Genres

Taking a look at the playlists for my show on Boston’s WZBC might give the more seasoned college-radio listener a bit of déjà vu: They’re filled with bands like Versus, Team Dresch, and Sleater-Kinney, who were at the top of the CMJ charts back in the ’90s. But the records they released in 2019 turned out to be some of the year’s best rock. Versus, whose Ex Nihilo EP and Ex Voto full-length were part of a creative run for leader Richard Baluyut that also included a tour by his pre-Versus outfit Flower and his 2000s band +/-, put out a lot of beautifully thrashy rock; Team Dresch returned with all cylinders blazing and singers Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson wailing their hearts out on “Your Hands My Pockets”; and Sleater-Kinney confronted middle age head-on with their examination of finding one’s footing, The Center Won’t Hold.

Italian guitar heroes Uzeda—who have been putting out proggy, riff-heavy music for three-plus decades—released their first record in 13 years, the blistering Quocumque jerceris stabit; Imperial Teen, led by Faith No More multi-instrumentalist Roddy Bottum, kept the weird hooks coming with Now We Are Timeless; and high-concept Californians That Dog capped off a year of reissues with Old LP, their first album since 1997. Juliana Hatfield continued the creative tear she’s been on this decade with two albums: Weird, a collection of hooky, twisty songs that tackle alienation with searing wit, and Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, her tribute record to the dubby New Wave chart heroes (in the spirit of the salute to Olivia Newton-John she released in 2018). And our playlist finishes with Mary Timony, formerly of the gnarled rockers Helium and currently part of the power trio Ex Hex, paying tribute to her former Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte via an Ex Hex take on “What Kind of Monster Are You?,” one of the signature songs by Billotte’s ’90s triple threat Slant 6.

The legend of The Stooges has been documented in every medium possible—books, documentaries, box sets, Audi commercials—and all support the undeniable case that punk rock as we know it would not exist without the glass-smashing, chest-slashing hysterics of Iggy Pop and his Ann Arbor bastard brethren. But while it’s tempting to plot The Stooges along a linear fuse that led to punk’s big bang, the group’s 1970 sophomore release, Fun House, has always defied such a simple narrative.

Most of what we refer to as proto-punk—be it the sneering garage rock compiled on Nuggets or the heavy-duty psychedelic blues of Blue Cheer—is really just a louder, scrappier take on the British Invasion sounds that dominated the ’60s. And even the wild, death-trippin’ rock ’n’ roll of The Stooges’ canonical 1973 album Raw Power wasn’t that far removed from, say, the raunchy thrust of early KISS or Aerosmith. But from Ron Asheton’s opening guitar strike on “Down on the Street,” Fun House instantly feels so much darker, heavier, and—thanks to Ron’s drummer brother Scott and bassist Dave Alexander—funkier than anything of its vintage. A boiling-hot cauldron of early heavy metal, bad-trip psychedelia, James Brown, and free jazz, Fun House is anarchy executed with military precision—not so much a display of controlled chaos as chaotic control. To mark the album’s 30th anniversary in 2000, Rhino Records released a box set, 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions, that compiled every single take from the album’s original recording sessions—we’re talking 142 tracks to document a seven-song album that yielded no viable non-album outtakes. And on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in July 2020, the box set is being issued on vinyl for the first time at a price tag of $400. But while some may question the value of hearing 14 versions of “T.V. Eye” in a row, for Fun House devotees, such financial and practical considerations are immaterial. Because that’s what Fun House does to you—it’s less a record than a sinister spell, that mysterious cursed object in a horror movie that you’re warned not to upset, lest you unleash its horrible powers, but you do it anyway. More than a mere proto-punk classic, this album belongs to its own subterranean netherworld, one whose pathways continue to burrow into all corners of the underground, as this playlist of Fun House favorites and followers can attest.

On her debut album, With Me, which moves from cheeky pop tracks to heartwarming ballads to empowering anthems, Tatum Lynn sounds well beyond her 19 years. Still, the Arizona-based singer/songwriter glosses it all with a youthful vibrancy that’s infectious. Through it all, she channels a little of Ariana Grande’s sass (see single “Later Baby, XO” with its “thank u, next” vibe) and Taylor Swift’s evocative storytelling—and we think she’d dig that latter comparison, given that Ms. Swift shows up on Lynn’s Car Jams playlist more than once.

