Genres

They reimagined not only how the genre sounded, but how it felt. They changed the rhythm, and, by embracing compositional pastiche and kitschy psychedelic, they crafted music that was deeply cerebral and personal. And while they both heavily sampled jazz and soul — the dominant source for the boom bap era producers who served as their shared stylistic avatars — their palette was more expansive and worldly, privileging obscurity over nostalgia, grainy textures over raw masculine presence.You can hear echoes of their work in some of today’s most critically lauded and commercially successful music, from the space jazz symphonies of Flying Lotus to the pan-African milieu of Kendrick Lamar, the refactored soul of Frank Ocean or the jittery, jump-cut flow of Kanye’s Life of Pablo. For this playlist, we’ve collected their best.

Whats This Playlist All About? The global party-starters keep the world spinning and twerking with an ever-expanding mix of new and classic dancehall and reggae bangers.What Do You Get? Nine-plus hours of sweaty, adrenaline-soaked EDM, reggae, dancehall, and soca for both sunny, tropical getaways and dark, dank clubs. Expect plenty of Major Lazers own bumping pop collaborations (including everything from the Give Me Future doc soundtrack), alongside plenty of Jamaican talents (Cutty Ranks, Gyptian, Beenie Man, etc.) and some Canadian ones, too, for good measure (PARTYNEXTDOOR, Drake).Greatest Discovery: Tobago-born calypsonian Calypso Roses feel-good groove "I Am African," here remixed by Major Lazers Jillionaire.Guiltiest Pleasure: Don Andres silly, sizzling cut "Tom Cruise," a weird ode to the actor and dancing in Ray-Bans.Will This Keep the Party Going … Forever? We think thats the point, but only if you and your friends really, really dig dancehall.

What with all the costumes, masks, and other visage-obscuring efforts that have contributed to the mystique of Karin Elisabeth Dreijer, just seeing her face on the cover of her new album may be startling enough. Of course, just like the music on Fever Ray’s Plunge, the grisly nature of the image (seen above) demonstrates her determination to be something far bolder and more provocative than the more passive, pliable, and predictable female stereotypes on which the music industry so often thrives.Taking a plunge into Dreijer’s sound world can be as unsettling as it is exhilarating. Even though the sometimes brutal yet oddly buoyant electro-pop of her (now-defunct) sibling duo The Knife remains a fundamental element of the songs she creates as Fever Ray, the project continues to expose her broad range of influences, from dark metal to African music to the soundtracks of David Lynch and Miami Vice to the work of Meredith Monk and Kate Bush (two other women who’ve been similarly fearless when it comes to demolishing conventions and exploring the properties of their astonishing voices). And while the cumulative effect can be as chilly as a New Year’s Eve party in Göteborg, there’s always a charge—and sometimes even a warmth—thanks to the stormy emotions and vulnerabilities that exist just below the surface. Hit play on our mix to hear the music that’s inspired her and catch the same fever.

A kick drum? A tambourine? Foot stomps and spoons? One very tired Razeem? It’s impossible to imagine what hip-hop, house, and techno might have used for a rhythmic foundation block if not for the 808 beat.That’s why the impact that inventor Ikutaro Kakehashi had on the last four decades of music is incalculable. The news of the Osaka-born engineer and Roland founder’s death on April 1 at the age of 87 has prompted a deluge of grateful tributes from just about every music maker who benefited from his innovations, most prominently with Roland’s most iconic drum machine, the TR-808. One of the earliest programmable models, its sound was initially criticized as too synthetic when it was introduced in 1980. But with its tight snare and booming bass, Kakehashi’s contraption proved to be more adaptable than anyone could’ve dreamed.Since the fine 2015 documentary 808 tells you everything you could want to know on the subject (and way more), we’d prefer to let the music do the talking with a set that includes many of the most famous uses of the 808 (and its successor the TR-909) by early adopters like Arthur Baker as well as such present-day devotees as Kanye West, who transformed the beat into the sonic epitome of emotional desolation on 808s And Heartbreak. Roland developer Tommy Snyder said it best in his farewell: “He was a super funny, wonderful and gifted human being, and his contributions to the musical instrument world and music touched millions of people worldwide.” To which we can only add: let the rhythm hit ‘em forever more.

