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Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.Those who can’t remember the ‘60s may be doomed to repeat them, but that may be more a blessing than a curse. Though other eras ebb and flow in terms of their musical influence on the present moment, the Age of Aquarius appears to be a constantly churning river that runs through every subsequent period in pop culture, providing inspiration anew to each fresh crop of strummers, slammers, and shouters. 2016 was no exception to this phenomenon—of the albums released over the course of the year, there was no shortage of records sporting a significant ‘60s flavor. Of course even among ‘60s fetishists, everyone has their own variation. For instance, current troubadours like Ryley Walker and Itasca show fealty to the acoustic guitar-wielding folkie songsmiths of bygone days, while The Explorers Club and Seth Swirsky pay homage to the sunshine pop powers of The Beach Boys and their ilk, and Night Beats and The Warlocks represent the drop-some-acid-and-floor-the-distortion-pedal approach to psychedelia. All in all, 2016 turned out to be a pretty good year for the ‘60s.

If you were a teenager in the ‘80s (as I was), you could be forgiven for thinking the ‘60s were lame. Between yuppies dancing around to Motown milestones in The Big Chill to classic rock radio’s ossification of a couple dozen hippie-era hits (whose ubiquity proved that familiarity does indeed breed contempt), any right-thinking young person was bound to eschew the Aquarian age in search of greener pastures. Most likely, you gravitated toward the bright, gleaming light beckoning from the New Wave/post-punk realm, where everything seemed fresh and vibrant.But as I discovered pretty quickly into my obsession with college radio—and contemporary chronicles like Trouser Press, New York Rocker, and Creem—punk’s tabula rasa/year zero ideal didn’t hold much ground when you got into the nitty-gritty of what followed it. The flood of ‘80s acts who arrived in punk’s wake, for all their bold new moves, still sported a slew of influences from the ‘60s—sometimes overtly in the form of cover tunes, and sometimes more subtly in the influences they’d assimilated.The more I viewed the music of the ‘60s through the filter of ‘80s bands who were breathing new life into the airwaves and record stores again, the more attractive that bygone era seemed. Sometimes a cover version could put you on a direct route to the original artist’s oeuvre: For instance, ‘60s L.A. psych underdogs Love, who would be posthumously deified a couple of decades later, were more popular than ever as an underground phenomenon in the ‘80s. The Damned’s cover of their “Alone Again Or” made it easy to find your way to the seminal Forever Changes; and once you were there, the spelunking was endlessly rewarding.Even on the less obvious end of the spectrum, it didn’t take a cultural anthropologist to trace the links from, say, the power chords of The Jam and Secret Affair to mod OGs like The Who and Small Faces. Nor was it too tough to determine that the chiming guitar riffs of R.E.M. and The Cleaners From Venus led straight back to first-gen jangle kings The Byrds.It wasn’t just ‘60s rock that revealed itself to me in this manner. The ‘80s synth-pop bands may not have had much of a musical investment in psychedelia and such, but the pop, R&B, and girl group sounds of the ’60s were another story. It was easy to follow the paths of the likes of Naked Eyes to the glittering legacy of singers like Dionne Warwick, who previously might have seemed like a middle-of-the-road musician from another generation to my amateurish ears. And while New Orleans R&B wasn’t especially accessible to an ‘80s kid growing up in The Bronx, Devo’s mechanized take on the Allen Toussaint-penned Lee Dorsey classic “Working In the Coal Mine” illuminated a whole new world to be explored.Of course, in a pre-Internet world, these explorations of the past were far more difficult than they are for teens, or anybody else, today. But the thrill of the chase was as much a part of the fun as the end result.

