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Sometimes I wish I’d had a cooler childhood. Many of my friends have neat stories about discovering The Smiths at age 13 or getting drunk and listening to Springsteen (which I certainly do, but it’s for a different reason when you’re 30). My experiences were a little different. Sure, my dad used to play Electric Light Orchestra and Supertramp vinyls when we would clean the house and Paul Simon and B.B. King cassettes when we went on drives, which was awesome and formative, but most of my meaningful early experiences with music were with the classical music my grandparents and teachers would tell me about.A lot of my childhood was spent alone at the piano. After school, on weekends, when I would fake being sick so I could stay home alone with it, I revelled in the time I had with the instrument. I would play whatever I could get my hands on, as long as I liked it. My grandparents, who were very passionate about all kinds of music, would buy me CDs of famous works performed by illustrious pianists and conductors, and I would fall in love with certain sonatas or movements, sometimes buying the scores but usually printing them out from illegal sheet music sites in my high school library, daydreaming about them until I could go home and work on them. I loved Chopin’s nocturnes and Beethoven’s sonatas, Joplin’s rags and Ravel’s chamber music. I grew to love Serkin, Horowitz, Rubenstein, Bernstein, Goode, Abbado, Toscanini—so many great pianists and conductors.In addition to the piano I began playing saxophone when I was about 10. When I entered high school I decided to start taking lessons and I somehow made it into the studio of the St. Louis Symphony bass clarinet player James Meyer. Mr. Meyer taught me a tremendous amount about a whole range of cool things, such as zen meditation, martial arts defense moves, how to select and prepare reeds, and, most importantly, how to think about music. He exposed me to jazz, playing me my first real jazz record. It was Oliver Nelson’s 1961 Blues and the Abstract Truth, a hard bop masterpiece with unreal orchestration and elegant solos. I remember very clearly feeling like it was the dopest shit I’d ever heard. I bought the CD the following day at Borders. He also taught me about modern and postmodern music, from Debussy to John Adams. We played through everything we could.One summer Mr. Meyer was playing in the pit orchestra for a production of John Adams’ excellent 1987 opera Nixon in China. He showed me some of the sheet music and explained what post-minimalism was about. He said it was one of the hardest pieces he had ever played. I knew nothing about Adams or opera, but when I told my grandparents about it, they insisted that I have the opportunity to see it. My grandfather and I went to see Nixon in China a few weeks later—I found it exhilarating, new, and inspiring, but as a lifelong Puccini and Verdi fan, he did not like it very much at all. To this day I sing arias from that opera to myself when I am alone. Maybe it’s not as cool to some people as singing Springsteen, but I still think it’s pretty fuckin’ rad.

Barack Obama was, among other firsts, the first POTUS who shared his listening habits with the public through Spotify playlists. And though he hasn’t personally curated any music selections since leaving the White House, his Chicago-based non-profit recently debuted the first iteration of Hometown, a collection of tracks handpicked by Chicagoans that remind them of home. Comedian Cameron Esposito opens the playlist with one Chicago band covering another, JC Brooks & The Uptown Sound putting an unlikely retro soul spin on Wilco’s fragile epic “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart.” But while songs from and/or about Chi-town dominate, not everyone is so literal with the theme; actor Nick Offerman picks two Tom Waits songs that remind him of his theater days in Chicago (neither of which is Waits’s 2011 track “Chicago”). Kanye West looms large over the playlist, with three curators picking his tracks. One is West’s young protege Chance The Rapper, who singles out the sweetly nostalgic “Family Business.” A few tracks later, President Obama’s former Deputy Press Secretary, Bill Burton, picks Chance’s own “Blessings,” with a tip of the hat to Chance’s father’s work on Obama’s first campaign. But despite some recurring threads, Hometown offers a pluralistic view of Chicago music, with equal room for Liz Phair and The Staple Singers.

Boasting more than 2,500 followers on Spotify, Jonathan Good has made quite a name for himself as an independent playlist curator — and for good reason. He possesses both a great ear for current pop trends and a knack for quirky, eye-catching themes. Simply look no further than If Darth Was a DJ. The pithy title is ingenious as it tells listeners exactly what they’re about to dive into: Thumping EDM, electro, and hip-hop suffused with dark, sci-fi vibes befitting a Sith Lord bent on galactic domination. It’s important to note that the music never turns too dark. Good, after all, is all about having fun and packs his massive tracklist with party jams from Daft Punk, Justice, Simian Mobile Disco, and many other acts popular with the Friday night club kids.

