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.I don’t believe America was a fair and just nation before Donald Trump’s horrid ascendency to the presidency on November 8. White supremacy, economic inequality, and military imperialism are central traits of the American experience reaching back to the beginning of our country. But make no mistake: Trump is a historic figure, one invoking dark and ugly forces in ways that surely will create profound suffering and strife. As a citizen, father, and human being, I am terrified. I’m marching, calling politicians, and listening to the voices of those who will be most deeply affected by the Trump presidency to find out what the hell else I can do.At the same time, I’ve sought solace in uniquely vernacular music as a way to stay connected to the positive qualities of American culture. It seems to me that the history of American protest music can be split into two distinct (though oftentimes overlapping) categories. The first is rooted in the daily struggles of those who hit the pavement marching, strategizing, and rebelling. Phil Ochs singing for striking laborers and, more recently, Black Lives Matter activists singing Kendrick Lamar’s forceful and defiant “Alright” during a conference and protest in Cleveland in 2015 are prime examples. This is music whose timeliness and currency are its strengths. It is drawn into the moment and forever tethered to it. The second is less overtly topical, though equally vital. It is music, usually visionary in scope, that turns toward the spiritual, yearning for the better world that those on the streets are attempting to forge. In this sense it appeals to what philosopher Williams James in Varieties of Religious Experience calls our “religious emotion,” which in his profoundly democratic and transcendentalist worldview enables us to feel (as opposed to simply believe — critical difference) that a richer and far more just “kingdom of being” is fully within our grasps.With this playlist I’ve tried to pull together an eclectic range of songs that to my heart, soul, and ears channel America’s transcendentalist spark. Not surprisingly, a healthy dose of this sublime American music comes grounded in religious themes and symbolism — gospel pioneer and civil rights activist Mahalia Jackson for instance. I also focus on songs that are religious primarily in energy. Sam Cooke’s soul music brought the church to the pop charts. On his early acoustic sides, young and prophetic Bob Dylan sounds like the living embodiment of the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.” Even in the mournful, despondent cries of blues legends Blind Willie Johnson and Mississippi Fred McDowell (whose musics typically are framed as embodying the dark side of the American experience) one can sense glimmers of that other kingdom of being. It also can be felt in tunes that at first blush have nothing at all to do about politics or struggle, like Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives sessions from the mid ’20s.Because transcendentalism believes in living life experimentally just as much as it does self-reliance, the divinity in all existence, and social justice, I’ve also included some fairly far out fare drawn from the wells of funk, free jazz, and minimalism. For me this just may be the most powerful stuff to listen to these days. John Coltrane’s cosmic “A Love Supreme,” Sonny and Linda Sharrock’s pleading “Black Woman,” Patty Waters’ haunted “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” Steve Reich’s mind-blurring tape epic “Come Out” — these pieces move beyond language and reason while at the same time affirming the inherent dignity and uniqueness of humanity. I don’t know if there is any tonic for what the hell is going on in America right now, nor do I think my playlist can ever fill that role, but hopefully for those who feel as alienated as I do it can bring some sense of togetherness.
