Hip-hop

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...

On Vic Mensa’s debut album, The Autobiography, the young Chicago rapper’s personal travails come sharply into view. He raps about his very public struggles with addiction, occasional troubles with the law, a complicated relationship with his hometown’s hip-hop scene, and stray thoughts about ending his life. Yet somehow, his musical identity lies just out of reach.That’s not surprising for a teenage prodigy whose first group, Kids These Days, was profiled in the New York Times when he was just finishing high school. The hip-hop/emo-pop band yielded many of the players who have driven the Windy City’s current renaissance, including trumpeter Nico Segal (a.k.a. Donnie Trumpet of The Social Experiment). Their rise preceded that of Chance the Rapper, who guested on the band’s EPs—and co-founded the SaveMoney crew with Mensa—before embarking on his own stellar career. But while Chance is now widely known as a good kid who connects a secular post-millennial generation with its spiritual potential, Vic has experimented as a solo artist, sometimes fitfully. His best single so far is arguably “Down on My Luck,” a terrific hip-house number from 2014. Like so many next-gen rappers, his work with electronic producers like Flume and Kaytranada is second nature, not a cross-genre gimmick. Yet he’s also tried to translate his industry buzz into songs with Kanye West (2015’s “U Mad”) and Gucci Mane (“What It Takes”), with little crossover success.Much of The Autobiography opts for an airy emo-rap sound typical of recent big-budget hip-hop like Logic’s Everybody and G-Eazy’s When It’s Dark Out. But Vic’s too sharp of a stylist to drown in the indistinct mainstream beats that mar some of his debut. He works real magic with Pharrell Williams and Saul Williams on “Wings,” and his collaboration with controversial South Side iconoclast Chief Keef on “Down 4 Some Ignorance (Ghetto Lullaby)” is long overdue. Then there are those diary-like lyrics, which range from comic tales like the Weezer-assisted “Homewrecker” to anguished meditations on blackness like “We Could Be Free.” Throughout, he remains an engaging performer, even if we’re not always sure where he’s leading us.

The editors at Hip-Hop DX honored the legendary producer by compiling some of his greatest beats. Theyre all essential, and theres a few surprising picks, like A Tribe Called Quests "(Weve Got) Jazz," which Pete claims Q-Tip copied from him, and the Notorious B.I.G.s "Juicy (Remix)," which also involves claims of behind-the-scenes nonsense. The list sticks to the Chocolate Boy Wonders 90s heyday, but his latest work is also worth a listen. -- Mosi Reeves

