Genres

Once again, Teen Vogue—the young, woke sister of the Condé Nast family—reveals its on-the-pulse badassery with a recent article detailing the shady politics of Coachella bigwig Phillip Anschutz, who has historically donated funds to anti-LGBTQ charities and organizations. As the magazine points out, billionaires supporting right-wing institutions are nothing new, but if you want to try and elicit change, “The most effective way (as the #BoycottCoachella tag demonstrates) is to hit em where it hurts: their wallets.”But boycotting festivals doesn’t mean you have to be without banging tunes. In the article, Teen Vogue champions queercore bands as musicians “who are using their art for more productive means.” And while purists may balk at the term “queercore” in this context, the message is clear: LGBTQ rights matter, and there are a lot of amazing musicians out there willing to scream it from the rooftops.The inclusion of London band Skinny Girl Diet is a measure of just how right they’ve gotten this playlist—part Russ Meyer vixens, part scrappy girl gang, the band have produced some of the most sublimely, unapologetically feminist punk of the last decade (their most recent album is called Heavy Flow). SGD’s “Silver Spoons” is a rollicking dirgey mess, a wall of sound with an insanely hooky vocal line, while Brooklyn’s Aye Nako champion a more nostalgic, grungy sound. London trio Shopping (pictured) amp up the energy with “In Other Words,” with Rachel Aggs’ inimitable jagged guitar work driving the track. And no queercore playlist would be complete without math-pop dreamboats PWR BTTM’s “Answer My Text.” This isn’t just a list of queer artists; it’s a statement of intent, a journey through genres, and a politically driven (wo)manifesto.If you like Teen Vogue’s playlist, you’ll also love artists like New Yorkers The Shondes, Pittsburgh natives Rue, and Seattleites Tacocat. And luckily for you, I’ve added a handful of relevant artists to the end of the playlist. Consider it further reading.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Free jazz is a bit of a nebulous thing. All Music Guide lists Thurston Moore, Charlie Haden, and Eric Dolphy, among others, as its key artists, and even Ornette Coleman, whose album Free Jazz arguably launched the genre, later publicly dismissed it as a genre. Still, whatever you want to call it, the type of playing that Coleman pioneered -- the endless tangents, aborted themes and searing improvisational stabs of noise -- became a style that would influence generations of jazz and rock artists. This playlist, from the Village Voices archives, captures some of the highlights of that style. This is definitely a narrower (and more current) take on the genre -- there is no Thurston Moore, but Sharp also leaves out Don Cherry and Cecil Taylor, two very important musicians I generally have associated with the genre. Still, this remains a compelling playlist.

Philip is consistently one of my favorite music writers and he proves why with this excellent look at the artists and tracks that influenced a key track from Jamie XXs new collection, In Colour. Four Tet, Burial and Lone are all clear influences, but (relatively) obscure artists such as IVVVO and WK7 make this playlist enjoyable. Be sure to also read Philips excellent profile of Jamie XX in Pitchfork

By the early 90s, Brian Eno’s cachet was at its apex. I caught up to him the year he did more than produce U2’s best album, Zooropa: I discovered Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger, found a Nice Price cassette version of Another Green World, and bought James’ Laid. Then Roxy Music beckoned. Eno was right, as usual: Roxy recorded its best music upon his departure. Through four wonderful vocal albums—unmatched in their admixture of formal invention and gonzo humor—and a beguiling series of collaborations with Robert Fripp, Cluster, Harold Budd, John Cale, and others, Eno has approached rock with a dilettante’s amateurish glee and a sophisticate’s subtlety, bound only by the limits of his curiosity.So vast as to seem forbidding, his catalog is full of unexpected diversions, uneven by definition. I rank his 1990 Cale collaborationWrong Way Up with Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Before and After Science but find the Jon Hassell co-recording Fourth World, Volume 1: Possible Musics a vaporous bore, while Discreet Music and Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks are never far away from my stereo, notably around bedtime.I’m happy with my list: a compulsive miscellany. The songs include the collaborations mentioned above, plus a couple excellent ones from David Bowie’s Outside and a standout from his second Karl Hyde project. The differences between “songs” and “collaborations” is elastic though.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Here’s the thing with jukebox heroes acquainted with Greatest Hits: as much as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, with whom he has little else in common, Al Green recorded albums. Modest about issuing statements in the post-sixties sense of the word, concerned with the space between sticks and snare, attentive to the percussive effect of a single electric guitar strum, they did not reinvent so much as return rhythm and blues to its base: a relationship between the singer and the Divine as intimate as pillow talk.The way in which Green and producer Willie Mitchell repeated their strategic use of strings and vocal moues reminded listeners of their debt to hymns and liturgies; for Green writing and singing a couplet like “Full of fire/You’re my one desire” was an affirmation, not a prayer. He sang from a place of confidence. Not for him Gaye and Curtis Mayfield’s anguish. Even Aretha Franklin’s melismatic evocation of joy as a secular speaking in tongues was beyond his interest. No wonder he covered Willie Nelson — I can think of no other singer from the era who trusted stillness, whose pose was emulating God moving over the face of the waters. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he sang in “Jesus is Waiting.” Although a few years from becoming a reverend, he had the swagger of a man who had found grace but sang as if he had to persuade, one listener at a time; this hushed breath-on-the-neck fervor gives “You Ought to Be With Me” and “Your Love is Like the Morning Sun” their power. The suggestion that he was assuming the omnipotence of the God he loved would have appalled him. I’ll take it further: how else to account for a grinning assurance unknown to any godhead who has tangled with mortals?Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

