Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

Sixty-one tracks, and not one sleigh bell. This is a holiday playlist in the truest sense — what actually gets played when the family is in the house. The music that fills a room full of people who grew up together The title suggests carols. What you get instead is a deep, loving reconstruction of late-1990s and early-2000s R&B and hip-hop — the music of a specific generation's youth, which is exactly what tends to go on when everyone comes home for the holidays and somebody takes over the speaker. That is a smarter idea than a seasonal playlist. Holiday music is nostalgic by design; this achieves the same effect with records people actually love rather than ones they tolerate once a year. What to listen for The Notorious B.I.G. appears twice — "Big Poppa" and the "One More Chance / Stay with Me" remix — and both are pure party records rather than the harder material, which is the right call. Busta Rhymes gets two o...

Thirty-five tracks by artists who are no longer with us, chosen to celebrate rather than to mourn. A memorial that swings. A celebration, not a wake The framing matters. A playlist of dead musicians could easily be maudlin; this one opens with James Brown's "Get On The Good Foot" , which sets the terms immediately. The selections are chosen for what these artists did rather than for how they left, and the sequencing moves between eras and genres without treating any death as more significant than another. It also does something quietly valuable: it includes people whose deaths went largely unremarked outside their own communities alongside the household names. What to listen for The giants are here handled lightly. Marvin Gaye's "If I Should Die Tonight," Prince's "The Beautiful Ones," Michael Jackson's "Stranger in Moscow" — note that none of these are the obvious choices, and "Stranger in Moscow" ...

Fourteen tracks from the most spectacularly dysfunctional band in rock history, who turned it into the best-selling music of their era. Five people who should not have been in a room together Fleetwood Mac began in 1967 as a British blues band led by Peter Green , and its early instrumental "Albatross" — included here — went to number one in the UK and sounds nothing like what came later. Green left in 1970 after a period of severe mental illness, and the band spent several years in flux. Then in 1975 Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined, and the lineup that made Rumours was complete: two couples and a drummer, all of whom broke up with each other while making the album, and none of whom left. Rumours has sold in the region of forty million copies and is essentially a record of five people telling each other exactly what they think, in harmony. What to listen for "Dreams" is the band's only US number one and had an unlikely...

Nine songs from a trio who arrived with one of the most-played R&B singles of 1995 and were, for a moment, the best vocal group in the genre. (RIP Charmayne Maxwell – your voice will always be cherished) Brownstone Brownstone were Nicci Gilbert , Charmayne "Maxee" Maxwell and Monica "Mimi" Doby , and their route into the business was unusual: they were signed to MJJ Music , the Epic-distributed label Michael Jackson had set up, which made them one of the very few acts to come through that imprint and actually land a hit. What set them apart was that they were a harmony group in an era that had mostly stopped making them. The early nineties were full of vocal trios, but most were built around one lead with two voices behind her. Brownstone wrote together, blended properly, and traded leads — Gilbert's grain against Maxwell's clarity — which is why their records still sound like a group rather than a session. Charma...

She started making music to process her mother's death and ended up with one of the most quietly adventurous catalogues in modern R&B. Twenty-seven tracks of Amber Mark. Grief, travel, and a very wide record collection Amber Mark was born in Tennessee and raised largely on the move — her mother, the artist Mia Mark, took her through India, Nepal, Thailand, Germany and beyond. That upbringing is audible: her records draw on Brazilian rhythm, Indian percussion, house, gospel and straight R&B without any of it registering as tourism. Her first EP, 3:33am , was written after her mother's death in 2013, and the whole project is structured around that loss. It is a remarkable debut precisely because it is not maudlin — several of the songs are danceable, and the grief sits underneath rather than on top. What to listen for "Monsoon" is the song to start with. Credited to Amber Mark and Mia Mark , it incorporates her mother directly, and the In...

The more peaceful your mind is, the easier it is to realize what spirituality is

He played the most ferocious saxophone in jazz and then spent fifty years making some of the gentlest music anyone has recorded. Eighteen tracks for Pharoah Sanders, 1940–2022. Farrell Sanders, called Pharoah Pharoah Sanders was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1940 and arrived in New York broke enough to sleep on subway trains. Sun Ra took him in and gave him the name. Then, from 1965, he joined John Coltrane's final band — the group that made Ascension and Meditations — and became the most extreme voice in a music that was already at its limit. His playing in that period is pure overtone: shrieking, multiphonic, closer to a human scream than to a saxophone. What happened after Coltrane's death in 1967 is the more interesting story. Sanders spent the following decades making music of extraordinary tenderness, built on modal vamps, chanted vocals and long, patient builds. The ferocity never left, but it became something he deployed rather than somethi...

