Hip-Hop

The emergence of a viable rap scene in Seattle didn’t happen overnight. Even as Macklemore & Ryan Lewis briefly took over the pop airwaves with “Thrift Shop” in 2012, less-celebrated artists were determining the future of the Northwest city’s sound. In fact, much of the Seattle rap underground resembles other U.S. homegrown scenes that formed in the wake of indie rap icons like Lil B and Odd Future: The music is amorphous and electronic, the lyrics tend toward chemically enhanced streams-of-consciousness, and there are enough sonic quirks to make you want to crawl down a SoundCloud wormhole.Shabazz Palaces’ surreal, Afrocentric-inspired treatises are a touchstone, as are Blue Sky Black Death’s cloud rap symphonies. The latter worked with Nacho Picasso, who then formed the Moor Gang collective with Jarv Dee and Gifted Gab. Shabazz Palaces’ Black Constellation crew attracted THEESatisfaction and Chimurenga Renaissance—who coined the popular event and meme “Black Weirdo” before disbanding in 2016—and influenced avant-rap artists like Porter Ray and Tay Sean. Then there’s Thraxxhouse, a crew formed by Mackned and Key Nyata who take inspiration from internet oddities like Florida’s Raider Klan.Unfairly or not, there’s some lingering resentment in the city toward Macklemore, whose huge successes have overshadowed the city much as Sir Mix-A-Lot did with “Baby Got Back” in the ‘90s. (We declined to include all the diss songs aimed at the rapper on this playlist.) No one seems capable of ascending to the same commercial heights, although Eighty4 Fly has earned over 1 million streams on SoundCloud with his 2012 trippy smoker tune “Kush High.” But maybe that’s the status quo the Emerald City prefers: a micro-scene dictated by industrious talents instead of pop novelty.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!We’re eight movies into our age’s preeminent action movie franchise and Vin Diesel has yet to use more than one facial expression. To be fair, it can’t be easy to maintain such a high standard of manly, steely intensity while glowering over your hand as it grips the top of a steering wheel and you put the pedal to the metal. Indeed, moviegoers would likely start throwing chairs if they didn’t see Diesel’s hard-driving hero Dom Toretto assume his signature stare in the next installment of the increasingly bombastic, ridiculous, and thrilling series of high-octane blockbusters spawned by the original The Fast and the Furious back in 2001.Actually, it can feel pretty good to assume the pose yourself. For one thing, it helps foster the adolescent fantasy that you’re burning up the highway in a souped-up Dodge Charger or a tricked-out Koenigsegg CCX-SR—while The Rock hangs out the passenger side window and fires a bazooka at the bad guys, of course—rather than barely hitting the speed limit in a shitbox Corolla or CR-V with two booster seats in back.So with The Fate of the Furious blazing into theaters soon, it’s high time for a soundtrack that’ll further stoke those foolhardy dreams of speed and supremacy. Featuring songs from the hip-hop heavy F&F soundtracks and other tunes built for the road, this playlist is for all the wannabe speed demons who’d be just like Dom if that kind of driving didn’t get people killed in real life. Sorry to be a bummer, but face it: You’re no stunt driver.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.A Tribe Called Quests fourth album Beats, Rhymes and Life debuted at No. 1 on Billboard in 1996, preceded on the charts by Nas It Was Written and proceeded by Alanis Morrissettes Jagged Little Pill. The second single, "Stressed Out," featured Faith Evans during the height of her estranged relationships with Biggie and 2pac and was a radio mainstay. But the album was largely considered a disappointment, partly due to the inclusion of two unannounced new members of Tribe: producer Jay Dee, a quiet beatmaking genius from Detroit, and rapper Consequence, Q-Tips cousin. Jay Dee, the new member of The Ummah, only caught a fraction of the wrath from Tribe purists for the shift in sound; production credits on Tribe albums were always hazy (Q-Tip didnt admit to producing the bulk of the first three album singlehandedly until the mid 2000s). Consequence, featured on seven of the albums sixteen cuts, was presumed to have broken up the group by usurping Phife Dawg. He was in the videos, he was on the albums biggest hit, and he was related to Q-Tip. He passed on a deal with Bad Boy to stay in Tribe. He was 18 years old. The plan was for Consequence to be the next Cappadonna, a new artist gradually pulled into the Tribe universe on a prominent album and single. But unlike the soft opening of Cappadonna as New Wu-Tang Clan Member on Raekwons Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Consequence ended up on seven songs, and then followed it up with a shelved album on Elektra. He had no appearances on the next Tribe album, The Love Movement, in 1998. This would be like Cappadonna ousting Ghostface on Cuban Linx and then never appearing on a Clan album again. Random white labels dripped out over the years from Consequence: "Queens Get the Money," produced by Havoc of Mobb Deep, "The Riot" featuring Busta Rhymes and produced by The Ummah, "The Consequences" produced by The Lone Ranger (Q-Tips alias). But Consequence didnt move the needle again until 2004 on the beloved album cut "Spaceship" from Kanye Wests The College Dropout. Ye and Cons met in New York randomly in the early 2000s; Kanye, a diehard Tribe fan, was starstruck. Cons was working a day job. Both were told by the industry in so many words that they didnt fit as rappers. They started a production company called KonMan, which later morphed into GOOD Music. Cons dropped one LP on GOOD Music, the uneven Dont Quit Your Day Job, pairing with The College Dropout and Rhymefests Bluecollar as the GOOD Music Working Man Trilogy. He passed the time by dropping singles, ghostwriting for Kanye, beefing with Pusha T and Joe Budden, and playing himself on Love & Hip Hop. Now that Cons is back with A Tribe Called Quest on the outstanding reunion album We Got it From Here...Thank You For Your Service, its worth combing through his archives to hear why people like Puffy, Q-Tip, and Kanye wanted him on their team. Hes energetic, confident, and topical. Hes a songwriter who can be braggadocios and conceptual. Hes a street dude from Queens who dropped mixtapes to get his buzz back (check the classic Take Em to the Cleaners to hear pre-College Dropout Kanye and Cons giggling and rapping like teens while trying to kick down the door for deals). Hes not as Abstract as Tip or as oddly charming as Ye on the mic. Hes a Professional Rapper with an understanding of his limits and a deep list of industry contacts after 20 years holding every title: Next Big Thing, Forgotten Footnote, Underdog Making a Comeback, Grammy Family Member, Tabloid Fodder, Reality TV Star, and now Beloved Tribe Member Who Came Back Home Again.

