- The Retrographer
- Posts
- The Retrographer, Issue Twelve: 1 0 0 2 0 1 5
The Retrographer, Issue Twelve: 1 0 0 2 0 1 5
December, 2015The Retrographer, Issue 12
1 0 0 2 0 1 5
Thus concludes the first year of The Retrographer.For a year you've welcomed me into your inboxes and earbuds, based on a simple pledge I make every issue: “I listen so you don't have to.” That Snoop Dogg album you deemed non-essential? You weren't wrong, but I listened anyway. That three-hour Jazz epic from the arranger of the last Kendrick album? I gave it more than that many hours of listening, and sifted for the song you'd like best. Ever wonder what's happening in metal, country, East African blues? I do too, and while I'm no expert, you'll get a sense here.The World Star Hip Hop anthems, the Vine-popular songs, the pop songs that seemed too plastic to be any good, the Pitchfork-favorites, the Soundcloud remixes - they're all worth consideration, and this list is my best, though flawed, attempt, at a tasting menu for what happened in music in 2015.I hope this thing introduces you to new music you love, and, based on what I put around it, shows you a new angle on the songs you already know. But most of all I hope it's a fun listen for you.
Bulletins
A number of my friends made music of their own this year, and some really special stuff came out. Notice, most prominently: Ian Wayne’s CEREAL, Ball of Flame Shoot Fire, The Danger Boys, Pat Kelly, Jess Tambellini, Pastimer. My own band Milhaus put out an EP this year, too.
This was also the year I left the Webby Awards to work with my friends Gabe, Mario, Amadou, and Sam on Cymbal. Here's a quick rundown of what the app’s inaugural year looked like.
While this is the first year I've published this newsletter, it's the fifth I've published a best-of list. Check out 2014, 2013, 2012, and 2011 if you want to time travel.
I also continued to write for Frannie Kelley at NPR Music, which gave me the opportunity to interview to be Waka Flocka Flame’s blunt roller and write about it.
On January 7th and 8th I will be performing music I wrote for my friends Lydia and Ben’s choreography in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Grab tickets here.
Instructions for Maximum Enjoyment (Some Assembly Required)
A number of these songs are not available on Spotify. Never fear, i’ve got you covered. Take these two steps:
To see what tracks are missing, go to "Preferences", scroll down to "Display Options," and then switch on "Show unavailable tracks in playlists."
To actually listen to those songs, download this small .zip file that fell off the back of a truck. Add it to wherever Spotify queries your local music files (likely a dusty iTunes), and the rest should work like a charm.
I sequenced this deliberately, meaning I worked hard to make each song transition sensically into the next. It’s not in order of how much I like each song. The best listening experience is to start on any song, or from the beginning, and let it go without shuffle.
If you wanna turn on shuffle, go for it. I’m not your dad. Just realize you might go straight from Carly Rae Jepsen into Deafheaven and, as funny as that might be, is probably not what you want at your pregame.
I love feedback, so please write me! Just remember the immortal words of my 20th Century Music professor in college, Heather Buchman: “I don’t care if you like it. I just want you to understand it.”
100 Songs for 2015
Story is Jamie Smith was inspired to make this track while listening to Hot 97 on a trip in New York. If that’s true, it couldn’t be a better tribute to the eclecticism of this city, from the immigrant sounds of Popcaan, to the seismic bass, to Young Thug’s inventive stewardship of the city’s greatest art form.
Baauer feat. Fetty Wap, “Promises” (YouTube)
Ben Cronin, whose newsletter Two Songs is as delightful as it is sporadic, introduced me to this song. Unlike Fetty Wap’s ubiquitous album cuts and singles, this Baauer (bet you didn't think you'd see his name again) collaboration strikes an utterly charming balance between singing and rapping. An easy top-5 summer jam of 2015.
Another top 5 summer jam, top 5 meme of the year. Jhene Aiko’s sexual empowerment is badass, and not just because she talks so freely about analingus. On the outro, Omarion and Chris Brown tag with their names, but Jhene shouts, “I’ll make him do it!” I love a little equal-opportunity objectification.
