’90s

Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.In 1995, the Dangerous Minds soundtrack yielded the smash hit "Gangstas Paradise" by Coolio and LV. The rest of soundtrack featured respected West Coast acts like Rappin 4-Tay and Big Mike flanked by Aaron Hall, Immature, and DeVante Swing of Jodeci. It was a winning formula: R&B + credible rappers + covers of 70s song. The album went triple platinum.A year later, Atlantic/Big Beat would try their hardest to copy the Dangerous Minds formula, ironically with the High School High soundtrack. The film itself, starring Jon Lovitz, Tia Carrere, and Mekhi Phifer, was a modest hit, spoofing the Michelle Pfeiffer-in-a-leather-jacket approach to reaching the "urban" youth in school, a formula already spun in films like The Substitute, Lean on Me, and Stand and Deliver. The soundtrack was designed for crossover success, largely off the inclusion of Quad City DJs breakout dance hit "The Train (Come On Ride It).” "The Train" went platinum, hitting No. 3 on the charts. Atlantic/Big Beat also double downed on The Braids, a Canadian art rock band, and their slick R&B cover of Queens "Bohemian Rhapsody," produced by Stephan Jenkins of Third Eye Blind. It failed to catch on like "Gangstas Paradise,” peaking at No. 42 on Billboard.Unknowingly, the High School High soundtrack was a trojan horse for the last remaining non-jiggy major label rap acts to get one last check. The year was 1996, or in terms of Jiggy vs. Real Hip Hop, Year Two post-Bad Boy. Acts like KRS-One, Grand Puba, Pete Rock, A Tribe Called Quest, and De La Soul, all on major labels for close to a decade by 1996, were slowly being erased from the charts in favor of Puffy and Biggies Steven Soderbergh approach to the game: one for you, one for me. In their case, it was one song for the ladies and the clubs, one song for the streets: "One More Chance Remix" and "The What”; "Big Poppa" and "Warning”; "Juicy" and "Unbelievable.” The graduating class of Raps Golden Age had two choices: adapt or die. The lineup on the High School High soundtrack chose the latter. Whereas acts like Mic Geronimo switched their entire sound in the Post-Bad Boy wave, from boom-bap poet on 1995s The Natural to jiggy thug on 1997s Vendetta, Artifacts, Wu-Tang, and The Roots made the kind of songs that got them signed in the first place, years before Christopher Wallace changed the landscape. When you remove forgettable R&B cuts from The Braxtons, Changing Faces, and Faith Evans from the tracklisting, and toss Quad City DJs and The Braids onto your random gym mix, what you have left is an uncontaminated collection of rap songs that were radioactive on major label releases by 1997. Even Lil Kims contribution, "Queen Bitch," ghostwritten by Biggie, still garners her respect 20 years later from the headz for being so raw — Kim bragged about being a "disease free bitch.” Wu-Tangs "Wu Wear: A Garment Renaissance" was a strategic audible billboard for their new clothing line by RZAs brother/Wu Wear CEO Power, and it peaked at No. 6 on the rap charts. Pete Rock & Large Professors "The Rap World" was a favorite of Biggie himself; he hummed the chorus to Pete on a chance meeting a year later. The Roots carried on their gloomy slanged-out paranoia from illadelph halflife on "The Good, The Bad and the Desolate.” And "Semi-Automatic: Full Rap Metal Jacket" proved why Wu-Tang slipped up not by releasing an Inspectah Deck solo album immediately after Wu-Tang Forever.The new tracklisting of High School High is a snapshot of rap before lines in the sand were drawn between Real vs. Commercial. All the rappers on the album were indeed commercial acts, but their sound wasnt indebted to Diana Ross records. Almost every rapper involved would go on to make statements against commercial rap (or even at Biggie and Puffy, directly or subliminally). The reaction to the Anti-Puffy Movement would later inspire classic albums from Company Flow, Lootpack, and Freddie Foxxx on an indie level and the beginning of the Ruff Ryders sound — both sects deliberately made unpretty rap in defiance. But for a brief time, on a soundtrack to a movie few still remember, rappers werent in opposition to anyone, they were only trying to further their own cause. -- Zilla Rocca

