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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 this series, After the Election. The following text is a transcript of an e-mail to a friend that accompanied the playlist. Hey Jordan,Sorry that it has taken me so long to write this to you. Since I last saw you, things have been a bit crazy, for all of us, I guess. I’m glad to hear that you’re doing well. I was worried, at first, with you being in Texas, but I’m glad to hear that Austin remains a solid blue fortress. I know you mentioned that you were into Run the Jewels, but hadn’t dug into any of El-P’s solo work, so I’ve made you a playlist of his early work. You can find it here. As a note, I had to make a Youtube playlist since his earlier work is not on any streaming services. So, I’ve been listening to El-P’s music in various incarnations for nearly 20 years. At first, I lumped him in with the other abstract/heady/sci-fi emcees of that era — Del the Funky Homosapien, MF DOOM, Kool Keith, et al — but that doesn’t feel accurate now. Those guys were walking, rapping therasuses or science books, and tapped into a grimey-but-essentially-goofy thread of afrofuturism where robots and aliens are cool, and people talk in polysyllabic rhymes. For El-P, the idea of unseen universes didn’t carry so much a promise of escape (as it traditionally does for afrofuturism), as it represented an opaque, existential threat, and his lyrical density was more of a textural element.Impenetrability was the point. The occasional Marxist-tinged slogan or Philip Dick reference would surface, but you didn’t need to unpack all of El-P’s clustered alliteration to understand that things were fucked and scary. There’s a sense of vulnerability when he describes drones hovering over Brooklyn, or builds a narrative around the idea of a factory that manufactures abusive stepfathers, or describes a Nazi theme park. Like he raps on “Tuned Mass Damper,” "Motherfucker, does this sound abstract?/ I hope that it sounded more confusing than that."The first album that I ever professionally reviewed was El-P’s solo debut, Fantastic Damage. The album came out in May, 2002 — a few months after the attacks on the Twin Towers — and it’s hard to overstate how important it was to many of us. There are those who’ve pointed out the similarities between 9/11 and this election — the collective shock, a sense of unreality, the helplessness and fear we feel. But there are also differences. After 9/11, culture as we know it shut down. We were urged to pull together, irony was declared dead, dissent quashed, and, for the sake of our safety and our nation, monoculture reinstated. Neil Young tried to heal us during a marathon for dead firemen. My roommate foisted an American flag outside of our apartment. For months, things were like this: patriotic country songs and overwrought rock anthems. We’d all come together collectively, as a nation, and it was weird as fuck. Fantastic Damage — with its throughlines of static; lo-fi rumble; crusty, cacophonous boom bap; and jerky, noisey funk — was an anecdote to the sanguine. Every word that El-P rapped rang true, even the ones I couldn’t understand, which were a lot of them. It validated a lot of the confusion and darkness and paranoia we felt. It contained no answers, per se, but it was enough to know that there were others who felt like they were walking through the world with a gun held to our heads (see the video for “Deep Space 9mm”).I’ve returned to those early albums since the election. Honestly, Run the Jewels feels more appropriate now. It’s cleaner, clearer, and more focused in its dissent; its anger is cut through with liberal doses of humor and levity. Killer Mike is a moderating force for El-P. Fantastic Damage feels like an ugly artifact unearthed from a dark time capsule. Maybe we don’t need to open that, yet.Anyway, I hope you’re well. I finished that Emma Cline book. I was wrong and you were right: It’s good. The prose in the first 50 pages was really verbose and overworked. It felt like she had something to prove, as a young, first-time novelist. But once it settled in, it was pretty great. The Suzanne character felt well-developed and original. I liked that issues of gender and sexuality were present, but kept at arms length; it made them feel more powerful. Did you finish Savage Detectives? I’ve been thinking about rereading 2666. Last night, I read Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s The Last Wolf. It’s only one sentence long, but that sentence lasts for 75 pages. So, yeah, I hope you’re doing well. Write me back and let know what’s up.Best,Sam

