Essentials

There’s a kid inside of us, no matter how decrepit we get, and the kid inside Tom Waits probably sounds a lot like the one in “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” a highlight of Waits’ gloriously ragged 1992 masterpiece Bone Machine. Given that there’s “nothing out there but sad and gloom” based on what he’s seen in the lives of the adults around him, the world of grown-ups rightly seems unappealing and bewildering. “How do you move in a world of fog that’s always changing things?” he wonders, articulating a dilemma that stymied so many of the hard-luck characters who tell their stories in the hundreds of songs authored by one of American music’s most cherished mavericks.That question is probably still on the man’s mind as he turns 70. We like to imagine him as the coot prospector he played in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, scratching his head and grumbling, “How the hell did that happen?” in that iconic voice, which never seemed as if it could get any raspier but somehow always did.Then again, turning 70 maybe isn’t such a big deal to a guy who tried hard to seem old before his time. When Waits first emerged in the Los Angeles club scene of the early ’70s, his clear devotion to heroes like Jack Kerouac and Thelonious Monk made him seem like a scruffy relic to listeners more hip to Jackson Browne. He styled himself as a piano-playing Charles Bukowski, tickling the ivories as he spun hard-luck tales equal parts miserable and hilarious. (Check out his 1975 live album Nighthawks at the Diner for vivid early evidence of both his storytelling chops and his ability to delight a crowd.)But anyone who figured they had him pegged would be surprised again and again by what followed in the ’80s and beyond. Once Waits found a long-sought sense of personal stability with wife and creative partner Kathleen Brennan, his creative moves grew bolder, starting with 1983’s stunning Swordfishtrombones and continuing with later triumphs like 2004’s Real Gone. The music they contained could be tender and heartbreaking or crazy and chaotic. Whatever the case, it all remained true to his reliably skewed vision of that confusing grown-up world.In the process, he’d honor his own inspirations—Bob Dylan, Harry Partch, Mose Allison, Captain Beefheart—while inspiring countless younger artists who absorbed his profound influence on how great songs get made and sung. To celebrate the occasion of his 70th, here’s a set of 70 Waits essentials and many more songs that show his grubby fingerprints.

Before we had RIYL algorithms and Spotify discovery playlists, we had Kurt Cobain. The Nirvana frontman wasn’t just one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed alt-rock artists of the early ‘90s, he was also its foremost tastemaker. Cobain’s conflicted relationship with fame has been well documented, but one benevolent side effect of his discomfort in the spotlight was that he used every opportunity to redirect it onto lesser-known artists, and not just ones from his immediate community. While the media was hyping the Seattle scene, Cobain was leading impressionable kids down underground pathways that extended from Scotland to Japan.This was a guy who could get an obscure, out-of-print punk record reissued through a major label by name-dropping it an interview, or who could effectively play armchair A&R rep and score a deal for an unsung artist just by wearing their t-shirt. Even if only a tiny fraction of the 10 million people who bought Nevermind were willing to check out a record based on his recommendation, it was enough to turn groups like Shonen Knife into international club headliners, and enough to transform The Wipers’ once-obscure early ‘80s releases into canonical punk classics for future generations to discover.Since his 1994 suicide, Cobain’s life and work have been put under the microscope many times over, through numerous biographies, documentaries, and barrel-scraping box sets. But one of the most illuminating pieces of detritus can be found in the 2002 scrapbook Journals: a handwritten list of his 50 favorite albums of all time. It’s a document that illustrates how, behind all the disaffected cool, Cobain was just a list-making music nerd like the rest of us. And based on the most recent entry—PJ Harvey’s 1992 debut Dry—it was a practice he indulged in even after his face was all over Rolling Stone and MTV. (He even divided his entries with lines as if he were designing the flippable label cards in his own imaginary jukebox.)

