Indie

Gucci Mane became one of the south’s most prolific and influential rappers with the help of a deep bench of producers, and Xavier “Zaytoven” Dotson is first and foremost among them. A transplant from Oakland, California, who grew up playing church organ, Zaytoven brought a new set of textures and influences to the Atlanta trap sound with soulful keys, ornate piano runs, and squealing synths. That brighter array of tones helped Gucci stand out from his contemporaries on his early hits, and Zay soon began expanding his client base, working extensively with artists including Migos and Future. And after Gowop spent years in and out of prison, he linked up with his favorite beatmaker again to get back to work.

First off, what the hell is The Triangle? Technically speaking, it’s shorthand for Research Triangle Park, a massive slab of subtly rolling hills in the center of North Carolina that’s home to a whole mess of tech companies. Informally, however, it refers to the cities and college towns surrounding the RTP, namely Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. Most fans of indie music are well aware of the area’s bona fides: It is (or at one time was) the home of Superchunk and the Merge Records empire, a young Ben Folds Five, cult faves Archers of Loaf, and John Darnielle, the super-learned tunesmith behind The Mountain Goats, who just dropped their latest album, the wonderfully idiosyncratic Goths.So yeah, The Triangle is highly respected as a place where important music is created. At the same time, the region is underrated because it doesn’t quite strike the same level of reverence and cool as the similarly sized Seattle, Austin, or Portland. Perhaps its greatest quality is the sheer breadth of music it has churned out: In addition to all that legendary indie music, it has been a home for genre-defining thrash (Corrosion of Conformity), punk blues (Flat Duo Jets), swing revivalism (Squirrel Nut Zippers), hip-hop (Lords of the Underground), electro-pop (Sylvan Esso), and experimental noise (Secret Boyfriend).Now, a good deal of this music exists because The Triangle overflows with creative kids and arty weirdos attending one of its gazillion universities. But that’s only half the story, amazingly enough: It’s also served as a major hub for Southern vernacular music, like blues, country, and folk, since the early 20th century. Indeed, these artists may actually outnumber the many indie and alternative bands in the area. In addition to the Carolina Chocolate Drops, one of the most lauded old-time revival outfits in the United States, there’s campfire folk troubadour Hiss Golden Messenger, absurdly soulful singer/songwriter Tift Merritt, and American Primitive banjoist Nathan Bowles.Outside of Austin, or perhaps Memphis, what other scene in the U.S. boasts such an amazing balance between the modern and cutting edge and the folksy and down-home? The Dowsers guarantee that this will be the only playlist you’ll hear all week with synths, atonal guitars, and banjos.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Released on September 24, 1996, Illadelph Halflife marked a turning point in the Roots’ career from free-spirited jazz-hop players to soothsayers of doom. Much of rap music was obsessed with the Y2K apocalypse, the New World Order, and the presumptive demise of hip-hop – see De La Soul’s pivotal single “Stakes is High” – and the Philly ensemble was no exception. More than just Black Thought and Malik B launching cipher battles on “Uni-Verse at War,” and waging jeremiads against rapper “Clones,” the album sounds cloudy and introverted. The beats seem to mostly consist of organic bass, keyboards and drums, resulting in blue beats as sparse as a Wes Montgomery jam session, and moodily ominous vibes similar to contemporaneous works like A Tribe Called Quest’s Beats, Rhymes & Life, the Pharcyde’s Labcabincalifornia, and Slum Village’s Fan-Tas-Tic. When neo-soul and jazz guests like Raphael Saadiq (on “What They Do”), D’Angelo (on “The Hypnotic”), and Cassandra Wilson (on “One Shine”) appeared, they contributed pained vocals that contributed to the overall sense of melancholy.As a clear product of 1996’s pre-millennium tensions, Illadelph Halflife may have not aged as well as the band’s next album, the more successful Things Fall Apart. Its deeply rooted entropy is more suited for late-night listening, or perhaps the kind of contemplative smoke-out sessions the Black Thought, Malik and Bahamadia rhyme about on “Push Up Ya Lighter.” However, it established a theme. Led by drummer and group mastermind Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the Roots have continued to assess cultural and political trends with skepticism and occasional hope ever since.

