Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

Nine tracks from a 1988 debut that helped invent a sound and made its teenage maker one of the defining voices of new jack swing.   Al B. Sure!: In Effect Mode (1988) Al B. Sure! arrived at nineteen with an unusual combination: a light, breathy tenor that sounded almost fragile, set against production that was among the hardest in R&B at the time. In Effect Mode was the result, and it was one of the records that established what came to be called new jack swing . The production, largely with Kyle West , is the key. Where earlier R&B had smoothed its drums, this record leaves them exposed and swung — hip-hop rhythm under a singer who was doing something closer to Smokey Robinson than to anything contemporary. The album was enormous, won him the Soul Train Best New Artist award, and he went on to write and produce for others while remaining, oddly, a somewhat underrated figure in the history of the genre. What to listen for "Nite and Day" is the r...

Sixteen tracks from a singer who spent years as a session musician before anyone heard his name, and then won Grammys with almost every record he made. James Ingram died in January 2019, aged sixty-six. James Ingram (1952–2019) James Ingram had one of the great male voices of his era and one of the more unusual routes into using it. He worked for years as a session keyboard player and demo singer in Los Angeles, and it was a demo recording that reached Quincy Jones — who put him on The Dude in 1981 and effectively launched him at the age of twenty-nine. What he had was a combination almost nobody else managed: a gospel-derived rasp with genuine grit in it, and the technical control to sing extremely quietly. That range made him the ideal duet partner, which is why so much of his catalogue is shared. He was also a songwriter, and co-wrote "P.Y.T." for Michael Jackson with Quincy Jones, which is not a bad line to have on a biography. What to listen f...

Sixty-two records from the decade that perfected the slow jam — and a demonstration of how much sophistication went into music dismissed as easy listening. The 80’s had so many killer ballads that will stand the test of time! These cuts took me back to some fond memories….ah yes…fun times. Old School Soul: The 80s Eighties slow jams get patronised more than any other category in this music, usually by people who have only heard the biggest four or five. What a set like this shows is that the decade produced an enormous body of carefully made records — unusual chord voicings, real bass players, arrangements with actual dynamics — that happened to be built for a specific purpose. The other thing it shows is how quickly the technology changed. Records made three years apart here sound like different eras, because the drum machines, the synthesisers and the recording formats were all being replaced continuously. What to listen for Zapp's ...

“Drone Bomb Me” is disarmingly beautiful yet devastating at the same time. It captures the emotional weight of terror from the skies and the death wish of self-annihilation. Having to see your loved ones explode to pieces via a drone attack must be inexpressible. Naomi Campbell does a masterful job in this video in capturing the agony. Anohni’s woeful delivery brings the geopolitical to a deeply felt personal level igniting our empathy & righteous indignation. “4 Degrees” is anothe disturbingly beautiful track from this artist. In case some of you are unaware, if the Earth’s climate hits the four degree tipping point, we’re pretty much done as a species. Anohni is sending a signal of our impending doom. . I wanna see this world, I wanna see it boil It’s only 4 degrees, it’s only 4 degrees I wanna hear the dogs crying for water I wanna see fish go belly-up in the sea All those lemurs and all those tiny c...

Twenty tracks from the man Bob Dylan reportedly called America's greatest living poet — and the person who gave a whole radio format its name. Smokey was the man back in the day! If he wasn’t crooning and making the ladies go wild, he was writing/producing for others that had the same effect. No late-night Quietstorm playlist would be complete without a Smokey classic… Smokey Robinson William "Smokey" Robinson is one of the few figures in popular music whose importance is genuinely difficult to overstate. He was the first artist Berry Gordy signed, became a vice-president of Motown, wrote or co-wrote an enormous share of the label's catalogue for other artists, and had a career as a performer that ran from 1959 into the present. As a writer his signature is the extended conceit — a single image turned over and examined for three minutes — and the willingness to put genuine sadness inside a pop song without flagging it. As a...

