Skip to main content
Eddie Rockerz VibeZ - curated playlists, mixes and music commentary

Dig the crates

Every playlist on the blog, sorted by where it takes you.

Browse all 600+ VibeZ

DJ Mixes & Series

The house sets, the Producer Series and the running volumes.

Show all 16Show fewer

RockerZ Nostalgia : A Late Night 90s Mix

Seventy-eight tracks aimed with real precision at 2am in 1997. This is not a nostalgia playlist so much as a working reconstruction of a specific feeling.

The decade R&B got its own architecture

The 1990s were when R&B stopped borrowing its production language from pop and built its own. Hip-hop drum programming, sung-through harmonies stacked six deep, basslines with actual movement, and an unembarrassed commitment to slow tempos. Radio supported it, labels invested in it, and singers were allowed to be album artists.

What this mix captures specifically is the late-night end of that — not the singles that defined the era but the album tracks, the quiet storm cuts, the ones that came on after midnight. Seventy-eight tracks is four hours, and the sequencing holds a single mood across all of it.

What to listen for

Maxwell appears twice, including "Drowndeep: Hula" — from Embrya, the album critics disliked and time has vindicated — and "Whenever Wherever Whatever." He is the right artist to open with; nobody did this specific atmosphere better.

Jon B. gets two tracks, which is correct and slightly overdue. "They Don't Know" is a superb record, and the fact that he was a white singer fully accepted by Black radio in that era is a story in itself.

Case and Joe's "Faded Pictures" is the connoisseur's pick — two of the most underrated male voices of the decade on one ballad. LSG's "Love Hurts" is the supergroup at its most melancholy.

Meshell Ndegeocello's "Outside Your Door" is the outlier and the most interesting thing on the list — a bassist and songwriter who never fitted the R&B format and made better records than most who did.

SWV's "When This Feeling," TLC's "Take Our Time," Karyn White and Shai's "If I Ever Fall In Love" round out the harmony-group side. Blackstreet's "Tonight's The Night" is Teddy Riley at his smoothest.

Go deeper

Three albums to hear whole from this era: Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite, D'Angelo's Brown Sugar, and Jodeci's Forever My Lady. Those three cover most of what the decade was doing.

Meshell Ndegeocello's Plantation Lullabies and Bitter deserve rediscovery by anyone who missed them.

And the structural point: this music was made in a period when albums sold, budgets were real, and a singer could record with a full band. A great deal of what makes these records sound the way they do is simply money and time, and both are considerably scarcer now.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more

De La Soul VibeZ (R.I.P Trugoy the Dove)

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...
Post a Comment
Read more