Decades

It’s difficult to overstate how much DFA meant to modern indie music. When the label first appeared in the early aughts, many in the Pitchfork crowd were afraid of dance music, but bands like LCD Soundsystem and Rapture made electronic music hip again for a certain audience. It was post-internet music, meaning that there was a premium put on pastiche and obscurity; and the music referenced everything from Krautrock to disco. But the music wasn’t stale or overly cerebral; it rocked, thumped and sometimes bumped. Elliot Sharp, from RBMA, places the tracks in chronological order, and it’s interesting to hear the collective sound develop and mature over the years. There seems to be an over-reliance on remixes, and some of the labels biggest names are not on here, but every track is great, and it’s a decent enough place to start.

The origins of post-rock are nebulous, but the aesthetic is more exact: airy instrumentals that found that common ground between the industrial fuzz of musique concrete, the ambience of pre-fusion, late-60s jazz (think In a Silent Way), and the straight lines of ‘80s math rock. When it came out, it felt like a rejection of the scenestery, overly emotive indie rock of the ‘90s, and a path forward for rock, which felt like it had been treading water in the shallow end of ‘60s-inspired nostalgia. It got real boring really quickly, but it sounded glorious at the time. Garrett Kamps, in his write-up for Stereogum, doesn’t try to capture the cannon, but rather a personal reflection of what he remembers to be the best tracks from this now-maligned subgenre.

The first American Football album presents an image on its cover that has long remained in my mind. This image, a photo of the side of a Midwest house on a cloudy night, is conjured up from my unconscious and displayed on the projection screen of my mind’s eye every time I hear Mike Kinsella’s voice. American Football sounds like that photo looks: inviting, mysterious, and decidedly more complex than the surface would lead one to believe. The past few years have seen a renaissance in American Football’s emo/math rock aesthetic, with numerous young indie bands taking up the torches of sincerity and despair, displaying their emotions cleanly and clearly on distortion-tinged canvasses that recall the side of that house from the American Football album cover. And yet as the emo revival seems robust and healthy, I recently saw online that the house—which resides in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois—is for sale. Some things come full circle, it seems, especially with the release of a long-awaited second American Football album. But many things do change: people move away, houses fall apart, neighborhoods fall into dilapidation. Perhaps if the house is to be a metaphor for the resurgence of emo, it must be taken both as a memory and a state of disrepair that tasks the present with its rebuilding.

The electropop of Australian producer/DJ Flume certainly moves—the tracks on his latest album are full of dizzying drops, deep, tough rhythms, and gorgeous, sky-climbing pop hooks—but there’s a sludgy textural element that adds weight and helps him stand apart from the pack of superstar DJs. His latest album, 2016’s Skin, is a perfect piece of post-everything pop maximalism, and his hand-curated Spotify playlist serves as a virtual index to his influences. Jeremih bumps up against MF DOOM, while Boyz Noize share airtime with Sigur Rós. The assortment would make no sense unless you’re familiar with Flume, but, for the initiated, it’s damn near perfect.

Footwork is a little maddening, but its also brilliant. Its deeply experimental. The percussive elements are very tightly clipped and the songs are repetitious to the point of being disorienting-- its one of the musics key characteristics, and gives the music a polyrhythmic sway. And the songs mutate; they were created to be mixed and distorted by DJs, which means that they were more or less created to be defaced. Its also littered with random and current pop cultural references, making it a sort of barometer for social relevancy - a role that hip-hop used to fill. Its also deeply funky. There are a lot of great playlist out there that over this, and Teklife recently announced that they were going to become a record label. Wills Glasspiegel does a nice job here at introducing the genre.

