Decades

No Wave always seemed like more of an idea or a scene than a particular music aesthetic -- theres a lot of space between Liquid Liquid, ESG and Sonic Youth, for example -- but there are general common denominators (detuned guitars and shouted vocals). The scene was entirely based in New York, began in the late-70s and fizzled out by the mid-80s. It got its name from the amazing Godard quote, "There are no new waves, there is only the ocean," and while it was never popular, per se, the bands associated with the scene were endlessly influential, inspiring everything from hardcore to DFA-era electro pop. Im sure a no wave purist would scoff at some of the inclusions on this list, but its still a good primer for the genre.

You could pretty easily make the case that Chicago is the musical center of the United States. Blues, juke and house all originated (at least in part) from the city. Two-Step (or just Steppin) never achieved the national name recognition as house music, but it was a pretty potent strain of R&B that peaked in the middle half of the last decade. Like a lot of music to emerge in the past thirty years, it was a dance first. The music was bright, romantic and highly syncopated. Its great, summery R&B music. It was popularized nationally by R. Kelly in his "Step in the Name of Love" single, but that was really just the tip of the iceberg, as this excellent playlist demonstrates. Rizoh over at Beats did a great job capturing some of the highlights from the scene. Listening now, it definitely feels of a certain time and place, and it seems very out-of-step with the more dour and minimal sounds the genre would adopt in subsequent years, which makes two step even more powerful.

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.Thanks to a cadre of specialty imprints, as well as guerilla crate diggers like Awesome Tapes From Africa, music fanatics can now explore numerous reissues and compilations that chart the evolution of dance music in post ’60s Africa. It’s from this wealth of archival work that Resident Advisor has constructed “Afro Disco,” a collection of cuts that show how the scorching syncopation of mid-’70s Afrobeat gradually cooled into a purring, disco-inspired repetition by the dawn of the ’80s. Another key change is a heavier reliance on synthesizers and chunka-chunk guitars fed through the kind of coked-out effects that Chic’s Nile Rodgers pioneered. RA’s aesthetic is so tightly focused (big surprise there) that one could easily imagine these tracks being released as their own compilation.

“I’m a wolf child, girl, howlin’ for you! Wild flower!” When these lines appeared 50 seconds into The Cult’s Electric, nothing would ever be the same—even if it sounded pretty much like it always had.Future historians may prefer a more phonetic rendering of the song’s title, which sounds more like “wiiillldd flllowww-ahh!” coming out of Ian Astbury’s mouth. Married to Billy Duffy’s crunchy riffage, the singer’s schtick was gloriously, even knowingly, dumb. But critics at the time were unkind to our hero. In a Spin review of the more absurd follow-up album, Sonic Temple, writer David Sprague pondered whether Astbury was indeed the Jerry Lee Lewis of rock, ridiculing the former goth band’s bald-faced lifts from Led Zeppelin, Queen, and The Doors (who were fronted by Astbury’s true god, Jim Morrison).Hard as it may be for present-day aficionados of cock rock to believe, all of the genre’s bands were largely treated as objects of ridicule when Electric was delivered into the greedy hands of teenagers 30 years ago this month. After all, classic rock radio was just becoming a thing, and with thrash and hardcore yet to go overground and Hüsker Dü and The Replacements left stuck on the dial, what passed for hard rock in the mainstream was hair metal’s limp glam pop pastiche. Machine-tooled to perfection by Rick Rubin, Electric did a lot to change that.So did Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction, which arrived just a few months later. Soon, the scene on both sides of the Atlantic would be thick with Jack-swilling, bandana-clad he-men schooled in Zeppelin, Sabbath, Aerosmith, and the newly resurgent AC/DC. Even former hair metal lightweights like Cinderella did all they could to toughen up.Having set the gold standard first with Slayer and then The Cult, Rubin continued to put his Midas touch on bands like Masters of Reality and The Four Horsemen, two lesser lights who still churned out some monster jams. Meanwhile, the hip-hop/mega rock merger that Rubin first devised would soon reach maximum overdrive when Public Enemy sampled Slayer and teamed up with Anthrax. Deep in the Pacific Northwest, there were rumblings of the grunge to come, though back in the late ’80s, it took a discerning ear to hear any hard line between Soundgarden and German Zep wannabes Kingdom Come. Which is to say they were both awesome.Tragically, this period of magnificence came to an end, right around the same time Nevermind arrived alongside GnR’s bloated Use Your Illusion in September of 1991 (oddly, Ozzy Osbourne’s final solo masterpiece, No More Tears, came out the same month). To commentators at the time, Nirvana’s conquest signaled rock’s new relevance; a narrative that made sense, seeing as the genre’s popularity had sagged so much that not a single rock album topped the charts the year before.But that’s dead wrong now, what with the age of gods ushered in by Electric replaced by the lumpen likes of Creed, Staind, and Nickelback—if Astbury was hard rock’s Jerry Lee Lewis, surely Chad Kroeger is its Rob Schneider. Saddled in between the ass-end of hair metal and the rise of grunge, this era has rarely gotten its due. Hell, classic rock radio rarely touches the stuff—it’s too damn gnarly. But make no mistake: This wolf child is still howlin’ for you.

