Genres

Photograph: Misha Vladimirskiy/FilterlessJack White didn’t invent garage-blues, yet more than any other modern rocker the ornery dude has helped transform it from an underground phenomenon into a mainstream one. (And yes, The Black Keys certainly deserve major props, too.) There are now a wealth of high-profile musicians soaking bluesy, beastly jams in demonic layers of fuzz and echo-soaked string-bending. In addition to guitar-hero-in-the-making Gary Clark Jr. and, of course, the mighty Alabama Shakes, there’s the British outfit Royal Blood, as well as Deap Vally, a female two-piece from L.A. that turn all their angst into jackhammering, hip-swaggering, fist-pumping awesomeness. Our playlist also spotlights cuts from those artists in the 1980s and ’90s who were pioneers in the folding of rowdy garage-punk into the earthy mysteriousness that reaches all the way back to the Mississippi Delta. The blues, after all, are about tradition.

Whats This Playlist All About? The LCD Soundsystem mastermind and pals David & Stephen Dewaele of Soulwax and 2ManyDJs got back to spinning vinyl (and only vinyl) at their 2018 Despacio party residency at Queens Knockdown Center. If you were there, you may have enjoyed the set while sipping on wines from Murphys restaurant, Four Horsemen. If you werent, Brooklyn Vegans Arielle Gordon graciously compiled this mix featuring highlights from the first of three nights.What Do You Get? A whole lot of classic disco, New Wave, and house, all on the headier end of the dance spectrum. It kicks off with one of Paul McCartneys weirdest (and best) synth experiments ("Check My Machine"), then digs into classic Bowie, Byrne, and Carly Simon, alongside a few Soulwax remixes of French artistes Charlotte Gainsbourg and The Peppers. In between, theres just enough dance-floor cheese sprinkled about (including some "Jungle Boogie") to keep the mood pleasantly lighthearted.Greatest Discovery: The 1983 collaboration between French composer Hector Zazou, Congolese singer Bony Bikaye, and electronic duo CY1, who mixed analog synths, krautrock, funk, and African influences into entrancing tracks like "Lamuka."Guiltiest Pleasure: Lyn Christophers slinky, sexy funk-pop sizzler "Take Me With You."Best Surprise: Black Sabbaths psychedlic slow-burner "Planet Caravan." It glues together the surrounding disco beats and funky grooves surprisingly well.Toss Up: James Murphy Spinning This Mix or an All LCD Soundsystem Set? Were going to go with the former here, if only because were getting a little older and hearing these classics alongside a couple glasses of that wine sounds pretty nice right about now.

Jamie XX links up with Complex to give a themed favorite tracks playlist. You get a sense of the broad range of influences that goes into his own music, from the lo-fi electric blues of Love Sculptures "Blues Helping" to the skeletal proto-dubstep of Buriels "Forgive." The Walls and Steel An Skin tracks are simply sublime (Jamie samples the latter on his own "Sleep Sounds").Songs to Relax To: Love Sculpture, “Blues Helping”Songs Most Proud of Making: Radiohead, “Bloom (Jamie xx Rework Part 3)”Album that Made Him Want to Start Producing: Burial, BurialFavorite Song With Steel Drums: Steel An’ Skin “Afro Punk Reggae Dub”UK Garage Track He Cant Stop Playing: DJ Zinc “138 Trek”Album that Inspired Him While Recording In Colour: Walls, WallsTrack that Encompasses Everything He Loves About U.K. Rave Culture: Jamie XX, "All Under One Roof Raving"Favorite song from his label, XL Recordings: Roy Davis Jr. f/ Peven Everett “Gabriel”Go-to song for DJing: Bileo, “You Can Win”Song that makes Him Excited About Dance Music: C.P.I., “Proceso (Barnt Remix)”Want amazing playlist delivered to your inbox every day? Click here to subscribe to the Dowsers e-mail!