You can listen to selections from each of the records on the master playlist above. (Note: we included a song from each side of The Faith/Void split LP, bringing our track total up to 51. Also, the What Is It California-punk compilation he lists isnt on Spotify, though the Germs songs featured on it can be sourced from other releases.) But for a more in-depth look at how these records inspired Cobain—whether musically or philosophically—we’ve broken down his picks by category and created subsidiary playlists below that feature some of his picks alongside the Nirvana songs they inspired.

THE CLASSICS

Like many kids born in the late ‘60s, Kurt’s first musical obsession was The Beatles. Their melodic sensibility formed a crucial strain of his musical DNA that withstood his eventual conversion to punk, leading to breakthrough moments like “About a Girl.” (Tellingly, Kurt’s favorite Fab Four record isn’t a typical muso pick like Revolver or the White Album, but the band’s winsome U.S. debut, Meet the Beatles, whose brevity and simplicity are more compatible with his passion for DIY indie rock.) Meanwhile, his adolescent affinity for mid-‘70s Aerosmith was entrenched enough that he would (partially) name a song after them, and while David Bowie was a less obvious influence on Nirvana, the band’s reverential cover of “The Man Who Sold the World” forged their spiritual connection with rock’s original iconoclast. But Kurt was also willing to own up to inspiration from less-respected hit-makers—listen to the verses of The Knack’s “Good Girls Don’t,” and you’ll hear the sort of slack, sardonic delivery he brought to Nirvana songs like “On a Plain.” His list also betrays a growing fascination with ’40s folk pioneer Lead Belly that would ultimately yield one of Cobain’s most chilling performances.

THE PUNKS

Kurt’s list reveals a typical punk-rock initiation process: You’ve got the pioneers (The Stooges, the Sex Pistols), their more extreme hardcore spawn (Black Flag, Fear), the detouring post-punk experimentalists (Public Image Ltd., Gang of Four), and the mutant recombinant offspring who fuse and abuse all of the above (Flipper, Butthole Surfers). It’s the last iteration that had the most audible impact on Nirvana, particularly on bludgeoning Bleach-era tracks like “Paper Cuts” (which bears both the bone- and soul-crushing heft of ‘80s Swans), Incesticide oddities like “Hairspray Queen” (which finds Kurt squealing like a young Gibby Haynes), and In Utero crushers like “Milk It” and “Scentless Apprentice” (where Kurt chews on the tin foil spit out by Scratch Acid’s David Yow). And then there’s the only band to earn three slots on Kurt’s list: Portland underground demigods The Wipers, whose relentless momentum and hoarse-throat hooks set the fiery pace for Nirvana corkers like “Breed” and “Territorial Pissings.” (Funnily enough, after once admitting that The Clash’s Sandinista! disappointed him as a kid because it didn’t align with his perceptions of punk, Kurt includes the much more commercial follow-up, Combat Rock—perhaps as a commiserating reminder that he wasn’t the first punk who had to deal with becoming popular.)

THE ALT-ROCK PEERS

Nirvana’s explosive success couldn’t have happened without the fuse-igniting efforts of their immediate alt-rock antecedents—both close to home and beyond. “Negative Creep” is essentially Mudhoney’s “Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More” flipped from 33 rpm to 45. The crash/burn/rebuild structure of Sonic Youth’s “Silver Rocket” would reappear in smoothed-out form on the alternately rousing and brooding “Drain You.” The whisper-to-scream hysterics of the Pixies, can of course, be heard on any number of Nirvana songs, but bassist Kim Deal’s Breeders offshoot was an equally profound influence, with the nocturnal, string-scraped atmosphere of Pod filtering down to In Utero respites like “Dumb” and “Penny Royal Tea.” And though the radiant, paisley-patterned jangle of R.E.M.’s Green may not be as perceptible, the wry, self-reflexive quality of “Pop Song 89” feels like a spiritual successor to Nirvana’s own meta-rock commentaries, like “In Bloom.”

