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Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser weren’t so obviously ahead of the curve when the duo’s debut album as MGMT arrived 11 years ago. Maybe that’s because their wild, baffling, possibly culturally insensitive hipster-shaman look on the cover of Oracular Spectacular seemed more suggestive of the “spectacle” component of their cryptic title rather than a reference to the Oracle of Delphi or any other seers of ancient times.Nevertheless, few could’ve known how prescient they turned out to be when it came to heralding the dippy, woozy aesthetic of so much music from this past decade. Likewise, recent singles like the mesmerizing, darkly witty “When You Die” (from their upcoming fourth album, Little Dark Age) arrive into a rather more crowded field of freaky, dreamy pop oddballs than either of them could’ve anticipated back when “Electric Feel” was everywhere in 2007. With equally ubiquitous early singles like “Time to Pretend,” the duo crafted a canny merger of elements that felt modern and retro at once. Along with fellow travelers like Ariel Pink, MGMT popularized a lo-fi take on psychedelia that soon begat terms like “chillwave” and “hypnagogic pop.” Yet they were also remarkably astute about their music’s potential chart appeal——perhaps more so than they would’ve liked, seeing as VanWyngarden and Goldwasser would famously retreat from the spotlight and dive into more willfully obtuse sounds for 2010’s Congratulations and 2013’s MGMT, the pair’s subsequent and far less commercially successful albums.As the original articles were content to return to the fringes, many more artists would come to frolic in the Day-Glo-colored playground they built with Oracular Spectacular. Some——like Foster the People, Passion Pit, and fun.——would have fewer reservations about using these previously subterranean strategies and textures to create ear candy with mass appeal. The likes of Portugal. The Man, Two Door Cinema Club, and Neon Indian felt just as free to get their respective electric feels on. Meanwhile, Tame Impala, Temples, and other retro-renegades would continue their own MGMT-like exercises in temporal displacement, jumbling together ‘60s, ‘80s, and ‘00s aesthetics to create psych-pop that belonged to no age in particular. And there’s been no lack of shimmering, sun-kissed pop slathered in vintage synths and analog effects thanks to Mac DeMarco, who collaborated with VanWyngarden on some thus-far unreleased recordings in 2016. Indeed, there may be a whole new generation of MGMT devotees judging by the off-kilter yet eminently catchy sounds favored by teenage sensations like Cuco, Superorganism, and Cosmo Pyke.So were those two luridly attired loons on the cover of Oracular Spectacular looking into the future all along? It’s impossible to say, but this playlist featuring the many inhabitants of MGMT’s musical universe might’ve made them the envy of Nostradamus.

Hip-hop brought black America at its most unfiltered into the mainstream like never before. And rappers have been pushing the envelope for sexual content dating back to even the genres earliest pop crossover moments. (Recall the "Rappers Delight" verse about "super sperm.") But it took some time for hip-hop to get really dirty. In the late 80s and early 90s, it was often gangsta rap pioneers like Ice-T and N.W.A. that set the bar for explicit sex talk, but it felt almost like a side effect of their penchant for breaking other taboos.Miamis 2 Live Crew became one of hip-hops first major acts to center their image on sex, and, in the process, upset the same censorship advocates that had been so focused on Prince a few years earlier, becoming unlikely champions of free speech. Throughout the early 90s, gangsta-rap albums continued to be peppered with odes to orgies and oral sex, and even relatively clean-cut acts like MC Hammer made ass-shaking anthems like "Pumps And A Bump." LL Cool J evolved from hip-hop love-song pioneer to the sex god of "Doin It." Sir Mix-A-Lots "Baby Got Back" became a pop phenomenon in part because of his cleverly cartoonish approach to sex, but, as his career continued, he got even more anatomical with songs like "Put Em On the Glass."In the mid-90s, the burgeoning hip-hop underground allowed more leeway for kinky lyrics that didnt even try to get past radio censors. Akinyele of "Put It In Your Mouth" fame dedicated his career to obscenity. Kool Keiths Dr. Octagon project became an indie-rap touchstone with a playfully absurd cocktail of sci-fi themes and sex raps. And R.A. The Rugged Mans 1994 debut album contained such perversely nasty lyrics that even the presence of rising mainstream star Notorious B.I.G. on "Cunt Renaissance" couldnt keep it from being shelved for several years.Early sex-positive female rap stars like Salt-N-Pepa gave way to X-rated pinups like Lil Kim and Foxy Brown, and in the early 2000s, Khia and Trina. By the 2010s, nearly every female rapper of note is as comfortable and unapologetic in rapping about ass and pussy as their male contemporaries, from superstars like Nicki Minaj to underground upstars like cupcakKe. Meanwhile, the rise of the Internet has reduced radios role as a gatekeeper, giving tracks like "Fuckin Problems" and "UP! (Beat the Pussy Up)" more room to thrive on the pop charts without being cleaned up for broadcast.

