Decades

This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at the far-reaching, decades-long impact of disco. Curious about disco and want to learn more? Go here to sign up. 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. They’ll thank you. We thank you.When disco emerged as a dominant cultural force in the mid-to-late ’70s, regressive cultural forces converged under the banner of rockism to decry its ascendance. Racists, homophobes, and garden-variety closed-minded reactionaries started stirring up impressionable music fans with apocalyptic visions of disco taking over the world and crushing good ol’ rock ‘n’ roll into the dirt beneath its platform heels. Mass record burnings, graffiti, and sloganeering were all part of the benighted Disco Sucks movement. But if anyone ever bothered to ask actual rockers about the issue at the time, they would have gotten a very different perspective.Between the late ‘70s (when disco was at its zenith) and the early ‘80s (when it began to peter out), a remarkable number of high-profile rockers decided to take the plunge and adapt their sound to a disco groove, even if only for a song or two. Granted, it may not have been too huge a shock when try-anything types like The Rolling Stones and David Bowie turned out discofied tracks like “Miss You” and “Fashion,” respectively, especially since the no-disco movement was less prevalent in their native U.K. than in the U.S. But even some American bands you’d never expect to hit the dance floor were having a go at it.Hippie heroes The Grateful Dead got down with the four-on-the-floor feel for “Shakedown Street.” America’s Band themselves, The Beach Boys, put on their polyester (at least figuratively) for “Here Comes the Night.” And hard-rock demons Kiss stepped up to the plate with the ooga-ooga bass lines of “I Was Made for Lovin’ You,” ending up with one of the biggest hits of their career in the process.

‘90s R&B has emerged as a default sample source for hip-hop and R&B over the past few years. You can credit Drake for pushing this into the mainstream, but the predominance of ‘90s samples in alternative R&B, and the impact of artist such as The Weeknd or Bryson Tiller on pop music, has added wood to the slow-burning fire. And it’s a good match; the looseness and more textural sounds of Genuine or Alliyah provide a nice counterpoint to the aggressiveness of modern, EDM-influenced R&B. This playlist focuses on the songs that have sampled ‘90s R&B, rather than the source material itself. It would be nice if they paired the sampling and sampled songs, but, as it is, the playlist is a nice survey of the genre’s more mellow side.

The storied songwriting team of Elton John and Bernie Taupin won their first joint Oscar at the 2020 Academy Awards for “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again,” a disco-tinged, self-affirming strut from the Elton biopic Rocketman. That Oscar capped off a decade of big-ticket soundtrack songs, whether they were high-concept tracks like Lana Del Rey’s glammed-up Great Gatsby lament “Young and Beautiful,” heart-tugging ballads like Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born duet “Shallow,” or Pharrell Williams’ giddy Despicable Me 2 bounce “Happy.” Musicals were in high supply during the 2010s as well, with La La Land and Frozen leading the pack of song-filled fantasias that took viewers to far-off lands.

Todays tykes have no idea how easy theyve got it. If modern-day pop charts were filled with the kind of creepy, trauma-inducing fare that was commonplace when I was a child in the 70s, the FCC would be awash in lawsuits initiated by horrified parents.Though the 70s are commonly typecast as the decade when mellowness reigned supreme, radios gatekeepers thought nothing of filling the airwaves with songs of rape, murder, pedophilia, hate crimes, and other family-friendly activities. The eras artists in turn took the opportunity to let it all hang out.As a kid with a passion for pop, I would invariably have my bedside radio tuned to the local Top 40 station to help lull me into slumber. But some of the songs that slipped into my subconscious mind probably twisted my impressionable psyche for life.Clarence Carters R&B hit "Patches" concludes its wrong-side-of-the-tracks love story with—spoiler alert—a murder and consequent suicide. Rod Stewarts "The Killing of Georgie," true to its title, chronicles the murder of the homosexual title character by a bunch of gay-bashers. In Helen Reddys "Angie Baby," a young man tries to rape a mentally disturbed girl and is somehow eliminated by her supernatural abilities. Terry Jacks "Seasons in the Sun" adapts Jacques Brels "Le Moribond," in which a dying man tearfully bids farewell to each of his loved ones. And then there’s Ringo Starrs cover of "Youre Sixteen You’re Beautiful (And You’re Mine)," which ought to have been subtitled “(And Im 33).”At least Warren Zevons "Werewolves of London," with its account of little old ladies getting mutilated, was clearly played for laughs, but the bulk of these songs were unflinchingly earnest, and their 70s soft-pop trappings only made them all the more unsettling to a young mind. But go try and get a dour six-and-a-half minute song about a shipwreck where nobody survives into the Top 10 today—as Gordon Lightfoot did back in ’76—and see how far you get.

