Italo Disco  [Electric Fling]
June 15, 2015

Italo Disco [Electric Fling]

Critic Andy Beta provides an overview of Italo Disco (which he calls, "the most amazingly uncool genre ever created") in this Pitchfork feature. To be a bit snobby, including Paul Lekakis as Italo Disco is a bit questionable, but Andy is trying to take a wide swipe. Regardless, the genre is limitlessly influential and helped spawn everything from Chicago House to DFA-era New York electro. This playlist demonstrates why with a collection of the kitschy, endlessly addictive cuts. The Gary Cat Park song is a gem, among many others.

A Guide to No Wave
October 4, 2016

A Guide to No Wave

No Wave always seemed like more of an idea or a scene than a particular music aesthetic -- theres a lot of space between Liquid Liquid, ESG and Sonic Youth, for example -- but there are general common denominators (detuned guitars and shouted vocals). The scene was entirely based in New York, began in the late-70s and fizzled out by the mid-80s. It got its name from the amazing Godard quote, "There are no new waves, there is only the ocean," and while it was never popular, per se, the bands associated with the scene were endlessly influential, inspiring everything from hardcore to DFA-era electro pop. Im sure a no wave purist would scoff at some of the inclusions on this list, but its still a good primer for the genre.

Dubbin With King Jammy

Dubbin With King Jammy

Jason Gubbels, who has done an admirable job as the world critic over at Rhapsody, highlights the work from one of Jamaicas greatest and generally overlooked producers, King Jammy. As Jason points out, King Jammy has played a great influence on at least two eras of reggae. He was the dub master at King Tubbys studio during the 70s, and then later basically invented dancehall in 1985 with his single for Wayne Smith, "Under Me Sleng Teng." This is a very enjoyable playlist featuring everyone from Black Uhuru to Shabba Ranks.

The Dummy Guide To Todd Rundgren

The Dummy Guide To Todd Rundgren

Todd Rundgren certainly deserves an album guide. After peaking in the early 70s with his pop-rock classic Something/Anything?, he embarked on a journey that involved dozens of albums, side projects, and little of the AM gold clarity that marked his best-known work. Hes had a career similar to Prince -- using increasingly accessible technology and distribution methods to flood the market with product -- but without the Purple Ones killer catalog to sustain popular interest. So thank UK magazine Dummy for creating a sympathetic primer to Rundgrens boundless creativity. Its made in honor of Rundgrens Runddans, a collaboration with Sereena-Maneeshs Emil Nikolaisen and Ibiza disco revivalist Lindstrøm that was released last May.

Woke As Fuck Disco Mix
December 22, 2017

Woke As Fuck Disco Mix

Disco has proven to be one of the more malleable and durable genres, certainly more so than punk or many other genres that sprung up during the 70s. Tim Finney -- who’s written for Pitchfork, Complex and nearly everywhere between those poles -- offers this “woke as fuck” playlist on Spotify. And though there’s no written context for this, and the tracks span decades, they seem to all be from the more proggy and experimental end of the disco spectrum. They’re also consistently jaw-dropping amazing.

Arthur Russell Essentials

Arthur Russell Essentials

Arthur Russell was an extraordinarily gifted musician whose talent flowed unobstructed into myriad areas of musical culture. Born in Iowa in 1951, Russell rose to prominence in the ‘70s and ‘80s through New York’s downtown music scene, where he engaged with avant-garde, disco, experimental, classical, and more, working with artists such as Philip Glass, David Byrne, and Allen Ginsburg. His disco orchestrations were both profoundly complex and thoroughly hip, employing cello and horns in a radically vanguard way. He is perhaps most famous, though, for his use of amplified cello, the reverberated timbres of which provided an impeccably lush counterpoint to his angelic voice and candid words. His intimate solo recordings remain the nucleus of his genius, the extent of which may never even be fully known, as a tremendous amount of unreleased tapes and demos continue to be discovered since his untimely death in 1992.