There’s something uniquely satisfying and majestically meta about a hard rock classic whose core subject is the transformative power of rocking out. An unbeatable demonstration of Foreigner’s brand of no-apologies and no-holds-barred AOR, “Juke Box Hero” demonstrates that fact with all the cocksure swagger you could possibly demand.Over a stark, almost metronomic beat and a burbling, ominous synthesizer, frontman Lou Gramm devotes the first verse to a cinematic vignette about a downcast dude who “couldn’t get a ticket” to “the sold-out show” and now finds himself stuck in the rain. Nonetheless he gets all he needs by putting his ear to the wall and hearing the one guitar that “just blew him away.” As the tension rises through the second verse, he arms himself with the proverbial “beat-up six-string” and gets down to business. And you can tell how good all that rocking makes him feel because the song makes damn sure you feel it, too, especially when a series of windmill-ready riffs leads into a chorus that seems scientifically engineered to elicit fist-pumping, hard-strutting and anything else you need to do to cope with the surge of testosterone in your bloodstream. Formed in 1976 in New York by former Spooky Tooth and Leslie West Band sideman Mick Jones and King Crimson co-founder Ian McDonald with a cluster of burly Americans like Gramm, Foreigner undoubtedly knew they were never going to be cool. After all, they emerged as unrepentantly old-school rockers at a time when disco still ruled the airwaves and the critical establishment was far more interested in punk and new wave. There was little respect afforded to any band doing – as Jones later admitted – “the exact opposite.” Of course, that hardly meant there wasn’t an audience for their sound, which – thanks to the match of Gramm’s muscular vocal style and Jones’ flair for crunchy riffs and sticky hooks – was a big cut above most of the AOR that would become predominant on American radio through the ‘80s. On early hits like “Feels Like the First Time” and “Hot Blooded,” Foreigner managed to be beefy without being bombastic and dramatic without being overblown. They’d fine-tune the formula even further while somehow doubling its force when they joined forces with the era’s two most innovative rock producers: Roy Thomas Baker (Queen, Cars) for 1979’s Head Games and then Robert John “Mutt” Lange (AC/DC, Def Leppard) for 4.Alas, in the wake of the success of the globe-conquering but hardly strut-worthy power ballad “I Want to Know What Love Is,” the alliance between Gramm and Jones splintered. Though they would periodically re-team over the ensuing decades as Jones worked hard to maintain Foreigner’s health as a reliably rockin’ staple of the amphitheatre, county-fair and casino circuits, neither man would reach the heights they did in Foreigner’s ‘80s golden age. That said, Gramm did unleash one final iconic burst of AOR glory in 1987’s “Midnight Blue,” a pretty much perfect solo hit that may be the mightiest ever example of jukebox heroism. With all that in mind, we present this celebration of the Foreigner Strut, full of all the hits and deep cuts that you need for the ‘80s-movie training montage that may already be running in your mind.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.This playlist shouldn’t be interpreted as a best of 2016 mix. That would be insanely presumptuous of me. Rather, it needs to be considered a useful tool for anybody looking to explore just a fraction of the heavy, propulsive, and oftentimes weird beats forged on the outskirts of boring person normal culture. Simply press play and get blasted: there’s mangled hip-hop stutter (Prostitutes), aggro industrial fist-pumping (Orphx, M AX NOI MACH), meticulously sculpted hard techno (Cassegrain), dub-smeared throb (LACK), and pounding white noise that sounds like the next evolutionary step beyond Lightning Bolt and Death Grips (Dreamcrusher). You’re also going to encounter a few artists who are more rooted in rock than electronic tactics, yet make no mistake: they’re just as doggedly loyal to raw propulsion. The New York duo Uniform slayed 2016 with their vicious iteration of cyborg automation caked in gutter scum. Lost System, meanwhile, are pulsating synth-punk upstarts from West Michigan (a.k.a. DeVos country) chronicling Millennial alienation, while America flushes itself down the toilet. I’d wish you a happy new year, but we noth know that’s not going to happen.

Back in the stormy ‘70s, when Brian Eno was inventing ambient music in England and Tangerine Dream was mixing Moogs with Krautrock, a crew of electronic individualists in France was busy crafting some singular synthesizer tapestries of their own. Sometimes they were influenced by the aforementioned trailblazers and their ilk, but often they were finding their own idiosyncratic way into previously unexplored electronic thickets, without stopping to worry about what the end result might be or what anybody would think about it. With the notable exceptions of Jean-Michel Jarre, who found fame with his 1976 classic Oxygène, and Moog pop pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey, these artists were working well under the radar, largely unnoticed in their own country and all but invisible on an international level. (And that remains the case today—a lot of this music isn’t available on Spotify, so I’ve created a YouTube playlist instead.) But the frequently quirky electronic vistas they created deserve their own chapter in the saga of synth music.

