Rock + Alternative

To imagine twenty years ago that I’d compile a twenty-song Smashing Pumpkins list in 2017 is like thinking I’d deliver Ronald Reagan’s eulogy. But the Pumpkins, whose innovation was to find hard rock wrinkles in Butch Vig and especially Alan Moulder’s shoegaze mixes, were intermittently formidable, despite Billy Corgan — in every sense. I recoil from his voice. I can’t deny how dense the Pumpkins sounded when Corgan wrote worthwhile material. “Crush” was my introduction in fall 1991, receiving airplay on my top 40 station’s Sunday evening “modern rock” Sunday shows. “I Am One” and “Rhinoceros” followed. Their breakthrough two years later came as no surprise — for all Corgan’s complaints about Stephen Malkmus and cred he kept a hawk’s eye on the marketplace. After 1998, sorry, I lost track of them. I thought twice before including “1979” because I can’t forget how he mangled a perfect hook and decent lyric with a mouth full of cotton candy.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more

Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were already anachronisms when they met as jazz-obsessed teenagers in the late ‘60s and began to write the droll, harmonically complex songs that made Steely Dan one of the greatest and most unique bands of the ‘70s. So it’s not surprising that the duo who worked tirelessly to get the best performances out of skilled session players never had much interest in hip-hop and the art of sampling. They even made it difficult to clear samples; they negotiated for the entire songwriting credit and publishing for the Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz hit “Déjà Vu (Uptown Baby)” and only allowed a “Kid Charlemagne” sample on Kanye West’s “Champion” after West sent the duo a passionate handwritten letter. But even Steely Dan’s stingy attitude towards sample clearances hasn’t stopped dozens of artists from doing the necessary paperwork to obtain use of the band’s gloriously recorded jazz-rock grooves (though De La Soul may not have, which could be why one of the most famous Steely Dan samples, the “Peg” loop on “Eye Know,” isn’t available on streaming services). But while the Dan’s tightly syncopated grooves and densely detailed arrangements clearly attract crate-digging producers the most, Donald Fagen’s voice figures into a surprising number of samples, boasting “Yes, I’m gonna be a star” on Amiri’s “Star” or chanting “They don’t give a fuck about anybody else” on one of Super Furry Animals’ biggest UK chart hits. The Steely Dan songs that have been sampled by multiple artists offer a case study in how many options the band’s rich arrangements offer to beatmakers. Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz went for the obvious but irresistible opening bars of “Black Cow,” while MF Doom zeroed in on a lovely keyboard flourish that happens just once in the song’s bridge. And where Audio Bullys looped the hypnotic guitar lick from “Midnite Cruiser,” legendary Atlanta production team Organized Noize played the riff at three different speeds to create a whole new chord progression for Sleepy Brown’s solo track “Dress Up.” Becker, sadly, passed away on September 3, 2017. But his music lives on—and continues to find new audiences—through the many hip-hop, rock, and R&B tracks collected here.

Replacing the beret for a skull did wonders for Tom Waits’ cred. Movie ballads, sea shanties, Keith Richards collaborations, Delta blues, eating worms for Francis Ford Coppola — he’s beat you. His voluminous catalog defeats me; I relied on the CD-R I burned in the early 2000s of the beer ‘n’ Beats stuff and have fitfully kept up with his career since he and wife/chief collaborator Kathleen Brennan released album after album of songs about brawlers, boozers, and bastards this millennium. I prize Bone Machinemost, bought in January 1993 and to my ears the peak of his clink-clank ethos whose shrewdness allowed him to issue more than a few maudlin things that attracted him to Rod Stewart (I adore his “Downtown Train” by the way). He let Marc Ribot pull Beefheart-inflected melodic noise from his guitar, allowing him the space to treat percussion like a second lead. Give him this: he found a way to fuse Flannery O’Connor, Howlin’ Wolf, and Streisand.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