It was in the summertime half a century ago that the world first met one of the great American bands, a group that would reach sky-high success while retaining a resolutely rootsy, earthbound sound. Creedence Clearwater Revivals 1968 debut album introduced guitar-playing brothers John and Tom Fogerty, drummer Doug Clifford, and bassist Stu Cook, four young men out of El Cerrito in the San Francisco Bay Area. But while they emerged in a place and time where trippy psychedelic visions where the order of the day, CCR bucked the trends and instead tapped into a rich, traditional seam of American music that connected to blues, country, rockabilly, gospel, folk, and R&B.When their contemporaries were unfurling mind-bending musical excursions with elaborate productions that included everything but the proverbial kitchen sink, Creedence crashed into the upper rungs of the album and singles charts with songs that wasted nary a note or word, overflowing with raw soul and unbridled energy. They cranked out 10 Top 40 singles, six Platinum albums, and one Gold in just four intensely prolific years, all powered by John Fogertys gut-level growl, with the rest of the band providing just the right kind of gritty, in-the-pocket punch to propel CCRs vision.

Tidel does a lot with their playlists that are annoying. Theyre frequently too long, awkwardly titled and unattributed. But they do have interesting themes, and this is a good example. Even their descriptions are too long. This looks back at the past five years of post-punk and has some real jewels by The Soft Moon, Parquet Courts, Viet Cong and others. I only included the first 20 of these 50 songs (there are only so many hours in the day)

Over the past two years, there’s been such a remarkable abundance of great music by female artists in the overlapping territories of alt-country, roots, and Americana that it could fill this playlist many times over. From the folky, sepulchral sounds of Pieta Brown, to the Kitty Wells-style honky-tonk throwbacks of Rachel Brooke, to the raw and tender country blues of Adia Victoria (pictured), it’s a boom time all round.That said, trying to fit a disparate group of artists into a tidy category that’s based in part on their gender can’t help but feel unfairly reductive. Hell, it may even perpetuate the kind of backward sexual politics that persist in the worst of American country music and that many artists understandably buck against. Back in 2014, the duo Maddie & Tae scored a surprise smash with “Girl In A Country Song,” a bouncy piece of C&W pop that doubled as an unusually acerbic satire of the ways women are typically represented by Nashville. “We used to get a little respect,” goes the chorus. “Now we’re lucky if we even get to climb up in your truck/ Keep our mouths shut and ride along/ And be the girl in a country song.” Three years later, with “bro-country” acts like Florida Georgia Line, Luke Bryan, and Chase Rice doubling down on innuendo-laden tailgate-party anthems and yet more videos with models in bikinis, mainstream country needs that kind of skewering even more.Lest all this just serve as another reason for alt-country hipsters to feel smug about their superior tastes, even they ought to admit that there ain’t much gender parity when it comes to the artists who generally cross over from the No Depression crowd and gain wider renown and success. After all, there are many more female acts who’ve been just as willing as Chris Stapleton and Sturgill Simpson to pursue a richer, more adventurous kind of artistry than Nashville generally tolerates. They too deserve to garner audiences beyond the flannel-clad roots-music devotees who already recognize the virtues of Rhiannon Giddens’ revamps of old-time spirituals, savor the gilded harmonies of The Trishas, or tremble at the sound of Tift Merritt’s warble.This bounty of talent ranges from newbies like Kacy & Clayton (a Canadian duo who’ve become protégés of Jeff Tweedy) and Molly Burch (an Austinite blessed with a voice whose chilly beauty evokes Patsy Cline and Karen Dalton at their most desolate) to Shelby Lynne and Alison Moorer, sisters and alt-country vets who demonstrate their own dexterity by combining covers of Townes Van Zandt and Nirvana on their new album Not Dark Yet. These are the alt-country women you need to hear if you haven’t been so lucky already. Big-hatted bros best take heed.

