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It’s been 20 years since Wilco’s Being There seduced me in my roommate’s Ford Escort. This happened in the fall of 1996, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, just two hours northeast of Chicago. So yeah, the place was crawling with Midwestern college students all earnest and modest and way into Wilco, Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, The Jayhawks and any other artist camping out halfway between alternative and rootsy. A fan of noisy underground rock, I tended to dismiss these bands — that is until I started borrowing Rob’s Escort to run errands: laundry, the bank, record stores, Smirnoff. The super generous dude said I could take it anytime, and I did. (I also devoured a lot of his groceries — sorry, man.) Why exactly I began listening to his copy of Being There — which had been out only a few weeks — and not one of the dozen other CDs strewn across the floor has been lost time. I’d love to say that I started the ignition one day and became instantly intrigued once the gargantuan, Flaming Lips-like feedback of the opener, “Misunderstood,” drenched the car. But that would be the kind of apocryphal crap music critics love foisting upon readers. Nevertheless, I started listening to the record and gradually became obsessed. It’s never left me. I know it forwards and backwards. I can recite the track list from memory. I appreciate other Wilco albums, but none even come close to blowing my mind like their second.From the little I’ve read about the album (I’m not lying when I say I haven’t read much about Wilco), Jeff Tweedy, Jay Bennett (RIP), and the rest of the crew harbored lofty themes about the complex relationship between rocker and fan when they began recording the sprawling double album in late 1995. You can hear them grapple with this idea on “Misunderstood,” written from the perspective of a fan, as well as “Sunken Treasure” and “The Lonely 1.” I didn’t know any of this when I first formulated my take on Being There, which is this: It’s an overly self-conscious rock album made by an overly self-conscious rock a band about rock, both its awesomeness and suckitude. It’s about how rock is totally weary, spent, and repetitive, yet at the same time utterly inescapable for those addicted to it. And since there is no escape, we might as well drink from that repetition — revel in it. As Tweedy sings on “Someone Else’s Song,” a slowly rolling folk number with a melody reminiscent of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” “I keep on singing/ You’re eyes they just roll/ It sounds like someone else’s song/ From a long time ago.”Wilco take the notion of singing someone else’s song as a license to wear their influences on their sleeves in a way that most bands would be too embarrassed to ever attempt. Many of these — early Little Feat, Neil, Gram, The Replacements, Big Star — are baked deep into the grooves. Others, in contrast, are shoved in listeners’ faces. Not only does “Misunderstood” lift The Lips’ uniquely groaning feedback, it actually contains lines — “Take the guitar player for a ride/ You see he ain’t never been satisfied/ He thinks he owes some kind of debt/ Be years before he gets over it” — lifted almost verbatim from Rocket From the Tombs’ proto-punk ballad “Amphetamine.” The rocker “Monday” boasts Keith Richards’ guitar tone from Let It Bleed and blaring horns from Exile On Main St. On the blurry-eyed ballad “(Was I) in Your Dream,” Tweedy sounds like a drunken Dr. John impersonator, while over the course of the fiddle jam “Dreamer in My Dreams” he mimics the raspy hellraising of Tex-Mex legend Doug Sahm (who recorded with Uncle Tupelo, incidentally).In addition to blatant plagiarism and mimicry, Tweedy works in all manner of historical references, some obvious, others oblique. In the folksy love ditty “Far, Far Away,” he slips in the phrase “on the dark side of the moon.” You can tell from his hesitant delivery that he totally knows what fans will be thinking when they hear him nick a phrase from Floyd. “Hotel Arizona” has to be a nod to “Hotel California” because the song doesn’t actually contain the phrase in the lyrics. Tweedy sings “hotel in Arizona” but not actually “Hotel Arizona.” Being There contains an “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” as well as an “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)”; both are basically different versions of the same song, just like how The Beatles included slightly different renditions of the title track on the art pop classic Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Ditto for Neil on Tonight’s the Night.)I freely admit that many of my references are wholly my own creation, and Tweedy probably would roll his eyes if he ever read this. Like a nutty conspiracy theorist with a wall full of photographs, pins, and yarn, I’ve constructed a map of the different rock coordinates that I’ve projected onto . The whistling closing out the richly melodic “Red-Eyed and Blue” is a nod to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream.” “The Lonely 1,” a syrupy ballad about the rock ‘n’ roll life, is Wilco’s “Beth,” itself a syrupy ballad about the rock ‘n’ roll life. And best of all, the playfully walking piano chords opening “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)” are a secret love letter to the influence that “Sesame Street Theme” exerted on Tweedy as a child.Being There totally invites this kind of fanaticism, however delusional, from its fans. After all, only fellow rock fanatics — the kind that spent their teenage years picking apart every last lyric, riff, and fill on their favorite albums — could’ve recorded a set so absurdly referential. This is music by obsessives for obsessives. What started as a fling in a Ford Escort in the mid ’90s turned into a fascination spanning decades.