This post is part of our Psych 101 program, an in-depth, 14-part series that looks at the impact of psychedelia on modern music. Want to sign up to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. 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. Theyll thank you. We thank you.Probably the first exponent of what later became known as Afrofuturism was avant-jazz visionary Sun Ra, who began releasing cosmic-themed albums like Super-Sonic Jazz and Interstellar Low Ways in the late ’50s. Yet it truly exploded into popular consciousness when George Clinton’s mothership full of stardusted weirdos touched down over a decade later. Emerging from the intersection of mind-expanding psychedelia and Black Power consciousness, Parliament-Funkadelic’s science fiction-inspired funk introduced a stunningly new aesthetic, one that would eventually seep into the very fibers of hip-hop, techno, and R&B. That said, citing examples of Afrofuturism is significantly easier than actually trying to define a nebulous concept that blurs the edges between science fiction and magical realism, philosophy and spirituality, modern art and radical political critique. But let’s give it a try…First appearing in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future,” culture writer Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture.” These concerns are, of course, racism, oppression, liberation and, over the last decade, Black feminism. Just as vital are issues of identity, in particular grappling with the alienness of a people removed from their homeland, stripped of their culture, and enslaved in a far-off continent. Again, from Dery’s essay, “African-Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less unpassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind.)” We can add to this miserable list the military-grade technology now being wielded by America’s police force.Dery’s primary focus is literature (including seminal sci-fi authors Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany). But perhaps the most fertile ground for the movement has always been music. It’s an impulse that incorporates an astonishing number of voices cutting across a slew of genres: jazz, hip-hop, soul, reggae, funk, electro, Miami bass, techno, and even modern classical. In addition to this rich sonic diversity, Afrofuturism in music boasts a unique intersection of technological innovation, high-art concept, and pop novelty. This matrix reaches back to the aforementioned Sun Ra and P-Funk mastermind George Clinton, the two most important Afrofuturists. Each in his own,unique way mixed up pulp fiction stories of flying saucers with African-American esoterica, deeply philosophical ideas of Black consciousness, and pioneering experiments in sound, including the incorporation of synthesizers. Echoes of their innovations ripple through modern mavericks like Flying Lotus, Erykah Badu, Jamal Moss (a.k.a. Hieroglyphic Being), Danny Brown, Janelle Monáe, and flutist Nicole Mitchell, all of whom have helped carry Afrofuturism into the 21st century.If our playlist’s sprawling mix of interstellar horns, rapping robots, futuristic synths, galactic funk, technoid grooves, and dub-drenched bass does inspire you to explore the literary side of Afrofuturism, then definitely check out the powerful work of both Butler and Delany. Also, the essays of Greg Tate and John Corbett respectively are central to understanding the movement’s deliciously eccentric evolution. Now press play and be prepared for a trip down the alleys of your mind.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.It was, by many metrics, a terrible, terrible year. But it happened to be an excellent year for ambient music—and that turned out to be incredibly fortuitous, since nothing works better than ambient music when youre in the mood to close the blinds and crawl under the covers for the next four (or, God help us, eight) years.There was so much great ambient music this year that it inspired a number of commentators to ask whether we were in the midst of a comeback. Id venture that ambient music never went away, assuming you knew where to look for it. But its certainly true that this years crop of quality ambient music amply proved just how varied the form can be. Huerco S. gave us lo-fi ambient techno slathered in tape hiss. Former Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt kept perfecting his blissed-out Tangerine Dreamscapes. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith paired burbling arpeggios with wild vocal processing, while Julianna Barwick looped her own voice into a soft, tenebrous web.There was a surprising amount of guitar-based music that fit an ambient sensibility this year: Christian Naujoks paid tribute to Durutti Column on a lovely LP for Hamburgs Dial label; Tortoise member Jeff Parker explored skeletal atmospheres on his solo album Slight Freedom; and super-producer Daniel Lanois spun pure gossamer out of pedal steel on the masterful Goodbye to Language.One of the years most interesting developments in ambient music may have been the return of what Jon Hassel termed "Fourth World" music. Motion Graphics, Visible Cloaks, and the New York duo Georgia all paid tribute to the digital synthesizers and rippling textures of Japanese ambient and new age music of the 1980s; an artist named Slow Attack Ensemble even covered the Japanese duo Inoyama Lands 1983 song "Mizue" on a beautiful album called Soundscapes for the Emotional-Type Listener. And both Andrew Pekler and the duo of Jan Jelinek and Masayoshi Fujita delved into ideas of otherness and exoticism on their respective albums for Jelineks Faitiche label this year.Thats just scratching the surface; I havent even mentioned the ambient-leaning techno from Studio OST (White Materials Galcher Lustwerk and Alvin Aronson), or the broken-down synthesizer experiments from Kassem Mosses Honest Jons LP, or the jewel-toned clouds of tone Tim Hecker whipped up, or the spirit-channeling mysticism of Anna Homler and Steve Moshiers Breadwoman, an early-80s cassette that the deep-digging RVNG label rescued for contemporary ears. And special mention goes to Sarah Davachi, who is responsible for not one but two of the years finest ambient albums: Dominions and Vergers, both of them examples of drone music at its most meditatively breathtaking. If its respite youre craving, youll find plenty of escape routes on this two-and-a-half-hour playlist.