There’s an amazing story that DJ Premier relates near the beginning of this excellent hour + interview with Chairman Mao. Although he’s now synonymous with New York hip-hop, the legendary hip-hop producer and DJ was born and raised in Texas. His grandfather, however, was a BK resident, and Premier would frequently visit him as a child. On his first trip to New York in the fifth grade, Premier was on a subway car that ran over a man who had jumped onto the tracks. The train backed up, and a young Premier peered out the subway window and watched as the man’s disembodied arm wriggled on the tracks. According to an excited Premier, this had been a suicide attempt. “Wow, this is where I want to live,” DJ Premier remembers thinking.To a certain extent, this is just a typical NYC origin story -- the sort of semi-mythological shit you say to sound like a comic book bad-ass. But it also embodies a lot of the qualities of DJ Premier’s music --gruesome, grimey, traumatic, and incredibly vivid. Hip-hop is clearly bigger than one person, city, or era, and any attempts to claim ownership are misplaced -- to say the least -- but few figures seem to embody the music and the culture better than Premier. It’s not that he invented it -- he was nowhere near its mid-70s birth -- but he created a style and sound that was uniquely and singularly hip-hop. Bleary, spiraling samples wrapped around and onto drums that were harder than nails -- pounding, body-rocking combinations of the snare and bass drums known by its onomatopoeia, “boom bap” -- and paired with rough-hewn, Mt. Olympus raps from a rotating pantheon of legendary emcees (Jay-Z, Nas, Rakim, and, of course, Guru). But more than being a singular touchpoint for ‘90s hip-hop, Premier was arguably the most important sample-based musician, ever; his vision of hip-hop pastiche was unlike anything before it, and, due to market forces, it’s doubtful anyone will return to such a nuanced, intricate manner of sampling music, in hip-hop or elsewhere.Like a lot of early hip-hop innovations, the quintessential DJ Premier sound was born partially of necessity. It took a while for Premier to hone his godlike sound, though the journey there is almost as compelling as the destination. Listen to the early albums with Gang Starr, his flagship group with the Boston emcee Guru, and the sound is looser, jazzier. The instrumental “DJ Premier in Deep Concentration” from the 1989 album No More Mr. Nice Guy serves as an initial calling card of sorts for the young producer. The track is anchored by a liberal sample Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness” that achieves the neat trick of gliding off the track with soaring, croaking synth line, while also feeling diffuse and guazy -- it’s a multi-textured sonic illusion that be-bop musicians were particularly skilled at pulling off. There are no rapped vocals in “DJ Premier in Deep Concentration,” but Premier weaves in a variety of samples and callouts to various producer (“Prince Paul!”), so that the track both has vocal presence and texture and even a narrative focus. All of the components of his later masterworks are there: the sample-based pastiche, the self-referential callouts, the swagger, the soul.Around 1992, Premier begin to switch up his style. Like a lot of early hip-hop innovations, this evolution was born of necessity. In 1991, Biz Markie was sued for his use of Gilbert OSullivans 1972 hit, "Alone Again (Naturally)." Judge Kevin Duffy’s ruling against Markie not only cost the rapper $250,000, but also meant that hip-hop producers had to be much more careful and either clear their samples before use or cut them up to the point that they were unrecognizable. Premier largely, though not exclusively, decided for the latter course of action. He recognized that it was not just the rhythms or melodies that drew him to classic soul, jazz, and funk, but the textures and sound of the music, so he would cut his drums into millisecond intervals and overlay them on one another, combining them with a cache of synth and piano samples that seemed to emphasize their pure otherworldliness. For Gang Starr, this made sense. They had largely been marketed as a jazzy, college hip-hop, but that didn’t feel entirely true to either Guru’s personality or DJ Premier’s artist ambitions. They were nostalgist, to a degree, but their milieu was more modern and urban. The music they made on 1992’s Daily Operation and 1994’s Hard to Earn reflected this grimier reality. The dizzying organ sample laid of “Soliloquy of Chaos,” the chaotic swirl of “Brainstorm,” or the urgent, corporal drum breaks of “Code of the Streets” signal Brooklyn. It’s broken crack vials and loosey butts, summer nutcrackers and skelly sketches. Rarely has a music so embodied such a particular time and space.This would be the template for all of Premier’s best known productions, from Nas’ hip-hop totum “NY State of Mind” to Biggie’s dizzy disorienting “Unbelievable.” Though the sound undeniably strange and novel, it’s also immediate and visceral, which allowed it to ascend the charts in the mid to late-90s. It’s hard to believe, but, at one point, Premier was among hip-hop’s most on-demand commercial producers. The specificity of his music meant that designation wouldn’t last. Beginning in the late 90s, Southern hip-hop would loosen the genre’s focus -- bringing back the more overt homages to funk and soul -- and the music would move back onto the dancefloor. And New York hip-hop would adopt the more polished nihilism of G-Unit and Dip Set, before later seeming to abandon any notion that there was a unified, tri-state sound. But, for a minute, thanks to Premier, the music was pure, aberrant, and purely hip-hop.

