Decades

• The first song you danced to.I can’t remember but it was probably a song by Juan Luis Guerra - Dominican music• A song you wished youd written.Human Nature - Michael Jackson• Your favorite Tom Petty song.Breakdown and American Girl• A song everyone should hear.Welcome to heartbreak - Kanye West• A song for a late-night drive.Tyrant Destroyed - Twin Shadow• The song that reminds you of Brooklyn.Time to pretend - MGMT• A song you want to keep for yourself.Ship building - Robert Wyatt• A song that inspires you to create.The robots - Kraftwerk• A song that inspires you to destroy.The model - Kraftwerk• Song for a loved one.Vincent - Don Mclean (for my dad)• A song for your mother.By your side - Sade

Chance the Rapper owned hip-hop in 2016. He provided the musical backbone of Kanye’s Life of Pablo, partied with Beyonce at the VMAs, hung out with Obama at the White House, headlined his own festival, and released the groundbreaking mixtape/album Coloring Book. In terms of larger cultural impact, there’s very few rappers this decade who’ve matched Chance’s 2016 run. To an extent, it seems destined that Chance the Rapper would reach this stature -- he’s been buzzed about in underground circles since his 2012 mixtape 10 Day, and he comes from the upper echelons of Chicago’s political elites: his father is currently serving as the chief of staff for Mayor Rahm Emanuel -- but his moment in the limelight is a weird by-product of a dark political and cultural moment. The joy and euphoria of his rhymes, and the mindfulness and positivity of his persona, provide an anecdote to 2016’s riots, terrorism, police shootings, and political demagogues. He embodies the way we want to see ourselves, our future and our culture. For hip-hop fans, particularly those who fashion ourselves purists of a certain variety, he also reflects how we’d like to think of the genre. And part of the joy of listening to Coloring Book is picking apart his influences and how he reflects hip-hop. The smartly euphoric uplift of “No Problems” recalls Kanye during his pop maximalism peak, while the “Blessings” channels the strands of gospel that pops up in everyone from Tupac to Anderson.Paak. Though he reps his hometown of Chicago -- and his music contains echoes of everyone from Juke legend DJ Rhashad to classic boom bap icon Common -- he’s also has omnivorous tastes, channeling LA underground absurdists Freestyle Fellowship and the sludgy H-Town hip-hop of Mike Jones. For this playlist, we trace some of those influences and try to unpack Chance’s deceptively dense masterpiece, Coloring Book. You can subscribe to the playlist here. We’ve also curated a playlist of some of our favorite interviews of the rapper. Check it out below. -- Sam Chennault

Subscribe to this Spotify playlist right here.Pavement’s wildest, wooliest LP sits squarely in the middle of its career. In the wake of 1994’s indie totem Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, conventional wisdom held that 1995’s Wowee Zowee would be the moment when this quintet broke through to the mainstream. Instead, a mischievousness impulse won out, one that our musical culture is all the richer for. Primary songwriters Stephen Malkmus and Steve Kannberg dug deep into influences old and new, emerging with the scuzz-rock equivalent of a moth-eaten Choose Your Own Adventure book. Much of Wowee Zowee’s charm lies in its looseness, its abject lack of seriousness, the constant sense that things could fly off the rails at any moment; the album shares this DNA with the catalogue of Memphis’ The Grifters, a group frequently recorded by Wowee producer Doug Easley. Meanwhile, the gauzy, pedal steel-soaked “We Dance” recalls the woozy grandeur of “Quicksand,” from David Bowie’s Hunky Dory. Zig-zagging rager “Flux=Rad” cops attitude from “Let’s Lynch the Landlord,” a classic barnstormer by the San Francisco punk outfit Dead Kennedys. The freewheeling back end of “Half a Canyon” salutes Germany’s krautrock originators by way of Pavement’s 1990s peers Stereolab (“Exploding Head Movie”), while the nagging tug-o-war guitars powering the point where “Fight This Generation” crests can be traced back to key influence The Fall (“Jawbone + the Air-Rifle”). Olympia, Washington’s Bikini Kill celebrated an anti-corporate ethos that “Serpentine Pad” emulated, but as “AT&T” demonstrates, Pavement certainly weren’t above polishing a Nirvana-grade melody until it shone like a slacker anthem. Few albums have been quite so willing and eager to lead everywhere at once. -- Raymond Cummings

