Hip-hop

Andy Beta strikes again. This time around fans of Pitchfork’s Essentials series are treated to the music journalist’s historical romp through pop’s love affair with the vocoder and talk box, repurposed chunks of communications technology that transform the human voice into cyborg speech and frog croaks. His track list is a veritable house party packed with bouncing dance jams, from electro, hip-hop, electronica, and funk. A cunning curator, Beta has the chutzpah to actually leave off Kraftwerk, one of the vocoder’s most high-profile pioneers. He adds crate-digging obscurities from Can’s Holger Czukay and French disco freaks The Rockets instead. Neither is essential in terms of historical importance, yet they’re so deliciously novel that it hardly matters. Just turn them up and have a blast.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Joey Bada$$ emerged from Brooklyn in 2012 as part of a wave of New York teenagers—a.k.a. the Pro Era collective—who were reviving traditional hip-hop values. On his debut mixtape, 1999, he constructs songs with dense lyrical arrangements and beats from sampled loops and drum patterns. He raps about rocking stage shows and battling kids in other ciphers, two themes that haven’t been in vogue in mainstream rap since the mid-‘90s. A few of Joey’s song titles even pay subtle homage to old-school fare like Souls Of Mischief’s “93 ‘Til Infinity” (“95 Till Infinity”) and the illuminati fad (“Killuminati”).The narrative around Joey Bada$$ began to shift when his 2015 retail debut B4.DA.$$ (Before Da Money) debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard top 200 album chart, forcing rap fans who dismissed him as a niche backpacker to pay attention. (A widely circulated Instagram photo of Malia Obama rocking a Pro Era T-shirt also helped.) Then, last year, he released “Devastated,” an empowerment anthem filled with chorus and echo that foregrounds his singing while relegating ‘90s homage to the background. (There’s a brief flicker of the melody from OutKast’s “SpottieOttieDopaliscious.”)Bada$$ will never be confused with Wiz Khalifa, who forever reduces his bars in favor of a catchy hook. Joey’s new album, All-Amerikkkan Bada$$, shows how he’s managed to transform into something more contemporary—sharply assessing the political landscape on “Land of the Free” and trading bars with Schoolboy Q on “Rockabye Baby”—without losing the qualities that made him a star. The songs collected here chart his evolution.

“We got London on the track” is the famous drop, spoken by Skooly of the Atlanta rap group Rich Kidz, that helped turn producer London Holmes into a brand name. But it was one of the group’s contemporaries, Young Thug, that brought London On Da Track’s beats to the Hot 100 with a series of hit collaborations with Rich Gang, Tyga, T.I. and others. And over the course of Thug’s solo releases, particularly the Slime Season series, London On Da Track has emerged as the rapper’s most indispensable producer. His rich piano chords, swirling synth lines, and crisp, swinging percussion provide the musical heft for Young Thug’s best songs, allowing the iconoclastic rapper to experiment with his elastic voice over a solid foundation.

Despite parting ways with his long-time collaborator Josh Young (a.k.a. YehMe2) in 2016, Flosstradamus Curt Cameruci continues to rally the HDYNATION—a.k.a. Hoodie Nation—as a one-man festival-rockin machine. For this playlist he created specially for The Dowsers, the Chicago trap-master selects the tracks that best reflect the Floss philosophy. "The overall theme is HDYNATION and its roots. I tried to incorporate some early Floss influences—90s Chicago rappers, drill music, NY hip hop from 411 skate videos, and even a punk track!"—Curt Cameruci, a.k.a. Flosstradamus

There’s no pain exactly like losing a musician you love. Partaking in good art can’t help but feel like a communion between oneself and the work’s author, so even if we never get the chance to meet our favorite creators in real life, the loss of one feels deeply personal. Not to mention the collected weight of all those songs that will never be written, and concerts never performed. Add to this the complicated nature of mourning a public figure — whose private life and struggles are often known only to their family and friends — and, well, it’s just brutal.That’s why posthumous songs, while so often a source of strife between labels and artists’ estates, can be so soothing to us fans. They give us a chance to remember the musicians as they were (consider Sublime’s “What I Got”) or as they might be right now (Avicii’s “Heaven”). They let us feel grateful for what we had (Bob Marley’s “Give Thanks & Praises”) or pissed off over what we lost (Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”). Sometimes they play like a final missive from beyond (John Lennon’s “Woman”). Often they’re prophetic (Tupac’s “To Live and Die in L.A.”). And occasionally they’re just big, beatific shrugs (Mac Miller on “That’s Life”).Some of these songs were released within days of the artist’s passing, and most came within a year. But all of them feel imbued with some extra meaning, from the sad irony of the opener, Hank Williams’ “I Ain’t Got Nothin’ but Time,” to the hard-fought optimism of the closer, Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Music heals, so grab a tissue box and hit play.