While critically maligned during its heyday at the end of the ’00s, Atlanta snap rap has always been fun and remains influential today. Musically stripped-back, with vast separations between the bass, midrange (the raps), and treble (the repetitive keyboard figures), the music sounds gigantic in the club because of all the space in the mix. It’s slow yet steady, topping out at 80 beats per minute. You can dance to it by doing a simple or complex lean-back, coupled with a snap of the fingers.The definitive snap hit is “Laffy Taffy” by D4L (pictured). Everything else is tied for second place. Many snap anthems—like BHI, Lil Jon, and K-Rab’s 2006 cut “Do It, Do It (Poole Palace)”—have actual fingersnaps in the song, and eventually the style’s sound bled into R&B when T-Pain adopted it and, to a lesser degree, The-Dream. If you have to pin it to a place, it’s an Atlanta thing, but Mississippi and Compton have made crucial contributions with David Banner’s “Play” and Quik & The Fixxers’ “Can U Werk Wit Dat,” respectively. The most creative envisioning of the music was done by Soulja Boy, who basically invented viral dance videos with his “Crank Dat,” the template for up-and-coming stars like Ayo & Teo (Soulja Boy was a product of the YouTube era; Ayo & Teo are Instagram stars).Snap rap prioritizes dancing and downplays lyrical intellectualism, and while it isn’t the first rap subgenre to embrace those concepts, it has a strong following who have set a new norm. Modern-day adherents include Young Thug and Future, Atlantans whose music has the same tempo, and DJ Mustard, whose music is faster but still has that snap feel. In the big picture, snap is another point in the ongoing hip-hop conversation between the South and the West, without any comment from New York City. Look at California’s hyphy and jerk music and Atlanta’s crunk and snap music: It’s all part of the same swirl. New York has turned up its nose the whole time.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Snoop Dogg is a rapper who will collaborate with anyone for the right price. But unlike, say, Gucci Mane, his tossed-off verses appear on more than miscellaneous cuts by random regional street rappers. Snoop’s musical promiscuity has led to surprisingly unlikely songs like “Lavender,” a track he made with Canadian jazz band BadBadNotGood and producer Kaytranada. Earlier this month, their video generated national headlines by depicting Snoop pointing a toy gun at a Donald Trump impersonator, resulting in an angry tweet from the president himself.