Saying Wu-Tang owned ‘90s hip-hop is a slight overstatement—Dre, B.I.G., Pete Rock, Mannie Fresh, and dozens of other legendary figures also chipped in—but it’s also inaccurate to say that they completely fell off thereafter. Yes, they never reached the heights of their initial 1993-97 run, but they remained one of the most talented and idiosyncratic groups in rap. In the aughts, there was at least one classic album (Supreme Clientele), a couple near-classics (Fishscale, Only Built for Cuban Linx II), and several underrated jewels (8 Diagrams, No Said Date,Legend of the Liquid Sword) tucked into their catalog, and even their lesser, disappointing releases (Birth of a Prince, Wu Massacre, Tical 0) usually contained a banger or two. We’ve highlighted our 36 favorite of these, using Spotify, into one playlist. But, before we get into the the list, a few disclaimers:* GZA’s Grandmasters, RZA’s Digi Snacks, and the Wu-Tang’s 8 Diagrams are not available on streaming, so we have not included any of those tracks here.* We are not including tracks that the Wu-Tang guested on (hence no Kanye tracks).* In the interest of including as broad a selection of tracks from the Wu-Tang Clan, while still remaining honest to the concept, we didnt include eight tracks from Supreme Clientele. With those qualifiers, enjoy the list and subscribe to the playlist right here.36. “Meth Vs. Chef 2”, Meth + Ghost + Rae, Wu Massacre, 201035. “Silent”, GZA, Legend of the Liquid Sword, 200234. “Wu Tang,” U-God ft. Method Man, Dopium, 200933. “Ill Figures,” Wu-Tang Clan, Chamber Music, 200932. “All Natural,” Masta Killa, Selling My Soul, 201231. “Pioneer The Frontier,” Wu-Tang Clan, A Better Tomorrow, 201430. “Biochemical Equation,” RZA ft. Wu-Tang Clan and MF DOOM, Wu-Tang Meets Indie Culture, 200529. “Sound the Horns,” Wu-Tang Clan, Chamber Music, 200928. “9 Milli Bros,” Ghostface Killah ft. Wu-Tang Clan, Fishscale, 200627. “Keep Watch,” Wu-Tang Clan, A Better Tomorrow, 201426. “City High,” Inspectah Deck, The Movement, 200325. “When I’m Writing,” Killah Priest, Black August, 200324. “If Time is Money,” Wu-Tang Clan, The Saga Continues, 201723. “The Glide”, Method Man, 4:21...The Day After, 200622. “Ghost Showers,” Ghostface Killah, Bulletproof Wallets, 200121. “Grab the Microphone,” Masta Killa, No Said Date, 200420. “Uzi (Pinky Ring),” Wu-Tang Clan, Iron Flag, 200119. “Must Be Bobby,” RZA, Digital Bullet, 200118. “Colombian Ties,” GZA, Pro Tools, 200817. “Got to Have It,” Method Man, 4:21...The Day After, 200616. “Shakey Dog,” Ghostface Killah, Fishscale, 200615. “Pop Shots,” Ol Dirty Bastard, Osirus, 200514. “The Sun,” Ghostface, Bulletproof Wallet outtake, 200113. “Grits,” RZA, Birth of a Prince, 200312. “Pyrex Vision”, Raekwon, Only Built for Cuban Linx 2, 2009.11. “Run,” Ghostface, The Pretty Toney Album, 200410. “We Pop”, RZABirth of a Prince, 2003In the end, the Wu-Tang sound—stringy hip-hop minimalism with Memphis soul samples and crusty, boom bap beats—had little lasting impact on hip-hop. By 1996, rap had moved on to the jiggy beats of Diddy and the Trackmasters, and, shortly thereafter, the pumped-up Orleans bounce of Mannie Fresh; and by 1997, so had the Wu, unleashing their own variants on their signature template. On this track from 2003s Birth of a Prince, RZA tries to catch up to the rap mainstream by taking a page from G-Unit, unleashing bronzed-out F-funk over a paean to popped champagne bottles, “hoes in different areas,” and “the bass shake in the club.” It really shouldn’t work, which makes this earworm semi-hit all the more remarkable.9. “Holla”, Ghostface KillahThe Pretty Toney Album, 2004“I’m from a place where fish was made,” Ghostface rasps on this track’s opening line, and, like many of Ghost’s best lyrics, it means absolutely nothing and everything. The song is alternately tough-as-nails and unimaginably fragile, from the quivering strings of the The Delfonics “La-La (Means I Love You)” to Ghostface’s taunt brag, “Like, an angry, cripple, man, dont push me!” Ghost isn’t constructing meaning here as much as he’s conjuring mood, and, as such, there’s no real production on here to speak of; the Delfonics track is left as-is—no loop, chop or cut—as Ghost raps over the broken boombox beat, channeling a time and place that is bitterly, sweetly nostalgic. 8. “Pass the Bone (Remix)”, Masta KillaMade in Brooklyn, 2006In the aftermath of World War II, there were stories that pockets of Japanese soldiers remained stranded on deserted islands. Isolated, and without any news of Shigemitsu’s surrender, they fought on for many years after that war had ended.* Masta Killa is the Wu’s version of that. He was a disciple of GZA who was only sparingly featured on Wu tracks during the group’s glory years, and, as other members were trying to update their sound (see RZA’s “We Pop”) or disappearing into their own aesthetic (pretty much any Ghostface record), Masta Killa made two classic albums (2004’s No Said Date and 2006’s Made in Brooklyn) anchored by his dense lyricism and crusty breakbeats. These late-period jewels sounded like they had been delivered to the 2000s from Wu headquarters circa ‘96 in a hazy time machine. “Pass The Bone,” a highlight from Made in Brooklyn, is rap as cinema verité, conjuring loose Saturday nights, coughed-up blunts, random hook-ups, and stoop conversations over a straightforward soul loop.