Paul Putti’s short-lived Pôle label achieved underground renown releasing albums by his project of the same name as well as fellow travelers like Philippe Besombes, freely utilizing minimalism and avant-garde techniques. Composers like Jean-Pierre Decerf and Teddy Lasry crossed over from the world of “library” recordings for film and TV but ultimately made intoxicating, atmospheric music that stood on its own. On tracks like “Speedway,” the duo Space Art came off like a Gallic version of Autobahn-era Kraftwerk. If there’s ever a synth-assisted apocalypse, Fredric Mercier’s doomy, titanic “Storm” would certainly make a suitable soundtrack. And Philippe Féret has all but vanished into the deep pockets of time, but his 1978 debut album nevertheless found him at the front lines of the ambient movement. Take a deep dive into a French river filled almost to overflowing with visceral analog electronic tones and maverick notions about what music could be.

Future’s career reached new heights in 2015 thanks to his prolific mixtape output, and he continued the pace in 2016. January brought the mixtape Purple Reign, which spun off one of his biggest solo hits, “Wicked,” and February brought the chart-topping album EVOL, with brooding favorites like “Low Life” featuring The Weeknd. He linked up with Lil Uzi Vert and Rich Homie Quan on the Future-dominated DJ Esco mixtape Esco Terrestrial, guested on hits by 21 Savage and A$AP Ferg, and continued his partnership with Drake beyond What A Time To Be Alive. But perhaps the biggest surprise of the year was that even Jay-Z wanted Future on the hook, for the DJ Khaled single “I Got The Keys.”

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!When The Get Down premiered on Netflix last August, it won plaudits for its smart evocation of New York music in the 1970s. But with the second half of its first season debuting on April 7, it’s a good time to revisit its meticulously curated soundtrack—and what aspects of the era it overlooks.The Get Down is structured around the rise of hip-hop culture in the Bronx, with Ed Koch’s mayoral campaign and the citywide blackout on July 13, 1977 as key events. On the one hand, the music supervision values precise period authenticity—the lack of anything from Saturday Night Fever initially seems like a major omission, but the film was released at the end of 1977 and its soundtrack didn’t dominate the airwaves until 1978. But at other points, that logic goes out the window: The show features Machine’s “There But for the Grace of God Go I,” released in 1979.At any rate, The Get Down is a historical fantasy. At best, it completely dispenses with reality, whether it’s the kung fu sequences that mark the first episode, or the discotheque shootout that ensnares drug dealer and budding DJ Shaolin Fantastic, a fictional protégé of real-life hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash who is recruiting MCs into the group The Get Down. Besides, why use sappy soft pop tracks like Chicago’s “Hard To Say I’m Sorry” and bland quiet-storm ballads like The Manhattans’ “Kiss and Say Goodbye” when you can cherry-pick the funkiest disco and soul of the early to mid-’70s?Perhaps the second half of The Get Down will broaden beyond the South Bronx park jams, community rec centers, and grungy neighborhood discos to include settings and music from different parts of New York in the late 70s. Maybe Marcus “Dizzee” Kipling, the graffiti artist who drops ecstasy and almost experiments with same-sex romance at a gloriously overcooked loft party, will stumble into a Manhattan bathhouse or check out a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show; it’s possible that Ezekial “Zeke” Figuero, the teenage poet whose halted attempts at rapping to his would-be disco-queen girlfriend set the story in motion, will journey down to CBGB and check out a Ramones set; or maybe Marcus’ knuckleheaded kid brother Boo-Boo channels his anger into a KISS Army fan club.We’ll find out what The Get Down kids get into next when the series returns. For now, enjoy our selection of ’70s pop chestnuts that didn’t make it into the first half of the inaugural season—and hopefully will make the cut for the second.