It’s been 20 years since Wilco’s Being There seduced me in my roommate’s Ford Escort. This happened in the fall of 1996, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, just two hours northeast of Chicago. So yeah, the place was crawling with Midwestern college students all earnest and modest and way into Wilco, Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, The Jayhawks and any other artist camping out halfway between alternative and rootsy. A fan of noisy underground rock, I tended to dismiss these bands — that is until I started borrowing Rob’s Escort to run errands: laundry, the bank, record stores, Smirnoff. The super generous dude said I could take it anytime, and I did. (I also devoured a lot of his groceries — sorry, man.) Why exactly I began listening to his copy of Being There — which had been out only a few weeks — and not one of the dozen other CDs strewn across the floor has been lost time. I’d love to say that I started the ignition one day and became instantly intrigued once the gargantuan, Flaming Lips-like feedback of the opener, “Misunderstood,” drenched the car. But that would be the kind of apocryphal crap music critics love foisting upon readers. Nevertheless, I started listening to the record and gradually became obsessed. It’s never left me. I know it forwards and backwards. I can recite the track list from memory. I appreciate other Wilco albums, but none even come close to blowing my mind like their second.From the little I’ve read about the album (I’m not lying when I say I haven’t read much about Wilco), Jeff Tweedy, Jay Bennett (RIP), and the rest of the crew harbored lofty themes about the complex relationship between rocker and fan when they began recording the sprawling double album in late 1995. You can hear them grapple with this idea on “Misunderstood,” written from the perspective of a fan, as well as “Sunken Treasure” and “The Lonely 1.” I didn’t know any of this when I first formulated my take on Being There, which is this: It’s an overly self-conscious rock album made by an overly self-conscious rock a band about rock, both its awesomeness and suckitude. It’s about how rock is totally weary, spent, and repetitive, yet at the same time utterly inescapable for those addicted to it. And since there is no escape, we might as well drink from that repetition — revel in it. As Tweedy sings on “Someone Else’s Song,” a slowly rolling folk number with a melody reminiscent of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” “I keep on singing/ You’re eyes they just roll/ It sounds like someone else’s song/ From a long time ago.”Wilco take the notion of singing someone else’s song as a license to wear their influences on their sleeves in a way that most bands would be too embarrassed to ever attempt. Many of these — early Little Feat, Neil, Gram, The Replacements, Big Star — are baked deep into the grooves. Others, in contrast, are shoved in listeners’ faces. Not only does “Misunderstood” lift The Lips’ uniquely groaning feedback, it actually contains lines — “Take the guitar player for a ride/ You see he ain’t never been satisfied/ He thinks he owes some kind of debt/ Be years before he gets over it” — lifted almost verbatim from Rocket From the Tombs’ proto-punk ballad “Amphetamine.” The rocker “Monday” boasts Keith Richards’ guitar tone from Let It Bleed and blaring horns from Exile On Main St. On the blurry-eyed ballad “(Was I) in Your Dream,” Tweedy sounds like a drunken Dr. John impersonator, while over the course of the fiddle jam “Dreamer in My Dreams” he mimics the raspy hellraising of Tex-Mex legend Doug Sahm (who recorded with Uncle Tupelo, incidentally).In addition to blatant plagiarism and mimicry, Tweedy works in all manner of historical references, some obvious, others oblique. In the folksy love ditty “Far, Far Away,” he slips in the phrase “on the dark side of the moon.” You can tell from his hesitant delivery that he totally knows what fans will be thinking when they hear him nick a phrase from Floyd. “Hotel Arizona” has to be a nod to “Hotel California” because the song doesn’t actually contain the phrase in the lyrics. Tweedy sings “hotel in Arizona” but not actually “Hotel Arizona.” Being There contains an “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” as well as an “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)”; both are basically different versions of the same song, just like how The Beatles included slightly different renditions of the title track on the art pop classic Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Ditto for Neil on Tonight’s the Night.)I freely admit that many of my references are wholly my own creation, and Tweedy probably would roll his eyes if he ever read this. Like a nutty conspiracy theorist with a wall full of photographs, pins, and yarn, I’ve constructed a map of the different rock coordinates that I’ve projected onto . The whistling closing out the richly melodic “Red-Eyed and Blue” is a nod to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream.” “The Lonely 1,” a syrupy ballad about the rock ‘n’ roll life, is Wilco’s “Beth,” itself a syrupy ballad about the rock ‘n’ roll life. And best of all, the playfully walking piano chords opening “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)” are a secret love letter to the influence that “Sesame Street Theme” exerted on Tweedy as a child.Being There totally invites this kind of fanaticism, however delusional, from its fans. After all, only fellow rock fanatics — the kind that spent their teenage years picking apart every last lyric, riff, and fill on their favorite albums — could’ve recorded a set so absurdly referential. This is music by obsessives for obsessives. What started as a fling in a Ford Escort in the mid ’90s turned into a fascination spanning decades.