In his book Terminated for Reasons of Taste, seasoned rock critic Chuck Eddy sought to articulate the ways in which the currents of the pop music industry are in many ways cyclical, despite the ever-changing political and cultural realities of our great country. His justifications/excerpts related to each piece are generally historical, dealing with charts and accolades and weird aspects of the music, but his writing is most interesting when he discloses his own experiences. In one anecdote, Eddy discusses an event in 1987 where two of the Beastie Boys dissed him for his hipster style and then broke into his hotel room in the middle of the night and dumped a wastebasket of “extremely wet water” on his head. These songs act as a guide to the unique taste of Chuck Eddy, for which he was apparently terminated. -- Adam Rothbarth

In 2017, the perpetually restless and increasingly prolific post-punk veterans Wire released their 16th album, Silver/Lead, and hosted three editions of their roving curated festival DRILL (in Los Angeles, Leeds, and Berlin). Here, the bands main singer/guitarist Colin Newman reveals the songs that inspired him most this past year. "A list of a few things that have been catching my ear this year. Some artists will be on everyone’s list, some will be on no one’s! It includes one artist celebrating his 50th (10 more than Wire!), one artist who actually thinks Michael McDonald is cool, one band who played in DRILL : LA, and one person who played in the pinkflag guitar orchestra, oh and the best band in Brighton (my hometown) right now. You don’t need me to tell you it’s been an unsettling year but luckily not for music."—Colin Newman of WireNote: Colin also wanted to include Wands "Plum," but it isnt available on Spotify.Photo: Mike Hipple

Photograph: Misha Vladimirskiy/FilterlessAs one of the most unbridled voices in rap today, Danny Brown can come off as something of an attention-starved maniac to the uninitiated. But get past the gritty hood politics, blacked-out benders, and turbulent fuckfests, and Browns music reveals itself to be largely about the pained, confused loss of one’s innocence. His lyrics are as dotted with old-school street poetics as they are ridiculously turnt up hedonism, and Brown confronts the addictive, drug-fueled culture of his native Detroit upbringing with an attitude that is both relentlessly eager and utterly horrified at itself. For all his delirious energy, hes an incredibly sentimental artist, a rapper whose braggadocio-filled nights tend to end with a sad, self-loathing walk home. A genuine wildcard with a taste for heavy atmospherics (the man is a self-professed Radiohead fanboy), Brown draws inspiration from the party animals and outcasts who bear a solemn knowledge of the brutal side of life in the city, and who refuse to let that darkness interfere with their good time. -- Sam Goldner

According to one account, disco was born on Valentines Day, 1970, in New York City. It certainly couldnt have come at a better time. Nixon had been president for a little over a year; the Vietnam War was dragging on, and the unrest of the 60s had settled in like a hangovers dull throb. Some groups had it worse than others: In New York, it was still illegal for two men to dance together, and while the Stonewall Riots of the previous year had helped kick a nascent gay-rights movement into gear, undercover cops were still busting gays, lesbians, and transsexuals in dimly lit bars.So you can understand why a young, bearded bohemian named David Mancuso wrote "Love Saves the Day" on invitations announcing a private party at his home, a loft in a former warehouse in a deserted corner of lower Manhattan. A little positive energy was needed. A safe space was sorely needed—space to dance, space to socialize, and space simply to be oneself. ("Love Saves the Day" might also have been a way of hinting at the mystery ingredient in the punchbowl, but what world-changing musical event hasnt come with its own social lubricant?)Mancusos private party eventually became a regular shindig, known simply as the Loft. Its trappings became legendary: the scores of multicolored