Genres

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!For over two decades, R. Kelly has been brimming with ideas. In addition to the hundreds of original songs he’s penned, he often revisits his own singles, adding entirely new lyrics, beats, and melodies on remixes. Many of these, such as “Bump N’ Grind (Old School Mix)” and “Down Low (Nobody Has To Know) - Live To Regret It Mix,” became quiet-storm radio staples in their own right, while “Step In the Name of Love (Remix)” even eclipsed the original cut in popularity.In modern rap and R&B, remixes typically add guests to bring extra star power, like R. Kelly’s single version of “Did You Ever Think,” which features Nas. But even “Fiesta (Remix),” with verses from JAY Z and Boo and Gotti, features an update of a beat from the Trackmasters and a rewritten chorus. When writing original hooks for other artists, Kelly goes above and beyond, providing two distinct versions of Cassidy’s “Hotel” and Twista’s “So Sexy.”“Ignition (Remix)” is, of course, the most famous of all R. Kelly remixes, with a dancehall spin on the original track’s groove that almost abandons the song’s automobile-themed metaphor for a string of whimsical riffs. The original and the remix are meant to be heard together as one six-minute epic, as presented on 2003’s Chocolate Factory—and, in hindsight, 2001’s “Feelin’ On Yo Booty (Hypnosis Mix)” can be seen as a dry run for many of the melodic and rhythmic ideas heard on “Ignition (Remix).” Kelly’s revisions have spawned their own compilations—like 2005’s Remix City Volume 1—but our three-hour playlist brings together his remixes, their original tracks, and more. And with R.’s recent overhaul of the 1993 hit “Your Body’s Callin’,” it’s clear that he’ll always be willing to apply a fresh coat of paint to his masterpieces.

With a performing career that dates back to the early ‘60s, drummer-turned-guitarist R.L. Boyce has emerged as the modern-day torch-bearer for Mississippi Hill Country blues—a regional style that puts an emphasis on shuffling locomotive rhythms extended to hypnotic, trance-inducing states. His recent record for Waxploitation, Roll and Tumble, is a paragon of the form, with Boyce and his double-drummer tandem of Cedrick Burnside (grandson of another revered R.L.) and Calvin Jackson recorded live off the floor by producer Luther Dickinson (of the North Mississippi Allstars). Here, R.L. shares “songs by people I know or have met or have played with that I like to listen to when I am traveling.”Photo credit: William Burgess

Khalif “Swae Lee” Brown and Aaquil “Slim Jxmmi” Brown were an unknown pair of brothers from Tupelo, Mississippi, when they caught the attention of Atlanta super producer Mike WiLL Made It. He signed the duo to his Ear Drummers label, and flipped the company’s name backwards to dub their group Rae Sremmurd. They were soon off to the races with a smash debut single, “No Flex Zone,” that was remixed by Nicki Minaj and Pusha T, and have been rubbing elbows with major stars regularly ever since. They’ve assisted on singles by Wiz Khalifa and Ty Dolla $ign and branched out into EDM with Baauer and Dillon Francis. And Swae Lee has become in demand as a writer, notching credits on songs by Gucci Mane and even Beyonce.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Loud music ceased to be strictly a young person’s phenomenon a very long time ago. What’s more, if you came of age during the punk and post-punk eras and fervently believe in the prevailing ethos that anyone can do it, then there shouldn’t be anything amiss about continuing to make a racket even if you now qualify for a discount transit pass. Besides, Johnny Rotten said you should never trust a hippie—but he wasn’t so specific about anyone over 30 (or 50).Nevertheless, the warhorses of the era still contend with an ageist tendency that’s unfortunately common. There’s no lack of public enthusiasm or critical acknowledgment of the early musical innovations and successes on which the reputations of the acts in this playlist were staked. Fans are happy to see their aging-but-spry heroes play old favorites on reunion tours, but alas, they typically zone out during new songs that the artists are genuinely excited to play. These latter-day addendums to revered back catalogs somehow feel superfluous, even when they come to outnumber the LPs that already occupy prime real estate in your collection.Now in their 41st year of activity—save for a few hiatuses—Wire are one of the many acts who say bollocks to that. This week sees the release of the band’s 15th album, Silver/Lead, which is just as vital as anything in their history. The same degree of vim and vigor distinguishes a diverse array of songs on this playlist, from peers who emerged alongside Wire in the punk/post-punk era of 1976–1982 and who have recently reunited (PiL, The Pop Group) or rudely refuse to die (New Order, Pere Ubu, Mekons). Here’s to you, magnificent geezers.

