Skip to main content
Eddie Rockerz VibeZ - curated playlists, mixes and music commentary

Dig the crates

Every playlist on the blog, sorted by where it takes you.

Browse all 600+ VibeZ

DJ Mixes & Series

The house sets, the Producer Series and the running volumes.

Show all 16Show fewer

India Arie VibeZ

Twenty-eight tracks from a singer who arrived in 2001 with an acoustic guitar and a song about self-worth, and has spent twenty-five years refusing to be anything else.

Image result for india arie

 

India.Arie

India.Arie emerged at the height of the neo-soul wave with "Video", a song that rejected the beauty standards the music industry ran on, and which became a hit anyway. She has spent the following quarter-century making records with a consistency of purpose that is almost unmatched in the genre.

The purpose is essentially devotional, though not in a narrowly religious sense. Her albums are structured around wellbeing, self-acceptance, healing and spiritual practice, and the music is built to serve that: acoustic guitar at the centre, arrangements that stay out of the way, and a voice that never pushes.

She is also a genuinely fine guitarist, which gets mentioned far less often than it should.

What to listen for

"Video" is the calling card and remains a remarkable piece of writing — a manifesto delivered as a light, funny, entirely unpreachy pop song.

"Strength Courage & Wisdom" and "The Truth" come from the same debut album and are the two that show the songwriting rather than the message.

"There's Hope" appears twice here and is the most durable of the later songs.

"Pearls" with Dobet Gnahoré won a Grammy and is the best vocal collaboration in her catalogue — an Ivorian singer and an American one on a Sade song about women's survival.

"A Time To Love" with Stevie Wonder is the co-sign that mattered most, and "Timeless" with Sérgio Mendes is the Brazilian one.

"The Heart Of The Matter" is the Don Henley cover and a considerably better fit than it sounds, and "Get It Together" is the soundtrack single.

The "Grains" interludes and "I Am Light" come from SongVersation: Medicine, the most explicitly therapeutic of her records, and "Carefully Taught" with Billy Porter is the Rodgers and Hammerstein song about how racism is learned.

Go deeper

Acoustic Soul (2001) and Voyage to India (2002) are the essential albums, and the second won two Grammys.

For the wider neo-soul moment she belongs to: Erykah Badu's Baduizm, Jill Scott's Who Is Jill Scott? and Angie Stone's Black Diamond, all released within a few years of each other.

Listening note: the guitar playing gets overlooked because the message is loud. She plays most of what you hear, in open tunings, with a percussive right hand that carries the rhythm where a band would normally sit — which is why the records work stripped to one voice and one instrument, and why they have aged better than the neo-soul productions around them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more

De La Soul VibeZ (R.I.P Trugoy the Dove)

Trugoy the Dove died in February 2023, weeks before De La Soul's catalogue finally reached streaming after a fifteen-year legal deadlock. Thirty-one tracks, and a difficult kind of timing. Rest in peace, Dave David Jude Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove, later just Dave — formed De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island with Posdnuos and Maseo. Their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising , produced with Prince Paul , remains one of the most inventive records in the history of the genre: dense with samples from Steely Dan to Johnny Cash to French language instruction tapes, funny, formally strange, and entirely uninterested in the postures rap was expected to strike. The consequence of that invention was a curse. The sample clearance landscape changed after Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie in 1991, and De La Soul's early catalogue — built on hundreds of uncleared fragments — became legally impossible to license. For roughly fifteen years, their most important a...
Post a Comment
Read more