When I asked my hipster neighbors about the first things that come to mind when they think about indigenous cultures, they said the following: feathered headpieces, teepees, dream catchers, tobacco, ritualistic ceremonies, genocide, and the worship of mother nature. Not all these terms are positive, to say the least, and it’s important to recognize the centuries of historical oppression the native population has endured here in the U.S., as well as in other regions of the Americas. It is also utterly important to celebrate their rich, beautiful traditions -- traditions that respect life in all its forms. With the rise of social media, more and more indigenous artists are stepping into the spotlight, recounting their stories via songs with a modern spin, which is in itself an act of resistance. Ottawa Canada DJs A Tribe Called Red incorporate powerful powwow drum and chants into hard-hitting EDM, while Ecuadorian beatmaker Nicolá Cruz blends hypnotic Andes Step into his mix. Dakota rapper Frank Waln ferociously spits eye-opening tales that take place at the “rez” (or reservations), and Bolivian Quechua singer gets the ZZK treatment in her charango and zampoña-driven hymn. The artists, featured on this playlist, are multifaceted, inspiring, and sincere. Ultimately, the music empowers their tribes, their communities and the listener.

Anyone familiar with the writings of Haruki Murakami knows that he’s a massive music geek with a particular interest in jazz. From the beginning of his career, his books have been filled with musical references. He longed to be a musician way before becoming a writer but lacked the necessary chops. Instead, he ran his own jazz bar, immersing himself in music 24/7, and even after becoming a writer, he continued that immersion—music is a constant part of his environment when he’s working. His official website offers a tantalizing photo of his vinyl collection, which he estimates at more than 10,000 records, and he even published a pair of books containing his own essays on his favorite jazz artists.An enterprising soul named Masamaro Fujiki has taken it upon himself to tally up the tunes in Murakami’s collection into a massive Spotify playlist. In its current state, the playlist contains only a small portion of the music on the author’s shelves—but even that ends up in excess of 3,000 tracks. According to Fujiki, he based his playlist on a Q&A website Murakami put up a couple of years back and on his music essays. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the albums represented are jazz: Murakami’s tastes cycle between bop (Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young), cool (Stan Getz, Bud Shank), and vocalists (Beverly Kenney, copious amounts of Billie Holiday), which are interspersed with classical offerings (Prokofiev, Mozart, Tchaikovsky) and occasionally punctuated by a handful of rock records (The Beach Boys, CCR).If we take this to be an accurate sampling of Murakami’s collection, he definitely isn’t much of a modernist. He is, however, clearly capable of going deep when it comes to his chosen niches, as exemplified by the presence of obscure artists like Swedish sax man Lars Gullin and contemporary jazz vocalist Stacey Kent among all the icons. Fujiki has declared his intent to add more music to the list when he can, but in the meantime, what he’s already created is an impressive achievement—one that allows you to tune in to the celebrated author’s wavelength for a while and muse on the way his listening habits inform his singular literary style.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Vancouver power duo Japandroids kicked off 2017 with a big bang by releasing their biggest and boldest album yet, Near to the Wild Heart of Life, back in January. And if you caught the band on their subsequent never-ending world tour this year, then these songs may sound familiar… “For me, 2017 was a wild ride. I spent almost the entire year on tour—100 shows in 20 countries—so I was always on the move. There were highs, lows, and everything in-between, which is very typical of touring. If there was any one constant among all the craziness, it might be my pre-show playlist, which I listen to every night before we go on stage—you know, to get pumped up. I initially made this playlist in January, ahead of our first shows, and had every intention of keeping it the same throughout the year… but every so often, 2017 sent a undeniable jam my way, and thus some swapping inevitably occurred. And so while not all of these songs are from 2017, when I think back on the year in music, or at least my year in music, this is what I hear.”—Brian King of Japandroids

Shibuya-Kei is a subgenre of Japanese pop that originated in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. If you were a music nerd in the ‘90s, you probably remember Cibo Matto, Cornelius or Buffalo Daughter. The base of the music was 80s synthpop, but there was also a coat of shimmering guitars stubbled with quirky electronic flourishes and occasional forays into jazz or lounge. It was self-consciously cheeky music that occasionally teetered towards kitsch, and was viewed, by Western hipsters, with a tinge of exoticism. Birgitta has some wonderful playlist on her Spotify channel, and this one does a great job at capturing the genre’s oddness, thought it’s curious that she didn’t include Pizzicato Five.

