Genres

After collaborating with the likes of Nico Muhly and Ben Frost, and serving as a sound tech for the Philip Glass Ensemble, Canadian soundscape artist Jonathan Kawchuk will give his debut album, North, a wide release on January 26 through Paper Bag Records. But while the record presents a meditative melange of drifting piano melodies, string-scraping drones, and field-recording ambiance, the music that inspires him is decidedly less chill... “I have a Spotify folder that holds all these time-capsule playlists. Whenever my life enters a new feel or vibe, I make a playlist of whatever new music I’m listening to at the time. I have a playlist called ‘i’m learning’ for a stretch of my life when I was sneaking into university classes. I have a playlist called ‘ooo nåni nåni,’ which is when I moved to Toronto. There’s ‘Damn He Woke Me Up Early,’ ‘i miss mutek,’ ‘17 crux,’ ‘This way out!,’ et al. I do this when I’m writing as well; listening and picking apart a ton of music helps me hunt for the language I’m trying to speak. And even though my new record North is coming out soon, I thought it would be fun to share the playlist of what’s informing my music right now.”—Jonathan Kawchuk

Fitting for someone who was born in New Zealand but currently calls London home, Jordan Rakei covers a lot of ground. His recently released sophomore album, Wallflower (Ninja Tune) is a mesmerizing melange of after-hours R&B, experimental indie-pop, and soul-jazz grooves. To help you get in a suitably nocturnal mood, he made us this playlist of his favorite chillout soundtracks. “To me, these are some of the most beautiful songs in the world. Very sparse. Very relaxing. All have such an amazing energy that keeps bringing me back to them.”—Jordan Rakei

Australian singer Juanita Stein has fronted the acclaimed rock-noir outfit Howling Bells since 2004. She releases her rootsy debut solo album, America, on July 28, 2017. To mark the occasion, shes produced this special playlist for The Dowsers of her favorite acts from Down Under. Here, Juanita explains what unites her selections: "Dirty and desolate: Aussie artists have a knack for beautifully capturing the dust settling, whether it be the psychedelic grit of King Gizzard or the delicate twilight of Julia Jacklin. These songs best capture my love of recent and (some) classic Australian bands."Watch the video for Juanita Steins recent single, "Dark Horse," 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.By 2007, Kendrick was already on his way to becoming a hip-hop star. He had signed with Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE), released two mixtapes—2003’s Y.H.N.I.C. (Hub City Threat: Minor of the Year) and 2005’s Training Day—and he even managed to perform his first show, which was also the first concert he ever attended.“When I went on tour with The Game [and Jay Rock, in 2006]—that was my first show,” Lamar remembers. “[Going to shows] cost money. Gas money. Me being on stage was me fulfilling two different things—performing and getting to enjoy it like the people were enjoying it.”But violence was never far behind, and, just after midnight on June 13, 2007, officers from the LAPDs Southeast Division responded to a domestic-violence call on East 120th Street, about five minutes from Lamars house. There, they found his good friend D.T. allegedly holding a 10-inch knife. According to police, D.T. charged, and an officer opened fire, killing him."It never really quite added up," Kendrick says. "But heres the crazy thing. Normally when we find out somebody got killed, the first thing we say is Who did it? Where we gotta go? Its a gang altercation. But this time it was the police—the biggest gang in California. Youll never win against them."If Kendrick’s childhood was about survival—finding a way to live amidst the pervasive gang and political violence that consumed his community—then his late-adolescence and young adulthood was about escaping that reality through his music. Kendrick was always talented, but, from 2005 to 2011, he would dramatically grow as an artist, and he would go from being an obscure Compton rapper to a globally recognized, award-winning superstar. The reasons for this growth are both obvious—he’s a preternaturally talented rapper and an extremely hard worker—and more nuanced. Over the years, Kendrick allowed himself to grow; he learned from his mistakes, embraced his artistic ambition, and constantly struggled to mold a singular and honest voice.“What you going to do?” Kendrick asks. “You going to find something you love to do and have a passion for, or you going to stay mingling in the streets till something major happens. So the moment when I defined myself and freed myself was the time that I locked myself in the studio and said I need to do music.”Kendrick’s first release, Y.H.N.I.C., is very much the product of a 16-year-old hip-hop fan. The production is scattershot, largely lifted from early-’00s hip-hop beats—Lloyd Banks’ “Work Magic,” Lil Wayne’s “Go DJ,” Snoop’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot”—while Kendrick’s lyrics are a similarly generic hodgepodge of cliched machismo (“I might Ken Griffey ya bitch/ But wont buy her shit/ Not even a small bag of chips”) and vague truisms. Still, despite the debut’s shortcomings, you can hear a confidence and focus in his voice, and, ultimately, the mixtape served its purpose.“We put [Y.H.N.I.C.] out on a local scale in Compton and built a buzz in the city and eventually got to this guy named Top Dawg, he had his own independent label. And I’ve been with them since and we’ve just been developing my sound,” Kendrick remembers.Shortly thereafter, in the summer of 2004, Kendrick was also courted by Def Jam Records. Though not much is known of this, and it didn’t result in any recorded music, it allowed Kendrick to meet one of his idols, Jay-Z.“I don’t think even Jay remember that. This was when I was like first turned 17,” Kendrick says. “And I remember coming out here for a meeting and I was too excited, man. And all I remember was Jay walking in the room, ‘Yo, what’s up?’ And walked back to the elevator and we was like, ‘Damn, that’s Jay.’ So he doubles back, goes back to his office next door and he’s playing my music… that was just one of those situations where I wasn’t ready.”

