Genres

Toronto trio Odonis Odonis weren’t kidding when they named their new record No Pop. The band’s fourth album (out Oct. 20 on Telephone Explosion Records in Canada and Felte worldwide) is a claustrophobic hellscape of industrialized shocks, black-light beats, and pure punk insolence. For his Dowsers playlist, band braintrust Dean Tzenos reveals the music that gets him in a dystopian state of mind. “Heres some tracks that we were spinning around the making of the new record. Some are from bands we played shows with, and others are just sick tracks that we would play in van.”—Dean Tzenos, Odonis OdonisYou can order No Pop here.

With a career that spans more than 60 years, Quincy Jones has one of music’s most formidable résumés: sideman, Dizzy Gillespie musical director, bandleader, label executive, arranger, soundtrack composer, TV mogul, and winner of 28 Grammys (so far). His biggest legacy, however, is as a producer—a job he described as “part babysitter, part shrink.” Though his long footprint has been known to careen into jazz, bossa nova, and hip-hop, it’s the R&B, pop, soul, and soundtrack music he made in the ’70s and ’80s that define entire worlds, thanks to Q’s lush arrangements, perky percussion, and airy sounds—not to mention his work on Michael Jackson’s 1983 album, Thriller, the biggest-selling album of all time.His early-’70s soundtrack work and TV themes mixed large orchestral vision with indelible jazz-funk rhythms. His mid-’70s solo albums—and concurrent work with Aretha Franklin and the Brothers Johnson—simmered with soft-focus groove, bravado, slickness, and warmth. It was a perfect fit for the era when disco and funk met pop, when he eased on down the road into the 1978 soundtrack to The Wiz and Michael Jackson’s glossy 1979 breakthrough Off the Wall. The records he produced on his record label, Qwest—George Benson, Patti Austin, James Ingram, and a late-career album for Frank Sinatra—provided sophisticated songs for Quiet Storm radio and beyond.By the end of the ’80s, Jones had produced the record-breaking charity single “We Are the World,” garnered three Academy Award nominations for his work on The Color Purple, produced Jackson’s Bad, and taken his own victory lap with 1989’s star-studded solo album Back on the Block, winner of that year’s Grammy for Album of the Year. On the title track, featuring rappers Ice-T, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Kool Moe Dee, and Big Daddy Kane, you can hear the whining horn from Ironside that he had introduced nearly 20 years earlier. In honor of Off the Wall’s 40th birthday, here’s a celebration of Jones—the producer—in his most iconic period.

In the dawning weeks of 2019, Spotify declared that “emo-rap” was the previous year’s fastest-rising genre. While the term had, by then, come to be associated with a fresh crop of post-genre, pro-feelings artists like XXXtentacion, Lil Peep, Lil Uzi Vert, and Juice WRLD, back in the early ’00s it had a different association. Inspired by the artsy, socially conscious likes of Project Blowed out west and Native Tongues back east, a small but creatively mighty wave of experimentally minded MCs and beatmakers had emerged in the ’90s from the underground tape-trading scene. By the decade’s end, they had congealed into a handful of seminal record label/collectives, each with its own regional flavor but all often derisively referred to by hip-hop purists as “emo-rap.”

The brashest camp was anticon., whose members had relocated from various points across the U.S. to Oakland, where wordsmiths like Sole, Doseone, and WHY? basked in the Bay Area’s scrappy boho-hippie vibe and kitchen-sink approach to art. The coolest by far was New York’s Definitive Jux, headed by El-P (who’d later become half of Run the Jewels) and heralded by Cannibal Ox, a duo so captivatingly cutting-edge that Elvis Costello was known to name-drop them in interviews. Meanwhile, Minnesota’s Rhymesayers Entertainment held it down for the blue-collar, lovelorn, bad-childhood types—a lane that Atmosphere carved out brilliantly before finding broader success on (in hindsight rather fittingly) the Warped Tour circuit.