In 1990 when I discovered Consolidated and Meat Beat Manifesto, Nine Inch Nails didn’t come up. Melodic, entranced by rock star poses, Trent Reznor had no patience for the happiness-in-slavery submission to beats and noise of industrial, which marked him as a star from the beginning—NIN, not Consolidated, were asked to play Lollapalooza in 1991. I’m not a fan—this kind of hysteria makes me question the idea of sex itself, for if you’re heaving and shouting and lisping and drooling so strenuously, you must be more desperate than I need at the moment. But I can’t deny Reznor’s manipulation of self-destructive zones that stop just short of demilitarized zones. His most sustained recording is Broken, when he figured out the connections between Adam Ant and Adam and Eve. I wish I had seen his 1995 tour with David Bowie, with whom he formed a poignant bond: a tour that didn’t deserve its slings, according to the clips I’ve watched.Visit our partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

We’re supposed to be living in the age of infinite, unimpeded access to the entire history of recorded music. The reality, of course, isn’t so simple. If streaming services are the new record stores, they can be just as susceptible to supply-side issues as their brick-and-mortar predecessors. In other words: sometimes, the album you really want to hear isn’t in stock. In the streamiverse, certain artists’ discographies can resemble digital Swiss cheese, particularly if they bounced between number of labels over the course of the career, and especially if some of those labels went belly up. Historically, reissues have taken the form of lavish packages that come loaded with outtakes, rare photos and detailed liner notes, and that often still is the case. But in this day and age, “reissue” has also just become a fancy code word for “old album I can now stream on Spotify.”As such, some of the year’s most welcome new arrivals to the streaming world were technically reissues of once-lost records whose preceding reissues had also gone out of print, such as Simply Saucer’s crucial early ‘70s proto-punk document Cyborgs Revisited or pre-teen disco-punk diva Chandra’s 1980-era Transportation. 2018 also proved that there are still obscure private-pressed singer-songwriters (like Colorado-based pro-rock-climber-turned-troubadour Pat Ament), ‘70s space-rock groups (Canada’s Melodic Energy Commission), ‘80s post-punk bands (New Zealand’s Nocturnal Projections) and unsung ‘90s grunge groups (Australia’s Magic Dirt) out there waiting to rediscovered; still unsung funk auteurs deserving to be rescued from the crates (Tim Jones a.k.a. Preacherman); still no limit to the synth-fueled freakery lurking in the back catalog of late electronic-music pioneer Bruce Haack (check the proto-rap jam “Party Machine”); and still no bottom to the well of wiggy grooves emanating from West Africa in the 1970s (see: the Benin-focused second edition of Analog Africa’s Africa Scream Contest series).Among more high-profile reclamation projects, The Beatles’ 50th-anniversary White Album box set proved to be the rare classic-rock cash grab whose bonus tracks are just as mythical as the original material. (On top of providing fans with official versions of oft-bootlegged curios like “Revolution 1 - Take 18”—which connects the familiar acoustic sing-along with the sound-collage chaos of “Revolution 9”—the alternate Take 10 version of “Good Night” suggests Ringo invented the third Velvet Underground album a few months early.) In some cases, reissues transported us back to a watershed moment in rock history, be it Detroit’s mid-’60s garage-band scene (via a pre-fame Bob Seger’s band the Last Heard) or Neil Young’s infamously rowdy post-Harvest/pre-Tonight’s the Night residency at the Roxy in Los Angeles circa 1973. With others, we revisited notoriously mercurial bands at a key early stage in their evolution, like when The Flaming Lips started to dress up their psych rock with bells and whistles (on the ‘92-era gem “Zero to a Million”) or when Brooklyn bruisers The Men started to infuse their punk-rock roar with more emotional undertones on “Wasted.” And then there were reissues that gave us an intimate audience to private moments of creation—like Prince’s largely improvised Piano & A Microphone1983, Julee Cruise’s early ethereal demos, or the 25th-anniversary excavation of Liz Phair’s lo-fi Girly-Sound Tapes, which was perfectly timed to reify her profound influence on a new generation of confessional indie-rockers.But some of this year’s most notable archival projects were less about satiating completists than commemorating lives cut short far too soon. Women guitarist Chris Reimer—who passed away suddenly in 2012 at age 26—was honored with a collection of private home recordings, Hello People, that showcased his budding talents as an ambient soundscaper. The legacy of Ross Shapiro, the late singer/guitarist for Athens indie-rock hopefuls The Glands, was fortified with the release of the outtakes collection Double Coda. The free-ranging career of Chris Cornell was encapsulated by an box set featuring a handful of previously unreleased oddities—including a cover of U2’s “One” that subs in the lyrics to Metallica’s “One”—that present a more playful portrait of the brooding grunge god. And a survey of Joe Strummer’s solo career, 001, was capped with the 1988-era castaway “U.S. North,” a valorous 10-minute cavalry charge that marks a rare reunion with Mick Jones, suggesting the sort of epic rock music The Clash might’ve headed toward had they survived into the late ‘80s. It’s a reminder that the best reissues and compilations don’t just preserve history, but allow us to imagine an alternate one.

