Genres

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.Shakespeare once famously declared that brevity is the soul of wit, but simplicity has been the last thing on Kendrick Lamar’s mind for the majority of his career. His two previous albums, 2012’s ghetto uprising saga good kid, M.A.A.D. city and 2015’s political prog-rap opus To Pimp a Butterfly were sprawling, intricately detailed patchworks, suffused with symbolism and strung together with the kind of recurring characters and monologuing one would expect from the Bard himself. But DAMN. is a different story. Having already claimed the throne as one of (if not the) most talented rappers in the history of the game, DAMN. is the sound of a young artist at the peak of his abilities delivering his music straight, no chaser. Not to say that DAMN. isn’t as multilayered and critical as anything else K.Dot’s put his name on, but now more than ever it feels like Lamar’s focus is entirely on the songs rather than the cohesive effect of the project. Each song on DAMN. feels as if it is coming from a different universe, be it the ‘90s slow ride of “HUMBLE.” or the futurist R&B of “LOVE.” or the absolutely bipolar “XXX.,” which travels between Metro Boomin minimalism, Public Enemy fury, and smooth boom-bap consciousness in the span of four minutes. Though Lamar’s influences are vast and easily traceable (the bassy Afrofuturism of Flying Lotus, the beat-poetry prophecies of the Last Poets, the self-aware party-rap of OutKast), on DAMN. he synthesizes them effortlessly, letting his own musical voice shine through more clearly than ever before.All of which makes DAMN. an incredibly fun, engaging listen, and adds another notch to Lamar’s already impressive catalog. With small-time songwriters emerging from the woodworks on major tracks (Zacari?) and mind-boggling appearances from big-name rock stars (U2!?), DAMN. is packed to capacity with ideas and influences and collaborators—so take a listen to this playlist and start unpacking the latest from one of our generation’s greatest.

You may not be as excited as a lot of people are to have Kesha Rose Sebert back in action. But even the very worst of haters ought to give her a chance to make a second impression after what she’s been through.After she spent the first years of the decade establishing herself as pop’s preeminent hard-rocking, fast-talking, tik-tok-ing party girl, things came off the rails when her already rocky relationship with producer Dr. Luke took a toxic turn in 2014. The charges and counter-charges—including sexual assault and battery, unfair business practices, and much more from her side—put her in the starring role in a legal drama so ugly, it made the “Blurred Lines” case seems like 10 benign minutes in traffic court. Though that drama is hardly over, developments earlier this year freed her from the conditions that prevented her releasing any new music for three years.During that time, she did her best to convey her feelings through other people’s songs. Of course, that was far from ideal for a singer who’s long prided herself on being a songwriter, too— she clearly took far more satisfaction in her co-writing credits for Britney Spears and Big Time Rush than for any hook-up with Flo Rida. But at least Kesha’s choice of covers on recent tours—a smattering that ranges from Lesley Gore to Eagles of Death Metal—has proven she has a wider, more surprising set of musical tastes than was evident from the over-abundance of would-be club bangers on her two albums. Nor should the abundance of Bob Dylan tributes over the years—like her exquisite cover of “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right” from 2012’s Chimes of Freedom tribute—be quite so surprising given the number of times she’s namedNashville Skyline as her favorite album.In fact, Kesha’s been eager to show off her affinities for classic rock, punk, and alt-rock since well before it all went sideways. When not citing The Damned as heroes, she was palling around with Alice Cooper and getting assists from The Strokes, The Black Keys’ Patrick Carney and Iggy Pop. And while that fabled Flaming Lips/Kesha collaboration—nicknamed Lip$ha—may have been sucked into a legal void from which it has yet to escape, we still got a tantalizing taste thanks to her mind-bending appearance on The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends.So as for all those haters and doubters who didn’t miss her, I say: You don’t know what you were missing. To mark the arrival of her third album Rainbow, here’s a set of her most adventurous and most surprising songs, and many more she loves, which should demonstrate there was always more to her than she got credit for… though maybe that’s about to change.

Tribe Called Quest created universes by cobbling together post-bop saxophones, rolling bass lines, and hard boom bap beats, topping them off with Q-Tip’s fluid freeform rhymes that played an alto sax to the gruff, declarative blurts of Phife’s deceptively straightforward lyrics. As music nerds, we’d already digested the Velvet Underground and De La Soul, so we instantly got Tribe’s vibes and references, but blending these two opposing worlds—despondent, glamorous sleaze rock and idiosyncratic, jazz afrocentrism—was a revelation. Here’s a playlist of some of their best and most well-known samples, from RAMP to Lou Reed.