Vince Staples came to prominence as an associate of the L.A. underground rap collective Odd Future, making multiple appearances on Earl Sweatshirt’s 2013 album Doris. Two years later, Staples released the acclaimed album Summertime ’06 on Def Jam, which featured an appearance by frequent collaborator Jhene Aiko and established the Northside Long Beach rapper as a brilliant and distinctive voice in hip hop. Despite his irreverence toward traditional hip hop gatekeepers, Staples has proven an able collaborator for conscious veterans like Common and Dilated Peoples, as well as an agile MC who can tackle adventurous tracks from producers like Flume and Clams Casino. With the sheer variety of collaborators he sounds at home with, Vince Staples has enhanced the unique place his solo work occupies in the musical landscape and the ways he can express his sense of humor and political perspective.

Since the first VMA ceremony in 1984, where Madonna performed “Like a Virgin” and David Bowie won the first Video Vanguard Award, the VMAs have served as a benchmark for pop culture artistry. This year’s video nominees are no different. Bowie’s arresting “Blackstar” felt like a dispatch from beyond the grave, while Drake’s “Hotline Bling” became a neon-soaked instant classic. Kanye West’s provocative, queasy “Famous,” featuring wax replicas of the naked celebrities, was both a celebration and condemnation of celebrity culture, while Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” relied on the juxtaposition between its celebratory images and the song’s pleading lyrics. These are all beautiful videos, but they’re also great tracks. This playlist collects the seductive and dramatic songs that inspired this year’s top videos.

There is only one dude in rock who has Miley Cyrus, Tame Impala, Yoko Ono and Lightning Bolt all on speed dial, and that is Wayne Coyne. His long list of BFFs and partners in crime is just as phantasmagoric and unpredictable as the psychedelic murals splashed across the façade of The Womb, The Flaming Lips’ art space in Oklahoma City. One would think a playlist featuring such a motley assortment of musicians would yield to musical chaos, but that’s not the case at all. It doesn’t matter if he’s crafting high-polish chart pop with Kesha or unleashing noise-rock tantrums with Yoko — the trippy, alt-rock messiah has a way of drawing those around him deep into his Day-Glo surrealism and candy-coated, kaleidoscopic wondrousness. You will be, too, after hitting play.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist right here.I like to stay active—I work out, I go on walks, I do yoga. Each activity I do comes with a different set of musical criteria, though—for example, when I do yoga each morning, I almost exclusively listen to drone or black metal. At the gym, however, when I’m on the elliptical or lifting weights, I like to get lost in modern jams. This is the special time of day in which I don’t have to listen to classical music for work, I don’t have to write, I don’t have to do any thinking at all. I can just rock ‘n roll. This year has seen a number of great additions to my workout jam repertoire, from Bowie’s incredible final album to Swans’ brilliant and aggressive The Glowing Man, both of which have seen so much gym time that I now think about bicep curls and stairmasters every time I hear them. My top exercise album of the year has unquestionably been The Life of Pablo, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has spent more than five minutes talking to me. I listened to that album so many times while going for runs that I think my heartbeat is permanently synced up to its flow. Here is a playlist of some of my favorite gym tunes of the year. I have structured it so that you could actually listen to it during a workout. It starts with a new recording of the “Allemande” from Bach’s C minor French Suite, which should aid you in some elegant stretching. Then, the blood gradually starts flowing with Aphex Twin’s “Cheetah 7b.” By the time the climax of Ashbringer’s “In Remembrance” hits, you should be completely in the zone, ready to take on the world… or at least hit a new high in your preferred routine. Some moderate songs follow, allowing you to relax as you maintain your peak, then coming down with The Field’s “The Follower” and, finally, getting back into the real world with Nick Cave’s sobering “I Need You.”