This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you.Terrace Martin is best known to most hip-hop fans as one of the architects of Kendrick’s seminal album, To Pimp a Butterfly, but the multi-instrumentalist producer, and son of a jazz pianist, has been carving out a signature sound for the past decade on tracks from Snoop, YG, Raphael Saadiq as well as on his own full length albums. His best work integrates multiple decades of West Coast black music -- from the baroque jazz funk of David Axelrod through the whizzing harmonics of DJ Quik’s G-Funk. It’s woozy, bobbing funk, and his solo tracks, in particular, are breezy summer jams that is perfect white owl BBQ music.

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 have studied music since I was a child, but in my memory there is one singular moment in which more was revealed to me about the potential of the art form than in any other event in my life. I was an undergrad student at Webster University, where I was studying music history and piano, when this metamorphosis happened. It was very simple: I was working on an assignment in the music building’s computer lab, half listening to a conversation between my friend Shumpei, a Japanese composition student, and one of the composition professors. Shumpei, for his senior project, was writing a symphony, and he was describing the work to the professor, saying that he was fleshing out this or that part of it on that particular day. The professor was intrigued by this project, especially because in today’s composition programs, most students are working in electronic, atonal, or highly-specialized experimental composition. For Shumpei to be writing a symphony was very strange. Then the professor posed the question that was immediately and permanently seared into my mind. He asked, “What’s it about?”It had never occurred to me that classical music could be “about” something. Clearly operas were about something, and program music was about something. But instrumental works? It seemed insane to me. My first thought was that the professor was joking, being facetious, testing Shumpei with an obviously rigged question. But as the conversation unfolded, I started to become attuned to a new plane of meaning in music. I became aware of its essence.I share this anecdote not only because it continues to resonate with me today in my work as a historical musicologist, but also because it frames the way I associate music with contemporary historical events. Whether one likes it or not, Trump’s election is the most significant, unexpected, and potentially transformative political event that has occurred in the adult life of a person my age. I am not saying this in the affirmative or the negative—I am merely being dialectical about it. It is going to produce a new political terrain. Neoliberalism is under siege, the Democratic Party has fractured, the category of “president” is changing, and, most importantly and ideally, the Left has a new position from which to critique—and hopefully overcome—capitalism. From a Marxist standpoint this is truly an interesting situation.I have found myself listening to Beethoven for the past week. At first I did not question it, for this is typical of someone in my line of work. But as I started to realize that I was listening almost exclusively to Beethoven, I began to wonder why this was. As I have thought about it for the past few days, I find myself contemplating not only Beethoven, but the French Revolution, Hegel, and subjectivity. I don’t intend to descend too far into philosophy here, but I will point out that for Adorno, Beethoven’s music represented a particularly sensuous, philosophical image of society. He believed that in Beethoven’s music resided hope and transformation, that his music personified the emerging human quest for consciousness, becoming spirit. “Art is more real than philosophy,” Adorno wrote in his fragments on Beethoven, “in that it acknowledges identity to be appearance.” This means that, to put it reductively, art’s forms, like those of society, are subject to change, that the whole is mediated by the individual parts, that the totality can become something greater than itself, something non-identical, something other.What will Trump do? I don’t really know. I want to believe that he wont be that bad, and that, in opposition to him, we will witness the first revolutionary Left that has existed during any of our lifetimes. In my opinion, this possibility—as the sectarian, dead “left” has shown in the past decades—could not have existed if Clinton had become president. The code word here is “revolution,” and it always must emerge in opposition to something. Trump is the better opponent.My point with all this is that I look to Beethoven’s music for hope, because it was truly revolutionary in every