Loud, fast, and simple, punk rescued rock‘n’roll from suffocating on its own excesses, giving the genre a razor-blade edge it hadn’t had since its earliest days. The rebellious spirit and willingness to question traditional conventions—like the idea that you had to know how to play an instrument before you could start a band—would find their way into nearly every meaningful musical revolution that followed, from hip-hop to indie rock to techno.

Music’s only ever been just one facet of punk’s identity, though. It’s more than just a sound, it’s a whole way of being—a philosophy, an attitude, and, crucially, a look.

Punk’s sonic foundations were laid down in New York City by the same people who established the beginnings of punk style: artists like Lou Reed, the Ramones, Suicide, and the New York Dolls who wanted to strip away the bloat rock had accumulated in the psychedelic era and return it to something purer. While Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones matched their arena-filling ambitions with equally elaborate costumes of velvet and sequins, rock’s new rebels preferred lived-in T-shirts and Levi’s.

“We came out of the glam scene,” says photographer Paul Zone, author of Playground: Growing Up in the New York Underground. “So by the time ’74 came around and glam was winding down, probably 50 percent of the people in that scene were involved in what would come to be known as the punk scene. It was just that our flamboyance got a little more played down.”

“There was still fashion going on,” Zone adds. “They’d go to the thrift shops, where you could find vintage clothes. Black Levi’s jeans became a staple for everyone who was there. When it comes to Levi’s and jeans, they were being used in a lot of different ways. In the glam days, the Dolls were wearing little boys’ Levi’s jackets that were so small that they could hardly get their arms in them.”

In the mid-1970s, the new New York sound and style came into focus through the Ramones (who created a uniform of shredded Levi’s 505 jeans and black leather jackets), Television (whose guitarist Richard Hell was one of the first performers to rock spiked hair and torn T-shirts held together by safety pins), and Blondie (fronted by Debbie Harry, who pioneered high-low mixes of Levi’s and designer pieces), and other groups that orbited divey clubs like CBGB. “They had no money,” photographer Jenny Lens recalls. “The holes in Joey’s knees were from wear and tear. They were not fashion. I have photos of Dee Dee Ramone wearing a leather jacket, and around the wrists it’s really frayed. It was shameful back then to run around with holes in your jeans, and the Ramones said f—k that, that’s who we are!”

By the time people started calling it punk, the revolution had already started to spread around the globe. Malcolm McLaren managed the New York Dolls before returning to London where he and partner Vivienne Westwood operated a boutique called Sex. Inspired by what he saw in New York, he combined the Dolls’ over-the-top outrageousness with Richard Hell’s deconstructed style to create a quintessentially British spin on punk fashion and tapped his new clients, the Sex Pistols, to promote it.

“McLaren went back to England and emulated the look and gave it a little more pizzazz with hair color and putting more fashion into it,” Zone explains. At the same time, other London punks like X-Ray Spex—fronted by Poly Styrene—seized upon the movement’s DIY philosophy and started using staple items like jeans and leather jackets as blank canvases to decorate with pins, paint, and spikes.

At nearly the same time as it crossed the ocean to the UK, punk spread to L.A., where fans of the Ramones and Blondie adapted their distinctive looks to fit the city’s unique identity. “What we were doing in L.A. had to do with a lot of factors,” Lens says. “One was the weather. We could have a lot of thrift stores and a lot of yard sales, church bazaars. We don't have the rain and snow and cold that you have in London or New York. We were very into that DIY thing. You could repurpose [clothes], you could cut them up and do things with them. We’d rarely wear the same thing twice.”

L.A.’s bands were diverse, from pop-friendly acts like the Go-Go’s to the defiantly anti-commercial approach of the Germs, to bands like the legendary X who sat somewhere in between, but they were united by the bonds of their tight-knit community. “The fashion was very organic,” Lens says. “There were no paid stylists. We were stylists for each other. Everybody was going to thrift stores together, going to bazaars together, sharing each other’s clothes. It really came out of dressing up every day and expressing yourself and being an artist. You could be an artist who expressed themselves visually from head to toe and also on stage. Or not—you could be a photographer or a graphic artist or a fan or whatever.”

The L.A. style comes through in one of Lens’s favorite photos of the time, where X singer Exene Cervenka and scenester Pleasant Gehman pose in a shower at a loft where the pioneering fanzine Slash was throwing a party for Devo. “Pleasant had bleached her jeans and written ‘Slash’ for Slash magazine,” she explains. “Nobody had bleached jeans then. We did a lot of things that other people weren’t doing.”

