Decades

“Techno is a brain-dead exercise of plastic sound.” Those were the words Thurston Moore chose to utter in a recent episode of Pitchfork’s “Over/Under” series, and goddamn did they ignite a burst of social media disputes and outrage. Techno and house music diehards were incensed, labeling the indie legend a white male rocker has-been who doesn’t know jack. His defenders, meanwhile, dismissed his detractors as whiny, thin-skinned club brats who take themselves too seriously. It’s a dustup that’s just another manifestation of the rock vs. dance music rivalry that flared up in 1979 when the Chicago White Sox hosted the infamous Disco Demolition Night.This stuff is so played out. Clearly, the folks on both sides of the “Thurstongate” debate don’t listen to many mainstream jams. If they did, they’d realize that rock and electronic dance music, once rivals, have now cross-pollinated to such an extent that it’s often impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Simply look at Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart for the week of July 1, 2017: the top three songs—Imagine Dragons’ “Believer,” Twenty One Pilots “Heathens” (this thing is just never going to leave the charts, is it), and Linkin Park’s “Heavy”—are produced like dance tracks: Programming and sequencing fill every conceivable space; keyboards are all over the place; and vocals frequently dip into rapping and/or an R&B/dance-pop falsetto. Guitars are in the mix, but they’re no longer a core quality.This is just the tip of the iceberg. Ever since Aaron Bruno (a.k.a. AWOLNATION) introduced the novel idea of marrying a Black Keys/White Stripes-style thump and grungy power chords to electropop synths, EDM shimmer, and even some chopped and screwed goop, modern rock has witnessed a surge of artists who simply don’t give a shit about operating within the genre’s traditionally drawn boundaries. There’s Lorde, X Ambassadors, Rag’n’Bone Man, Bastille, Issues, and MISSIO (whose massive, electro-rock anthem “Middle Fingers” probably is unknown to most folks over the age of 30). Even South Africa’s KONGOS, who utilize plenty of chunky, distorted-riff action, build their songs for both the arena and club.All this prompts the question: trend or the new normal? Hard to tell. After all, the charts still see action from garage-bred dudes like Jack White, Benjamin Booker, and the Black Lips who remain faithful to a classic conception of rock ’n’ roll. But it does seem as if Twenty One Pilots and Imagine Dragons, as well as every other artist on our playlist, are expressions of deeper shifts in rock’s relationship to digital production technology that are going to continue to become more far-reaching. Of course, we could run out of energy by the end of the decade; in that case it’s back to folk music for everybody.

I don’t know very much about Britpop. I like Pulp somewhat, especially when this woman I am friends with (read: attracted to) comes over to my apartment and plays it for me. I don’t like Blur. I like Oasis all right, but I really don’t know their music well. I like Radiohead—is that Britpop? I love The Smiths. Are they Britpop? Determined to find answers and to investigate my own general distaste for the style, I decided to dig into Pitchfork’s recent 50 Best Britpop Albums list.The first thing I see on the page is a Sgt. Pepper-style mural, ostensibly with all of the important Britpop figures on it. I recognize Thom Yorke and the guys from Oasis. I see the guys from Trainspotting. Did they do Britpop? There’s a smiling milk carton, some dancers, and around 30 other people I don’t recognize. But by reading through the feature, I start to develop a better understanding of what Britpop is.It began in London in the ‘90s, which answers my question about The Smiths (but then... is Morrissey Britpop?), and I find that Britpop is characterized by “anthemic melodies, social observations of British culture and daily life, and their country’s musical heritage,” according to the article. I learn what Britpop isn’t: The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Coldplay, Kasabian. As I listen to some of the tracks on the playlist, I note that most of them are upbeat, many have light, airy atmospheres, and the guitar tones are largely bright and shiny with little distortion or overdrive. I actually recognize a number of these songs from the radio. I am having sort of a coherent moment.I see a supplementary interview with Danny Boyle and remember that Trainspotting 2 came out a few weeks ago. I put two and two together: This list is meant to coincide with Trainspotting 2. I am a big fan of some songs on the soundtrack of the original, namely those by Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, New Order, and Lou Reed… So, the tracks that aren’t Britpop. As I read through the Boyle interview, searching for information that might lead me to understand why Britpop is important to think about in 2017 or why I should really care about it as a musical style (other than it’s in the pantheon of rock styles), I strike out. And there isn’t much rhetoric in the copy of this playlist to convince me of the genre’s greatness. The interview ends with Boyle responding to a question of whether he prefers Oasis or Blur: He says that he comes from Manchester, so the answer should be obvious. It isn’t to me, so I have to do some research.Despite my skepticism, I actually enjoyed the article and the playlist. I learned what Britpop is for Pitchfork and why Danny Boyle popularized it in Trainspotting, and I acquired a comprehensive playlist of the best Britpop songs. I still don’t like Britpop, and I’m not convinced that it’s important for me to think about today, but at least I now know what it entails. And hey, that’s progress.