sense of the word—its forms, its relationship to tonality, and, of course (!) its dialectical relationship to the French Revolution. His music is living proof that spirit cannot be extinguished. Beethoven during his lifetime (1770-1827) witnessed the rise and delay of the possibility of freedom, and this had a profound impact on his development as a composer. In no other body of music can one bear witness to such dizzying moments of hope and despair.The Eroica asked what it would mean if a particular interval resolved upward instead of downward, allowing the listener to observe as the status quo of form was broken apart before their very ears, melodies conversing and intertwining, down literally becoming up. The fugue of the op. 110 piano sonata contemplates, among other things, what would unfold if a theme was inverted, played as its own negative. The counterpoint and orchestration of the “Harp” quartet is sublime, especially in the last 90 seconds of its first movement, which contains gestures that continue to legitimately blow my mind. The late quartets investigated tonality to its full potential, so much so, in fact, that most music for the following 75 years was a form of sublimation, trying to catch up to what Beethoven did. This is distilled in Josef Danhauser’s 1840 painting Liszt at the Piano, which shows Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt playing at the keyboard under the consterned bust of his great predecessor, a symbol of Beethoven’s domination of all of his 19th century pupils.To invoke the opening to this essay: What is music about? It is about humanity and possibility. It is an image of ourselves in which the rules do not have to apply, allowing us to work through our desires, our fears, our fantasies, and our losses. I conceived of this playlist as covering a range of classical works that I consider to have significant moments of beauty and freedom, but due to the lengths of the movements I would have selected, as well as the fact that for me, Beethoven is *the* subjective composer, I decided to make this a Beethoven Essentials, of sorts. These are some of his most inspiring flourishes of autonomy. I have listened to Beethoven this week because, if we were living in a sonata form, we would be in the development. There has been a thesis and an anti-thesis, and there is hope. Things are changing, whether we like it or not. It is up to us to determine how we recapitulate.

Mere minutes before sitting down to write this post, Dais Records announced its plan to drop reissues of Psychic TV’s Pagan Day and Allegory & Self—stone-cold classics of ’80s psychedelia—in July. This is exactly the kind of record nerd–salivating news I’ve come to expect from label co-founders Ryan Martin and Gibby Miller (who started the operation in 2007). On what feels like a weekly basis nowadays, they revive some long-forgotten synth/ambient masterpiece or a vintage industrial jam that’s exquisitely dark and dreary. If you’ve never soaked up Annie Anxiety’s Soul Possession, a fringe art-pop album from the post-punk era, prepare to have your skull cap unscrewed and brain turned upside down. (Seriously—“Turkey Girl” manages to sound like outsider hip-hop recorded inside an intestinal tract.) Same goes for Hunting Lodge’s Will. It may have been forged in the raging fires of Michigan’s ’80s industrial scene, yet its hell-encrusted hypnotism, stuttering bass thuds, and minimalist dread is so damn prescient, it may as well have been recorded yesterday.Dais isn’t just an archival label, however. In the spring of 2017, the pair unleashed The Gag File, American noise artist Aaron Dilloway’s highly anticipated follow-up to 2011’s Modern Jester. Easily a contender for experimental album of the year, it employs murky, surrealist electronics and violently contorted samples to capture the fear and loathing suffusing our Trumplandia nightmare. In addition to Dilloway, the Dais 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.But 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. To date, they’ve released two albums from Scout Paré-Phillips (pictured), a gothic singer/songwriter whose imposingly austere sound falls somewhere between folk music and art rock. At first blush, Drab Majesty’s gauzy and undulating darkwave feels worlds removed from Paré-Phillips’ guitar-driven theater, but when you sit down and spend some quality time with the former’s Careless and The Demonstration, it becomes apparent both explorers share a love for intricate songwriting with lyrics balancing the cryptic with the emotional. Quite honestly, most modern darkwave artists don’t even come close to touching Drab Majesty in terms of compositional originality. Then again, most modern experimental labels don’t even come close to touching Dais in terms of quality, so it’s a perfect fit.