* If you don’t believe me, there’s a Gilligan’s Island’s episode dedicated to this.7. “Animal Planet”, GZALegend of the Liquid Sword, 2002GZA was always Wu-Tang’s most accomplished technician. Where Method Man or ODB’s lines contained a visceral velocity, crushing coal to near-perfect lyrical diamonds in split seconds, GZA’s rhymes seemed as if they were written in tomes over the course of decades, revealing calculated phonetic associations and delicately crafted allusions. “Animal Planet” abstracts the violence and politics of the streets into a jungle metaphor; the tarantula is the “hype man” and chimps “sling in trees” with “elephants for security,” while everglades were “controlled by the gators” before they were “crashed by the crocs who came years later.” The conceit is anchored by a lush beat and the simple, half-whispered chorus—“it’s a jungle sometimes”—that appropriates Grandmaster Flash’s classic line from “The Message.”6. “Nutmeg”, Ghostface KillahSupreme Clientele, 2000The best art teaches you how to see it, writing its own rules and daring viewers to decipher the lines, hues, and figures on its own terms, and not according to your preconceived notions of how it should be. Metaphorically speaking, that’s exactly what Ghostface did on 2000’s Supreme Clientele, bending nouns to verbs (“watch me Dolly Dick it”), building up a thick lattice of NYC esoterica (Scotty Woody, Clarks, Optimo), and tilting towards the undecipherable (sample lyric: “Dancing with Blanche and them bitches, flicking deuce pictures/ Kick down the ace of spades, snatch Jack riches”). “Nutmeg” was produced by Ghostface’s barber, Black Moes-Art—which is as perfect and makes as much sense as anything else on Ghostface’s wacky masterpiece.5. “Black Widow, Pt. 2,” Bobby DigitalDigital Bullet, 2001It only lasts a little over two minutes—not including the ponderous outro—but this song is terrifying, sonically and morally. For the second time in his career, RZA samples Wendy Rene’s “After Laughter (Comes Tears),” but where his previous flip on “Tearz” emphasized the track’s hardwon soul—contrasting the source track’s anachronistic strings and vocal harmonies against some of the toughest drums RZA ever produced—“Black Widow, Pt. 2” strips the sample to the bone, focusing on Rene’s scream—a primal, sensual, terrifying plea that loops over and over, building a screeching house-of-trap horrors, backlighting the moment where ODB’s sputtering, disconnected misogyny (“bitch, you belong to me”) turns to violence and the song’s female subject screams, “Dirt, I don’t want to die.” None of this is defensible—it’s morally repellent—but the best Wu was frequently ugly.4. “I Can’t Go to Sleep,” The Wu Tang ClanThe W, 2000Middle-period Ghostface—starting with 2004’s ThePretty Toney Album and lasting through 2009’s Ghostdini—found the MC trying to formulate himself as a post-crack-era Al Green, appropriating classic soul tracks verbatim (e.g., “Big Girl,” “Holla”) and rapping in a pleading, quivering voice that imbued 36 lifetimes of desire, confusion, loathing and transcendence. This track from 2000’s The W laid the groundwork for all that, building off the symphonic, proto-prog soul of Isaac Hayes “Walk on By” and chronicling the “havoc of the streets of Satan,” the murdered babies, raped women, and “crack and guns” of the “early 80s.” Even if his lyrics amount to little more than clever phonetic interlacing (sample: “Whippy got hit up with the big shit, bong bong”), Ghostface’s voice—cracked, pleading, piercing—seems to have absorbed all that. When RZA comes on the track’s second verse, translating Ghostface’s grief by making the personal political and the political historical—referencing Malcolm getting “shot in the chest” and Marcus Garvey getting deported because “he tried to spark us”—the track enters the upper pantheon of Wu Tang, regardless of the era.3. “House of the Flying Daggers,” RaekwonOnly Built 4 Cuban Linx 2, 2009By the late-aughts, Wu Tang were more or less playing hip-hop’s oldie circuit, and the prospect of them revisiting a deeply cherished album from their golden period seemed fraught, to say the least. And while Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2 doesn’t quite match the considerable heights of the original, the uneasy, propulsive “House of the Flying Daggers” is monumental. Ghost, painting in his usual loopy word spasms, threatens to “humiliate, brutalize, Ruger pop, pulverize,” as Rae requests that they “bury me in Africa with whips and spears and rough diamonds from Syria.” The production, provided by J Dilla, cyphering the dirty adrenaline of classic RZA, simply bulldozes you.2. “Cherchez LaGhost”, Ghostface KillahSupreme Clientele, 2000It’s easy to forget that the Wu-Tang didn’t have much of a imperial, decadent period. They began as an underground unit from a (very) outer-borough, cataloging the litter of broken crack vials and busted 40 ounces, and, after shortly flirting with pop success, they and their quirky, never-quite-mainstream sound quickly slid back into obscurity, foregoing the usual accoutrements of hip-hop royalty (velvet roaches, Superhead, and French vanilla Ciroc). Still, this song, couched in the cooing cocaine big-band disco of Dr. Buzzards Original Savannah Band’s “Cherchez La Femme,” feels like the party after the afterparty, the slice of euphoria before the comedown. Rarely have the Wu-Tang sounded as if they were having this much fun. It didn’t last long, but it was a good minute (or three).1. “Careful (Click, Click)”, Wu-Tang ClanThe W, 2000The unvarnished soul sample that bleeds out of the track’s opening hints at classic Wu, but this banger from The W feels utterly unlike anything that came before it, or after. As a forlorn flute slinks between the track’s hovering bassline and tight boom bap beat, “Careful (Click, Click)" doesn’t so much describe the grit and toxicity of urban life as it revels in in, recoiling in the tight spaces where brown paper bags, dirty syringes, and cocked hammers mark the dark spaces of Wu’s boarding houses/imaginary slums, bobbing with a millennial sleekness that underlines the track’s post-industrial menace, eerily evoking future trauma through Ghost’s insistence, nearly a year before 9/11, that the “boxcutter went click click.” Quite simply, this is the Wu at the height of their powers.

