Rock + Alternative

New Order may have recorded indifferent songs, but I could only think of a handful of terrors before scouring their solo careers.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Nineteen-seventy-seven was a year of styles congealing and pointing beyond themselves, musical moments coming into focus and then, just as quickly, getting blurry. Four decades later, this single year of music continually haunts us with its greatness through deaths and rebirths, reissues, and reunion tours. With the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks…, the Ramones’ Rocket to Russia AND Leave Home, and The Clash’s self-titled album, it was a major year for punk; through Television’s Marquee Moon and Wire’s Pink Flag, we glimpsed the dawn of post-punk. And I, for one, still don’t know what to call Iggy Pop’s dual masterpieces from that year, The Idiot and Lust for Life, two records that strayed far enough outside the conventions of rock, proto-punk, and post-punk that they should maybe just be left under the art-rock banner. Likewise, Suicide’s ghostly, self-titled classic could be called anything from proto-punk to post-punk to synth-pop; its mercurial nature only amplifies its staying power as we continue to struggle to digest it in light of Alan Vega’s 2016 death.Also along the lines of the weirder, more avant-garde pop: David Bowie (who produced Iggy Pop’s two releases from that year) dropped Berlin-trilogy classics ”Heroes” and Low—the latter produced by Brian Eno, whose own Before and After Science came out that December. These records, alongside Talking Heads: 77, Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express, and Elvis Costello’s debut LP, My Aim Is True, pointed clearly and forcefully toward the New Wave of the ‘80s.Nineteen-seventy-seven also saw rock continuing to explode into a vast diaspora of sub-genres: disillusioned folk rock (Neil Young’s American Stars ‘n Bars, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours), politicized prog rock (Pink Floyd’s Animals), country-inflected jam rock (Grateful Dead’s Terrapin Station), smooth jazz rock (Steely Dan’s Aja), and whatever you’d call Billy Joel’s The Stranger. (Oh yeah, and John Williams’ Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope soundtrack came out.)This (incomplete, to be sure) list has probably inspired thoughts of nostalgia, as well as, possibly, some feelings of melancholy about the music of our own time. If strong opinions about any of these records have surfaced, it’s because 1977 is still very alive today. The year still guides the rock we make, and it still infiltrates our playlists. The political and social issues of 1977 still, in many ways, exist, and we still struggle to respond to them in ways that are appropriate and meaningful. This playlist isn’t going to change the world, but if it leads to a new way of understanding the present, that’s a good thing. Or, if you just jam out to it while cleaning your house or going for a run, that’s fine, too.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.Those who can’t remember the ‘60s may be doomed to repeat them, but that may be more a blessing than a curse. Though other eras ebb and flow in terms of their musical influence on the present moment, the Age of Aquarius appears to be a constantly churning river that runs through every subsequent period in pop culture, providing inspiration anew to each fresh crop of strummers, slammers, and shouters. 2016 was no exception to this phenomenon—of the albums released over the course of the year, there was no shortage of records sporting a significant ‘60s flavor. Of course even among ‘60s fetishists, everyone has their own variation. For instance, current troubadours like Ryley Walker and Itasca show fealty to the acoustic guitar-wielding folkie songsmiths of bygone days, while The Explorers Club and Seth Swirsky pay homage to the sunshine pop powers of The Beach Boys and their ilk, and Night Beats and The Warlocks represent the drop-some-acid-and-floor-the-distortion-pedal approach to psychedelia. All in all, 2016 turned out to be a pretty good year for the ‘60s.

