Genres

The African nation of Ethiopia has a unique history. It was never colonized by a European power, and through much of the 20th century the country was ruled by Haile Selassie, a member of Ethiopia’s Solomonic dynasty and the spiritual hero of the Rastafari movement. After 44 years as emperor, Selassie was overthrown in 1974, and the coming years saw a surge of repression and bloodshed by the communist military junta that took over. But in the waning years of Selassie’s reign, Ethiopia become famous for producing a generation of singers and artists who reinvigorated and reinvented local popular music.As has been documented over the past decades by international labels like Buda Musique—known for its famous Éthiopiques compilation series—great artists like Mahmoud Ahmed, Mulatu Astatke, Tlahoun Gessesse, and Bzunesh Beqele came to prominence in the ‘60s and ‘70s by playing in the capital of Addis Ababa with Emperor Selassie’s Imperial Bodyguard Band and the Police Orchestra, both state-controlled outfits. The music—called adadis zefanotch, or “new songs” in Amharic—was decidedly modern, influenced in part by American funk and jazz, but also drew heavily on local rhythms, modal systems, and the folk repertoire while featuring lyrics sung in Amharic and Oromigna.One fine example is Mulatu Astatke’s 1972 album, Mulatu of Ethiopia. Recorded in New York City in between Astatke’s studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the album finds the jazz composer forging an Ethio-jazz sound by melding Latin jazz and psychedelic soul while using pentatonic melodies and 3/4 rhythms. The album is being reissued this month in a deluxe LP package via Strut Records, so to celebrate, we’ve put together a playlist that looks at his music and the music of other Ethiopian greats from that period—a body of work that still sounds revolutionary today.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

To state the obvious, Chance the Rapper is a good emcee! The Chicago rapper has a nice, soft voice that telegraphs his “boy next door” charm. He mixes up his flows from verse to verse (and, sometimes, line to line), so things never get monotonous with him. And while he’s not a syllabic-stacking, thesaurus-thumping rappity rapper like a Kendrick or Nas, he’s able to draw thematic through-lines through his tracks and (especially) albums that give his work a narrative focus and arc. In short, he’s more of a performer than a technician -- which is awesome -- and, to be a little more abstract, he’s more of a feeling than he is a place, and that feeling (joyous, personal, a little pious) defines his tracks.This works perfectly marvelous for his own music, but it can make his guest verses hit or miss, but, when the energy works and the vibes align, it’s awesome. Kanye West basically fashioned much of his 2016 album The Life of Pablo around Chance’s swaggering choirboy euphoria -- Yeezy even began to adopt Chance’s trademarks yelps -- so Chance feels more than at home on the deconstructed gospel of “Ultralight Beam,” and the lumbering, twilight R&B of SZA’s “Child’s Play” mines much of the same quixotic nostalgia that framed Chance’s 2016 album Coloring Book.This, of course, requires some alignment or compromise on the part of the hosting artists, but as Chance is a marquee star, and a guest spot from him is becoming increasingly coveted, more artists are willing to go there, which is just fine with us.