Forty years after punk started, the music continues to reverberate, not only in the punk scenes that have popped up in cities and small towns around the world, but in the indie and alternative movements that punk inspired. In fashion, its influence has spread even further. You can see some of X’s rootsy simplicity in the indie rock uniform of jeans and T-shirts, and the continuing influence of McLaren and Westwood’s vision in the complexly customized jackets that have become de rigueur for rap stars. Punk style’s most enduring legacy can’t be boiled down to a particular item of clothing, or even the popularity of distressed jeans and dyed hair. It’s more about the idea of being authentic, that if you do your own thing and dress your own way, you can make the world change around you. “We would take what we would see in fashion and make it our own, where other people would take what’s in fashion and just run with it,” Lens says. “We influenced fashion more than the other way around.”

Moor Mother: “Georgia+Mass” (via SoundCloud)

“Basic” may be the most chilling pejorative of our time. And it is never more severe than when Philadelphia’s Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, churns it out on one austere, Nicki Minaj-sampling single from last year: “Look ma, we made it/Only lost a hundred thousand coming over on them slave ships/That’s just one ship,” she booms. “Muhfuckas, I’m jaded/I’m in one big room, and everybody basic.” Ayewa articulates so lucidly and irreducibly that it’s like she is writing with a ballpoint pen; if you have chosen to remain silent in the face of injustice, which is to say in the face of our world, this artist is staring you in the eye.

On a weekday night on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Ayewa caps off a performance at a stranger’s apartment—10 foldings chairs, Christmas lights, a bevy of plants—with “Basic.” Her set, which is part of a series highlighting politically-oriented artists, is a mix of soundscapes and poetry. Phrases I jot down during the show include: “no more androids for president, no more zombie artists”; “cops are grim reapers, violence costs nothing”; “the public housing of minds”; and “at what age do we teach our daughters to play dead?” Reality is rendered as hard as it ought to be. “Everything I do is a true story,” she says to the crowded living room. “I just tell the truth.”

After a decade spent in the Philly underground—as show-booker, community organizer, punk musician, rapper, poet, and multidisciplinary visual artist—Ayewa’s work has coalesced into a total vision. It is concrete-heavy, abrasive, and generative. Ayewa reimagines protest songs as radical electronic noise montages, but her lyrics about systemic racism and historical trauma are searing Afrofuturist statements. Take, for example, this incendiary line from Fetish Bones, her recent solo debut: “I’m bell hooks trained as a sniper,” Ayewa snarls, transmuting the intersectional feminist theorist into a warrior. She then declares herself “Sandra Bland returning from the dead with a hatchet,” referencing the 28-year-old black woman who was found dead in jail after being pulled over for a minor traffic violation last year. Befitting the tremendous fire of Ayewa’s words, a 122-page book of poetry was released alongside Fetish Bones.

“I let these stories pass through me—I’m the narrator,” Ayewa tells me over Skype a couple of weeks after her house-show set. In conversation, she is a calming and genial presence; she measures her thoughts, and when she mentions Alice Coltrane, it’s not hard to imagine her in graceful meditation like the cosmic jazz swamini herself. This is in utter contrast to the unwavering anger of Ayewa’s staggering performances. “I start out so smiley, but as soon as the lyric comes, I’m pissed,” she says of her live shows. “When you’re telling the truth, and trying to be respectful to the things that are happening around you, it comes out like that.”

For Fetish Bones, Ayewa was awarded a grant from the Leeway Foundation, which supports women and trans artists whose work promotes social justice. This allowed her to create a studio from scratch in a closet of her North Philadelphia home. The process of making Fetish Bones coincided with Ayewa’s process of learning to produce electronic noise, practicing on her hardware and drum machine. “There’s so many mistakes,” Ayewa says. “Limitations helped it.” But she’s learning everyday. She mentions a recent trip to Rotterdam, Netherlands, where she had access to a studio full of synths; she used the tools to blend the Dutch version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin with her own “noisy techno craziness.”