In August 2017, indie rocker Jen Cloher released her self-titled record, which cracked the Top 5 on the album charts in her native Australia; she also received a great deal of exposure in North America when her song “Fear Is Like a Forest” was covered on Lotta Sea Lice, the collaborative album from Kurt Vile and Cloher’s better half, Courtney Barnett. Before she heads out on her U.S. and European tours in early 2018, Jen shares the songs that defined 2017 for her. “2017 was a year where we heard more diverse voices break through, in Australia particularly. While global politics became more regressive, divisive, and fear-mongering, music did the opposite.”—Jen Cloher

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.By 2007, Kendrick was already on his way to becoming a hip-hop star. He had signed with Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE), released two mixtapes—2003’s Y.H.N.I.C. (Hub City Threat: Minor of the Year) and 2005’s Training Day—and he even managed to perform his first show, which was also the first concert he ever attended.“When I went on tour with The Game [and Jay Rock, in 2006]—that was my first show,” Lamar remembers. “[Going to shows] cost money. Gas money. Me being on stage was me fulfilling two different things—performing and getting to enjoy it like the people were enjoying it.”But violence was never far behind, and, just after midnight on June 13, 2007, officers from the LAPDs Southeast Division responded to a domestic-violence call on East 120th Street, about five minutes from Lamars house. There, they found his good friend D.T. allegedly holding a 10-inch knife. According to police, D.T. charged, and an officer opened fire, killing him."It never really quite added up," Kendrick says. "But heres the crazy thing. Normally when we find out somebody got killed, the first thing we say is Who did it? Where we gotta go? Its a gang altercation. But this time it was the police—the biggest gang in California. Youll never win against them."If Kendrick’s childhood was about survival—finding a way to live amidst the pervasive gang and political violence that consumed his community—then his late-adolescence and young adulthood was about escaping that reality through his music. Kendrick was always talented, but, from 2005 to 2011, he would dramatically grow as an artist, and he would go from being an obscure Compton rapper to a globally recognized, award-winning superstar. The reasons for this growth are both obvious—he’s a preternaturally talented rapper and an extremely hard worker—and more nuanced. Over the years, Kendrick allowed himself to grow; he learned from his mistakes, embraced his artistic ambition, and constantly struggled to mold a singular and honest voice.“What you going to do?” Kendrick asks. “You going to find something you love to do and have a passion for, or you going to stay mingling in the streets till something major happens. So the moment when I defined myself and freed myself was the time that I locked myself in the studio and said I need to do music.”Kendrick’s first release, Y.H.N.I.C., is very much the product of a 16-year-old hip-hop fan. The production is scattershot, largely lifted from early-’00s hip-hop beats—Lloyd Banks’ “Work Magic,” Lil Wayne’s “Go DJ,” Snoop’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot”—while Kendrick’s lyrics are a similarly generic hodgepodge of cliched machismo (“I might Ken Griffey ya bitch/ But wont buy her shit/ Not even a small bag of chips”) and vague truisms. Still, despite the debut’s shortcomings, you can hear a confidence and focus in his voice, and, ultimately, the mixtape served its purpose.“We put [Y.H.N.I.C.] out on a local scale in Compton and built a buzz in the city and eventually got to this guy named Top Dawg, he had his own independent label. And I’ve been with them since and we’ve just been developing my sound,” Kendrick remembers.Shortly thereafter, in the summer of 2004, Kendrick was also courted by Def Jam Records. Though not much is known of this, and it didn’t result in any recorded music, it allowed Kendrick to meet one of his idols, Jay-Z.“I don’t think even Jay remember that. This was when I was like first turned 17,” Kendrick says. “And I remember coming out here for a meeting and I was too excited, man. And all I remember was Jay walking in the room, ‘Yo, what’s up?’ And walked back to the elevator and we was like, ‘Damn, that’s Jay.’ So he doubles back, goes back to his office next door and he’s playing my music… that was just one of those situations where I wasn’t ready.”