In July of 1967, The Monkees dropped what would quickly become their fourth top-five single in just under a year. At first blush, “Pleasant Valley Sunday” is a lot like its predecessors: a hummable gem powered by finger-snapping swing and tumbling folk jangle over which fly pleading harmonies anchored by Micky Dolenz’s nervy soulfulness. There’s a nifty percussive breakdown at the 1:30 mark that recalls Ringo Starr’s super-charged bongos in “A Hard Day’s Night;” even better, though, is the bottomless cavern of reverb and echo that, like a black hole, swallows the song whole in the closing 30 seconds--a small but significant step towards the then exploding psychedelic movement.“Pleasant Valley Sunday” is exactly why Screen Gems picked up The Monkees concept from producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider: to churn out the kind of feel-good pop that both The Beatles, having graduated from lovable mop tops to acid-dropping sound explorers, and The Beach Boys, retreating into insular eccentricity after Smile failed to materialize, had abandoned by the time of the Summer of Love. Davy, Peter, Michael, and Micky, the film production company were banking, would appeal to those suburban youth who still craved innocent AM pop and not the anti-establishment weirdness of the hippies.Dig into the verses, however, and one discovers the song--penned by Gerry Goffin and Carole King in reaction to the leisurely boredom of identical row houses, perfect lawns, and patio cookouts--actually satirizes the very suburbia that embraced the act. It’s brilliantly subversive, and The Monkees make for an exceptional delivery system, turning out a nuanced performance that manages to encode youth alienation into a song that on its surface is as plastic and superficial as its subject.At the time, and for several decades afterwards, The Monkees were derided as corporate-manufactured fluff (i.e. the “Pre-Fab Four”). It’s a view that has softened in recent years. Yet there’s still a long list of music critics and rock tastemakers (including, apparently, Jann Wenner, cofounder of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that has yet to induct them) who fail to fully acknowledge the band’s slyly radical genius--of which “Pleasant Valley Sunday” is just a small taste. From 1966 through to 2016’s Good Times!, an impeccable album featuring one of the 21st century’s most heart-aching slices of indie folk in the Ben Gibbard-penned “Me & Magdalena” (and yes, The Monkees make modern indie folk), they haven’t just released a wealth of finely crafted pop; they’ve also pushed the form into brand new sonic territory and conceptual complexity.Considering the era from which they emerged, it only makes sense that The Monkees’ experimental streak expresses itself most stridently in their psychedelic recordings. Their single greatest song, the symphonic “Porpoise Song (Theme from “Head”), from their 1968 flick lampooning their own celebrity and consumer society in mid-’60s America, is every bit as glorious and dramatic as “Good Vibrations” and “A Day in a Life.” Not far behind is “Randy Scouse Git,” littered with references to partying with The Beatles and a dancehall-style melody sped up and smashed into pieces with ball-peen hammer, and “Auntie’s Municipal Court,” which folds the chiming drone and bassy thump of the Fabs’ “Rain” into California-bred roots-pop. But seriously, we could could go on and on, citing nuggets like “Daily Nightly,” one of the first rock songs featuring the sci-fi zaps and twirls of the Moog synthesizer (Dolenz owned one), or the drug reference-littered “Salesman,” written by Craig Smith who later record deeply strange psych-folk under the name Satya Sai Maitreya Kali, or “Circle Sky,” a fuzz-punk raver pivoting on a wiry riff presaging The Fall, or “Zilch,” ear-tweaking avant-gardeness that’s crosses Mothers of Invention-type studio shenanigans with composer Steve Reich’s tape loop experiments. You see?There also exist subtler yet no less bold examples veering off in the other direction, into earthy twang and proto-singer-songwriter intimacy. The Monkees--whose battles with music supervisor Don Kirshner for creative control are now the stuff of rock legend--actually had a far harder time slipping this material onto their ’60s albums. Where the psych-pop fare could be pretty strange, at least it made commercial sense when placed alongside trippy joviality like “Incense and Peppermints” and “Sunshine Superman.”Cuts such as 1967’s “You Told Me,” in contrast, make a more thorough break with the silly lightheadedness of The Monkees television program, recasting them as pioneers of the kind of countrified confessionals that wouldn’t pierce mainstream pop until the early ’70s. As the cerebral and astute Michael Nesmith has explained time and time again, the concept of The Monkees, as a mass media creation, simply didn’t have the room for his love of American vernacular music. This meant a great deal of the outfit’s most mature material, including the Bob Dylan-flavored “Nine Times Blue” (a dreamily poetic ballad Nesmith’s First National Band also recorded), wouldn’t see the light of day until Rhino’s stellar Missing Link series of outtakes, demos, and rarities that popped up in the late ’80s.When you add up these myriad facets of The Monkees’ catalog--all the psychedelia, the fuzzy garage punk, the rustic country-rock, the synthesizer-laced Baroque pop—a case can be made that not unlike The Byrds or even The Grateful Dead they managed to unite humanity’s oftentimes opposing desires for a sense of roots and cosmic transcendence into a rock-and-roll vision that’s profoundly expansive. And they did this while struggling to achieve creative autonomy and a sense of human dignity in a cold, corporate world. No shabby feat, people.