If you were a teenager in the ‘80s (as I was), you could be forgiven for thinking the ‘60s were lame. Between yuppies dancing around to Motown milestones in The Big Chill to classic rock radio’s ossification of a couple dozen hippie-era hits (whose ubiquity proved that familiarity does indeed breed contempt), any right-thinking young person was bound to eschew the Aquarian age in search of greener pastures. Most likely, you gravitated toward the bright, gleaming light beckoning from the New Wave/post-punk realm, where everything seemed fresh and vibrant.But as I discovered pretty quickly into my obsession with college radio—and contemporary chronicles like Trouser Press, New York Rocker, and Creem—punk’s tabula rasa/year zero ideal didn’t hold much ground when you got into the nitty-gritty of what followed it. The flood of ‘80s acts who arrived in punk’s wake, for all their bold new moves, still sported a slew of influences from the ‘60s—sometimes overtly in the form of cover tunes, and sometimes more subtly in the influences they’d assimilated.The more I viewed the music of the ‘60s through the filter of ‘80s bands who were breathing new life into the airwaves and record stores again, the more attractive that bygone era seemed. Sometimes a cover version could put you on a direct route to the original artist’s oeuvre: For instance, ‘60s L.A. psych underdogs Love, who would be posthumously deified a couple of decades later, were more popular than ever as an underground phenomenon in the ‘80s. The Damned’s cover of their “Alone Again Or” made it easy to find your way to the seminal Forever Changes; and once you were there, the spelunking was endlessly rewarding.Even on the less obvious end of the spectrum, it didn’t take a cultural anthropologist to trace the links from, say, the power chords of The Jam and Secret Affair to mod OGs like The Who and Small Faces. Nor was it too tough to determine that the chiming guitar riffs of R.E.M. and The Cleaners From Venus led straight back to first-gen jangle kings The Byrds.It wasn’t just ‘60s rock that revealed itself to me in this manner. The ‘80s synth-pop bands may not have had much of a musical investment in psychedelia and such, but the pop, R&B, and girl group sounds of the ’60s were another story. It was easy to follow the paths of the likes of Naked Eyes to the glittering legacy of singers like Dionne Warwick, who previously might have seemed like a middle-of-the-road musician from another generation to my amateurish ears. And while New Orleans R&B wasn’t especially accessible to an ‘80s kid growing up in The Bronx, Devo’s mechanized take on the Allen Toussaint-penned Lee Dorsey classic “Working In the Coal Mine” illuminated a whole new world to be explored.Of course, in a pre-Internet world, these explorations of the past were far more difficult than they are for teens, or anybody else, today. But the thrill of the chase was as much a part of the fun as the end result.

Rock ’n’ roll is all about relentless forward propulsion, and its success hinges on how well a musician can balance his or her violent adrenaline rushes and animalistic urges with the self-discipline and focus that comes with heady groove research. This is something at which AC/DC’s Malcolm Young—who recently left us after succumbing to the dementia that had plagued him for nearly a decade—excelled. If his brother, Angus, is Chuck Berry (all about dazzling flashes of lightning and speeding, razor-wire licks) then Malcolm was Bo Diddley, a brilliant groove engineer (as well as songwriter—let’s not forget that) who could ceaselessly combine and recombine the essential, fundamental components of boogie (rock, as well as the blues). He was not unlike a minimalist architect, only Malcolm’s geometry unfolds across time, which certainly adds a whole new level of intelligence to it. In fact, a friend of mine recently said something quite relevant to this point: There should be a chapter on AC/DC in any quality book chronicling the rise of minimalism in 20th-century music and art. Amen. Such a proclamation is a testament to Malcolm’s belief in the effectiveness of simplicity and archetypal forms and how this belief shaped AC/DC’s mission statement. To really bask in his understated genius, check out berga570’s fantastic YouTube clip, which isolates and loops his riff for “Thunderstruck.” It’s insane—a sublime blending of off-kilter, intuitive swing with a kind of mechanized symmetry. It’s maniacally stuttering and repetitive, falling somewhere between John Lee Hooker and avant-garde oddity Henry Flynt.But Malcolm took things another couple steps further; blast the extended live version of “Bad Boy Boogie” or the locked-tight “Overdose” (both representative of the deeper-style cuts you’ll hear on our playlist) and what you have is the grease of vintage rock and blues fed through the grinding gears of the modern industrial world. We’re talking savage robotics here. Hell, you could even argue that AC/DC were proto-techno rockers before such a concept even existed! So yeah, thanks to Malcolm, these dudes weren’t just debauched rock ’n’ rollers; they were (along with ZZ Top and Motörhead) real-deal innovators of what I like to call rough-neck, working-class minimalism. R.I.P. to the greatest rhythm guitarist in the history of hard rock.