I didn’t linger too long in front of the theater. A sign posted by the front door warned that the street was under surveillance, and I didn’t want to arouse suspicion. But I stayed long enough to take in the beauty and whimsy and power of it all: The hulking size of the building. The bright colors of the exterior, evoking a Moulin Rouge-esque festivity. The letters doing a merry jig above the front door: BATACLAN.It was early April and I was on a 13-hour stopover in Paris while on an overseas trip back to Los Angeles. For all of its romance and history, the French capital has never been one of my bucket-list travel destinations. But now that I had a chance, the first place I wanted to see (aside from the Eiffel Tower) was the 1,500-capacity Bataclan theater, site of the 2015 terrorist attack where ISIS gunmen killed 89 people during an Eagles of Death Metal concert.In front of the building, I thought back to the day when it all went down. I remembered driving my car around sunny Los Angeles, listening with growing panic and horror as news of the coordinated Paris attacks unfolded in real-time on NPR. Terrified reporters and witnesses were giving reports while barricaded inside restaurants as shooting went on mere blocks away. French president François Hollande was broadcast live giving a statement calling the attacks an act of war.Terrorism is a heavily symbolic gesture—it’s a spectacle meant to spill blood and cause carnage, but also to generate waves of confusion and panic, to undercut our sense of safety, elevate our sense of doubt, and make us feel ill at ease wherever we are. Now, in recent years, as a music journalist and longtime music lover, I’ve felt more and more so that my own community has become a target. There was the attack on the Bataclan. There were the jihadis aligned with Al-Qaeda who violently banned music in northern Mali in 2012—a region that has long enjoyed a rich overlap between religion and song. There was the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last year, and the New Year’s Eve attack at a club on the Bosphorus in Istanbul.And then there was the bombing at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester on May 22. The bombing killed 22 people, including an eight year old girl, and I struggle to imagine how far gone a militant must be, how many atrocities they’ve already committed, how deep they’ve sunk into their own numb and dead-eyed worldview, to be capable of carefully plotting out an attack like this: Targeting the fans of an artist whose songs are so expertly crafted that they always have a way of hitting right on the pleasure centers of your nervous system, an artist whose very name—“Grande”—speaks to the enormity of her personality and the power of her voice in conveying joy and release and love.The point of these attacks, of course, is to destroy lives and destroy what we love. To make us think twice about going to our next show. To make us look for the emergency exit signs every time we walk into a venue, instead of focusing on the great music unfolding onstage. But music is one of the most resilient human expressions, and this playlist—featuring Ariana Grande and Eagles of Death Metal, Mali’s Khaira Arby and Vieux Farka Touré, a release off Turkish label Drug Boulevard, as well as some classic Manchester bands—stands as a testament to the way music keeps us coming together even in the face of hatred.

Phil Spector may be a homicidal madman with a skyscraping afro, yet he also is responsible for creating one of pop’s most iconic production styles: the wall of sound. Simple in effect yet complex in process, it entails the deliciously gratuitous spilling and layering of instruments (forget doubling — think tripling) until no single one is distinguishable from any other. The results are titanic, textural, and stunningly atmospheric pop songs that feel as though they’ve been bestowed upon mere mortals by the angels. Critics tend to believe that Spector’s wall reached it highest point on (Ike and) Tina Turner’s 1966 masterwork River Deep — Mountain High, but don’t overlook Dion’s Born to Be With You from 1975; in my opinion, its majestic power is unrivalled. Spector inspired a slew of badasses throughout the ’60s and ’70s. In addition to Beach Boy genius Brian Wilson and a young Bruce Springsteen on Born to Run, soul visionaries Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield erected their own unique walls of sound from the lushest of strings.Like Spector, these artists worked with large ensembles. The same cannot be said of The Byrds, Pink Floyd, and the minimalism-inspired Velvet Underground. Instead of leaning heavily on orchestral instrumentation, these mid-’60s pioneers built walls of sound, oftentimes spacey and reverb-drenched, from the distortion, fuzz, and feedback generally associated with rock-based instrumentation. Though it took several decades for their innovations to coalesce into an identifiable aesthetic, they certainly have influenced a great deal of the shoegaze, noise pop, and dream pop outfits to have emerged since the late ’80s. My Bloody Valentine’s absolutely hulking Loveless record, from 1991, has to be the modern era’s most startling expression of wall of sound tactics, though The Jesus and Mary Chain’s buzzing Psychocandy isn’t far behind. My personal favorite is The Flaming Lips’ Clouds Taste Metallic, which is like the perfect meeting point between Syd Barrett-era Floyd and The Beach Boys at their most psychedelic.

