Rihanna has become one of the most successful singles artists of our time thanks to her singular voice and charisma, as well as a small army of producers and songwriters that are itching to work on her next chart-topper. But she’s become an increasingly discriminating artist, turning down a number of surefire hits to pursue a more unique and personal sound. In the process, dozens of artists have wound up releasing the Rihjects that were pitched to Rihanna. Some were massive hits anyway, like Sia’s “Cheap Thrills” and Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop,” while some songs never found their way to a voice that could occupy Rihanna’s unique combination of dancehall, hip-hop, and EDM.
The storied songwriting team of Elton John and Bernie Taupin won their first joint Oscar at the 2020 Academy Awards for “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again,” a disco-tinged, self-affirming strut from the Elton biopic Rocketman. That Oscar capped off a decade of big-ticket soundtrack songs, whether they were high-concept tracks like Lana Del Rey’s glammed-up Great Gatsby lament “Young and Beautiful,” heart-tugging ballads like Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born duet “Shallow,” or Pharrell Williams’ giddy Despicable Me 2 bounce “Happy.” Musicals were in high supply during the 2010s as well, with La La Land and Frozen leading the pack of song-filled fantasias that took viewers to far-off lands.
More of us have experiences with PMS than we do going to a hip-hop party, or any of the other various mood or activity-based playlist on Google Play or Spotify, so its rather curious that this is the first playlist Ive seen that tackles this subject head on. Jessica did an admirable job, though I wish she wouldve included Missys "Funky Fresh Dressed" ("my attitude is bitchy, cuz my period be heavy").
Whats This Playlist About?: By now we all know Ms. Swifts rather fickle taste in men, so its refreshing to see 43 other things that she loves——at least for now. This playlist will be updated monthly, after all.What You Get: The old Taylor may be dead, but between a few f-bombs (which youre hit with straight away via Bazzis woozy R&B hit "Mine") and some feel-good hip-hop, she still wants——and needs——to preserve that cuddly every-girl image. The vibe here is almost exclusively mellow and moody. This is intimate pop for candlelit moments, with lots of silky post-xx dream-pop (EXES, Haux) and sensitive post-Bon Iver dream-folk (Bootstraps, Trent Dabbs). Filling in the gaps are a couple of her very own songs, because, you know, self-love is whats most important.The Track That Defines It All: Sylvan Essos stripped-down lullaby "There Are Many Ways To Say I Love You," a short but sweet distillation of everything Taylor stands for.Greatest Discovery: Kiwi singer/songwriter Holly Arrowsmith, whose pure, pretty folk number, "Love Together," is the most pleasantly modest track of the bunch.Biggest Surprise: Yoke Lores precious cover of Savage Gardens of "Truly Madly Deeply." Hes kind of like the male Birdy.Will This Playlist Turn Taylor Haters Into Lovers?: Not likely, but it may quickly put them to sleep (and shut them up).
Scandinavian pop sensibilities have sporadically found a home on the American charts since the days of ABBA. Like Sweden’s Max Martin, the Norwegian duo Stargate have joined the transatlantic crossover in the 21st century. Tor Erik Hermansen and Mikkel Storleer Eriksen formed Stargate in the late ‘90s, producing a string of hits for British groups like S Club 7 and Atomic Kitten that charted almost everywhere in the English-speaking world except America.Stargate finally broke into the U.S. by helping another behind-the-scenes player step into the spotlight—the young R&B singer Ne-Yo, who had also written hits for other artists. Their first collaboration, 2006’s “So Sick,” brought together Stargate’s slick European dance-pop sonics with Ne-Yo’s soulful midtempo songwriting to great effect. They came together many times over the next few years, with Ne-Yo penning Stargate-produced hits like Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” and Rihanna’s “Take A Bow,” broadening that signature sound with lush instrumentation and witty lyrics.Stargate soon began to use their foothold in R&B to nudge American radio toward four-on-the-floor dance beats with tracks like Rihanna’s “Don’t Stop The Music” and Ne-Yo’s “Closer” years before uptempo EDM grooves began to saturate U.S. airwaves. In Rihanna, they’ve perhaps found their greatest muse, producing six of her 14 chart-topping singles and putting their own unique spin on Caribbean sounds in “What’s My Name?” and “Rude Boy.”In recent years, Hermansen and Eriksen have shown their versatility, hopping from rock (Coldplay) to hip-hop (Wiz Khalifa) to pure pop (Katy Perry). They even scored a viral hit in 2013, providing the killer dance track that made Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis’ “The Fox” a YouTube phenomenon. But it hasn’t been until this year that Stargate put their considerable music-industry clout behind a record of their own, releasing the single “Waterfall,” featuring P!nk and Sia.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.
As Harry Styles embarks on a solo career with an eagerly anticipated self-titled debut out May 12, we’ll see a new side of One Direction’s most famous member. As is usually the case when a boy-band member goes solo, his new music is more personal and idiosyncratic than the pop anthems the group cranked out over five albums in five years. But where Zayn left One Direction altogether and took a sharp left turn toward R&B, Harry’s solo work is more of an organic continuation of the One Direction sound, with influences from classic rock, power pop, and folk music.One Direction thrive on big choruses that bring everyone’s voice together in unison, while giving each member a turn at singing verses, but it’s undeniable that Styles is the most prominent voice in the mix. As far back as the band’s peppy debut hit “What Makes You Beautiful,” his deep, relaxed voice has always stood out among the other members’ more boyish vocals. As they ventured into bombastic arena rock on tracks like “Clouds” and “Diana,” his voice took on a gentle soaring quality.Over the course of One Direction’s run, the members of the band gradually took on a more active role in songwriting, with Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson taking the lead. But Harry Styles notched over a dozen songwriting credits in the group’s catalog, the best of which are included in the second half of this playlist. Styles occasionally put a personal stamp on their material—most famously with his thinly veiled lyrics aimed at Taylor Swift on “Perfect”—but he was also involved in some of the band’s most buoyant melodies, including the Tears For Fears homage “Stockholm Syndrome.”Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.