I first met Janelle Monàe when she was 22 years-old and opening up for the Oakland neo-soul legend Raphael Saadiq at the San Francisco venue Bimbos, a mid-size club on the outskirts of that city’s North Beach neighborhood. A few months before, she’d released her debut EP, Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase). It was an exciting, groundbreaking collection. It combined the wild, post-rap funk of Outkast and afrofuturism of George Clinton with the tech dystopianism of William Gibson and a more formalalistic, Brechtian remove. For a kid weaned on semiotics and Gang Starr, this collision was enthralling, if a bit messy. Janelle’s voice was captivating, but the songs sometimes couldn’t keep up with her energy -- the backing vocals blurred together, and the choruses weren’t always memorable. In short, I liked the idea more than her music.Regardless, she was a dynamic personality, and I was excited for the interview. About a half hour before she took the stage, her manager took me backstage, where Janelle was cloistered inside of small changing room -- more of a closet than a suite. She was already outfitted in her signature white tuxedo shirt, with her hair was bunched up into its beehive coif. She was nervous, but friendly. She offered me a water, which was nice of her. I spent the first 10 minutes of the interview trying to place her in the lineage of afrofuturism, discussing Octavia Paz and Parliament. In retrospect, it was a dumb move -- I assumed that her reading of herself was the same as mine, and didn’t allow her to speak for herself -- and the strategy bit me in the ass when, with five minutes left in my appointed interview window, she, annoyed and maybe embarrassed, declared that she didn’t know much about afrofuturism, she’d barely even heard of it. I felt shitty and a little bit disappointed. I hated that I had put her in a foul mood, and, more selfishly, I had no idea if anything in the interview was usable.But her live show that night was rapturious, a prolonged ecstatic release of energy that found her bouncing, jerking, and bounding across the stage in barely controlled dance patterns. You couldn’t take your eyes off her. And though she doesn’t make dance music, you couldn’t help but move. It didn’t matter that here hooks weren’t quite there, or that she hadn’t yet been able to name her own style, the performance was special, even singular. Since then, she’s made some jaw-dropping tracks that’ve shown immense growth and refinement, but the music, though oftentimes very very good, has never quite escaped her heavy conceptual framework. Luckily, she’s entirely catches up with herself on Dirty Computer. The album largely, though not entirely, loses the funkified Android conceit of her earlier work. It’s both more personal and more self-assured. It glides where her other music tends to churn, and the hooks are immediately catchy, and stick in your head. It’s still occasionally directive of other people’s work -- “Make Me Feel” sounds remarkably like Dirty Mind-era Prince, for example -- but she entirely makes it her own here; the sums of her influence coalesce into something much more personal and singular. It’s the best work of her career, and may end up being both the most fun and important album of 2018.The album’s two opening tracks are among the most memorable one-two punch in recent memory. Brian Wilson’s vocal remain pop’s greatest invocation, and amidst his lilting, layered , the lead-off title resurrects Janelle’s dreamy, sensual landscape. She invites us to “look closer” at the “text message caught up in the sky.” Once again, she’s identifying with hardware (a dirty computer, in this case), but the vocals are warm and human, and, soon, we hear MLK reciting the Declaration of Independence. We’re onto “Crazy, Classic, Life” now -- one of the neat tricks the front half of the album pulls off is blurring the space between songs, so that it all sounds like one, long jam -- and Janelle quickly asserts a theme that will run through the album. It’s 2018 now, and her and people like her are no longer on the margins; they’re now the “rulers” and “kings.” “Im not Americas nightmare,” she coos on the song’s pre-chorus, “Im the American dream.”In that way, it resembles Frank Ocean’s Blonde, another coronation of a queer America that was curtailed by Trump’s election a few months later. Monàe’s work contains little of Ocean’s melancholy or ambience; Dirty Computer is pure pop music, euphoric and uncluttered. “PYNK,” which features Montreal steam pop producer Grimes, is a technicolor march down the broadest boulevards of American culture. The song hems together and subverts lyrical archetypes. Witness the pre-chorus:“So, here we are in the carLeavin traces of us down the boulevardI wanna fall through the starsGetting lost in the dark is my favorite partLets count the ways we could make this last forever"Taken out of context, this could be sung by Tom Petty, Britney Spears, or any number of chroniclers of main street adolescence. That Janelle is using this in the service of an anthem to pansexuality should be subversive, but, in 2018, it seems perfectly normal. This is a victory for all of us.Monàe’s previous music has always seemed to exist in a different time. The revved-up guitar riffs and funky drummer breakdowns place her in the ‘60s, while the lyrics’ runaway-Android lover motif put her firmly in the (20)40s. But Dirty Computer feels necessarily of this time. The world caught up with her. The techno-dystopian daydream of her earlier work has become a crippling reality, and, yes, that’s unfortunate. But the sheer, self-conscious otherness of Janelle, which ten years ago was a commercial liability, is not only permissible, but is celebrated, and this album is funky testament to this new freedom.