The only thing surprising about Mariah Carey’s residency in Las Vegas is that it didn’t start at an earlier point in the post-millennial extended-run boomlet, which was kicked off by Céline Dion back in 2003 and which had, before “#1 to Infinity” was announced in 2015, included retrospective shows by the likes of Britney Spears, Shania Twain, and Rod Stewart. One of pop’s premier divas skipping tour and beckoning her fans to come to her? Of course, dahling. Arranging the show so that it focused on her 18 chart-topping singles, an achievement that’s a rallying cry for her Lambs? [Whistle note here.]Mariah’s series of shows at the Colosseum in Caesars—the same theatre where Celine embarked on her extended run all those years ago—wrapped up last week. I caught one of the final performances, where she preened and belted through her biggest hits (and a couple of other notable tracks) while well-appointed dancers who could have been lured over from the Rio’s Chippendales revival flowed around her. James “Big Jim” Wright, a Flyte Tyme Studios alum who’s worked with Mariah since the Rainbow era, was the music director and, at times, the star’s soothsayer; Trey Lorenz, who became an MTV fixture when Mariah’s MTV Unplugged cover of the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” hit big, sang backup. During longer set changes, a DJ would come out and try to hype up the crowd while running through megamixes of Mariah songs that had been hits, but not chart-toppers—hello “Can’t Let Go,” hi there, “Obsessed.” (Sadly, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” was missing, but Mariah’s holiday Vegas residency, set for Caesars this December, will no doubt rectify that.)A Mariah Carey show in 2017 not only gives one a chance to see her sing while sporting a fuzzy purple bathrobe that resembles an overly huggy Muppet; it doubles as a tour through pop’s last quarter-century. When she started out, Mariah was presented as a diva in the Whitney mold, a Long Island-born glass-breaker whose ability to leap octaves in a single bound was often the guiding force behind her songs’ arcs. “Vision of Love” and “I Don’t Wanna Cry” (produced by glitter-master Narada Michael Walden on record) updated the torch song for the MTV era, which was easier to get away with in the era when pop gave women more leeway about acting (and being) older; “Someday” and “Dreamlover” bubble and fizz, allowing for ample room to embark on gravity-defying vocal runs. “Fantasy” is a caesura for Carey’s career, its “Genius of Love” sample lending her a lighter-than-air platform off which she could vault and giving a shot of somewhat recent history to pop radio; its remix upped the Tom Tom Club quotient and dropped Ol’ Dirty Bastard into the mix for good measure.In the immediate wake of “Fantasy,” Mariah kept her big ballad quotient high (the chart-dominating Boyz II Men duet “One Sweet Day,” the diva showdown with Whitney Houston on “When You Believe”) but the taste of youth-culture fame that song had provided resulted in the production of varying clones, each with different old-school samples that suspiciously echoed “Genius,” each with different MCs serving as Mariah’s foil. It worked for a while, and the template laid down by these songs—gossamer vocals from singers bedeviled by dudes who were either lusty or self-obsessed, or both—calcified into an R&B norm. The Emancipation of Mimi—Mariah’s 2005 rebound from a rocky early-naughts period that included the megaflop Glitter and her multi-album contract with Virgin Records being canceled—broke the mold once again, allowing Mariah to show off her subtlety on songs like the gently tut-tutting “Shake It Off” and the passionate “We Belong Together.” While she was still flaunting her vocal prowess, she also reined it in at crucial moments, allowing the bruised emotions to take centerstage.Since then, Mariah has released a clutch of quality singles that have given space to her slightly maturing voice, which can still soar but which also has a bit more body in its low end, sounding a bit similar to the huskier affectations of Christina Aguilera. However, the tribulations of the music business—and those faced by female R&B artists in particular—have, sometimes unfairly, aced her out of the mainstream. “H.A.T.E.U.,” from 2009’s tumultuous Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, got notice when it was remixed with Ghost Town DJs’ 1996 rollerskating jam “My Boo,” but received little pickup on radio. “#Beautiful,” her 2013 collaboration with the ever-omnivorous Miguel, was absolute candy, its simple guitar lick and swaggering beat seemingly adding up to a lock for song of the summer. That didn’t quite work out. (“Blurred Lines” hogged the headlines; “Get Lucky” got the nerds excited.)The setlist for Mariah’s Vegas show, as a result, halted at 2008; even the gangster-era throwback YG, who appears on her latest single “I Don’t,” was relegated to sitting on the bed that serves as a set piece during “Touch My Body,” Mariah’s most recent chart-topper. (That was one of two beds involved in the evening’s festivities, both of which were motorized so that she could enter while seated. Other modes of on-stage transportation included a jet ski, a motorbike, and a pink Cadillac a la Christie Brinkley’s big entrance in Billy Joel’s absurd video for “Keeping The Faith.” When a diva is given the choice between wearing arch-contorting heels and walking on stage like a common person, there’s only one real option.) It was mostly fine, with Mariah dipping into the audience to say hi to her lambs a couple of times; why anyone wants her to perform choreographed steps, especially given her choice of footwear, is odd. And besides, she was always more of a bop-along type, as her early videos show.While the retro bent of the show was in keeping with Vegas traditions, it was also a moment to wonder what might need to change in order to allow the pop world to allow women over 30 back into whatever mainstream exists in 2017. A splintering of the Hot AC format—so that one type of station explicitly caters to, and even at times programs new music by, grown women—might seem like a desperate solution, but it’s one that would have at least allowed “#Beautiful” and other recent, and more than decent, songs by Carey’s peers and immediate heirs to get a little shine.

