Decades

Of Montreal may be nearly two decades removed from their days as Elephant 6 upstarts, yet the collective’s unmistakable blend of eccentric DIY ethos and ’60s pop hooks continues to haunt the Georgia group’s music — including 2016’s Innocence Reaches. The same holds true for indie rock as a whole. Inspect the genre’s rank and file and the dreamily melodic flavors of Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, The Apples in Stereo, and all their blissed out pals continue to exert a powerful influence. In addition to spotlighting key tracks from Elephant’s 6’s charter members, our playlist ropes in notable outliers such as neo-psych brats The Essex Green and the utterly indescribable A Hawk and a Hacksaw.

Clap clap clap clap: one of the dominant sounds of hip-hop and R&B in the 2010s is a synthesized handclap, hitting hard on straight 8th notes for every measure of the beat. This deceptively simple formula, which was foreshadowed in the previous decade in beats by Soulja Boy and Swizz Beatz, is compatible with any number of rhythms and production styles, from New Orleans Bounce and D.C. Go-Go to Atlanta crunk and stomping EDM. Stars like Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Kanye West, and Nicki Minaj all have their share of clappers, slowing down a soul clap for a relaxed groove or picking up the BPM to a frenzied pace that no pair of human hands would be able to keep up with.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Classic rock possesses all the stubborn resilience of a cockroach . It’s the 21st century, and the technological singularity is upon us: Humans are banging in VR, autonomous cars are causing fender benders up and down the West Coast, 3-D printers are capable of creating hideous yet entirely livable homes, and indie folkie Bon Iver has gone full-blown weepy cyborg. But despite wave upon wave of civilization-disrupting futurism, young musicians totally worship the musty vinyl albums on which their grandparents rolled joints back in the ‘60s and ’70s. The Temperance Movement’s bluesy chops earned them an opening slot for The Rolling Stones in 2014; Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats have zipped up the charts thanks to the kind of high-octane rhythm ‘n’ blues that made the J. Geils Band a workhouse live act in the mid-’70s; and Deap Vally, the take-no-shit female duo from Los Angeles, lay down grooves as big and growling as anything from Cactus.Clearly inspired by The White Stripes and The Black Keys—who basically are the patron saints of what we’ll call nü classic rock—a good number of these young guns temper their nostalgia with modern touches and twists inspired by alt-rock. On Sound & Color, Alabama Shakes dress up their Southern-fried garage rock with a gauzy, shoegaze-like drift and hulking bass drops. Royal Blood, who’ve memorized the stripped down, pulverizing caterwaul of Led Zeppelin I and II, have in Ben Thatcher a drummer whose beats frequently slip into the battering-ram stutter of robotic hip-hop funk.But not every artist on this playlist is a descendent of the Jack White/Dan Auerbach lineage. Both Crobot and Sweden’s Blues Pills follow the lead of retro-everything forerunners Wolfmother and The Sword, bashing out hybridizations of bell-bottomed riff rock and vintage metal heavily informed by Deep Purple, early Rush, The Jeff Beck Group, and other eardrum-drubbing longhairs from the FM rock days. If you think Western civilization peaked with James Gang’s “Funk #49,” then this definitely is the playlist for you. Best of all, no VR goggles needed.

