Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

Eighteen tracks from a Chicago rapper who once held a world record for speed and spent the rest of his career proving that was the least interesting thing about him. Twista Carl Terrell Mitchell came out of Chicago's West Side in the early nineties as Tung Twista , and got his first real attention by being certified as the fastest rapper in the world — a novelty that could easily have ended him. What saved the career was that the speed turned out to be musical rather than athletic. He does not simply rap quickly; he subdivides the beat into patterns that most rappers never attempt, and he does it while maintaining diction clear enough that the words land. That style — later called chopper — became a whole subgenre, and Chicago and the Midwest are still full of its descendants. The other thing that saved him was taste. His best records are built on soul samples and real singing, and he has always been more interested in warmth than menace. What to listen f...

Twenty tracks from a New Jersey band who started as a jazz group, became one of the great funk outfits, and then wrote the song every wedding on earth plays. Kool & The Gang The story of Kool & The Gang has two almost incompatible halves, and this playlist covers both. They formed in Jersey City in the sixties as a jazz outfit built around the brothers Robert "Kool" Bell and Ronald Bell , and spent the first half of the seventies making some of the hardest instrumental funk anyone recorded. Then, at the end of that decade, they brought in the singer James "J.T." Taylor and the producer Eumir Deodato , and turned into one of the most successful pop groups in the world. Purists tend to prefer the first half. The honest position is that both are excellent, and that very few bands have managed either — let alone both. What to listen for "Summer Madness" is the single best thing here: a 1974 instrumental built around a Moog solo, ...

Forty-nine tracks from a Jamaican singer whose speciality is taking someone else's song and making it permanently his.   Sanchez Sanchez — born Kevin Anthony Jackson — has one of the most recognisable voices in Jamaican music: high, pure, and with a quality of yearning that has made him the island's definitive lovers-rock singer for four decades. His career is built substantially on interpretation. A large part of this playlist consists of readings of American soul and pop songs, recast over Jamaican rhythms, and the reason it works is that he treats each one as a song rather than as a novelty. He is not doing reggae versions; he is singing the song, and the rhythm happens to be Jamaican. He also came from the church and has returned to gospel repeatedly, which explains the particular kind of intensity in the upper part of his range. What to listen for "Brown Eye Girl" and "I Can't Wait" are the dancehall-era records that made him a sta...

Five pieces recorded in two sessions in 1959 by a band that had barely rehearsed them. It remains the best-selling jazz album ever made. Miles Davis: Kind of Blue (1959) Kind of Blue is the record that gets bought by people who own no other jazz albums, which has slightly obscured how radical it was. Its innovation was modal playing: rather than improvising over a fast-moving sequence of chords, the musicians were given scales and long stretches of harmonic stillness, and told to find something to say inside them. Davis brought in sketches rather than finished compositions, and most of what is on the record was played by musicians seeing the material for the first time. Nearly everything was a first or second take. The band is the other reason. John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley on saxophones, Bill Evans on piano — whose harmonic sensibility shaped the record as much as Davis's — with Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb , and Wynton Kelly playing on one track....

Twenty tracks from the group who gave Philadelphia International its voice and proved that a dance record could be an indictment. The O'Jays The O'Jays formed in Canton, Ohio in the late fifties and spent more than a decade going nowhere before Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff signed them to Philadelphia International in 1972. What followed was one of the great runs in soul music. The line-up that mattered was Eddie Levert , Walter Williams and William Powell , who died in 1977. Levert's voice is the engine — a hard, gospel-derived tenor that can sound like an accusation — and it is what makes the political records work. Because that is the group's real distinction. Gamble and Huff gave them material about corruption, greed, betrayal and Black solidarity, and dressed it in lush orchestration and a dance rhythm, so that records people played at parties were also making arguments. What to listen for "For the Love of Money" is the most famous bass...

Twelve tracks from a group whose drummer stepped out from behind the kit and turned into one of the greatest voices in soul music. Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes The group was named after Harold Melvin , who led it, but the reason anyone remembers it is Teddy Pendergrass — who joined as the drummer, was moved to lead vocals when Melvin heard him singing, and proceeded to deliver a run of performances that reset what a male soul singer could do. Signed to Philadelphia International , they became the vehicle for some of Gamble and Huff's most ambitious writing. Pendergrass left in 1976 for a solo career that made him one of the biggest stars in American music until a car accident in 1982 left him paralysed; he continued recording and died in 2010. The twelve tracks here are essentially the complete case for the group, and there is not a weak one among them. What to listen for "If You Don't Know Me by Now" is the most famous and the most restrained ...