These days, Christian music and pop culture are so deeply intertwined, it’s easy to assume that it’s a marriage tested by time. In fact, it’s a relatively new phenomenon, and like many things that are now a part of our society’s status quo—the internet, meditation, health food—it reaches back to the hippie revolution. As scholar and writer Erik Davis points out in the liner notes to the Wanted: Jesus Christ compilation, “Many acidheads had ‘Christ trips’ in the sixties. Some went on to become Jesus People: hippie born-agains whose faith offered ‘One Way’ out of the chaos of the times. While rejecting the hedonism of the hippies, these long-haired converts also epitomized the countercultural dream of personal transformation through ecstatic and collective spiritual encounters.”Jesus People—or Jesus Freaks, as they proudly called themselves—initially were a California-based movement. As a result, their formative sounds are rooted in the Golden State’s utopian mix of wispy folk-pop and psychedelia. Larry Norman’s 1971 anthem “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” is a fragile meditation laced with strings and the singer/songwriter’s Neil Young-like cry. On the other hand, Agape’s “Wouldn’t It Be A Drag/Change Of Heart” is fiery, funky acid rock packed with soul-jarring organ and smoking guitars. Especially sublime is Azitis’ “Judgement Day,” which boasts Byrds-style harmonies, jazzy flute, and a freak-out middle section drenched in wah-wah.America’s older Evangelicals were perplexed, troubled, and often hostile to far-out hippie preachers like Lonnie Frisbee and their shaggy followers, who tended to eschew traditional worship and living for natural settings and communal homes (this issue is covered in great depth in Larry Eskridge’s engrossing tome, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America). Nevertheless, over the course of the ’70s, the two groups did become one. This evolution is mirrored in how Jesus music gradually became less eccentric and weird and more professional and mainstream. By the decade’s end, the movement was churning out polished hits like “You Put This Love In My Heart,” a deliciously infectious tune from soft-rock tunesmith Keith Green, and “At The Cross,” from Maranatha! Music—slick, blue-eyed praise featuring the voices of Harlan Rogers and future solo star Kelly Willard.Nowadays, a good deal of the early Jesus music is only known to those older converts who were a part of the movement or to hardcore record collectors who specialize in hippie obscurities. But it has to be noted that the massive, global industry now labeled contemporary Christian music—or CCM—certainly wouldn’t exist were it not for the long-haired visionaries found on this playlist.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.
My father passed away on May 4, 2017, in Milwaukee, where he’d been living with my older brother Zac. I got out of work late that night, and after I returned my brother’s call and heard the news, I felt a little numb, too far physically removed from the personal significance of what had just happened 800 miles away. Driving home, I put on Little Feat’s “Easy to Slip,” a song I’d heard in Dad’s car a thousand times, and it helped me feel something that night when it was all almost too slippery and abstract to grasp.Three weeks later, Zac and his family flew out to Baltimore, with our father in an urn, to hold a memorial in his hometown. Richard David Shipley was born in Baltimore and lived most of his life there, selling his house of 25 years a month before his death. He wasn’t a religious man, so we celebrated his life in a secular fashion that seemed fitting, enjoying the earthly pleasures of music, food, and good company. We took over the upstairs of his favorite Fells Point bar, Kisling’s, for a few hours, and enjoyed some beer and the best bar food in Baltimore while a playlist I assembled of his favorite music blared in the background. “I can’t believe I’m listening to Michael McDonald,” my brother told me after I sent him a link to the playlist.Dad, like many other baby boomers, loved rock’n’roll ever since he saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan as a teenager, and he sang in a band in college. One night when his group was performing in Baltimore County, Dad met a musician who was in town recording an album. Lowell George invited my dad to come by the studio, where he saw the eccentric California band Little Feat run through songs for their fourth album, Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, a chance meeting with one of the great cult bands of the ‘70s.I grew up with my mom and saw Dad on weekends, when we’d spend hours in the backseat of his car listening to him sing along with the radio and tapes of The Eagles and Tori Amos. He loved Tears For Fears’ ‘80s records, but it was their last U.S. hit, 1993’s “Break It Down,” that uniquely stuck with both him and me as a masterpiece. As a teenager, I got my first turntable and started to pore through the boxes of vinyl that Dad hadn’t touched since he got a CD player—all his Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac records. (I always thought it was unusual that he seemed to prefer Tusk to Rumours.)Dad and I continued to bond over music in his later years, and we’d go together to see Little Feat, Michael McDonald, and Jackson Browne. (He met my mother at a Jackson Browne concert in 1978.) But he remained open-minded to all sorts of music in ways that sometimes surprised me. When I was 17, I needed a ride to go see Boredoms and Scarnella at the 9:30 Club, and in retrospect it’s pretty remarkable that a 50-year-old dad actually really enjoyed Vision Creation Newsun-era Boredoms. I invited the Baltimore post-rock duo The Water to perform at my 30th birthday party, and Dad became a fan, buying their album and returning to see them live again.So much of the music here is “dad rock” in every sense of the word, but it’s never felt like a pejorative to me. I never loved everything Dad loved, and certainly I didn’t agree with him that Sting was as good solo as with The Police. But I learned how to love music partly through him, and I’ll never hear any of these songs, or a hundred other songs, without thinking of him.