balloons hugging the ceiling and bobbing along the floor; the sumptuous fruit spread; the Klipschorn speakers, so clear that listeners heard details in records theyd never noticed before. Two elements above all were paramount: the mixed crowd—a joyfully nonhierarchical sampling of sexualities, genders, ethnicities, and social classes—and the music, chosen and sequenced according to Mancusos own impeccable instincts.And while it wasnt a club, by any stretch of the imagination—for one thing, the Loft remained a members-only event, and strictly BYOB—in its focus on the music and the crowd, its attempt to carve out a refuge from the pressures of the outside world, the Loft established the blueprint for the discotheque and the modern nightclub. Thats not to say that many modern clubs live up to the example set by the Loft; most dont. (As Mancuso himself told Red Bull Music Academy in 2013, "For me the core [idea behind the Loft] is about social progress. How much social progress can there be when youre in a situation that is repressive? You wont get much social progress in a nightclub"; for Mancuso, the non-profit motive was crucial to preserving a venues liberatory potential.)Mancuso didnt call himself a DJ; he preferred to be known as a "musical host," and somewhere along the line, he even stopped blending his transitions, simply letting each song play out in full before starting the next one. But the open-mindedness of his selections helped establish disco, at least before it codified into an oonce-oonce beat, as a zone of possibility rather than a narrowly defined genre, and that message continues to resonate with DJs today. This Spotify playlist gathers more than 100 songs that Mancuso played at the Loft: deep, ecstatic funk (Wars "Me and Baby Brother," The J.B.s "Gimme Some More"), African funk (Manu Dibangos "Soul Makossa," a song Mancuso popularized), classic soul (Al Greens "Love and Happiness"), house music (Fingers Inc.s "Mystery of Love"), even folk-rock (Van Morrisons "Astral Weeks"). No playlist can replicate the way he played the music, though, juxtaposing songs to play up their lyrical themes, or building intensity as the party crept toward dawn.In Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979, Tim Lawrence asks various New York DJs who came in Mancusos wake if they had ever danced at the Loft. "Time and again," he writes, "they would describe Mancuso as their most important influence, a musical messiah who also happened to resemble Jesus Christ."That messiah died on November 14, 2016, after a protracted illness, at the age of 72. It seems a cruel irony that he should leave us now, precisely when safe spaces, both real and metaphorical, suddenly feel more necessary than ever, their survival even more precarious. His followers can only hope that love might save the day once more.

On August 20, Frank Ocean released his first full-length work in four years (two if you count the soundtrack for the Endless visual album). As Blonde (alternately spelled as Blond) reached Apple Music, Ocean organized giveaways of a limited-edition magazine, Boys Don’t Cry, at four pop-up shops around the globe. A page in the magazine lists Blonde contributors, inspirations, and sample sources; as of this writing, it’s the only evidence of official album credits he’s given us so far.As a result, half of this playlist references Blonde guests such as Beyonce, Kendrick Lamar, Andre 3000, and Tyler, the Creator, and session players like Om’mas Keith of Sa-Ra Creative Partners. However, the other half of the list attempts to deduce how Ocean created his new album’s dense computer washes and hazy, amniotic sound. Thanks to the aforementioned Boys Don’t Cry tip sheet, we know that Brian Eno’s ambient explorations, Jonny Greenwood’s moody soundtracks, and Jamie xx’s melancholy club tracks make up his sources. There are parallels to Bradford Cox of Deerhunter’s fluid sexuality and adolescent anomie, Raury’s blend of airy indie-rock and conscious rap, Julee Cruise’s ethereal “Falling” theme for Twin Peaks, and Mazzy Star’s essential ode to long California drives with nothing to think about, “Fade Into You.” In total, this collection of gospel, electronic, rap, pop and rock numbers are a varied contrast to Blonde’s washed-out haze. Think of Ocean as a good chef who reduced dozens of ingredients into a tonally consistent and thought-provoking work.