All my conversations with electronic-music heads have had a common theme recently: Everyone agrees that there was little consensus in dance music this year. It’s been that way for a while, really. Every year, there are more scenes running in parallel, fewer standout anthems that everybody can agree on. But this year, even dance music’s broad, diffuse overground felt scattered. Plenty of reliable figures kept doing what they do best—Four Tet and the Caribou side project Daphni turned out well-regarded albums, for instance—but aside, perhaps, from Bicep, there were few emergent artists with wide crossover appeal.The good news, though, is that there were plenty of pockets of brilliance across the underground, both in terms of micro-scenes and individual artists boldly blazing their own paths. In terms of the former, the most exciting was a nameless corner of the UK bass spectrum, largely headquartered in Bristol, encompassing labels like Hemlock, Hessle Audio, Timedance, Livity Sound, and Whities. Even here, there’s no single rhythmic signature or sonic feature that unites them all, the way there is with dubstep or techno. Instead, it’s a shared predilection for highly abstracted sound design, deliriously drawn-out patterns, and twisted arrangements that turn on a dime. Minor Science’s shuddering, jewel-toned “Volumes,” Mosca’s wild, whip-cracking Latin-dub raver “Peyote Stitch,” and Batu’s feverishly repetitive “Murmur” were all standouts here, alongside stellar tracks from Lanark Artefax, Airhead, Ploy, Hodge, Parris, and the artist known simply as Joe.If that’s the “scenius” end of things, the genius end was just as fruitful. Confidently sailing far beyond the known limits of Chicago footwork, Jlin continued to melt minds with her own brand of dazzlingly polyrhythmic, ultra-vivid, triplet-riddled club tracks. Laurel Halo, never one to repeat herself two records in a row, hit upon the strangest, squishiest sounds she’s conjured yet—an enveloping amalgam of funk, affectless electro-pop, and musique concrete. Errorsmith, designer of Native Instruments’ popular software synth Razor, put his creation through its paces on a head-spinningly intricate album of synthesized percussion and needling sound design that, despite its wanton experimentalism, is also one of the most giddily enjoyable records of the year. And as far as singularity of vision goes, few could touch Fever Ray, who returned from a eight-year absence with the brilliant, challenging, sometimes sexy and sometimes confounding Plunge. “IDK About You,” highlighted here, was one of its wiliest curveballs: a 160-BPM co-production with the young Portuguese batida producer Nídia Minaj (also included here with her own “Underground”) that put an unprecedentedly breathless spin on Karin Dreijer’s creepy, out-of-body pop.The link between electronic music and pop is practically as old as electronic music itself, but this year there were still artists who made the relationship feel fresh. The Korean-American singer/producer yaeji turned out a heady, low-lit fusion of house, ambient, and trap music. Sophia Kennedy, an American living in Hamburg, brought her experience writing music for the theater to an odd and deeply infectious album for DJ Koze’s Pampa label. And even TORRES, best known as an indie rocker, broke new ground on “To Be Given a Body,” the absorbing final track from her album Three Futures: It’s a captivating fusion of storytelling and wispy-yet-weighty ambient production, and I couldn’t stop listening to it this year, often cueing it up multiple times in a row. It’s an outlier on this list, but it also feels like a jumping-off point. Hopefully, 2018 will bring more songs like it—fresh energy and fresh ideas from artists way out on the margins of a deeply decentered genre.