THE LO-FI LOVES

Embarrassed somewhat by Nevermind’s big-budget studio polish (which he infamously compared to a Mötley Crüe record), not to mention the increasingly slick nature of alternative rock, Kurt used his pop-star pulpit to champion the virtues of amateurism. In the collapsible sing-alongs of ‘60s outcasts The Shaggs, he heard something stranger and more radical than anything you could find on 120 Minutes. Through his beloved Vaselines, he learned how to balance playful melodies atop rickety punk-rock foundations. And in the solitary serenades of Daniel Johnston and the giddy garage-rock of Shonen Knife, he heard the purest manifestation of the childlike emotions he tried to access on songs like “Sliver.” But while his fondness for ramshackle post-punk and lo-fi indie pop brought out Nirvana’s more playful side (best heard on Incesticide’s odds ‘n’ sods and the more whimsical moments of the MTV Unplugged set), for Kurt, that music also represented an effective weapon for dismantling rock’s patriarchal power structure. Nirvana may not bear the direct musical influence of minimalist, female-fronted bands like The Raincoats, Young Marble Giants, and Kleenex, nor is there anything in their catalog resembling the homoerotic joke-folk hijinks of The Frogs, but they undoubtedly inspired him to become the preeminent male-feminist and pro-gay rock star of his generation, one who was willing to write indictments of rape (“Polly”) and machismo (“Mr. Moustache”), and who happily used his liner notes to tell the racist and homophobic jocks in his audience to fuck off. (Though one cant help but wonder if, he were around today to make a similar Top 50 list in this post-poptimist age, he might include more than one hip-hop record.)SaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSave

Four Tet (nee Kieran Hebden) has said that he wants his music to tell the story of his life, and his tracks do occupy the same psychic space as a certain class of Instagram pictures: the sun-dappled portrait taken on a mountaintop, or the early morning shot of the steam rising off an alpine lake. These are the sort of moments that are too slippery to adequately capture in a caption, though, invariably, we try. A lot of musicians spend their career chasing a sound, and while Hebden does have a certain sonic palette -- one that is inordinately taken up by anything that chimes -- the listener gets the distinct impression that, more than anything, the British producer is in search of a feeling.This is true of the work he does on remixes. Hebden is not only one of the most prolific remixers of his generation, but also one of the most catholic. He’s remixed Riri as well as the Australian avante-electro-jazz quartet Tangents. And while his remixes generally correspond to the stylistic shifts and whims of his own work, there are times when they precede his own transformations, seemingly blurring the subject and object. In many ways, these remixes provide an alternative history of Hebden’s own music.One thing you’ll notice is that while Hebden’s sound is unmistakable, he rarely transforms the tracks he remixes, at least not entirely. There is an occasional bit of brinksmanship with the source material -- for Bonobo’s early track, Pick Up, Hebden takes the originals dusty breakbeats and adds a stuttering, polyrhythmic pounce; and the fact that he would remix half of Madlib’s Madviliany album feels somewhere between an homage and a dare -- but, for the most part, Hebden’s remixes are retellings of the original, albeit a bit refractured. Hebden latches onto a specific idea, melody, vocal line, or beat in the source material, and tweaks that according to his own muse. He’ll add a bit of electronic swirl to the spacial post-rock of The Drift, draw out the pinging keys of Matthew Dear’s “Deserter,” or tuck a thumping disco beat and skronky sax line beneath Nenah Cherry’s after hours swinger “Dream Baby Dream,” though, ultimately, the focus of that remix remains on Cherry’s smokey voice. Similarly, his remix of The XX’s 2002 “Angels” adopts the original’s chimy key drops and maintains the vibe of post-coliatal emotional surrender, but Hebden flips the melody and adds in airey textures that make the track more tender than sensual. It feels as if two artists are viewing the same scene -- lovers, naked, intertwined, near daybreak -- and coming to slightly different, though complimentary conclusions. Hebden is also very savvy when it comes to selecting the tracks he remixes. It’s easy to understand why Radiohead commissioned him to remix “Scatterbrain” from the band’s 2003 album, Hail to the Thief. With its spare, hypnotic guitar figure at its core, the original sounds like a daydream -- albeit a particularly dark one -- and in many ways it matches with the more pastoral, delicate electronic music that Four Tet was making at the time. But Hebden has mentioned that he very quickly came to resent the folktronica tag that critics and fans applied to his 2003 album Rounds, and he quickly pivoted to a new sound. This remix could be a early indication of that transformation His remix takes the track into an entirely different direction.Thom Yorke’s vocals are sliced and reprocessed, and paired with a jittery drum pattern and (towards the end) atonal, skronky sax outburst, which hints at the IDM-tinted free jazz experiments of Hebden’s middle period work.As Hebden’s own sound evolved, from the more acoustic/organic work of Rounds to the dancefloor-ready tracks of his later work, his remix work gained a fuller, more bass-heavy sound. A great example of this is his remix for Scandinavian nu-disco DJ/producer Todd Terje. The track starts out with a swell of chiming synths (of course), and the motif pops up repeatedly through the track, but the song soon settles into a four-on-the-floor dance groove, giving the track an immediacy that balances out Hebden’s more delicate tendencies. In some ways, Hebden’s work as a remix is just as satisfying as his own solo work. Yes, the latter feels more high-stakes and substantial, but his remixes are oftentimes more playful and experimental, as if Hebden is testing out ideas and aesthetic masks. Yes, to an extent, the payoff for these are his full length albums, but, as with many things in life, the journey is oftentimes more fascinating than the destination.