Taj Weekes & Adowa are back with another Roots Rock classic! Entitled Love, Herb & Reggae – a positive spin on Sex, Drugs & Rock’n’Roll-Taj& his group, Adowa, continue on their mystic journey to enliven & enlighten us in these troubled times. Staying true to the very foundation of Roots Reggae music, Taj Weekes and Adowa flavor their infectious one drop & rocker beats with wicked choral harmonies & Taj’s compelling vocals that draw the meaning & emotion out of each word. We each form a link in the chain of our shared existence and at once feel the plight of the downtrodden everywhere through the unifying spell of one of the best Roots reggae bands on the scene right now. Each song on this album is a shining gem which much to learn from and vibe to so here is my breakdown: 1 -Let Your Voice – be as loud as your silence..”IN CONFIRMATION OR DISSENT ,YOUR VIEW AND THOUGHT DO REPRESENT CONFIRMATION OR DISSENT...

Zouk originated in the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Growing up in an island just south of Martinique (St Lucia), I was exposed to the early beginnings of Zouk which the radio stations heavily promoted & was a crowd favorite at parties & festivals. Zouk  means “party” or “festival” in the local French Caribbean dialect, and it’s a type of music one does not listen to without moving something . Leading the way of this new sound was a band named Kassav. It was Kassav who put Zouk on the international music map so all respect due! Rest in peace to the Guadeloupean vocalist & original member of Kassav, Patrick Saint-Eloi, who passed away a few of years ago.

Thirty-two tracks from a Californian songwriter who has spent fifty years making the same record, extremely well, and never once raised his voice. Michael Franks Michael Franks is a genuinely unusual figure: an American songwriter with a background in literature who has built a five-decade career on a very quiet, very dry singing voice and lyrics full of wordplay, puns and literary reference. The music sits in a category of its own — jazz-inflected pop with Brazilian rhythms underneath, played by first-rate session musicians, arranged with real care. He has worked with an extraordinary cast over the years, including Michael Brecker, Larry Carlton and the Crusaders, and the playing on his records is consistently better than the easy-listening shelf they get filed on. His voice is the entry barrier. It is small, conversational and entirely without projection, which some listeners find unbearable and others find the whole point — it is the voice of someone telling ...

Ten tracks from the album where a former child star turned twenty-one and made the best dance-pop record anyone has produced. This is the best Michael Jackson album, in my humble opinion. Michael Jackson: Off the Wall (1979) Off the Wall is frequently treated as the warm-up for Thriller . It is better than that, and in some respects better than Thriller : looser, warmer, less concerned with conquering every market simultaneously, and played by a band rather than assembled. It was the first full collaboration between Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones , who met while working on The Wiz , and it is the record where Jackson stopped being a former Motown child act and became an adult artist. He was twenty-one and wrote three of the songs himself. The other key figure is Rod Temperton , the Heatwave keyboard player, who wrote three tracks including the title song and "Rock With You" . What to listen for "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" is Jackson...

Forty-six tracks from the most commercially successful songwriter-producer of the nineties — heard here mostly as a singer, which is the half people forget. Babyface Kenneth Edmonds has written or produced an almost absurd number of hit records — for Whitney Houston, Boyz II Men, TLC, Toni Braxton, Madonna, Mariah Carey and many others — and co-founded LaFace Records with L.A. Reid , which gave the world Outkast, TLC and Usher. What this playlist emphasises instead is his own singing, and it is a useful correction. He has a light, high, slightly frail tenor that he uses with unusual intelligence: he writes songs for his own voice that would not suit anyone else, keeping the melodies conversational and leaving space for the lyric to work. His subject, consistently, is the ordinary business of relationships — not seduction or heartbreak at their peaks, but the negotiation in between. That is a harder thing to write about and a much less glamorous one....

What more can be said of the living legend, Stevie Wonder? I found this site to be one of the best in chronicling the life & music of one of the greatest pop/soul singers of all time. What an impressive body of work!

Sixty-one records by artists who were, at the time this was assembled, doing excellent work that almost nobody was hearing. Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind . OneLove Under The Radar This is the earliest of the several playlists on this blog devoted to the under-promoted, and in some ways the most ambitious. Sixty-one tracks, mostly from the first half of the 2010s, drawn from soul, rock, gospel, electronic and singer-songwriter territory, with almost no famous names. Reading it now is instructive. Several of these artists went on to considerable careers, several did not, and the quality distinction between the two groups is not obvious from the music — which is more or less the point the playlist is making. What to listen for Alabama Shakes' "Don't Wanna Fight" is the biggest thing here, and Brittany Howard's vocal is one of the great rock performances o...