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

Adekunie Gold Vibez

Adekunle Gold started out as a highlife traditionalist in a kaftan and ended up making records with Pharrell and Nile Rodgers. The route between those two points is the most interesting story in modern Nigerian pop.

The most complete reinvention in Afrobeats

Adekunle Kosoko began, improbably, as a graphic designer who made a cover version — his 2014 reworking of One Direction's "Story of My Life" as "Sade" went viral in Nigeria and got him signed to YBNL Nation. His early albums leaned hard into highlife and Yoruba folk traditions: acoustic guitars, talking drum, storytelling lyrics, a deliberately old-fashioned presentation.

Then he took it apart. Beginning around Afro Pop Vol. 1 and accelerating through Catch Me If You Can and Tequila Ever After, he rebuilt himself as a sleek, funk- and disco-inflected pop artist — more falsetto, more live bass, more explicit debt to Michael Jackson and Off the Wall-era arrangements. He also disclosed living with sickle cell disease, which recontextualised a lot of the striving in his writing.

What to listen for

The playlist is sequenced to make the arc audible. "Sade," "Ogaranya" and "Sinner" represent the earlier, more traditional palette — though "Sinner" with Lucky Daye is a later record that reaches back for the same warmth.

"Falling Up" with Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers is the headline collaboration and exactly the disco-funk lineage he had been building toward — Rodgers' guitar is unmistakable within two bars. "Do You Mind?" and "Party No Dey Stop" with Zinoleesky are the club end.

"High" with Davido was the record that made him unavoidable internationally. "One Woman" with Ty Dolla $ign and "Make It Easy" with Coco Jones show him operating comfortably inside American R&B.

The quieter tracks are where the writing lives: "It Is What It Is," "Believe," "Something Different" and "Okay." Fourteen tracks, and a case study in how to change completely without losing anyone.

Go deeper

To hear the transformation properly, play Gold (2016) and then Tequila Ever After (2023) back to back. Same man, almost nothing in common. Catch Me If You Can (2022) is the hinge record.

For the highlife roots he started from, go to Ebenezer Obey and King Sunny Adé — the jújú and highlife tradition his early records were consciously reviving.

His wife Simi is a superb songwriter in her own right and their catalogues are worth hearing alongside each other. And for the disco-funk direction he moved toward, the obvious homework is Nile Rodgers and Chic, plus Off the Wall, which is clearly the album he has been chasing.

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