There were two things we were looking forward to in 2018: Robert Mueller indicting Donald Trump, and Migos releasing Culture II. After all, Migos has been at the forefront of pop music for the better part of this decade. If we’re being 100% honest, we’ll admit that we dismissed them as one-hit wonders when “Versace” first dropped in 2013, even if we kept it in rotation for a long minute. But they’ve proven much more resilient, creative, and influential than we ever imagined. “Bad and Boujie” and “T-Shirt” helped get us through the past year-and-a-half of this orange-stained apocalyptic shitshow, and the first Culture felt like a coronation not only of Migos as the kings of hip-hop, but also of a new generation of hip-hop stars. So we just assumed Culture II would be like Easter with triplet flows, pinging trap beats, and wealth-porn punchlines.We can’t blame Migos for taking a victory lap, but, at 24 songs stretching nearly two hours, Culture II feels like a victory slog. There’s some hot tracks——“Stir Fry,” “BBO,” and “MotorSport” are all career highlights——but there’s a lot of bloat. Whether they did this because they lacked any sense of quality control (sorry), or because they were trying to game the streaming system, doesn’t really matter to us. The fact is, it gets tedious.So we’re asking you, our loyal readers and keen discerners of good taste, to help us make Culture II great again. Please, EQ the speakers, stake out the X-Actos, and carve out the amazing, taut album that we feel is lurking in there somewhere. You can see how we’d cut this up in the playlist above, but we want to hear your version, too. So, visit our Facebook post here, post your tracklist and Spotify playlist link in the comments, and/or give the thumbs up to the other version you like the best. We’ll feature the winning version of Culture II on our homepage and in our social feeds, attributed to you. Playlist away.

Chicago native Kanye West is one of midwest hip-hop’s biggest stars, and he made his name producing hits for JAY-Z and other New York rappers. But West has maintained his relevance over the years in part by keeping a finger on the pulse of southern hip-hop, drafting rising stars from Atlanta, Houston, and Miami to appear on his albums and producing hits for Dirty South stars like Ludacris and Jeezy. Most recently, he served as “executive producer” on Atlanta trio Migos’ new album, Culture II, where he co-produced the 21 Savage collaboration “BBO (Bad Bitches Only).”Kanye West’s track record below the Mason-Dixon line dates back to the late ‘90s and early 2000s, when he was a relatively unknown producer placing tracks with southern trailblazers like Goodie Mob and Scarface. In 2003, he notched his first No. 1 on the Hot 100 producing Ludacris’ club banger “Stand Up,” along with a pair of tracks on an album that would help define the next wave of southern rap, T.I.’s Trap Muzik. Over the next few years, as West became a solo star who bridged many divides in hip-hop, he became the kind of rare stylistic chameleon who could make trap hits with Jeezy or screwed ’n’ chopped grooves with Paul Wall in between his excursions into east-coast boom bap and futuristic EDM.As the founder of G.O.O.D. Music, Kanye West has signed Atlantans 2 Chainz and CyHi The Prynce, and helped mentor Houston rapper/producer Travis Scott. G.O.O.D.’s 2016 posse cut “Champions” brought together some of the above with Gucci Mane, Yo Gotti, and Quavo. Some of Kanye’s southern collaborations are better off forgotten, like the treacly Future duet “I Won” and the ill-fated Lex Luger-produced Watch The Throne single “H.A.M.” But by and large, Kanye West has been present for moments of greatness in southern rap, from Scarface’s The Fix to Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III.