Joe Gibbs Reggae Essentials

Joe Gibbs Reggae Essentials

Joe Gibbs was one of reggae’s great businessmen and ambassadors, and also one of the genre’s great producers. He was responsible for the highly influential African Dub series, introduced Dennis Brown to America, and worked extensively with the great Lee “Scratch” Perry. The write-up to this playlist on FACT provides an excellent detail to all of this, and the playlist itself is a monster. Though one wonders why they limited themselves to so few songs, the chronological order works to its advantage, as you can hear Gibbs’ sound (and, by extension, the sound of reggae in general) evolve from the late-60s throughout the 70s. As a note, some of these songs were not available on Spotify, but we did our best to recreate it.

Pitchfork’s Top 200 Tracks of the ‘70s
August 28, 2016

Pitchfork’s Top 200 Tracks of the ‘70s

Pitchfork got a lot of shit for their ‘70s list, and most of that is unwarranted. Sure, AM radio, Southern Rock, and Philly Soul are all underrepresented, and they picked the wrong Bowie song to be #1 (sorry, “Life on Mars”). But there’s some great world and reggae selections, which was unexpected, and Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” more than deserves its high placement. As a stand-alone playlist, rather than a list of top tracks, it only sometimes works. There’s an occasional serendipity — the shimmering astral mysticism of Alice Coltrane “Journey in Sachidananda” gives way to the plaintive, yearning opening lines of the Beatles’ “Let it Be,” a contrast that teases out the radicalness of both tracks — but it’s also kind of jarring to go from the edgy downtown disco of Dinosaur to fucking Black Sabbath. Still, their piece is a great tool for music discovery — the write-ups are generally solid and frequently inspired — and it’s easy to imagine a dozen, more focused and coherent playlists spawning from this list.

The Best Afro Disco
November 18, 2016

The Best Afro Disco

This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at the far-reaching, decades-long impact of disco. Curious about disco and want to learn more? Go here to sign up. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. They’ll thank you. We thank you.Thanks to a cadre of specialty imprints, as well as guerilla crate diggers like Awesome Tapes From Africa, music fanatics can now explore numerous reissues and compilations that chart the evolution of dance music in post ’60s Africa. It’s from this wealth of archival work that Resident Advisor has constructed “Afro Disco,” a collection of cuts that show how the scorching syncopation of mid-’70s Afrobeat gradually cooled into a purring, disco-inspired repetition by the dawn of the ’80s. Another key change is a heavier reliance on synthesizers and chunka-chunk guitars fed through the kind of coked-out effects that Chic’s Nile Rodgers pioneered. RA’s aesthetic is so tightly focused (big surprise there) that one could easily imagine these tracks being released as their own compilation.

