Nobody in rap sounded like DMX, and nobody has since. Twenty-four tracks of a man who made pain audible and never once flinched from it. Rest in power Earl Simmons, from Yonkers, New York, arrived in 1998 and did something that had not happened before and has not happened since: his first two albums, It's Dark and Hell Is Hot and Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood , both entered the Billboard chart at number one in the same calendar year. He went on to have five consecutive number one albums. The appeal was never technical. DMX was not a lyricist in the Rakim or Nas tradition — his gift was conviction . The bark, the growl, the prayers he put at the end of albums, the way he could move from a party record to something close to a confession within a single track sequence. He rapped about addiction, abuse, loyalty and God with an openness that was almost unbearable at times, and audiences responded because none of it sounded performed. He died in April 2021. The res...

Forty-nine tracks and one clear argument: Raphael Saadiq is the most important producer in modern soul music, and he has been for thirty years. The bassline underneath everything Charles Ray Wiggins, from Oakland, has had roughly four careers. He was the bassist and co-frontman of Tony! Toni! Toné! , the most musically substantial R&B group of the early 1990s. He formed Lucy Pearl with Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Dawn Robinson. He made a run of solo albums — Instant Vintage , The Way I See It , Stone Rollin' , Jimmy Lee — that got progressively better and less commercial. And throughout, he has been the producer other artists call when they want a record to sound like it was played rather than assembled. His method is consistent: real instruments, analogue warmth, and an unfashionable insistence on bass as the harmonic centre of a record. He is a bass player first, and it shows in everything he touches. What to listen for D'Angelo's "Untitled (H...