Genres

Noise-Beat America is an introduction to the U.S. noise underground’s anarchic, rowdy, and cacophonous forays into mechanized groove research. Techno convention isn’t challenged—it’s obliterated: Hi-hats surrender to blasts of static; synthesizers bleed distortion; and kicks stutter like malfunctioning jackhammers. Ren Schofield (a.k.a. Container) is often cited as one of the first noise-beat freaks. And while the Rhode Island native’s success certainly has helped give the movement an international profile, a handful of noise-based musicians (Forcefield, VIKI, Unicorn Hard-On, and Pleasurehorse among them) started exploring technoid-sputter as far back as the early ’00s. Be forewarned, intrepid clubbers: This playlist cares nothing for rhythmic flow nor energy management. It’s all about blasting you in the face as haphazardly as possible. Soak it up!

I came to Yo La Tengo late. Rob Sheffield’s lead review in Rolling Stone did the persuading. The Blue Mask? I’m there (his Lovesexy analogy crumbles though). Confident enough in its smarts to use declarative sentences, employing guitars and vibes and synths to shape sounds commensurate with the relationship it’s celebrating, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out was a good first album but a taxing one. I got I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One on the defunct Columbia House’s website; it soundtracked a summer of county wide commuting to my first journalism internship. One Saturday afternoon I got too stoned listening to “”Spec Bebop.” Summer Sun I embraced without a worry three years later: eleven miniatures, capped by a hushed version of “Take Care.” I may overrate the album because that tour was spectacular: two men and a woman switching instruments and no loss of momentum or joy in the other’s company. We liked the band enough to drive to Jacksonville in 2003, a not inconsiderable concession especially if you know the world’s dullest city. The tour for I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, which made a stop in February 2007 at the long gone Studio A, also charmed the hell out of me; the album itself was a take it or leave it deal.Take or leave my opinion. If being a fan means the demonstration of passion and the willingness to forgive mistakes or mere competence, then I’m not one. But I love these songs.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

Following the US election on Nov 8, 2016, we asked Dowsers contributors to discuss the moods and music the results inspired. We collected their responses in a series, After the Election.It’s the wee small hours of November 9: I wake up around 3:30 and can’t get back to sleep. Just one of those nights, it seemed. Since I hadn’t watched any of the election night coverage because television news sucks, I have no idea who won. I reluctantly grab my phone, click on HuffPo (more lamestream journalism, folks), and see the ghastly headline: “Nightmare: President Trump.” What the fuck just happened? A thick and heavy feeling of anxiety and disgust rips through my gut as though I’m trying to crap out an Ex-Lax-dusted anvil. I pace; I weep. My heart races; my head turns feverish. Pure evil is here.I’ve since been able to gather myself — for the most part. Along with 2,000 other equally alarmed Americans (good people from all walks of life), I’ve marched here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a battleground state, and called a long list of representatives. As for my soundtrack during these days (record nerds would fret over what jams to spin for an asteroid bashing into the planet), I’ve been listening to a lot of classic American music (folk, gospel, blues, soul), and that helps me stay motivated and anchored. Still, I experience stretches of nihilistic dejection when reality feels like a cosmic scam. It’s during these phases that my belief in love, peace, and understanding is chucked out the window; all I want to do is curse American mainstream society to hell. Screw Trump’s army of pasty white racists, and screw the smug neo-libs who enjoy undermining good Americans who try to forge progressive reforms. Hell, screw this entire empty, meaningless universe.The soundtrack to these admittedly unhealthy states of mind is seething, eardrum-damaging noise-rock, industrial, electronic-tinged propulsion, and bummer metal: Sightings singer Mark Morgan’s choked screams, Scissor Girls’ manic and fidgety spazz-tantrums, Pissgrave’s stuttering blasts of pure decrepitude and down ‘n’ out vibes, God Bullies’ swirling eviscerations of small-minded yokels. What’s interesting to note about noise-rock (as well as its related movements) is its non-affiliation in terms of politics. I mean, sure, most of these bands save their most intense viciousness for Repugs and deranged Bible bangers (when they’re that explicit, of course), yet it has to be noted that the Clinton years witnessed an explosion of virulent badasses, including Six Finger Satellite and KARP. Some musicians are pissed off no matter who is in office. Mainstream normalcy in and of itself is to be rejected.The irony is that all this cacophony, like therapy, actually sets me straight (though this wasn’t always the case in my self-loathing, pre-dad years, when hard booze and other substances weren’t infrequent). These bands are so committed to loud, writhing, horrid music that they wind up creating beautifully ugly artwork, and that’s 1000% life affirming. Think about it: beauty from ugliness. Maybe that’s something those fighting the good fight in modern AmeriKKKa can achieve in the coming years?