There were posse projects and crossovers (cLOUDDEAD, Deep Puddle Dynamics), rivalries and outliers (Nova Scotia’s Buck 65, Los Angeles’ Busdriver). But whether it’s Sage Francis tracing his sister’s self-inflicted wounds on “Inherited Scars,” Alias converting depression into revelation on “Watching Water,” or Aesop Rock bundling a life’s worth of observation into one glorious tumble of words, this is, was, and forever will be the original emo-rap.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Punk may be eternal, but one of its earliest, most explosive subgenres has been largely ignored for decades. The Oi! movement emerged in England at the tail end of the ’70s, just as the initial surge of British punk was receding, and was founded by bands who wanted punks to walk like they talked. For all its proletarian ethos, the first wave of UK punk was largely fomented by middle-class, art-school kids, but the Oi! scene was populated by working-class youth who longed for something that spoke more genuinely to their own experience as council-flat kids in a country with a crumbling infrastructure.The first phase of Oi! was led by the likes of Cockney Rejects, Sham 69, and The Angelic Upstarts, who took the basic, three-chord roar and stomp of punk and added messages of working-class pride and youth-culture unity, with choruses often delivered en masse, football-chant style. The Oi! kids copped their image from the previous generation’s ska-loving skinheads: Doc Martens (hence the appellation “bootboys”), button-down shirts, suspenders, and buzz cuts.The initial Oi! movement flourished into the early ’80s, but before long, the violence that had always been lurking on the outskirts of the scene began to overwhelm live shows, and things began to unravel. National Front forces tried to infiltrate the movement and spread their nationalist, racist agenda, an ideology that had nothing to do with what Oi! was really about. The conflict contributed to the scene’s destruction.But even though the first wave of Oi! petered out after just a few years and has seldom been celebrated in any widespread way since, its spirit refuses to die. Each subsequent generation has had its own Oi! revival bands, keeping the sound alive on an international level, from Swedish bands like Perkele and City Saints to New York Hasidic punks Moshiach Oi!

Open Mike Eagle has thrived during the tectonic shift of what it means to be an "independent rapper." Ten years ago, that term was solely aligned with a rapper on a label like Stones Throw, Rhymesayers, Def Jux, Anticon, etc. Today, "independent" is Chance the Rapper, who is managed by the same agency behind Tom Hanks and Derek Jeter. Open Mike Eagle is on Mello Music Group, an indie-rap haven inspired by Rawkus, but hes also friends with Paul F. Tompkins and Hannibal Burress. Hes "independent" because hes not on a major label, but hes about to have his own TV show, The New Negroes, with Baron Vaughn on Comedy Central. Where rappers in the past kept their friendships with comedians to a few skippable skits on CDs, Mike Eagle dropped the backpack and entered the world of comedy as unique specimen: the rapper who was both funny and lyrically sturdy, a performer who can play with Aesop Rock and Peter Sagal, a student of comedy who mastered Twitter while freestyling off the head better than almost anyone.The former school teacher from Chicago—who just seven years ago released his debut album, Unapologetic Art Rap, on Mush Records—brought the worlds of indie rap and comedy together after dozens of cross-country tours listening to comedy podcasts and stand-up routines to pass the time. Prior to the release of his newest and most highly anticipated album, Brick Body Kids Still Daydream (and the premiere of the aforementioned New Negroes), the Open Mike Eagle discography wrestled with sadness, race relations, lack of wealth, and growing up weird in the 90s. But after first self-classifying his style as “art rap,” and then now as an auteur of his own “dark comedy,” hes deftly created a universe where Eric Andre and Danny Brown make sense together.As Mike stated on his masterpiece track, "Dark Comedy Morning Show,” hes bad at sarcasm, so he works in absurdity. Because we live in absurd times, this playlist of choice cuts from Open Mike Eagles earlier work feel prophetic, with beautiful melodies, glitchy neck-snapping beats, and odes to data mining, hustling to pay rent in gentrified hotbeds, and our collective addiction to smartphones.

Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.Rapper/producer/super-villain MF DOOM is a paradox. He is a legend, revered by a generation of indie music fans, but he’s also all-but-unknown to casual music fans. He is at once mercurial and unmistakable -- he wears a mask to disguise his face, changes monikers like Hillary changes pantsuits, and has appeared, disappeared and reappeared again (without warning) over the course of his 20 + year career. Yet, there is also no mistaking DOOM on the mic -- the slightly nasally flow, the jumble of alliteration and internal rhymes, the expansive surrealist imagery. It’s easy to over-intellectualize MF DOOM, but he is also genuinely funny -- such as on Rhinestone Cowboy, when he declared that he “got more soul than a sock with a hole” -- and playful (his take on lesser rappers: “Out of work jerks since they shut down Chippendales/ They chippin nails, DOOM, tippin scales”).It’s a really fun but, I suspect, largely thankless task to come up with a list of his best tracks. For this one, we’ve used three criteria: we wanted to represent as wide a span of his career as possible (it’s tempting to just cull from the span between Doomsday and Madvillian); and we want the list to have a certain flow and work as a playlist that you can put on and listen to all the way through; and we want to throw in a few left-field and obscure tracks for those who are already familiar with him. -- Sam Chennault

Third Eye Blind were huge, but they were never credited with being exactly “important.” Sales of the band’s self-titled 1997 debut might have put them in the same tax bracket as Green Day and Nirvana, but unlike those twin towers of ‘90s alt-rock, Third Eye Blind were profoundly uncool. For all their bluster about being rejects and creeps, Billie Joe Armstrong and Kurt Cobain emerged from punk microcosms in which they were already stars, and they rode into popular consciousness as kings of an undiscovered country that the rest of the world would soon try to invade. The landscape shifted, the culture morphed. By contrast, the band Stephan Jenkins built had to live and die by songcraft alone, and in a way that has made their songs all the more enduring.Kids wanted to be Kurt and Billie Joe. No one ever wanted to be Stephan Jenkins; he could never quite ingratiate himself with a scene of ostensible outcasts. Teenagers couldn’t chase Third Eye Blind’s sound backward into a hip demimonde and attendant identity that said something about the world and a kid’s place in it. The band’s breakthrough song, “Semi-Charmed Life,” was seemingly designed to keep “Two Princes” and “One Week” company in future documentaries about Beanie Babies, Super Soakers, and other ‘90s trends. It opened onto nothing more that its own fleeting moment. Just like the album it came from opened only into the worlds contained in its songs. There was no shifting, no morphing.So Third Eye Blind came from nowhere. And they came bearing beautiful music that has aged remarkably well, unburdened as it is by epoch-making cultural significance. The songs have remained pure and vital, and if time has done anything to them, it has burnished them into reflective surfaces that contain and clarify a brief span of pop history.“How’s It Going to Be” is a standout from a debut album fit to burst with hits and should-have-been-hits, one of the great ballads of the ‘90s, a gloriously simple heartbreaker that builds a bridge between Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” and Dashboard Confessional’s “Screaming Infidelities.” It was a blurry Polaroid snapshot of music’s barely noticeable pivot from one kind of unhip earnestness to another, and this in-betweenness has sustained the song through time. It can float in that indeterminate realm forever, attracted by the weakest gravitational force to the songs surrounding it, but mostly standing beautiful and alone, waiting for the future to find it again and again.Third Eye Blind’s discography teems with three-minute secret histories like this one. Jenkins’ hyperactive style—the dude will try just about anything to build an earworm—has a way of erasing the traces of anyone but Jenkins himself. But in the same way an old commercial tells us more about the past than whatever program it once interrupted, Third Eye Blind’s best songs remain shiny, hermetic wonders that were whispering to us about the future of guitar-based pop all along.A sizeable chunk of Third Eye Blind predicts Red Hot Chili Peppers’ post-horndog phase as semi-sensitive dudes who worked out how to write pop songs. Blue highlight “Anything” turned emo-inflected pop-punk into humongous arena rock two years before Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American pulled the same trick. And One Direction might have perfected a blend of Coldplay’s grandiosity and Kelly Clarkson’s epic flights, but Third Eye Blind beat them to the idea on “Faster,” one of the few bright spots on 2003’s Out of the Vein.Much of the band’s work since 2009 has been unremarkable, and at this point Third Eye Blind mostly just sound like fans of Third Eye Blind. And maybe that’s fine. They finally found their scene: Turns out they were it all along.