Though 2005’s follow-up, Training Day, was a vast improvement, it was still fairly derivative. But, at least now, he’d narrowed his focus to one influence in particular. Instead of funneling Jay-Z, Pac, G-funk, and DMX, Training Day pretty squarely echoes imperial-era Lil Wayne. Like Wayne, Kendrick’s voice has a strained whisper that’s punctuated by sudden whelps, and you can map almost every flow on the album to something on Wayne’s first two Carter albums.

Kendrick even has Wayne’s tick where he deeply exhales through his teeth before the beginning of each verse. It’s uncanny, and not terribly creative, but it’s an accomplishment in its own way. After all, Wayne has one of the most intricate flows in rap. This remote, one-sided tutelage would continue for some time, and four years later, Kendrick released C4, an homage to Lil Wayne that featured many of that rappers’ beats.

C4 also contains what, by Kendrick’s own estimation, is his worst song: “Bitch, I’m in The Club.” Though not a terrible song, per se, it is a clanking, perfunctory club banger with rote, swagger-pumping lyrics and tinny production. “That was a reach,” Kendrick says. “I know the level of reach that I was doing when I wrote that record to everything that was playing on the radio to what was on TV. [Lil’ Wayne] was definitely running radio at that time.”

But rather than discourage him, Kendrick took inspiration from the song. When asked what was the moment that he realized this rap thing was for real, Kendrick replied, “I think when I made a terrible single, and that shit was just garbage. Its the real moment because, at that point youre at your lowest ... but, at the same time, I wasnt aware that that was my highest point because I got back in there and I did it all over again, and continued to push through. Thats when I realized I really wanna do this, because I aint give up when I made a terrible ass song.”It was around this time, in 2009, when Kendrick decided to change his performing name. From his time at Centennial High, Kendrick had always rapped by the name K. Dot, and while his rap career was moving forward, he felt that he’d grown creatively stagnant. He was a great writer, but he’d didn’t feel as though he’d invested himself into his stories, so he decided to be more direct.“When I stopped going by K. Dot, I think that was the moment where I really found my voice,” Lamar remembers. “Early, early on, I really wanted to be signed. And that was a mistake, because it pushes you two steps backwards when you have this concept of ‘OK, I’ve got to make these three [commercial] songs in order to get out into the world and be heard.’ So there were two or three years where I wanted to be signed so badly that I’m making these same two or three repetitive demo kinds of records, and I’m hindering my growth. The world could have got Kendrick Lamar two or three years earlier if I’d stuck to the script and continued to develop.”At that moment, Kendrick began work in earnest on good kid, m.A.A.d. city, but that project would be derailed and he instead focused on The Kendrick Lamar EP. “He actually wrote a project called good kid, m.A.A.d. city before the EP came out,” TDE president Punch relays. “The plan was for the eight-song EP to drop as a warm-up for the good kid, m.A.A.d. city he did already. In the process, he had more songs and the buzz started growing, so we dropped the EP.”While we had to wait another three years for the landmark good kid, m.A.A.d. city, the hour-long, 14-track EP was perhaps Kendrick’s first essential release, and it represented a dramatic artistic evolution for Kendrick. For one thing, it sounded like nothing he’d done in the past. TDE producer Sounwave has been in and out of the TDE camp since 2005, and he produces most of the cuts here. Tracks like “P&P” and “Celebration” feel relaxed and fluid, intercutting snippets of tinkling, jazz-inflected piano lines with rich vocal harmonies. Unlike Kendrick’s previous releases, the EP doesn’t sound like just a mixtape, but rather something fully realized and alive.Kendrick, meanwhile, sounds genuinely like Kendrick for the first time. There’s an added vulnerability in his rhymes, as on “Vanity Slaves” when he relays, “Sometimes I want to leave, sometimes I want to cry/ Sometimes I hate to bear the truth, sometimes I want to lie.” Aside from the newfound emotional honesty, the album contains many nods to Kendrick’s spirituality and to his brimming social consciousness. But, unlike other “conscious” MCs, Kendrick relays his lessons in small stories, whether it’s the self-assured black female of “She Needs Me” or the housing project kids in “Vanity Slaves” who find worth in material value.Kendrick also benefited from good timing. Hip-hop was in a transitional period during that time. Hip-hop’s old guard—Jay-Z, Nas, UGK—were still lingering around, but there was a younger generation emerging. Drake broke in 