Though 2005’s follow-up, Training Day, was a vast improvement, it was still fairly derivative. But, at least now, he’d narrowed his focus to one influence in particular. Instead of funneling Jay-Z, Pac, G-funk, and DMX, Training Day pretty squarely echoes imperial-era Lil Wayne. Like Wayne, Kendrick’s voice has a strained whisper that’s punctuated by sudden whelps, and you can map almost every flow on the album to something on Wayne’s first two Carter albums.

Kendrick even has Wayne’s tick where he deeply exhales through his teeth before the beginning of each verse. It’s uncanny, and not terribly creative, but it’s an accomplishment in its own way. After all, Wayne has one of the most intricate flows in rap. This remote, one-sided tutelage would continue for some time, and four years later, Kendrick released C4, an homage to Lil Wayne that featured many of that rappers’ beats.

C4 also contains what, by Kendrick’s own estimation, is his worst song: “Bitch, I’m in The Club.” Though not a terrible song, per se, it is a clanking, perfunctory club banger with rote, swagger-pumping lyrics and tinny production. “That was a reach,” Kendrick says. “I know the level of reach that I was doing when I wrote that record to everything that was playing on the radio to what was on TV. [Lil’ Wayne] was definitely running radio at that time.”

But rather than discourage him, Kendrick took inspiration from the song. When asked what was the moment that he realized this rap thing was for real, Kendrick replied, “I think when I made a terrible single, and that shit was just garbage. Its the real moment because, at that point youre at your lowest ... but, at the same time, I wasnt aware that that was my highest point because I got back in there and I did it all over again, and continued to push through. Thats when I realized I really wanna do this, because I aint give up when I made a terrible ass song.”It was around this time, in 2009, when Kendrick decided to change his performing name. From his time at Centennial High, Kendrick had always rapped by the name K. Dot, and while his rap career was moving forward, he felt that he’d grown creatively stagnant. He was a great writer, but he’d didn’t feel as though he’d invested himself into his stories, so he decided to be more direct.“When I stopped going by K. Dot, I think that was the moment where I really found my voice,” Lamar remembers. “Early, early on, I really wanted to be signed. And that was a mistake, because it pushes you two steps backwards when you have this concept of ‘OK, I’ve got to make these three [commercial] songs in order to get out into the world and be heard.’ So there were two or three years where I wanted to be signed so badly that I’m making these same two or three repetitive demo kinds of records, and I’m hindering my growth. The world could have got Kendrick Lamar two or three years earlier if I’d stuck to the script and continued to develop.”At that moment, Kendrick began work in earnest on good kid, m.A.A.d. city, but that project would be derailed and he instead focused on The Kendrick Lamar EP. “He actually wrote a project called good kid, m.A.A.d. city before the EP came out,” TDE president Punch relays. “The plan was for the eight-song EP to drop as a warm-up for the good kid, m.A.A.d. city he did already. In the process, he had more songs and the buzz started growing, so we dropped the EP.”While we had to wait another three years for the landmark good kid, m.A.A.d. city, the hour-long, 14-track EP was perhaps Kendrick’s first essential release, and it represented a dramatic artistic evolution for Kendrick. For one thing, it sounded like nothing he’d done in the past. TDE producer Sounwave has been in and out of the TDE camp since 2005, and he produces most of the cuts here. Tracks like “P&P” and “Celebration” feel relaxed and fluid, intercutting snippets of tinkling, jazz-inflected piano lines with rich vocal harmonies. Unlike Kendrick’s previous releases, the EP doesn’t sound like just a mixtape, but rather something fully realized and alive.Kendrick, meanwhile, sounds genuinely like Kendrick for the first time. There’s an added vulnerability in his rhymes, as on “Vanity Slaves” when he relays, “Sometimes I want to leave, sometimes I want to cry/ Sometimes I hate to bear the truth, sometimes I want to lie.” Aside from the newfound emotional honesty, the album contains many nods to Kendrick’s spirituality and to his brimming social consciousness. But, unlike other “conscious” MCs, Kendrick relays his lessons in small stories, whether it’s the self-assured black female of “She Needs