Fresh off the release of their third album, I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone, the Seattle-based indie band Chastity Belt have compiled an annotated playlist that outlines the three phases of a “Coffee Comedown”: Ecstasy, Anxiety, and Hope. In the same way the four-piece band have built their songs around turning everyday observations into weighty revelations, bassist Annie Truscott’s emotional, caffeine-fueled expedition doubles as the soundtrack to an existential crisis.Process is paramount and Truscott takes her time untangling the complexities of each phase. Her description of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Higher” is both jubilant and feral: “When the coffee starts crankin’ through my system, I feel invincible. I feel ready to take on the day.” However, Truscott differentiates between contemplating big thoughts and actually putting them into action. These flashes of clarity show up in moments of transition on the playlist. Merchandise’s “Become What You Are” caps the the Ecstasy phase and its lulling repetition offers a reprieve before the track’s quiet chaos morphs into Anxiety.But like most seemingly catastrophic situations, Truscott knows that this will not last forever. One of the best (and worst) things about coffee is that it will inevitably wear off. It mirrors an ongoing tension in Chastity Belt’s own music; a self-aware brand of self-indulgence derived from knowing that the tribulations of youth are also temporary. Of course, Stevie Nicks gets in the last word with “After the Glitter Fades,” which Truscott explains as a cleanser of sorts: “I remember how it feels, and I can look on all the phases of my comedown thru nostalgia-colored glasses.”

Judy is one of if not my favorite voice in Latin music criticism/journalism, and she created an interesting playlist for Rhapsody: Latin songs that pay homage, either directly or in spirit, to Che Guevara. She correctly identifies Che as being more of a pop cultural meme than a revolutionary figure at this point, but it is interesting just how positive most of the tracks are towards the man. Spending nearly a year in Miami, I wouldve guessed that his legacy in music would be a bit more mixed. There are even several albums dedicated specifically to Che.

In an era where taking ownership of and proclaiming faith in one’s own project seems a rarity, Chief Keef’s confidence in his own work and that of his friends is a breath of fresh air. When asked by Complex to list his favorite songs, he submitted a list almost exclusively of his own music. He justified this by pointing out that the meaning of each song is communicated in the title of each song, and the list ends up reading like more of an OKCupid “About Me” than a list of favorite songs. An interesting aberration here is “Gucci Mane’s Entire Catalog,” although Keef gives a bit by disclosing that his favorite Gucci song is “Spanish Plug.”

When Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter—two denizens of Germany’s musical underground—founded Kraftwerk in 1970, nobody could have imagined the impact they would have. But all these decades later, few corners of popular music are untouched by their influence. The sounds they crafted in the ’70s and ’80s with Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür resonated worldwide, influencing post-punk, synth-pop, New Wave, hip-hop, techno, and more.

Kraftwerk were among the first to use electronics as a tool for fashioning pop music. Even though their first few albums employed electronics in a more experimental way, they broke through internationally in 1974 with “Autobahn,” their mechanically paced hooks and android image positioning them as the Beach Boys of the robot revolution, pointing toward an entirely fresh musical future.

Before the ’70s were over, disciple David Bowie had released the Florian homage “V-2 Schneider” and incorporated Kraftwerk’s influence in his legendary “Berlin trilogy” of albums, and Gary Numan had channeled the band’s inspiration into the first flowering of synth-pop, which would continue to bear Kraftwerk’s mark in the ’80s.

