Genres

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!

Let’s be blunt: Southern California is the perfect place to get high. The skies are sunny year-round and the beaches are beautiful and plenty. There’s the bountiful surf of Malibu, the craggy rocks and gnarled trees of Joshua Tree, and the sweeping canyons and mellow vibes of San Diego; the landscape is the stuff of myth. Inspiration can be found all around, so perhaps it’s no surprise that so many great artists, all from the region but from different genres, sing marijuana’s praises.The list of artists is seemingly endless: In Los Angeles alone there’s The Mamas & The Papas, who were definitely thinking about lighting up when they sang “Safe In My Garden”; there’s Sublime, who made their interests obvious enough when they covered The Toyes’ reggae classic “Smoke Two Joints”; and of course there’s Cypress Hill and Snoop Dogg, the latter who has built a whole brand as the champion of weed smokers. These are just some of the obvious picks, of course, but put your finger practically anywhere on the SoCal map and you’ll find tendrils of smoke and pleasant sounds rising up, from Kyuss out in Palm Desert to Wavves’ Nathan Williams, who got his start recording tunes like “Weed Demon” at his parent’s house in San Diego.In honor of the release of Wavves’ latest album, You’re Welcome, out May 19 via Ghost Ramp, we’ve put together a playlist of SoCal stoner classics. Taking this in is sure to lighten any social engagement involving a bubbler, spliff, or vape pen, but it also offers a little slice of SoCal history and legacy through the bloodshot eyes of some of its greatest talents.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Since 2010, Oaklands Luis Vasquez has been delving into the darkest depths of post-industrial synth-pop as The Soft Moon. But with his fourth album, Criminal (Sacred Bones), on the horizon, Vasquez opted to make us a playlist that reveals a different side of his musical personality. "Every time I get asked to put together a mix or playlist, my first instinct is to want to show people my collection of weird and obscure oddities. For this playlist, I wanted to do something different, something out of my comfort zone, and something unexpected when it comes to representing The Soft Moon. The majority of my favorite music stems from the 1980s pop genre and, in fact, it’s what I feel molded me into the musician I am today. Most of us wouldn’t consider these songs guilty pleasures because, in the end, they’re actually all great songs that we all know. But when I was younger playing in punk bands, these songs were secret."——Luis Vasquez, a.k.a. The Soft Moon

Solange Knowles’ album, A Seat at the Table, is a crisply executed R&B pop album that wooed fans and debuted atop the charts. The album blends elements of pop and electronic music with various threads of soul, adding afrofuturistic flourishes as well as guest appearances from Lil’ Wayne, Kelly Rowland, and Q-Tip. And while that sounds like a hodgepodge of sounds and personnel, the album is subtle and graceful, anchored by Solange’s soft, confident voice and down-to-earth musical sensibility. “Borderline (An Ode to Self Care)” and “Don’t Touch My Hair” champion ideas of black liberation and self-empowerment, and are powerful statements from one of pop’s most socially conscious singers. On this playlist, we look at some of the inspirations for Solange’s beautiful new album, from the woozy otherworldly hip-hop of Shabazz Palaces to the astral jazz of Alice Coltrane. -- Jordannah Elizabeth

When we think of the truly transformative albums in pop history—those rare records that clearly mark a line between “before” and “after”—they tend to herald a seismic moment in musical innovation (Sgt. Pepper’s), generational upheaval (Nevermind), or social unrest (To Pimp a Butterfly). But in its own subtle, sophisticated way, Air’s 1998 Moon Safari belongs to this class of game-changing albums. Appearing at the tail end of the ‘90s alterna-boom, it signalled a 180-degree shift away from indie-rock’s lo-fi, thrift-store aesthetic into the sort of plush, expansive sound that demanded attentive listening in leather easy chairs and through expensive stereos. It was an album that made once-verboten guilty pleasures——’70s prog-rock, lush vocoderized disco, easy-listening exotica——innocent again, while firmly entrenching the seductive symphonic funk of Serge Gainbourg in the indie lexicon alongside rickety Velvet Underground rhythms and Sonic Youthian discord. And for better or worse, Moon Safari codified the concept of the bistro album, supplying the finest audio wallpaper to exposed-brick, Edison-bulbed eateries around the world. When you consider indie-rock’s transformation from scrappy, DIY artform to commerical sync-license gold in the 21st century, you can’t discount Moon Safari’s aspirational influence and affluence.This playlist hones in on its immediate moment of impact. In the wake of Moon Safari, guitar-oriented acts like Radiohead and The Flaming Lips refashioned themselves as studio scientists to pursue sounds both more elegant and experimental. Daft Punk’s heavy-duty house began exhibiting a more pronounced ‘70s soft-rock flavor. And you couldnt swing a rolled-up shag carpet without hitting an upstart downtempo duo like Röyksopp, Arling & Cameron, Lemon Jelly and Thievery Corporation. And in Zero 7, you had the more pop-oriented successor that took Air’s retro-futurist soundscapes into the mainstream. With Moon Safari turning 20 this month, let’s bask in its lunar eclipse.

More of us have experiences with PMS than we do going to a hip-hop party, or any of the other various mood or activity-based playlist on Google Play or Spotify, so its rather curious that this is the first playlist Ive seen that tackles this subject head on. Jessica did an admirable job, though I wish she wouldve included Missys "Funky Fresh Dressed" ("my attitude is bitchy, cuz my period be heavy").

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.”

