Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

Seventy-four tracks making a case that does not need making. British soul has been world-class for forty years and remains almost entirely undocumented. Brits got soul The history runs deeper than most listeners realise. Britain's Black communities — Caribbean, West African, and their descendants — built a parallel music economy from the 1960s onward: sound systems, pirate radio, soul weekenders, rare groove nights and specialist record shops, largely ignored by the mainstream press and enormously influential on everything that followed. What came out of it is a distinct tradition. British soul tends to be cooler in temperature than American, more indebted to reggae and jazz, and less concerned with vocal display. Seventy-four tracks is about the minimum needed to show the range. What to listen for Omar's "There's Nothing Like This" is the essential record. Released independently in 1990, it is the founding document of modern British soul, and Om...

Ninety tracks from the label that brought Jamaican music to the world by the simple method of never stopping. VP Records is a family business that became an institution. Vincent and Patricia VP Records takes its name from Vincent and Patricia Chin , who ran Randy's Record Mart and Studio 17 in Kingston — one of the most important recording spaces in Jamaican history — before emigrating to New York in the late 1970s and founding VP in Queens. What they built is the largest independent reggae and dancehall label in the world, and the primary route by which Jamaican music reaches international audiences. The Strictly the Best compilation series, running since 1990, is effectively the genre's annual report. This selection concentrates on the late-1980s and 1990s dancehall era — the period when digital riddims replaced live bands and the music became faster, harder and enormously influential on hip-hop. What to listen for Ini Kamoze's "Hot Stepper...

Fifty-five tracks assembled around a quality rather than a genre. The title is a thesis, and the music mostly supports it. A dedication, and a premise worth examining The framing here — the feminine voice as an energy that is soft, yielding, nurturing and nourishing — comes out of a familiar way of thinking about gender as complementary energies, with roots in Taoist yin and yang and in various strands of contemporary spiritual practice. It is worth saying plainly that this is a contested framework. Associating softness and nurture specifically with femininity has a long history of being used to narrow what women are permitted to be, and a number of the artists on this playlist have spent their careers refusing exactly that association. Solange , H.E.R. and Amber Mark are not soft or yielding in any useful sense; they are precise, controlled and frequently furious. What the selection actually demonstrates is something more interesting than its title: that r...

Sixteen tracks from a Tony and Grammy winner with two Oscar nominations, who also happens to be a genuinely excellent soul singer. Leslie Odom Jr. Leslie Odom Jr. grew up in Philadelphia, trained at Carnegie Mellon, and became internationally known as Aaron Burr in Hamilton — a performance that won him the Tony for Best Actor in a Musical and, with the cast recording, a Grammy. What is less widely known is that he was a recording artist before and has continued since, working largely in the Great American Songbook and in soul. He is a genuine jazz-literate singer with excellent time and an unusually clear sense of what a lyric means — which is the actor's contribution. His portrayal of Sam Cooke in One Night in Miami earned Academy Award nominations for both acting and for the song "Speak Now," which he co-wrote. What to listen for "Wait for It" is the Hamilton track and one of the best things in that show — Burr's entire...

One hundred tracks by white men singing Black American music. The category is loaded, and the records are mostly excellent. Blue-eyed soul, and what the term is doing The phrase dates to the mid-1960s, when Black radio stations used it to describe white acts — the Righteous Brothers among the first — whose records they were willing to play. It was a marketing term before it was a genre, and it has always carried an implicit question: who is allowed in, and who decides. The honest answer is that the audience decides. Some of the artists here were fully accepted by Black radio and Black listeners; others were not, and a few had careers that depended on access their Black contemporaries were denied. Both things are true simultaneously and are worth holding while you listen. What is not in dispute is that a great many of these records are genuinely good. What to listen for Bobby Caldwell's "Coming Down from Love" is the emblematic case — his la...

Twenty-eight songs by a man from a fishing town in Lincolnshire who wrote some of the most enduring Black American music of the twentieth century. Rod Temperton Rod Temperton was born in Cleethorpes, England in 1949 and worked in a frozen-food factory before answering an advertisement and joining Heatwave , a multinational funk band formed by American servicemen in Germany. He was their keyboard player and, it turned out, an extraordinary songwriter. Quincy Jones heard Heatwave and brought him to Los Angeles. What followed is one of the least-known great catalogues in popular music: three songs on Off the Wall , three on Thriller including the title track, and a run of material for George Benson, the Brothers Johnson, Patti Austin, James Ingram and Michael McDonald. He was almost entirely private, gave very few interviews, and was known in the industry as "the Invisible Man." He died in 2016, and the news was released only after his funeral. What to listen f...