A hastily convened supergroup who combine the power and fury of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy, and Cypress Hill, Prophets of Rage failed, sadly, in their pre-election mission to prevent the end of America as we know it. Still, Chuck D and Tom Morello’s intrepid crew—who continue to pulverize audiences in Europe this summer before hitting Riot Fest in Chicago—have done something that many people may have thought impossible. They’ve made a very convincing argument in favor of the most vilified musical genre of the last 25 years: rap metal.Of course, the two preeminent styles favored by this nation’s youthful miscreants have had a complicated relationship ever since their earliest flirtations, like when Rick Rubin and The Bomb Squad deployed slashing guitar riffs and big John Bonham beats in an array of seminal hip-hop tracks. With the success of Run-DMC and Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” in 1986, the door was kicked wide open, though it really was Anthrax and Public Enemy’s matchup on “Bring Tha Noize” that formed the blueprint five years later. Then Ice-T went to war with Warner over Body Count and things couldn’t get any more aggro if you tried.And try they did, on projects like the high-concept/higher-testosterone soundtrack for 1993’s Judgment Night, in which MCs faced off against a gallery of grunge and thrash acts like Slayer and Biohazard. The results inevitably were hit-and-miss, but Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Linkin Park absorbed the lessons well. By the end of the decade, the cumulative effect on the new—or nu—rap metal hordes was akin to a back-alley bludgeoning.Inevitably, the formula got stale and the parties retreated to their respective corners in the wake of rap metal’s commercial zenith in 2004, JAY Z and Linkin Park’s fittingly titled Collision Course. Yet many of the style’s foremost progenitors remain in good health today. True, many have shifted tactics—you’ll hear more EDM in Linkin Park’s new album, One More Light—but the California chart-toppers were still asking Rakim to drop by the studio as recently as three years ago. In another sign of rap metal’s refusal to lay down and die, Cash Money Records signed Limp Bizkit, but alas, the band’s would-be comeback album is still in limbo four years after the release of “Ready To Go,” a shockingly OK team-up with Lil Wayne, a man who may be more metal than 18 Cannibal Corpses put together. Prophets of Rage are planning to release an album of new material in September.For some listeners, the music will remain dude-bro bombast at its most egregious. But at its best, there’s always been something compelling—even noble, in a quiet-emotional-moment-in-a-Michael-Bay-movie kind of way—about the alchemy that’s created when musicians from different paths join together in the common pursuit of getting as loud, hard, and gnarly as possible. Let the bludgeoning begin again.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Although he’s released four acclaimed solo albums, Raphael Saadiq has made his greatest impact on popular music as a member of groups and as a producer and songwriter for major artists. After touring as a bassist in Prince’s band in the late ‘80s, Saadiq led the ‘90s groups Tony! Toni! Tone! and Lucy Pearl, and began a fruitful production career. As something of an elder statesmen of the neo soul movement, he co-wrote D’Angelo’s two biggest singles, as well as hits for Erykah Badu and Bilal, and produced Solange’s chart-topping third album A Seat At The Table. And as a songwriter and guest vocalist, he’s collaborated with multiple generations of hip-hop artists, from The Roots to Rick Ross.

Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.One of the greater meta-narratives in hip-hop in recent years has been the genre’s embrace of gospel music. Kanye called his album Life of Pablo a “gospel album with a whole lot of cursing” and arguably hip-hops biggest new star, Chance the Rapper, has an album that unapologetically tackles themes of spirituality. Kendrick Lamar, meanwhile, has spent his career mapping out a space for spirituality amidst inner-city carnage.While it’s kind of unusual the degree that this thematic strand has risen to the forefront, hip-hop has been flirting with the sacred for nearly its entire existence. Outkast, Tupac and Mos Def have all skirted the spaces between the sacred and the profane. The tracks compiled on this playlist aren’t “Christian rap” exactly — as with Kanye, there’s some cursing on many of them — but they all tie back to the genre’s debt to gospel music. -- Sam Chennault

Fun shit I learned while reading The Quietus amazing Andy Gill playlist: at one point, Nile Rodgers was slotted to produce a Gang of Four record; John Cale hit on Gills girlfriend; and he doesnt think The Beatles groove!As a note, I couldnt find the specific Erik Satie recording he mentions.The Band, Music From Big PinkBob Dylan, Blood On The TracksJimi Hendrix, Band Of GypsysWild Beasts, WanderlustGabriel Fauré, RequiemThe Camarata Contemporary Chamber Group, The Music Of Erik Satie: The Velvet GentlemanThe Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground & NicoBig Youth, Dread Locks DreadCulture, Two Sevens ClashChic, Good TimesJames Brown, "Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine"Marvin Gaye, "I Heard It Through The Grapevine"Kanye West, "Hold My Liquor"

