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.
With a performing career that dates back to the early ‘60s, drummer-turned-guitarist R.L. Boyce has emerged as the modern-day torch-bearer for Mississippi Hill Country blues—a regional style that puts an emphasis on shuffling locomotive rhythms extended to hypnotic, trance-inducing states. His recent record for Waxploitation, Roll and Tumble, is a paragon of the form, with Boyce and his double-drummer tandem of Cedrick Burnside (grandson of another revered R.L.) and Calvin Jackson recorded live off the floor by producer Luther Dickinson (of the North Mississippi Allstars). Here, R.L. shares “songs by people I know or have met or have played with that I like to listen to when I am traveling.”Photo credit: William Burgess
Fun shit I learned while reading The Quietus amazing Andy Gill playlist: at one point, Nile Rodgers was slotted to produce a Gang of Four record; John Cale hit on Gills girlfriend; and he doesnt think The Beatles groove!As a note, I couldnt find the specific Erik Satie recording he mentions.The Band, Music From Big PinkBob Dylan, Blood On The TracksJimi Hendrix, Band Of GypsysWild Beasts, WanderlustGabriel Fauré, RequiemThe Camarata Contemporary Chamber Group, The Music Of Erik Satie: The Velvet GentlemanThe Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground & NicoBig Youth, Dread Locks DreadCulture, Two Sevens ClashChic, Good TimesJames Brown, "Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine"Marvin Gaye, "I Heard It Through The Grapevine"Kanye West, "Hold My Liquor"
Rich Jones may be a solo artist, but everything he does stands for community. The Chicago rapper/singer-songwriter is the utmost optimist, championing and collaborating with local artists while striving to find acceptance and appreciation within himself via his own slick, soulful tunes. In 2018, Jones self-released <I>The Shoulder You Lean On</I>, a cool, calm, and collected set that melds his hip-hop background with the poise of a suave crooner. This is the sound of modern Chicago at its most sincere, though Jones proves there’s plenty more to be heard with this playlist of some of his favorite artists, many of whom also call the Windy City home.Says Jones: “A playlist for you! Featuring some of my favorite music from Chicago and afar, both new and timeless. Catch a vibe and enjoy thoroughly.”
Launched in September 2015 by Snoop Dogg and marketing entrepreneur Ted Chung, Merry Jane is a site that focuses on cannabis culture. One of its regular features is a Spotify playlist called “Takeover.” Earlier this May, Run the Jewels curated a collection of tracks for it that includes their own songs, other New York rappers like Your Old Droog, late-’60s garage rock savants The Shaggs, current garage punk faves White Reaper, and mysterious R&B singer H.E.R.It’s mostly rap, and lots of it—124 tracks to be exact—and its theme is hard to discern; it comes off as a data dump of whatever’s been percolating on El-P and Killer Mike’s hard drives (or, perhaps more accurately, streaming service accounts). Unfortunately, Patrick Lyons’ accompanying Q&A doesn’t go into how El and Mike selected the tracks for their list.With such a large and unwieldy buffet to explore, it may be best to head toward the more exotic fare. St. Louis rapper Tef Poe, buzzy Canadians like Ebhoni and VNCHY, and Chicago rapper Lud Foe are just a few to start with. But if you’re just looking for a good banger like Danny Brown’s “Really Doe,” well, there’s that too.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.
Toronto indie-rock trio The Rural Alberta Advantage release their fourth album, The Wild, on October 13, 2017 via Paperbag Records. (Listen to its lead single, "Brother," here.) With this playlist created specially for The Dowsers, singer/guitarist Nils Edenloff reveals some of the music that inspired the band during the recording process. "As a band, I think weve always been fairly divergent in terms of our musical tastes but, at the same time, thats something that weve tried to draw on. Whenever were writing, were always aiming to find the intersection between these differing tastes while still trying to find a way push each other out a little outside of their comfort zone. This is by no means a list of everything that we were listening to while we were working on The Wild, but I think the DNA of a lot of these songs definitely left a mark on the record."—Nils Edenloff, The Rural Alberta Advantage
Vermont-based singer-songwriter Ryan Montbleau has written his share of tear-jerking songs over the years of heavy touring and steady gigging, so its only fitting that this playlist accompanying live album Woodstock Sessions and a Winter 2019 tour be full of tunes that bring on the waterworks.Montbleau says: "So many of these have to do with time and place, but they all brought the tears at some point. You don’t know when a song is going to hit you or why, of course, although some of these are more reliable in that way. Some are from my childhood (Annie, Howard Jones, Elton John?). Some have to do with a particular relationship. The Tedeschi Trucks Band song I heard them play at a soundcheck when I opened for them and it just went right through me. Assembly of Dust played that dang Oasis song at midnight on a New Year’s show, a song that I had heard on the radio a hundred times and dismissed. Time and place, you never know though... waterworks..."
Gangsta rap is supposed to be all about bravado and bluster -- a fantastical playground of platinum-plated pistols, barely dressed women and John Woo worthy shootouts. Houston emcee Scarface provides a dose of realism to the genre with his finely detailed narratives of guilt-ridden murderers, sorrowful drug dealers and disposed "civilians." First as a member of the Geto Boys and then throughout a lengthy solo career, Scarface is one of the Souths most respected and enduring lyricist. For a 2013 Complex feature, he picked his favorite tracks from his extensive. Its a comprehensive playlist that covers hits such as "My Block" or "Mind Playin Tricks," but also dips into deep catalog picks such as the excellent "A Minute to Pray and a Second to Die," a stand-out song from his debut that hinted at the narrative nimbleness and moral complexity that would become his calling card.
Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian is not just responsible for his own sonic output, but has positioned himself as a bit of a music authority. As the guitarist and lyricist of his main, iconic band Anthrax, the guitarist of the heavily influential Stormtroopers of Death, a member of supergroup The Damned Things, as well as guitarist in Pearl alongside his wife, singer Pearl Aday, Ian was also a talking head on all things rock/metal history for VH1 in various series (including one he personally hosted called "Rock Show" in the early 2000s). For someone so immersed as both a musician and historian, not to mention an overall ambassador of thrash as one of the Big Four, we of course wanted to know what hes personally hanging out listening to. When Scott sent us his playlist, sure theres a lot of metal classics, but theres also some choices you might not expect, like Otis Redding. Says Ian of his Dowsers mix, "No specific order. Hit shuffle." Listen above or go right here.
The music of The Shacks is blurry, hazy pop, at once nostalgic and uncanny. Their debut, Haze, is out now. Check it out, and listen to their playlist of favorite driving songs below.From the band:Over the past year we started touring all over the US, Canada, and Europe, which means that we have done quite a bit of driving. Whether were rattling down a dusty country road in Texas or winding through the Californian Redwood Forests, these songs keep us going.
The ’90s have never sounded better than they do right now—especially for modern-day indie rockers. There’s no shortage of bands banging around these days whose sound suggests formative phases spent soaking up vintage ’90s indie rock. Not that the neo-’90s sound is itself a new thing. As soon as the era was far enough away in the rearview mirror to allow for nostalgia to set in (i.e., the second half of the 2000s), there were already some young artists out there onboarding ’90s alt-rock influences. But more recently, there’s been a bumper crop of bands that betray a soft spot for a time when MTV still played music videos and streaming was just something that happened in a restroom. In this context, the literate, lo-fi approach of Pavement has emerged as a particularly strong strand of the ’90s indie tapestry, and it isn’t hard to hear echoes of their sound in the work of more recent arrivals like Kiwi jr. or Teenage Cool Kids. Cherry Glazerr frontwoman Clementine Creevy seems to have a feeling for the kind of big, dirty guitar riffs that made Pacific Northwestern bands the kings of the alt-rock heap once upon a time. The world-weary, wise-guy angularity of Car Seat Headrest can bring to mind the lurching, loose-limbed attack of Railroad Jerk. And laconic, storytelling types like Nap Eyes stand to prove that there’s still a bright future ahead for those who mourn the passing of Silver Jews main man David Berman. But perhaps the best thing about a face-off between the modern indie bands evoking ’90s forebears and the old-school artists themselves is the fact that in this kind of competition, everybody wins.
It may be that 2019 was the best year for ’90s metal since, well, 1999. Bands from the decade of Judgment Night re-emerged with new creative twists and tweaks: Tool stretched out into polyrhythmic madness, Korn bludgeoned with more extreme and raw despair, Slipknot added a new drummer (Max Weinberg’s kid!) who gave them a new groove, and Rammstein wrote an anti-fascism anthem that caused controversy in Germany (and hit No. 1 there too). Elsewhere, icons of the era returned in unique ways: Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor scored a superhero TV series, Primus’ Les Claypool teamed up with Sean Lennon for some quirky psych rock, and Faith No More’s Mike Patton made an avant-decadent LP with ’70s soundtrack king Jean-Claude Vannier. Finally, the soaring voice of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington returned for a moment thanks to Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton, who released a song they recorded together in 2017.
Taking a look at the playlists for my show on Boston’s WZBC might give the more seasoned college-radio listener a bit of déjà vu: They’re filled with bands like Versus, Team Dresch, and Sleater-Kinney, who were at the top of the CMJ charts back in the ’90s. But the records they released in 2019 turned out to be some of the year’s best rock. Versus, whose Ex Nihilo EP and Ex Voto full-length were part of a creative run for leader Richard Baluyut that also included a tour by his pre-Versus outfit Flower and his 2000s band +/-, put out a lot of beautifully thrashy rock; Team Dresch returned with all cylinders blazing and singers Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson wailing their hearts out on “Your Hands My Pockets”; and Sleater-Kinney confronted middle age head-on with their examination of finding one’s footing, The Center Won’t Hold.
Italian guitar heroes Uzeda—who have been putting out proggy, riff-heavy music for three-plus decades—released their first record in 13 years, the blistering Quocumque jerceris stabit; Imperial Teen, led by Faith No More multi-instrumentalist Roddy Bottum, kept the weird hooks coming with Now We Are Timeless; and high-concept Californians That Dog capped off a year of reissues with Old LP, their first album since 1997. Juliana Hatfield continued the creative tear she’s been on this decade with two albums: Weird, a collection of hooky, twisty songs that tackle alienation with searing wit, and Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, her tribute record to the dubby New Wave chart heroes (in the spirit of the salute to Olivia Newton-John she released in 2018). And our playlist finishes with Mary Timony, formerly of the gnarled rockers Helium and currently part of the power trio Ex Hex, paying tribute to her former Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte via an Ex Hex take on “What Kind of Monster Are You?,” one of the signature songs by Billotte’s ’90s triple threat Slant 6.