Unlike Eminem fictionalizing his rap-battle life in 8 Mile, or JAY-Z pumping his hustler memoirs behind Frank Lucas story in American Gangster, Kendrick Lamars contribution to the upcoming soundtrack for Black Panther appears to be more than just autobiographical inspiration. The first hint was Kendricks collabo with Vince Staples in a trailer, the second being "All the Stars" with labelmate SZA. The newest single, "Kings Dead," features K Dot, Jay Rock, Future, and James Blake tipping the cap to Wakandas monarchy. And though Run the Jewels has been saluted by Marvel in print and featured in one Black Panther trailer with their banger "Legend Has It," Kendrick was a natural choice for curating the official soundtrack, given that his loyalty ‘n’ royalty theme "DNA." echoes the philisophies of Chadwick Boseman’s TChalla, the lone king of a country who sometimes kicks ass with The Avengers when not leading the most technologically advanced nation in the Marvel universe.Hip-hop artists have long used movie soundtracks to catapult some of the biggest hits of their careers, from Public Enemys "Fight the Power" in the 80s, to Coolios "Gangstas Paradise" in the 90s, to JAY-Zs "La La La" in the 00s. The Bad Boys II soundtrack, for example, was helmed by Puff Daddy to exploit the roster of early-’00s Bad Boy Records, while the previously mentioned 8 Mile and 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Trying corraled some outside rappers within a mostly Shady/Aftermath/Interscope package. In honor of Black Panther’s arrival, this playlist celebrates 30 years of hip-hop soundtrack hits, from the "left it off the album and we needed a home for it" variety to the "worldwide platinum single that just happened to be attached to a movie” kind.

Where oh where did all the dance-punk bands go? In the first decade of the new millennium, amid the countless other genres that looked back at older music through rosy glasses (chillwave, freak folk, neo-psychedelia), few dominated both the mainstream charts as well as the underground as heavily as dance-punk did. Though the sound’s essential properties came down to a fusion of punk and disco, its purveyors ranged from award-collecting pretty-boys (Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chefs) to aging hipsters carving out new territory (LCD Soundsystem, Le Tigre). Some groups leaned more heavily into their funk forebears (Electric Six, VHS Or Beta), while others embraced a pop-friendly mix of acoustic and electric instrumentation, shooting for the festival stages while riding a steady wave of blog buzz (Matt And Kim, Two Door Cinema Club).Though often fairly accessible (it is dance music after all), bands that practised the sound often thrived on an indie-schooled sense of cool, never straying too far from their rock roots as they attempted to bring guitar music into the 21st century. You can still hear the echoes of the sound in indie rock today, even if most of its original architects have been left by the wayside. But with dance-punk luminaries Franz Ferdinand returning in February with their fifth album, Always Ascending, we took the time to revisit some of the genre’s most definitive moments. Hit play, and bust out those MySpace moves.

