Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

She sings in isiXhosa over contemporary production and has one of the most powerful voices in African music. Eleven tracks of Amanda Black. Eastern Cape soul Amanda Benedicta Antony , who records as Amanda Black, comes from the Eastern Cape of South Africa and emerged through a television talent competition before releasing Amazulu in 2016 — an album that went platinum in South Africa within weeks and established her as one of the country's most significant voices. The important thing about her is linguistic. Much of her work is in isiXhosa , and she has been explicit about that as a choice rather than a default — a decision to make music that speaks directly to the people it is about rather than reaching first for English and an international audience. That the songs travel anyway is the point. Her voice is enormous and gospel-trained, but she uses it with restraint, and her records combine Afro-soul, traditional Xhosa musical elements and contemporary South ...

Sixteen tracks of Trinidadian soca from a singer who has been at the top of the form for twenty years. If your only Carnival reference is a beach advert, start here. Patrice Roberts and the business of Carnival Patrice Roberts is from Tobago and has been a major figure in soca since her teens, when she was singing with Machel Montano's band. She has since built one of the most consistent careers in the genre — a run of Carnival-season hits, Road March contention, and a body of work that has broadened well beyond the party record. Soca deserves better framing than it usually gets. It emerged in Trinidad in the 1970s as calypso absorbed Indian and American influences, and it operates on an annual cycle: songs are written for Carnival, released in the season, competed over, and then either enter the canon or vanish. That structure produces an extraordinary rate of output and a genuinely competitive songwriting culture. Roberts' particular skill is writing soca that ...

A songwriter, producer and singer from Port Elizabeth who does all three at a level almost nobody in her scene matches. Fifteen tracks of Zonke. Zonke Dikana Zonke Dikana was born in KwaZakhele, Port Elizabeth in 1979, into a musical family — her father Vuyisile was a drummer, and her late stepmother Anneline Malebo sang with the band Joy. Her sister Lulu Dikana was also a recording artist, and died in 2014. She took a degree in human resource management from the University of the Free State before committing to music, started in house, and moved toward Afro-soul and neo-soul. The breakthrough was Ina Ethe (2011), which went double platinum in South Africa and established her as one of the country's major artists. She signed with Sony in 2013 and has since released Work of Heart , L.O.V.E , Enigma and Embo . She names Sade , Miriam Makeba and Brenda Fassie as her influences, and you can hear all three — Sade in the restraint, Makeba in the linguistic com...

A singer signed to Death Row Records who sounds uncannily like Marvin Gaye, making an album that says so in the title. Eleven tracks that somehow avoid every trap in that sentence. The Rebirth of Marvin October London is from South Bend, Indiana, and was signed by Snoop Dogg to the revived Death Row Records — a label whose name carries an enormous amount of history and almost none of it about smooth soul singing. That is the first surprise. The second is the voice. The Marvin Gaye comparison is not a marketing angle; it is simply what he sounds like — the same light, slightly nasal upper register, the same tendency to stack his own harmonies, the same habit of sliding into a note rather than hitting it. Naming the album The Rebirth of Marvin is a considerable act of nerve, because it invites exactly the comparison an artist in his position would normally try to avoid. It works because he does not attempt a museum reconstruction. The production is contempora...

Twenty-two tracks from Louisville's biggest export since the Ali era. Jack Harlow is a genuinely divisive figure, and the records are more interesting than the discourse. Louisville, and the charisma question Jack Harlow came up in Louisville, Kentucky, releasing mixtapes through his teens and building a local following long before "WHATS POPPIN" broke nationally in 2020. He is signed to Generation Now, the Atlantic imprint run by DJ Drama and Don Cannon. He is also the subject of a genuine and ongoing argument. His detractors say he is a competent rapper elevated by charisma and by being a white artist in a Black genre; his defenders point to the consistency of the mixtapes, the ear for a beat and the willingness to be funny on record, which is rarer than it should be. Both cases have merit, and the records are worth hearing on their own terms rather than through the argument. What is not in dispute is that he is a very good technical rapper with an unusu...

Half of EPMD, leader of the Def Squad, and the producer who put Marvin Gaye on a rap record and made it a hit. Twenty-two tracks of Erick Sermon. The Green-Eyed Bandit Erick Sermon , from Brentwood, Long Island, formed EPMD with Parrish Smith in 1987, and the group's first four albums — all with "Business" in the title — are foundational documents of East Coast rap. Their sound was built on heavy funk samples, particularly Zapp and Roger Troutman, played at a deliberately unhurried tempo, and it stood apart from the faster, denser New York records around it. As a producer, Sermon developed one of the most identifiable styles in rap: thick, slightly murky, bass-forward, with samples looped rather than chopped. He led the Def Squad with Redman and Keith Murray , and worked extensively as a remixer — a role that in the 1990s often meant building an entirely new record around an existing vocal. What to listen for "Music" is the landma...