Since the first VMA ceremony in 1984, where Madonna performed “Like a Virgin” and David Bowie won the first Video Vanguard Award, the VMAs have served as a benchmark for pop culture artistry. This year’s video nominees are no different. Bowie’s arresting “Blackstar” felt like a dispatch from beyond the grave, while Drake’s “Hotline Bling” became a neon-soaked instant classic. Kanye West’s provocative, queasy “Famous,” featuring wax replicas of the naked celebrities, was both a celebration and condemnation of celebrity culture, while Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” relied on the juxtaposition between its celebratory images and the song’s pleading lyrics. These are all beautiful videos, but they’re also great tracks. This playlist collects the seductive and dramatic songs that inspired this year’s top videos.

Don’t try looking up pop-mosh on urbandictionary.com. It’s so street that only those kids deep into everything Warped-related use it to tag tracks in their music libraries. It refers to the recent explosion of metalcore and post-hardcore bands who add melodic vocals, big room synths, and/or thumping beats to their gutter howls and bruising breakdowns. While some of the groups, A Day to Remember and Of Mice and Men among them, still sound very crunchy and riff-centric, others, including The Amity Affliction and I See Stars, are inching closer to an aggro brand of art pop. Then there’s Bring Me the Horizon and Issues: These party monsters are so down with EDM they may as well be hanging with Steve Aoki and Skrillex at Ultra. -- Justin Farrar

When Black Rebel Motorcycle Club sang, "Whatever Happened to My Rock n Roll" on their 2001 debut, they were gazing upon a contemporary rock landscape overpopulated with backward red baseball caps and greasy grunge-oil salesmen, and lamenting the lack of raw, raucous, life-changing (and corrupting) devils music on the radio. In this case, the complaining actually worked: Within a year, BRMC found themselves standing alongside The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Hives, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, and many other disgruntled guitar-slingers, perched on the precipice of the last moment in history when the words "rock" and "revolution" could be uttered together with a straight face. And mobilizing right behind them were all the bands on this playlist——groups that may have enjoyed a few spins on Subterranean, earned a glossy magazine spread or two, got name-dropped by Jack White in an interview, or scored a prime opening slot on a Franz Ferdinand tour, but never quite achieved the same notoriety or longevity as the aforementioned acts.The early 2000s were, of course, a transformative moment in the music industry: The advent of mp3s and file-sharing opened up new portals for underground bands to achieve more widespread visibility; at the same time, old-school publications like NME and SPIN still wielded enough king-making power to anoint new rock saviors on a seemingly weekly basis, while labels were scooping up any band with unkempt hair and thrift-store blazers. The result was a cyclonic swirl of hype that sucked in MTV2-ready arena-indie acts (Longwave, Ambulance Ltd.), stylish post-punk revivalists (The Stills, Hot Hot Heat), unruly post-punk revivalists (Ikara Colt, Radio 4), unrulier post-hardcore miscreants (The Icarus Line, The Bronx), post-hardcore 70s-rock fetishists (Danko Jones, Rye Coalition), brainiac Brits (The Futureheads, Clearlake), seasoned garage acts gunning for a long-deserved close-up (Billy Childish with the Buff Medways, Mick Collins with the Dirtbombs), new-school misfits (The Ponys, The Gris Gris, Vietnam), and, thanks to The Hives surprise crossover success, an uncommon amount of Swedes (Sahara Hotnights, Division of Laura Lee, Mando Daio, The Concretes)——not to mention Canadians (The Deadly Snakes, Tangiers, The Marble Index), New Zealanders (The D4, The Datsuns), and Icelandians (Singapore Sling).Though a handful of these acts have managed to duke it out to this day, many didnt survive the 2000s. And a quick glance at this years Coachella line-up shows that the question posed by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club at the top of this post has, in the long run, only become more existentially pertinent. However, if the early 2000s garage-rock uprising didnt alter the course of popular music in the way its adherents had hoped, its impact can still be felt in less tangible ways. The eras blurring of indie aesthetics and mainstream aspirations has become manifest in everything from satellite-radio formats to boy bands sporting skinny jeans and salon-sculpted messy haircuts to the sheer number of annual alterna-festivals that didnt exist before 2001. Meanwhile, Lizzy Goodmans recent tell-all oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom has effectively mythologized the Strokes heyday for a new generation just as Please Kill Me did with the 70s CBGB scene (with a documentary adaptation to come). And right on cue, several long-dormant early-2000s phenoms——including Franz Ferdinand, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and BRMC——are resurfacing with new albums and/or reunion appearances; you can also expect 2018 releases from Jack White, ex-Walkmen singer Hamilton Leithauser, and Julian Casabalancas garage-prog side band The Voidz.But here, we remember those bygone would-be hype magnets who are less likely to fire up newsfeeds in 2018. Just as Lenny Kayes 1972 compilation Nuggets commemorated the countless short-lived garage bands that formed in the wake of the mid-60s British Invasion, this playlist forsakes the most hyped and heavily rotated bands of the 2000-2005 era to focus on the forgotten phenoms, unsung instigators, and steady-as-she-goes survivors who, in their own little ways, intensified the hysteria of that moment. (It also excludes groups like The Kills, The Black Keys, and Gossip, who, while still relatively under-the-radar at the time, would go on to much greater success. You may also note the absence of The Libertines, who quickly transcended their second-hand Strokes roots to spawn a landfill-indie legacy all their own.)This is a mix for anyone who actually bought a stellastar* single based on the NMEs recommendation, anyone who was momentarily convinced The Mooney Suzuki (pictured at top) were the future of rock n roll, and anyone who thought Elefant would be as big as Elephant. Our Cheap Monday jeans may not fit anymore and our once fulsome shag cuts may have given way to receding hairlines, but lets do a bump for old times sake——this bathrooms got your choice of 50 stalls.