Digging for jewels in a mountain of crap is no tiny task. When you start making your way through some of music history’s most notoriously awful albums hoping to uncover a hidden treasure, you’ve got to wade through a lot of unsavory stuff. More often than not, albums with rotten reps got them for a good reason, especially where major artists are concerned. It’s no big event when an artist of little renown discharges a stinker, but once you start diving into the nitty gritty of infamous career-killers like The Clash’s Cut the Crap or Blondie’s The Hunter, there’s nary a redemptive moment to be found.But just because great songs on awful albums are a rarity, that doesn’t mean they’re non-existent. And when you do come across them, their anomalous quality only makes them seem all the more special. Sometimes, you’re dealing with low-hanging fruit; it’s no mystery why “Under Pressure” is the only track 99.9 percent of the planet knows from Queen’s otherwise unsalvageable Hot Space, for instance.It take a lot more fortitude to find the real under-the-radar moments on wretched records. For the most part, the forbidding confines of albums like Bob Dylan’s double-length clunker Self Portrait or The Velvet Underground’s sad swan song, Squeeze (featuring zero original members) are enough to make the hardiest soul long for sudden deafness. But then you come across Bob’s own unhinged version of “Quinn the Eskimo,” best known by Manfred Mann’s cover version, or the Lou-less VU’s “Louise,” which could sit comfortably on a late-’60s Kinks album. And suddenly, the world seems a little sweeter for your valiant sonic spelunking.But just so you don’t have to go trawling through the refuse yourself, we’ve done the heavy lifting for you here, exposing estimable moments from albums that otherwise ought to be swiftly forgotten. Just don’t try this at home.

Anyone familiar with the writings of Haruki Murakami knows that he’s a massive music geek with a particular interest in jazz. From the beginning of his career, his books have been filled with musical references. He longed to be a musician way before becoming a writer but lacked the necessary chops. Instead, he ran his own jazz bar, immersing himself in music 24/7, and even after becoming a writer, he continued that immersion—music is a constant part of his environment when he’s working. His official website offers a tantalizing photo of his vinyl collection, which he estimates at more than 10,000 records, and he even published a pair of books containing his own essays on his favorite jazz artists.An enterprising soul named Masamaro Fujiki has taken it upon himself to tally up the tunes in Murakami’s collection into a massive Spotify playlist. In its current state, the playlist contains only a small portion of the music on the author’s shelves—but even that ends up in excess of 3,000 tracks. According to Fujiki, he based his playlist on a Q&A website Murakami put up a couple of years back and on his music essays. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the albums represented are jazz: Murakami’s tastes cycle between bop (Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young), cool (Stan Getz, Bud Shank), and vocalists (Beverly Kenney, copious amounts of Billie Holiday), which are interspersed with classical offerings (Prokofiev, Mozart, Tchaikovsky) and occasionally punctuated by a handful of rock records (The Beach Boys, CCR).If we take this to be an accurate sampling of Murakami’s collection, he definitely isn’t much of a modernist. He is, however, clearly capable of going deep when it comes to his chosen niches, as exemplified by the presence of obscure artists like Swedish sax man Lars Gullin and contemporary jazz vocalist Stacey Kent among all the icons. Fujiki has declared his intent to add more music to the list when he can, but in the meantime, what he’s already created is an impressive achievement—one that allows you to tune in to the celebrated author’s wavelength for a while and muse on the way his listening habits inform his singular literary style.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Barack Obama was, among other firsts, the first POTUS who shared his listening habits with the public through Spotify playlists. And though he hasn’t personally curated any music selections since leaving the White House, his Chicago-based non-profit recently debuted the first iteration of Hometown, a collection of tracks handpicked by Chicagoans that remind them of home. Comedian Cameron Esposito opens the playlist with one Chicago band covering another, JC Brooks & The Uptown Sound putting an unlikely retro soul spin on Wilco’s fragile epic “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart.” But while songs from and/or about Chi-town dominate, not everyone is so literal with the theme; actor Nick Offerman picks two Tom Waits songs that remind him of his theater days in Chicago (neither of which is Waits’s 2011 track “Chicago”). Kanye West looms large over the playlist, with three curators picking his tracks. One is West’s young protege Chance The Rapper, who singles out the sweetly nostalgic “Family Business.” A few tracks later, President Obama’s former Deputy Press Secretary, Bill Burton, picks Chance’s own “Blessings,” with a tip of the hat to Chance’s father’s work on Obama’s first campaign. But despite some recurring threads, Hometown offers a pluralistic view of Chicago music, with equal room for Liz Phair and The Staple Singers.