C’mon: That big ol’ slap bass, Passion Pit-y synth, and melismatic “You-hoo-hoo” that caps the chorus got you going just a little, right? How about the narrative change at the end, when Carly Rae decides if you don't need her, she doesn't need this? I'll take that as a yes.
Marina and the Diamonds, “Froot (Oliver Nelson Remix)” (YouTube)
Take note: this is what a remix is supposed to be. And Marina’s lyrics, fetid and sexy, recall almost no other pop song I’ve ever heard. Like, “Leave it too long I'll go rot / Like an apple you forgot / Birds and worms will come for me / The cycle of life is complete.” Yow.
It's not “Jealous”, but it is a super-power-bestowing, dance-floor-quaking, SoulCycle-optimized anthem, and everyone who thinks that last descriptor is an insult hasn't ever been to a class.
Dr. Dre (Feat. Kendrick Lamar, Marsha Ambrosius, and Candice Pillay), “Genocide” (YouTube)
Having Kendrick on a song in 2015 is a little like hitting the invincibility cheat code in a video game. Not that Dre needed it; This beat is as steroidal as he is. Fact: the last time this guy put out an album, Kendrick was 12. Don't you love him for that doo-wop interlude?
I think there must have been a point before he started working on VEGA Intl Night School that Alan Palomo looked in the mirror and thought, “I look enough like John Travolta to…” Enjoy the impossibly sustained backup vocals on the chorus, the palm-muted lead lines, the intimated, handwritten narrative. Lurid.
I love how the spaciness of the verse solidifies at a whim under the ramrod tension of the chorus’ bassline. Abel Tesfaye is our opiated Michael Jackson (sorry, Dornik), and until now he always lacked MJ’s two winning qualities, the things every dopehead lacks: rhythm and fun.
Florence Welch’s voice has power, and incredible confidence, too. As thrilling is the orchestral arrangement, which is a little bit “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and a little bit “Appalachian Spring” – cosmic fourths rendered in brass and strings. Stately and ineffable, like the singer herself.
In a world that had unexpectedly gotten it's Dr. Dre, D’Angelo, and My Bloody Valentine fixes, Adele surprisingly became music’s highest-profile recluse. And the only one with the courtesy to say “Hello” with an enormous, unifying hit when she returned. Like Bieber, she channels her fans’ sentiments into a song; Craftier, though, to turn the tables on the listener.
A song about not taking someone you love for granted, from a voice it’s altogether too easy to fall in love with. I love the little references to “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and “I’ll Be Good To You”, the seriousness in her quiet bridge, and how supremely simple this song can be when you lose what you don’t need.
PW turned me onto this one months back, and I listened to it on repeat, walking down 6th avenue and riding the subway, feeling like a character in a Dave Matthews song. Its guitars swirl without percussion for almost a minute, before coalescing and marching, like ants.
I love the cranked organ, the big fuzzy guitars, the explosive hits, the stabbing acoustic piano and the loopy electric. I love how the backup vocals stack and mount as the outro goes on, and how James Petralli’s voice never seems to belie the muscularity of the song right beneath it.
His last album Kaputt indicated, in billowing tones, the open-road romanticism Dan Bejar shares with the Boss. In an era where young listeners are both classified as Bruce-haters (which they aren't) and chastised for that categorization, Destroyer stands with a defiant few in carrying Bruce’s Everyman mandate.
Meaning, “cranked all the way to 10” or, alternatively, broken up and placed in little $10 bags for you to smoke with your friends behind the dumpsters at your high school. Either way, we really really like it when it's dimed out, and that's why I've got the hearing of an octogenarian. What a guitar solo.
There's a special love you hold for great songs no one else knows, and another kind for songs that get the tone of a past time just right. Somewhere between Purple Rain and Born in the USA, the pseudonymous Ronnie Stone finds both here. This song will always mean driving north from Brighton Beach with Matt and Annie-Rose to me.
Bronson’s most appealing quality, and his most endangered, is his ability to mock himself in surrealistic strokes. Vivid and absurd images, like copping bop at the opera, with Mark Ronson’s reminiscing production, and Chance’s goofy if somewhat cloying omens, are the best recipes from rap’s bubbling chef.