This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at the far-reaching, decades-long impact of disco. Curious about disco and want to learn more? Go here to sign up. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. They’ll thank you. We thank you.Panicked by the backlash and other problems caused by disco’s market oversaturation, most of the big record labels had abruptly shuttered their dance-music departments by the end of the decade. Yet they overlooked something that should’ve been obvious: A whole lot of people hadn’t tossed out their boogie shoes.And so those dancers found new havens in places like the Paradise Garage, where DJs like Larry Levan and François Kevorkian fostered new innovations in the art of the mix. In so doing, they inspired musicians to try their own experiments in disco science. One Paradise Garage regular was a downtown cellist and composer named Arthur Russell who began releasing a more avidly peculiar brand of dance music under names like Loose Joints and Dinosaur L. Elsewhere in New York, punks and no-wavers developed their own take, with labels like ZE Records and 99 Records becoming hotbeds for the “mutant disco” sound pioneered by acts like ESG (pictured) and Liquid Liquid. Meanwhile, hip-hop began its move from the Bronx to Manhattan, the first step in a burgeoning revolution.Back in the overground, labels like SOLAR and acts like Shalamar and the S.O.S. Band ruled the radio with a shiny, synth-heavy sound that bridged the gulf between disco and the urban pop that would define the new decade. A 1979 masterpiece that built something shiny and new out of the old aesthetic, Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall had already shown what was possible. Rick James and Prince had their breakouts next. In Chicago, DJs and producers found new ways to sate their dancers’ undimmed appetites for disco by integrating the sounds they wanted with Italo disco and electro, and the result became known as house. Meanwhile, a New York club kid named Madonna was paying very close attention to everything that was going down.As wild and adventurous and modern as this music could be, all of it had disco in its DNA. And as this playlist of post-disco essentials demonstrates, many of these mutations have proven to be just as hardy.

This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at the far-reaching, decades-long impact of disco. Curious about disco and want to learn more? Go here to sign up. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. They’ll thank you. We thank you.Over the course of 1975 and 1976, disco was most definitely ascendant as radio programmers and DJs fed the new appetites and clubs competed to have the most advanced sound systems and the largest glitter balls. The apex was reached in 1977 as Studio 54 swiftly became not only the most famous disco in New York, but the world, too. Later the same year (and well into the next), Saturday Night Fever turned America into a land of wannabe Tony Maneros in tight-fitting white suits, strutting down every street to the ubiquitous sound of the Bee Gees’ soundtrack.At its worst, disco in its imperial phase was a whitewash of the dance music that preceded it, the blandest examples removing soul’s passion and funk’s hardness. But the foremost practitioners—like Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, also architects of hits for Diana Ross and Sister Sledge—made music of indisputable sophistication. It could be also be cheekily subversive, like when French producer Jacques Morali cast a series of hunks, dressed them up as gay archetypes of the era and somehow sold the Village People to Middle America.Like all parties, this one couldn’t last forever. By 1979, disco suffered a fatal counter-attack by its haters, i.e., the white dudes whose traditional position of privilege was threatened by a cultural surge that was so strongly female, African-American, and gay. But no matter how many records they tried to blow up in baseball parks, there was no way to erase the mark made by so many of the tracks on this 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. Like the most challenging art, the music of Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 masterpiece To Pimp a Butterfly teaches you how to listen to it. Its production is dense and layered, drawing in strains of jazz, funk, blues, and hip-hop, and though squishing genres together is not new, per se, other fusionists tended to reduce the elements of each sound to, more times than not, populist beats and smooth melodies. TPAB, on the other hand, throws the boldest, loudest, and brashest elements of each genre against one another. It can be jarring and even disorienting.It’s an appropriate backdrop for Kendrick’s lyrics, which are knotty, neurotic, and, ultimately, transcendent. Those elements—anger, despair, empathy, and hope—have been present in protest anthems from “We Shall Overcome” to Beyoncé’s “Formation,” but they generally don’t converge in one song or one album. And, even less frequently, do the songs implicate their author, or blur the line between subject and the object.This is a