2009, and the West Coast also had a cadre of viable new talent for the first time in nearly a decade. Critics (and even some artists) called this the “new west,” and it included a broad range of styles. Rappers like Nipsey Hussle and Dom Kennedy tapped into the more traditional strands of West Coast rap, channeling the ghosts of Dre and G-funk, while “blog rap” acts like Pac Div, The Pack/Lil’ B, and Odd Future embodied a more eccentric and ironic take on the genre that was located less in a specific geographical place than a cultural one. Kendrick split the difference, embracing the ambition and irreverence of blog rap while maintaining a starkly SoCal identity. He rounded out the sound by embracing the neo-soul underpinnings and broad social commentaries of boho rappers like Mos Def and Common. It was a compelling blend, one that managed to seem vaguely familiar and also completely singular.The Kendrick EP was released on the last day of 2009, and provided an apt capper to that decade. But, in the next year, things would move forward very quickly. Overly Dedicated, which was originally imagined as a remix project for The Kendrick EP, was released in September 2010. The album is full of intimate, subtle tracks. Over the shuffling rhythm and simmering vibes, “Average Joe” crystallizes Kendrick’s persona: “Who is K. Dot? A young nigga from Compton/ On the curb writing raps next to a gunshot/ On the corners where the gangsters and the killers dwell/ The fraudulent tender scars that get unveiled/ Everyone I knew was either Crip or Piru.”But it would be another track, “Ignorance is Bliss,” that would end up being the most important track of Kendrick’s career. The song is a sly commentary on gangster rap, with Kendrick spitting out the violent cliches of the genre—“Imma back em down like Shaq with this black 2-2-3 in my hand”—before bookending each verse with the ironic, self-canceling declaration, “Ignorance is bliss.” This would be the first Kendrick track that Dr. Dre would hear.“Believe it or not, Paul Rosenberg, Eminem’s manager, is the one that put me on [to Kendrick],” Dre recalls. “I was in Detroit and he’s like, ‘You got to hear this kid from Compton.’ So I went online and the thing that really turned me on at the beginning was the way he spoke in the interview—it wasn’t even the music at first, it was the way he showed his passion for music. There was something in that, and then I got into the music, and then realized how talented he was.”Kendrick was on tour with Jay Rock and legendary Kansas City, MO indie MC Tech N9ne. When Dre called his engineer and Kendrick initially thought it was a prank. But, the next week, Dre got in touch with Kendrick’s management and invited the MC into the studio to record with him. “It came to a point where I had to really snap out of fan mode and become a professional because after we were introduced, he said he liked my music and I said that I’m a fan of his work,” Lamar remembers of the sessions. “Then he said, ‘Okay, now write to this, write a full song to this.’ Right after I said, ‘Man, Dr. Dre, you’re the greatest’ and he was like, ‘Yeah man, you’re good too, you could be something… alright now write to this beat.’ And that beat ended up being the first song I did with him and ended up on my album—‘Compton’.”It had been nearly a decade since Kendrick first started releasing material, but, at this point, he had very much arrived. Though his 2011 release, Section.80, was not the sweeping Bildungsroman Kendrick had been planning (that would come soon enough), it was an evolution of subtly introspective rhymes and jazz-tinged hip-hop soul that Kendrick had been mining on the previous two releases. Tracks such as “A.D.H.D” and “Fuck Your Ethnicity” were instant classics, and the album would eventually go gold. Critics placed it near the top of their year-end lists, and compared him to everyone from Ice Cube to Nas. Of course, the next few years would reveal that Kendrick needed no comparisons—he inhabited his own story, and told that in his own voice. But it’s not a bad way to end the beginning.Related Reading:Kendrick Lamar, Conscious Capitalist: The 30 Under 30 Cover InterviewKendrick Lamar Says "Section.80" Is Just A Warm-Up, Analyzes Work With Game & Dr. DreThe Making of good kid, m.A.A.d. city

Tribe Called Quest created universes by cobbling together post-bop saxophones, rolling bass lines, and hard boom bap beats, topping them off with Q-Tip’s fluid freeform rhymes that played an alto sax to the gruff, declarative blurts of Phife’s deceptively straightforward lyrics. As music nerds, we’d already digested the Velvet Underground and De La Soul, so we instantly got Tribe’s vibes and references, but blending these two opposing worlds—despondent, glamorous sleaze rock and idiosyncratic, jazz afrocentrism—was a revelation. Here’s a playlist of some of their best and most well-known samples, from RAMP to Lou Reed.