These days, Christian music and pop culture are so deeply intertwined, it’s easy to assume that it’s a marriage tested by time. In fact, it’s a relatively new phenomenon, and like many things that are now a part of our society’s status quo—the internet, meditation, health food—it reaches back to the hippie revolution. As scholar and writer Erik Davis points out in the liner notes to the Wanted: Jesus Christ compilation, “Many acidheads had ‘Christ trips’ in the sixties. Some went on to become Jesus People: hippie born-agains whose faith offered ‘One Way’ out of the chaos of the times. While rejecting the hedonism of the hippies, these long-haired converts also epitomized the countercultural dream of personal transformation through ecstatic and collective spiritual encounters.”Jesus People—or Jesus Freaks, as they proudly called themselves—initially were a California-based movement. As a result, their formative sounds are rooted in the Golden State’s utopian mix of wispy folk-pop and psychedelia. Larry Norman’s 1971 anthem “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” is a fragile meditation laced with strings and the singer/songwriter’s Neil Young-like cry. On the other hand, Agape’s “Wouldn’t It Be A Drag/Change Of Heart” is fiery, funky acid rock packed with soul-jarring organ and smoking guitars. Especially sublime is Azitis’ “Judgement Day,” which boasts Byrds-style harmonies, jazzy flute, and a freak-out middle section drenched in wah-wah.America’s older Evangelicals were perplexed, troubled, and often hostile to far-out hippie preachers like Lonnie Frisbee and their shaggy followers, who tended to eschew traditional worship and living for natural settings and communal homes (this issue is covered in great depth in Larry Eskridge’s engrossing tome, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America). Nevertheless, over the course of the ’70s, the two groups did become one. This evolution is mirrored in how Jesus music gradually became less eccentric and weird and more professional and mainstream. By the decade’s end, the movement was churning out polished hits like “You Put This Love In My Heart,” a deliciously infectious tune from soft-rock tunesmith Keith Green, and “At The Cross,” from Maranatha! Music—slick, blue-eyed praise featuring the voices of Harlan Rogers and future solo star Kelly Willard.Nowadays, a good deal of the early Jesus music is only known to those older converts who were a part of the movement or to hardcore record collectors who specialize in hippie obscurities. But it has to be noted that the massive, global industry now labeled contemporary Christian music—or CCM—certainly wouldn’t exist were it not for the long-haired visionaries found on this playlist.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

My father passed away on May 4, 2017, in Milwaukee, where he’d been living with my older brother Zac. I got out of work late that night, and after I returned my brother’s call and heard the news, I felt a little numb, too far physically removed from the personal significance of what had just happened 800 miles away. Driving home, I put on Little Feat’s “Easy to Slip,” a song I’d heard in Dad’s car a thousand times, and it helped me feel something that night when it was all almost too slippery and abstract to grasp.Three weeks later, Zac and his family flew out to Baltimore, with our father in an urn, to hold a memorial in his hometown. Richard David Shipley was born in Baltimore and lived most of his life there, selling his house of 25 years a month before his death. He wasn’t a religious man, so we celebrated his life in a secular fashion that seemed fitting, enjoying the earthly pleasures of music, food, and good company. We took over the upstairs of his favorite Fells Point bar, Kisling’s, for a few hours, and enjoyed some beer and the best bar food in Baltimore while a playlist I assembled of his favorite music blared in the background. “I can’t believe I’m listening to Michael McDonald,” my brother told me after I sent him a link to the playlist.Dad, like many other baby boomers, loved rock’n’roll ever since he saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan as a teenager, and he sang in a band in college. One night when his group was performing in Baltimore County, Dad met a musician who was in town recording an album. Lowell George invited my dad to come by the studio, where he saw the eccentric California band Little Feat run through songs for their fourth album, Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, a chance meeting with one of the great cult bands of the ‘70s.I grew up with my mom and saw Dad on weekends, when we’d spend hours in the backseat of his car listening to him sing along with the radio and tapes of The Eagles and Tori Amos. He loved Tears For Fears’ ‘80s records, but it was their last U.S. hit, 1993’s “Break It Down,” that uniquely stuck with both him and me as a masterpiece. As a teenager, I got my first turntable and started to pore through the boxes of vinyl that Dad hadn’t touched since he got a CD player—all his Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac records. (I always thought it was unusual that he seemed to prefer Tusk to Rumours.)Dad and I continued to bond over music in his later years, and we’d go together to see Little Feat, Michael McDonald, and Jackson Browne. (He met my mother at a Jackson Browne concert in 1978.) But he remained open-minded to all sorts of music in ways that sometimes surprised me. When I was 17, I needed a ride to go see Boredoms and Scarnella at the 9:30 Club, and in retrospect it’s pretty remarkable that a 50-year-old dad actually really enjoyed Vision Creation Newsun-era Boredoms. I invited the Baltimore post-rock duo The Water to perform at my 30th birthday party, and Dad became a fan, buying their album and returning to see them live again.So much of the music here is “dad rock” in every sense of the word, but it’s never felt like a pejorative to me. I never loved everything Dad loved, and certainly I didn’t agree with him that Sting was as good solo as with The Police. But I learned how to love music partly through him, and I’ll never hear any of these songs, or a hundred other songs, without thinking of him.