“Lavender” may be the most prominent example of how Snoop Dogg has extended his reach beyond the confines of urban pop. He’s delved into L.A.’s indie funk and electronic scenes by working with Dâm-Funk—on 2013’s underrated 7 Days of Funk—Adrian Younge, and Flying Lotus, appeared on Run the Jewels’ willfully bizarre remix project Meow the Jewels, and worked with adult soul veterans like Goapele and Kindred the Family Soul. On most of these tracks, the 40-something rapper genially plays the Uncle Snoop role, a celebrator of fine women and good smoke, while tactfully avoiding the vocal aggression that occasionally creeps up in his street-rap cameos (his “Lavender” verses against the president are a notable exception). He can come off as corny but he knows how to fit in, as memorable songs like his duet with Gorillaz, “Sumthin Like This Night,” prove.Among Snoop’s generation of late-‘80s/early-‘90s solo rap stars, there are precious few who still release commercially viable work: E-40, Too $hort, Dr. Dre, Nas, and JAY Z come to mind. Amidst that increasingly short list, Snoop’s role as West Coast ambassador for everyone, and not just the pop music industry in particular, is important. And the fact that he’s used his position to make intriguing digital funk gems like Flying Lotus’ “Dead Man’s Tetris” is a big plus.Click here to add to Spotify playlist!

Let’s be blunt: Southern California is the perfect place to get high. The skies are sunny year-round and the beaches are beautiful and plenty. There’s the bountiful surf of Malibu, the craggy rocks and gnarled trees of Joshua Tree, and the sweeping canyons and mellow vibes of San Diego; the landscape is the stuff of myth. Inspiration can be found all around, so perhaps it’s no surprise that so many great artists, all from the region but from different genres, sing marijuana’s praises.The list of artists is seemingly endless: In Los Angeles alone there’s The Mamas & The Papas, who were definitely thinking about lighting up when they sang “Safe In My Garden”; there’s Sublime, who made their interests obvious enough when they covered The Toyes’ reggae classic “Smoke Two Joints”; and of course there’s Cypress Hill and Snoop Dogg, the latter who has built a whole brand as the champion of weed smokers. These are just some of the obvious picks, of course, but put your finger practically anywhere on the SoCal map and you’ll find tendrils of smoke and pleasant sounds rising up, from Kyuss out in Palm Desert to Wavves’ Nathan Williams, who got his start recording tunes like “Weed Demon” at his parent’s house in San Diego.In honor of the release of Wavves’ latest album, You’re Welcome, out May 19 via Ghost Ramp, we’ve put together a playlist of SoCal stoner classics. Taking this in is sure to lighten any social engagement involving a bubbler, spliff, or vape pen, but it also offers a little slice of SoCal history and legacy through the bloodshot eyes of some of its greatest talents.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

As President Barack Obama’s historic term in office winds to a close, his legacy remains unsettled, and so does his presence within hip-hop culture. When he emerged in the mid-2000s as a talented Illinois senator, Chicago rapper Common rapped on Jadakiss’ “Why” remix with eerie prescience, “Why is Bush acting like he trying to get Osama/Why don’t we impeach him and elect Obama?” Four years later, as Obama capped a historic run to the White House, he became a pop culture meme celebrated on Jeezy’s “My President is Black” and Nas’ “Black President.” But there was also an emerging leftist critique against the Democratic president– see Mr. Lif’s “What About Us” and dead prez’ “Politrikks” – and that criticism only increased as he battled with an implacable Republican Congress, failed to prosecute Wall Street executives responsible for the 2008 economic recession, struggled to extricate the country from wars in the Middle East, and tried to bring the country out of an economic recession.Only time will tell which image resonates the most: the pop icon from Jidenna’s “Long Live the Chief” who shifted the country towards steady but incremental progress, or the establishmentarian whose policies resulted in insubstantial trickle-down gains for the working class, leading African-Americans like Ice Cube to declare that “Everythang’s Corrupt.” The arrival of his Republican successor, real estate tycoon Donald Trump, only muddies the waters of how we’ll eventually perceive this historic figure. As YG raps on “FDT,” “[Trump] got me appreciating Obama way more.”

