Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

Sixty-four records about what is wrong and what might be done about it, drawn from six decades of soul music. Conscious Soul for Dark Times Every generation assumes its own protest music is unprecedented. The value of a set like this is that it flatly disproves that assumption: the arguments here, made between 1964 and 2018, are substantially the same arguments, and the musical vocabulary for making them was largely settled by 1975. What makes it work as listening rather than as a lecture is that almost every track is a good song first. The politics is carried in the writing rather than announced over the top of it. What to listen for Harold Melvin and Teddy Pendergrass's "Wake up Everybody" opens the set, which is the right choice — a Philadelphia International record from 1975 that manages to be a call to action and a slow jam at once. Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" needs no comment except this: Motown initially did not want to re...

Forty-five pieces assembled for something harder to describe than a mood — a set about scale, grief and the natural world. Chilled Soul XI: The Transcendence Collection This is the strangest volume in the series and probably the most personal. It abandons genre entirely: soul, Indigenous ceremonial song, contemporary classical, folk, film score and ambient recordings all sit together, and the organising principle is closer to a subject than to a sound. The subject seems to be perspective — the deliberate act of making yourself small against something larger. That is an unusual thing for a playlist to attempt and it mostly works, though it demands to be heard in order. What to listen for Meshell Ndegeocello appears three times and effectively anchors the set. "Haditha" is named after the Iraqi town where American marines killed twenty-four civilians in 2005, and knowing that changes the piece entirely. Joanne Shenandoah's "Prophecy Song"...