Nine pieces built from Tibetan bowls, chant and voice, recorded as a single continuous ceremony. This is a sound bath, not a playlist. Soundbath Love AYA's record is structured exactly as a live sound bath would be: an "Opening Ceremony" built on Tibetan singing bowls, then a sequence of mantra and melodic pieces, then a closing. It is meant to be experienced in order and in full, lying down, which is a genuinely different proposition from background music. The sound bath as a practice combines singing bowls, gongs, chimes and voice, and has spread widely through wellness spaces over the last decade. The instruments themselves have long histories — metal singing bowls in Himalayan Buddhist contexts, though the specific therapeutic framing around them is largely a Western development of the last fifty years. What to listen for Singing bowls produce a complex stack of overtones rather than a single clean pitch, and when several sound together the frequenci...

He had the biggest debut of 1987, compared himself to the Beatles, disappeared, changed his name, and has been quietly making music ever since. Seventeen tracks of Sananda Maitreya. The most complete disappearance in pop Terence Trent D'Arby was born in New York, served in the US Army in Germany, and released Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D'Arby in 1987. It sold over a million copies in its first three days in the UK, won a Grammy, and made him a global star at twenty-five. It also came with an unusual amount of self-belief. He publicly compared the album to Sgt. Pepper , which the British press never forgave. His second album, Neither Fish Nor Flesh , was a deliberate commercial refusal, and the backlash was severe enough to effectively end his mainstream career. In 2001 he legally changed his name to Sananda Maitreya , following what he has described as a series of dreams, and has since released a substantial independent catalogue on hi...

Nineteen tracks of the funniest, sharpest, most gloriously arrogant band of the 1980s. Morris Day understood that funk works better with a punchline. Too cool for the room, on purpose The Time were Prince's creation and also, genuinely, one of the great funk bands. The recorded lineup in the early years was largely Prince himself playing everything under the pseudonym Jamie Starr, with Morris Day singing on top — but the live band, featuring Jimmy Jam , Terry Lewis , Jesse Johnson and Jellybean Johnson , was formidable enough that Prince reportedly worried about being upstaged on his own tours. The persona was the innovation. Morris Day played a preening, mirror-obsessed lothario, with valet Jerome Benton literally holding the mirror up, and the comedy never undercut the funk. Purple Rain made the act famous; "Jungle Love" and "The Bird" are as memorable in that film as anything Prince does. Jam and Lewis were later fired for missing a sh...

Twenty tracks from a man who has also written for television, created two acclaimed series, and won an Emmy. Childish Gambino is the side project that became the main event. Donald Glover, under a name from a Wu-Tang name generator Donald Glover arrived as a comedy writer — on 30 Rock at twenty-three — then as an actor on Community , and the rap career began as something close to a hobby. The name came from a Wu-Tang Clan name generator, which he has cheerfully admitted. The early mixtapes were technically able and easy to dismiss. What changed everything was a steady refusal to stay in one register: Because the Internet came with a screenplay, "Awaken, My Love!" abandoned rapping almost entirely for Funkadelic-style psychedelic soul, and by the time of "This Is America" he was operating as a conceptual artist who happened to release singles. Meanwhile he created Atlanta , one of the best television series of its decade, and won...

Ninety-nine tracks, no genre discipline, and a stubborn refusal to distinguish between a 1980 Stevie Wonder album cut and something released last month. This is what a year of actual listening looks like. Not a chart, a diary Most year-end lists are arguments. This one is a record — what actually got played, in whatever order it accumulated. That makes it considerably more useful than a critics' poll, because it shows how a real listening habit works: a handful of new discoveries, a returning core of older favourites, and a wide net across scenes that have no reason to sit together. Ninety-nine tracks is roughly six hours. The independent and internationally sourced material outweighs the mainstream by a long way, which tells you where the curatorial attention actually goes. What to listen for Rema's "Calm Down" is the biggest record here by an enormous margin — it became one of the most-streamed African songs ever released, and its presence marks...

Nine tracks containing one of the greatest ballads ever written and one of the greatest party records ever made. I Am is Earth, Wind & Fire at their commercial peak. I Am, 1979 By 1979 Earth, Wind & Fire were among the biggest acts in the world, and I Am is the sound of a band operating with total confidence and considerable outside help. Maurice White co-wrote much of it with David Foster — then an ascendant arranger and producer — and the collaboration pushed the band toward a slicker, more melodically direct sound than the mystical sprawl of All 'n All . Some purists prefer the earlier records for exactly that reason. But I Am contains two of the most durable songs in the American catalogue, and the musicianship never slackens. What to listen for "After the Love Has Gone" is the ballad, written by David Foster , Jay Graydon and Bill Champlin . It won a Grammy, and it is one of the most harmonically sophisticated songs to reach the ...

Fifty-eight records from a single calendar year — 1979 — which is arguably the most loaded twelve months in the history of American dance music. 1979 1978 1977 1976 1975 1974 1973 1972 1970 /1971 1979: the year everything happened at once This is not a decade playlist. It is one year, and that focus is what makes it remarkable: 1979 was the point at which disco reached its commercial peak, rock radio turned on it, hip-hop made its first appearance on record, and the sound that would become eighties R&B was already audible in the corners. All four of those things are on this list, sitting next to each other, and none of the people involved knew which way it was about to go. What to listen for The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" is the historical pivot — the first rap record to reach a mass audience, built over Chic's ...