All you need to make a riff really big is to find how to dance to it, and then play it like you love it. Once you buy in, everyone else does too, and then you have a song like this, which passes through many movements without disturbing the good time being had by all.
I love the little rhumba behind East, whose raspy voice sits so pleasantly between Sam Cooke and Rod Stewart, who owed everything to Cooke anyway. What I’m trying to say is Sam Cooke was the greatest, and as Anderson East or Leon Bridges will tell you, he’s alive and well.
Despite how self-aggrandizing the lyrics are here, I love how much he gives on the chorus. The past 60 years of music history have relied so heavily on how a harried white guy sounds in a black art form, you’d think it’d get old by now. And yet.
Leon Bridges is, despite his wardrobe, not Sam Cooke. He never attempts the sandpaper wails or sensual coos. But he does know how to sound cool, just as cool as the placid waters he sings about.
His point is supremely simple: He loves his grandmother. But in a genre of fatherless children, where love is a sign of weakness, where deep down, we’re all scared, as he says elsewhere, “To let our grandmothers outside”, what could be more freeing than that point, stated so simply, sung so truly?
One Direction, “Olivia” (Spotify)
One last one for the Queen. I’m not sure the fellas of 1D, one foot out the door of the world’s biggest pop group, have ever made a song that’s quite so British, all the way down to the “World of Pure Imagination”-ripping bridge. They always did say the Beatles were their favorite boy band.
This song is why it’s fun to listen to Father John Misty. At first listen, it’s just the narrator being a dick to some frivolous woman. Then you realize he can’t get his dick hard. Then you realize the title flips the perspective. It’s unflattering to any listener who takes a side, and to any interpretation of the composition you can muster other than, “Everyone’s a jerk.”
They needed an ode, didn't they? Those lanky, lean, indomitable athletes. But on the inside, they need a lot of internal encouragement to get to the finish line, or wherever they're going.
Like Joanna Newsom and Tom Waits, Natalie Prass loses many first-time listeners with the quality of her voice, which is waiflike and private. But they then miss her soaring composition, as well as Matthew E. White’s gorgeous production, perfectly channeling period music in the manner it influenced our present.
One of the great Song Exploder episodes. Like Tame Impala, Ruban Neilsen channels many of the sounds of soul and psychedelica and synthesizes them in ways that didn’t exist before except in your memory. I love how the Isleys-inspired breakbeats can be heard both as homage to the period music referenced here, and through the lens of hip-hop they engendered.
When Angel Deradoorian performs, she sometimes performs alone, with a bass, drum machine, and looping pedal. And somehow she replicates the complex, baroque vocal acrobatics of these songs, both buttoned-up and soulful, passing in dramatic movements, like a symphony in a capella miniature.
All these years later and I still can’t figure Noah Lennox out. His music finds newness in it’s forward-thinking, hallucinogenic loop-based arrangements, and it’s classic, vocal-group-inspired melodies. He somehow makes old things and new things coexist, and on top of that, doesn’t wear out his own tricks.
In mid-2012, Islamist rebels imposed strict Sharia Law across Mali. In cities like Bamako, strict dress codes were implemented, boys and girls were separated in schools, and rock bands like this one were forced into an exile from main street. On Music in Exile, these four bluesmen play with vitality and urgency to match the political unrest of their home.
“Somewhere, in me, are memories that I cannot gather anymore,” Brittany Howard sings. And it’s true: Memory recall only takes you where you know to look. Worse so when you’re leaving someone behind. You’re losing your memories, someone else, your ability to give a fuck.
Ava Luna is a many-limbed beast. The band can call in a multitude of voices, and the reactive combinations of such, to impress the hard left turns each of their songs take. They love the contrast between loud and quiet, coos and screams, the concurrence of abrasion and lusciousness.
Wolf Parade closed up shop years ago, but lives on in ex-Women singer Matt Flegel’s stomping post-hardcore. Also think 154, Chairs Missing, and Zen Arcade. I love how the chorus contracts into a tight groove, all galloping bass and guitar, with half-remembered backup vocals riding along.
Call it “slowcore”, call it “emo”, call it “alt-rock”. No matter what subset of alt-rock you hear in Cloakroom, I guarantee you hear a richer harmonic palette here than those descriptors would have you expect. Within its immolating fuzz is complexity and depth, but most will miss it.