Classic rock, cook-outs, and flag-waving patriotism aren’t only for right-wing yahoos who keep a copy of Cat Scratch Fever tucked next to their Beanfield Sniper Remington Sendero SF II. I know it feels that way in an age when the Nuge and Kid Rock are snapping selfies in the Oval Office. But trust me: There’s plenty of us on the left who jump at the chance to blast big, shaggy riffs and slather grub in barbecue sauce (even if the grub being slathered is veggie burgers). And it’s for you, my fellow classic-rock lefties—like the proud American down my street with the “End the War on the Middle Class” sign in his window and a pickup truck covered in union stickers—that I’ve put together what, in my humble opinion, is one hell of a Fourth of July playlist stuffed with songs fighting the good fight.A lot of the tunes you know and love, like Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (though maybe not everybody has cracked open the howling, wall-of-guitars rendition from 1975’s Rolling Thunder Revue) and Jefferson Airplane’s muddy-ass, piano-banging, Woodstock anthem “Volunteers.” (“Hey, I’m dancing down the streets! Got a revolution!!!”). And as should be expected of any patriotic playlist worth its salt, you’re bound to find some Springsteen (whose original, acoustic version of “Born in the U.S.A.” is a bloody, brooding anti-war cry that sounds more like the dread-stained “State Trooper” than the high-gloss “Dancing in the Dark”) and Seger. (If you know only the Night Moves era—which isn’t bad, mind you—then his 1969 anti-Vietnam War psych-raver “2 +2 =?” will have you burning flags by its second verse.)But listeners will also run into a bunch of obscure nuggets. Detroit’s megaton demolition of The Velvet Underground’s “Rock ’n’ Roll,” from 1971, should’ve been a massive hit for lead singer and perpetual underdog Mitch Ryder, who around the time of its recording had joined the fight to release White Panther revolutionary and all-around awesome guy John Sinclair from prison. Ditto for Relatively Clean Rivers’ “Easy Ride,” a smoothly rolling evocation of rural hippie ethos that will totally appeal to those pro-legalization types in love with Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.There’s also a ton of soul and funk to be heard, and that’s because all true lefty rock fans don’t see any difference between rock ’n’ roll and R&B. It’s all righteous people making righteous groove music to battle the forces of oppression and tyranny that now, more than ever, are bearing down on our beloved United States. On the deliriously punchy, horn-stabbing “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” Stevie Wonder rails against Tricky Dick, but it may as well be 45. Aretha Franklin’s “Spirit in the Dark” isn’t overtly political but rather serves as a gorgeous and uplifting example of the sublimely redemptive vibrations emanating from African-American spiritual music. Another powerhouse is the proto-disco “I Want to Take You Higher” recorded at Woodstock. For just shy of seven minutes, Sly & the Family Stone make good on the American dream: full equality and integration riding some of the most ecstatic funk ever laid down.So, this Fourth of July, crank these jams, eat a ton of great food, maybe even set of some explosives. But come Wednesday morning, let these songs inspire you to crawl into the trenches to fight all the anti-union, anti-universal healthcare, anti-Black Lives Matter, anti-LGBTQ, anti-climate change, anti-public education, anti-abortion, pro-corporate, pro-war, pro-Koch forces hijacking our country.