In 1982 Tina Turner laid the groundwork for her Private Dancer comeback when she collaborated with the British Electric Foundation, a side project of Human League and Heaven 17s Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh. Their collaboration—a synth-heavy rework of The Temptations 1970 broadside "Ball of Confusion"—was enough of a smash for the then-unsigned Turner to ink a deal with Capitol, and the B.E.F. offered to produce. But they had a difficult time agreeing on a track. "Nearly everything [Ware] brought me was some kind of R&B," Turner told Musician in 1984. "I said, I dont want R&B, I want rock n roll." Turner bristled when people pigeonholed her as a soul singer; "I am a rock and roll singer," she told Rolling Stone while promoting Private Dancer in 1984, neither the first nor the last time she would correct anothers assumptions. "River Deep, Mountain High," which she recorded with Phil Spector in 1966, was one of her early efforts at defying convention, her bravura vocal paired with Spectors famed (and pricey) Wall of Sound; the song, now a standard, stiffed at radio in the States. Spector, as guitarist and longtime friend Marshall Lieb recounted in Mark Ribowskys biography of the producer Hes A Rebel, believed it was because hed refused to engage in payola. But Tinas ex-husband, who was credited on the track yet didnt appear on it, had other ideas: "Ike Turner, who places River Deep up next to Good Vibrations as his two favorite records, says the Spector production didn’t get airplay because the soul stations said too pop and the white stations said too R&B," Ben Fong-Torres wrote in a 1971 issue of Rolling Stone. "’See, what’s wrong with America,’ [Turner] told Pete Senoff, is that rather than accept something for its value…America mixes race in it." While Ike Turners overall effect on his ex-partners life was pretty terrible (and he and Tina did have a fair amount of R&B in their repertoire), this broken-clock sentiment touches on a couple of things that have been true for decades. First, listening with ones eyes can result in genres being placed on music despite its sonics; and second, the stringent formatting of radio leaves a lot of worthy records by even big names stuck between the cracks. Black artists who, like Turner, rooted their music in rock ideals had to forge their own path. Betty Davis mixed rock and funk with Davis intense yowling in ways that still blow minds. "She introduced me to the music of Jimi Hendrix—and to Jimi Hendrix himself—and other black rock music and musicians," Miles Davis (her ex-husband) wrote in his 1989 autobiography. "She knew Sly Stone and all those guys, and she was great herself. If Betty were singing today shed be something like Madonna: something like Prince, only as a woman. She was the beginning of all that when she was singing as Betty Davis. She was just ahead of her time." The R&B trio Labelle, meanwhile, followed up the breakout success of "Lady Marmalade" with Phoenix, a showcase for singer/producer Nona Hendryx’s rock knowledge that stiffed on the charts. And Princes 1981 slot opening for the Rolling Stones—who had brought Ike and Tina on tour with them a decade-plus earlier—for two shows in Los Angeles was received so poorly by audiences conditioned to a particularly white-man-dominated "rock" ideal that promoter Bill Graham had to calm the crowd down. “I got hit in the shoulder with a bag of fried chicken," then-bassist Brown Mark recalled in 2016, "then my guitar got knocked out of tune by a large grapefruit that hit the tuning keys.” Private Dancer, the first album to result from Turner’s Capitol deal, operated squarely in the rock realm even as it contained covers of Ann Peebles "I Cant Stand the Rain" and Al Greens "Lets Stay Together" (the latter wound up being the song she collaborated on with Ware and Marsh). Her cover of David Bowies pre-apocalyptic "1984" pairs her roar with glittering synths; the simmering "Private Dancer" has a weeping guitar solo by Jeff Beck; "Better Be Good To Me" pairs Turner with a gang-vocal choir that wouldnt sound out of place on an AC/DC album. Yet with the exception of "Better," none of Private Dancers singles charted on rock radio—not even the monumental "Whats Love Got To Do With It," which topped the Hot 100 for three weeks in 1984.As the tabulations of the Hot 100 have shifted, that cross-genre chart has become more susceptible to trends among radio programmers and consumers. In recent years, this has particularly affected those artists whose music checks multiple boxes, or even the wrong one. While Beyoncé is rightly considered one of pops premier artists, she didnt have a chart-topping single between November 2008, when "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" was in the pole position, and December 2017—and that was through a featured credit on an Ed Sheeran song (the goopy "Perfect"). The Hot 100s ever-mutating formula shut out the pop-art explosion video for "Countdown" and the "If It Isnt Love"-saluting clip for "Love On Top"; both came out in 2011, two years before YouTube stats were incorporated into the big charts formulas. And her keeping Lemonade off Spotify was a big part of why no song from that watershed album cracked the top 10. Beyond Beyoncé, though, R&B seemingly fell out of favor among pop programmers in the late 2000s, a trend that was accelerated by radio consolidation, programmers doubling down on tight-ship formatting, the rise of the less-grooving style of music shorthanded as "EDM," and the increased presence of sports talk, a longtime staple of the AM band, on the FM dial. While that didnt alter Beyoncés musical trajectory very much, it did leave R&B artists—even ones with proven track records, like the silvery-voiced Amerie and the human-condition observer Ne-Yo—in what seemed like eternal turnaround. Ameries joyously resilient "Gotta Work" found its biggest audience when it boomed out of NBA All-Star Game promos; Ne-Yo, meanwhile, had his greatest chart successes when he played Pitbulls foil, giving a winsomeness to hope-tinged EDM bangers like "Time of My Life." More than five decades after "River Deep, Mountain High" was rejected by American programmers and listeners, artists who want to identify as pop while also bridging genres are still finding if not outright resistance, at least confusion from the more conservative-minded people out there (and in boardrooms). But theyre soldiering on, and as Miguels Kacey Musgrave-assisted country rework of his psych-funk track "Waves" shows, theyre continuing Tina Turners legacy of resisting classification, and—like her—theyre doing so loudly and proudly.