IDM, or Intelligent Dance Music, has undergone many interesting transformations over the years. It originated in the early nineties, and was used to described modern electronic music that eschewed the dancefloor bombast in favor of a more experimental interpretation of the medium. The term was used to describe artists such as Autechre, Aphex Twin, LFO and Luke Vibert. Theres a lot of space between all those artists -- and the term was always problematic -- but a few of the common aesthetic currents included jittery arhythmical backdrops and airy and at times noisy atmospheric embellishments. The artists also tended to be more conceptual, and were also generally better versed on the history of electronic music BH (before house). Of course, tagging a genre as being uniquely "intelligent" was always going to be problematic, and it was (rightfully) met with scorn by many critics and fans who thought there was nothing inherently dumb about most dance music. But the term persisted, and the music evolved. In many ways, it became a more specific aesthetic than its cousin "electronica" (which was also effectively a genre largely for people who werent into mainstream dance music) and it also outlasted its 90s peer trip-hop in terms of general relevancy.Few people are more qualified to provide an overview of IDM than Philip Sherburne, and his "essentials" article focuses on the more melodic side of the heady microgenre. Its a fun, non-intuitive take on the music, and the tracks by Gescom, Atom TM and Ms Jynx were all pretty great and unexpected. It also makes for a great playlists, especially if youre looking for a more wallpaper, background playlist. Philips sequencing is pretty spot on as well, and it represents a pretty good synthesis of his expertise as a renowned film critic and a DJ.

The origins of post-rock are nebulous, but the aesthetic is more exact: airy instrumentals that found that common ground between the industrial fuzz of musique concrete, the ambience of pre-fusion, late-60s jazz (think In a Silent Way), and the straight lines of ‘80s math rock. When it came out, it felt like a rejection of the scenestery, overly emotive indie rock of the ‘90s, and a path forward for rock, which felt like it had been treading water in the shallow end of ‘60s-inspired nostalgia. It got real boring really quickly, but it sounded glorious at the time. Garrett Kamps, in his write-up for Stereogum, doesn’t try to capture the cannon, but rather a personal reflection of what he remembers to be the best tracks from this now-maligned subgenre.

You really need to go to Red Bull Music Academys critical reclamation of happy hardcore to know what Im talking about -- and you totally should, btw, regardless of how you feel about the music -- but the smiley face graphics they have randomly popping up over the text is as inanely brilliant as the genre. Miles Raymer provides a critical perspective to a genre he says has been treated as "as an awkward phase in dance music’s teen years, the gangly, overenthusiastic cousin of the more sophisticated, intriguingly dark jungle scene." Miles goes on to observe keenly that "happy hardcore quickly became the UK equivalent of what pop punk was in the States at the time" and "like happy hardcore, EDM artists judge their work strictly by its ability to get large crowds moving, using a number of techniques drawn from happy hardcore’s playbook to do the job, from digitally altered pop vocals to aggressively noisy synths to huge drops that come at regularly scheduled intervals."

On January 4, famed technologist Anil Dash and playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda collaborated on a Spotify tribute to New Jack Swing, that much-beloved yet transitional period between classic funky soul and contemporary R&B.“Okay! For the young people who might not be familiar with New Jack Swing (or old people who were distracted by grunge at the time), Lin-Manuel & I made you a New Jack Swing 101 playlist to learn from,” wrote Dash on Twitter. He added, “Shout out to Bruno Mars for the inspiration,” nodding to Bruno Mars and Cardi B’s New Jack era-referencing video for “Finesse (Remix).”Music nerds will point out that New Jack Swing actually peaked in popularity around 1990——nearly two years before Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten blew up on the charts and made grunge mainstream. But this playlist is ultimately less of an authoritative history lesson than a very good fan mix. It collects major hits like Bobby Brown’s “Don’t Be Cruel,” and underrated gems like Chuckii Booker’s “Games.” Feel free to quibble about whether Alexander O’Neal’s Minneapolis funk track “Fake” truly qualifies, or whether Xscape’s 1994 debut “Just Kickin’ It” and Blackstreet’s “Before I Let You Go” stretch the timeline a bit too far. And it’s unclear why Dash and Miranda tacked on a re-recorded version of Father MC’s “I’ll Do For You” at the end of their mix. Copycat and fake recordings of popular songs are the bane of streaming music.Still, if you’re looking for some old-school grooves to do the Funky Charleston to, New Jack Swing 101 ain’t half bad. As Ice Cube once said, “You can New Jack Swing on my nuts!”