What a difference 25 years can make. In 1992, the American alt-rock movement arguably reached its zenith: It had become big enough to earn major-label attention, but hadn’t yet been corrupted by its exposure to the mainstream. The gods of grunge were walking the earth but so were the power-poppers, sadcore kings, lo-fi upstarts, and others. A quarter-century later, some of them have departed this earthly plane, but most of them are still active and making music that’s a far cry from the sounds that helped them ascend to the top of the alt-rock heap back in the early ‘90s.When Pavement were putting the lo-fi movement on the map with 1992’s Slanted and Enchanted, it would have been tough to predict that Stephen Malkmus would one day unleash an 11-minute cover of a Grateful Dead tune. The hooky pop perfection of The Lemonheads’ “It’s A Shame About Ray” doesn’t exactly set you up for Evan Dando’s take on country-folk troubadour Townes Van Zandt’s doomy “Waiting Around to Die.” Nor could you draw a straight line from Chris Cornell’s wailing on Soundgarden’s post-metal monster “Rusty Cage” to the epic, romantic balladry of his 2017 single “The Promise” (the track that sadly proved to be his swan song). The latest output from the likes of The Afghan Whigs (pictured) and Mark Lanegan is a complete 180 from the sounds of their salad days, but there’s an undeniable artistic maturation at work there.The alt-rock class of ‘92 might seem different from what you remember (if you’re even old enough to remember), but they’re still at it today, and they’ve still got something to say. Here’s a snapshot of what some of them have been up to lately, paired with tracks from a quarter-century ago.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.It was, by many metrics, a terrible, terrible year. But it happened to be an excellent year for ambient music—and that turned out to be incredibly fortuitous, since nothing works better than ambient music when youre in the mood to close the blinds and crawl under the covers for the next four (or, God help us, eight) years.There was so much great ambient music this year that it inspired a number of commentators to ask whether we were in the midst of a comeback. Id venture that ambient music never went away, assuming you knew where to look for it. But its certainly true that this years crop of quality ambient music amply proved just how varied the form can be. Huerco S. gave us lo-fi ambient techno slathered in tape hiss. Former Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt kept perfecting his blissed-out Tangerine Dreamscapes. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith paired burbling arpeggios with wild vocal processing, while Julianna Barwick looped her own voice into a soft, tenebrous web.There was a surprising amount of guitar-based music that fit an ambient sensibility this year: Christian Naujoks paid tribute to Durutti Column on a lovely LP for Hamburgs Dial label; Tortoise member Jeff Parker explored skeletal atmospheres on his solo album Slight Freedom; and super-producer Daniel Lanois spun pure gossamer out of pedal steel on the masterful Goodbye to Language.One of the years most interesting developments in ambient music may have been the return of what Jon Hassel termed "Fourth World" music. Motion Graphics, Visible Cloaks, and the New York duo Georgia all paid tribute to the digital synthesizers and rippling textures of Japanese ambient and new age music of the 1980s; an artist named Slow Attack Ensemble even covered the Japanese duo Inoyama Lands 1983 song "Mizue" on a beautiful album called Soundscapes for the Emotional-Type Listener. And both Andrew Pekler and the duo of Jan Jelinek and Masayoshi Fujita delved into ideas of otherness and exoticism on their respective albums for Jelineks Faitiche label this year.Thats just scratching the surface; I havent even mentioned the ambient-leaning techno from Studio OST (White Materials Galcher Lustwerk and Alvin Aronson), or the broken-down synthesizer experiments from Kassem Mosses Honest Jons LP, or the jewel-toned clouds of tone Tim Hecker whipped up, or the spirit-channeling mysticism of Anna Homler and Steve Moshiers Breadwoman, an early-80s cassette that the deep-digging RVNG label rescued for contemporary ears. And special mention goes to Sarah Davachi, who is responsible for not one but two of the years finest ambient albums: Dominions and Vergers, both of them examples of drone music at its most meditatively breathtaking. If its respite youre craving, youll find plenty of escape routes on this two-and-a-half-hour playlist.

While little on this playlist would otherwise be deemed "folk," everything here retains that genres elegant simplicity—all shot through a moody ambient soundscape. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver is the absolute king of this sparse, lonely sound, ever-enhancing it through velvety guitars, samples, and fragmented beats, while his cohort James Blake creates such fragile atmospheres from a whole different angle: bass music and hip-hop. But they blend seamlessly together (just see their "I Need a Forest Fire" collaboration), alongside Radiohead (who can lift you into a dream-like state like no other), Daughter (whose hushed electro-folk is absolutely gut-wrenching), and a few of their most notable IDM and ambient influences.