new form of protest music, one where (to borrow a phrase from second-wave feminism) the personal is political, and the political is personal. In this new strain of agitprop, Kendrick is our most reliable narrator; he acknowledges the ambiguity, and he inhabits his stories rather than tells them to us. The moments of uplift—the chorus of “Alright,” or the first half of “i”—feel hard-won and authentic. He sounds like a savior, but, sometimes, he talks like a killer.Contradiction is a byproduct of this era. Our lives are endlessly complex, but we reject nuance. We’re globally interconnected, but locally isolated. We reject the weight of history, but still live in its shadow and play by its unspoken (and often unacknowledged) rules. All of us negotiate these things, in small and large ways, and Kendrick is no different. He’s just more talented than most of us, and perhaps a bit more honest.To Pimp a Butterfly resonated with so many of us because not only was it such a frank negotiation of these conflicted themes—identity, allegiance, history, and duty—but also because it’s a personal testimony, grounded in a very specific set of circumstances. Some of the catalysts for the album are obvious—the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown; Kendrick’s well-documented hardscrabble upbringing in Compton; the continual spectre of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and police brutality—but there are also largely hidden stories that explain the context and headspace that birthed TPAB.The process for creating TPAB was familiar to anyone who’s worked with Kendrick: endless ideation, constant revision, and precise execution. “We did good kid [m.A.A.d City] about three, four times before the world got to it… new songs, new everything. I wanted to tell that story, but I had to execute it,” Kendrick recalls. “My whole thing is about execution. The songs can be great, the hooks can be great, but if it’s not executed well, then it’s not a great album.”The process for TPAB was similarly painstaking, and had begun even before the release of its predecessor. “Good kid, m.A.A.d city wasn’t even printed up, and already he’s doing brainstorms for the new album,” Sounwave remembers.“We recorded 60 to 80 tracks for this album over the three years, and Kendrick tried many different concepts and approaches,” go-to TDE engineer Derek Ali shared in June 2015. “The final direction began to emerge in the last year and a half or so, with most of the tracks written and played from the ground up.”One of the earlier sessions for the recording took place during Kendrick’s 2013 stint as opener on Kanye’s Yeezus tour. Kendrick had enlisted L.A. producer, DJ, and multimedia artist Flying Lotus to help out with his light show, and, during the process, FlyLo had slipped him a “folder of beats.” As the producer recalls, “Later that night he told me he had the concept for the album.”While FlyLo speculates that Kendrick rapped over every one of his beats, most of the recordings never made it to the album, and he only ended up with one production credit, albeit a very significant one with album opener “Wesley’s Theory.” That song begins with an invocation of sorts, a sample of the chorus from Boris Gardiner’s smooth jazz track “Every Nigger is a Star.” Afterwards, Kendrick assumes the stereotype of a newly minted rap star—“Ima buy a brand new Caddy on fours/ Trunk the hood up, two times, deuce-four/ Platinum on everything, platinum on wedding ring”—before transitioning to the persona of Uncle Sam, a familiar symbol who’s transformed here from an icon of oppression to a consumerist pimp: “What you want? You a house or a car?/ Forty acres and a mule, a piano, a guitar?/ Anything, see, my name is Uncle Sam, Im your dog/ Motherfucker, you can live at the mall.”From the inception of the album, Kendrick knew that the struggle he articulated would be a personal one, and would reflect his own battles with temptation and identity. “One thing I learned, from when you in the limelight: Anything that you have a vice for is at your demand, times 10 and it can kill you,” Kendrick said in 2012.But the album’s creation would be halted as Kendrick wrestled with a set of personal tragedies. In 2013, three close friends were gunned down in Los Angeles, seemingly one after another. Kendrick remembers being on tour, leaving the stage, where he “faced the madness, and gets these calls … three of my homeboys that summertime was murdered, close ones. Psychologically, it messes your brain up. I got to get off this tour bus and go to funerals.”On one hand, Kendrick was touring behind one of the best-received hip-hop albums of the decade in good kid, m.A.A.d city, but he was also tasked with going back to Compton to attend the funerals of loved ones. Kendrick captured this turmoil on the YG song “Really Be (Smokin N Drinkin)” from 2014: “Im on this tour bus and Im fucked up, I got a bad call/ They killed Braze, they killed Chad, my big homie Pup/ Puppy eyes in my face, bruh, and Ive really been drinkin/ Muthafucka, I really been smokin, what the fuck? Im the sober one/ Man, Im so stressed out, I cant focus.”