In honor of Kanyes birthday (June 8th), were pulling out this classic playlist from Andrew Noz that looks at the influences behind Kanyes abrasive and divisive 2013 album, Yeezus. The playlist could be read as an alternative history of modern music, with nods to classic acid house, soul, industrial, trap, Chicago drill, club-friendly hip-hop and everything in between. If nothing else, it reveals Kanyes omnivorous tastes, and provides a testament to the Chicago producers ability to coalesce all these seemingly disparate sounds into a cohesive (if still jarring) whole. You can count me among those who feel that Yeezus was his high-water mark, and this playlist does an amazing job at showing why.

Frank Ocean is a great artist, but not a particularly gifted vocalist, at least not in the traditional sense. His range is rather limited, his phrasing is straightforward and voice is somewhat generic. His power lies in the risks he takes, as a musician, songwriter, and as a personality. There are few albums of the past decade as adventurous as Channel Orange, and there have been few celebrities who’ve navigated the media machine as seamlessly and eloquently as Ocean. Stripped of the context of his own music, his guest turns work best when he’s allowed to be himself; either in the prickly politics of “Church in the Wild” or on the laconic, SoCal anthem “Sunday.”

Since rising to fame with a scene-stealing guest spot on YC’s 2011 hit “Racks,” Future has established himself as one of Atlanta’s most consistent hitmakers. Capable of both crooning bittersweet melodies in AutoTune and shouting himself hoarse on hedonistic club bangers, his range has helped make him a hook factory who can write a tender ballad for Rihanna as well as anchor an Ace Hood anthem. But as much as he shines on collaborations, including frequent team ups with Drake, Future’s increasingly prolific output of solo albums and mixtapes have found him plunging into his own dark world of heartbreak, intoxication, and surviving the trap. Establishing a rapport with a circle of talented producers including Metro Boomin, Zaytoven, Mike WiLL Made It, and Southside, Future toys with increasingly inventive cadences and flows to match his gift for choruses, pushing him to new creative and commercial heights.

Clad in a T-shirt and basketball jersey, Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott looked like no other MTV fixture in the late Clinton era. Whether she’s gay is of no account: her clattering aluminum beats, declaration of appetites, camp ethos, and fascination with banality denotes a queer sensibility regardless. Every one of her albums released between 1997 and 2005 — an era that encompassed boom times and end times — is essential; This is Not a Test! has the most bangers and good album tracks, Da Real World still curiously forgotten, but Supa Dupa Fly still sounds like strange voices from another star, for which she deserves more credit than Timbaland. Souping up guys like won-ton, swaying on dosie-do like you loco, making you hot like Las Vegas weather, she reminded artists that before hip hop developed a social consciousness and was known as rap, it was an excuse to fling fly rhymes over dope beats. “‘Look, it’s very simple,” John Lennon once said to David Bowie in a fictional conversation. “‘Say what you mean, make it rhyme, and put a backbeat to it.’” What else is there?Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

Apple’s generally excellent write-up of this playlist notes that Metro’s production are “surreal, vaguely dystopian soundscapes” that sound a “thousand years ahead of his time.” It’s a good description of the sound, but his soupy, sludgy sounds always struck me as more retro-futuristic, a regression towards a vision of a sinister pre-millennial tension rather than the glittering, bleached oppression that currently dominates our assumptions about what lies in front of us. Regardless, few producer/singer teams have been as successful at developing an instantly recognizable (and wildly successful) aesthetic as Future and Metro Boomin, and this playlist collects the best of them. This is pretty essential for understanding where hip-hop music was in the mid-’10s.