Writing another memoir, hiring replacement Wilburys, or actually bothering to show up to collect a Nobel Prize—these are just a few of the ways Bob Dylan could spend his eighth decade on Earth. Instead, he’s undertaken a rather different endeavor, one that on the surface may be as peculiar as any of his most inscrutable artistic gestures in the last half-century or more. But to just about everyone’s surprise, Dylan’s quest to perform and record his own versions of dozens of songs made famous by Frank Sinatra and others has yielded some unexpectedly marvelous music thus far.This week sees the release of Triplicate, the unfeasibly large follow-up to 2015’s Shadows in the Night and 2016’s Fallen Angels. The new three-disc set adds 30 more songs to the Nobel Laureate’s newly expanded repertoire of classics. Though most of them were initially made famous by Ol’ Blue Eyes, all are part of a canon that has become loosely known as the Great American Songbook, and also includes the handiwork of songwriters like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, and the team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. These songs transcended their own era—one that roughly spans the glory days of Tin Pan Alley in the 1920s to the artistic peak of Broadway musicals in the 1950s—becoming pop and jazz standards for many generations up to and including this one.As tired as these tunes may seem in slavishly retrograde renditions—with Rod Stewart and Michael Bublé being regular offenders, though we must never forget Seth MacFarlane’s big band jazz album—their lyrical wit, melodic sophistication, and sheer malleability mean that they’re forever ripe for reinterpretation and hardy enough to withstand the occasional act of desecration. To mark the arrival of Dylan’s latest venture into the Great American Songbook, we provide a survey of renditions by other artists—Bryan Ferry, Joan Jett, The Roots, and The Bonzo Dog Band, just to name a few—who clearly love this canon, but whose own approaches avoid those easy conventions.
Click here to add to Spotify playlist!We’re eight movies into our age’s preeminent action movie franchise and Vin Diesel has yet to use more than one facial expression. To be fair, it can’t be easy to maintain such a high standard of manly, steely intensity while glowering over your hand as it grips the top of a steering wheel and you put the pedal to the metal. Indeed, moviegoers would likely start throwing chairs if they didn’t see Diesel’s hard-driving hero Dom Toretto assume his signature stare in the next installment of the increasingly bombastic, ridiculous, and thrilling series of high-octane blockbusters spawned by the original The Fast and the Furious back in 2001.Actually, it can feel pretty good to assume the pose yourself. For one thing, it helps foster the adolescent fantasy that you’re burning up the highway in a souped-up Dodge Charger or a tricked-out Koenigsegg CCX-SR—while The Rock hangs out the passenger side window and fires a bazooka at the bad guys, of course—rather than barely hitting the speed limit in a shitbox Corolla or CR-V with two booster seats in back.So with The Fate of the Furious blazing into theaters soon, it’s high time for a soundtrack that’ll further stoke those foolhardy dreams of speed and supremacy. Featuring songs from the hip-hop heavy F&F soundtracks and other tunes built for the road, this playlist is for all the wannabe speed demons who’d be just like Dom if that kind of driving didn’t get people killed in real life. Sorry to be a bummer, but face it: You’re no stunt driver.
Steven used the release of the film Straight Outta Compton to review the best album lead-off tracks ever. The actual song selection for this playlist is decent enough. Its hard to argue about the greatness of "Welcome to the Jungle," "Crazy in Love," "Bring Da Ruckus," etc. This list is the cannon -- its safe, there are very few left-field choices, and the only selection that gave me any pause is the Counting Crows selection.This is a conceptthathasbeendone a lot. And initially, I was a bit skeptical that it would make a good playlist. At least the Complex playlist linked to above picks from only hip-hop tracks, which makes it more stylistically consistent. The Grantland playlist uses tracks from all genres and eras. Its something thats easier to ponder than listen to. Still, the songs are connected aesthetically -- theyre generally the albums most hard-hitting, rambunctious tracks. This playlist is like the Seinfeld episode where Elaine only buys muffins for their tops.