Their gimmick is that they interpolate the intentional causticity that black metal employs to keep its community pure with sweeter genres that aspire to the same power and eminence. Make it through their black gates, trust the guiding lead guitar, and redemption waits you at the end.
History’s most important post-punk band now lives in a world that has metabolized its invention. What sense do they make of it? This song starts in kaleidoscopic reverse loops and grows into a coasting, constant rumble, before breaking up into embers, taken by the wind.
This song has fucking balls. It builds with cinematic grandeur, like a camera drone passing over the relief of the Grand Canyon, and then finds a cruising quietude in the pre-chorus, time billowing overhead, before exploding with, “I can only love you more.”
“Been praying for my period all week” is hereby nominated in the category of “Best Lyrics 2015” and the “Why am I?” refrain is also nominated for “Most Belt-able Outros 2015.” Something tells me Kurt Cobain would have a Bully t-shirt if he had only made it.
This is a lament about the stifling commercialism of modern life, written by three punks in professional dress. They slip into their work clothes, make breakfast, drop their kids off at school, clock into work, ponder the futility of their existence, and rock really fucking hard.
Frances Quinlan has the best voice in rock. Her instrument is performative and mercurial, inflecting between smoothness and cat-strangulation at dramatic cues. It's enough to make you forget how good the songwriting is, too.
Bradford Cox has been one of indie rock’s most visible figures of sexual fluidity, and here we see how. “You should take your handicaps / channel them and feed them back / until they become your strengths / hollowed out, it's all the same”.
Hearing this song made me realize what the 2003-2009 period that formed my understanding of indie rock actually sounded like. It’s sweet, harmonized, charmingly ramshackle, somewhat convincingly homespun, and built around the kind of half-baked philosophical position (“Heaven is a chemical”) only someone with no self-awareness would speak, not sing.
The fingerpicked guitar and milky synths give its celestial mood, but the way Victoria LaGrande holds her single note in the prechorus as the chord changes pivot around her is what creates the perception that she is the center of gravity in this song’s universe. Ursa Majorette.
There’s something very odd about this song, and it’s hard to place. The flying, peaceful soprano of the verse is broken up lightning bolts in the chorus, in front of tightly maintained unison backup vocals. The bridge collapses upon itself.
Alan Palomo loves Prince. Only the author of “Starfish and Coffee” would assemble such a strange and yet funky marriage of metaphor and instrumentation and sell it so convincingly as universal. Case in point: That shrill synth that opens the chorus jars at first, then joins the beautiful gaggle of mutts that are this song’s sounds.
She’s a truly great storyteller, painting a picture in just her first stanza that fails to waste a word. When we celebrate, as we do, the towering aspirations of the broke, we forget the people who support them, the people they leave behind, the quiet, painful moments of dreams deferred and promises broken.
Goon is great in part because Tobias is such a limited piano player, which, unlike his 70s soft-rock idols Elton John and Paul McCartney, keeps ability out of the way of songwriting. This is his most Macca work, taking “She’s Leaving Home” and “Eleanor Rigby”-like turns in the bridge, with woody, “Yesterday”-like strings.
“A man is a product of / all the people that he ever loved / And it don’t make no difference how it ended up / If I loved you once, my friend / I can do it all again / if it takes a lifetime.” Doing better is hard, and it helps to have a clear-eyed, full-hearted song to embolden those on the journey.
Mac DeMarco is a teen idol for some of the same reasons Odd Future was: a public image of rowdy, gross churlishness. Fun, too. Like OF, however, his music is much more melancholy than fans let on, which can only make things lonelier for the man-child.
A little bit of Belle and Sebastian, a little Lou Reed. “Never made a latte greater” is just the kind of quiet joke you make with someone you love when no one else is watching you.
This is a song that takes it’s time, taking maybe four minutes to get to it’s climax. Again and again, Marty Frawley tells you you’re free to do what you wish, until you’re swept up in the glory of your own agency. Simple and exultant.