Kendrick Lamar isn’t just the most talented hip-hop lyricist of his generation; he’s also a transformational cultural figure. He meets with gang bangers and world leaders. Protesters chant his lyrics at rallies to voice their opposition to police brutality and Donald Trump. And millions of fans from across the globe absorb and internalize his knotty, progressive lyrics. As a pop-culture figure, his power is unrivaled. It’s not innappropriate to speak of him in the same breath as Bob Marley, Dylan, or Fela Kuti.In many ways, he gets this—and so does the music press. Few stars have had their lives as extensively chronicled as Kendrick. There are literally hundreds of interviews, thousands of think pieces, and tens of thousands of blog and message-board posts trying to piece together his story. With this series, we’ve consolidated all those different sources to provide you with a comprehensive look at the rapper. We’ll start off with this playlist of his essential tracks, and then, over the course of the next 10 posts and playlists, we’ll tell the story of his childhood, and the story of Compton. We’ll track his early years in the rap game, and provide you with a deep dive into his collaborators and inspirations. If you’re a casual admirer, you’ll come away feeling that you know Kendrick so much better. And if you’re already an obsessive fan, you’ll still learn a few new things. And, regardless of your level of engagement, you’ll have 11 awesome new playlists. Enjoy.

Psychedelic music emerged in the mid-’60s as a mutant offspring of the British Invasion and American garage rock. But, over the past five decades, it has morphed into so many different forms that its more accurate to describe it as a feeling than a sound. Be it the surrealist pop of The Beatles and Caribou, the brain-melting feedback of Jimi Hendrix and The Jesus and Mary Chain, the dreamy reveries of Slowdive and Tame Impala, or the head-nodding beats of Madvillain and Flying Lotus, psychedelia is hard to pin down—but you’ll know you’re hearing it when you feel your mind altering.In The Dowsers Psych 101 feature, well be exploring the psychedelic sound through a 14-playlist program that breaks down the crucial components of this mesmerizing musical kaleidoscope. This introductory mix provides an overview of what you can expect in your inbox over the next two weeks: the rock n roll radicals, the Afrofuturist freaks, the headiest hip-hoppers, the most adventurous beatmakers, the lava lamp–smashing metalheads. By the end of it, we hope youll see psychedelia less as a hippy-dippy 60s phenomenon and more as an endlessly renewable energy source that is forever fueling boundary-pushing artistry across all genres and eras. For now, we invite you to turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream—and brace yourself for the many weird and wonderful trips to come.

Chart the journey from the Fab Four to Flying Lotus through The Dowsers virtual box set devoted to all things psychedelic. Your trip begins in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