Aside from suggesting that masturbation is a "more defiant act of self love and self care," Pitchforks stab at the best onanistic songs by female pop stars is largely devoid of politics, which is refreshing. This is truly a playlist that speaks for itself (just as its subjects do other things for themselves), but its in interesting to note in passing that this contains a couple of tracks that are not on Spotify or Apple Music, and, to date, has not been uploaded to Pitchforks Apple site. Were all curious to see how Pitchfork ongoing relationship with Apple will affect its core, site content, and this suggests that maybe their business relationship isnt getting in the way of a good (if click-baity) playlist.
The overall unsteadiness of 2017 stretched to pop, which seemed plagued by an existential crisis that could be chalked up to the still-developing sea legs of streaming-music discovery, the panic of radio programmers looking over their collective shoulders at the looming threats posed by Spotifys Rap Caviar and Apples A-Lists, or just overall exhaustion. (It was a trying year.) The best pure pop pleasures of the year came largely from those artists who decided to cast formula to the wind and instead veer off in their own direction.Carly Rae Jepsens "Cut to the Feeling" (a holdover from the E•MO•TION era that proved how her cast-offs pack more punch than even the most precision-grade Max Martin concoction) led the charge, its call for letting it all out urged along by a squad of synths clapping; Paramore distracted from the heartache at the core of After Laughter by eclipsing it with laserbeam guitars and Hayley Williams height-scaling vocals; Miguel threw himself into his vocals as well on War & Leisure, singing like it was the only thing keeping him from certain doom. Radio wasnt without its pleasures; DJ Khaleds seemingly improbable Santana interpolation got life from Rihannas dead-serious flirtations on "Wild Thoughts," while Camila Cabellos slinky "Havana" felt like a trap-pop update of the "Smooth" formula, only with Young Thugs tongue-twisting rhymes standing in for Carlos licks.Kelly Clarkson and Kesha announced their liberation from pops mathematicians with albums that felt more like their live presences, electric and whipsawing through genres and giggling at the fun of it all. Ne-Yo, trapped in the purgatory of vocal features and top-down label uncertainty over the "marketability" of R&B for so long, put out "Another Love Song," a suited-up return to his Year of the Gentleman era that also stood out for actually expressing romantic pleasure. It aided a resurgent year for the genre on multiple levels: younger artists like Khalid, SZA, and Jordan Bratton used their soul-side-ready voices as a jumping-off point into modern textures; the sibling duo Chloe x Halle twinned and looped their ghostly voices into next-generation gold on The Two of Us; Luke James triple-dipped with his star turn as Johnny Gill in BETs outrageous New Edition biopic, the woozily coital "Drip," and a recurring role (complete with weekly singles releases) on Foxs girl-group musical soap Star; and Michigans Curtis Harding threw it back to the hot-buttered era on the stunning, sumptuous Face Your Fear. Pops best moments provided a metaphor for the year—the noisy mainstream might have its ever-more-fleeting moments, but the really satisfying moments lurked within more hidden corners.
Subscribe to the Spotify playlist right here.Lady Gaga once seemed so untouchable, perched on skyscraping heels while spinning dirty innuendos into chart-topping gold. But like the fame she has so gloriously glorified, shes also fickle—sometimes to a fault. Now, she simply wants to be our slightly wild drinking buddy eager to cause a scene at the dive bar in her Bud Light crop top and ratty cut-offs. Or at least this is the scrappy image shes conceived for her fourth solo album, Joanne.Since her arrival, Gaga has been constantly, exhaustedly calculating her next move. On Joanne, she speeds up that process, attempting reinvention with nearly every song. It makes for a scattered album with little focus: Even the title, named after her late aunt who died young of lupus, makes no sense in the context of, say, the reggae-tinged self-pleasuring ode "Dancin in Circles."But it also makes for one of pops more exciting releases of 2016. And thats partially due to her choice of collaborators: She pushes for indie cred by enlisting Tame Impalas Kevin Parker for "Perfect Illusion," a move that becomes somewhat overshadowed by Mark Ronsons disco-fied production and the chorus likeness to Madonnas "Papa Dont Preach." Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme is more successful at pulling that rock-bred rawness out of her on the Springsteen-soaring, Pat Benatar-nodding anthem "Diamond Heart."But when Gaga ditches the 80s glamour, she makes an even better case as a convincing Spaghetti western seductress alongside hippie-eccentric Father John Misty on "Sinners Prayer"; a slinky soul sister to Florence Welch on "Hey Girl"; and even a country crossover star, making the gorgeous ballad "Joanne" her "Jolene" and giving Taylor one more thing to shake off with the honky-tonkin "A-Yo," co-penned by Nashville hitmaker Hillary Lindsey. Forget that dive bar girl— with all that (and more), Gaga suddenly seems untouchable again.For this playlist we attempt to trace the influences and collaborators behind Joanne, which deserves way more than one listen to fully unpack.
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.