The Influence of A Clockwork Orange on David Bowie

The Influence of A Clockwork Orange on David Bowie

For casual David Bowie fans who spin the radio hits and not much else, A Clockwork Orange may not be the first work of science fiction that comes to mind when chewing on the well-read singer’s labyrinth of influences from the realms of film, literature, fashion, and avant-garde art. After all, whether we’re referring to Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel or Stanley Kubrick’s notorious film adaption from 1971, the story is a blend of pitch-black satire, graphic violence, and Cold War-inspired dystopia that feels worlds removed from the cosmic-hippiedom-meets-androgynous-space-alien quirkiness soaked into Bowie’s most popular expressions of sci-fi rock: “Space Oddity,” “Starman,” “Life on Mars?”—even the riff-fueled “Ziggy Stardust.” In fact, a more apt connection might be Kubrick’s other landmark from the same era: 2001: A Space Odyssey. Released in 1968 (just over a year before Apollo 11’s touchdown on the moon ignited a global fascination with space travel), the director’s sweeping meditation on human evolution, outer space, and extraterrestrial life slammed into psychedelic culture like an asteroid, helping to unleash a whole new movement in space rock.However, dig deeper into Bowie’s cluttered universe (lyrics, interviews, photographs, production credits, etc.), and relics of his fascination with A Clockwork Orange emerge in all corners. It’s a fascination that lasted throughout his career, right up through the release of 2016’s Blackstar, a brilliant, strange, and moodily intoxicating album awash in sci-fi references.Let’s begin with the singer’s ever-changing visual aesthetic: Bowie himself once stated to Rolling Stone writer David Sinclair that the look for his 1972 classic The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars reflected in part his love of the outfits worn by the sociopathic antihero Alex (played by Malcolm McDowell) and his ultraviolent droogs. Those costumes (black bowler hats, bovver boots, suspenders, codpieces) were the brainchild of designer Milena Canonero; by appropriating elements of “London street style,” she helped lay the groundwork for an iconic (and much imitated) look that wound up seeping into glam, punk, hardcore, and even heavy metal. Incidentally, Canonero and Bowie eventually worked together on 1983’s The Hunger, an erotic vampire flick sporting heavy Dario Argento vibes.Bowie again turned to the film for inspiration during the making of 1973’s Aladdin Sane, a harder-rocking album that finds the singer’s alter-ego turning mischievous, even nasty at times, much like Alex. In addition to sleeve art featuring airbrush work from Philip Castle, whom Kubrick hired to design the movie’s infamously outlandish posters, there were some seriously Clockworkian wardrobe moves, including Bowie’s classic printed silk turtleneck.Shifting from aesthetics to the music itself, let’s return to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. While touring in support of the record, Bowie opened concerts with a recording of Beethovens Symphony No. 9, yet another nod to Alex, who describes the piece as “bliss and heaven” in one of the movie’s most biting scenes. There’s also the use of the word “droogie” in “Suffragette City.” Though a fairly minor reference, it speaks volumes about Bowie’s intimate understanding of Burgess’ original vision. After all, “Suffragette City” isn’t one of Ziggy’s orchestral ballads, floating dreamily like an orbiting satellite. It’s gnarly proto-punk inspired by The Velvet Underground and The Stooges—exactly the kind of slasher you’d expect a violent street gang to blast before a night of smashing storefronts and busting heads.Again, this seems like an odd fit for the red-haired Bowie, who (truth be told) never fully embraced the sneering menace that would come to be associated with punk rock in the late ’70s. But much like The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger (who interestingly enough owned the movie rights to the novel for a short while), he certainly flirted with such notions. Bowie seemed attracted to the transgressive darkness that often surrounds youth culture and street gangs, especially as they are portrayed in the book and film incarnations of A Clockwork Orange, both of which, it should be noted, were censored and condemned on numerous occasions in the United Kingdom and the United States. They possessed a undeniable and dangerous allure. Back in the ’70s, any artist who dared make allusions to them clearly was looking to be edgy.But it was more than just trying to be provocative (though that always was a factor during his glam years). Bowie truly loved A Clockwork Orange, of which his most passionate expression pops up on the previously mentioned Blackstar and the cryptic “Girl Loves Me.” Pay close attention to the lyrics and you’ll notice how the singer, displaying a linguist’s virtuosity, brilliantly litters the song with the Nadsat spoken by Alex and the droogs (itself a Nadsat term). Originally conceived by Burgess, it basically is working-class British slang heavily inspired by Russian:

You viddy at the CheenaTruth is me with the Red RockYou be loving little zipshotDevotchka want ya golossSpatchka want the RussianSwear to dead fun is dang dangViddy viddy at the CheenaGirl loves meHey cheenaGirl don’t speakGirl loves me

Bowie was a sci-fi junkie, one well-versed in the writings of Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, and George Orwell. He especially loved Orwell’s dystopian landmark Nineteen Eighty-Four, which served as the thematic basis for 1974’s Diamond Dogs. On top of all that, he starred in the cult flick The Man Who Fell to Earth and in 2013 was inducted into the Museum of Pop Culture’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. But the fact that Bowie returns to A Clockwork Orange on Blackstar, which he knew would be his last album, drives home the work’s stature in his personal universe. Deep down Bowie really was a droog.

'90S THROWBACKS
Indie Rock Face-Off: Neo vs. ’90s

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Indie Rock Face-Off: Neo vs. ’90s

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Indie Rock Face-Off: Neo vs. ’90s

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.