Genres

The standard boilerplate narrative maintains that synth-pop is all about the Brits, but look a little closer and it becomes apparent that Germany deserves just as many synth-pop props as England, if not more. In fact, it was the Germans who switched the whole thing on.Sure, the UK was full of early adopters like Gary Numan, OMD, Human League, et al. But when it comes down to determining the true originators of synth-pop, nobody would argue against Kraftwerks status as the fount from which everything else flowed. While the Düsseldorf quartet were immersed in experimental Krautrock exploits as early as 1970, it was their international 1974 hit "Autobahn" that definitively married electronics and pop for the first time, daring to dream of what The Beach Boys might have sounded like had they been born a decade later in Deutschland and with oscillators instead of guitars.Alongside Kraftwerk, electronically inclined Krautrock peers like Cluster and Harmonia were making inroads in that direction as well. But the British synth jockeys of the late 70s and early 80s all took their cues from Kraftwerk, whether they owned up to it or not. And as the UK New Wave and post-punk scenes blossomed in that era, Germany was having its own musical revolution with the NDW (Neue Deutsche Welle) movement, with game-changing Teutonic knob-twiddlers like Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft (DAF), Pyrolator, and Der Plan hitting the same sonic targets.By the time the first generation of German synth-poppers had broken ground, it was anybodys game, and plenty of early-80s Deutsche electronic artists were going for the gold, combining synthesizer technique and drum-machine beats with a seemingly endless supply of infectious pop hooks. Bands like The Twins and Propaganda earned attention on the homefront, while Taco (who struck upon on the novel gimmick of setting American Tin Pan Alley tunes to a synth-pop style) and Peter Schilling even broke through in the U.S.But it was a band that came along just years later that would make one of German synth-pops most passionate, cinematic statements, which resonated all over the world. Alphaville emerged from Münster in 1984 with their debut album, Forever Young, the first single of which—the party-starter "Big in Japan"—was a huge international hit. But it was the soaring, larger-than-life track "Forever Young" that brandished their most outsized hooks and emotional gravitas. Born of Reagan-era nuclear paranoia, the song spoke from a place of fear, courage, desire, despair, and determination all at once, upping the ante on rocks "live fast, die young" ethos by proposing that the proper response in the face of existential angst was simply to stay young in perpetuity.Plenty of other German synth-poppers would follow in the years to come, from Camouflage and Modern Talking to Chicks on Speed and Stereo Total. But when you hit a peak like Alphaville’s classic, you can pretty much claim your immortality right there.

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.

The rise of Hiatus Kaiyote, the Melbourne-based ensemble whose blend of jazz fusion and downtempo earned a 2016 Grammy nomination for Best R&B Performance, has drawn attention toward the Down Under’s unlikely hotbed of post-millennial soul. Some of the acts on our survey hail from Australia, while others come from nearby New Zealand. But all hew to the kind of cool, urbane, and hip-hop inflected beats that have thrived in underground music circles since the early ‘00s. Onetime Disclosure collaborator Jordan Rakei is earning acclaim for his Cloak debut, New Zealand duo Electric Wire Hustle is a familiar Okayplayer and Soulection favorite, and Ngaiire just released an album on Sony Music Australia.

The most neutral adjective you could use to describe the voice of Sleaford Mods mouthpiece Jason Williamson is probably “distinctive.” His wordplay, as in the opening couplet of the Nottingham duo’s 2014 breakout track “Tied Up in Nottz”—“The smell of piss is so strong, it smells like decent bacon / Kevin’s getting footloose on the overspill under the piss station”—is impressive enough, what with the way he stitches together an in-joke about the band’s favorite grimy Hamburg hotel and a reference to everyone’s favorite Kevin Bacon movie. But Williamson’s air-hammer delivery and thick-as-marmite East Midlands accent—both front and center on the new album English Tapas—contribute hugely to Sleaford Mods’ appeal, even if some non-Limey listeners may require the use of subtitles—and probably footnotes, too.Indeed, the unabashedly regional nature of Williamson’s voice remains a rarity for any act who’s garnered international attention. The vast majority of British acts have largely stuck with the tradition instituted by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, which holds that popular music should be sung in an American accent or a close enough facsimile. While fellow British Invasion acts like The Kinks and Herman’s Hermits subverted the convention—and the ubiquitous voices of Adele and Ed Sheeran sometimes demonstrate a similar degree of latitude—it can still be jarring to get an undiluted dose of Cockney, Brummie, Manc, Geordie, Scouse or any other strain. Sleaford Mods belong to a proud counter-tradition of vocalists who not only defy the pressure to Americanize but brandish accents that have traditionally been masked as markers of low class in British society.This quality creates a fascinating connection between an otherwise disparate series of singers, poets, and shouters operating not just in the punk and post-punk styles dear to Sleaford Mods, but in folk, electronic, grime, and even sound poetry. To mark English Tapas’ release and the band’s first North American tour this spring, here’s a selection of these distinctive voices. And if it just sounds like a whole lot of British people—and a few Irish—yelling at you, just remember: You probably did something to deserve it.

