundtrack. His favorites span genres and eras, much like his own work (which is, of course, his true favorite).The only album from Big Boi’s list that isn’t on Spotify—and thus not included here—is Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. In its place, I’ve included “Kill Jill,” the Killer Mike and Young Jeezy-assisted single from Boomiverse. If Big Boi were compiling this list today, I can only assume his new album would’ve knocked one of these off the list.

These songs will take you from zero to 100. The perfect group of tracks to listen to while you get ready to go out to the club.