The Joshua Tree wasn’t one of those albums that quietly arrived on record store racks one dewy morning, attracting a few raves and then enjoying a gradual build before changing the world. Instead, U2’s fifth studio album elicited a reception that in contemporary terms would be described as breaking the internet ten times over.Speaking as an ‘80s kid who listened to his cassettes of War and The Unforgettable Fire obsessively and could sense that something big was on the launch pad, I can tell you that everything about the album felt massive from the get-go. Sending the mass media and the band’s fast-expanding audience into maximum overdrive when it was released in the spring of 1987, The Joshua Tree was the subject of heavy promotion and hype, such that U2’s music and image seemed everywhere at once. According to a Newsweek story published the same week the band made the cover of Time, Island spent $100,000 in 1987 dollars on store displays alone. Not even Bono’s cold-ravaged voice put a damper on the hysteria when the band opened its sold-out North American tour in Tempe, Arizona, on April 2. That show included the first live performance of “With Or Without You,” which became the band’s first American No. 1 single a few weeks later. It would help drive sales for an album that eventually shifted 25 million units worldwide.And the rest is history, which, if we know anything about history, means we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s repeating itself in the form of a summer anniversary tour this year. It too feels massive—over one million tickets were snapped up in the first 24 hours of going on sale—even if no rock act will dominate the pop-culture landscape as forcefully as U2 once did. Indeed, just about every subsequent effort to achieve the same level of impact by U2 or later contenders reeked of an unseemly hubris or—in the case of that iTunes debacle—sheer stupidity.Yet The Joshua Tree is still huge and intimate all at once, which is a testament to the production skills of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois (whose thumbprints were far more overbearing on The Unforgettable Fire) and to the big leap in songwriting acumen by a band who had mostly got by on bravura up to that point. True, there were glimmers of what was to come on songs like “40” on War and “I Threw a Brick Through a Window” on October, which now seems like a dry run for “Bullet The Blue Sky.” But this album is where U2 indisputably became U2, achieving the greatest synthesis of their various punk and post-punk influences—especially Joy Division, Echo & the Bunnymen, and the sorely underrated The Chameleons—and the most anthemic rock of Springsteen and The Clash. Bono also talked up his blues, gospel, country, and folk inspirations at the time, but thankfully they had yet to result in the kind of stodgy Americana that clogs up Rattle and Hum. Here’s our exploration of the fertile ground around the biggest of U2’s big moments.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Calling Anderson .Paak an R&B singer shortchanges him. Under the moniker, NxWorries, his 2016 collaboration with producer Knxwledge, Yes Lawd!, the LA musicians pleading, lurching voice carries the weight of that genre’s history -- most distinctly recalling the bluesy soul of O.V. Wright -- but you can also hear the heft and bravado of hip-hop, a byproduct of both .Paak’s early years at the seminal underground label Stones Throw and his association with Dr. Dre and Aftermath Records. He’s of a generation of singers who came of age in rap’s shadows, and this makes for a strange nostalgia; a hall of mirrors where soul refracts hip-hop refracting soul, creating a sound that is uncanny.And while Yes Lawd! feels singular and very much of this moment, the sound that Knxwledge and .Paak crafted is the culmination of a strain of soul that has been bubbling in the LA underground scene (and beyond) for at least a decade. The twin pillars of the sound are J. Dilla and Madlib. The former worked with D’Angelo and Erykah Badu to craft neo soul in the 90s, while the latter opened the door of hip-hop towards psychedelia and outre world music. Their syncopated drums, hazy samples and penchant for compensational pastiche can be heard in the everyone from Flying Lotus to OmMas Keith, the latter of whom helped craft Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blonde.Yes Lawd! feels like a distillation of that sound -- Madlib’s presence is most clear in the compositions sketch-like quality, but there’s also a pop sensibility grounded in 90s R&B and the generation of forgotten alt. soul groups of the ‘00s, most notably Foreign Exchange (a group comprised of Little Brother vocalist Phonte and Dutch producer Nicolary) and the underrated LA group J*DaVeY, a trashy, funky duo who proclaimed themselves the “Black Eurythmics.”For this playlist, we peel back onion on this universe, tracing the influences of NxWorries; .Paak and Knxwledge’s solo work; as well as samples and the work of guest and collaborators. If you love the new album, as many do, this should provide great complimentary listening. Subscribe to the playlist here.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!There may be no other contemporary player who’s logged as many miles, taken as many left turns, or made as many friends on his musical journey than Thundercat. The artist more prosaically known as Stephen Bruner began playing bass at age 15, absorbing the lessons of jazz fusion greats like Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, and Jaco Pastorius. He soon joined his older brother Ronald Jr. as a member of Suicidal Tendencies, serving the L.A. thrash-funk-metal institution for the better part of a decade, while still making time to tour with Snoop Dogg and build a rep as a session musician for the likes of Erykah Badu and Bilal. Even after Thundercat established his own flair for spaced-out, vanguard R&B with his debut solo album The Golden Age of Apocalypse in 2011, he continued collaborations with Flying Lotus on the Brainfeeder label and forged a new one with Kendrick Lamar. He and brother Ron were also a part of Kamasi Washington’s formidable group for The Epic.The influence of these past hookups are easy to hear in the astonishingly diverse sounds of Thundercat’s new album, Drunk. Yet the album contains fresh surprises, too. Appearances by Lamar and newbies Wiz Khalifa and Pharrell may not be so shocking, but who could’ve known that Thundercat’s allegiance to yacht rock was so fervent that he’d enlist Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins for cameos on the ultra-smooth “Show You The Way”? The album’s crackpot humor and abundance of short, weird tracks are equally suggestive of his devotion to Frank Zappa, and at some shows he’s performed a cover of “For Love (I Come Your Friend)” by George Duke, the R&B maverick who was one of Zappa’s best musical foils.Drunk could only be a product of Thundercat’s vast and vivid musical universe, one that we explore here via songs he’s either created or helped craft, plus equally vibrant tracks by other artists he’s covered, sampled, and loved.