The rock band Ratt have said they wrote their best and best-known song, “Round and Round,” using a cassette recorder in a one-room L.A. apartment called Ratt Mansion West, where they survived on top ramen. “You can’t get much less glamorous than that,” singer Stephen Pearcy told Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman, authors of Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal. No doubt. In fact, you also can’t get much…rattier.See, Ratt came from a long line of rodents. Aerosmith, the band they were most often compared to, had recorded songs called “Round and Round” and “Rats in the Cellar” years before Ratt crawled out of MTV with their 1984 debut album, Out of the Cellar; they’d also covered funk progenitor and minstrel-show veteran Rufus Thomas’ “Walking the Dog” a decade before Ratt revolved a self-titled 1983 EP around it. “I was the last child, just a punk in the street,” Stephen Tyler shriek-howled on “Last Child” in 1976, the year punk supposedly happened, though really it had been around for years. Ratt fit into that line, as well.“Out on the streets, that’s where we’ll meet”: That’s how “Round and Round” starts, a line that immediately recalls the MC5, yet is hardly the punkiest thing about Out of the Cellar. Writing about the song in The Village Voice at the time, I noted, “It’s reasonably fast [with] a simple repeating riff that serves (and works) as the hook, and no real guitar showboating to speak of.” I also praised the album’s lack of “keyboards or strings or any of that sissy stuff, and a couple cuts (‘I’m Insane,’ ‘She Wants Money’) that approach Ramones/Motörhead velocity and intensity.”Deborah Frost, writing a metal-revival roundup in Rolling Stone, went so far as to suggest that “Pearcy sounds like a great L.A. street punk who would have been at home fronting the Seeds or the Standells,” then predicted “Round and Round” might wind up someday “on a 1984 version of Nuggets.” No such compilation ever materialized, but Frost’s estimation still rings true. Jon Young, in Rolling Stone Review 1985, similarly praised Pearcy’s “itchy-throated and proud” vocals above “junky but succinct” playing. Even Creem’s John Mendelsohn, ranking Ratt among his least favorite new bands of the ‘80s, zeroed in on Pearcy’s “petulant whine.”Here’s the thing about mid-‘80s MTV metal (pop-metal, that is—later indelibly dubbed “hair metal,” since my far more evocative labels “Nerf metal” and “shag metal” tragically never caught on): As myriad more extreme meanies will forever point out, it wasn’t really all that metal. In the ‘70s, when genre distinctions were fuzzier, most of these bands would’ve been filed under hard rock, if not glam rock—the New York Dolls (via Hanoi Rocks) and Alice Cooper (whom Twisted Sister swiped their look from) and Slade (whom Quiet Riot swiped their hits from) plus The Sweet, T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, and above all Kiss were unmistakable inspirations, both sonically and visually. The Dead End Kids, a sort of late-‘70s suburban Jersey/Philly answer to the Dolls, more or less sired the Pennsylvania-to-Sunset Strip bands Poison, Cinderella, and Britny Fox. W.A.S.P.’s and Quiet Riot’s earliest L.A. shows, circa 1975, had them opening for Dolls bassist Arthur “Killer Kane” and Stooges (not Joy Division!) spinoff The New Order. Great White covered Ian Hunter. Ex-Runaways were everywhere. And all the pretty boys wore scarves, Spandex, striped low-cut tank tops, shiny necklace baubles, flamboyant eye makeup, and Vaselined cheekbones.But ‘70s glam didn’t beget only hair metal; it also, earlier, begat ‘70s punk. There’s a fine line, and barely a year, between The Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz” (revived in ’84 by Swiss cheese-metallers Krokus) and the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop.” Poison borrowed guitar chords from the Sex Pistols, who’d in turn borrowed them from the Dolls. Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider slipped into Johnny Rotten snarls over the shouty Slade stomp of “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” Van Halen, who made L.A. hair metal inevitable, had a song called “Atomic Punk” on their first album and one called “D.O.A.” that sleazed like The Stooges on their second. Duff McKagan banged bass for Seattle punks The Fartz and Fastbacks prior to Guns N’ Roses. And so on.Ratt, like Mötley Crüe a couple years before—and so-called New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands like glam-rock obsessives Def Leppard a couple years before that, and actual punk rockers on both sides of the pond a couple years before that—put out their first vinyl on an indie label. Punk was already speeding metal up, weeding out pomp, and making it more D.I.Y. well before thrash rewrote the rulebook. New wave magazine-readin’ super freaks in 1981, especially the type drawn to heavy-riffed hardcore bands like Flipper and the Angry Samoans, might’ve noticed an ad for Crüe’s original Too Fast for Love, on Leathür Records. Ratt’s 1983 EP came out on Time Coast, a label run by longtime rock and comedy manager Marshall Berle—nephew of Milton Berle, who wound up co-starring partly in pre-glam drag along with several actual rats in the video for “Round and Round.” Time Coast also put out a single by spoofy Malibu clan the Surf Punks and a couple releases by L.A.’s excellent (and X-like) co-ed trio The Alley Cats; Ratt seem to have been the only alleged “metal” band on the imprint.So…cats and rats, how ‘bout that? The model on the cover of both Ratt’s first EP (with a rat scaling her stocking) and first album was kittenish Tawny Kitaen, later of Whitesnake video fame. Back in the ‘70s, when Ratt were still struggling under the moniker Mickey Ratt, a similarly somewhat Aerosmith-inspired Irish band called The Boomtown Rats took out-in-the-streets tunes like “Rat Trap” to the top of British charts; by 1984, their singer, Bob Geldof, was leading charity supergroup Band Aid, trying to cure Ethiopian famine. One of the first punk albums released in England, in early 1977, was The Stranglers’ ‘60s-garage-infused Rattus Norvegicus.Speaking of thematically titled albums, it’s worth noting that Ratt’s 2010 Infestation, featuring mostly original members, was arguably their most rocking since Out of the Cellar a quarter-century before. In 2002, Austin bluegrass cow-punks the Meat Purveyors recorded a highly entertaining and energetic alt-country cover of “Round and Round.” And by 2017, hip young German speed-metal troupe Stallion were channeling early Ratt riffs on their own second album, From the Dead. What comes around goes around, as Stephen Pearcy would say. I’ll tell you why—or maybe I already have.