“I’m a wolf child, girl, howlin’ for you! Wild flower!” When these lines appeared 50 seconds into The Cult’s Electric, nothing would ever be the same—even if it sounded pretty much like it always had.Future historians may prefer a more phonetic rendering of the song’s title, which sounds more like “wiiillldd flllowww-ahh!” coming out of Ian Astbury’s mouth. Married to Billy Duffy’s crunchy riffage, the singer’s schtick was gloriously, even knowingly, dumb. But critics at the time were unkind to our hero. In a Spin review of the more absurd follow-up album, Sonic Temple, writer David Sprague pondered whether Astbury was indeed the Jerry Lee Lewis of rock, ridiculing the former goth band’s bald-faced lifts from Led Zeppelin, Queen, and The Doors (who were fronted by Astbury’s true god, Jim Morrison).Hard as it may be for present-day aficionados of cock rock to believe, all of the genre’s bands were largely treated as objects of ridicule when Electric was delivered into the greedy hands of teenagers 30 years ago this month. After all, classic rock radio was just becoming a thing, and with thrash and hardcore yet to go overground and Hüsker Dü and The Replacements left stuck on the dial, what passed for hard rock in the mainstream was hair metal’s limp glam pop pastiche. Machine-tooled to perfection by Rick Rubin, Electric did a lot to change that.So did Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction, which arrived just a few months later. Soon, the scene on both sides of the Atlantic would be thick with Jack-swilling, bandana-clad he-men schooled in Zeppelin, Sabbath, Aerosmith, and the newly resurgent AC/DC. Even former hair metal lightweights like Cinderella did all they could to toughen up.Having set the gold standard first with Slayer and then The Cult, Rubin continued to put his Midas touch on bands like Masters of Reality and The Four Horsemen, two lesser lights who still churned out some monster jams. Meanwhile, the hip-hop/mega rock merger that Rubin first devised would soon reach maximum overdrive when Public Enemy sampled Slayer and teamed up with Anthrax. Deep in the Pacific Northwest, there were rumblings of the grunge to come, though back in the late ’80s, it took a discerning ear to hear any hard line between Soundgarden and German Zep wannabes Kingdom Come. Which is to say they were both awesome.Tragically, this period of magnificence came to an end, right around the same time Nevermind arrived alongside GnR’s bloated Use Your Illusion in September of 1991 (oddly, Ozzy Osbourne’s final solo masterpiece, No More Tears, came out the same month). To commentators at the time, Nirvana’s conquest signaled rock’s new relevance; a narrative that made sense, seeing as the genre’s popularity had sagged so much that not a single rock album topped the charts the year before.But that’s dead wrong now, what with the age of gods ushered in by Electric replaced by the lumpen likes of Creed, Staind, and Nickelback—if Astbury was hard rock’s Jerry Lee Lewis, surely Chad Kroeger is its Rob Schneider. Saddled in between the ass-end of hair metal and the rise of grunge, this era has rarely gotten its due. Hell, classic rock radio rarely touches the stuff—it’s too damn gnarly. But make no mistake: This wolf child is still howlin’ for you.

It was in the summertime half a century ago that the world first met one of the great American bands, a group that would reach sky-high success while retaining a resolutely rootsy, earthbound sound. Creedence Clearwater Revivals 1968 debut album introduced guitar-playing brothers John and Tom Fogerty, drummer Doug Clifford, and bassist Stu Cook, four young men out of El Cerrito in the San Francisco Bay Area. But while they emerged in a place and time where trippy psychedelic visions where the order of the day, CCR bucked the trends and instead tapped into a rich, traditional seam of American music that connected to blues, country, rockabilly, gospel, folk, and R&B.When their contemporaries were unfurling mind-bending musical excursions with elaborate productions that included everything but the proverbial kitchen sink, Creedence crashed into the upper rungs of the album and singles charts with songs that wasted nary a note or word, overflowing with raw soul and unbridled energy. They cranked out 10 Top 40 singles, six Platinum albums, and one Gold in just four intensely prolific years, all powered by John Fogertys gut-level growl, with the rest of the band providing just the right kind of gritty, in-the-pocket punch to propel CCRs vision.

For a song proclaiming its desire for eternal youth, Alphaville’s 1984 signature single “Forever Young” has a way of making you feel pretty old. Certainly, the essential, inescapable ’80s-ness of the song—the sunrise-summoning synths, the slick gated-reverb drum sound, the lighter-waving chorus line, the Cold War context—has a way of making those of us who came of age in that era feel all the more attuned to the passage of time. And the song’s very lyrical conceit presents a cruel paradox: With its yearning plea to return to the innocence and ecstasy of adolescence, “Forever Young” also underscores the fact it must come to an end.At the time “Forever Young” was released, rock ‘n’ roll was reckoning with its own lost youth. Twenty years after The Who’s Roger Daltrey famously declared “I hope I die before I get old,” the original classic rockers were starting to become aware of, if not their mortality, then their fading relevance. Rod Stewart seemed particularly preoccupied with the subject: While he tried to align himself with the New Wave kids on 1981’s synth-powered new-generation anthem “Young Turks,” by decade’s end, he had fully accepted his dad-rock fate with the parentally themed serenade “Forever Young” (which shares only its title with the Alphaville song; in fact, Rod’s “Forever Young” is an interpretation of Bob Dylan’s namesake 1974 deep cut). Other veteran artists, however, defiantly embraced their inner child, like Tom Waits on “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” his ramshackle folk-punk repudiation of the adult world and all the responsibilities and disappointments that go with it.So while Alphaville’s “Forever Young” may strike many as an ‘80s synth-pop artifact, permanently frozen in the Reagan era, it really belongs to a broader tradition of pop and rock songs that celebrate the state of being young and/or recognize how fleeting that moment really is. This playlist repositions “Forever Young” in its true natural habitat, amid a set of songs that embody all aspects of being young: the feelings of invincibility (Oasis’ “Live Forever,” Skid Row’s “Youth Gone Wild,” fun.’s “We Are Young”), the celebrations of immaturity (Supergrass’ “Alright,” Wilco’s “Just a Kid”), the compulsion to live for the moment and seize the day (Japandroids’ “Younger Us,” Constantines’ “Young Lions”), and emergent anxieties over getting older (Lana Del Rey’s “Young And Beautiful”). “Life is a short trip,” Alphaville’s Marian Gold warns us on “Forever Young”—but this playlist represents a bottomless fountain of youth where you can relive and savor the best days of your life just a little longer.

