Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

RIP to The Eagles’ guitarist, Glenn Frey. I wasn’t really much of  an Eagles fan, but I did like a few songs from their extensive body of work which I highlight on this playlist. The first song, “The Last Resort” is my favorite. I never understood why this song went into the shadows when it’s way better than their much heralded “Hotel California”. In an interview regarding “The Last Resort”, Don Henley explained that the song is about how people from the Eastern United States ruined the West early on. They killed the Native Americans, and the more West America went, the more commercial it got. In a 1987 interview with Rolling Stone, Henley said: “ The Last Resort is still one of my favorite songs… That’s because I care more about the environment than about writing songs about drugs or love affairs or excesses of any kind. The gist of the song was that when we find something good, we destroy i...

Forty-four tracks tracing a career that began in defiance of a famous name and ended by embracing it. Natalie Cole died on the last day of 2015, aged sixty-five. OneLove Natalie Cole (1950–2015) Natalie Cole spent the first half of her career deliberately not being her father's daughter. She arrived in 1975 with hard, gospel-inflected soul records produced in Chicago, won Best New Artist at the Grammys, and was frequently compared to Aretha Franklin rather than to Nat King Cole . The second half is one of the more remarkable reinventions in popular music. After years of addiction and commercial decline, she released Unforgettable... with Love in 1991 — an album of her father's repertoire, including a duet constructed from his 1951 recording. It won seven Grammys and sold millions, and it recast her as a jazz and standards singer for the rest of her life. She died on 31 December 2015, and this playlist was posted a fortnight later. What to listen for ...

Sixty-two tracks from a Haitian-American producer, rapper, singer and guitarist who has never once stayed inside a genre for a whole album. OneLove Wyclef Jean Wyclef Jean was born in Haiti, raised in Brooklyn and New Jersey, and came to prominence in The Fugees , whose The Score (1996) is one of the best-selling and most influential hip-hop albums ever made. His solo work is defined by restlessness. A single album will contain hip-hop, reggae, Haitian kompa, soca, folk guitar, gospel and Spanish-language pop, and he plays guitar throughout — which is unusual in hip-hop and central to how his records sound. He has also been a significant figure in Haitian public life, running a foundation, campaigning after the 2010 earthquake, and attempting a presidential run. The catalogue is inseparable from that. What to listen for "Guantanamera" with Lauryn Hill , Celia Cruz and Jeni Fujita is the most ambitious thing here — a Cuban standard rebuilt a...

Twenty-two tracks from a band who used reggae rhythms to make new wave, and a songwriter who then spent thirty years refusing to repeat himself. These cats were the shit!!! Their music atill sounds fresher than most of the crap on the airwaves today. Sting & The Police The Police were three highly accomplished musicians pretending, briefly and successfully, to be a punk band. Stewart Copeland was a drummer of genuine technical sophistication, Andy Summers had years of professional experience behind him, and Sting was a jazz bass player and schoolteacher. What made them distinctive was rhythm. They built almost everything on reggae and ska patterns — the emphasis on the offbeat, the enormous space in the arrangements, the guitar playing chords rather than riffs — and combined it with pop songwriting of unusual quality. Sting's solo career went further into jazz, world music and classical repertoire, with a rotating cast of first-rate players, and it ...

R.Kelly is without a doubt a musical prodigy. In spite of his questionable, well-publicized personal issues, he ranks up there with the best (Quincy Jones, Stevie Wonder..) when he is at his best. There are few artists who can master both the production and performance sides as well as R. Kelly. With 13 solo studio albums and over 100 million records sold worldwide, he reigns as the most successful R&B male artists and also one of the best selling musical artists of all time. OneLove

Sixteen tracks from a singer, writer, producer and multi-instrumentalist who made herself indispensable to a scene that had no category for her. The ivory Queen of Soul will never be forgotten! Teena Marie (1956–2010) Mary Christine Brockert was a white woman from Santa Monica signed to Motown , which the label handled by releasing her first album without a photograph on the sleeve. A great many listeners assumed she was Black, and the eventual reveal did nothing to dent her standing — she remained one of the most genuinely beloved figures in Black American music until her death in 2010. The reason is that she was the real thing at every level. She wrote her own songs, produced her own records, played guitar and keyboards, arranged her own vocals, and sang with a power and agility that put her among the best of her generation. Rick James was her mentor, collaborator and sometime partner, and their work together is the centre of both catalogues. She also w...