Producer Xavier “Zaytoven” Dotson has been instrumental in shaping the sound of Atlanta trap music as an early ally of Gucci Mane and Migos. But perhaps his most revered work is Future’s 2015 mixtape Beast Mode. At the time, Future’s friend DJ Esco was locked up abroad with the hard drive containing all of the rapper’s unreleased music. So Future entered the studio with Zaytoven, and in three days recorded what became Beast Mode, one of a trio of acclaimed mixtapes the MC released in the space of a few months. And in 2018, it’s rumored that Future and Zaytoven will reunite for the long-promised sequel, Beast Mode 2.Future and Zaytoven first crossed paths on Free Bricks, the 2011 collaborative mixtape by Gucci Mane and Future. And the chemistry between Future’s throaty melodies and Zay’s lush piano and flute loops was cemented on 2012’s Astronaut Status, one of the mixtapes that built Future’s buzz before he began releasing major-label albums. Since then, Zaytoven has been a frequent presence on Future records, contributing a warmly melodic and relaxed sound that contrasts with the more aggressive textures of producers like Metro Boomin on chart-topping albums like 2015’s DS2 and 2017’s FUTURE.Future and Zaytoven’s biggest hits together include the tawdry Beast Mode highlight “Real Sisters,” the celebratory Drake collaboration “Used To This,” and “Too Much Sauce,” the Lil Uzi Vert-featuring single from DJ Esco’s 2016 mixtape Project E.T. The familiar sound of Future over a Zaytoven beat even opened “3500,” the epic lead single from Travis Scott’s debut album, Rodeo. But the duo’s dozens of collaborations include mixtape favorites of any Future aficionado, including “Just Like Bruddas,” “Space Cadets,” and the ominous, paranoid masterpiece “Feds Did A Sweep.”