Over the past two years, there’s been such a remarkable abundance of great music by female artists in the overlapping territories of alt-country, roots, and Americana that it could fill this playlist many times over. From the folky, sepulchral sounds of Pieta Brown, to the Kitty Wells-style honky-tonk throwbacks of Rachel Brooke, to the raw and tender country blues of Adia Victoria (pictured), it’s a boom time all round.That said, trying to fit a disparate group of artists into a tidy category that’s based in part on their gender can’t help but feel unfairly reductive. Hell, it may even perpetuate the kind of backward sexual politics that persist in the worst of American country music and that many artists understandably buck against. Back in 2014, the duo Maddie & Tae scored a surprise smash with “Girl In A Country Song,” a bouncy piece of C&W pop that doubled as an unusually acerbic satire of the ways women are typically represented by Nashville. “We used to get a little respect,” goes the chorus. “Now we’re lucky if we even get to climb up in your truck/ Keep our mouths shut and ride along/ And be the girl in a country song.” Three years later, with “bro-country” acts like Florida Georgia Line, Luke Bryan, and Chase Rice doubling down on innuendo-laden tailgate-party anthems and yet more videos with models in bikinis, mainstream country needs that kind of skewering even more.Lest all this just serve as another reason for alt-country hipsters to feel smug about their superior tastes, even they ought to admit that there ain’t much gender parity when it comes to the artists who generally cross over from the No Depression crowd and gain wider renown and success. After all, there are many more female acts who’ve been just as willing as Chris Stapleton and Sturgill Simpson to pursue a richer, more adventurous kind of artistry than Nashville generally tolerates. They too deserve to garner audiences beyond the flannel-clad roots-music devotees who already recognize the virtues of Rhiannon Giddens’ revamps of old-time spirituals, savor the gilded harmonies of The Trishas, or tremble at the sound of Tift Merritt’s warble.This bounty of talent ranges from newbies like Kacy & Clayton (a Canadian duo who’ve become protégés of Jeff Tweedy) and Molly Burch (an Austinite blessed with a voice whose chilly beauty evokes Patsy Cline and Karen Dalton at their most desolate) to Shelby Lynne and Alison Moorer, sisters and alt-country vets who demonstrate their own dexterity by combining covers of Townes Van Zandt and Nirvana on their new album Not Dark Yet. These are the alt-country women you need to hear if you haven’t been so lucky already. Big-hatted bros best take heed.

What a difference 25 years can make. In 1992, the American alt-rock movement arguably reached its zenith: It had become big enough to earn major-label attention, but hadn’t yet been corrupted by its exposure to the mainstream. The gods of grunge were walking the earth but so were the power-poppers, sadcore kings, lo-fi upstarts, and others. A quarter-century later, some of them have departed this earthly plane, but most of them are still active and making music that’s a far cry from the sounds that helped them ascend to the top of the alt-rock heap back in the early ‘90s.When Pavement were putting the lo-fi movement on the map with 1992’s Slanted and Enchanted, it would have been tough to predict that Stephen Malkmus would one day unleash an 11-minute cover of a Grateful Dead tune. The hooky pop perfection of The Lemonheads’ “It’s A Shame About Ray” doesn’t exactly set you up for Evan Dando’s take on country-folk troubadour Townes Van Zandt’s doomy “Waiting Around to Die.” Nor could you draw a straight line from Chris Cornell’s wailing on Soundgarden’s post-metal monster “Rusty Cage” to the epic, romantic balladry of his 2017 single “The Promise” (the track that sadly proved to be his swan song). The latest output from the likes of The Afghan Whigs (pictured) and Mark Lanegan is a complete 180 from the sounds of their salad days, but there’s an undeniable artistic maturation at work there.The alt-rock class of ‘92 might seem different from what you remember (if you’re even old enough to remember), but they’re still at it today, and they’ve still got something to say. Here’s a snapshot of what some of them have been up to lately, paired with tracks from a quarter-century ago.