Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.It’s difficult to name another hip-hop musician who has stayed relevant as long as Q-Tip. He launched his career in 1988 with a verse on the Jungle Brothers’ “Black is Black.” But it’s his underrated talents as a producer, not as a rapper, that holds the key to his continued relevance. Alongside DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad, he produced most of the beats for the group’s first three albums, including classics like “Bonita Applebum” and “Electric Relaxation.” He devised several tracks for Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, worked with Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, and briefly served as part of Kanye West’s GOOD Music team, resulting in numerous contributions to Kanye and Jay Z’s Watch the Throne. This year, he has continued to land production credits on major albums like Solange’s A Seat at the Table. However, the recent surprise release of A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got It From Here…Thank You for Your Service is a reminder that Q-Tip is best known as one of the greatest ensembles in the genre’s history.

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

Miss Sharon Jones, who passed away from pancreatic cancer on November 18, 2016, may have not briefly conquered pop like the late Amy Winehouse, who famously used Jones’ band the Dap-Kings to make Back in Black. But unlike most of the unsung soul-blues world from which she emerged in 1996, when musician and producer Gabriel Roth plucked her out of a Lee Fields recording session, Jones eventually soared as an international headliner. Songs like “100 Days, 100 Nights” appeared on film and TV soundtracks and commercials. Her “Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects” became a holiday perennial. She became the subject of an inspirational, award-winning documentary about her fight against cancer, Miss Sharon Jones! And she collaborated with Lou Reed, David Byrne, and many others. Jones served as an influential rejoinder to an increasingly formulaic and electronic pop and R&B environment, and led a small revolution subsequently called “retro soul.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Adele, Aloe Blacc, Joss Stone, Leon Bridges or any other revivalist flourishing without the woman whose first Desco 7-inch preceded Back in Black by a decade, mentored fellow soul shouter Charles Bradley, and is Daptone Records’ biggest star. Sharon Jones may have been taken from this world too soon. But she got her due.

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

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Long Island rapper and producer Roc Marciano hails from a late-‘90s era when thug talk was the vernacular in New York hip-hop. His sound, along with that of contemporaries such as Ka and Westside Gunn, has been described as a revival of dusty-fingered, sample-heavy, old-school boom bap. Roc Marciano was a product of Busta Rhymes’ Flipmode Squad and later formed his own group, the U.N., with help from Pete Rock.But by the time he started dazzling critics and crate-digger aesthetes with his 2011 solo debut Marcberg, his music didn’t quite resemble the rotten apple rap of the ’90s. His softly confident, matter-of-fact tone sounds like he’s speaking to you from the driver’s seat of a plush Cadillac, and he often crafts his own beats using drums sparingly, resulting in music with a spacey, opiate-like haze. It’s boom bap 3.0, filtered through the weed-crusted psychedelic influence of beatmasters like Madlib and The Alchemist, both of whom he’s worked with; in particular, with The Alchemist on the one-off project Greneberg.But if his friend Ka is the Brooklyn clocker-turned-basement mystic, then Roc Marciano is the OG braggart teaching grasshoppers about real hustlers. He lays out the game in vivid detail on his latest album, the revelatory Rosebudd’s Revenge, a title that pays homage to the totem of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. The lyrics are full of pimps, big booty girls, and fine threads, but more important is the aura he projects—this is music that transports you to a film in your mind, whether it resembles Super Fly or something else entirely.The selections on this playlist include tracks from his three solo albums and mixtapes like The Pimpire Strikes Back, plus cameos like last year’s appearance on De La Soul’s And the Anonymous Nobody.