Nicolas Jaar has commitment issues. His music slithers between psych-speckled post-rock, world-building ambient, minimalist techno, hip-hop-inflected house, and reconstituted pop. Sometimes it’s slinky and sexy, other times it maps out a cavernous space that is icy and foreboding. As an artist, Jaar can be thought of as an arch conceptualist or a sharp-eyed technician, a festival-headlining electronic music god or a museum-dwelling avant garde knob twiddler.He’s all these things, of course. Regardless of the medium, the most interesting artists are the ones who spend their careers negotiating contradictions. Jaar is no different. He’s the NYC club kid, the omnivorous intellectual, and a product of South America’s political unrest. His tireless pursuit of Born in 1990, Jarr came up in the late-’00s NYC house scene, playing Brooklyn’s Marcy hotel parties. Gadi Mizrahi, who hosted the parties as one half of the legendary NYC house duo Wolf & Lamb, heard Jaar’s early compositions — which veered toward experimental atmospherics — and suggested that he add a 4/4 house beat beneath them. Within two years, Jaar had become one of the hottest DJs in NYC’s house scene, releasing his first EP (The Student) and starting his record label (Other People). At the end of this hot streak, he turned 20.Making a playlist of Jaar’s best music is difficult, to say the least. Figuring out how to sequence the euphoric house of his A.A.L. project with the austere techno of his Nymph EPs is a fool’s errand, while blending the Southwestern inflected psych twang of Darkside’s “Golden Arrow” with the sorrowful piano tones of his 2013 Leonard Cohen cover, “Avalanche,” is near-fucking-impossible.And what does one do with Pomegranates? The 2015 release was intended as a soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 Soviet-times movie The Color of Pomegranates, and combines scraps of electronic debris to approximate noisy ambient music. The music at the beginning of the collection is largely abstract sound design — the whizzing harmonics of opener “Garden of Eden” gives way to the clattering, gear-crunching ambience of “Construction” — but this leads to some of Jaar’s most beautiful music: the twinkling, near-East melodies of “Tourists,” the pastoral sheen of “Shame,” and the haunting piano ballad “Muse.”It all makes a little more sense if you’ve seen the movie. Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates is considered one of that era’s definitive underground films. In it, as well as its predecessor, 1965’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Parajanov bucked the state-sanctioned aesthetic of social realism — a stylistically rigid movement that celebrated the nobility of the proletariat — for an hallucinatory style that veered between esoteric, Freudian examinations of a vast innerspace and oblique, symbolist critiques of Soviet politics and society. Upon release, Parajanov’s films were generally panned by native critics and banned by the censors, and Parajanov himself was sentenced to five years of hard labor in Siberia (ostensibly for his homosexuality).In many ways, Parajanov’s sideways agitprop is a fitting corollary to Jaar’s own work, but Jaar has definitely had an easier go of it. By the time Pomegranates was released in 2015, Jaar was one of the most celebrated producers and DJs in the world. He had a teaching gig at the prestigious Berklee College of Music. His collaborative side-project Darkside had released their critically acclaimed debut, 2013’s Psychic, and became a touring powerhouse, treating audiences worldwide to their loose, spaghetti techno. And Jaar formed an interdisciplinary arts collective called Clown & Sunset Aesthetics that performed inside a geodesic dome at MOMA’s PS1 contemporary art museum. His 2012 BBC Essential Mix was named Radio 1’s Essential Mix Of The Year, while his 2011 debut, Space is Only Noise, was named album of the year by Resident Advisor, Mixmag, and Crack Mag.But Jaar’s breakout composition was 2010’s “Mi Mujer,” which remains his most streamed track on Spotify. It was a song that was never intended to come out — Jaar had laid down the Spanish language vocals of his mother, somewhere between a tribute and a joke — but Jaar released it after bemoaning the appropriation of Latin music samples in electronic music.This is not the only time that Jaar’s family showed up in his work, nor the only time that he has engaged with the issues surrounding the Latin American diaspora. Jaar is from New York, but his family is Chilean. His father, the celebrated multimedia artist Alfredo Jaar, was born in the Chilean capitol of Santiago in 1956. Alfrado’s family soon moved to Mozambique, but they were devoutly liberal, and when the socialist Salvador Allende was democratically elected in 1972, the family returned to Santiago. Unfortunately, Allende’s reign was short lived, and the following year, when Alfredo was 17, Allende was assassinated as Augusto Pinochet rose to power in a bloody coup.Much has been written about Pinochet and Allende, particularly of the CIA’s involvement, but the net of it was that 3,000 were killed and many more “disappeared,” tortured, or imprisoned by the Pinochet-backed Chilean death squad the Caravan of Death (Caravana de la Muerte). Jaar’s family stuck it out in Chile for nearly a decade after Pinochet took power before moving to New York in 1982. Pinochet himself held onto power until March 11th, 1990, when he was disposed following a country-wide referendum. At this time, Nicolas Jaar was 3 months old.Nicolas Jaar has never been an explicitly political artist, but this particularly gruesome chapter of history shows up in his work, particularly on Sirens, from 2016. That album is both his most personal and political work to date. If Pomegranates and the Nymph EPs found him exploring particular strains of his music — musique concrète and fractured techno, respectively — then Sirens is a synthesis, blending the warbling post-rock wanderings of his Darkside project with the textural elements of Pomegranates and the conceptual, cinematic framework of Space, while adding a veneer of pop to give the songs more structure. The collection also, perhaps tellingly, abandoned sampling, and was solely constructed with live instrumentation and Jaar’s voice. “The Governor” and “Three Sides of Nazareth” have a presence that’s lacking in his other work — in particular, the cowpoke vocals and driving baseline of “Governor,” which are juxtaposed with the swirling, subterranean sound effects.The spectre of violence and political unrest hangs over all of Sirens, but the most pointedly political track is “No.” It contains one of the albums few samples — a clip of Andes folk music — and its title references the 1988 referendum that would eventually bring down Pinochet (the choice was, effectively, “yes, he stays” or “no, he leaves”). Speaking to Pitchfork, Jaar noted, “What interested me a lot was that, in 1988, there was a referendum that asked the Chilean people: ‘Do you want Pinochet to stay for eight more years?’ That simple, yes or no. So the resistance—which was artists, leftists, activists—created a campaign for the ‘no.’ They effectively turned a negative message into a positive message, which seems like the most elemental change that you can do.”The track ends with a snippet of sampled dialogue between Nicolas and Alfredo Jaar taken from when the former was a child. It can be translated as such:“Alfredo: Stay against the wall. Put yourself against the wall. Go there and tell others. The one you like, tell a nice story.Nico: Once upon a time there was a little bird that was flying. And there, there was a man with a very big gun and did like this (gunshot).”It’s tempting to view Sirens as a culmination (or synthesis) of Jaar’s approach — the marriage of the personal and political; narratives built from scraps of memories and noise — but 2012 – 2017, his 2018 release under the moniker A.A.L. (Against All Logic), displays yet another side of Jaar. The tracks are hedonistic, transcendent, and eerily (for Jaar) coherent. “Rave On U” builds off clomping high-hats and smeared synth textures for a banger, while “Cityfade” comes outfitted with gospel handclaps, a streaking piano line, and a submerged children’s choir, and is his most accessible work to date. “I Never Dream,” meanwhile, is pure dancefloor euphoria, building off shuffling rhythms and lightly processed female soul vocal for a finish that’s as pretty and blissful as anything Jaar or any of his contemporaries have ever made.When building a playlist, the curator always tries to find the center of an artist or a genre. With Jaar, that’s nearly impossible; his work is endlessly digressive and varied. There are strains of ideas and sounds that appear and reappear, but putting a finger on one feels impossibly reductive. The journey may be bumpy, but it also includes some of the most important and idiosyncratic music created this decade.