Alex G is endlessly prolific, and that's just how we like our indie prodigies. The odd 15-beat verse makes sense in the way an idea makes sense in your head before you have to explain it to someone and realize it's holes. The outro drums sit surprisingly deep in the pocket, so it all makes sense.
Kurt Vile is fucking with you. When you read existentialist Metamorphasis-clones like this one, you’re used to the narrator insinuating some solipsism about your unknowable reality. Vile just notes his own boneheaded narcissism.
Sometimes I like to listen to Beach House and pretend I'm listening to a Ronettes 45 on the 33. Phil Spektor may have had his big sound, but he never wrote guitar parts like the one that closes this languid waltz, and thank God he never got his hands on Victoria LaGrande.
It moves slowly and doesn’t put too much on your plate, so Touré can sing the blues with presence and patience. Like Blues in Exile, he named his album to describe the tragedy in his home of Mali: Gandadiko means “Burning Land.” Music with this poise is sorely needed.
Joanna Newsom, “Things I Say” (YouTube)
The artifice suggested by her dense lyricism and delivery belies a profoundly human vulnerability and insecurity, articulated here and in “Good Intentions Paving Company” about a jar she couldn't open.
“It’s a boy’s last dream and a man’s first loss.” What a beautiful metaphor for the way death changes you the first time you feel it’s touch. Like “Fourth of July”, this song is a portrait of the prosaic nightmare of hospice, the way our fear of losing someone impossibly coexists with our unresolved experience of knowing them.
It begins with a chill and then opens into the end. Morbid questions (“Should the body be gassed?”) shock you into the unfathomability of your reality, and are almost funny, but only as long as they distract you from the inescapable, whispered reality that closes this song in its final lines.
“Shipping” is a breed of fan fiction centering around imagined or fantasized versions of relationships between celebrities. Exes Erykah Badu and Andre 3000 might be the first real couple to birth such an intrigue after a breakup. This one crashed many a year-end list.
The Ngoni looks sort of like a guitar, if a guitar was a gourd. Bassekou Kouyate is it’s best practitioner, famous throughout Mali both for his incredible skills on the instrument, and his huge, gruff voice, gliding on a laid-back groove and fluttering riffs.
Drake loves women, or at least he says he is. He wants to control them. They used to do dirty things, but it was okay, because it was with him. He used to go through her phone when she went to the bathroom. This song is great because it’s popularity made Meek Mill, and his misguided beef, irrelevant, and the tropicalia it introduced to pop, not because of what he has to say.
A pop music reader: Whenever you think your favorite pop star is singing about a girl, he’s singing about his fan base. Whenever you think he’s singing about his fan base, he’s singing about his career. Whenever you think he’s sorry, he’s really not at all.
Where’s the middle ground Jacques Webster deserves? Sure, he’s highly derivative of Tyler, the Creator and MBDTF-era Kanye, but that doesn’t mean he’s incapable of making something new from those parts. When this song reaches its Rodeo Drive second movement, don’t you feel like something new has happened?
A quiet descends over the meadow, as our shaman appears serenely into view. Divine in cornrows and rotten-looking gold teeth, Austin Post crosses haters up with the godliness of A.I.’s handle. His proverb:“Fuck practice, this shit just happens.”
Viewed from down here, the places we end up doesn’t make much sense, if we can even explain how we got there. But from way high up, what do they mean anyway? Time passes infinitely on, and lost in our optionality, we grasp on for the things and people we love to make those everlasting houses homes.
Critics have rightly spit-shined Kendrick’s knob clean for this album, to the point that listeners wilfully ignore it’s persistently negative imagery of women. That said, I listened to “These Walls” on repeat with my family on the beach in Jamaica last March, and this damn guitar line…
I stand by what I wrote in September: Look, man. I’m not going to sit here and tell you to like Justin Bieber. Like Kanye, it seemed like after a while hating the guy turned into a safe pose for extremely basic 14-year-old Redditors. I don’t care. This song intertwines odd reclaimed sounds (pan flutes, clock ticks) with smooth and beautiful vocals.
Oneotrix Point Never, “No Good” (Spotify)
This is like “What Do You Mean” in fractals, like how it might sound if you put a DVD of the music video into your CD player. There’s something sublime in the way the opening notes bend freely, dust rising from their endless tensors in the sunlight.