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.For many, good kid, m.A.A.d. city was their entry point to Kendrick Lamar, and it was one of the greatest revelations in hip-hop this decade. Tracks such as “Money Trees” and “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” pare the vulnerability and earned spirituality of a trauma survivor with the heft of a master technician, while his intricate raps carry a conceptual framework that revealed the full weight of the post-millennial American collapse—the dead homies, the dead-end jobs, the deadened interpersonal relationships. Released one week before that album dropped, and in conjunction with this “making of” article published by Complex, this playlist—in Kendrick’s own words—captures “some of the records that inspire me to this day.” It’s predictably diverse. The first two tracks veer from the hardscrabble pathos of DMX’s “Slippin’” (“Im possessed by the darker side, livin the cruddy life”) to the haunting atmospheric grumbling of Portishead’s trip-hop trailblazer “Roads,” before eventually settling into the G-funk (DJ Quik’s “I Don’t Want to Party Wit U,” MC Eiht’s “Straight Up Menace”) that provided the soundtrack to Kendrick’s youth.This playlist comes with a minor caveat: As of 2017, it contains only nine tracks. Probably, at some point, it contained more tracks; and, at some point in the future, it will contain fewer. Spotify either lost rights to certain tracks on the playlist, or else the labels redelivered them in different versions. This Dowsers is a site dedicated to looking at playlists as artistic/critical artifacts, and this is both one of that medium’s charm and vulnerabilities: It’s ephemeral, susceptible to the vagrancies of anonymous digital-music content-operation teams. Like graffiti—which is itself vulnerable to time, weather and gentrification—this doesnt make it any less of an artform, but it’s important to understand.

Flutes are everywhere in hip-hop in 2017. They provided a wistful counterpoint to the grizzled trap of Future’s ubiquitous “Mask Off,” propped up Drake’s throttling “Portland” with a snaking melody, and popped up on tracks from D.R.A.M. (“Broccoli”), Gucci Mane (“Back on Road”), Kodak Black (“Tunnel Vision”), and Migos (too numerous to list off here). As trap continued to grow murkier and more psychedelic, the flute provided an otherworldly texture, a hypnotic counterpoint to hip-hop’s tougher, spare beats. This, of course, is nothing new, and this playlist from Okayplayer provides a quick history of the instrument’s use in hip-hop. The great Beatnuts used the instrument as a rhythmic counterpoint on "Watch Out Now," while the vaguely Eastern melody in 50 Cent’s “Just a Lil Bit” slithers through his teflon pimpin’ boasts. The instrument also provides a lightness to the shuffling, monochromatic beat for J Dila’s “Fuck the Police.”The playlist largely ignores the South, instead focusing on the headwrap rap heroes Okayplayer tends to champion (Mos Def, Common, A Tribe Called Quest), and, as a result, it feels quite incomplete. But it’s still an enjoyable listen, and the presence of a particular instrument provides a throughline between a lot of disparate selections. It forces the listener to lean in and pay attention to the track, and consider the ways that different artists, periods, or scenes have used the instrument. It doesn’t exactly make the case that the flute has been “hip-hop’s secret weapon,” but it does demonstrate that its been central to some amazing tracks.

Regardless of what you think qualitatively about Drake’s music, or his progression as an artist, his impact on culture is undeniable. He’s a pop idol in a classical, pre-pomo sense; his fans not only devour his music, they model their ideas about fashion, art, and even sports around the Toronto emcee. In ranking the songs that defined the “Drake era,” the Fader staff make note that “this is not a “Best Of” or a ranking of any sort, but an acknowledgement of the songs that represent Drake’s expanding influence in music, culture, and our lives.” It’s a subtle but interesting distinction, but nonetheless interesting: they’re not pulling their favorite songs, or even his most popular songs, but tracks that capture the Drake zeitgeist.