There’s an amazing story that DJ Premier relates near the beginning of this excellent hour + interview with Chairman Mao. Although he’s now synonymous with New York hip-hop, the legendary hip-hop producer and DJ was born and raised in Texas. His grandfather, however, was a BK resident, and Premier would frequently visit him as a child. On his first trip to New York in the fifth grade, Premier was on a subway car that ran over a man who had jumped onto the tracks. The train backed up, and a young Premier peered out the subway window and watched as the man’s disembodied arm wriggled on the tracks. According to an excited Premier, this had been a suicide attempt. “Wow, this is where I want to live,” DJ Premier remembers thinking.To a certain extent, this is just a typical NYC origin story -- the sort of semi-mythological shit you say to sound like a comic book bad-ass. But it also embodies a lot of the qualities of DJ Premier’s music --gruesome, grimey, traumatic, and incredibly vivid. Hip-hop is clearly bigger than one person, city, or era, and any attempts to claim ownership are misplaced -- to say the least -- but few figures seem to embody the music and the culture better than Premier. It’s not that he invented it -- he was nowhere near its mid-70s birth -- but he created a style and sound that was uniquely and singularly hip-hop. Bleary, spiraling samples wrapped around and onto drums that were harder than nails -- pounding, body-rocking combinations of the snare and bass drums known by its onomatopoeia, “boom bap” -- and paired with rough-hewn, Mt. Olympus raps from a rotating pantheon of legendary emcees (Jay-Z, Nas, Rakim, and, of course, Guru). But more than being a singular touchpoint for ‘90s hip-hop, Premier was arguably the most important sample-based musician, ever; his vision of hip-hop pastiche was unlike anything before it, and, due to market forces, it’s doubtful anyone will return to such a nuanced, intricate manner of sampling music, in hip-hop or elsewhere.Like a lot of early hip-hop innovations, the quintessential DJ Premier sound was born partially of necessity. It took a while for Premier to hone his godlike sound, though the journey there is almost as compelling as the destination. Listen to the early albums with Gang Starr, his flagship group with the Boston emcee Guru, and the sound is looser, jazzier. The instrumental “DJ Premier in Deep Concentration” from the 1989 album No More Mr. Nice Guy serves as an initial calling card of sorts for the young producer. The track is anchored by a liberal sample Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness” that achieves the neat trick of gliding off the track with soaring, croaking synth line, while also feeling diffuse and guazy -- it’s a multi-textured sonic illusion that be-bop musicians were particularly skilled at pulling off. There are no rapped vocals in “DJ Premier in Deep Concentration,” but Premier weaves in a variety of samples and callouts to various producer (“Prince Paul!”), so that the track both has vocal presence and texture and even a narrative focus. All of the components of his later masterworks are there: the sample-based pastiche, the self-referential callouts, the swagger, the soul.Around 1992, Premier begin to switch up his style. Like a lot of early hip-hop innovations, this evolution was born of necessity. In 1991, Biz Markie was sued for his use of Gilbert OSullivans 1972 hit, "Alone Again (Naturally)." Judge Kevin Duffy’s ruling against Markie not only cost the rapper $250,000, but also meant that hip-hop producers had to be much more careful and either clear their samples before use or cut them up to the point that they were unrecognizable. Premier largely, though not exclusively, decided for the latter course of action. He recognized that it was not just the rhythms or melodies that drew him to classic soul, jazz, and funk, but the textures and sound of the music, so he would cut his drums into millisecond intervals and overlay them on one another, combining them with a cache of synth and piano samples that seemed to emphasize their pure otherworldliness. For Gang Starr, this made sense. They had largely been marketed as a jazzy, college hip-hop, but that didn’t feel entirely true to either Guru’s personality or DJ Premier’s artist ambitions. They were nostalgist, to a degree, but their milieu was more modern and urban. The music they made on 1992’s Daily Operation and 1994’s Hard to Earn reflected this grimier reality. The dizzying organ sample laid of “Soliloquy of Chaos,” the chaotic swirl of “Brainstorm,” or the urgent, corporal drum breaks of “Code of the Streets” signal Brooklyn. It’s broken crack vials and loosey butts, summer nutcrackers and skelly sketches. Rarely has a music so embodied such a particular time and space.This would be the template for all of Premier’s best known productions, from Nas’ hip-hop totum “NY State of Mind” to Biggie’s dizzy disorienting “Unbelievable.” Though the sound undeniably strange and novel, it’s also immediate and visceral, which allowed it to ascend the charts in the mid to late-90s. It’s hard to believe, but, at one point, Premier was among hip-hop’s most on-demand commercial producers. The specificity of his music meant that designation wouldn’t last. Beginning in the late 90s, Southern hip-hop would loosen the genre’s focus -- bringing back the more overt homages to funk and soul -- and the music would move back onto the dancefloor. And New York hip-hop would adopt the more polished nihilism of G-Unit and Dip Set, before later seeming to abandon any notion that there was a unified, tri-state sound. But, for a minute, thanks to Premier, the music was pure, aberrant, and purely hip-hop.

Anthony Gonzalez is a singular force in French electronic music. Since 2001, operating primarily as M83, he has created everything from nostalgic shoegaze rock and pulsing electronic dream pop to film soundtracks, asserting his meticulousness both as a composer and performer. 2003’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts explored the intersection of sampled sound, electronic synths, and post-rock, evoking both Mogwai and My Bloody Valentine, while the melancholy and ecstatic Saturdays = Youth stands strong as 2008’s best ‘80s album. Employing battalions of excellent vocalists, mixers, engineers, and more, Gonzalez always manages to push his perfect rhythms into crystalline atmospheres of sound. His expansive music is equally perfect for midnight cruises with friends and packed music festival fields, insisting that feeling sad can feel good, as long as you are dancing through it.