Me” or the housing project kids in “Vanity Slaves” who find worth in material value.Kendrick also benefited from good timing. Hip-hop was in a transitional period during that time. Hip-hop’s old guard—Jay-Z, Nas, UGK—were still lingering around, but there was a younger generation emerging. Drake broke in 2009, and the West Coast also had a cadre of viable new talent for the first time in nearly a decade. Critics (and even some artists) called this the “new west,” and it included a broad range of styles. Rappers like Nipsey Hussle and Dom Kennedy tapped into the more traditional strands of West Coast rap, channeling the ghosts of Dre and G-funk, while “blog rap” acts like Pac Div, The Pack/Lil’ B, and Odd Future embodied a more eccentric and ironic take on the genre that was located less in a specific geographical place than a cultural one. Kendrick split the difference, embracing the ambition and irreverence of blog rap while maintaining a starkly SoCal identity. He rounded out the sound by embracing the neo-soul underpinnings and broad social commentaries of boho rappers like Mos Def and Common. It was a compelling blend, one that managed to seem vaguely familiar and also completely singular.The Kendrick EP was released on the last day of 2009, and provided an apt capper to that decade. But, in the next year, things would move forward very quickly. Overly Dedicated, which was originally imagined as a remix project for The Kendrick EP, was released in September 2010. The album is full of intimate, subtle tracks. Over the shuffling rhythm and simmering vibes, “Average Joe” crystallizes Kendrick’s persona: “Who is K. Dot? A young nigga from Compton/ On the curb writing raps next to a gunshot/ On the corners where the gangsters and the killers dwell/ The fraudulent tender scars that get unveiled/ Everyone I knew was either Crip or Piru.”But it would be another track, “Ignorance is Bliss,” that would end up being the most important track of Kendrick’s career. The song is a sly commentary on gangster rap, with Kendrick spitting out the violent cliches of the genre—“Imma back em down like Shaq with this black 2-2-3 in my hand”—before bookending each verse with the ironic, self-canceling declaration, “Ignorance is bliss.” This would be the first Kendrick track that Dr. Dre would hear.“Believe it or not, Paul Rosenberg, Eminem’s manager, is the one that put me on [to Kendrick],” Dre recalls. “I was in Detroit and he’s like, ‘You got to hear this kid from Compton.’ So I went online and the thing that really turned me on at the beginning was the way he spoke in the interview—it wasn’t even the music at first, it was the way he showed his passion for music. There was something in that, and then I got into the music, and then realized how talented he was.”Kendrick was on tour with Jay Rock and legendary Kansas City, MO indie MC Tech N9ne. When Dre called his engineer and Kendrick initially thought it was a prank. But, the next week, Dre got in touch with Kendrick’s management and invited the MC into the studio to record with him. “It came to a point where I had to really snap out of fan mode and become a professional because after we were introduced, he said he liked my music and I said that I’m a fan of his work,” Lamar remembers of the sessions. “Then he said, ‘Okay, now write to this, write a full song to this.’ Right after I said, ‘Man, Dr. Dre, you’re the greatest’ and he was like, ‘Yeah man, you’re good too, you could be something… alright now write to this beat.’ And that beat ended up being the first song I did with him and ended up on my album—‘Compton’.”It had been nearly a decade since Kendrick first started releasing material, but, at this point, he had very much arrived. Though his 2011 release, Section.80, was not the sweeping Bildungsroman Kendrick had been planning (that would come soon enough), it was an evolution of subtly introspective rhymes and jazz-tinged hip-hop soul that Kendrick had been mining on the previous two releases. Tracks such as “A.D.H.D” and “Fuck Your Ethnicity” were instant classics, and the album would eventually go gold. Critics placed it near the top of their year-end lists, and compared him to everyone from Ice Cube to Nas. Of course, the next few years would reveal that Kendrick needed no comparisons—he inhabited his own story, and told that in his own voice. But it’s not a bad way to end the beginning.Related Reading:Kendrick Lamar, Conscious Capitalist: The 30 Under 30 Cover InterviewKendrick Lamar Says "Section.80" Is Just A Warm-Up, Analyzes Work With Game & Dr. DreThe Making of good kid, m.A.A.d. city