The most successful duo in chart history, dismissed for decades as lightweight, and now revered by exactly the musicians whose opinion counts. Eleven tracks of Hall & Oates. Philadelphia soul in a rock band's clothes Daryl Hall and John Oates met at Temple University in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, and the city is the key to everything they did. Hall in particular worked around the Philadelphia soul scene, recording with Gamble and Huff's operation as a session singer, and the vocal approach he developed there — light, agile, heavily gospel-inflected — is what makes their records sound the way they do. They spent the 1970s finding their footing and the 1980s essentially owning the American charts, becoming the best-selling duo in history. The critical reception at the time was condescending; the reassessment since has been thorough, largely driven by musicians and hip-hop producers who noticed how sophisticated the arrangements are and how much soul i...

Eleven tracks, two interludes, and a band operating at the outer limit of what a pop group can be. All 'n All is Earth, Wind & Fire's most ambitious record. All 'n All, 1977 By 1977 Earth, Wind & Fire had already had enormous success, and Maurice White responded by making the band's most complicated album. He travelled to Brazil and Argentina before recording it, and the South American influence runs through everything — not as decoration but as structure. The record was released with an elaborate Egyptian-and-cosmology-themed sleeve by Japanese artist Shusei Nagaoka, which was entirely in keeping with White's project. Earth, Wind & Fire were a funk band that took spirituality, Egyptology and self-improvement seriously, and the mysticism was never a costume. Musically it is a band with a horn section, a string arranger, multiple lead vocalists, and a willingness to put a two-minute Brazilian interlude in the middle of a commercial albu...

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...

Forty-two tracks from the most consequential producer in the history of rap, and one of the very few whose reputation rests almost entirely on how records sound rather than what they say. Compton, and the sound of everything after Andre Young has had three distinct careers. With N.W.A he built the sonic template for gangsta rap — dense, siren-heavy, Bomb Squad-adjacent chaos. At Death Row he invented G-funk : slow tempos, Parliament and Zapp interpolations, live bass, that high whining synth line, and enough space for a rapper to sound relaxed. And from the late 1990s onward he became a discoverer, signing and developing Eminem , 50 Cent , The Game and Kendrick Lamar . The obsessive part is the mixing. Dre is famous for spending months on drum sounds and for re-recording samples with live players rather than lifting them, and the result is that his records still sound enormous on systems that did not exist when they were made. What to listen for "Nuthin' ...

Forty-four tracks assembled for the specific pleasure of staring out of a window. Slow, spacious, and completely indifferent to genre. A mix built on one quality What holds this together is not style but weightlessness . Everything here is arranged with air in it: piano and voice, acoustic guitar, the occasional string section, and almost no percussion doing anything assertive. Coldplay sits next to Prince sits next to a Czech pianist, and the transitions are seamless because the criterion is atmosphere rather than category. It is also, quietly, a covers playlist. A remarkable number of these are reinterpretations, and hearing familiar songs slowed down and stripped back is a large part of the effect. What to listen for k.d. lang's "Hallelujah" is the definitive version of the Leonard Cohen song for many people — Cohen himself said as much — and it is worth hearing next to the hundreds of lesser ones. Michael Bublé's "God Only Knows...

Seven tracks from a Montreal songwriter with a falsetto like a held breath. Patrick Watson is the kind of artist people discover by accident and then keep for life. The most cinematic songwriter in Canada Patrick Watson leads the Montreal band of the same name, and won the Polaris Music Prize — Canada's major critical award — for Close to Paradise in 2007. His music is difficult to file: chamber pop with strong classical instincts, orchestrated with real care, and centred on a high, fragile voice that he uses more like an instrument than a delivery system for lyrics. He has scored films and worked extensively in television and advertising placement, which is how a great many people first hear him without knowing whose record it is. That is worth stating plainly rather than as a criticism — his music is genuinely cinematic, and it does the job because the writing is strong. What to listen for "Je te laisserai des mots" is the phenomenon. R...

Thirty-one tracks from a production duo who wrote "Thong Song" and "So Into You" and somehow made both sound inevitable. Tim & Bob, the quiet 1990s workhorses Tim Kelley and Bob Robinson spent the 1990s and early 2000s as one of the most reliable production teams in R&B without ever becoming public figures. Their records are recognisable by their construction rather than by a signature sound: warm keyboards, a bassline with genuine melodic movement, and an arrangement that leaves the singer plenty of room. What is striking about their catalogue is the breadth of voices they served. Boyz II Men, Tamia, Brian McKnight, Case, The Isley Brothers, Monica, 112, Dave Hollister — and Sisqó. Very few producers could handle both a five-part harmony group and a novelty smash without one undermining the other. What to listen for Tamia's "So Into You" is the masterpiece. It has been covered and interpolated repeatedly — Fabolo...

He co-wrote "Umbrella" and "Single Ladies" and "Baby." Twenty-seven tracks of Christopher "Tricky" Stewart, who has probably been on your radio more than almost anyone. The other half of a very productive room Christopher "Tricky" Stewart is from Atlanta, the son of a music-industry family, and his defining professional relationship is with Terius Nash — better known as The-Dream . Together they wrote and produced a run of records in the late 2000s that reshaped pop: "Umbrella" for Rihanna, "Single Ladies" for Beyoncé, "Baby" for Justin Bieber, and much of The-Dream's own catalogue. The Stewart sound is built on a specific kind of drum programming — hard, dry, high in the mix, with a lot of open space around it — combined with unusually lush chord voicings. That contrast between brittle rhythm and rich harmony is why records like "Umbrella" sound both ag...