On January 26, Texan trio Khruangbin release their second album, Con Todo El Mundo (on Dead Oceans), a supremely chilled fusion of classic funk grooves, sun-dazed psychedelia, and global influences spanning Mexico to the Middle East to South Asia. For their Dowsers playlist, the band open up their deep crates to recreate the soundtrack to a recent magical moment in India. "After playing our first Indian festival, we were lucky to enough to see the turning of the new year in Goa. These songs were the perfect company on the beach. Were trying to bring the Indian sun and warmth to any wintery grey places through this mix, which includes some of our favorites from all over the globe."—Khruangbin

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Chicago’s underground has been on fire the past few years. Every other week seems to deliver a new batch of releases from the Hausu Mountain label, purveyors of madcap electronics and cyborg-bopping eccentricity. The shadowy Beau Wanzer, whose icy and forlorn productions disintegrate the divide between post-punk and techno, is nearly as prolific—and that’s just one dude. And then there’s Jaime Fennelly’s always progressing Mind Over Mirrors project: his latest album, the critically lauded Undying Color, wanders dense, rippling expanses of pastoral art folk and baroque électronique.Of course, “underground” means a lot of different things to a lot of different heads. For denizens of the city’s thriving avant-garde jazz and hardcore punk scenes, it conjures up a significantly different cluster of artists. So for this playlist, we focus primarily on musicians, bands, and oddball geniuses who stalk the back alleys, linking DIY electronics, industrial, droning experimentation, and mutant dance music. At first blush they may seem too far apart to link, but in Chicago, where musicians from different disciplines have always mingled freely, the overlap between them is substantial.This idea is reflected in the growing catalog of Midwich Productions, a label specializing in “electronic music from the urban wilderness of the Midwest.” Founded by longtime resident and musician Jim Magas, it’s home to both HIDE (pictured at top), who unleash mechanized nightmares that carry forward the city’s electro-industrial tradition, and Alex Barnett, a composer whose quirky, bubbling pieces ooze a cozy sense of nostalgia for ’70s synthesizer music.As you can probably guess, a lot of this music gets awfully weird—Fire-Toolz’s collision of boom-box EDM and grindcore rasp makes zero sense. Yet a good deal of it is deeply beautiful: Quicksails, an alias for multi-instrumentalist Ben Billington, crafts flickering avant-pop that bridges DIY electronics with the city’s deep reverence for jazz and free improv. It’s music that could only come from Chicago.

Whats This Playlist All About? In preparation for the release of their fifth studio album, 2018s All Nerve, Breeders boss Kim Deal schools us on her influential bands most influential tracks.What Do You Get? Before 90 alt-rock essential "Cannonball," Deal deals us a trio of newbies from All Nerve, including the grit-and-syrup-flavored single "Wait in the Car." Elsewhere, you’ll find the bands moodier escapes in "Off You" and "Night of Joy," noisier dalliances in "Roi" and “Glorious," and, of course, their woozy, punky rendition of "Happiness is a Warm Gun."What Did She Forget? In favor of the new stuff, Deal omits some quality gems from their 1990 debut, Pod, like the loose, wild, fiercely feminine "Iris."Should This Be Required Listening for All High-School Students? Yes. Every teen needs this kind of cathartic noise in their life.

In October 2017, L.A.-via-Nebraska phenom King Leg released his debut album, Meet King Leg (Sire/Warner), a winsome collection of heartland power-pop and twangy balladry gilded by his Orbison-esque croon. Here, he lets us ride shotgun with a Dowsers playlist of favorite road tunes: “Here are some songs Ive enjoyed listening to while driving around: windows down on many; windows up on some. Some of these songs are perfect for neighborhood driving with plenty of four-way stops, while some are better for speeding under a yellow light. Open-road driving or bumper-to-bumper wallowing, this list has a song for me. Mostly, I just like to start the car and turn it up and let the tunes do the steering.”——King Leg Watch the video for King Leg’s “Great Outdoors” (co-directed by Dwight Yoakam!):