It’s been 20 years since Wilco’s Being There seduced me in my roommate’s Ford Escort. This happened in the fall of 1996, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, just two hours northeast of Chicago. So yeah, the place was crawling with Midwestern college students all earnest and modest and way into Wilco, Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, The Jayhawks and any other artist camping out halfway between alternative and rootsy. A fan of noisy underground rock, I tended to dismiss these bands — that is until I started borrowing Rob’s Escort to run errands: laundry, the bank, record stores, Smirnoff. The super generous dude said I could take it anytime, and I did. (I also devoured a lot of his groceries — sorry, man.) Why exactly I began listening to his copy of Being There — which had been out only a few weeks — and not one of the dozen other CDs strewn across the floor has been lost time. I’d love to say that I started the ignition one day and became instantly intrigued once the gargantuan, Flaming Lips-like feedback of the opener, “Misunderstood,” drenched the car. But that would be the kind of apocryphal crap music critics love foisting upon readers. Nevertheless, I started listening to the record and gradually became obsessed. It’s never left me. I know it forwards and backwards. I can recite the track list from memory. I appreciate other Wilco albums, but none even come close to blowing my mind like their second.From the little I’ve read about the album (I’m not lying when I say I haven’t read much about Wilco), Jeff Tweedy, Jay Bennett (RIP), and the rest of the crew harbored lofty themes about the complex relationship between rocker and fan when they began recording the sprawling double album in late 1995. You can hear them grapple with this idea on “Misunderstood,” written from the perspective of a fan, as well as “Sunken Treasure” and “The Lonely 1.” I didn’t know any of this when I first formulated my take on Being There, which is this: It’s an overly self-conscious rock album made by an overly self-conscious rock a band about rock, both its awesomeness and suckitude. It’s about how rock is totally weary, spent, and repetitive, yet at the same time utterly inescapable for those addicted to it. And since there is no escape, we might as well drink from that repetition — revel in it. As Tweedy sings on “Someone Else’s Song,” a slowly rolling folk number with a melody reminiscent of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” “I keep on singing/ You’re eyes they just roll/ It sounds like someone else’s song/ From a long time ago.”Wilco take the notion of singing someone else’s song as a license to wear their influences on their sleeves in a way that most bands would be too embarrassed to ever attempt. Many of these — early Little Feat, Neil, Gram, The Replacements, Big Star — are baked deep into the grooves. Others, in contrast, are shoved in listeners’ faces. Not only does “Misunderstood” lift The Lips’ uniquely groaning feedback, it actually contains lines — “Take the guitar player for a ride/ You see he ain’t never been satisfied/ He thinks he owes some kind of debt/ Be years before he gets over it” — lifted almost verbatim from Rocket From the Tombs’ proto-punk ballad “Amphetamine.” The rocker “Monday” boasts Keith Richards’ guitar tone from Let It Bleed and blaring horns from Exile On Main St. On the blurry-eyed ballad “(Was I) in Your Dream,” Tweedy sounds like a drunken Dr. John impersonator, while over the course of the fiddle jam “Dreamer in My Dreams” he mimics the raspy hellraising of Tex-Mex legend Doug Sahm (who recorded with Uncle Tupelo, incidentally).In addition to blatant plagiarism and mimicry, Tweedy works in all manner of historical references, some obvious, others oblique. In the folksy love ditty “Far, Far Away,” he slips in the phrase “on the dark side of the moon.” You can tell from his hesitant delivery that he totally knows what fans will be thinking when they hear him nick a phrase from Floyd. “Hotel Arizona” has to be a nod to “Hotel California” because the song doesn’t actually contain the phrase in the lyrics. Tweedy sings “hotel in Arizona” but not actually “Hotel Arizona.” Being There contains an “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” as well as an “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)”; both are basically different versions of the same song, just like how The Beatles included slightly different renditions of the title