Seventy-four tracks assembled as a thank-you rather than a greatest hits — and almost none of them are the songs you would expect. OneLove Thanks Mike: a Michael Jackson collection The most striking thing about this set is what is missing. There is no "Billie Jean" , no "Beat It" , no "Thriller" . What there is instead is seventy-four tracks of Motown-era Jackson 5, Jacksons album cuts, ballads, and the quieter corners of the solo catalogue. That is a deliberate curatorial argument. The received version of Michael Jackson is built almost entirely on four years in the eighties. This set makes the case for the other twenty-five — the extraordinary child singer, the Philadelphia-produced group records, and the adult ballads that get overshadowed by the spectacle. Heard this way he sounds less like a phenomenon and more like a singer, which is the harder and more interesting thing to hear. What to listen for "Who's Lovin' Yo...

Twenty-two tracks from a Minneapolis band who played their own instruments in an era of programmed R&B and were quietly the best live act in the genre. OneLove Mint Condition Mint Condition are an anomaly and have been since 1989: a six-piece self-contained band in a genre that had comprehensively moved to producers and session players. They write, arrange and play everything, and they have kept essentially the same line-up for three decades. They came out of Minneapolis and were signed to Perspective Records , the label run by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis , which placed them at the centre of the city's scene without making them sound like anyone else on it. Stokley Williams is the reason they cut through. He sings lead and plays drums simultaneously — a rare combination — and he has one of the most flexible voices in R&B, capable of a rasp and a falsetto within the same phrase. What to listen for "Breakin' My Heart (Pretty Brown Eyes)" ...

Nineteen tracks from an Atlanta quartet built around twin brothers, who made some of the most durable R&B of the early 2000s.     OneLove Jagged Edge Jagged Edge were Brian and Brandon Casey — identical twins who wrote most of the material — with Kyle Norman and Richard Wingo , signed to Jermaine Dupri's So So Def in Atlanta. What they did better than their contemporaries was harmony. Four singers, all capable of leading, arranged so that the lead line moves between them within a verse. That is an old technique from doo-wop and gospel quartets, and in the late nineties almost nobody was bothering with it. They were also unusually good at a specific register: the apology record, the commitment record, the argument-in-a-relationship record. Their biggest hit is literally a marriage proposal. What to listen for "Let's Get Married" is the enormous one — and the remix with Run from Run-DMC officiating became the version most peopl...

One of the best conscious Hip Hop groups  is Dead Prez. Their message is clear, politically charged & powerfully expressed. Their penchant is reporting on what is happening on the dark side of a society haunted by the lost, contorted souls. They not only paint a nightmarish picture overhanging darkly across the American landscape, but  also offer strokes of wisdom like healthy living, conscious love and giving respect to the Earth. I wish more of our young ones tuned into their message of self-discipline, honor, love & respect. In “Don’t Forget Where U Goin” they rap: “ Ghetto children you’re the spark, you’re the energy, you’re the heart To the granma’s, you’re the glue ’cause you know things fall apart” Now isn’t this better than most of the garbage in rotation today? Folks are thirstin’ for this revolutionary flow…. OneLove...

Every generation has an artist that stands high above his/her competitors. Once upon a time, Notorious B.I.G & 2Pac loomed large, then Jay-Z , Nas & Eminem arrived and smacked the competition off the stage. There has always been an abundance of talented wordsmiths, but the ones that stood out for me were the ones who had something relevant to say. Right now I see Kendrick Lamar as the voice of a new generation. He is unlike most in his peer group in that he thinks – no empty, forgettable lyrics from this young brother. Much like Nas, he combines a razor-sharp, sometimes harrowing street mentality with a depth-diving philosophy that gives us reason to pause & go hmmmmm. At the end of his song “Faith” for example, he opines, “ I’d rather not live like there isn’t a God than die and find out there really is… ” Sounds a little like Dostoevsky if you ask me. Some will take offense to the profanity in some of his son...