For a while, the discussion was about the album around this song that was scrapped; then it was how this demo compared to the album cut that arrived. But this version remained singular and different, between the sugar rush of Venus Fly and the thorny synth futurism of Visions.
I listened to this song on endless repeat when I ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon this past May. Whoever put the three smoothest guys in music in a room and tell them to give us an ode to burning medicinal in the sunshine state should get a fat one rolled for them right now.
Rihanna, “James Joint” (YouTube)
Like Stevie Wonder’s “Superwoman”, this song shows the swirling romance of Moog. Like Ariana Grande’s “Intro”, it shows how just a minute of true love can transport you. “We can’t see,” she sings. “We’re too busy kissing.”
This song found widespread popularity on Cymbal and elsewhere, but when I first heard it, it reminded me of the jazz and space funk from the likes of Herbie Hancock I enjoyed in relative secrecy as a kid. It’s poignancy as a breakup song is partly obscured in the depth of its pocket.
T.I. never relinquishes the title of smoothest rapper alive, and Boosie BadAzz’s mumbling rap borders between soliloquy and conversation. But most fascinating, as always, is Thugger, who impossibly skirts contradiction, despite honoring his idol Lil Wayne and defaming him at once, while being as incomprehensible as he is communicative.
If you don't listen to new music, you wonder where the protest anthems in this moment of police brutality are. You don't know “Alright”, or Run the Jewels, or how the rumination and quiet pain felt in the memory of Sandra Bland sings just as loudly as “We Shall Overcome.”
The thesis statement not just of I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, but of his whole career, Thebe Kgositsile describes his restless isolation and depression, the conflict between him and his mother, his artistry and his profession, his obligations and his responsibilities. His interview at Mic Check is essential.
Darkness falls on Esau Mwamwaya, whose music is usually so full of sunlight. It was written on the 50th anniversary of his home of Malawi’s independence from colonial rule, and carries the chill of colonialism that still plagues his country.
To Pimp a Butterfly is as much a personal statement as it is an exploration of black identity. And because of this, the invocation of Ronald Isley, his voice weathered yet ageless, is both timely and timeless in its illustration of the godliness of charity and the hatefulness of judgement.
Sam Shepherd’s quiet dub absorbs adjacent styles: Soul jazz, dance, space funk. In the watercolor tones of electric piano, it’s hard to tell what here is sampled and what is composed, and in this way carries the same revitalized musical legacy that Kendrick Lamar, Thundercat, and Kamasi Washington championed this year.
This idea was new to me when Drake forwarded it, but now that it has been echoed by artists like Drake and Future, I understand it: The simmering rage for those who didn’t believe you, didn’t give you a chance, didn’t understand you, and now expect something from you. Your every move is a refutation of their denial, even if it’s spoiling your girl or eating dessert and dinner at the same time.
More fascinating than this rolling thunder beat, the windchime prechorus, Popcaan’s spoken-word interlude that never seems to get old, the endless guesses at the meaning of his slang, is Drake’s bottomless bag of earworms, a new breed from what’s been before.
Jeremih, feat. YG “Don't Tell ‘Em (KASBO Remix)” (YouTube)
“The drop” is a bygone fixation of the music industry, and just in time for electronic music’s newest rising star to entirely reinvent it. The shimmering multiverse that dawns on this song just a minute in consumes the landscape around it, like film giving way to flame.
This video explains a lot, but there’s not much that needs to be explained about the intimacy of Justin’s delivery, which comes with pain and gravitas. This was the first single from the album that would become so beloved that its “guilty pleasure” status would become trite, but you can hear the whole change in its 4 minute microcosm.
Janet really freaked me out as a kid. Maybe it was something about her uncanny sexiness of her recombinant Ivan Ooze / Rita Repulsa persona “What’s It Gonna Be” video, but it hasn’t gone away, either. She’s somehow superhuman.
And here’s her progeny. This whole song seems to occur in the frozen moment after you’ve lock eyes with the one you want to be with, and you wonder if you’ll get another chance to make a move. And shit, I really love the note the bass starts on in the chorus.