On October 18, 2017, Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip received more American-media attention in a single day than they had in their entire 30-year career. There was the front-page placement in The New York Times’ Arts section, an extended feature at Rolling Stone, and an essay on Vulture, to name a few. Sadly, the newsfeed blitz wasnt spurred by a new album release or some reissue that triggered an overdue reappraisal of the Hip’s back catalog—the band’s lead singer, Gord Downie, had passed away at age 53 from brain cancer, unleashing a tsunami-sized outpouring of tears across Canada that couldnt help but seep into newsrooms south of border.Of course, posthumous appreciation for unsung artists is a storied rock n roll tradition. But the sight of Downie’s photo in major U.S. publications was especially bittersweet, given that so much of the Hip’s history was tied up in their inability to translate their decades-long domination of Canadian rock radio into widespread stateside success. North of the border, the band are unimpeachable icons, with nine No. 1 albums, 16 Juno Awards, and six million records sold (in a country of 30 million people where sales of just 100,000 earns you a platinum disc). They’re the sort of band whose songs you know verbatim even if you’ve never owned one of their records—because when you grow up in Canada, an encyclopedic knowledge of The Tragically Hip catalog is just something you naturally acquire, like a regional accent, or an inferiority complex.Sure, their fist-pumped riffs made them the go-to band for backward-baseball-capped bros across the land, yet as Downie’s latent eccentricities came to the fore, he became a magnet for misfits as well. The Hips songs have been covered by pop stars and punk bands and name-checked in rap tracks; even the 6 God bows before the Gord. When Downie publicly revealed his cancer diagnosis in the spring of 2016, the Hip embarked on a final cross-Canada arena tour that summer, the final show of which—on August 20, in the band’s hometown of Kingston, Ontario—was broadcast live by national broadcaster the CBC, was attended by Prime Minister/super-fan Justin Trudeau, and sparked massive public-viewing tailgate parties from coast to coast. I half expect that date to eventually become a new statutory holiday up here.Trying to explain the Hip to Americans is something of a parlor game for Canadians, one whose goalposts have shifted over the years. Initially, they were sort of like Crazy Horse fronted by an extra-spastic Michael Stipe, or a Rolling Stones greased by Midnight Oil. Then they became more like a hoser Pearl Jam, and in their later years, a Canuck cousin to Wilco. (Lately, I’ve come to think of them as a proto-National.) And in terms of celebrity stature, Downie was effectively our Springsteen, but with the jean jacket and bandana replaced by a hockey jersey and toque. He was a rock star with blue-collar blood, whose intimate portraits of Canadian life could stir a patriotic fervor with a simple small-town namedrop.But Downie’s hyper-specific local references and invocations of obscure Canadian history were probably as impenetrable to casual American listeners as, say, Mike Skinner’s bloke-speak. The closest the Hip came to breaching the border was in 1995, when, at the insistence of host/fellow Ontarian Dan Aykroyd, the band appeared as the musical guests on Saturday Night Live—a performance watched with bated breath across the nation like parents at a child’s first piano recital. Alas, the Monday-morning sales spike wasn’t to be. Never quite angry and abrasive enough for the post-Nirvana age, but too cerebral for the Black Crowes blues-rock/jam-band set, the Hip would resign themselves to being the biggest band in Canada, and Canada only.It certainly didnt help that The Tragically Hip came up in a pre-internet age when being a Canadian musician made you tragically unhip, long before the web-boosted likes of Arcade Fire, Drake, Grimes, et al. cemented the countrys international cachet. But where that lack of American recognition always seemed to append the Hip’s considerable legacy with an asterisk, over the years, it’s become more a point of pride. In a country whose pop-cultural identity has historically been caught in a tug-of-war between our patronizing parents in the U.K. and our boorish big brother south of the border, the Hip’s contained domestic success affirmed that there is, in fact, an ineffable Canadian sensibility that exists independently of our superpower relations. And in Downie, we had a uniquely Canadian rock star—which is to say, someone too humble and self-effacing and peculiar to ever fully embrace the job.Downie always seemed uncomfortable with the flag-waving hysteria the Hip’s music inspired, and seemed eager to steer their music beyond the beer can–crushing bruisers of their early records. While his band epitomized mainstream Canadian rock, Downie had long sought solace among the country’s indie cognoscenti. He collaborated with Eric’s Trip alumnus Julie Doiron (among other Canadian avant-indie veterans) for a string of solo albums through the 2000s; cut an entire record with Toronto roots-rock rebels The Sadies; guested on hardcore dynamos Fucked Up’s 2014 album, Glass Boys; and tapped Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew and The Stills’ Dave Hamelin to apply their sound-collage aesthetic to the album that would become his Tragically Hip swan song, Man Machine Poem.But his desire to challenge audiences went beyond mere music. After spending the past three decades making his fans proud to be Canadian, Downie spent his last year forcing them to grapple with what that really means, and confront the fact that the romanticized version of Canada that people like to associate with The Tragically Hip is a construct built on shaky—read: stolen—ground. Mere days after the Hip’s final show last August, with Canada still abuzz in a national love-in, Downie forcefully redirected the spotlight that had been fixed upon him onto the country’s heinous historical mistreatment of its Indigenous people. He announced a new solo album/graphic-novel project, Secret Path (also produced by Drew and Hamelin), based on the true story of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old First Nations boy who escaped the notoriously abusive residential-school system only to die trying to find his way home.The conception and recording of Secret Path actually predated Downie’s cancer diagnosis by a couple of years, but when the album finally surfaced last fall, it felt like a suitably elegiac send-off for an artist long defined by his sense of compassion and generosity. Amazingly, as his condition worsened over the past year, Downie threw himself into the most ambitious recording project of his career. Just a week after his death, we saw the release of his Drew-produced double-LP Introduce Yerself, and like David Bowie’s Blackstar and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, it’s an album that will be inextricably intertwined with its creator’s passing. But its not the typically grim meditation on mortality we’ve come to expect from an ailing artist: Each of the record’s 23 songs were written about a specific person in his life. Its a suitably selfless final gesture from Downie, providing a portal into a personal life he had closely guarded.In the same spirit, here’s a playlist of 23 songs to introduce non-Canadian newcomers to Downies deep discography. While it includes some Hip hits, these aren’t necessarily the band’s most popular songs. Rather, they’re ones that mostly venture beyond the band’s bar-rock roots and don’t require an Encyclopedia Canadiana to decode. And they’re the ones that most directly communicate Downie’s singular combination of outsized passion, white-knuckled intensity, sly humor, absurdity… and grace, too.