Sure, at this point, KISS are less a band than an automated merchandise factory, with Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley essentially counting down the days until old age forces them to hire younger actors to slap on the facepaint and portray them in a never-ending Vegas musical revue. And, even in his own son’s opinion, Simmons is to rock ‘n’ roll what Donald Trump is to U.S. politics—except that Gene’s become even too big of an asshole for Fox News. But there’s a case to be made that, for all their relentless branding and ingrained arrogance, KISS are kinda underappreciated.They were always too craven in their careerism to acquire any of the dirtbag cool of early ‘70s glam peers like the New York Dolls, too pop-oriented to stand alongside more artful proto-metal giants like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, too enamored with spectacle to attain the working-class cred of Thin Lizzy or AC/DC, too liberal with the shameless horn-dog metaphors to accrue the camp cachet of Queen. (Sorry kids, "Rocket Ride" is actually not about space travel.) And aside from the occasional spin of “Rock and Roll All Nite,” you’d still be hard-pressed to find them in regular rotation on any classic-rock radio station. However, when you strip away the make-up, upchucked blood, and one-piece open-chested unitards, the six studio albums KISS released in their 1974-77 golden period showcase a band with a preternatural gift for wrapping sticky melodies around sturdy riffs——a power-pop band with a steely command over both halves of the equation.While their many live albums and greatest-hits sets tend to prioritize the songs that go best with pyro, those early KISS records are loaded with more modestly scaled tunes that betray the group’s affinity for ’60s garage nuggets (see: “Love Her All I Can,” a blatant rewrite of The Nazz’s “Open Your Eyes”), harmony-rich sing-alongs that wouldnt sound out of place on a Big Star or Raspberries album (“Comin’ Home”), acoustic-powered Rod Stewart-style serenades (“Hard Luck Woman”—the plaintive Peter Criss antidote to the more popular and opulent “Beth”), and a lean, punkish propulsion (“Plaster Caster”—well, as close to punk as you can get when youre a rock star singing about getting a souvenir of your dick made by the world’s most famous groupie). Heck, debut-album deep cuts like "Let Me Know" could almost pass for Three Dog Night. And while “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” has come to epitomize KISS’ disco phase, it’s better represented by the ultra-smooth, mirror-ball-twirling slow jams “Sure Know Something” and “Shandi” (which features the sort of gilded, glistening jangle that’s become indie-ubiqutious in a post-Mac DeMarco world). The band’s core philosophy may have never evolved beyond rockin’ and rollin’ all night, but this playlist highlights the KISS songs you can still respect in the morning.

Toronto-based jangle-punk combo Kiwi jr.’s debut album, Football Money, received a U.S. release in January 2020, mere weeks before the world was forced into hibernation by the COVID-19 virus. But if they can’t hit the road this year, the least they can do is relive past gig glories through this playlist of “people we have played with and hung out with and admire.” Their selections double as a pocket history of Canadian indie rock, spanning defunct ’90s icons (Thrush Hermit), dogged veterans (The Sadies, Fucked Up), unsung local heroes (Jim Guthrie, Daniel Romano), like-minded contemporaries (Nap Eyes), and a certain big-deal alt-pop group with whom they share a member (Alvvays). But the playlist is also a testament to Kiwi jr.’s rising cachet in the Toronto scene and their ability to score prime opening slots for visiting buzz bands like Aussie wonders Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, Detroit singer/songwriter Stef Chura, and Brooklyn art-punk dynamos BODEGA.

The borders around whatever constitutes country music were awfully loosey-goosey long before hick-hop was a thing. Everyone from the original hillbilly and rockabilly cats of the ‘50s through the Californian hippies of the ‘60s to the outlaws of the ‘70s all stepped back and forth along the genre’s boundaries in their own music. In the ‘90s and beyond, country artists began to reach across the proverbial aisle to their brethren and sistren in the rock and hip-hop worlds. Of course, the crossovers flourished in the other direction as well, with former rock-world types like Kid Rock and Hootie & The Blowfish’s Darius Rucker finding warm homes on the state-fair circuit. Those traditional distinctions have never seemed as blurry as they do today, in an age when even the most seemingly unlikely cross-genre matchups—whether it’s Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg or Carrie Underwood and Ludacris—hardly raise an eyebrow. The success of Uncle Kracker is a big reason why country got to be such a broad church (and sometimes a weird and wild one, too).Uncle Kracker’s buddy and former employer Kid Rock may have busted the field wide open with his redneck-MC routine on 1998’s “Cowboy,” but Uncle Kracker’s own pair of smashes with “Follow Me” and “Drift Away” in the early 2000s may have been even more influential. Here was a sound that somehow spiked a down-home and eminently country brand of mellow with the brasher edge of hip-hop. Around the same time, a scrappy Timbaland protégé by the name of Bubba Sparxxx was scoring hits with rawer variations on this new hybrid.You might expect that artists in the country world would not take too kindly to these incursions into their traditional terrain. But if anything, it was a cue for them to get bolder, too. The swagger brandished by superstar duo Big & Rich suggested a greater kinship to Jay-Z than with any old-timers at the Grand Ole Opry. Hell, Big & Rich even have their own Wu-Tang-like posse in MuzikMafia, a loose collective that has dominated country music for much of the century thanks to the duo’s own hits and those of friends and sometime collaborators like Gretchen Wilson and hick-hop icon Cowboy Troy. Given that overall spike in badass attitude, the rise of bro-country stars like Jason Aldean and a new wave of proudly redneck MCs like Colt Ford and Upchurch was inevitable.So where this kind of hybridization still seemed like a novelty in 2004 when Nelly and Tim McGraw delivered “Over and Over”—still the quintessential country-rap slow-jam—it’s now a testament to the fact that American popular music might as well be one giant purple state. And Uncle Kracker helped make it all possible, which is why he belongs in this playlist of essential songs and artists that forced open the rusty gates of country music’s corral.