track on the art pop classic Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Ditto for Neil on Tonight’s the Night.)I freely admit that many of my references are wholly my own creation, and Tweedy probably would roll his eyes if he ever read this. Like a nutty conspiracy theorist with a wall full of photographs, pins, and yarn, I’ve constructed a map of the different rock coordinates that I’ve projected onto . The whistling closing out the richly melodic “Red-Eyed and Blue” is a nod to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream.” “The Lonely 1,” a syrupy ballad about the rock ‘n’ roll life, is Wilco’s “Beth,” itself a syrupy ballad about the rock ‘n’ roll life. And best of all, the playfully walking piano chords opening “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)” are a secret love letter to the influence that “Sesame Street Theme” exerted on Tweedy as a child.Being There totally invites this kind of fanaticism, however delusional, from its fans. After all, only fellow rock fanatics — the kind that spent their teenage years picking apart every last lyric, riff, and fill on their favorite albums — could’ve recorded a set so absurdly referential. This is music by obsessives for obsessives. What started as a fling in a Ford Escort in the mid ’90s turned into a fascination spanning decades.

Nas may be known primarily for classics albums such as Illmatic and It Was Written, but his work on other people’s tracks reveals new dimensions of his work. On earlier classics such “Verbal Intercourse” or the vastly underrated AZ collaboration “Mo Money, Mo Murder (Homoside),” Nas seems primarily concerned with sensory detail and pure sound -- the clanging consonants and sly insertions of internal rhymes that melt the rusted metal of his harrowing imagery into pure liquid poetry. As his career would progress, he became more interested in carving out meaning, and tracks such as “Road to Zion” -- his collaboration with Damian Marley -- and “Music for Live” are thoughtful post-colonialists critiques set to boom bap. His recent verse of DJ Khaled’s “Nas Album Done” verifies that, 20+ years into an already legendary career, the rapper is still near the top of the game. The power of his voice is matched by the subtlety of his language as he pushes for equality through economic re-investment in black communities. Yeah, it’s admittedly strange this is taking place on a DJ Khaled track, but the track has to be encouraging for all Nas fans.

Vince Staples came to prominence as an associate of the L.A. underground rap collective Odd Future, making multiple appearances on Earl Sweatshirt’s 2013 album Doris. Two years later, Staples released the acclaimed album Summertime ’06 on Def Jam, which featured an appearance by frequent collaborator Jhene Aiko and established the Northside Long Beach rapper as a brilliant and distinctive voice in hip hop. Despite his irreverence toward traditional hip hop gatekeepers, Staples has proven an able collaborator for conscious veterans like Common and Dilated Peoples, as well as an agile MC who can tackle adventurous tracks from producers like Flume and Clams Casino. With the sheer variety of collaborators he sounds at home with, Vince Staples has enhanced the unique place his solo work occupies in the musical landscape and the ways he can express his sense of humor and political perspective.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Visible Cloaks’ Reassemblage is the latest in a string of recent electronic music to investigate the ties between Eastern and Western forms of music, connecting commercial and spiritual art forms to create a mélange of plastic textures and heavenly auras. You can hear a similar—albeit more disturbing—collision in the Internet diaspora of vaporwave, or the constantly shifting configurations of Oneohtrix Point Never. But this meeting of schizophrenic digital assemblage and tranquil meditation stretches back into the ’80s as well, through the extraterrestrial world music of Jon Hassell.In widening the sonic palette of what constitutes easy listening, these artists lead the charge in finding new ways to zone out as we step further into the future, creating a liminal space where film scores, computer start-up sounds, and video game music can all mingle together in the otherworldly deep end. This playlist seeks to piece together the fractured influences of Reassemblage, and to illustrate the lush history of music that pushes the limits of what ambient means.