Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

Fifty-five tracks pitched at the tempo of a long evening. Nothing here is trying to get your attention; it has already assumed it. Slow music, seriously made The downtempo half of a two-part set, this is R&B built for the hours after midnight — slow tempos, soft drums, and vocals that stay conversational rather than reaching for a big moment. What separates it from ordinary chill-out compilation fare is the quality of the songwriting; these are proper songs played quietly, not ambience with a voice on top. It also functions as a survey of the independent and adjacent-to-major R&B world, where a great deal of the genre's most interesting work has migrated. Very few of these artists get radio play. Almost all of them are worth following. What to listen for Christión's "Face Like Yours" is the historical anchor — the Bay Area duo signed to Roc-A-Fella in the 1990s, whose one album has become a cult object among R&B obsessives. Its pr...

Fifty-six tracks with the brakes off. The uptempo half of the set, and a reminder that pop music at full volume can still be genuinely adventurous. Big records, wide net If the downtempo companion is about restraint, this one is about scale — and about how thoroughly the borders between pop, rap, dancehall, Afrobeats and reggaeton have dissolved. The playlist moves between languages, continents and genres in consecutive tracks, and the joins barely show, because the common element is simply energy . What makes it more than a party mix is the choice of big records. These are largely tracks that were commercially enormous and formally interesting — a combination that is rarer than it should be. What to listen for The Carters' "APESHIT" is the statement piece — Beyoncé and Jay-Z, filmed in the Louvre, and a record whose swagger is inseparable from where the video was shot. Kendrick Lamar and SZA's "All The Stars" from Black Pa...

Nellee Hooper produced Soul II Soul, Björk, Massive Attack, Madonna and No Doubt. Twenty-six tracks from a man who quietly built the sound of British music for two decades. Bristol, London, and the invention of a certain kind of cool Nellee Hooper came out of Bristol's Wild Bunch — the sound system collective that also produced Massive Attack and Tricky, and from which the whole trip-hop genre eventually emerged. He moved to London and joined Soul II Soul , Jazzie B's collective, at exactly the right moment. What Soul II Soul did in 1989 was genuinely new: a slow, heavy breakbeat, a warm bassline, strings, and a soulful female lead. That template — sometimes called the "funki dred" sound — travelled everywhere, and it is not a stretch to say a great deal of the 1990s is downstream of it. Hooper then became one of the most sought-after producers in the world, working across genres with an ear that stayed identifiably his: spacious, rhythm-...

Remixing Bob Marley is a good way to make enemies. Twenty-one tracks argue that, done by the right hands, it can also honour him. The most argued-over catalogue in music Few bodies of work are as fiercely guarded as Bob Marley's, and remix projects have drawn genuine criticism over the years — the charge being that they smooth a revolutionary catalogue into background music for people who have not listened to the words. Sometimes that charge lands. What makes this selection interesting is that it includes several remixes that clearly do not deserve it — particularly the ones handled by people with a real relationship to the music, and the ones by producers with the nerve to actually change something rather than just add a beat. What to listen for The Bill Laswell remixes are the essential ones. Laswell — the bassist and producer behind Material and countless dub-adjacent projects — approached the Marley catalogue in his Dreams of Freedom project ...

One track. Trinidadian trumpeter, a band called BadJohn Republic, and a title that names a whole national art form. Picong: the art of the insult, played on a trumpet Picong is a Trinidadian word — from the French piquant — for a specific cultural practice: the exchange of witty, cutting, improvised insults, traditionally between calypsonians competing in extempo. It is combat conducted entirely through cleverness, and the rules are strict: you must be funny, you must be quick, and you must not actually cross into cruelty. Getting picong'd well is a compliment. Naming an instrumental after it is a statement of intent. Etienne Charles is a Trinidadian trumpeter, composer and scholar whose entire career has been about excavating Caribbean musical traditions and placing them inside contemporary jazz — calypso, kaiso, steelpan, folk masquerade traditions, Haitian and Cuban forms. He has built projects around Carnival, around folklore, and around the Gullah ...

A monotone that could carry any beat ever made, and the man who first took rap into a room full of jazz musicians. Thirty-three tracks remembering Guru. Keith Elam, 1961–2010 Guru — born Keith Edward Elam in Boston, the son of a judge, and a Morehouse graduate — was one half of Gang Starr with DJ Premier, and one of the most distinctive voices rap has produced. It was not a technically flashy delivery. It was flat, unhurried and completely unmistakable, and it sat on top of Premier's chopped, dusty production like the two had been designed for each other. His other great contribution was Jazzmatazz , launched in 1993: a series that put him in the studio with actual jazz musicians — Donald Byrd, Roy Ayers, Branford Marsalis, Courtney Pine — rather than sampling them. At the time this was close to heretical in both camps. It is now the obvious ancestor of everything from The Roots to Robert Glasper's Black Radio . He died of cancer in April 20...