Drake OvO Sound may effectively be a vanity imprint for its biggest star, but there’s something to admire in their stylistic consistency and aesthetic continuity. It speaks to Drake’s overall impact on culture, and also the partnership that Drake has formed with his core set of producers (40 and Boi-1da). There’s a clear through-line from the sound those developed on solo Drake releases and the sonic nooks that PARTYNEXTDOOR or dvsn are currently exploring. This playlist, curated by Drake, features some of the labels best tracks. Though the music is at times vibrant and it’s well worth a listen, this at times feels like a boilerplate marketing/PR playlist, and the inclusion of Drake on at least 2/3rds of the tracks feels slightly distasteful.

Listen to Partners delightful debut album, In Search of Lost Time, and you will quickly learn that Canadas foremost queer-positive fuzz-pop duo are also massive potheads. For this Dowsers playlist, they reveal the songs they like to crank up when they spark up. "Stoner," Young Thug: This song is cool because, while there are a lot of odes to weed, this song is a little different: Its an ode to stoners. Young Thug thinks stoners are cool and is proud to be one. Plus, this track just buuumps."Cotton Eye Joe," Rednex: This song is good to get stoned to just cause its really hilarious and a total throwback to middle-school dances. No matter how lazy you are feeling, you might be able to muster a jig. Bonus points for the weird/scary video."Sweet Leaf," Black Sabbath: The original ode to weed. "You introduced me/ to my mind." SAME. Possibly the only song written in the second person, directed at weed, that doesnt use the term "Mary Jane.""Really Doe," Danny Brown: This song is great to get stoned to cause its a sick posse cut featuring a really cool stylistic array of rappers. Earls verse shouts out dirty spliffs and blunts. Everyones flow is completely different and they are all very impressive, especially when youre stoned."James Joint," Rihanna: "Id rather be/ smoking weed." Lots of people love to smoke weed, but Rihanna somehow also manages to make blazing seem glamorous and sexy. (Impressive.)"Solo," Frank Ocean: Like Rihanna, when Frank talks about smoking weed, it seems sophisticated and deep. This is a great track to listen to when youre blazing alone, at night, wondering what it all means..."Broccoli," DRAM (feat Lil Yachty): DRAM is all "good vibes" if thats what youre into, and this is a feel-good party-jam ode to rolling one up at a party. Infectious piano hook."HennyNHoes," Young M.A.: This is a good song to listen to at any time, and we will never not shout it out cause its our favourite and Young M.A. is cool as fuck."You Dont Know How It Feels," Tom Petty: This song is great to get stoned to cause when it gets to the part where he says, "lets rollll another joiiint," you can use it as an excuse to do just that."Dust on the Bottle," David Lee Murphy: This song is about homemade wine, not weed, but its great to get stoned to, cause it tells a great story and, lets be real, all music is good when youre stoned.

The release of Partynextdoor’s third album, PX3 or Partynextdoor 3 has been greeted by a growing realization that this Canadian singer is a bona fide R&B star. After all, it was only three years ago when critics derided the Toronto singer’s debut as a Faustian cataclysm of Future’s croon, the Weeknd’s anomie, and Drake’s suburban blues. Yet partly thanks to Drake’s cosign, each of his albums have performed better than the last, with his recent “Come and See Me” single being the first to crack the pop charts. His music fits snugly into the genre’s taste for what has been described as “woozy” R&B, a electronic conceit that once seemed like an innovation with the Weekend’s 2010 trio of EPs and Miguel’s “Adorn” smash, but which, over five years later, now looks like an artistic cul-de-sac. However, unlike other genres, tastemakers don’t determine the course of R&B – the audience does. Twitter trolls may love to crack jokes about Bryson Tiller’s overly familiar blend of screwed rap&B, but his album still went platinum. And Drake’s continued dominance needs no unpacking here. Like it or not, the electronic, synthesized “wooz” of post-millennial R&B clichés seems like it will be with us for the immediate future.