Says Tatum: “This playlist is definitely all music I would jam out to in my car! It reminds me of road trips I have taken with my girlfriends and how we just belt out each song like we were putting on our very own concert. I see people doing this with songs from my album, With Me, and am hoping one day I’ll pass by a car of girls blasting and putting on their own road-trip concert of ‘Later Baby, XO’!!”

‍Photo Credit: Nick Spanos

It was 2010, and ghosts were everywhere. The previous decade’s electronic innovations were staring down dead ends: Dubstep had run its course, and minimal techno was flatlining. In the absence of a bold new narrative, absence itself haunted the conversation. Into this void stepped Tri Angle. The Brooklyn label, founded by Robin Carolan, came whispering of another world. The first record on the label, Balam Acab’s See Birds, was all sighs and reverb, its sonics as corroded as a thing exhumed. The label’s next release was an eponymous EP from someone or something called oOoOO—not so much a band name as a wraithlike howl.

Over the next few years, this kind of doomy affect would become a kind of self-parody, but Carolan never settled for kitsch. Taking echo-soaked emptiness as a starting point, he kept pushing outward and, in the process, redefined the sound of 21st-century pop. Acts like Forest Swords and The Haxan Cloak helped make goth cool for a new generation; Lotic and Rabit drove deconstructed club music toward dystopian extremes, queering the electronic vanguard; Clams Casino shaped an entire generation of hip-hop by steeping his beats in an impenetrable haze. It’s impossible to think of Billie Eilish—to name just one multiplatinum megastar—without Tri Angle’s atmospheric precedent.

In April, Carolan announced that he was closing down the label, bowing out after just 10 years. To mark the occasion, he put together a 29-song playlist. (It’s telling that he added the first tracks to the playlist in September 2019; clearly, he’d been getting ready to shut things down for a while.) It makes for both a strong introduction for the uninitiated and a comprehensive recap for the label’s followers: While it’s neck deep in murky gloom (The Haxan Cloak’s sensuously dreadful “Miste,” FIS’ frankly terrifying “DMT Usher”), it also touches upon more ecstatic club music (Katie Gately’s “Lift”) and, crucially, the sort of genre-crossing soul (AlunaGeorge’s “You Know You Like It,” How To Dress Well’s “Ready For The World”) that constitutes one of the most fertile fields in pop music over the past decade. Taken together, it makes for a wide-ranging look at a label whose influence outstripped its own fame. Tri Angle is dead; long may it haunt us.

The world has gotten smaller. If you compare the U.S. and U.K. Top 40 pop charts these days, you’ll mostly see the same batch of songs on both. It’s probably a function of the Information Age turning cultural variations into one big, transatlantic pile of homogeneity.

But it wasn’t always that way. In decades past, the British and American pop charts were almost entirely different creatures. Americans trawling through the U.K. Top 40 would encounter a slew of songs and artists that were foreign to them in every sense of the word, as well as some they might know but would never have expected to have mainstream appeal.

The U.S. Top 40 has always been known for playing it safe. Rarely does anything too far outside the margins pop up. But in England of old, you could find edgy, underground artists rising to the top as well as utterly eccentric bits of weirdness with no readily discernible explanation, the results of the kind of old-fashioned regionalism that’s been increasingly phased out.

This collection of U.K. Top 40 hits from the ’60s through the ’90s is designed to astonish Americans who’ve grown used to thinking of the pop charts as the home of the lowest common denominator. On one end of the spectrum are the artists too cool, too quirky, or too in-your-face to ever score U.S. pop hits. That encompasses everything from the doomy post-punk of Joy Division and Public Image Ltd. to the goth glory of Bauhaus, the seminal electro-pop of Kraftwerk, the punk roar of The Damned, and the thrash-metal madness of Megadeth.

But before you decide the U.K. musical mainstream is just exponentially cooler than that of the U.S., take a look at the other end of the spectrum. There’s goofy pre-WWII pastiche, Peter Sellers’ mock-dramatic recitative of “A Hard Day’s Night,” a loopy-sounding brass-band instrumental, a ska remake of a tune whose only lyrics are “Ne Ne Na Na Na Na Nu Nu,” and plenty of other bizarre entries unknown to most Americans.