Though electronic music nostalgia continues unabated, its a little difficult to swallow that Exit Planet Dust is 21. Upon its release in 1995, it sounded like the future. Listening to it in 2015, it shows its age. The breaks, in particular, sound dated, a relic of an era that were a little more forgiving to snares, while the sound affects, with their channel-panning flares, sound quant and a little contrived. With that said, the Chemical Brothers remain the innovators of modern popular electronic music. They were the among the first ones to successfully shoehorn the freeform, experimental trax-sound of early electronic into the pop format. And whats surprising listening to Nate Patrins playlist is just how good some of their later work is ("Escape Velocity" in particular).

Dummy Magazine has an interesting artist-curated playlist series that focuses on very specific themes or motifs and engages some truly knowledgable figures, thus avoiding the cliched, self-serving, PR-crafted "artist-curated" playlists that plague mainstream music services. This one looks at the 10 best "proto grime" tracks. Theyve tapped DJ Logan Sama, who has been connected to the grime and underground hip-hop and electronic scenes in the UK for the past decade.

Remember Stereolab? The band was one of the biggest stars of the 90s indie scene and, like so many of their peers, seemed as much interested in process -- refining the same idiosyncratic grooves over and over -- as in writing singularly great songs. As a result, any fan could come up with their own top 10, though Raymond Cummings omission of "Metronomic Underground," which was a mainstay of Stereolab shows before they finally splintered in 2008, seems particularly careless. However, if you need a short primer to the band that made 60s French chanson cool again, this is as good as any.

This list is great. One could argue that there’s too much Chi Ali and not enough Queen Latifah, or that “Jazz (We’ve Got)” doesn’t belong in the top 10, or that the list would be better if they opened it up to Native Tongue “affiliates” such as The Beatnuts or Pharcyde. But, really, it’s fine. The tighter focus on the core Native Tongue members makes it more cohesive and gives the playlist a flow as it progresses from the rougher sketches that dominate the early tracks (the playlist is in reverse order) to the tighter, tauter “classic” songs in the top 20. Why this all only kind of works, and one of the great tragedies of the digital era, is that only 57 of the 100 greatest Native Tongues tracks are currently available on Spotify. This is largely, though not entirely, due to sample clearance issues around De La Soul’s catalog. De La does show up on “Fallin’,” their collaboration with Teenage Fanclub from the “Judgement Night” soundtrack. The song reminds us of everything we love about that group — their competing pull of whimsy and melancholy; the back-of-the-classroom absurdity that gives way to twilight-youth pathos and then comes full circle as that sadness loses focus and dissipates into fits of giggling.

Aside from suggesting that masturbation is a "more defiant act of self love and self care," Pitchforks stab at the best onanistic songs by female pop stars is largely devoid of politics, which is refreshing. This is truly a playlist that speaks for itself (just as its subjects do other things for themselves), but its in interesting to note in passing that this contains a couple of tracks that are not on Spotify or Apple Music, and, to date, has not been uploaded to Pitchforks Apple site. Were all curious to see how Pitchfork ongoing relationship with Apple will affect its core, site content, and this suggests that maybe their business relationship isnt getting in the way of a good (if click-baity) playlist.