The ‘90s were an unstable moment for female-driven pop music. Coming out of new wave and post-punk, the decade’s mainstream pop struggled to find its true identity within the context of the grunge of Hole, the coffee-house croonings of Sarah McLachlan, and the hip-hop stylings of Lauryn Hill and the Fugees. Then came the divine intervention of Britney Spears and producer Max Martin, two of the musicians responsible for infusing bubblegum pop with the vitality and sugary veneer of pounding Swedish house and electropop. With their provocative and skirt-shakin’ single “...Baby One More Time,” which featured clean dance rhythms, driving piano chords, and cresting synths, they transformed the game. The next few years saw the infiltration of the new style into the music of both established and rising pop stars such as Christina Aguilera, Mariah Carey, Brandy, Monica, and more, ushering in a new era of pop history.

There’s a tragic feeling of incompleteness to Sharon Jones’ career, and it’s best be summed up with the phrase "discovered too late and gone way too soon." The soul and funk vocalist’s story is a well-told one: a criminally overlooked session powerhouse—who clearly possessed the chops and sheer life-force to be a star when she first turned professional in the ’70s—finally achieves fame in her late-’40s only to have pancreatic cancer claim her life in 2016 at the age of 60. Fortunately for the world, the Grammy-nominated Jones and her band, the Dap-Kings, made the most of her all-too-brief stardom, dropping seven stellar studio albums, including the posthumously released Soul of a Woman, recorded as the singer underwent debilitating chemotherapy treatments.What makes the group so unique is their ability to feel unapologetically old-school, yet without any residue of weepy nostalgia. Anchored not just by Jones’ attention-seizing voice, but the group’s agilely stabbing horns and preternaturally metronomic rhythm section as well, their music pops, sizzles, and jumps with a sweaty, determined modernism. (Especially relevant in this context is their funk-spiked reworking of Janet Jackson’s “What Have You Done for Me Lately?”) It’s a sound that has exerted a huge impact on 21st-century pop, pushing retro-soul into the mainstream while also making the Dap-Kings, as well as their sister outfit the Dap Kings Horn Section, in-demand session musicians in the same vein as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section or the Wrecking Crew.Arguably the first artist to take notice was the late Amy Winehouse, who employed the Dap-Kings when crafting her own fusion of retro and contemporary R&B for 2006’s game-changing Back to Black. The album’s co-producer, Mark Ronson, then used the ensemble’s crack horn section on his massive retro-pop hit “Uptown Funk,” featuring dynamo singer Bruno Mars. More recently, the digitally minded Kesha used those soul-piercing horns on her crushing, feminist anthem “Woman,” from her emotional tour de force Rainbow.But not every session/appearance fits snugly between the poles of R&B and pop—there’s a slew of leftfield examples, too. On her self-titled full-length from 2014, avant-garde singer-songwriter St. Vincent leans heavily on the unswerving pulse of Dap-Kings drummer Homer Steinweiss (who also plays skins for the Dan Auerbach-led Arcs), while her collaborative effort with David Byrne, Love This Giant, weaves their horns into the duo’s art-rock pointillism. Other standouts include The Black Lips, whose garage-punk rave-up Underneath the Rainbow utilizes the services of baritone guitarist Thomas Brenneck and trumpeter David Guy, and country outlaw Sturgill Simpson, who worked with the the Dap-Kings horns on A Sailor’s Guide to Earth and then brought them onstage for his 2017 Grammy performance.On top of featuring cuts from each of the artists already mentioned, our playlists dips into the Dap-Kings many related projects (including The Budos Band and Menahan Street Band), as well as veteran soul and funk singers Charles Bradley, Lee Fields, and Rickey Calloway who, like Jones, found a welcoming home on Daptone, easily retro-soul’s most important record label. Of course, the absence left by Jones’ death will forever be felt; she was, after all, a once-in a-generation talent. But it becomes all too clear when exploring this diverse array of songs that her vision and style will continue to echo throughout modern music for a long time to come.