It all adds up to one of the most schizophrenic playlists you’re ever likely to experience, swooping back and forth from the sublime to the ridiculous with giddy glee. And the breathless momentum incurred will echo the mercurial feeling of following the U.K. Top 40 in the pre-internet era.

Welcome to a history of the Grammys’ greatest misses. The first Grammy Awards were given out in 1959, and obviously the organization has doled out well-deserved honors to countless awesome artists since then. But let’s face it: It’s a lot more fun to home in on the mistakes that this august assemblage of music-industry pros has made in terms of legendary artists they’ve snubbed for decades. So here’s a handy tally featuring some of the most glaringly obvious omissions from the Grammy rolls. Note that if we’d made this list in 2019, it would have also included Tanya Tucker, who won her first Grammy in 2020 at the age of 61, no less than 47 years after her first nomination (yes, she started young). And note further that we aren’t counting Lifetime Achievement awards, which are bestowed as opposed to being won in a competitive context.

Looking all the way back, the Grammys actually missed a big one straight out of the gate. The first awards ceremony occurred in May of ’59, three months after Buddy Holly was killed in the infamous “The Day the Music Died” plane crash, and both of his solo (i.e., non-Crickets) albums had been released in ’58. You can probably tell where this is going. Many of the artists who shaped the ’60s didn’t fare much better—Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, and The Grateful Dead, for instance, remain in the non-Grammy pile to this day. The awards missed their share of ’70s heroes as well, from ABBA to Bob Marley and beyond. (For the latter, it didn’t help that the industry did not have a reggae category until 1985.) So how did the Grammys do when hip-hop and New Wave were in the ascendant? Well, ask Run-DMC, Public Enemy, Depeche Mode, or The Cure, whose (surviving) members have presumably given up on waiting for the call. The Notorious B.I.G. and Nas can tell you there was some catching up to do on the hip-hop side in the ’90s. And country superstars like Dierks Bentley and Martina McBride have their issues with the institution too. In fact, when you step back and see how much titanic talent has been given the cold shoulder by the GRAMMYⓇs, it sort of starts to seem like a badge of honor.

The great irony about the MTV Unplugged phenomenon of the 1990s is that the performances were often less stripped down than gussied up. Sure, the series provided a forum for rock artists to reimagine their riffed-up repertoires as campfire fare, but it also gave them license to crowd the stage with string players, woodwind sections, and other auxiliary personnel. Even a punk-conscious band like Nirvana weren’t immune to this when they sat down for their now-iconic Unplugged taping in November 1993 (released a year later as MTV Unplugged in New York), as they brought along a cello player and a couple of Meat Puppets. But the band’s quietest performance ever proved to be their most intense, no more so than on Kurt Cobain’s traumatic excavation of the Lead Belly standard “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.”

That song didn’t just become a key part of Nirvana’s legacy; it set the gold standard for acoustic-administered emotional exorcisms, clearing the bar set by white-knuckled strummers like Bob Dylan and Richie Havens. The other performances collected on this playlist may not approach the same soul-wrenching extremes, but they each document a revelatory moment in a career (such as a young David Bowie finding his flamboyant voice in Jacques Brel’s “Port of Amsterdam” and the early Jane’s Addiction showcasing their range with the harmonica-honked anomaly “My Time”), or they capture a legend in their purest, most primal state (see: Lauryn Hill’s epic freestyle on “Mystery of Iniquity” and Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum stretching the physical limits of his voice on the haunting “Oh Comely”). The casual nature of acoustic performances has also presented artists with a forum for making other people’s songs their own, like Wings’ dramatic reading of Paul Simon’s “Richard Cory” (in which Macca cedes lead vocal duties to Denny Laine) and Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson’s arresting rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore” (released on the Singles soundtrack under their Lovemongers alias). And no survey of quality acoustica is complete without oft-overlooked hair-metal outsiders Tesla, whose Five Man Acoustical Jam record actually predated the first proper MTV Unplugged release by six months.