Chad Keaton’s loss, in particular, was difficult for Kendrick to handle. "He was like my little brother; we grew up in the same community," he says. "I was actually best friends with his older brother, who is incarcerated right now. And him just always telling me to make sure that Chad is on the right path. And, you know, he was on the right path. But, you know, things happen where sometimes the good are in the wrong places, and thats exactly what happened. He got shot … when Chad was killed, I cant disregard the emotion of me relapsing and feeling the same anger that I felt when I was 16, 17—when I wanted the next family to hurt, because you made my family hurt. Them emotions were still running in me, thinking about him being slain like that. Whether Im a rap star or not, if I still feel like that, then Im part of the problem rather than the solution."

Kendrick + ChadGiven his harrowing childhood, there’s a good chance that Kendrick suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s not alone. According to Howard Spivak M.D, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Violence Prevention, PTSD is rampant among inner-city youth. Some studies have cited that one in three youth live with it. “Youth living in inner cities show a higher prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder than soldiers,” Spivak commented. And, unlike war zones, most children in these areas are never able to escape. Those that do, carry their own scars.One related condition that Kendrick has been very outspoken about is the idea of survivors guilt, a complex that occurs when a person believes they are at fault for surviving a traumatic event. It was first identified in Holocaust survivors who didn’t understand how they escaped when so many of their friends and family members died in the gas chambers. “How can I be a voice for all these people around the world, and not reach them that are closest to me?,” Kendrick wondered.In addition to the problems at home, Kendrick was having issues adjusting to his newfound fame and wealth. Throughout 2013, Kendrick’s feelings of isolation and displacement intensified, and his unease with the space he now occupied was nearly crippling. The transition was jarring and cannot be understated. "Im going to be 100 per cent real with you," Kendrick shares. "In all my days of schooling, from preschool all the way up to 12th grade, there was not one white person in my class. Literally zero… Youre around people you dont know how to communicate with. You dont speak the same lingo. It brings confusion and insecurity. Questioning how did I get here, what am I doing?"And his interactions with the black kids that were bused in from other areas more affluent than Compton were jarring. “I went over to some of their houses … and it was a whole ‘nother world,” Kendrick says. “Family pictures of them in suits and church clothes up everywhere. Family-oriented. Eatin’ together at the table. We ate around the TV. Stuff like that—I didn’t know nothin’ about. Eatin’ without your elbows on the table? I’m lookin’ around like, ‘What is goin’ on?!’ I came home and asked my mama, ‘Why we don’t eat ’round the table?’ Then I just keep goin’, always askin’ questions. I think that’s when I started to see the lifestyle around us.“You always think that everybody live like you do, because you locked in the neighborhood, you don’t see no way else … You can’t change where you from. You can’t take a person out of their zone and expect them to be somebody else now that they in the record industry. It’s gonna take years. Years of traveling. Years of meeting people. Years of seeing the world.”Luckily, Kendrick would soon get to see a very important part of the world for him. In late 2013, he did a brief tour of Africa, an experience that changed his life. It helped him understand himself—where he’s from and even where he was going. “I felt like I belonged in Africa,” says Lamar. “I saw all the things that I wasnt taught. Probably one of the hardest things to do is put [together] a concept on how beautiful a place can be, and tell a person this while theyre still in the ghettos of Compton. I wanted to put that experience in the music.”He traveled the Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban, among other places. This had huge implications for his music. According to his go-to engineer, Derek Ali, Kendrick scrapped “two or three albums worth of material.” But more than being just about subtraction, the excursion inspired a whole new suite of songs. The iconic track “Alright” has its roots in that trip. The song’s chant, “we gonna be alright,” was sparked from witnessing people’s struggles in the country.Traveling in a black-dominated continent brought into stark relief many of the symptoms of American oppression. “Complexion (A Zulu Love)” deals with the idea of colorism—that people within the same race or ethnicity can discriminate based on the shading of the skin. "Theres a separation between the light and the dark skin because its just in our nature to do so, but were all black,” Kendrick says. “This concept came from South Africa and I saw all these different colors speaking a beautiful language."But even beyond the lyrics, the idea of unity informed the sound of the album. Just as Western culture draws lines between skin types, it also needlessly segments black music. Lead producer for TPAB, Terrace Martin, explains the approach: “I kinda don’t like saying jazz no more when it comes to TPAB. It’s throwing everybody off because we haven’t had a real black record in about 20 years with real black music and real black people doing the music, and people who understand that we’re under attack everyday who show up to do the music… that album is just black, it’s not funk. It’s not jazz. It’s black.”[caption id="attachment_10843" align="alignnone" width="576"]

Kendrick in Africa[/caption]But more than being the birthplace of any given song, the Africa trip helped heal Kendrick and gave TPAB a focus. “The overall theme of [TPAB] is leadership,” Kendrick later said, “[and] using my celebrity for good.” This came into focus when Kendrick visited the jail cell in Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was locked away for 18 of his 27 years behind bars. The experience taught him the value of resistance and resilience, and it helped him understand his role as a leader in his community as well as in the larger world.“I’m not speaking to the community,” Kendrick says. “I’m not speaking of the community. I am the community.”It’s difficult to overstate the impact of the album that came from these two very different experiences. TPAB debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and would go platinum. It received nearly unanimous critical acclaim—Rolling Stone, Billboard, Pitchfork, Spin, The Guardian, Complex, Consequence of Sound, and Vice all named it their album of the year—and it would go on to win the Best Rap album at the GRAMMYS. (It was nominated for Album of the Year, though GRAMMY voters felt that Taylor Swift’s 1999 was a more worthy recipient.) The Harvard University Library archived it alongside Nas Illmatic, A Tribe Called Quests The Low End Theory, and Lauryn Hills The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.It certainly wasn’t the first “woke” album, but it set the stage for the budding social consciousness of an entire generation. It also established Kendrick as a generational spokesman, and earned him a visit to the White House, where he met another African American who was also wrestling with issues of identity, experience, and power."I was talking to Obama," Kendrick says, "and the craziest thing he said was, Wow, how did we both get here? Blew my mind away. I mean, its just a surreal moment when you have two black individuals, knowledgeable individuals, but who also come from these backgrounds where they say well never touch ground inside these floors."Related Reading:The Narrative Guide to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a ButterflyTo Pimp a Butterfly Album Review—Dead End Hip-HopFlying Lotus Details His "To Pimp A Butterfly" InvolvementHere’s A Timeline Of Everything That Led Up To Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A ButterflyKendrick Lamar Breaks Down the Making of To Pimp a ButterflyKendrick Lamar: "I was DRAGGED off the street & FORCED into the studio" (2017)Kendrick Lamar, By David Chappelle Real Talk | Producers Talk Making Kendrick Lamars "To Pimp a Butterfly"SaveSaveSaveSave

In September 2017, Enter Shikari released their fifth album, The Spark, which saw the British post-hardcore experimentlists foreground the synth-pop sounds that have always been an undercurrent in their work. It’s a move that makes even more sense once you hear what the band were blasting this year. “For us personally, 2017 was a game of two very distinct musical halves. We started the year looking backwards and touring in celebration of 10 years since the release of our debut album, and then halfway through the year we released what we would consider to be our most forward-thinking music so far.“While we were putting our list together, it became apparent that it’s been a good year for great music. It’s probably been a good year for shit music too, but we haven’t been listening to that. It’s always amazing how some people can still release new music from beyond the grave. Still, were glad they did.“This is a list of music released this year that we’ve been enjoying, from the smooth tones of Brian Eno to help with mindfulness, to the big bangers like Astroid Boys.”—Enter Shikari