Tracks we dig! Songs we like by artists we like.

The sound of go-go was born on the streets of Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s, a mutant variation of the funk and R&B grooves that had been evolving over the course of the decade. At its core, go-go is all about the beat—and while one of its chief calling cards is a primal, butt-shaking feel, the go-go groove is also an extremely precise and specific sort of beast, adorned in just the right way with congas, timbales, and Rototoms accentuating the bone-deep rhythm the drummer is dropping. It’s music for getting a good, sweaty party going all the way through the wee hours, and its been embedded in the culture of the Baltimore/D.C. area for decades, transcending all sorts of borders. For instance, in the ’80s, D.C. punk pioneers like Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye eagerly left their comfort zone behind for the city’s black clubs to catch go-go heroes like Trouble Funk in action.

But partly because it’s always been such a regionally focused scene, go-go has usually remained a cult phenomenon for the rest of the country. One of the only times it even came within spitting distance of the national mainstream was when E.U. was featured performing “Da’ Butt” in Spike Lee’s 1988 film School Daze. Even the ultimate go-go anthem, Chuck Brown’s 1979 tune “Bustin’ Loose”—generally credited as the genre’s flagship track—only reached the middle of the pop charts. (Nelly fared far better with his 2002 blockbuster “Hot in Herre,” which borrowed its hook from Brown’s song.)

But on February 19, 2020, go-go truly became part of American history when D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser signed a bill into law declaring it to be the official music of the city. Let’s take the long view of how go-go grew. Look back to the early influences of the scene, from the fiery funk of Young Senators to the jazzy jams of Grover Washington, Jr., and the sweet soul of The Moments, then shift to the giants of the go-go game like Chuck Brown, Trouble Funk, and Rare Essence, and run up to hip-hop/Go-Go crossover kings like DJ Kool.

Few bands greeted the new millennium with as much pure pizzaz as The Go! Team did when they emerged out of Brighton in 2004. Fronted by mastermind Ian Parton and featuring a rotating cast of members (most notably Ninja, who delivers most of the group’s irresistibly upbeat raps), The Go! Team stood apart from many of their indie-rock peers with their eclectic, overflowing cauldron of influences and sounds, drawing on everything from English big beat to classic film scores to ‘90s college rock to left-field hip-hop. Approaching their craft with the diligence of crate-diggers, The Go! Team’s music channels all the relentless joy of an elementary-school playground, their sing-songy melodies and marching-band exuberance freely mashing together samples and styles until the resulting product feels as if it’s about to burst.Part of the magic of The Go! Team is how the band is able to stir all their scattered sources of inspiration together into something that feels effortlessly cohesive, their cheer-leading celebration rock sounding as though it were the kind of thing that just always existed in the sunny side of our imagination. But a peek into their influences unveils a wonderland of varying artists and styles, a plane where the Beastie Boys can shoot hoops with Ennio Morricone, and Deerhoof might get caught stealing Pokémon cards from The Prodigy. With their new album, Semicircle, arriving on January 19, we took the opportunity to assemble a roll call of The Go! Team’s many muses, charting the ways that the band has connected the dots between everyone from Happy Mondays to The 5th Dimension, and, in the process, forming a compendium of feel-good music for the ages. One, two, three, GO!!!!