When Black Rebel Motorcycle Club sang, "Whatever Happened to My Rock n Roll" on their 2001 debut, they were gazing upon a contemporary rock landscape overpopulated with backward red baseball caps and greasy grunge-oil salesmen, and lamenting the lack of raw, raucous, life-changing (and corrupting) devils music on the radio. In this case, the complaining actually worked: Within a year, BRMC found themselves standing alongside The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Hives, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, and many other disgruntled guitar-slingers, perched on the precipice of the last moment in history when the words "rock" and "revolution" could be uttered together with a straight face. And mobilizing right behind them were all the bands on this playlist——groups that may have enjoyed a few spins on Subterranean, earned a glossy magazine spread or two, got name-dropped by Jack White in an interview, or scored a prime opening slot on a Franz Ferdinand tour, but never quite achieved the same notoriety or longevity as the aforementioned acts.The early 2000s were, of course, a transformative moment in the music industry: The advent of mp3s and file-sharing opened up new portals for underground bands to achieve more widespread visibility; at the same time, old-school publications like NME and SPIN still wielded enough king-making power to anoint new rock saviors on a seemingly weekly basis, while labels were scooping up any band with unkempt hair and thrift-store blazers. The result was a cyclonic swirl of hype that sucked in MTV2-ready arena-indie acts (Longwave, Ambulance Ltd.), stylish post-punk revivalists (The Stills, Hot Hot Heat), unruly post-punk revivalists (Ikara Colt, Radio 4), unrulier post-hardcore miscreants (The Icarus Line, The Bronx), post-hardcore 70s-rock fetishists (Danko Jones, Rye Coalition), brainiac Brits (The Futureheads, Clearlake), seasoned garage acts gunning for a long-deserved close-up (Billy Childish with the Buff Medways, Mick Collins with the Dirtbombs), new-school misfits (The Ponys, The Gris Gris, Vietnam), and, thanks to The Hives surprise crossover success, an uncommon amount of Swedes (Sahara Hotnights, Division of Laura Lee, Mando Daio, The Concretes)——not to mention Canadians (The Deadly Snakes, Tangiers, The Marble Index), New Zealanders (The D4, The Datsuns), and Icelandians (Singapore Sling).Though a handful of these acts have managed to duke it out to this day, many didnt survive the 2000s. And a quick glance at this years Coachella line-up shows that the question posed by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club at the top of this post has, in the long run, only become more existentially pertinent. However, if the early 2000s garage-rock uprising didnt alter the course of popular music in the way its adherents had hoped, its impact can still be felt in less tangible ways. The eras blurring of indie aesthetics and mainstream aspirations has become manifest in everything from satellite-radio formats to boy bands sporting skinny jeans and salon-sculpted messy haircuts to the sheer number of annual alterna-festivals that didnt exist before 2001. Meanwhile, Lizzy Goodmans recent tell-all oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom has effectively mythologized the Strokes heyday for a new generation just as Please Kill Me did with the 70s CBGB scene (with a documentary adaptation to come). And right on cue, several long-dormant early-2000s phenoms——including Franz Ferdinand, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and BRMC——are resurfacing with new albums and/or reunion appearances; you can also expect 2018 releases from Jack White, ex-Walkmen singer Hamilton Leithauser, and Julian Casabalancas garage-prog side band The Voidz.But here, we remember those bygone would-be hype magnets who are less likely to fire up newsfeeds in 2018. Just as Lenny Kayes 1972 compilation Nuggets commemorated the countless short-lived garage bands that formed in the wake of the mid-60s British Invasion, this playlist forsakes the most hyped and heavily rotated bands of the 2000-2005 era to focus on the forgotten phenoms, unsung instigators, and steady-as-she-goes survivors who, in their own little ways, intensified the hysteria of that moment. (It also excludes groups like The Kills, The Black Keys, and Gossip, who, while still relatively under-the-radar at the time, would go on to much greater success. You may also note the absence of The Libertines, who quickly transcended their second-hand Strokes roots to spawn a landfill-indie legacy all their own.)This is a mix for anyone who actually bought a stellastar* single based on the NMEs recommendation, anyone who was momentarily convinced The Mooney Suzuki (pictured at top) were the future of rock n roll, and anyone who thought Elefant would be as big as Elephant. Our Cheap Monday jeans may not fit anymore and our once fulsome shag cuts may have given way to receding hairlines, but lets do a bump for old times sake——this bathrooms got your choice of 50 stalls.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!The effects the Internet has had on human civilization can’t be understated. You can see it in our industries, our social behavior, and our very psychological health. The Internet is an invasive presence in our society, pushing us toward the future whether we’re ready for it or not. It’s thanks to the Internet that I have a job, yet it’s also thanks to the Internet that I become intensely anxious about what dumb status I’m going to post on Facebook. Our entire culture has shifted to accommodate the presence of this connecting force that nonetheless seems to isolate us, and now it’s impossible to imagine a reality where we turn back from this road we’re on.Music has reflected these changes in splendid detail, giving us ample reason to be excited about living in such strange times. The possibility of directly reaching listeners all around the planet has paved the way for bizarre and exciting new formats to emerge, such as the hyper-saccharine pop madness of the PC Music collective, or the Chicago street phenomenon footwork, which has already sprouted fans and disciples as far away as Japan. If anything, it’s overwhelming how much incredible music we now have access to thanks to the Internet, the old guards of the industry cast away to make room for new ideas and artists capable of broadcasting to the masses from the comfort of their bedrooms.The music of the Internet era has defined itself through diversity, and there are common, shared ideas that emerge from the ethos of digital art. Much of our recent experimental music finds inspiration in the uncomfortable merging of opposing forms—artists like Oneohtrix Point Never and QT spin fantastic new shapes through the juxtaposition of uncanny sound manipulations and inescapably alluring Top 40 mechanics. A DIY mentality also pulses through a lot of music today, as with the gloriously simple and infectious Internet rap of Lil Yachty, or the barebones, anything-goes mania of DJ Paypal. But to paint the Internet as an entirely positive force would be closing your eyes to its strangely imprisoning nature, a dynamic deeply explored in the schizophrenic rap of Death Grips and the pained electronic distortion of Holly Herndon and Arca.All of the artists on this playlist share a common inspiration: picking apart the nature of society’s new favorite medium and the effects it has on our perceptions, memories, and experiences we subject ourselves to, given endless customization options. The old notion of genres has given way to an endless sea of individuality, where the mainstream has become underground and the underground has gone mainstream. The future is here, and it’s even more horrifying and beautiful than we ever could have imagined. Hit play to take a tour of the sounds emitted from our hyperreal, constantly connected world.