I don’t know very much about Britpop. I like Pulp somewhat, especially when this woman I am friends with (read: attracted to) comes over to my apartment and plays it for me. I don’t like Blur. I like Oasis all right, but I really don’t know their music well. I like Radiohead—is that Britpop? I love The Smiths. Are they Britpop? Determined to find answers and to investigate my own general distaste for the style, I decided to dig into Pitchfork’s recent 50 Best Britpop Albums list.The first thing I see on the page is a Sgt. Pepper-style mural, ostensibly with all of the important Britpop figures on it. I recognize Thom Yorke and the guys from Oasis. I see the guys from Trainspotting. Did they do Britpop? There’s a smiling milk carton, some dancers, and around 30 other people I don’t recognize. But by reading through the feature, I start to develop a better understanding of what Britpop is.It began in London in the ‘90s, which answers my question about The Smiths (but then... is Morrissey Britpop?), and I find that Britpop is characterized by “anthemic melodies, social observations of British culture and daily life, and their country’s musical heritage,” according to the article. I learn what Britpop isn’t: The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Coldplay, Kasabian. As I listen to some of the tracks on the playlist, I note that most of them are upbeat, many have light, airy atmospheres, and the guitar tones are largely bright and shiny with little distortion or overdrive. I actually recognize a number of these songs from the radio. I am having sort of a coherent moment.I see a supplementary interview with Danny Boyle and remember that Trainspotting 2 came out a few weeks ago. I put two and two together: This list is meant to coincide with Trainspotting 2. I am a big fan of some songs on the soundtrack of the original, namely those by Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, New Order, and Lou Reed… So, the tracks that aren’t Britpop. As I read through the Boyle interview, searching for information that might lead me to understand why Britpop is important to think about in 2017 or why I should really care about it as a musical style (other than it’s in the pantheon of rock styles), I strike out. And there isn’t much rhetoric in the copy of this playlist to convince me of the genre’s greatness. The interview ends with Boyle responding to a question of whether he prefers Oasis or Blur: He says that he comes from Manchester, so the answer should be obvious. It isn’t to me, so I have to do some research.Despite my skepticism, I actually enjoyed the article and the playlist. I learned what Britpop is for Pitchfork and why Danny Boyle popularized it in Trainspotting, and I acquired a comprehensive playlist of the best Britpop songs. I still don’t like Britpop, and I’m not convinced that it’s important for me to think about today, but at least I now know what it entails. And hey, that’s progress.

On Questlove’s list of his favorite 50 hip-hop songs, he offers an important caveat. “I decided to concentrate on 1979-1995,” he writes, because the latter year marks the major label debut of his group the Roots and their second album, Do You Want More?!!!??! “I wanted to concentrate on the period that I was not professionally involved in the art form.” His canonical picks skew heavily toward the “golden age” of East Coast hip-hop, with a few cursory nods at the West Coast (one track apiece from NWA, Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, but no Ice-T or 2Pac) and the South (Geto Boys, but no OutKast or bass music). Questlove may not be much of a hip-hop historian — inexplicably, he ranks Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two” over Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones Pt. II,” and doesn’t find any space for Nas (or Jay-Z, whose debut single “In My Lifetime” dropped in 1994). But he’s an engaging writer, and his capsule explanations for his picks are frequently entertaining, whether it’s humble-bragging how Chuck D gave him an extra copy of Son of Bazerk’s Bazerk Bazerk Bazerk, effusing about Trouble Funk’s “Pump Me Up,” or using Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s “The Message” to talk about being unfairly pulled over by the cops in 2008. “It is like a jungle, still,” he writes about the latter.Want updates with awesome artist-curated, hip-hop, and handcrafted playlists? Subscribe to our e-mail here and follow Questlove’s playlist on Spotify here.

‘90s R&B has emerged as a default sample source for hip-hop and R&B over the past few years. You can credit Drake for pushing this into the mainstream, but the predominance of ‘90s samples in alternative R&B, and the impact of artist such as The Weeknd or Bryson Tiller on pop music, has added wood to the slow-burning fire. And it’s a good match; the looseness and more textural sounds of Genuine or Alliyah provide a nice counterpoint to the aggressiveness of modern, EDM-influenced R&B. This playlist focuses on the songs that have sampled ‘90s R&B, rather than the source material itself. It would be nice if they paired the sampling and sampled songs, but, as it is, the playlist is a nice survey of the genre’s more mellow side.

Though electronic music nostalgia continues unabated, its a little difficult to swallow that Exit Planet Dust is 21. Upon its release in 1995, it sounded like the future. Listening to it in 2015, it shows its age. The breaks, in particular, sound dated, a relic of an era that were a little more forgiving to snares, while the sound affects, with their channel-panning flares, sound quant and a little contrived. With that said, the Chemical Brothers remain the innovators of modern popular electronic music. They were the among the first ones to successfully shoehorn the freeform, experimental trax-sound of early electronic into the pop format. And whats surprising listening to Nate Patrins playlist is just how good some of their later work is ("Escape Velocity" in particular).