Atlanta’s Black Lips belong to a long and winding lineage of garage rockers and twang-infused punks from the South, and continue that tradition with the new release of their eighth album, the Sean Ono Lennon-produced, Satan’s Graffiti Or God’s Art? In addition to hugely influential labels like Goner, the region has coughed up a slew of the genre’s most notable pioneers. With “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” Lone Star State psychonauts The 13th Floor Elevators created what may very well be the single most important song in the mid-’60s merger of garage and psychedelia, while the lo-fi bash and screech of Memphis heavyweights Jay Reatard and Oblivions are central to the evolution of modern garage punk (with each spawning a slew of projects, spotlighted in our playlist).It should come as no surprise that a good chunk of Southern garage rock soaks up the region’s more renowned flavors: blues, soul, gospel, and rockabilly. The Moving Sidewalks, Billy Gibbons’ pre-ZZ Top outfit, blend orange sunshine-fueled fuzz with the kind of greasy R&B swing heard in East Texas juke joints; Alex Chilton’s “My Rival,” from his 1979 cult classic, Like Flies On Sherbert, is a brain-blasted concoction of ’50s boogie and eccentric New Wave that has more in common with Swell Maps than Big Star. Seratones are another telling example—the young band from Shreveport, Louisiana, have in AJ Haynes a powerful singer equally inspired by gospel and distortion-caked punk.But there are plenty of garage rockers in the South who aren’t the least bit rootsy. Nots, one of the hardest and hottest bands to emerge from Memphis’ always fertile scene, are cold, brittle, and jagged, just like old-school post-punks on Rough Trade (Kleenex, Delta 5, and Stiff Little Fingers). In contrast, Nashville’s JEFF The Brotherhood devote a lot of their creative energy to cutting garage with hook-littered power pop, glam, and shambolic indie rock. But enough chatter, people—it’s time to press play and lose yourself in a whole mess of Southern-fried snarl and reverb.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

When I need to bask in the genius of Bob Dylan I listen to a record; I don’t read his lyrics like a book of poetry. This is why his winning the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature doesn’t validate a damn thing. To reduce his lyrics to text is to miss the most important aspect: their delivery. Along with Jimi Hendrix’s guitar and Miles Davis’ trumpet, Dylan’s voice is one of the most immersive, soulful, and psychologically complex instruments in the history of American music. And much like Frank Sinatra, he’s shrewdly turned the wear and tear that comes with time into an advantage. When the culture-wrecking roar ‘n’ whine of the 1960s and ’70s became a physical impossibility, he reinvented himself as an ancient ghost with a deliciously sandpapered groan that can flip between ageless truth and sneering insolence at the drop of a hat. While you’ll certainly encounter a handful of classics, my playlist isn’t a greatest hits mix. Rather, I’ve pulled together a bunch of songs — some recorded live, many deep cuts, all personal faves — that I feel show off Dylan’s power, range, and utter eccentricity as a vocalist.