Nine tracks from a band assembled in Germany by American servicemen, fronted by two brothers from Ohio, with songs by an Englishman who would later write for Michael Jackson.   Heatwave Heatwave have one of the most unlikely origin stories in soul music. Johnnie Wilder Jr. was a serviceman from Dayton, Ohio stationed in Germany; he formed a band there, brought in his brother Keith , and recruited members from Britain, Jamaica, Czechoslovakia, Spain and Switzerland. Among them was a keyboard player from Lincolnshire named Rod Temperton , who turned out to be one of the great songwriters of the era. He wrote most of what made Heatwave famous, then left to write "Rock With You" , "Off the Wall" and "Thriller" for Michael Jackson. The band's story turned tragic in 1979 when Johnnie Wilder Jr. was left paralysed by a car accident. He continued to sing and produce from a wheelchair, and died in 2006; Keith Wilder died in 2017. What to liste...

Seventeen tracks from the sweetest-sounding group Philadelphia produced — and a lesson in how much sophistication can hide inside a love song. The Stylistics The Stylistics were built around Russell Thompkins Jr. , whose extraordinarily high, pure falsetto is one of the most identifiable sounds in soul music. What made the group great, though, was the partnership with the producer and arranger Thom Bell . Bell, working with the lyricist Linda Creed , wrote them a run of songs that are considerably more complex than their surfaces suggest. The chord movement is jazz-derived, the orchestrations use French horn, oboe and harpsichord — instruments soul records did not use — and the arrangements are meticulous. The result is music that can be dismissed as sentimental on a casual listen and reveals itself as some of the most carefully constructed popular music of the seventies on a closer one. What to listen for "You Make Me Feel Brand New" is the g...

Ten tracks from a New Jersey vocal group who specialised in a very specific thing: the song that opens with a man talking. The Manhattans The Manhattans formed in Jersey City in the early sixties and worked for more than a decade before their commercial breakthrough. The classic line-up paired the smooth lead of Gerald Alston with the deep spoken introductions of Winfred "Blue" Lovett , and that contrast became their signature. The spoken intro was not an affectation. It is a device from gospel and from the doo-wop era, and in their hands it does something specific: it establishes a situation before the singing begins, so that the song arrives as a response rather than a performance. A remarkable number of their records are effectively short plays. They also had one of the smoothest group blends of the seventies, which is why they thrived on the quiet-storm format that emerged just as they peaked. What to listen for "Kiss and Say Goodbye" is the eno...

Marvin Gaye’s timeless, soul-stirring, intuitively brilliant opus, “What’s Going On?” is what’s happening now . From the tragically beautiful  “Mercy Mercy Me” to the dark & brooding, “Save the Children” (which includes the penetrating lines, “ Who really cares to save a world in despair? There’ll come a time, when the world won’t be singin’..Flowers won’t grow, bells won’t be ringin’…”), you have to agree that this classic recording is still relevant for the simple fact that we still have not learned from our mistakes. Listening to it now can be quite chilling, like an eerie warning from some soul-powered time machine. In 2003, the album was ranked # 6 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of all time. Personally, I would rank it #2 after Bob Marley’s, “ Rastaman Vibration “ .

Ninety-eight tracks across three decades — the longest single-artist collection on this blog, and one of the few catalogues that can sustain it. Common: the long view A ninety-eight track career survey is a serious commitment, and the reason it works for Common is that he has had at least four distinct artistic lives: the nineties Chicago battle rapper, the Soulquarian experimentalist, the mainstream Kanye-era star, and the elder statesman making jazz records and winning Oscars. What connects them is an unusual willingness to be wrong in public and revise. He has written songs recanting positions from earlier songs, and the catalogue reads as an argument with himself conducted over thirty years. This set is best approached as a biography rather than a playlist, and the sequencing rewards that. What to listen for "The Light" is the record that made him famous outside hip-hop — a J Dilla production built on Bobby Caldwell, and one of the great love s...