From there, Kraftwerk’s electronic innovations went on to profoundly affect hip-hop and electro, starting with Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force’s “Planet Rock” and continuing through countless samples. This fed into the band’s influence on Detroit techno (and subsequently the international IDM scene). By the 2000s, the band’s influence was doubling back on itself via the ’80s-retro electroclash movement.

Today the majority of pop and hip-hop is created with electronics, and even artists who have never heard a note of Kraftwerk in their lives owe some of their existence to them, whether they realize it or not. Schneider left the band in 2008 and Hütter continued to lead a new lineup in occasional tours, but when Schneider passed away on April 30, 2020, at the age of 73, even though he was no longer working with the band, it marked an epoch’s end. Gathered in the accompanying playlist is a tiny percentage of the countless artists indebted to Kraftwerk’s fearless vision.

Even if you take Soundgarden off his résumé, the late Chris Cornell was one of the most dynamic and adventurous rock singers to emerge in the 90s. He explored lush psychedelia and folk-informed songwriting on solo albums like Euphoria Morning and Higher Truth, and was a must-have soundtrack guest, whether crafting sprawling acoustic gems like "Seasons" for Cameron Crowes Singles or teaming up with Joy Williams for 12 Years A Slave. He created funk-informed arena rock with Audioslave and an a Generation X-defining duet with Eddie Vedder on Temple of the Dogs "Hunger Strike." Just to prove there was no genre he feared, hes the only rock singer to have worked with both Timbaland and the Zac Brown Band, while always sounding unmistakably like himself.

It’s that time of year again when shop windows fill with red-and-green dioramas, city sidewalks bristle with shopping bags and sharp elbows, and the pressure to reach strictly enforced levels of good cheer can turn the season into one giant, holly-covered bummer. Sometimes it can feel like there’s just no eggnog strong enough to take the edge off.That’s why it’s so nice to have music that understands how you may feel (or not feel) about the whole holiday thing. For every unwelcome tiding of joy, there’s another song that captures the melancholy side of the season, the alienation felt by anyone whose experience of the holidays doesn’t align with a rosy fantasy of cozy contentment as spun by Hallmark Christmas TV movies and radio stations that cruelly play nothing but “Joy to the World” 24 hours a day.Perhaps the most lovably caustic of the holiday-themed classics, “Fairytale of New York” is an especially valuable counterpoint to all that. First released a few weeks before Christmas of 1987 and later included on the Celtic folk-punk faves’ third album, If I Should Fall From Grace With God, the classic song united The Pogues with their friend Kirsty MacColl for a tale of star-crossed lovers whose romance began on a more hopeful note “on a cold Christmas Eve” only to shatter like an ornament dropped from a great height. Singer and co-writer Shane MacGowan casts himself as a wreck reminiscing about good and bad times while spending the big night in a Big Apple drunk tank. MacColl appears as the voice of the other half of this romantic calamity. Hard words are exchanged (a few of them too hard for some stations), and God only knows what misdeeds could’ve inspired lines like “Happy Christmas your arse, I hope it’s our last.”As rancorous as the song may be — and poignant, too, all the more so after MacColl’s tragic death while on a pre-Christmas holiday in Mexico in 2000 — it’s an accurate snapshot of the big emotions that the season elicits in many of us. In fact, “Fairytale of New York” is full to the brim with the same feelings expressed in the rest of this playlist’s special selection of bittersweet holiday fare.Christmas cheer be damned. Go ahead and revel in the loneliness conveyed by Boyz II Men’s “Cold December Nights,” the unrepentant bleakness of Sufjan Stevens’ “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!” or the dread and despair that fill the full-on Santa-pocalypses described in Johnny Cash’s “Ringing the Bells for Jim” and Nat King Cole’s “The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot.” To borrow a phrase by LCD Soundsystem’s endearingly Scrooge-y curmudgeon James Murphy, Christmas can break your heart in oh so many ways.

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.