Most people take the apocalypse as an article of faith, but what exactly the apocalypse entails is in the eye of the beholder. Will the universe dissolve and all matter cease to exist, or will the pillaging be more localized? Perhaps the sun will explode. Or, more specifically (and likely), the oceans might rise and drown large swaths of humanity Or maybe the opposite is true, and we’ll simply run out of water like in Mad Max? There are also health issues to consider. What if we develop a mutation that makes a certain portion of society both resistant to death and hungry for human flesh? This seems like a very popular (if scientifically) scenario. Or perhaps it’s a more mundane: maybe we’ll just stop producing babies. Or maybe we’ll slip into a computer-generated virtual reality simulation, with our robot overlords overseeing out inert sleeping bodies. Honestly, I don’t really know how it all will end, and I haven’t given it that much thought, to be honest. But I know someone who has: Bob Dylan. Over the course of his nearly 60 years career, Dylan has written very extensively about extinction events, though his take is always evolving. Initially, Dylan seem to look at the upside of the end of the world. “A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall” is at-times terrifying in its depiction of the dire aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, but it also left room for the emergence of a visionary poet who would serve as a sortof bohemian Moses to lead his people out of the wilderness (spoiler: the poet is Dylan). The track “When the Ship Comes In” sounds downright celebratory as it imagines a post-racial society, until you realize that this society exists in the ashes of traditional Western civilization. During the mid-‘60s, as Dylan forsook folk for fock n’ roll, the bard imagined the apocalypse as a weird mash-up of Cold War terror, religious zealotry, and pop culture schizophrenia. Tracks such as “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” and “Highway 61 Revisited” are gleeful, language-melting odes our impending dome. They imagined a society standing on the precipice of mass confusion. In the context of the chaos of the ‘60s social upheaval, these songs were considered prophetic.As the ‘60s wore on, his vision of the apocalypse grew at turns mournful (“All Along the Watchtower) and menacing (“Wheels on Fire”), but it was never far from his mind. In the time sense, he bends the apocalyptic to help further his own pet projects and theories. Doomsday provided great grist for the mill when Dylan was a fire-and-brimstone preached in the late-70s and early 80s. And, when Dylan released a string of brilliant mid-life-sad-sack records in the late 90s and early aughts, apocalyptic imagery helped illuminate the full range of his personal malaise.

Of the infinite subgenres crammed under the rock ‘n’ roll umbrella, no two feel as diametrically opposed as country-rock and glam. The former is a emblematic of authenticity, traditonalism, humility, and lonesome landscapes; the latter is the product of artifice, stardust-speckled futurism, flamboyance, and seedy inner-city alleyways. But on his two solo releases to date—2016’s Dolls of Highland and the new Full Circle Nightmare—Portland-via-Shreveport tunesmith Kyle Craft effortlessly initiates a holy communion between roots and ritz, casting his audacious, satellite-chasing voice and saucy narratives in a downhome brew of teary-eyed guitars and barrelhouse piano rolls. And he’s just the latest, most visible participant in a long conversation between these polar-opposite aesthetics.Before they became ‘70s pomp-rock icons, David Bowie and Elton John cast their vivacious voices in more rustic settings on their early records, while their peers in The Rolling Stones wallowed in southern-bordello sleaze on Exile on Main Street. And ever since, glam-loving rock acts from The Flaming Lips to Jack White to Girls have twisted heartland sounds to suit their own whimsical worldviews or, in the case of The Replacements, expressed solidarity with gender-bending outsiders. There is, of course, also a deep history of openly queer artists—from renegade troubadour Patrick Haggerty (a.k.a. Lavender Country) to doomed glitter-rock sensation Jobriath to avant-disco polymath Arthur Russell to modern-day indie acts like The Hidden Cameras and Ezra Furman—who’ve infiltrated the notoriously conservative arena of Americana, balancing sly subversion with sincere appreciation. Follow the lipstick traces into the heartland with this playlist of artists who serve up the glitz with a side of grits.

Unlike most hyphenated sub-genres, soul-punk isn’t really a collision of two different musical forms. It’s not so much a modification of punk as a reassertion of what’s been embedded in the music all along——do-or-die, preacher-man passion, pulpit-shaking intensity, and floorboard-smashing backbeats. After all, when you strip down the sound of proto-punk legends like the MC5 and Stooges, you’ll find an engine powered by Motown spunk and James Brown funk. And that emphasis on rhythm certainly wasn’t lost on future generations of garage-rockers—from the New Bomb Turks to Make-Up to The Bellrays—who liked their rama-lama with a little fa-fa-fa.But soul-punk is more than just revved-up guitar carnage loosened up with hip-shakin’ moves. The conversation works both ways: In The Jam and Dexys Midnight Runners, you had bands that retained the formal qualities of classic ‘60s soul, but updated them with a working-class punk perspective. In the Afghan Whigs, you see the two forms fuse and explode into a cinematic maelstrom. And in the gospelized post-hardcore of the Constantines and the drum-machined manifestos of Algiers, you hear more modern variations that violently shake off soul-punk’s retro, party-hearty associations to forge a new kind of protest music for the here and now.