Twenty-one tracks from the Philadelphia production duo who made neo-soul sound like a movement rather than a marketing term. Dre & Vidal, and the Philly sound reborn Andre Harris and Vidal Davis came out of Philadelphia and, working from Touch of Jazz — the studio complex run by Jazzy Jeff — became the production team most responsible for the sound of neo-soul's commercial peak. Their records are built on live musicianship: real drums, Rhodes and Wurlitzer, bass played by a person, and horn and string arrangements that come from the Philadelphia International tradition rather than from a sample library. Harris is a serious multi-instrumentalist, and it shows. What made them commercially important is that they could take that approach into the mainstream. The same duo that made Jill Scott's most beloved records also produced Usher and Justin Bieber. What to listen for The Jill Scott material is the core, and it is remarkable. "A Long Walk," ...

Fifty-one tracks, and every one of them fronted by a woman. This is the best argument available that African pop's most interesting work is being done by its sisters. The African Sistas Mix The framing does real work here. African pop coverage tends to orbit a small group of men — Wizkid, Burna Boy, Davido — and a mix built entirely around women makes visible how much is being missed. What emerges is a scene with more stylistic range than the mainstream narrative allows: South African deep house, Nigerian Afropop, Ghanaian and Cape Verdean crossover, Zambian rap, and a great deal of straight soul singing. It also spans the continent properly. South Africa is the strongest presence, which reflects the depth of its vocal tradition, but Nigeria, Ghana, Cape Verde, Zambia and the diaspora are all here. What to listen for Ayra Starr's "Rush" is the biggest record — a global hit and the moment she became a headline act. The South African contin...

Twenty-two tracks he wrote, produced, played on or simply willed into existence for somebody else. Prince's second career was making other people famous. The Minneapolis machine Prince's productivity was such that his own albums could not absorb it, so he built an ecosystem instead. The Time , Vanity 6 , Apollonia 6 , Sheila E. , The Family , Jill Jones , Taja Sevelle , Madhouse — most of these acts existed because he wanted somewhere to put songs. He often wrote, arranged and played nearly everything himself, then handed the results to a front person, frequently under a pseudonym: Jamie Starr , Christopher , Alexander Nevermind , Joey Coco . Several of the biggest hits of the 1980s are Prince records that nobody knew were Prince records at the time. What to listen for The Time's "777-9311" is the one musicians talk about — that bassline is Prince, played on a synth, and it is one of the most technically absurd things in funk. "Jungle Lov...

He played with Miles Davis, invented jazz-funk, made the first scratch record to reach a mass audience, and won Album of the Year with a Joni Mitchell tribute. Fifteen tracks of Herbie Hancock's restlessness. The most curious man in jazz Herbie Hancock was a child prodigy who played a Mozart concerto with the Chicago Symphony at eleven, joined Miles Davis's second great quintet at twenty-three, and has spent the sixty years since refusing to stay anywhere. The arc is genuinely extraordinary: hard bop with Blue Note, then the electric experiments with Miles, then the Mwandishi band's free jazz, then Head Hunters — which fused jazz with Sly Stone funk and became one of the best-selling jazz albums ever made — then disco, then "Rockit," which put turntable scratching in front of a mainstream television audience, then a late career of collaboration and reinterpretation. He is also a practising Buddhist and has spoken often about the philosophy be...

The most esoteric rapper in a crew full of them. Nineteen tracks of Ab-Soul, who writes about conspiracy, grief, philosophy and his own eyesight, usually in the same verse. Black Hippy's strangest member Herbert Anthony Stevens IV is from Carson, California, and is one of the four members of Black Hippy alongside Kendrick Lamar , ScHoolboy Q and Jay Rock — the Top Dawg Entertainment collective that became the most consequential rap crew of the 2010s. Ab-Soul was always the one facing a different direction. He lives with Stevens–Johnson syndrome , a severe reaction he had as a child that damaged his eyes and skin and is the reason for the dark glasses. His writing runs toward the mystical and the conspiratorial — numerology, esoterica, religion, systems of control — delivered with a density of wordplay that rewards a lyrics sheet. He has also written openly about the death by suicide of his partner, the artist Alori Joh, in 2012, and about hi...

Twenty-five pieces of instrumental music built for yoga, breathwork and meditation. Functional, unpretentious, and better made than most of what fills this space. Music with a job to do Fred Westra is a Dutch musician and producer who works almost exclusively in yoga and meditation music, with a substantial catalogue released across streaming platforms and licensing libraries. This is a professional practice rather than an artistic pose — music written to a specification, for teachers and practitioners who need something that will hold a room for an hour without pulling focus. The track titles map the intended use precisely: "Slow Breathing," "Releasing Negative Energy," "Third Eye Adagio," "Wheel of Energy," "Ajna Chakra," "Emotional Dimension." Nothing here is ambiguous about what it is for. A note on the vocabulary Several titles reference concepts from yogic and Buddhist traditions. Ajna is the s...