This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you.For many, good kid, m.A.A.d. city was their entry point to Kendrick Lamar, and it was one of the greatest revelations in hip-hop this decade. Tracks such as “Money Trees” and “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” pare the vulnerability and earned spirituality of a trauma survivor with the heft of a master technician, while his intricate raps carry a conceptual framework that revealed the full weight of the post-millennial American collapse—the dead homies, the dead-end jobs, the deadened interpersonal relationships. Released one week before that album dropped, and in conjunction with this “making of” article published by Complex, this playlist—in Kendrick’s own words—captures “some of the records that inspire me to this day.” It’s predictably diverse. The first two tracks veer from the hardscrabble pathos of DMX’s “Slippin’” (“Im possessed by the darker side, livin the cruddy life”) to the haunting atmospheric grumbling of Portishead’s trip-hop trailblazer “Roads,” before eventually settling into the G-funk (DJ Quik’s “I Don’t Want to Party Wit U,” MC Eiht’s “Straight Up Menace”) that provided the soundtrack to Kendrick’s youth.This playlist comes with a minor caveat: As of 2017, it contains only nine tracks. Probably, at some point, it contained more tracks; and, at some point in the future, it will contain fewer. Spotify either lost rights to certain tracks on the playlist, or else the labels redelivered them in different versions. This Dowsers is a site dedicated to looking at playlists as artistic/critical artifacts, and this is both one of that medium’s charm and vulnerabilities: It’s ephemeral, susceptible to the vagrancies of anonymous digital-music content-operation teams. Like graffiti—which is itself vulnerable to time, weather and gentrification—this doesnt make it any less of an artform, but it’s important to understand.

As LCD Soundsystem release their fourth studio album American Dream, fans owe more than a little gratitude to David Bowie. Indeed, James Murphy has been quick to give the late rock icon credit for encouraging him to reactivate the band six years after their 2010 Madison Square Garden swansong, an action-packed evening that was documented both in the Shut Up and Play the Hits documentary and the live album The Long Goodbye. Murphy had gotten close to Bowie during the singer’s last years and even collaborated with him musically, doing a sterling remix of “Love Is Lost” from The Next Day and performing percussion on two songs on Blackstar. Unsurprisingly, LCD Soundsystem’s performance of “Heroes”—one of Murphy’s favorite songs from long before he had his own coffee brand—was the most poignant moment at their Coachella reboot in 2016.That deep connection between sadly missed master and studious acolyte may explain why American Dream—an alternately moody, anthemic, inspirational, cranky, and expansive masterwork if there ever was one—sounds like it could’ve fit into Bowie’s own back catalog. If you’re looking for a precise location, it’d be between Low and Lodger, the point in Bowie’s Berlin tenure when he shifted from Krautrock- and Kraftwerk-influenced experimentalism into a harder rock and dance sensibility. Yet the most Bowie-esque element of the new album is its adventurous spirit, something that’s continually been part of the LCD Soundsystem aesthetic as Murphy refined and extended the hallmarks first heard in the dance-punk moment of early-‘00s New York.Of course, a whole lot has changed since then, and American Dream reflects the shifts that have gone on not just in Murphy’s life and career, but those of his bandmates, too. Many of the album’s most exciting moments point to the influence of the other musical activities of the LCD membership, whether it’s the brooding electro-pop of drummer Pat Mahoney’s band Museum of Love, the continuing dancefloor adventures of Nancy Whang and John MacLean in The Juan MacLean, the edgy post-DFA tech-funk of artists on Tyler Pope’s Interference Pattern label, or the sprightly synth-pop Al Doyle makes with Hot Chip. Likewise, there are traces of the music that fills Murphy’s DJ sets on his own or with Soulwax as Despacio (e.g., Telex, Suicide, The Cars) or his scores for the films of his pal Noah Baumbach, along with hints of his other recent musical obsessions like The Roches, the art-pop sister act revered for their intricate and intertwined vocal harmonies.So all of this belongs alongside Murphy’s cherished Bowie/Eno-isms in our exploded view of American Dream, a work whose creative vision and generosity are as wide as such a title demands.

Flutes are everywhere in hip-hop in 2017. They provided a wistful counterpoint to the grizzled trap of Future’s ubiquitous “Mask Off,” propped up Drake’s throttling “Portland” with a snaking melody, and popped up on tracks from D.R.A.M. (“Broccoli”), Gucci Mane (“Back on Road”), Kodak Black (“Tunnel Vision”), and Migos (too numerous to list off here). As trap continued to grow murkier and more psychedelic, the flute provided an otherworldly texture, a hypnotic counterpoint to hip-hop’s tougher, spare beats. This, of course, is nothing new, and this playlist from Okayplayer provides a quick history of the instrument’s use in hip-hop. The great Beatnuts used the instrument as a rhythmic counterpoint on "Watch Out Now," while the vaguely Eastern melody in 50 Cent’s “Just a Lil Bit” slithers through his teflon pimpin’ boasts. The instrument also provides a lightness to the shuffling, monochromatic beat for J Dila’s “Fuck the Police.”The playlist largely ignores the South, instead focusing on the headwrap rap heroes Okayplayer tends to champion (Mos Def, Common, A Tribe Called Quest), and, as a result, it feels quite incomplete. But it’s still an enjoyable listen, and the presence of a particular instrument provides a throughline between a lot of disparate selections. It forces the listener to lean in and pay attention to the track, and consider the ways that different artists, periods, or scenes have used the instrument. It doesn’t exactly make the case that the flute has been “hip-hop’s secret weapon,” but it does demonstrate that its been central to some amazing tracks.