"Strange days have found us, and through their strange hours we linger alone" – Jim Morrison"Beauty always has an element of strangeness" – Charles BaudelaireThere was always something dangerous about The Doors. From the very beginning it was blindingly obvious that they stood far apart from the rest of the 60s Sunset Strip scene, not to mention the entire rock world. Sophistication? Sure. Darkness? Undoubtedly. Sensuality? You bet. Blend all of the above with a generous dose of transgression and you start to zero in on The Doors magic mixture. Not coincidentally, that same confluence of elements is pretty much the definition of 19th century Frances Symbolist poetry movement, as epitomized by Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud. It was an influence that is obvious to any fan of both The Doors and the French Symbolist, but it’s also an influence that Morrison spoke to when he mailed French literature expert and Duke professor Wallace Fowlie, thanking him for producing a translation of Rimbuad’s complete poems, and relaying, "I dont read French that easily. . . . I am a rock singer and your book travels around with me."If course, Morrison was hardly the only singer of that era to be influenced by poetry. The second half of the 60s saw a giant evolutionary leap for rock n roll lyrics, one that inspired fans to append the "poetry" label to rock for the first time. Bob Dylan got that ball rolling, followed closely by The Beatles, but the arrival of The Doors gave the rock-as-poetry concept an even bigger boost of an entirely different kind. Jim Morrison was rocks first real poetic enfant terrible, an heir at last to the moody mien of poetrys original dark princes, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. It was all right there in The Doors very first introduction to the world at large. The first line of their first single, "Break on Through (To the Other Side)," which was also the opening cut on their debut album, immediately served notice of Morrisons intentions. "You know the day destroys the night, night divides the day" was both a world away from what was coming out of most rock singers mouths and an entirely different kind of enhanced lyricism than that of Dylan or John Lennon.Dylan and Lennon dazzled their disciples with phantasmagorical, LSD-aided imagery perfectly in tune with the psychedelically stimulated times. But while acid undeniably acted as a launching pad for some of Morrisons lyrics, The Doors werent wowing fans with "tangerine trees and marmalade skies" or gently calling to Mr. Tambourine Man in search of a "jingle-jangle morning." Sure, Morrison was a lyricist who liked to paint vivid, sometimes psychedelic pictures with words. But he was also a libertine who loved nothing better than to line up taboos and, well, break on through to the other side. In all of these things, he was blazing his own trail on a path begun a century earlier by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and company. Like The Doors singer, the French Symbolist poets were iconoclastic hedonists for whom nothing was more important than the derangement of the senses in the service of experiencing lifes absurd carnival to its fullest and finding an artful way to describe it. The bad boys of their eras literary scene, they might have been rock stars if the possibility existed at the time. But their visions burned as deeply and brightly as anything to emerge since. Morrison drew as much from these transgressive poets as he did from John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. He was an avowed admirer of their dark visions, from Baudelaires deliriously decadent Flowers of Evil to Rimbauds daring A Season in Hell. There was even a book dedicated solely to the topic of Morrisons relation to Rimbaud. But if you want to pick up on the connection all you need to do is listen.Its not so far a leap, for instance, from The Doors "End of the Night" to Baudelaires "Death of the Poor." The former finds Morrison crooning:

Realms of bliss, realms of lightSome are born to sweet delightSome are born to sweet delightSome are born to the endless night

In the latter, Baudelaire declares:

It is death who gives us life in excitationIt is the end of life, the one hope, the one delightThat, divine elixir, is our IntoxicationAnd which gives us the heart to follow the endless night

Parallels between Morrison and Rimbaud arent tough to spot either. Take the opening of the latters legendary A Season in Hell:

Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.One evening I seated Beauty on my knees. And I founder bitter. And I cursed her.I armed myself against justice.I fled. O Witches, Misery, Hate, to you has my treasure been entrusted!

It doesnt require a great contortion of sensibility to draw a line between that and "The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)," where Morrison cries:Listen to this, Ill tell you about the heartacheIll tell you about the heartache and the loss of GodIll tell you about the hopeless nightThe meager food for souls forgotIll tell you about the maiden with wrought iron soulMorrison never seemed to be aping his influences, but its certainly possible to imagine that he and the poets he admired were reporting from the same spiritual/psychological precipice. Of course, Morrison wasnt content to be considered merely a "rock poet" either; he published two books of his own verse, eventually combined as The Lords and The New Creatures. But The Doors singular mix of music and imagery remains the most intoxicating indication of the Symbolists sway over Morrison.