This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at the far-reaching, decades-long impact of disco. Curious about disco and want to learn more? Go here to sign up. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. They’ll thank you. We thank you.Arguably, Scandinavia has been ground zero for the nu-disco explosion of the past decade or so. This is in large part due to producer, DJ and Feedelity label head Lindstrøm, who was one of the first to pair the clean lines of minimal techno with the bubbling beats and juicy baselines of disco. This, of course, is to take nothing away from his peers, who include Lindstrøm collaborator Prins Thomas and dancefloor uber-crush Todd Terje. Of course, Resident Advisor does an amazing job at capturing this in a playlists takes a minute to build some momentum, but begins to crest with Terjes classic "Eurodance." The playlist is woefully brief, and this listener was left wanting a few more recent tracks, but it offers a great snapshot at one of our favorite scenes.

Before Biggie, nearly every rapper was a specialist. But Biggie was the complete package. Even Pharcydes Fatlip confessed that he felt inadequate next to Biggie’s overall excellence on record and in video. The fault of rappers in the post-Biggie era was thinking they could compete with him.Puff Daddy maximized Biggie’s eclectic tastes on 1994s Ready to Die: massive radio hits ("Juicy," "Big Poppa," "One More Chance") coupled with murderously head-nodding odes to spitting on graves ("The What"), feeding artillery to canines ("Warning"), and the defining advantage of boxers over briefs ("Unbelievable").Whereas Hammer and Vanilla Ice mined the grooves of 70s and 80s rollerskating jams for massive sales at the beginning of the decade, Biggie sampled Mtumes syrupy "Juicy Fruit" while sticking up Isuzu jeeps on "Gimmie the Loot." Blunts were rolled next to bottles of Cristal, Army jackets were hung next to Coogi sweaters, and platinum plaques were offered up to Bed-Stuy.But Life After Death upped the ante—Biggie had mastered every rap style under the sun by the tender age of 24. Never before had an MC owned the radio ("Hypnotize," "Mo Money Mo Problems"), the mixtapes ("Kick in the Door"), the 96 Knicks ("I Got a Story to Tell"), and every part of the map ("Going Back to Cali," "Notorious Thugs"). Life After Death checked off every box over its two discs: storytelling, beefs, murder, mortality, paranoia, drugs, sex, and extravagance. To paraphrase Doug E. Fresh, any Biggie song you played, youd immediately think to yourself, "Yo... Did that really happen?"Biggie was one of the best rappers, but more crucially, he had one of the best ears. For Life After Death, he picked arguably the greatest collection of beats that had no place being together on any one album. RZAs Stax Records obsession on "Long Kiss Goodnight" was pitted against Puffys Diana Ross jack move for "Mo Money Mo Problems"; DJ Premiers whittling of Screamin Jay Hawkins ("Kick in the Door") and Les McCann ("Ten Crack Commandments") coexisted with Stevie Js glossier crates—Barbara Mason ("Another") and Liquid Liquid ("Nasty Boy").Biggie was right at home paying homage to Schoolly D, the dusted West Philly inventor of gangsta rap, and DMC, a graduate of St. John’s University. There was no sample source too funky (Zapp on "Going Back to Cali") nor too melancholy (Al Green on "My Downfall"), and no beat presented any challenge.Life After Death was released just two weeks after the unfortunate, premature death of this fearless rapper. For the 20th anniversary, its important to celebrate its greatest quality: Biggies otherworldly ability to make you like everything he liked.