Vancouver power duo Japandroids kicked off 2017 with a big bang by releasing their biggest and boldest album yet, Near to the Wild Heart of Life, back in January. And if you caught the band on their subsequent never-ending world tour this year, then these songs may sound familiar… “For me, 2017 was a wild ride. I spent almost the entire year on tour—100 shows in 20 countries—so I was always on the move. There were highs, lows, and everything in-between, which is very typical of touring. If there was any one constant among all the craziness, it might be my pre-show playlist, which I listen to every night before we go on stage—you know, to get pumped up. I initially made this playlist in January, ahead of our first shows, and had every intention of keeping it the same throughout the year… but every so often, 2017 sent a undeniable jam my way, and thus some swapping inevitably occurred. And so while not all of these songs are from 2017, when I think back on the year in music, or at least my year in music, this is what I hear.”—Brian King of Japandroids

Shibuya-Kei is a subgenre of Japanese pop that originated in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. If you were a music nerd in the ‘90s, you probably remember Cibo Matto, Cornelius or Buffalo Daughter. The base of the music was 80s synthpop, but there was also a coat of shimmering guitars stubbled with quirky electronic flourishes and occasional forays into jazz or lounge. It was self-consciously cheeky music that occasionally teetered towards kitsch, and was viewed, by Western hipsters, with a tinge of exoticism. Birgitta has some wonderful playlist on her Spotify channel, and this one does a great job at capturing the genre’s oddness, thought it’s curious that she didn’t include Pizzicato Five.

We all have our passion projects. For some of us, it’s tending a garden or collecting vinyl, while others write novels or cut vanity records. JAY Z, being JAY Z, thinks on a much larger scale. For the past two years, he has been singly focused on building his fledgling streaming service, Tidal. He’s squeezed favors from friends, spent ridiculous amounts of time and money on promoting the service, and even gotten his wife involved in the proceedings (though, it must be noted, her contribution came wrapped in a bow of marital discontent). At first, this very much seemed like a business decision. Most of us never really believed the line about him trying to empower artists with a (somewhat) more fair streaming business model. The best guesses by industry insiders was that he would build it out, and then flip it for a couple hundred million in profit. After all, he is a business, man.But, increasingly, JAY Z seems to be motivated less and less by altruism, or even business acumen, and more by hubris. This is a man who’s not used to losing, and turning his back on Tidal—either by shutting it down, or selling it for scraps—definitely feels like an L. So, here we are. JAY Z has a new album, 4:44, his first since 2013’s critically panned but commercially successful Magna Carta Holy Grail. And that album will be available exclusively on Tidal. There’s been a lotofinkspilledabout why exclusives are bad for the industry and bad for fans, and those articles seem to focus on two basic principles: 1) Forcing fans to shell out for an additional music service is fundamentally unfair, and 2) it frustrates the fans, encourages privacy, and shrinks the marketplace. We generally agree with this line of thinking, albeit with a few caveats—the streaming marketplace isn’t as frail as it once was, and there are consumers with the resources and the motivation to buy what is effectively a bigger bag of popcorn. But, ultimately, the true casualty of the exclusivity wars is the artform.Music is a living medium. It’s supposed to be heard, discussed, and reappropriated into new forms. In short, it’s a conversation between millions of fans and artists, and if you have that conversation in a closet, or behind a velvet rope, then it’s a pretty shitty conversation. The fact that The Beatles took 10-plus years to get into the subscription music marketplace, and were so protective of their online presence, meant an entire generation had limited exposure to what is undoubtedly the most influential rock group of the past half century. It’s probably not a coincidence that most of the retro-minded bands of past decade have gravitated towards the bluesy, garage rock that was championed by The Rolling Stones. It’s simply what they had exposure to, and what they heard. And while the reservoirs of Boomer Beatles nostalgia is nearly endless, the band felt largely invisible to millennials for the better part of a decade.This is not to suggest that JAY Z’s legacy is in any immediate danger—he more or less owned hip-hop in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s—but it’s also pretty clear that the release strategy for 4:44 will hurt its overall cultural impact, even if, by some miracle, it boosts Tidal’s bottom line. It certainly hurt Beyoncé’s Lemonade. That was one of the strongest albums of the decade and arguably the best of Beyoncé’s career, but its impact and cultural cachet already seem to be waning just because many people can’t listen to it.To be very selfish, The Dowsers is a magazine exclusively devoted to playlist criticism and analysis. When an important record comes out—say, SZA’s CTRL or Solange’s A Seat at the Table—we pore over its influences, samples, collaborations, and impact in an attempt to put it in a larger context and make sense of it for our readers. It’s our part of the conversation around popular music. But we can’t do that with JAY Z’s 4:44. We can’t even create a playlist around his previous albums; they’ve also disappeared from Spotify. So, instead, we’ve opted to create a playlist that focuses on his guest verses. It’s an awesome playlist, of course, but it also feels like a missed opportunity—and that’s on JAY Z.

