Artists

Khalif “Swae Lee” Brown and Aaquil “Slim Jxmmi” Brown were an unknown pair of brothers from Tupelo, Mississippi, when they caught the attention of Atlanta super producer Mike WiLL Made It. He signed the duo to his Ear Drummers label, and flipped the company’s name backwards to dub their group Rae Sremmurd. They were soon off to the races with a smash debut single, “No Flex Zone,” that was remixed by Nicki Minaj and Pusha T, and have been rubbing elbows with major stars regularly ever since. They’ve assisted on singles by Wiz Khalifa and Ty Dolla $ign and branched out into EDM with Baauer and Dillon Francis. And Swae Lee has become in demand as a writer, notching credits on songs by Gucci Mane and even Beyonce.

Although he’s released four acclaimed solo albums, Raphael Saadiq has made his greatest impact on popular music as a member of groups and as a producer and songwriter for major artists. After touring as a bassist in Prince’s band in the late ‘80s, Saadiq led the ‘90s groups Tony! Toni! Tone! and Lucy Pearl, and began a fruitful production career. As something of an elder statesmen of the neo soul movement, he co-wrote D’Angelo’s two biggest singles, as well as hits for Erykah Badu and Bilal, and produced Solange’s chart-topping third album A Seat At The Table. And as a songwriter and guest vocalist, he’s collaborated with multiple generations of hip-hop artists, from The Roots to Rick Ross.

Fun shit I learned while reading The Quietus amazing Andy Gill playlist: at one point, Nile Rodgers was slotted to produce a Gang of Four record; John Cale hit on Gills girlfriend; and he doesnt think The Beatles groove!As a note, I couldnt find the specific Erik Satie recording he mentions.The Band, Music From Big PinkBob Dylan, Blood On The TracksJimi Hendrix, Band Of GypsysWild Beasts, WanderlustGabriel Fauré, RequiemThe Camarata Contemporary Chamber Group, The Music Of Erik Satie: The Velvet GentlemanThe Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground & NicoBig Youth, Dread Locks DreadCulture, Two Sevens ClashChic, Good TimesJames Brown, "Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine"Marvin Gaye, "I Heard It Through The Grapevine"Kanye West, "Hold My Liquor"

In the mid-90s, RZA negotiated the famous "Wu-Tang deal," where the Clan as a group were signed to Steve Rifkinds trailblazing Loud Records, but all of their solo albums would be spread out across multiple major labels, ensuring that the industry would be working for the crew, not the other way around.Raekwon was approached by Puff Daddy about signing to Bad Boy, but he chose to stay in-house with Loud Records to drop his landmark debut, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…. Puffy saw Raekwon as the perfect weapon: smooth enough to glide on R&B features—as he and Ghostface did on Jodecis "Freek‘n You" remix—and rugged enough to stomp beats like he did on Mobb Deeps "Eye for a Eye." Puffy had perfected this formula with The Notorious B.I.G., and Raekwon was a worthy choice to follow (this was before they became rivals on the infamous “Shark Biters” skit). Instead, Raekwon made the best drug-dealer album of all time, but never found the breakthrough mainstream success of Biggie or Puffy.Twenty years later, you can hear hints of Puffys vision on Raekwon’s recently released seventh solo album, The Wild. G-Eazy, Lil Wayne, CeeLo Green, Andra Day, and J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League all pop up on the record, instead of Method Man, GZA, RZA, and crew, to make sizeable waves with newer audiences. Raekwon can thrive outside of the beloved Wu-Tang sound—his freestyle over Drakes "Pound Cake" is a perfect example—and his work on recent R&B tracks by Mack Wilds, Ryan Leslie, and Faith Evans proves hes still a capable voice on lighter fare. His radical slang therapy on albums by Ghostface, Prodigy, and Statik Selektah continues to keep his razor tongue sharp.The Wild has moments like "Cant You See," “Nothing,” and "This Is What It Comes Too" that can hang with anything from Raes past work, but a stronger plan of attack mightve made the album bulletproof instead of a mixed bag. Rick Ross is a good example of a contemporary street rapper who mixes mafia-flick visuals with sax-laden R&B, all while cranking out gothic bangers. And he’s even done a thing or two with Puffy over the years.Nonetheless, Raekwon is the most active and beloved member of Wu-Tang in the industry, popping up on albums from Kanye West, French Montana, ScHoolboy Q, A$AP Mob, 2 Chainz, and Action Bronson. The Wild fails to match up to his contemporaries, but the abilities that Puffy and RZA saw twenty years ago are still evident when other people call on the Chef. This playlist pulls together the sleek and sinister works of Raekwon: R&B sprinkled with Snow Beach pullovers, crack and weed, Staten Island killers who love Gladys Knight, crushed velour tracksuits, and Moët.