Once you get past all the decadent, gaudy squalor of Hollywood, perhaps the most defining characteristic of Los Angeles is the myriad of gentle, swaying palm trees lining the streets, standing tall and surreal against the smog-stricken sky. L.A. is an urban tropicalia muddied by human ambition and confusion, and this sensibility has seeped into some of the most prominent and experimental artists working in the city today. Whether it’s in the chime-ridden new age of Leaving Records, the sandy jam sessions of Not Not Fun, or any of the sundry attitudes that coalesce under the local community radio standard-bearer Dublab, you can hear the palm trees coming through in the forward-thinking sounds of the L.A. underground, becoming churned from an object of paradise into something caught between imagination and reality. This mix gathers some of the most exciting voices making music in Los Angeles today, and attempts to find some common ground in their scattered, psychedelic visions.

On August 20, 2002, NYC was a much different place than it was just a year previous. Post-9/11, the air hung heavier, thick with apprehension and paranoia—exactly the type of environment ripe for an album as stunningly devastating as Interpols debut. Looking back 15 years, Turn on the Bright Lights remains the chiming centerpiece of 21st-century post-punk because it so acutely reflects its time and place of origin, while capturing a deep-seated malaise that would extend well past that time and place.Some 20-plus years before that, post-punk rose and fell with a sound that was so sharp and brutally real, there was no chance it could survive long. like PiL would invent it; bands like Joy Division would fully embody it. Their songs—tightly wound and always teetering on the edge of catharsis without ever fully realizing it—articulate that maddening clench in the pit of the stomach that refuses to ever completely let go. Its a similar feeling that Interpol intricately conveys on tracks like "PDA" and perfect album opener "Untitled," with its thick bass and quivering guitar jangle streaked in wavering drones. It doesnt hurt that Paul Banks stoic baritone fluctuates at the same low, dolorous tremble as Ian Curtis did.But where those pioneers stripped punks fiery brutality down to its starkest essence, Interpol also paint it in varying tones of goth and grey, echoing gloomy sonic architects like The Cure, Bauhaus, and Echo & The Bunnymen, whose seductive atmospherics, pounding rhythms, and damaged guitar jangle haunt slow-burning ballads like "NYC" and "Hands Away.”While Interpol may have found influence from dreary 80s England, their debut is purely rooted in early 00s New York. But youll never have needed to experience either time or place to wholly absorb the myriad shades of discontent—the disillusionment, dread, isolation, and alienation—rendered so achingly intoxicating on any one of these songs.

Back in the ’80s, uptight white people fretted over the decline of western civilization. For Tipper Gore and the PMRC, suburban youth were being morally debased by the down and dirty sounds of gangsta rappers, Satanic headbangers, and provocative pop divas. The most obscene of all was 2 Live Crew and the Miami bass sound they helped transform into something that was equal parts pop fad and national epidemic. Seemingly overnight, white teenage girls were shaking what their mamas gave them, while their brothers cruised strip mall parking lots in cars with the boom. School dances were cancelled, musicians arrested, and record stores shuttered. To celebrate this gloriously obscene time in America, here is a bass-thumping blast of genre cornerstones, radio hits, and lost nuggets.

With a career that spans more than 60 years, Quincy Jones has one of music’s most formidable résumés: sideman, Dizzy Gillespie musical director, bandleader, label executive, arranger, soundtrack composer, TV mogul, and winner of 28 Grammys (so far). His biggest legacy, however, is as a producer—a job he described as “part babysitter, part shrink.” Though his long footprint has been known to careen into jazz, bossa nova, and hip-hop, it’s the R&B, pop, soul, and soundtrack music he made in the ’70s and ’80s that define entire worlds, thanks to Q’s lush arrangements, perky percussion, and airy sounds—not to mention his work on Michael Jackson’s 1983 album, Thriller, the biggest-selling album of all time.His early-’70s soundtrack work and TV themes mixed large orchestral vision with indelible jazz-funk rhythms. His mid-’70s solo albums—and concurrent work with Aretha Franklin and the Brothers Johnson—simmered with soft-focus groove, bravado, slickness, and warmth. It was a perfect fit for the era when disco and funk met pop, when he eased on down the road into the 1978 soundtrack to The Wiz and Michael Jackson’s glossy 1979 breakthrough Off the Wall. The records he produced on his record label, Qwest—George Benson, Patti Austin, James Ingram, and a late-career album for Frank Sinatra—provided sophisticated songs for Quiet Storm radio and beyond.By the end of the ’80s, Jones had produced the record-breaking charity single “We Are the World,” garnered three Academy Award nominations for his work on The Color Purple, produced Jackson’s Bad, and taken his own victory lap with 1989’s star-studded solo album Back on the Block, winner of that year’s Grammy for Album of the Year. On the title track, featuring rappers Ice-T, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Kool Moe Dee, and Big Daddy Kane, you can hear the whining horn from Ironside that he had introduced nearly 20 years earlier. In honor of Off the Wall’s 40th birthday, here’s a celebration of Jones—the producer—in his most iconic period.