The age of the rock ‘n’ roll shaman is nearly gone. As far as frontman archetypes go, David Bowie’s cool and detached postmodernism won and Jim Morrison’s fiery and passionate romanticism lost. The idea of rock as something sacred and visionary has gradually gone out of fashion. This makes a singer like Mark Lanegan, who just released his 10th full-length, Gargoyle, a dead man walking. But he wouldn’t have it any other way.Ever since the longtime cult artist was a young underground rocker—one clearly inspired by Morrison and haunted punk-bluesman Jeffrey Lee Pierce, whose performances were regularly described as séances and possessions—Lanegan and his dark, cavernous, graveyard groan have been evoking spirit images of archaic apparitions and the underworld. In particular, the singer’s rendition of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (which predates Nirvana’s) sounds like a transmission from hell. Meanwhile, his lyrics come littered with Jungian imagery and references to religion and altered states of consciousness: In the 2004 single “Hit The City,” a sublimely ominous rocker featuring PJ Harvey on backing vocals, he sings about darkness, the promised land, ghosts, and kingdom come—that’s some grade A esoterica.Shamans are loners, people who participate in village life yet largely live outside of it, and that’s Lanegan to a tee. While he spent a good deal of his early years with Screaming Trees—a Pacific Northwest band who were always more in tune with the otherworldliness of ’80s psychedelia than sweaty dude-grunge—he started his solo career way back in 1990 with The Winding Sheet. Since then, the 6’ 2” brooder has cut a labyrinthine path: In addition to a slew of solo gems blending mountain folk balladry, gothic-tinged blues rock, dream pop, and even electronic, he’s racked up short-lived collaborations with stoner rock gods Queens of the Stone Age, Scottish chanteuse Isobel Campbell, fellow alt-rock icon Greg Dulli, avant-garde guitarist Duke Garwood, and electronic producer Moby. Lanegan loves working with other musicians, he just never sticks around for very long. Perhaps that’s because the vocalist, like any shaman, ultimately feels more at home in the spirit world than our own.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Whats This Playlist All About? The Dutch DJ extraordinaire reveals all: These are "tracks that I love to listen to at home or play out at a party." Its safe to say this spunky upstart totally brings the party with him everywhere he goes——even in the comforts of his own home.What Do You Get? An ever-changing weekly collection of buzzy, bass-y feel-good anthems, dizzying dancefloor-fillers, and——if the feel is just right——some frayed, frenetic house and bass experiments. Like any DJ worth his/her salt, Garrix is both calculated and playful with his selections, slipping in some esoteric sounds between poppy earworms.Biggest and Best Surprise: James Blakes sticky, splintered cosmic-electro-soul single "If the Car Beside You Moves Ahead."Can You Pull This Off As Your Mix At Your Next Party?: Nope, sorry. This is expert DJ stuff. No way your friends will believe you have such hip, eclectic tastes.

Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.Martin Newell has been making brilliant, ‘60s psych-pop-inspired DIY music at a startlingly prolific pace since the early ‘80s, either under his name or as Cleaners From Venus or the short-lived Brotherhood of Lizards. But he doesn’t just make a lot of records—he makes a lot of great records. He has a shockingly high battering average; out of the dozens of albums he’s released, there’s nary a bad one in the bunch. Provided you view the lo-fi homemade sound of his output as a plus rather than a minus (as all of his admirers must), pretty much everything the British singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist touches turns to gold.Naturally, 2016’s Cleaners From Venus album, Last Boy in the Locarno, is no exception. And it makes an excellent entry point for a deep dive into Martin Newell’s world. But in addition to absorbing highlights from his own vast catalog, try soaking up the sounds of Newell’s fellow travelers, like XTC (whose Andy Partridge once produced a Newell album), Robyn Hitchcock, and R. Stevie Moore. And while you’re at it, take a stroll through some of his ‘60s influences, like Syd Barrett, The Kinks, and The Move. Then for good measure, add some extra historical context by examining the other end of the aesthetic family tree, with sonic descendents like Guided By Voices and The Clientele.