Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

Twenty-seven tracks from a songwriter who had one of the biggest debut albums in history and then spent thirty years refusing to repeat it. Tracy Chapman Tracy Chapman grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, raised by a single mother, and studied anthropology and African studies at Tufts. Her self-titled 1988 debut was released into a pop landscape dominated by synthesisers and sold twenty million copies on the strength of a woman, a guitar and a set of songs about poverty, domestic violence and political change. The record won three Grammys, and its success owed something to an accident: when Stevie Wonder's equipment failed at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert at Wembley, Chapman was sent back out to fill the gap, alone, in front of a global television audience of several hundred million. Sales went vertical within days. She has released sparingly, given almost no interviews, guarded her privacy absolutely, and declined to perform live for long stretches. In 202...

Thirteen instrumental tracks by Sade's band, made without Sade. It is a considerably stranger and more adventurous record than that description suggests.   Sweetback Sweetback is Stuart Matthewman , Andrew Hale and Paul Denman — the three musicians who, with Sade Adu , make up Sade. The band is genuinely a band rather than a backing group, and Sweetback is what they do between albums. Their self-titled 1996 debut is largely instrumental, built on dub bass, jazz guitar and trip-hop-adjacent drum programming, with guest vocals scattered across it. It arrived at the height of the British downtempo moment and fits alongside Massive Attack and Portishead more than alongside anything Sade released. Matthewman in particular has had a substantial parallel career — he produced most of Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite , which is one of the most important neo-soul albums ever made. What to listen for "Au Natural" and "Softly Softly" are the two that m...

Fifty-seven tracks from a south London singer who became one of reggae's biggest international stars without ever leaving the tradition behind. Maxi Priest Max Alfred Elliott was born in Lewisham, south London, to Jamaican parents — one of nine children, in a Pentecostal household. He took his stage name after converting to Rastafari, and came up through the Saxon Studio International sound system, the legendary south London operation that also produced Smiley Culture and Tippa Irie. What he became is unusual: a British singer working in lovers rock — the romantic, soul-influenced strain of reggae that is genuinely a British invention — who then broke internationally on a scale almost no reggae artist from anywhere has matched. His cover of Cat Stevens' "Wild World" and the American number one "Close To You" made him a global star. He has kept working for four decades and remains one of the most respected voices in the music. What ...

Forty-two tracks spanning six decades of a career that has no real equivalent. Quincy Jones died on 3 November 2024, aged ninety-one. Quincy Jones (1933–2024) Quincy Jones was a trumpeter, then an arranger, then a film composer, then a record executive, then the producer of the best-selling album ever made — and he was genuinely first-rate at each of those jobs in turn, which is the part that beggars belief. He arranged for Count Basie and Frank Sinatra. He wrote film scores when Black composers were almost entirely excluded from that work. He ran a label, produced television, and then in his late forties took on a former child star's solo career and reorganised popular music around it. His method was consistent across all of it: hire the best musicians available, give them room, and edit ruthlessly. He treated a pop single with the same structural seriousness as an orchestral chart. What to listen for The Michael Jackson material is the centre and needs no...

Fifty-seven tracks and the most ambitious volume in the series — a set that moves between Lagos, Johannesburg and Kingston without ever changing temperature. African ChillZone IV The fourth volume is the one where the series stops being a mood playlist and becomes a survey. Fifty-seven tracks is a lot of music, and the sequencing is doing something specific with it: rather than grouping by country or genre, it moves by feel, so that Nigerian afrobeats, South African amapiano and Jamaican dancehall sit side by side as though they were always part of the same conversation. Which, increasingly, they are. The great story of the past decade in this music is not any one scene's rise but the traffic between them — producers in Lagos working with Johannesburg vocalists, Jamaican artists cutting over amapiano logs, London acting as the switchboard. What to listen for Master KG's "Jerusalema" in the Burna Boy remix is the global moment — a South Afric...

Five remixes, officially licensed by Motown, in which a Bronx hip-hop producer takes the most famous catalogue in American music apart and puts it back together his own way. Lord Finesse: Motown State of Mind This is a rarer object than it appears. Lord Finesse — a founding figure of the D.I.T.C. collective, one of the great New York producers, and the man behind Notorious B.I.G.'s "Suicidal Thoughts" — was given official access to Motown's masters and released the results through Motown/UMe in June 2020 as a box of seven-inch singles. Hip-hop has been remixing Motown unofficially for forty years. Getting the label's blessing and the original multitracks is another matter entirely, and it means these are not mashups over the finished records: they are rebuilt from the stems. Finesse's approach is reverent in an unexpected way. He does not modernise. He applies the specific drum weight and low-end of early-nineties New York hip-hop to songs rec...

Twenty tracks from a singer who was a child television star, then spent thirty years making some of the most adventurous R&B anyone has released. This Sade cover was never released which I always found strange as he does an incredible job with it: Rahsaan Patterson Most people who know Rahsaan Patterson's face know it from Kids Incorporated , the eighties children's television series that also launched Fergie and Martika. Very few child performers survive that start with their artistic ambition intact. Patterson is the exception. From his 1997 debut onwards he has made records that sit awkwardly against commercial R&B in the best way: harmonically restless, heavily influenced by seventies Stevie Wonder and by rock, with a countertenor that goes somewhere most male soul singers never attempt. He has also been openly himself in an industry that made that expensive, and the cost is visible in the size of his audience relative to his talent. What to list...

Twenty-four tracks from Compton's most musical producer — a man who has spent thirty-five years proving that West Coast rap was always a musicians' genre.   DJ Quik David Blake is frequently described as underrated, which is odd for someone with a catalogue this deep. The more accurate description is that he has been consistently undersold: a rapper good enough to carry albums, and a producer, arranger and mixer whose ear puts him among the best America has produced in any genre. What separates Quik from his contemporaries is that he plays. Where much of G-funk was built from loops of seventies records, Quik replays parts, writes horn charts, and treats the drum programming as a live performance. His records swing in a way that sampled tracks generally do not. He is also an exceptional mix engineer, which is why his productions sound louder and clearer than their neighbours without being harsher. What to listen for The Quik's Groove instrumentals are th...