Hip-hop brought black America at its most unfiltered into the mainstream like never before. And rappers have been pushing the envelope for sexual content dating back to even the genres earliest pop crossover moments. (Recall the "Rappers Delight" verse about "super sperm.") But it took some time for hip-hop to get really dirty. In the late 80s and early 90s, it was often gangsta rap pioneers like Ice-T and N.W.A. that set the bar for explicit sex talk, but it felt almost like a side effect of their penchant for breaking other taboos.Miamis 2 Live Crew became one of hip-hops first major acts to center their image on sex, and, in the process, upset the same censorship advocates that had been so focused on Prince a few years earlier, becoming unlikely champions of free speech. Throughout the early 90s, gangsta-rap albums continued to be peppered with odes to orgies and oral sex, and even relatively clean-cut acts like MC Hammer made ass-shaking anthems like "Pumps And A Bump." LL Cool J evolved from hip-hop love-song pioneer to the sex god of "Doin It." Sir Mix-A-Lots "Baby Got Back" became a pop phenomenon in part because of his cleverly cartoonish approach to sex, but, as his career continued, he got even more anatomical with songs like "Put Em On the Glass."In the mid-90s, the burgeoning hip-hop underground allowed more leeway for kinky lyrics that didnt even try to get past radio censors. Akinyele of "Put It In Your Mouth" fame dedicated his career to obscenity. Kool Keiths Dr. Octagon project became an indie-rap touchstone with a playfully absurd cocktail of sci-fi themes and sex raps. And R.A. The Rugged Mans 1994 debut album contained such perversely nasty lyrics that even the presence of rising mainstream star Notorious B.I.G. on "Cunt Renaissance" couldnt keep it from being shelved for several years.Early sex-positive female rap stars like Salt-N-Pepa gave way to X-rated pinups like Lil Kim and Foxy Brown, and in the early 2000s, Khia and Trina. By the 2010s, nearly every female rapper of note is as comfortable and unapologetic in rapping about ass and pussy as their male contemporaries, from superstars like Nicki Minaj to underground upstars like cupcakKe. Meanwhile, the rise of the Internet has reduced radios role as a gatekeeper, giving tracks like "Fuckin Problems" and "UP! (Beat the Pussy Up)" more room to thrive on the pop charts without being cleaned up for broadcast.