'90s

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.

A hip-hop cannon was created in 1994. Nas, Notorious B.I.G., Outkast, Gang Starr, Beastie Boys and Scarface all released breakout albums that were epochal and genre-defining. Some of these tracks -- "One Love," "Juicy," "Mass Appeal" -- have been so rhapsodized and overplayed that its difficult to listen to them with fresh ears, or to even believe that there was a time in hip-hop when these tracks were new. Illmatic, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik and Hard to Earn were all released within the span of a little more than a month. Hip-hops bench in 1994 was also deep, and Mosi makes a point in his write-up to state that these "were the years when hip-hop became universal." Classic tracks also came in from the West Coast ("Captain Save a Ho," "Playaz Club") and the South ("Front, Back and Side to Side"). As a note, Mosi uses singles released in 1994, even if their albums came out in the previous year, which explains the presence of tracks from Doggystyle and Enter the 36 Chambers .

This playlists/post was originally supposed to highlight the Shoegaze Love Songs station from Pandora, as that’s a pretty great concept. Shoegaze, a genre of rock that sprang up from the UK in the late ‘80s and sought to negotiate the distance between Phil Spector’s wall of sound and the Velvet Underground’s columns of noise, may have ostensibly made love as its central lyrical focus, but it was a opaque, narcotic and disheveled take on the subject. Saying that shoegaze bands made love songs is like saying that Master P made rap songs about starting small businesses. It’s true, but it misses the point. Still, it’s interesting to look at it from that perspective, and it would’ve been the subject of this blog post if not for the fact that Pandora is a radio service and the user is unable to view tracklisting. For a high-concept, edutainment that seems like an achilles heel. But we love shoegaze, and we hope you do (or will) as well. Here’s a good beginners guide from Ella Fraser-Thoms at the Guardian.

1992 was a transitional year for R&B and hip-hop. The first wave of bass was coming to an end, New Jack swing was beginning to wane, and East Coast and mainstream hip-hop had yet to transition between the golden age of the ‘80s and the boom bap of the mid-90s. One era hadn’t quite ended, and another hadn’t quite begun, and there was a bit of schizophrenia; the charts were populated by Southern rap bohos (Arrested Development), and Northwestern rappers who appropriated the sound and subjects of Miami bass. This truly awesome playlist by Spotify user John Cunningham is interesting because it captures this dynamic and operates from a very specific critical perspective and rejects the usual nostalgia associated with these type of playlist. It also really bangs. His original playlist was originally named simply “B96,” and we cleaned the title up a little bit to be more descriptive.

‘90s R&B has emerged as a default sample source for hip-hop and R&B over the past few years. You can credit Drake for pushing this into the mainstream, but the predominance of ‘90s samples in alternative R&B, and the impact of artist such as The Weeknd or Bryson Tiller on pop music, has added wood to the slow-burning fire. And it’s a good match; the looseness and more textural sounds of Genuine or Alliyah provide a nice counterpoint to the aggressiveness of modern, EDM-influenced R&B. This playlist focuses on the songs that have sampled ‘90s R&B, rather than the source material itself. It would be nice if they paired the sampling and sampled songs, but, as it is, the playlist is a nice survey of the genre’s more mellow side.

The origins of post-rock are nebulous, but the aesthetic is more exact: airy instrumentals that found that common ground between the industrial fuzz of musique concrete, the ambience of pre-fusion, late-60s jazz (think In a Silent Way), and the straight lines of ‘80s math rock. When it came out, it felt like a rejection of the scenestery, overly emotive indie rock of the ‘90s, and a path forward for rock, which felt like it had been treading water in the shallow end of ‘60s-inspired nostalgia. It got real boring really quickly, but it sounded glorious at the time. Garrett Kamps, in his write-up for Stereogum, doesn’t try to capture the cannon, but rather a personal reflection of what he remembers to be the best tracks from this now-maligned subgenre.

Its a bold move from Rolling Stone: Even with the recent resurgence of nostalgia for the decade, by now the ‘90s have been done to death. But, arguably, the ‘90s are also fertile ground for track-mining, the sheer breadth of genres and musical stars and styles it created proving unprecedented. And while this playlist collates an impressive compendium of tracks, it tends to read less like a celebration and more as an attempt to prove the curators collective savvy. This works in places, with such gems as Heliums “XXX” and Liz Phairs “Fuck and Run” making welcome appearances, but at times this approach is jarring: with all the Whitney tracks to choose from, does Faith Evans-collab “Heartbreak Hotel” really belong here? There are also a handful of glaring omissions, largely on the hip-hop front: where is Skee-Los “I Wish”? Salt-n-Pepas “Push It”? Naughty By Natures “Hip Hop Hooray”? Beats Internationals “Dub Be Good To Me”? House of Pains “Jump Around”? Dead Prezs “Its Bigger Than Hip-Hop”, Jurassic 5s “Concrete Schoolyard”? This mix might better be termed Introduction to the ‘90s, and if that were the case, its a solid offering: props, in particular to the inclusion of Geto Boys “Mind Playing Tricks On Me”.

On Questlove’s list of his favorite 50 hip-hop songs, he offers an important caveat. “I decided to concentrate on 1979-1995,” he writes, because the latter year marks the major label debut of his group the Roots and their second album, Do You Want More?!!!??! “I wanted to concentrate on the period that I was not professionally involved in the art form.” His canonical picks skew heavily toward the “golden age” of East Coast hip-hop, with a few cursory nods at the West Coast (one track apiece from NWA, Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, but no Ice-T or 2Pac) and the South (Geto Boys, but no OutKast or bass music). Questlove may not be much of a hip-hop historian — inexplicably, he ranks Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two” over Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones Pt. II,” and doesn’t find any space for Nas (or Jay-Z, whose debut single “In My Lifetime” dropped in 1994). But he’s an engaging writer, and his capsule explanations for his picks are frequently entertaining, whether it’s humble-bragging how Chuck D gave him an extra copy of Son of Bazerk’s Bazerk Bazerk Bazerk, effusing about Trouble Funk’s “Pump Me Up,” or using Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s “The Message” to talk about being unfairly pulled over by the cops in 2008. “It is like a jungle, still,” he writes about the latter.Want updates with awesome artist-curated, hip-hop, and handcrafted playlists? Subscribe to our e-mail here and follow Questlove’s playlist on Spotify here.

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.