Playlists allow you to play the role of musical tourist, immersing you in a regional scene on the other side of the world without the need for airfare. Or sometimes, the scene is less a geographic construct than a spiritual one, coalescening around a record label or common, internet-facilitated aesthetic. These are the scenes we were drawn to over the past year:
The emergence of a viable rap scene in Seattle didn’t happen overnight. Even as Macklemore & Ryan Lewis briefly took over the pop airwaves with “Thrift Shop” in 2012, less-celebrated artists were determining the future of the Northwest city’s sound. In fact, much of the Seattle rap underground resembles other U.S. homegrown scenes that formed in the wake of indie rap icons like Lil B and Odd Future: The music is amorphous and electronic, the lyrics tend toward chemically enhanced streams-of-consciousness (with Shabazz Palaces’ surreal, Afrocentric-inspired treatises serving as a touchstone), and there are enough sonic quirks to make you want to crawl down a SoundCloud wormhole.
Profound Lore was founded in 2004 by Chris Bruni as a casual venture, but within a few years it grew to be a serious metal label. Based in Kitchener, Ontario—about an hour’s drive west of Toronto—Profound Lore has produced some of the most vital voices in contemporary black, experimental, and heavy metal.
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. 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.
Maybe it’s the cheap rent that’s essential for sustaining the vitality and vibrancy of artists and culture in a modern metropolis, or maybe it’s the proximity to beloved landmarks and bit players from The Wire and the movies of John Waters; either way, Baltimore continues to thrive as a musical hotbed, one that retains a fierce loyalty among the many great acts born and bred there. With the release of Future Islands’ fifth album, The Far Field, we celebrated the city’s indie scene with a playlist of Baltimore acts you may already know and love (Beach House, Dan Deacon), and others who deserve more than hometown-hero status, like Ed Schrader’s Music Beat and relative newbies Sun Club.
Los Angeles rappers have a propensity for giving themselves two letter names. YG is the city’s most well-known export, but there’s also RJ, AD, T.F, and KR. Most of these artists have collaborated with each other, and are a hit or two away from breaking through at the national level. This playlist contains songs by these two-letter rappers, as well as the rest of the city’s best young talent.
On what feels like a weekly basis nowadays, Dais Records revive some long-forgotten synth/ambient masterpiece or a vintage industrial jam that’s exquisitely dark and dreary. Dais isn’t just an archival label, however—their catalog features churning brutality from hardcore-troublemakers-turned-EBM-fist-pumpers Youth Code, and Sightings, the most important noise-rock band of the 21st century. And not everything Dais puts out seeks to obliterate eardrums: On top of their taste for the ugly and abrasive, they have a deep love for the beautiful and sublime.
Home to international stars like Hugh Masekela, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and, um, Die Antwoord, South Africa has always been known for its music. Even during the days of apartheid, this country of 55 million people was a hotbed for pop, jazz, choral, and dance music. While Paul Simon worked with South African musicians back in the 1980s to make his career-defining album Graceland, these days it’s artists and label heads like Kode9 who are looking to the country amid the rising global popularity of gqom, the moody, broken-beat take on South African house that was first divined with the help of cracked Fruity Loops setups in the coastal city of Durban.
Afrobeats is the sound you heard on pop radio for much of 2016. It’s not to be confused with Afrobeat, the funk-based form that Fela Kuti made famous in the 1970s. Afrobeats emerged from Lagos, Nigeria and Accra, Ghana in the mid-to-late 2000s, and serves as an African response to post-millennial hip-hop, electronic music, Jamaican reggae and dancehall, and R&B. There are tracks that rely on familiar tropes—Auto-Tuned vocals, English-language lyrics about partying and sex—as well as build upon distinctive traditions like highlife and Afrobeat, resulting in songs that could only be African.
As cassette tapes and CDs proliferated in the ‘80 and ‘90s, music began to travel to uncharted territories—like small villages in South America. And thanks to the vast reach of MTV and, later the internet, that cultural cross-pollination has only accelerated. One of the more intriguing results of this process has been the rise of Latin American shoegaze: young South American musicians in thrall to U.K. bands like My Bloody Valentine and Ride, but putting their own spin on the genre.