In the many memorials and remembrances published after Gregg Allman’s death on May 27, 2017, the Allman Brothers Band and Hour Glass vocalist has been hailed as one of the great white blues and soul singers. It’s worthy praise for a mighty stylist, though it also has to be noted that Allman was just one of a slew of white Southern singers who, in the ’60s and early ’70s, reshaped the contours of American roots music by blending African-American soul, blues, and gospel with elements of country, pop, and, in select instances, the anti-establishment fervor and experimental flavors coursing through the hippies’ rebellious rock jams.Some of these musicians are well known. Dr. John, of course, is an American icon synonymous with New Orleans R&B, and Joe South achieved pop stardom at the turn of the ’70s thanks to a string of hits, including “Games People Play,” a socially conscious anthem laced with electric sitar and delivered with a preacher’s passion. Others, meanwhile, have never moved beyond cult status. Swamp rock pioneer Tony Joe White remains under the radar despite having his songs covered by Brook Benton, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley (whose comeback era, 1968 through 1973, makes him a key figure in this milieu). Even more obscure is the late Eddie Hinton. A songwriter and guitarist who contributed to many of the seminal soul albums recorded at Muscle Shoals, he also was a fabulous vocalist in his own right. Indeed, music critic Peter Guralnick describes the gravelly voiced howler as the ”last of the great white soul singers" in the indispensable book Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom.With all due respect to Van Morrison, Joe Cocker, and the seriously bad-ass Daryl Hall, nobody can touch these Southerners in terms of blue-eyed soulfulness. Of course, soulfulness is a tricky notion, as it veers into the immeasurably shadowy world of metaphysics. Thus, it helps to ground it in some geography and culture. After all, these singers—who so thoroughly soaked up the sublime cadences, emotiveness, and phrasing of their African-American heroes—were raised in a region of the United States where black music, art, and religion permeate—despite rampant racism and oppression—white culture to a degree that’s unique unto itself. (This is part of what Drive-By Trucker Patterson Hood has called the “duality of the Southern thing.”) This influence isn’t the result of merely buying records, attending concerts, or, in Jerry Lee Lewis’ case, growing up near a juke joint. It’s archaic, and it’s soaked into the very bedrock of the Southern collective subconscious.To see a mind-blowing microcosm of this point, check out the opening sequence of the 1983 documentary Chase the Devil: Religious Music of the Appalachians: Rev. Bobby Akers, based in Virginia, leads his all-white Pentecostal congregation in a style of revival—Holy Ghost–raising piano boogie, ecstatic singing, dancing in the aisles, speaking in tongues, hands raised to God, and what seem like trance states—that can be traced back to the African-American church and to the religious rites and rituals slaves brought over from West Africa. These very same roots are embedded in the jams comprising this playlist. They creep their way into both Gary Stewart’s honky-tonk bummer “Single Again” and Bobby Charles’ muddy “Save Me Jesus.” And they most certainly creep their way into The Allman Brothers Band’s “Dreams,” a sublime slice of Southern cosmic gospel music, if there ever was one.