Subscribe to the accompanying Spotify playlist that culls the influences of Kamasi Washingtons album, Heaven and EarthMusic discovery used to be much more difficult. Growing up in rural Louisiana, many quantum leaps from any recognizable cultural hub, and a good decade before the ubiquity of the internet, the process was much more iterative and laborious. I would find certain gateway artists, who would then lead towards other artists, aesthetics, or even entire cultures, and, with time, my understanding of both the broader musical landscape and of the world at large increased exponentially. My gateway to the gateways was discovering Bob Dylan when I was 13. To give you some context, the album I bought before Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. 1 was Young MC’s Stone Cold Rhymin’, and the only reason that I even bothered with Dylan was the betrayal and anxiety that my devoutly Christian parents expressed at Dylan drifting away from his religious fundamentalism of the early ‘80s. It was an act of blatant (if soft-toned) rebellion, but I was also experiencing my own doubts about religion, and I was curious about how someone could arrive at losing their faith. This was how I came to Dylan, but I quickly discovered the other pleasure of Dylan, and the potency of his music stirred an omnivorous curiosity in me to learn more about both Dylan and the world he existed within. I quickly scarfed down Dylan biographies and essays, and then can reams of microfiche (note: a pre-internet archive of journals and magazines maintained by libraries) for articles about him. During this process, I’d keep a journal, meticulously jotting down the names of musicians, authors, painters, and politicians, and then taking that list and doing further research. This was how I discovered Lenny Bruce, Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis, Rimbaud, Allen Ginsberg, and so on, who then subsequently led me to Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, John Coltrane, and so on and so forth. It was a slow education, and I went through a lot of notebooks.Music discovery is easier now, to state the obvious, but there are still gateway artists that nod towards larger, unknown universes for their fans. For a newer generation, Kamasi Washington is that point of entry for jazz. He’s recorded extensively with Kendrick Lamar, released his debut The Epic on Flying Lotus’ label Brainfeeder, and has been extensively praised by the Pitchfork and Faders of the world. He’s done this by playing a pretty straight-up variant of a specific type of jazz -- it’s not something you have to squint and call jazz -- and this is leading his legions of fans back to discover McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Alice Coltrane, or David Axelrod. Even for someone with an intermediate knowledge of jazz, such as myself, Kamasi still opens up certain windows. After the release of his latest, Heaven and Earth, I began diving into both West Coast Jazz and the genre’s more political threads. This lead me to the relatively unknown (at least to me) LA pianist Horace Tapscott. Horace began as a trumpet player, gigging with everyone from Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman to Fletcher Henderson and Gerald Wilson, but took up piano during a stint in the Air Force in the late ‘50s, and more of less stuck with that instrument for the remainder of his career. After a particularly harrowing tour of the South as part of Lionel Hampton’s big band, he became a devoted social activist, understanding and teaching the importance of music in both community building and societal transformation. He set up Union of Gods Musicians and Ascension (Ugmaa) in Watts, which was dedicated to supporting the artist community in the Watts neighborhood, and began recruiting young musicians into his group, The Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. When the infamous Watts Riots happened in 1965, the group drove a flat-bed truck through the chaos while playing their blend of afro-futurist, post-bop spiritual jazz. Soon, the group began to receive arts funding, and Horace would go on to mentor and teach hundreds of students throughout his life. When he passed in 1999, he was primarily known as an educator.Horace was incredibly influential in building out the Leimert Park jazz scene where Kamasi got his start, and where he recently returned for the launch party of Heaven and Earth. Kamasi has even stated in interviews that his father was a big fan of Horace’s music, and that he grew up listening to him and John Coltrane. Speaking to Jazzwise Magazine, Kamasi said, “Horace is one of the most important figures in the foundation of music in LA, from both a purely musically and socially conscious perspective. My dad took me to hear [Tapscott’s] Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra many times and I played with them after Horace passed away.”But more than anything, Kamasi is repaying that debt by keeping Horace’s legacy alive, and we all benefit from that.