Rich Jones may be a solo artist, but everything he does stands for community. The Chicago rapper/singer-songwriter is the utmost optimist, championing and collaborating with local artists while striving to find acceptance and appreciation within himself via his own slick, soulful tunes. In 2018, Jones self-released <I>The Shoulder You Lean On</I>, a cool, calm, and collected set that melds his hip-hop background with the poise of a suave crooner. This is the sound of modern Chicago at its most sincere, though Jones proves there’s plenty more to be heard with this playlist of some of his favorite artists, many of whom also call the Windy City home.Says Jones: “A playlist for you! Featuring some of my favorite music from Chicago and afar, both new and timeless. Catch a vibe and enjoy thoroughly.”

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.

Ornette Colemans passing on June 12 at the age of 85 reminded us what a rare bird he truly was. He innovated a dissonant, harmolodic-based version of bop that he coined "free jazz," only to distance himself from the term for the rest of his life. He inspired controversy, intellectual debates and rebukes. He seemed distant from the pop marketplace, yet regularly collaborated with rock musicians in the second half of his career, including fellow iconoclast Lou Reed and guitarist Pat Metheny. Seth Colter Walls Rhapsody playlist does a good job of surveying Colemans memorable career.

Some think that Young Thugs elastic, start-stop flow and roaming, stream-of-conscious lyrics make him future of rap, while others question hes merely a Lil Wayne clone given way too much hype. Make up your mind via this excellent overview from Beats Neil Martinez-Belkin, which features early hits and guest appearances.

After the 1980 death of John Bonham brought Led Zeppelin to a crashing halt, Robert Plant honored his band’s legacy by letting go of it. After all, the ultimate way to respect what Zeppelin accomplished—and Bonham’s crucial, inimitable contributions to it—was to lay the band to rest, and make no attempts to recapture their uncommon alchemy and ungodly roar with some ringer. (And when you consider The Who’s middling post-Keith Moon albums from the early ‘80s, who could blame him.) So on his first couple of solo records, Plant remodeled himself for the ‘80s, the shirtless golden god of old reborn as a suave, tidily coiffed, synth-pop sophisticate, leaving the blooze-metal regurgitation to the Whitesnakes and Kingdom Comes of the world. But by 1987’s Now and Zen, the specter of Plant’s former band had become unavoidable—not only did Jimmy Page guest on the hot-rod-revving single “Tall Cool One,” the song climaxed with a barrage of Zeppelin samples. And through 1990’s Manic Nirvana and 1993’s Fate of Nations, Plant tried to put a modernist spin on Zeppelinesque bombast, before just saying “fuck it” and hooking up with Page for a reunion that yielded an MTV Unplugged special and an album of new originals, 1998’s Steve Albini-produced Walking Into Clarksdale.But while he spent the first two decades of his solo career running away from his musical legacy and then gradually inching back toward it, Plant has spent the 21st century establishing a new one. Starting with 2002’s Dreamland, Plant has seemed less like a solo artist fronting hired guns who are not Led Zeppelin, and more like a co-pilot taking direction from an amorphous cast of intriguing collaborators, including bluegrass queen Alison Krauss (his partner on 2007’s Grammy Award-winning Raising Sand) and folk-rock veteran Patti Griffin (with whom he communed—professionally and, for a time, romantically—on 2010’s Cajun-cooked Band of Joy). And then there’s his recurring backing band the Sensational Space Shifters (formerly Strange Sensation), an exploratory, stylistically dextrous ensemble centered around guitarists Justin Adams (who’s played with Jah Wobble and Brian Eno) and Liam Tyson (formerly of Britpop chancers Cast), bassist Bill Fuller (also of Geoff Barrow’s Krautrockin’ trio Beak), and a pair of Portishead associates, John Baggot (synths) and Clive Deamer (drums).Collectively, these musicians have encouraged Plant to dig deeper into Zeppelin’s roots—American blues, British folk, Middle Eastern textures—but instead of blowing them up to into a proto-metal pomp, they throw them into a frying pan and melt them down into a mercurial elixir that’s reformulated in fascinating ways. That’s not to say he doesn’t occasionally get the Led out—the 2005 track “Tin Pan Alley” may be steeped in eerie Radiohead-esque atmospherics, but it eventually explodes into a Viking wail that echoes back to “Immigrant Song.” However, for the most part, Plant is entirely at home in his lower register, turning in some of the most graceful, beautifully understated performances of his career on the piano ballad “A Stolen Kiss” and the jangle-pop gem “House of Love.” And we’ve seen greater evidence of the ravenous record collector who’s fond of chatting up his current musical obsessions in interviews. Plant’s post-millennial catalog is loaded with exceptional covers, from an apocalyptic interpretation of the traditional gospel spiritual “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down” to the dreamy drift through Low’s “Silver Rider” to a reverential reading of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” that suggests Plant is well familiar with This Mortal Coil’s definitive version.The shadow of Led Zeppelin will forever loom large over Plant’s career, and so long as Plant, Page, and John Paul Jones are all still alive, murmurs of a reunion will refuse to die. But as Plant sets out for another voyage with the Sensational Space Shifters on his new album Carry Fire, let’s celebrate the 21st-century renaissance of an artist who should be regarded alongside Bowie, Peter Gabriel, and Neil Young as one of the most restlessly adventurous artists of his generation.

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.