Its an old story, but its still amazing both how persistent and subjective the "album" experience is at this point. Young Thug Leaks and Loosies 2015 is effectively a fan-curated playlist culled from Young Thug mixtape cuts, b-sides and singles that is published on a free, user-generated playlist site that is owned by a major urban media company (Complex). Still, it has nearly 140K plays, which is more than most albums these days, and definitely more than almost any playlist on a major streaming site. I was discussing this with a friend the other day, but the album is an artificial construct, and the common, underlying logic behind either a playlist such this one, or a proper album like The Barter 6*, is that its an extended collection of songs. By this logic, albums are merely officially curated collections of artist tracks. Still, theres a (false?) expectation of coherence when it comes to an album, an expectation for the artist to make a statement, whether that be aesthetically, politically or *The caveat is that The Barter 6 isnt itself a proper album, according to Thugger himself, but a teaser for his proper album,

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.Young Thug cemented his place as one of the most unique and exciting artists in hip-hop with his 2016 output, which included three brief but potent albums: I’m Up; Slime Season 3, the third installment in his Slime Season trilogy; and JEFFERY, a collection of odes to his personal heroes titled after their given name. Along the way, he also released essential one-offs like “Gangster Shit,” collaborated on hit singles with Usher and Travi$ Scott, and stole the spotlight on albums by Chance The Rapper and Kanye West. And through it all, he continued to twist and warp his inimitable voice into new shapes and tuck subtle wordplay into his lyrics.

Spaces are important. And for many people, the bathtub is the most sacred of all listening spaces. Amniotic water temperature, flickering candles, blissful solitude — rockin’ tunes in the tub rules. Thus, it makes sense why receiving someone’s bathtub playlist can be a truly revealing, psychological experience. Here are a few thoughts on Chance the Rapper’s bathtime playlist, titled “Yup.” First, if it were me, I would begin with something a little more relaxing, but that’s just my personality—”Harambe” is a cool choice to start off with, and Young Thug had a great 2016, so he deserves the top spot here. Then we go onto Bon Iver’s “00000 Million,” the inclusion of which 1) seems appropriate for bathing, and 2) reminds me of Rosie O’Donnell’s tweet from 2011, “i like the song perth — its good music for making dinner.” There are a lot of good hip-hop tracks on here, many of which I missed earlier in the year. I love that Chance included “Summer Friends” from <i>Coloring Book</i>—listening to one’s own music is an important experience, and the bath is a great place for reflection. Lots of Frank Ocean on here (maybe too much?), and a few things on that I’ve never heard of. Didn’t know Smokie Norful—now I do, and I like him. Even though this is a personal playlist, I feel like it should still be subject to the Playlist/Mixtape Rulebook, which clearly states that an artist not be used more than once on the same mix, and if they are, definitely not twice in a row. Penalty!

There was nothing like Hot Buttered Soul, the luxuriant, expansive, exploratory soul album by Isaac Hayes, when it was released in 1969. Given complete creative control, the Stax producer and songwriter stretched out figuratively and literally, two of its four tracks stretching past the 10-minute mark, exploding with strings and horns. It turned Hayes from songwriter to sensation to icon. His style—soulful, cinematic, assured, lush, deeply arranged—would win him an Academy Award for his theme song to 1971’s Shaft and earn him a headlining spot soon after at the historic Wattstax concert.

In the ’80s and ’90s, Hayes found most of his success as a film and TV star, but hip-hop musicians were keeping his music alive. Some of rap’s most defining songs between 1988 and 1992—Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” The Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” DJ Quik’s “Born and Raised in Compton”—were built off the baroque samples of Hayes tunes. New York producers like RZA, Pete Rock, MF Doom, and Evil Dee used his palettes to make boom bap. And drawn to the cinematic, ’90s British trip-hop artists like Portishead and Massive Attack used Hayes to cull their nocturnal moods. To celebrate 50 years of Hot Buttered Soul, here’s Hayes refracted through hip-hop’s prism.