Declaring that you are your own “business” — as Jay-Z famously did on the “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” remix — cuts both ways. On the one hand, it’s the ultimate hip-hop/hyper capitalism boast. You’ve transcended the station of mere worker, and are your own private cottage industry. But, on the other hand, you’re a business: cold, calculating, and corrupt. Not to be trusted, basically. And since Jay-Z uttered that now infamous line (full quote: “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man”), he’s gone out of his way to transition from a lowly humanoid to a fully functioning multi-national corporation. He bought a basketball team, started a talent management agency, and captained a digital streaming service. So it’s no wonder that the playlist that he created in conjunction with his inclusion into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame feels awfully transactional. There’s a smattering of old school hip-hop (Grandmaster Flash, Eric B & Rakim, Public Enemy), a few tracks from his friends/collaborators/labelmates (Kanye, Eminem, Nas), and some tasteful socio-conscious tracks (Mos Def, OutKast, 2Pac). He’s developed his own canon, and that canon is a lot like almost every other fair-minded hip-hop canon. It’d be hard to argue that “Stan,” “Ms. Jackson,” or “Fight the Power” aren’t Mt. Rushmore rap, but this playlist feels like a missed opportunity. In interviews and in song, Jay-Z has displayed a more idiosyncratic taste in rap, championing everyone from Big L to Jay Electronica. There is none of this on this seemingly raked-over, corporatized playlist. Sure, if you want to hear all the hits one more time, and delivered to you by one of the genre’s most talented and transitional figures, this is great, but it’s also not particularly interesting. And, hey, where’s the Memphis Bleek?

His landmark debut album with Air, Moon Safari, just turned 20, but Jean-Benoît Dunckel isn’t looking back. On March 16, he releases his new solo album, H+, and to prep us for its cinematic dream-pop synth-scapes, he’s made us a playlist of widescreened inspirations. “These days, Im listening to more soundtracky music, music for cinema, because I’d like my life to look more like a movie. I would know the scenario in advance, and I would meet anybody I fancy for real, as I’d take care of the casting as well. This playlist is for traveling safely, and to bring comfort and relaxation.”—Jean-Benoît DunckelWatch the video for the latest single from H+, “Transhumanity”:

Jean Castelis a French multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles, CA who first debuted his Billboard-described "forward-thinking pop" in the form of his catchy single, "What Happened to Us?" earlier this summer. Now with his infections debut EP Orange & Yellow out, Castel created a playlist for The Dowsers exploring what went into the making of his music. Having worked with production group Infrared, a partnership with Spike Stent (Ed Sheeran, Julia Michaels) and mastering by Chris Gehringer (Vince Staples, Rihanna), its no surprise to see some of those artists name-checked by Castel. Listen to his inspired playlist right here and check out his resulting debut EP.Says Castel, "Here’s my playlist. I’ve called it “Orange & Yellow, The Sounds”. They are the songs that inspired my forthcoming EP. I’ve drawn influence from each and every one of these records."