Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

The album that closed out the greatest R&B band of its generation, made by three people who were barely speaking. Eleven tracks, and not a wasted second. House of Music, 1996 Tony! Toni! Toné! — brothers Raphael Saadiq and D'wayne Wiggins with cousin Timothy Christian Riley — came out of Oakland and spent the early 1990s doing something almost nobody else in R&B was doing: playing their own instruments, writing their own songs, and treating the album as the unit of work. House of Music was their fourth and final album, released in 1996 amid the tensions that would break the group up shortly afterward. It is also comfortably their best — a record that moves between gospel, funk, doo-wop, hip-hop and straight soul without ever sounding like a genre exercise, because the band could actually play all of it. Its influence is out of proportion to its sales. A great deal of what neo-soul became was worked out here first. What to listen f...

Eight songs, five hit singles, and roughly twenty million copies sold. Can't Slow Down is the sound of a man who had already conquered country radio deciding to take everything else. Can't Slow Down, 1983 Lionel Richie had spent the 1970s as the frontman and principal songwriter of The Commodores , writing "Easy," "Three Times a Lady" and "Sail On" — ballads so successful that they arguably obscured how good a funk band the Commodores actually were. He went solo in 1982, and in 1983 released this. Can't Slow Down won the Grammy for Album of the Year and sold on a scale that puts it among the biggest records of the decade. What is striking about it now is the range: eight tracks that take in Caribbean-influenced pop, a country-leaning ballad, a synth-driven rocker and one of the most-played love songs ever written, all in under forty minutes. Richie's particular gift was writing songs that sounded like standards on first...

He invented the sound of 1990s R&B, ran a house full of teenage artists, and then largely vanished. Twenty-one tracks of DeVante Swing's strange, brilliant, difficult legacy. The architect of the bad-boy R&B group Donald DeGrate Jr. — DeVante Swing — was the producer, multi-instrumentalist and creative director of Jodeci , the group that arrived in 1991 and immediately made every other R&B act look overdressed. Where Boyz II Men wore matching suits and sang about commitment, Jodeci wore leather and combat boots and sang about everything else, and the production underneath was harder, sparser and more gospel-derived than anything else on radio. DeVante's influence runs much wider than his own group. His Swing Mob collective — the artists living and working in his New York house, sometimes called Da Bassment — included Timbaland , Missy Elliott , Ginuwine , Static Major and Playa . Essentially every major innovation in late-1990s R&B ...

Cleo Sol does not do interviews, rarely tours, and has made some of the most beautiful soul records of the last decade. Sixteen tracks of an artist who lets the music do all of it. The quietest great singer in Britain Cleo Sol — Cleopatra Nikolic — is from north-west London, of Serbian, Spanish and Jamaican heritage. Her career has been built almost entirely without conventional promotion: minimal press, few live shows, no attempt to construct a persona. She is central to SAULT , the anonymous collective whose albums arrived without warning, without artist photographs, and occasionally with a limited window before being withdrawn from streaming. SAULT's records — produced by Inflo , Sol's frequent collaborator and partner — are among the most acclaimed and least explained bodies of work in recent music. Her own albums, Rose in the Dark , Mother , Heaven and Gold , are gentler and more direct: warm, gospel-inflected soul about motherhood, grief...

Yebba sings like the last thirty years of R&B did not happen and she is still working from the source material. Eighteen tracks of a genuinely extraordinary instrument. West Memphis to everywhere Abbey Smith — Yebba, her first name reversed — is from West Memphis, Arkansas, and came up singing in church. She became known through a live performance of "My Mind" at Sofar Sounds in 2016: an entirely improvised, unaccompanied song, recorded on a phone camera, that circulated among musicians until essentially everyone in the industry had seen it. What people responded to was not just the range, considerable as it is, but the control — the ability to move between a whisper and a full belt within a phrase, and to place notes with the precision of a jazz singer. Her mother died by suicide shortly before that period, and a great deal of her subsequent work has dealt with grief directly. Her debut album Dawn arrived in 2021, produced largely wi...

Seventy-six twelve-inch mixes, extended versions and re-edits. This is the format at its purest: records built to keep a floor moving rather than to fit on the radio. Why the twelve-inch changed everything The twelve-inch single was a technical accident that became an art form. Cutting a record at 45rpm across a twelve-inch disc allowed wider grooves, which meant more bass and more volume — essential for club sound systems. It also meant room for longer versions, and DJs and producers in New York in the mid-1970s immediately worked out what to do with that room. The result was a whole vocabulary: the extended intro built for mixing, the long instrumental breakdown, the dub section where the vocal drops out and the rhythm carries alone. Tom Moulton is generally credited with inventing the disco mix; what followed shaped house, hip-hop and essentially all modern dance music. This playlist is that tradition in practice, running from 1979 to the present. What to liste...