Disclosure live to celebrate the intersection between soul and house. Their genre is so often categorized as soulless and quantized, so it's with great satisfaction that they let the beat swing and pulsate under Kwabs’ easy but dramatic lead.
DJ PayPal, along with Flying Lotus, makes music somewhere between trap-jazz and jazz-trap. This one is more soulful, and will one day be taught in music theory classes to show MPC virtuosity. Each bar is different from the next, the sample stuttering in the presence of such combustible riffs.
Paul Wall, “Swangin in the Rain” (Spotify / YouTube)
For the country that invented car culture, it takes a savant to “write a book on how to work the wheel.” I don't know how he turns corners from personal experience, but I do know about the iceman’s ability to turn a phrase, and comparing his leather backseat to “perforated butter” is just as good as to a summer’s day.
As he showed us on “Familiar”, Chance’s greatest joy is also his greatest strength and contribution: ecumenism. Give him hardcore rappers or backpackers; men or women; city kids or country boys; Drake or Chief Keef. In the light of his love for rap and mankind, he’ll make it all make sense.
I think it’s the juxtaposition between his internal, melancholy chorus and stomping, flowing verse, or maybe the realization that Future doesn’t even respect those divisions, or how seamlessly he transitions between singing and rapping (and how much time he spends in-between), but this is the song that illustrates why I love him so much.
The untrained genius. Makonnen spins perfect, catchy hooks and then never looks back to rethink them. Here’s an example: the carefree redundancy of saying “I be riding through the woods, city, and the forest” somehow makes this song more fun. “Shouts out to myself, too”, indeed.
Frannie’s favorite song of 2015. No song has more swagger, a breed of which has existed in Atlanta from “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik” to “Fight Night”. This is the sound of a man who beat a case and is ready to blow all that bail money in celebration. The man made $100,000 in two days; can you blame him?
Around Aaliyah’s memory is a stagnant pool of necrophilia, one that sometimes drowns out her actual musical legacy. Kevin Parker, usually redolent of Magical Mystery Tour, pays as beautiful a tribute to her work with Timbaland as has been attempted in this grooving refutation of fresh starts.
Meaning, how many commas are in your bank account? I first heard this song soundtracking a dunk cam video from somebody’s high school and immediately took to the comments to uncover it. A month later it’s all I heard emanating from the jeeps of Crown Heights.
Young Thug, “Hercules” (Spotify / YouTube)
As long as we’re talking about internet finds: I first heard this one on Thugger himself’s Instagram. At the time he was feuding with the song’s producer, so the song wasn’t released, but it’s pure existence suggested an undiscovered lode from the wunderkind rapper.
Prince gave the meme a try too. This version – and few out there can claim this – out-sexes the Purple version, and in doing so gives a taste of the duo’s ease and charisma. “Girl, improvise.” And who could forget Dej Loaf’s star turn in the video?
Part of what makes Rihanna more than a pop star is her ability to assume any sort of cool that's called for. This music video is flawless, but couldn't you just as easily imagine her as Clint in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly? Rih is greater than sex, race, time, or space.
Kanye West, feat. Paul McCartney, Theophilus London, and Allen Kingdom, “All Day” (Spotify / YouTube)
Part of the opulence of this McCartney feature is his utter superfluousness on the track. And what is opulence if not the opportunity to explain undetectable indulgences? Like having the best rapper alive ghostwrite one of your verses? And resent you later for it? And flamethrowers?
Kamasi Washington’s indebtedness to the sober John Coltrane is noted; So, too, is the modernity of his arrangements, which somehow lend history to contemporaries and update his influences. Note, particularly, the sparkling Stevie Wonder synths and steady-roiling gospel chops drumbeat.
The simple statement, a reassurance and resolution, buttressing a diaristic account of the travails of Compton forevermore, describes the incredible power, the unfathomable challenge, the undeniable imperative of nonviolent resistance, even as it destroys you, consumes you, forgets you, and slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.
Best-of Playlists
Though these playlists are all on Spotify, not every song (including many of my favorites) is available to stream.
To see what tracks are missing, go to "Preferences", scroll down to "Display Options," and then switch on "Show unavailable tracks in playlists."