In the two plus years since Kamasi Washington dropped The Epic, his appropriately titled three-CD bonanza of Afrocentric post-bop sound, there has been a revolution in the world of jazz—and some of it was televised. Its no longer uncommon for a jazz musician to play sold-out rock arenas and headline major festivals. And its no longer odd to see jazz on hip-hop playlists, be it tracks by Washingtons West Coast Get Down associates like Josef Leimberg, Miles Mosley, or Terrace Martin, or by hip, think-outside-the-box jazz players like Robert Glasper, Makaya McCraven, or Jeff Parker. Washingtons first release since The Epic—the new six-part EP, Harmony of Difference—arrives to a different scene.Harmony of Difference is the soundtrack to a film by A.G. Rojas that premiered during the Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in March 2017, and it shows the growth and diversification of Washingtons sound. He already draws heavily from the often overlooked glory days of the early 70s when musicians extended the jazz tradition into rock, funk, and African music. Deeper grooves power some of the tracks on Harmony, and the solos are more concise—where The Epics definitive tracks clocked in at longer than 10 minutes, the best music here often comes in under six. All of Washington’s stylistic advances are represented on “Truth,” which also provides a nifty recapitulation of what made The Epic so special, with its robust rhythms, a choir carrying a soaring melody, and a solo that would do John Coltrane proud. Its jazz eclecticism at its best—music that is both inclusive and deeply artful.But while his music can seem otherworldly, Washingtons bold new sound didnt land from outer space. The tracks on this playlist take you through his roots and influences, the current jazz movement he helped create, and the genre’s future.