With each new Gorillaz album, more attention is paid to the number of guest collaborators invited to perform than to the group’s only consistent musical member: Damon Albarn. Humanz, which arrives this week, is no different. The songs released so far center around performances from Benjamin Clementine, Popcaan, Vince Staples, Jehnny Beth, D.R.A.M., Pusha T, and Mavis Staples, with Albarn happily orchestrating things from behind the curtain. But he’s a strong performer and highly sought-after collaborator in his own right, one completely worthy of the spotlight he avoids. His selfless attitude, which foregrounds other performers in his own work, makes him such a great songwriting partner.Taking cues from The Kinks and XTC, Albarn’s early work in Britpop act Blur focused on couching his biting social commentary in character studies, a theme that continued even after the band’s influences drifted further and further beyond the white cliffs of Dover. As the band began to pull apart in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, Albarn walked away, melodica in hand, and started the horror film-loving, The Specials-aping, cartoon outfit Gorillaz, beginning a lifetime of long-standing—and very fruitful—collaborations with the eclectic and diverse likes of Bobby Womack, De La Soul, and Tony Allen, among many others.He’s had countless other projects, including Mali Music, Rocket Juice & The Moon, and DRC Music, as well as his Honest Jon’s label, all of which show the songwriter using his visibility in pop music to give credit where credit is due, and to highlight the work of incredible musicians who have inspired him.This playlist goes deep into Albarn’s discography, putting his songwriting talents front and center and focusing on the not-so-guest-heavy songs that form the bedrock of Gorillaz’s nearly 20-year career. It also contextualizes his work with Blur, the band that put him on the map, and any and every collaboration he’s been involved with in between.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