Indie supergroup GØGGS features singer Chris Shaw of Memphis-based punk outfit Ex-Cult, indie psych darling Ty Segall, Bay Area garage noise revivalist Charles Moothart and bassist Michael Anderson. Having started as a conversation between Shaw and Segall when Ex-Cult opened for White Fence back in 2013, the band has just surprise-released their second album Pre Strike Sweep digitally in early September and are currently celebrating the physical release. Built on the more aggressive side of their foundational music influences (namely 80s hardcore), GØGGS is both fierce and thoughtful, exploring each members root in the underground through the totally fitting theme of destruction and rebirth. We recently asked them to make us a playlist, and were stoked to see them explore that theme and their musical influences family tree even further.Says Chris Shaw: "Pre Strike Sweep- the title track from the new GØGGS album- is a song about starting over. New beginnings are a common theme in rock music, so it was easy to make this list of rippers that are all loosely based on some kind of change. This is also probably the only playlist to ever feature Lee Hazelwood and Urban Waste back to back. Medicinal marijuana will do that to you."Listen above or go right here.

This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you.Kendrick Lamar’s albums are holistic, meticulously crafted meditations on the idea of blackness in America; they’re novels disguised as albums, and one gets the sense that every couplet and every bass lick has been labored over. All this is great, but sometimes you just want to hear Kendrick rap. This is what made his untitled.unmastered outtakes album from 2016 so enjoyable, and also why his guest verses are always so charming. The span of artists on this playlist reflects the central tension in Kendrick’s own music; the transcendent, post-electronic jazz of Flying Lotus nestles beside the rickety soul street reportage of Schoolboy Q. Navigating the space between those two poles is Kendrick, who moves forward and raps his ass off.

George Lucas has never explained quite how the bulbous-headed musicians of Mos Eisley got hip to hot jazz. Maybe Jabba the Hutt got a hold of a hijacked cargo of scratchy 78s. Whatever happened, the players onstage — toting space-age clarinets of various sizes — sure are cooking when Luke walks into the smuggler bar where he first meets Han and Chewbacca.No matter how many times I’ve seen it, I’m always captivated by the music known as the “Cantina Theme,” perhaps because its loose-limbed vitality contrasts so sharply with the Wagnerian pomp that otherwise dominates John Williams’ scores for Episodes I-VI. As music designed for pleasure, it was a rare commodity in the dingy Republic that Luke, Leia and Han strived so hard to save.With the franchise in full swing once again, it’s high time to celebrate one of the most underappreciated facets of the Star Wars universe over the last four decades: its relationship with the dancefloor. You see, I wasn’t the only one struck by that cantina sound. A trombonist and producer who’d worked with Gloria Gaynor and Carol Douglas, Domenico Monardo was so obsessed with Star Wars and its score, he pitched the idea of a dancefloor-friendly revamp to Casablanca Records’ Neil Bogart. He also sweet-talked 20th Century Fox into green-lighting his scheme for a full-bore disco treatment, complete with 70-piece orchestra and an arsenal of synthesizers. Released under the droid-y artist name of Meco, the single supercharged both the main theme and the cantina music, and was a smash hit in 1977.Of course, Monardo wasn’t the first to fuse science-fiction tropes with earthbound grooves. Sun Ra, Funkadelic and Earth, Wind & Fire had all gotten plenty pan-galactic already. Futuristic fantasies had also become a core piece of code for electronic music, too, as evidenced by works as diverse as Bebe and Louis Barron’s score for Forbidden Planet (1956) and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s sci-fi opera Sirius (1975). But Meco’s success still ushered in a dazzling new age of space disco by American masters and European mavericks. It would also inspire similarly disco-fied themes for other movies and TV shows with starry settings and laser guns.The harder rock sound that Meco adopted for The Empire Strikes Back was a sad indication of disco’s waning potency by the turn of the decade. Yet the futuristic fantasies he sparked persist in the music that sometimes fills our cantinas. And as was the case for Monardo, sometimes they’re even sanctioned by the Lucasfilm empire, a fact that suggests there may be more going on in those rebel bases than the usual mission briefings.