Check out Kamasi’s new tracks in the playlist above, which captures his best alongside the artists and songs that influenced his career. We’ll keep it updated as new joints drop. Subscribe to the playlist here. In 2018, it’s difficult to figure out how we want pop culture -- and music in particular -- to deal with our larger, societal malaise. Really, it’s hard to get a handle on what’s going on with society at the moment. From data harvesting and the upward mobility of neo-Fascism, to environmental collapse, the #metoo movement and transhumanism, a larger narrative seems elusive. But one thing does seem clear: things are changing, and they’re changing very quickly. It could go one way or another, but, regardless, we will be radically different once we get out the other side.In this atmosphere of deep uncertainty, it feels silly to expect musicians (of all people) to have answers, and, as with previous generations, the art that best captures these times has been ambiguous and slippery. Think of Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. We all know the nature of our condition -- we’re living under a President that lies, steals, conjules, bullies and demeans every single fucking day -- and Lamar acknowledges that, but offers up few solution. Instead, the album feels powerful because it relays something more primal and honest: anger, confusion, distrust, and uncertainty. The two new tracks from modern jazz great Kamasi Washington engage with this dark, blurry zeitgeist. Appropriately, it’s difficult to think of any modern musician who contains as many multitudes as Kamasi Washington. He’s collaborated extensively with Kendrick Lamar, releases music through Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint, and plays in front of tens of thousands at Coachella, but his music doesn’t owe that much to hip-hop, electronic or modern pop traditions. Instead, it mines a broad spectrum of classic jazz, from the big band compositions of Charles Mingus to the free jazz spiritual quests of mid-’60s Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders and on to the smoother, R&B-inflected of Roy Ayers. Washington recently released two tracks in support of his upcoming album, Heaven and Earth, and, of the two new tracks, “Fists of Fury” is the most immediate and the most explicitly political. It’s ostensibly a cover of the theme song from the classic Bruce Lee movie, but it’s a fairly dramatic departure (the lyrics have changed, for one thing). It’s a beautiful, startling track -- spacious and intricately composed, full of nuanced movements that swerve in and out of its in its nearly 10-minute runtime. Tinkling piano solos flow out of rumbling bongos, while the track’s string arrangement give a stately color to Washington’s warm tenor saxophone tones. Patrice Quinn and Dwight Trible provide aggrieved and aggravated vocals that telegraph the songs’s #woke themes of racial retribution and justice, “Our time as victims is over/ We will no longer ask for justice/ Instead we will take our retribution.” It’s great, but it feels like an outlier in Washington’s catalog. It’s not only a cover, but it’s Washington’s first explicitly political track, which is something that Washington has shied away from in the past. “Someone like Donald Trump cant control the way I show love to my brother,” Washington recently told Rolling Stone. “He cant control the way I feel about my neighbors. Im trying to make the music bigger than the politics. If you get caught up in the day-to-day, youll get lost in that." Of course, this doesn’t mean that Washington’s previous music hasn’t been engaged with the larger socio-political conversation; they have, just not in obvious ways. His 2017 EP Harmony of Difference -- and, in particular, its centerpiece, “Truth” -- was a slow, simmering burn, full of melancholic phrasing and delicate passages that gripped at the hems of the sublime. It was the perfect salve -- a perfect refuge -- to the reigning socio-culture shitshow. Washington’s other new track, “The Space Travelers Lullaby,” lives in a similar space. It’s wiry and ethereal, building off a wistful string arrangement and a spritely piano figure. It feels like a Sunday morning jog through the cosmos, or a brief sojourn to a beatific foreign world. It’s easy to put it in the lineage of afrofutustist forefather Sun Ra, but, with its cooing vocals and tickling cymbals, the song is more stately, measured, and baroque. It’s a soundtrack of itself, a cosmic journey through an endlessly dense, placid innerspace. In this ways, “The Space Travelers Lullaby” feels more appropriate for these times than the more explicitly political “Fists of Fury.” Maybe it’s because of the track’s sonic maximalism, but, “First of Fury” feels disjointed from our pop culture timeline, despite all the BLM sloganeering. It could easily exist in 1972, 2005, or 2018. “The Space Travelers Lullaby” feels both sad and celebratory in a way that is very 2018. It draws its light from the dense darkness outside, and it feels as if it’s offering an answer of sorts, or at least a pretty good suggestion, about how to proceed in a world where we, as individuals, have no control.

Chicago native Kanye West is one of midwest hip-hop’s biggest stars, and he made his name producing hits for JAY-Z and other New York rappers. But West has maintained his relevance over the years in part by keeping a finger on the pulse of southern hip-hop, drafting rising stars from Atlanta, Houston, and Miami to appear on his albums and producing hits for Dirty South stars like Ludacris and Jeezy. Most recently, he served as “executive producer” on Atlanta trio Migos’ new album, Culture II, where he co-produced the 21 Savage collaboration “BBO (Bad Bitches Only).”Kanye West’s track record below the Mason-Dixon line dates back to the late ‘90s and early 2000s, when he was a relatively unknown producer placing tracks with southern trailblazers like Goodie Mob and Scarface. In 2003, he notched his first No. 1 on the Hot 100 producing Ludacris’ club banger “Stand Up,” along with a pair of tracks on an album that would help define the next wave of southern rap, T.I.’s Trap Muzik. Over the next few years, as West became a solo star who bridged many divides in hip-hop, he became the kind of rare stylistic chameleon who could make trap hits with Jeezy or screwed ’n’ chopped grooves with Paul Wall in between his excursions into east-coast boom bap and futuristic EDM.As the founder of G.O.O.D. Music, Kanye West has signed Atlantans 2 Chainz and CyHi The Prynce, and helped mentor Houston rapper/producer Travis Scott. G.O.O.D.’s 2016 posse cut “Champions” brought together some of the above with Gucci Mane, Yo Gotti, and Quavo. Some of Kanye’s southern collaborations are better off forgotten, like the treacly Future duet “I Won” and the ill-fated Lex Luger-produced Watch The Throne single “H.A.M.” But by and large, Kanye West has been present for moments of greatness in southern rap, from Scarface’s The Fix to Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III.

