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

Mariah The Scientist VibeZ

She was studying biology at St. John's when she quit to make records, which is where the name comes from. Eleven tracks of some of the most quietly vicious writing in modern R&B.

Mariah the Scientist

Mariah Amani Buckles is from Atlanta, and was on a pre-med track studying biology in New York when she abandoned it for music — hence the stage name, which reads as a joke until you notice how clinically she writes.

Her records occupy an unusual space. The production is soft, atmospheric and rooted in Atlanta's trap-adjacent R&B, and her voice is light, breathy and almost conversational. The lyrics, however, are frequently brutal — songs about obsession, jealousy, revenge and violent intent, delivered in the same gentle register as a love song. The contrast is the entire effect, and she is one of very few artists working it deliberately.

What to listen for

"Church" and "Spread Thin" are the essential tracks — both deceptively pretty, both about a relationship in its worst phase.

"Boys Don't Cry" is the most-streamed and the best entry point; it inverts the title's premise and then keeps going.

"Always n Forever" with Lil Baby is the most successful collaboration, and "Rear View" with YoungBoy Never Broke Again is the most jarring pairing — her floating vocal against one of rap's most volatile voices.

"Burning Blue" is the later record that broadened her audience considerably, and "Out of Luck" and "Revenge" are the deepest cuts on the list.

"Slow Down" with Future, Fridayy and German production outfit KITSCHKRIEG is the most unexpected thing here — and a reminder of how far Atlanta R&B travels.

Throughout, pay attention to how little she pushes. The whole style depends on never raising the volume, so the words have to carry the weight.

Go deeper

Master (2019) and RY RY WORLD (2021) are the albums to hear, and To Be Eaten Alive (2023) is the darkest.

For artists working related territory: Summer Walker shares the Atlanta setting and the emotional register, SZA the unguarded writing, and Kali Uchis the sweet-voice-hard-lyric contrast.

And for the Atlanta R&B ecosystem she comes out of — a scene where rap and R&B are not separate industries but the same one — 6LACK, Baby Rose and Omer Fedi-adjacent production are all part of the same conversation.

One more thing worth saying about the persona. The scientist framing is funny, but it also describes the writing accurately: these songs observe a relationship the way you would observe an experiment going wrong — noting the variables, recording the result, declining to intervene. That detachment is what makes the violent lines land, and it is a genuinely unusual stance in a genre built almost entirely on declared feeling.

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