A guitar hero in the terms truest sense, British axeman Mick Ronson distinguished himself with dazzling riffs for Lou Reed, Mott the Hoople, Bob Dylan, and others, but it was his early 70s work with David Bowie that really made Ronson a legend. Over the course of three years and four milestone albums, Ronson and Bowie gave rock n roll a radical facelift. When they were finished refashioning the music in their own image, it bore a passing resemblance to its former countenance, but its features were forever changed.Ronson was Bowies right-hand man from the revolutionary art rock of 1970s The Man Who Sold the World to the idiosyncratic songcraft of 1971s Hunky Dory, the glam-rock glory of 1972s Ziggy Stardust, and the arch, almost unhinged future-rock of 1973s Aladdin Sane. Its no coincidence that those albums form the backbone of Bowies legacy—without Ronson on hand for all of those milestone sessions, each of those albums would surely have sounded significantly different. By extension, its totally within the realm of possibility that Bowies breakthroughs, both artistic and commercial, might never have happened at all if the lad from Hull hadnt been by his side for them.Bowie made a big jump from the trippy ballads of Space Oddity to the bristling rock and bruising riffs of The Man Who Sold the World. It’s important to note that Ronson wasn’t just some random session dude wandering in for the date; he and drummer Mick Woodmansey had played together in a band called The Rats and were specifically recruited to be part of Bowie’s new band, as was Rats bassist Trevor Bolder, who would replace Tony Visconti on bass on the next album. Ronson led the charge that brought Bowie into a whole new realm, with not only immortal riffs (like the regal but foreboding one that defines the title track) but also the hard-rocking roar of less-celebrated, equally intense tracks like “Black Country Rock” and “She Shook Me Cold.”By the time Bowie cut Hunky Dory, with producer/bassist Visconti gone, arrangement chores fell to Ronson on top of his guitar duties. Ronson was more than prepared to help usher Bowie into his next remarkable evolutionary leap. The guitarist’s orchestrations helped make the reflective ballad “Changes” not just touching but transcendent, and gave the dizzying “Life on Mars” just the right air of grandeur, shining a spotlight on Bowie’s increasingly complex compositional powers. And Ronson’s lyrical licks on deeper cuts like “Song for Bob Dylan” showed his nose for nuance.If the Bowie-Ronson team hadn’t already assured its place in rock history by that point, their status was cemented by 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Not only was it the quintessential guidepost of glam rock, it was one of the primary influences on the next generation of mavericks that peopled the punk and New Wave revolution. Remaining resolutely anti-flash, Ronson propels Bowie’s conceptual tale of an alien rock star with short, sharp blasts of power. “Suffragette City” and the less ubiquitous “Hang On to Yourself” are punk five years ahead of time, attitude-laden bursts of streamlined rock ‘n’ roll stripped to the bone and spoiling for a fight. And Ronson’s simultaneously martial and magisterial riffs on the barnstorming title track remain among rock’s most goosebump-inducing moments.If Ziggy was the iconoclastic charmer gleefully leading his disciples down a merrily hedonistic path, 1973’s Aladdin Sane was its sociopathic sibling, setting fireworks off in your ear for the sheer twisted joy of it. While the former anticipated punk, the latter, still years ahead of that style, feels like a calling card for post punk. Bowie’s lyrics were at their wildest, and Ronson’s axe matches him step for step, deconstructing rock ‘n’ roll before your very ears on the edgy, off-kilter “Cracked Actor” and giddily reconstructing old-school signifiers like the blues riff at the heart of “The Jean Genie” and the Bo Diddley groove of “Panic in Detroit.” Ronson even works his wild squalls into the arch, postmodern cabaret rock of “Time.”This astonishing four-album flush of brilliance was obviously far from the last blast of greatness for either Bowie or Ronson. But not counting the arrestingly quirky covers album Pin Ups, it was their final creative surge as partners. All these years later, that partnership still stands as a brightly beaming moment constantly imitated but never even close to equaled.