The work of late hip-hop musician J Dilla is particularly suited to the record industry’s strategy of releasing anything a dead icon has created, no matter how modest or inessential. When he was alive, he would hand out CDs full of beats and short instrumental loops to his friends and collaborators. After he passed away in 2006, those same discs became fodder for bootlegs like J Dilla Anthology and Instrumental Joints Volume 1.However, the recent deluge of Dilla’s posthumously released material has tested the wallets of even his most fanatic disciples. There are remastered projects that didn’t get a full airing during his lifetime, like last year’s The Diary—a proper version of his shelved and oft-bootlegged 2002 album Pay Jay—and his extended Detroit crew has repurposed his beats with fresh vocals that are “produced by J Dilla” for Rebirth of Detroit, Yancey Boys’ Sunset Blvd. (a group comprised of Dilla’s brother Illa J and Frank Nitt), and Slum Village’s Villa Manifesto. Most of all, Yancey Media Group, a label established by his mother, Maureen “Ma Dukes” Yancey, has issued official collections of his beats: Dillatronic, The King of Beats, Lost Tapes, Reels + More, Dillatroit, and much more. Perhaps overwhelmed by the thousands of beats Dilla made in his life, the label has developed an annoying, even if unintentional, tendency to reuse material on different projects—for example, track 31 on Dillatronic is the same as track 663 on Jay Dee’s Ma Dukes Collection.This playlist attempts to sift through the wellspring of Dilla’s recordings to pick out some gems. There isn’t much background information on when these tracks were made, but a knowledgeable Dilla fan can pick out some clues: The King of Beats collection seems typical of his mid-’90s jazzy hip-hop period when he worked with The Pharcyde and A Tribe Called Quest; Dillatronic reflects his early-’00s, pre-Donuts years and his techno-inflected trunk music. A handful of vocal selections from The Diary and Yancey Boys round out this primer that will prepare you for a deep dive into the world of Dilla.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

The age of the rock ‘n’ roll shaman is nearly gone. As far as frontman archetypes go, David Bowie’s cool and detached postmodernism won and Jim Morrison’s fiery and passionate romanticism lost. The idea of rock as something sacred and visionary has gradually gone out of fashion. This makes a singer like Mark Lanegan, who just released his 10th full-length, Gargoyle, a dead man walking. But he wouldn’t have it any other way.Ever since the longtime cult artist was a young underground rocker—one clearly inspired by Morrison and haunted punk-bluesman Jeffrey Lee Pierce, whose performances were regularly described as séances and possessions—Lanegan and his dark, cavernous, graveyard groan have been evoking spirit images of archaic apparitions and the underworld. In particular, the singer’s rendition of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (which predates Nirvana’s) sounds like a transmission from hell. Meanwhile, his lyrics come littered with Jungian imagery and references to religion and altered states of consciousness: In the 2004 single “Hit The City,” a sublimely ominous rocker featuring PJ Harvey on backing vocals, he sings about darkness, the promised land, ghosts, and kingdom come—that’s some grade A esoterica.Shamans are loners, people who participate in village life yet largely live outside of it, and that’s Lanegan to a tee. While he spent a good deal of his early years with Screaming Trees—a Pacific Northwest band who were always more in tune with the otherworldliness of ’80s psychedelia than sweaty dude-grunge—he started his solo career way back in 1990 with The Winding Sheet. Since then, the 6’ 2” brooder has cut a labyrinthine path: In addition to a slew of solo gems blending mountain folk balladry, gothic-tinged blues rock, dream pop, and even electronic, he’s racked up short-lived collaborations with stoner rock gods Queens of the Stone Age, Scottish chanteuse Isobel Campbell, fellow alt-rock icon Greg Dulli, avant-garde guitarist Duke Garwood, and electronic producer Moby. Lanegan loves working with other musicians, he just never sticks around for very long. Perhaps that’s because the vocalist, like any shaman, ultimately feels more at home in the spirit world than our own.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.