About a decade ago, cumbia experienced a “ñu” makeover. The traditional genre that was once the soundtrack to Latin America’s ghettos bridged the gap between the old and the new, the poor and the rich. Refashioning themselves as ñu-cumbia, a fresh generation of cumbia-thriving musicians and producers replenished this once-marginalized genre by injecting it with an array of riveting sounds, from reggae to EDM to jazz and even balkan. Uruguay’s Campo, who adds tango’s sophistication to the breezy “La Marcha Tropical,” introduces his beats to sound system block parties and South American resorts alike; Bomba Estéreo, the feisty Colombian duo known for igniting global dance floors, inspired Will Smith to start rapping again after a ten-year hiatus in the EDM-tropical “Fiesta (Remix)”; and ZZK Records, Buenos Aires’ pioneering digital cumbia label home to Nicolá Cruz, La Yegros and Fauna, keeps spotlighting this Latin American music explosion, now in an upcoming documentary series. While some setlist-featured musicians maintain the cumbia rhythm in its original güiro and accordion-driven format, others let experimentation lead the way. These are the new sounds of the old forbidden rhythm.

Back in the ’80s, uptight white people fretted over the decline of western civilization. For Tipper Gore and the PMRC, suburban youth were being morally debased by the down and dirty sounds of gangsta rappers, Satanic headbangers, and provocative pop divas. The most obscene of all was 2 Live Crew and the Miami bass sound they helped transform into something that was equal parts pop fad and national epidemic. Seemingly overnight, white teenage girls were shaking what their mamas gave them, while their brothers cruised strip mall parking lots in cars with the boom. School dances were cancelled, musicians arrested, and record stores shuttered. To celebrate this gloriously obscene time in America, here is a bass-thumping blast of genre cornerstones, radio hits, and lost nuggets.

Although they’re often disregarded as a legitimate art form, video games have reached an astounding level of sophistication over the past few decades. We’ve come a long way since the days of simple arcade shooting simulators and digital table tennis. Video games have become one of the defining mediums of our time, offering deep interactive experiences and aesthetic invention not found in other formats.Music has always played a central role in video games, serving as both the sonic architecture upon which worlds are built and the emotional anchor players can connect to, as they explore new environments full of pixelated, inhuman shapes. Video game music is a unique art, beholden to the practical requirement of creating an endlessly looping soundtrack, while also tasked with building themes that slip into the mind subconsciously, returning and restating themselves with all the cohesiveness of a Sondheim musical. It’s background music created for a world completely unlike our own, and that’s why much of it sounds so out of place when heard outside of the game.Some truly remarkable music has emerged from the pantheon of video game producers, peculiar and moving pieces from the likes of Nobuo Uematsu, David Wise, Koji Kondo, Yasunori Mitsuda, Grant Kirkhope, Gustavo Santaolalla, and Disasterpeace to name but a few. This playlist highlights some of the finest moments in the genre, where the composer reaches past the lens of nostalgia and into territory that connects emotionally—even if you’ve never picked up a controller.

Seattle electronic duo ODESZA release their third album, A Moment Apart, on September 8, 2017. To celebrate its arrival, Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight put together this playlist for The Dowsers of tracks that are currently in their personal heavy rotation, some of which feature on their latest Soundcloud mix, NO.SLEEP.