As President Barack Obama’s historic term in office winds to a close, his legacy remains unsettled, and so does his presence within hip-hop culture. When he emerged in the mid-2000s as a talented Illinois senator, Chicago rapper Common rapped on Jadakiss’ “Why” remix with eerie prescience, “Why is Bush acting like he trying to get Osama/Why don’t we impeach him and elect Obama?” Four years later, as Obama capped a historic run to the White House, he became a pop culture meme celebrated on Jeezy’s “My President is Black” and Nas’ “Black President.” But there was also an emerging leftist critique against the Democratic president– see Mr. Lif’s “What About Us” and dead prez’ “Politrikks” – and that criticism only increased as he battled with an implacable Republican Congress, failed to prosecute Wall Street executives responsible for the 2008 economic recession, struggled to extricate the country from wars in the Middle East, and tried to bring the country out of an economic recession.Only time will tell which image resonates the most: the pop icon from Jidenna’s “Long Live the Chief” who shifted the country towards steady but incremental progress, or the establishmentarian whose policies resulted in insubstantial trickle-down gains for the working class, leading African-Americans like Ice Cube to declare that “Everythang’s Corrupt.” The arrival of his Republican successor, real estate tycoon Donald Trump, only muddies the waters of how we’ll eventually perceive this historic figure. As YG raps on “FDT,” “[Trump] got me appreciating Obama way more.”

Regardless of what you think qualitatively about Drake’s music, or his progression as an artist, his impact on culture is undeniable. He’s a pop idol in a classical, pre-pomo sense; his fans not only devour his music, they model their ideas about fashion, art, and even sports around the Toronto emcee. In ranking the songs that defined the “Drake era,” the Fader staff make note that “this is not a “Best Of” or a ranking of any sort, but an acknowledgement of the songs that represent Drake’s expanding influence in music, culture, and our lives.” It’s a subtle but interesting distinction, but nonetheless interesting: they’re not pulling their favorite songs, or even his most popular songs, but tracks that capture the Drake zeitgeist.

If this list proves anything, its that "alternative rock" has always been a nebulous concept—especially by 1996, when grunge was already long deemed dead. Then again, many of the tracks here remain some of the weirdest slices of rock to ever see regular airplay (Butthole Surfers! The Presidents of the United States of America!). But its still a little silly to hear Jewels half-yodeling coffee-shop acoustic pop sit alongside Porno for Pyros crunchy, psychedelic riffs, or 311s reggae-infused rap next to Sleater-Kinneys snotty feminist punk and Underworlds euphoric, bubbling trance. But thats exactly how alternative rock radio operated at the time—all of these sounds actually made sense together, because all of them have that Gen X angst baked right on in em. (I dare you to find one track that doesnt have at least a little cynicism or sarcasm raging through it.). Even the "Weird Al" polka parody that kicks this list off takes from some of the decades darkest alternative hits (and, seriously, whats more depressing than a polka?).

The top 100 tracks from Spotify, updated weekly.

Its about halftime for 2015, and the guys over at Stereogum have picked out their favorite 50 albums of the year so far. Its a decent list, and theres not too much to report trend-wise, though there are an inordinate amount of waifish female indie singers and not a lot of hip-hop or electronic. But its a fun list. As a note, these are in reverse order, and I generally picked out the singles from the album in the playlist.