Unlike Eminem fictionalizing his rap-battle life in 8 Mile, or JAY-Z pumping his hustler memoirs behind Frank Lucas story in American Gangster, Kendrick Lamars contribution to the upcoming soundtrack for Black Panther appears to be more than just autobiographical inspiration. The first hint was Kendricks collabo with Vince Staples in a trailer, the second being "All the Stars" with labelmate SZA. The newest single, "Kings Dead," features K Dot, Jay Rock, Future, and James Blake tipping the cap to Wakandas monarchy. And though Run the Jewels has been saluted by Marvel in print and featured in one Black Panther trailer with their banger "Legend Has It," Kendrick was a natural choice for curating the official soundtrack, given that his loyalty ‘n’ royalty theme "DNA." echoes the philisophies of Chadwick Boseman’s TChalla, the lone king of a country who sometimes kicks ass with The Avengers when not leading the most technologically advanced nation in the Marvel universe.Hip-hop artists have long used movie soundtracks to catapult some of the biggest hits of their careers, from Public Enemys "Fight the Power" in the 80s, to Coolios "Gangstas Paradise" in the 90s, to JAY-Zs "La La La" in the 00s. The Bad Boys II soundtrack, for example, was helmed by Puff Daddy to exploit the roster of early-’00s Bad Boy Records, while the previously mentioned 8 Mile and 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Trying corraled some outside rappers within a mostly Shady/Aftermath/Interscope package. In honor of Black Panther’s arrival, this playlist celebrates 30 years of hip-hop soundtrack hits, from the "left it off the album and we needed a home for it" variety to the "worldwide platinum single that just happened to be attached to a movie” kind.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist right here.Within the ever-evolving world of Latin music, we’ve seen some sensational moments and headline-grabbing spectacles in 2016. Colombian urban powerhouse J Balvin solidified himself as the reigning king of the new reggaetón movement via the skyrocketing Energía; Marc Anthony and J.Lo stunned global audiences with their surprise reunion at this year’s Latin GRAMMYS with a tropical rendition of Pimpinela’s “Olvídame y pega la vuelta” (and their now-infamous kiss!); our beloved Mexican legend Juan Gabriel passed away too soon yet left behind a charming duets document, Los Dúo 2, starring everyone in Latin music and their mothers (well, not really, but you get the point). Because these buzzed-about folks and their 2016 material are doing so well without our help, having a spot secured in nearly every big publication out there, we’ve decided to spotlight some sparkly hidden gems, exciting artists worthy of your discovery, and killer songs you might have missed by respectable acts. And boy, do these 50 Best Tracks resonate loudly in our hearts.Spunky electro-pop wunderkinds Alex Anwandter, Cineplexx, and Selma Oxor kept things intriguingly hyperactive through iridescent synths and a dash of mystery. Hypnotic electro-tropical masterminds Systema Solar, Compass, and Orkesta Mendoza continued to bend the boundaries of cumbia and folkloric sounds via their dashing experimentalism and love of tradition. Alt-norteño took the throne in unconventionalism in the good hands of regional Mexican iconoclasts Juan Cirerol and Helen Ochoa while staying true to form. Debaucherous punk made waves across borders through the awesomely cacophonic powerchords of daredevils AJ Davila, Sexy Zebras, and Los Nastys. For our utter excitement, we also saw the return of alternative rock royalty Café Tacvba, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, and Andrés Calamaro. Oh, and not to mention 2016 also brought us surprisingly killer renditions delivered by the likes of Mexrrissey and Vanessa Zamora. Here are the 50 most riveting tracks hailing from indie and non-conformist Latinx acts. Happy listening!