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

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

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!When The Get Down premiered on Netflix last August, it won plaudits for its smart evocation of New York music in the 1970s. But with the second half of its first season debuting on April 7, it’s a good time to revisit its meticulously curated soundtrack—and what aspects of the era it overlooks.The Get Down is structured around the rise of hip-hop culture in the Bronx, with Ed Koch’s mayoral campaign and the citywide blackout on July 13, 1977 as key events. On the one hand, the music supervision values precise period authenticity—the lack of anything from Saturday Night Fever initially seems like a major omission, but the film was released at the end of 1977 and its soundtrack didn’t dominate the airwaves until 1978. But at other points, that logic goes out the window: The show features Machine’s “There But for the Grace of God Go I,” released in 1979.At any rate, The Get Down is a historical fantasy. At best, it completely dispenses with reality, whether it’s the kung fu sequences that mark the first episode, or the discotheque shootout that ensnares drug dealer and budding DJ Shaolin Fantastic, a fictional protégé of real-life hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash who is recruiting MCs into the group The Get Down. Besides, why use sappy soft pop tracks like Chicago’s “Hard To Say I’m Sorry” and bland quiet-storm ballads like The Manhattans’ “Kiss and Say Goodbye” when you can cherry-pick the funkiest disco and soul of the early to mid-’70s?Perhaps the second half of The Get Down will broaden beyond the South Bronx park jams, community rec centers, and grungy neighborhood discos to include settings and music from different parts of New York in the late 70s. Maybe Marcus “Dizzee” Kipling, the graffiti artist who drops ecstasy and almost experiments with same-sex romance at a gloriously overcooked loft party, will stumble into a Manhattan bathhouse or check out a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show; it’s possible that Ezekial “Zeke” Figuero, the teenage poet whose halted attempts at rapping to his would-be disco-queen girlfriend set the story in motion, will journey down to CBGB and check out a Ramones set; or maybe Marcus’ knuckleheaded kid brother Boo-Boo channels his anger into a KISS Army fan club.We’ll find out what The Get Down kids get into next when the series returns. For now, enjoy our selection of ’70s pop chestnuts that didn’t make it into the first half of the inaugural season—and hopefully will make the cut for the second.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Joey Bada$$ emerged from Brooklyn in 2012 as part of a wave of New York teenagers—a.k.a. the Pro Era collective—who were reviving traditional hip-hop values. On his debut mixtape, 1999, he constructs songs with dense lyrical arrangements and beats from sampled loops and drum patterns. He raps about rocking stage shows and battling kids in other ciphers, two themes that haven’t been in vogue in mainstream rap since the mid-‘90s. A few of Joey’s song titles even pay subtle homage to old-school fare like Souls Of Mischief’s “93 ‘Til Infinity” (“95 Till Infinity”) and the illuminati fad (“Killuminati”).The narrative around Joey Bada$$ began to shift when his 2015 retail debut B4.DA.$$ (Before Da Money) debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard top 200 album chart, forcing rap fans who dismissed him as a niche backpacker to pay attention. (A widely circulated Instagram photo of Malia Obama rocking a Pro Era T-shirt also helped.) Then, last year, he released “Devastated,” an empowerment anthem filled with chorus and echo that foregrounds his singing while relegating ‘90s homage to the background. (There’s a brief flicker of the melody from OutKast’s “SpottieOttieDopaliscious.”)Bada$$ will never be confused with Wiz Khalifa, who forever reduces his bars in favor of a catchy hook. Joey’s new album, All-Amerikkkan Bada$$, shows how he’s managed to transform into something more contemporary—sharply assessing the political landscape on “Land of the Free” and trading bars with Schoolboy Q on “Rockabye Baby”—without losing the qualities that made him a star. The songs collected here chart his evolution.

Full disclosure: I contributed to this list, and while I have my quibbles with it -- "NBA Rap"? Nah -- I think its a fairly good primer on early West Coast rap. That scene is all the rage thanks to the overhyped Straight Outta Compton movie, and viewers who enjoyed that biopic will find more avenues to explore here. At the very least, its a good excuse to revisit Rodney O & DJ Joe Cooleys "Everlasting Bass." -- Mosi Reeves

The rise of Hiatus Kaiyote, the Melbourne-based ensemble whose blend of jazz fusion and downtempo earned a 2016 Grammy nomination for Best R&B Performance, has drawn attention toward the Down Under’s unlikely hotbed of post-millennial soul. Some of the acts on our survey hail from Australia, while others come from nearby New Zealand. But all hew to the kind of cool, urbane, and hip-hop inflected beats that have thrived in underground music circles since the early ‘00s. Onetime Disclosure collaborator Jordan Rakei is earning acclaim for his Cloak debut, New Zealand duo Electric Wire Hustle is a familiar Okayplayer and Soulection favorite, and Ngaiire just released an album on Sony Music Australia.