Whenever I try describing Phantogram’s music to a friend I find myself stringing together an absurd number of genre tags: Indie pop, electro-pop, dream pop, shoegaze, dance pop, electronica, and even that dusty, old relic known as alt-dance have all been uttered at one time or another. Phantogram aren’t alone in their ability to mix and match genres with what seems like algorithmic complexity. A new generation of post-everything artists have emerged in recent years, and they’re laying waste to music categories that for decades seemed fixed in place. Of course, some of these musicians are more indie-based (Glass Animals and Young the Giant come to mind), while others, Frank Ocean and The Weeknd included, are more rooted in R&B, yet the result ultimately is the same. Are we witnessing the death of genre? Probably not. But the map certainly is getting redrawn in some very fundamental ways.

Subscribe to our "Best of Pharoah Sanders" playlist here, and follow us on Spotify here.Pharoah Sanders music is a place you can get lost in. It’s noisy and transcendent, carving out universes in tinkling vibes and jumpy blues grooves that are upturned by Sander’s trademark squawking, primal tenor saxophone. The music feels timeless. They frequently last for more than 20 minutes. But even beyond that, they seem to exist beyond our more pedestrian concepts of temporal matters. But there’s also a cultural context for all this ecstasy and upheaval, one rooted in a very specific cultural and political milieu. The New York-by-way-of-Arkansas free jazz icon had a coming out party of sorts on John Coltrane’s 1965 album Ascension. That album consists of one, 40-minute track (Spotify breaks up the track into two parts, for some reason) and marks Coltrane’s complete abandonment of post-bop for free jazz. The cascading, squealing interplay between Coltrane and Sanders sounds bracing even today, but the key to understand it is that it’s a product of a particular time and place. The Vietnam War was dramatically escalating, the social norms of post-war America were quickly being overturned, and, perhaps more importantly, the civil rights movement was splintering and turning increasingly militant: Malcolm X had been assassinated four months prior; the Black Panthers would form a year afterwards.But this isn’t nihilistic music. It’s the sound of confusion and propulsion, of being angry in a dark room, of taking a dive into a deep, unknowable abyss. In two years, Coltrane was dead, and Sanders would strike out on his own, becoming a band leader while employing the sonic template that Coltrane had forged. The 11 albums that he would release on Impulse Records over the course of the next either years -- starting with 1966’s Tauhid and ending with 1974’s Love in Us All -- serve as a high water mark or sorts for free jazz.Free Jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman once said that Sanders was "probably the best tenor player in the world,” while Albert Ayler famously quipped, "Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost.” It’s easy to understand why when listening to tracks such as “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah” or “The Creator Has A Master Plan.” The tracks capture the uncertainty and chaos of creation, they sound like either the big bang or the apocalypse. You have to destroy to build, and Sanders did plenty of both.

Barry Walters delivers this great overview of the 70s soul scene in Philadelphia. With its funk intonations and more polished arrangements, Philly Soul is sometimes overlooked by R&B neophytes, but, as Barry proves here, the scene produced some of the sweetest and most memorable music from that decade. Much of the credit belongs to Gamble and Huff and their Philadelphia International Records, but the scene was bursting with talent. Check out this great retrospective of one of our favorite scenes.

What’s This Playlist All About? “The most trusted voice in music” works its way through a decade we all can’t seem to get enough of with this disclaimer: “Longtime readers may remember that, in 2002, we made a list of The Top 100 Albums of the 1980s. That list was shorter, sure, but it also represented a limited editorial stance we have worked hard to move past; its lack of diversity, both in album selections and contributing critics, does not represent the voice Pitchfork has become. For this new list, we gathered votes from more than 50 full-time staffers and regularly contributing writers to open up our discussion.”What You Get: The usual suspects crowd the top of the list (Prince, MJ, Madonna, Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, New Order), but dig into the heart of it and you may find some real hidden gems. You’ll find the throbbing, funky post-punk of Bronx band ESG; the brilliant sampling of hip-hop greats EPMD; the Satanic doggedness of death metal gods Morbid Angel; the infectious South African rhythms of The Indestructible Beat of Soweto compilation; and the intricate computer patchworks of electronic pioneer Laurie Spiegel. Let’s just say the whole 575-song mix certainly has the diversity promised.Greatest Discovery: At No. 130 is Scientist’s Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires, excellently described by reviewer Eddie “Stats” Houghton as “one of the greatest dub albums ever, transforming the swing of dancehall’s catchiest tunes into their spookiest, most expansive selves. Historically, this record is a precursor to trip-hop and dubstep, but even encountered as an isolated sonic experience, the tracks are revelatory, uniquely suffused with an eerie joy.”Do We Really Need Another ‘80s Playlist? This list is surprisingly fresh, and it may even be worth starting from the bottom, as you’ll likely discover some unexpected treasures you’ve never heard before. In other words, yes, another ‘80s playlist will do just fine. There’s still plenty to discover from the decade that just won’t die—thankfully.