In 2007, Kanye didnt know he would effectively end the near-20-year reign of gangsta rap by outselling 50 Cents lackluster album Curtis on their shared September release day. Kanye didnt know his mother would pass away suddenly, or that his longtime fiance would leave him, or that hed marry into the most famous American television family by choice. Graduation is a victory lap, the third part of a scrapped four-album story that was supposed to culminate with Good Ass Job, which instead became 808s & Heartbreak.Graduation continues the plucky underdog narrative built on 2004s breakthrough debut The College Dropout and 2005s Late Registration, which heralded the emergence of an artiste/hitmaker. Kanye was beginning to be regarded as the biggest egomaniac in rap history while still not showing his face on the cover on his record, something he still hasnt done. Kanye’s album covers hint at the music within: College Dropout is warm soul music, with brown, yellow, and burgundy tones on the cover and Kanye dressed in his trademark cuddly bear mascot. Late Registration is orchestral, full of strings, keys, and languid arrangements from Jon Brion—tellingly, the cover depicts the bear mascot, purposefully small, entering a vast new doorway that looks academic and orderly. By contrast, Graduation is exploding with anime, while the color choices of blue, yellow, pink and purple symbolize its ambitious energy, extravagance, and solidified confidence. Designed by Takashi Murakami (who Kanye described as "the Japanese Andy Warhol"), it nails Graduations wider palette of sample choices: Michael Jackson on "The Good Life," Krautrock gods Can on "Drunk and Hot Girls," Young Jeezys famous gravely "ha ha" adlibs on "Cant Tell Me Nothing," Elton Johns crooning on "Good Morning".Graduation was Kanyes leanest album up until that point: zero skits, and eight tracks shorter than both Dropout and Registration. Instead of telling the listener about all of his plans, his failures, his dreams, and his mostly bad jokes on songs and on skits, Graduation shows us his improved flow, his vast tastes, his arena-inspired hooks, and his added weapons of samples, live instruments, Southern-rap synths, and 808s (thanks to the inclusion of DJ Toomp and Mike Dean). 50 Cents music career has never recovered from the sales showdown he lost to Kanye West, but the truth is that if 50 Cent could make hits like "Stronger," "Flashing Lights," and "Cant Tell Me Nothing," gangsta rap would possibly still dominate the charts. Instead, a fashion-loving backpacker who wore Marty McFly shades and a Roc-a-Fella chain has remade rap and pop culture in his image every year for the past decade.

Kelcey Ayer is best known as the keyboardist and vocalist for L.A. indie-rock institution Local Natives, and on Sept. 22, he released his debut solo effort as Jaws of Love., titled Tasha Sits Close to the Piano. For his Dowsers playlist, he’s taking the opportunity to play catch-up on all the great music that came out last month—this is his “September Past, Present, and Future Friends’ Playlist.”“I was trying to think of an idea for this playlist and it occurred to me how difficult it can be doing what we do, and how it seems that playlists are becoming the go-to for getting music heard. We’re trying to get our music out there to the world, but with all the noise, its pretty fucking tough. I just released my solo project, and with all the feelings its bringing up from baring my insides to everyone, I could use some connection. So I thought fuck it, Im gonna hook it up! I love the idea of more community than less in the music world, so this is a playlist of either friends of mine, artists Ive always held in high regard, or new ones who I hope to have a beer with one day, whove released albums in September of 2017. So happy I did this too—it led me to so many awesome albums I missed. Enjoy!"—Kelcey Ayer