A spark that connects the feminine spirit with its masculine counterpart can create an undeniable musical dynamic. And it doesnt always come from a place of lust or romance (though, lets admit, any sort of sexual tension or frustration can inspire incredibly timeless art—just see Rumours). This idea has especially taken hold among a generation of indie folk and pop couples and collectives, who, coincidentally, have been inspired by bands like Fleetwood Mac in creating homespun tales that reveal universal truths of love and heartache via big pop hooks—and sometimes some serious fiddle. Male/female harmonies are a key ingredient when creating the best type of clap-happy sing-alongs (Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes), cathartic bursts of banjo-infused rock (The Head and The Heart), and acoustic ballads so intimate it feels sinful just to listen to (The Civil Wars). And, yes, some of these tracks do reflect real-life fireworks—or their dwindling remains—between certain band members (we miss you, Rilo Kiley!). -- Stephanie Garr

Disco has proven to be one of the more malleable and durable genres, certainly more so than punk or many other genres that sprung up during the 70s. Tim Finney -- who’s written for Pitchfork, Complex and nearly everywhere between those poles -- offers this “woke as fuck” playlist on Spotify. And though there’s no written context for this, and the tracks span decades, they seem to all be from the more proggy and experimental end of the disco spectrum. They’re also consistently jaw-dropping amazing.

In terms of Western music opening itself up to global influences, the years 1976 to ’82 represent a major paradigm shift. Radical invention was everywhere, both at pop’s fringes and its center. While world renowned visionaries Talking Heads and Joni Mitchell drew African-informed polyrhythms deep into their singular visions, underground mavericks Throbbing Gristle and The Pop Group grafted clanging atonalism to tribal percussion and reverb-encrusted dub, respectively. Jazz, too, boasted its fair share of explorers. Frenetic Afro-Caribbean percussion, mesmerizing Sufi music from Morocco, exotically droning woodwinds—nothing was off limits for the likes of Ornette Coleman or Miles Davis. Not surprisingly, this playlist casts a wide net. Some cuts are as hot and humid as a rainforest; others evoke the cold, dank isolation of abandoned warehouses. Yet they’re united in their bold, ethnological innovation.