SoundCloud rap sounds like an extension of a thread that arguably began in 2010 with Odd Future. As the genre of rap becomes more notional than actual—lyrics are harmonized and sung in barely recognizable hip-hop cadences, and beats are reduced to murky approximations of a boom-bap tempo—MCs trade form for texture, and professionalism for bellicosity. SoundCloud rappers are representative of the genre’s post-regional phase, when it’s no longer uncommon for a Philadelphia hook-man like Lil Uzi to sound like a trapper from Atlanta, a Texas melodicist like Post Malone to sound like a rapper/singer from Chicago, or a Florida bedroom producer like SpaceGhostPurrp to sound like a gangster from Memphis.
Solange Knowles’ album, A Seat at the Table, is a crisply executed R&B pop album that wooed fans and debuted atop the charts. The album blends elements of pop and electronic music with various threads of soul, adding afrofuturistic flourishes as well as guest appearances from Lil’ Wayne, Kelly Rowland, and Q-Tip. And while that sounds like a hodgepodge of sounds and personnel, the album is subtle and graceful, anchored by Solange’s soft, confident voice and down-to-earth musical sensibility. “Borderline (An Ode to Self Care)” and “Don’t Touch My Hair” champion ideas of black liberation and self-empowerment, and are powerful statements from one of pop’s most socially conscious singers. On this playlist, we look at some of the inspirations for Solange’s beautiful new album, from the woozy otherworldly hip-hop of Shabazz Palaces to the astral jazz of Alice Coltrane. -- Jordannah Elizabeth
When we think of the truly transformative albums in pop history—those rare records that clearly mark a line between “before” and “after”—they tend to herald a seismic moment in musical innovation (Sgt. Pepper’s), generational upheaval (Nevermind), or social unrest (To Pimp a Butterfly). But in its own subtle, sophisticated way, Air’s 1998 Moon Safari belongs to this class of game-changing albums. Appearing at the tail end of the ‘90s alterna-boom, it signalled a 180-degree shift away from indie-rock’s lo-fi, thrift-store aesthetic into the sort of plush, expansive sound that demanded attentive listening in leather easy chairs and through expensive stereos. It was an album that made once-verboten guilty pleasures——’70s prog-rock, lush vocoderized disco, easy-listening exotica——innocent again, while firmly entrenching the seductive symphonic funk of Serge Gainbourg in the indie lexicon alongside rickety Velvet Underground rhythms and Sonic Youthian discord. And for better or worse, Moon Safari codified the concept of the bistro album, supplying the finest audio wallpaper to exposed-brick, Edison-bulbed eateries around the world. When you consider indie-rock’s transformation from scrappy, DIY artform to commerical sync-license gold in the 21st century, you can’t discount Moon Safari’s aspirational influence and affluence.This playlist hones in on its immediate moment of impact. In the wake of Moon Safari, guitar-oriented acts like Radiohead and The Flaming Lips refashioned themselves as studio scientists to pursue sounds both more elegant and experimental. Daft Punk’s heavy-duty house began exhibiting a more pronounced ‘70s soft-rock flavor. And you couldnt swing a rolled-up shag carpet without hitting an upstart downtempo duo like Röyksopp, Arling & Cameron, Lemon Jelly and Thievery Corporation. And in Zero 7, you had the more pop-oriented successor that took Air’s retro-futurist soundscapes into the mainstream. With Moon Safari turning 20 this month, let’s bask in its lunar eclipse.
Police brutality (and murder) is certainly a timely subject, and one that has been covered extensively in music over the years. You could probably make a playlist of 20 songs about police brutality from hip-hop artist in the past month. Kali does a great job at providing a wide spectrum of genres, eras and perspectives on this playlist from Alternet. You have the cannon -- "Fuck tha Police" and "Killing in the Name Of" -- but there are also some great left-field picks -- like the Dicks or Anti-Flag ones.
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