An eight-track record by a singer who went viral for a song about wanting to leave the planet. It is funnier, sadder and better made than the internet moment suggested. These Songs Are For Anyone Sick Of Earth Aliah Sheffield broke through with "Earth Is Ghetto" — a song that took off on TikTok on the strength of a sentiment a great many people apparently shared, expressed in a chorus about wanting to go home to a planet she does not come from. What got lost in the virality is that it is a genuinely well-made record. The joke is real, but so is the melancholy underneath it, and the vocal arrangement — layered, gospel-inflected, harmonically ambitious — is the work of someone with serious training and taste. This project builds an entire short album around that combination of humour and exhaustion. What to listen for Read the tracklist as a sequence and the concept becomes clear: "Earth Is Ghetto," "Some Of Your People," ...

Recorded in 1960, released into a country that was not ready for it, and still one of the most uncompromising records in American music. This one is not background listening. We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite Drummer Max Roach and lyricist Oscar Brown Jr. conceived the Freedom Now Suite for the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963. Events overtook the plan — the sit-in movement began in Greensboro in February 1960, and Roach recorded the work that August instead, with a title that reads as a demand rather than a description. The album cover is three Black men at a lunch counter, staring at the camera. In 1960, on a jazz record, that was an act of confrontation. Several distributors would not handle it, and it damaged Roach's commercial standing for years. The music matches the cover. It traces a line from slavery through emancipation to the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles then underway in Africa, and it does so without a single momen...

Twelve tracks of Chicago soul made by a man who sings like the church is still in the building. BJ The Chicago Kid has never made a bad record, and this is one of his warmest. Gravy Bryan James Sledge grew up singing in church on Chicago's South Side, the son of choir directors, and that training is audible in every phrase he sings. Before his own career took off he worked as a background vocalist for Mary Mary and others — a background-singer's ear for blend is another thing you can hear throughout his records. He became widely known through features, most notably on Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city and To Pimp a Butterfly , and through his own albums for Motown. Gravy continues a consistent project: contemporary R&B that is unembarrassed about gospel, built on live-sounding arrangements, and interested in adult subject matter rather than club records. What to listen for The features are extraordinarily well chosen. "Never Change" w...

A producer from Perth, Western Australia, who assembles records the way a director casts a film. Twenty-two tracks and roughly forty collaborators. Ta-ku and the art of the guest list Regan Mathews , who records as Ta-ku , is a Filipino-Australian producer from Perth — about as far from any music industry centre as it is possible to be. He built an audience through SoundCloud and Bandcamp in the early 2010s with beat tapes and a widely-shared tribute project to J Dilla, and has since become a genuine connector: a producer whose records function as introductions between artists who would otherwise never have met. His own aesthetic is unmistakable — soft-edged, heavily textured, built on filtered samples and live-feeling drums, with a melancholy that never tips into gloom. He is also a designer and entrepreneur, and the visual identity around his projects is as considered as the music. What to listen for Read the credits, because they are the point. "...

One hundred tracks of ambient music built around the sound and idea of water. Functional, unshowy, and genuinely good at the job it was made for. …..breathe…… Music for lowering the temperature This is a Spotify-curated ambient set, and it makes no claim to be anything else. The selections are drawn from the enormous contemporary ecosystem of ambient and neoclassical producers making music explicitly for focus, sleep and calm — a category that has grown from a niche into one of the largest listening habits on streaming. The organising image is the ocean: track titles run through "Blue Horizon," "Healing Waves," "Oceanwide," "beneath the surface," "Seaesta," "Close Reach." Several pieces incorporate actual water recordings, which is a very old trick — broadband noise at a steady volume is genuinely effective at masking sudden sounds, which is most of why it helps people concent...

Twenty-eight tracks of the most convincing romantic voice in 1990s R&B. Gerald Levert sang like a man who meant every word, because he generally did. The Ladies' Man, and the weight behind the title Gerald Levert was the son of Eddie Levert of The O'Jays — one of the great voices of Philadelphia soul — and grew up inside the business. He formed LeVert with his brother Sean and Marc Gordon in Cleveland, had a run of hits through the late 1980s, and then built a solo career that made him the definitive male R&B balladeer of the 1990s. What set him apart was not range but conviction . Levert had a thick, gritty baritone with a preacher's sense of build, and he sang love songs with an intensity that could tip into something closer to pleading. He was also a serious songwriter and producer, working with Barry White, Patti LaBelle and The O'Jays among others. He died in 2006 at 40, from an accidental prescr...