In March, Ayewa began a performance art series called “HOUR/SHIFT.” The first piece was a 14-hour endurance test, a “sonic act of protest” in solidarity with survivors of domestic and sexual assault; the second was Ayewa’s attempt at resurrecting the unmarked graves of Potter’s Field, a burial place for poor black people before the Civil War. In addition to her art, Ayewa’s projects include Black Quantum Futurism—the name under which she and partner Rasheedah Phillips lead community workshops. In June, they opened a physical space called Community Futures Lab in North Philly, which also offers discussions, exhibitions, readings, performances, and housing resources. Beyond that, by day, Aweya coaches soccer and basketball at a Quaker school; even there, her lessons naturally transcend athletics. “These kids are never meeting anyone like me,” she says with a laugh. “One of them came up to me right before a game once and she was like, ‘You know, I really didn’t like Lemonade that much,’ and then just ran onto the field.” The awkward moment eventually led to a discussion about alienation in music.

These projects all speak to Ayewa’s desire to make noise that is practical, that processes history, that can actually teach. She raises her voice and the voices of her community so that they may beget more like their own. She solidifies stories that would otherwise evaporate. She performs magic.

Born in the small town of Aberdeen, Maryland, Ayewa came up around gospel music; she sang in choir and had a rap group with friends called Sister Soldier. But when rap started sounding too “poppy” to her, she sought out harder, political artists. She ultimately got into reggae, ska, and punk via Operation Ivy, 7 Seconds, X, Sleater-Kinney, and Bikini Kill. Riot grrrl particularly inspired her song “Of Blood,” an eerie psalm for menstrual cycles. “I love how everything women were supposed to hide, riot grrrl was just like, ‘No, shove it in their fucking face,’” Ayewa says.

She eventually relocated to Philly to study photography at the Art Institute. “I grew up with not a lot of photographs of myself,” she says. “So I wanted to be a part of helping to document people who don’t have records of their families, stuff that’s not seen—but that’s really expensive, so I got kicked out of school.” She still does photography, though, and her work as a preservationist continues with Fetish Bones.

For six years, Ayewa toured as bassist and vocalist in the DIY punk bands Girls Dressed as Girls and the Mighty Paradocs. In 2012, Moor Mother grew from her desire to say much more; she’s posted some 100 recordings to Bandcamp, with samples ranging from children’s hand games to Fugazi’s “Waiting Room” bassline to the poets Maya Angelou, June Jordan, and Ntozake Shange. The poetry energizes her most. “That’s the stuff that gives me life,” she says. “Poetry is my hardcore. I will rage to that stuff.” But she brings the unsparing spirit of punk to her spoken-word: “People are so confused every time I play a show. They’ll be like ‘What? You just started screaming!’ I scream! I do poetry and I scream.”

Pitchfork: What was your introduction to protest music?

Moor Mother: My family used to listen to scary gospel—Mahalia Jackson, people who were not just waiting for Jesus to come, but being like, “This is what we’re living with, we’re going to push through. I’m climbing up the rough side of the mountain, and we’re going to get into this chariot and go to a better place.”

I grew up in Maryland right by the Chesapeake Bay, and my family was involved with the church in the 1700s. Everyone participated in these prayer choirs—where a group of women, or healers, or priests come together at your deathbed and say this soft prayer, but it’s almost like a song. That’s a tradition of the area. By the time I was coming up in the church, it was no more, but I was in the choir. I love that stuff. Not so much that I was a Christian, even as a kid—I had too many questions that just seemed weird—but I loved the music.

How else did growing up in Maryland shape you as an artist?

My neighborhood offered endless inspiration. My area didn’t have stores close by, so people would open up stores within their apartments: the candy-apple lady, the guy selling cigarettes, the guy that fixes your bike, the guy that is like the cab service, but not the cab service. That’s just so inspiring to me, how we can create our own marketplace and be there for each other without outside help. All that stuff is so vivid and beautiful.

And most of my family were not born in a hospital, like my mom, because [my grandmother] wasn’t allowed to go there. So the doctors had to come to the house. We’re still in that house that my grandmother had owned. Everyone has been born there.

What kind of music were you into playing in Maryland outside choir?

The number one goal was to try and be in a punk band. That was everything. But nobody was into punk or even knew anything about it where I grew up. So I just searched and searched. With ska being the influence of early Jamaican music and punk, I was able to find groups like the Specials. I liked Operation Ivy so much, they weren’t under any rules. Where I grew up, it seemed that you almost couldn’t do anything. You had to stay within rules just because it was, like, hood. I would get on the bus, and they would be like, “You’re gonna get out of this [punk] phase soon.”

When you were younger, was there anyone in particular who warped your brain or changed the way you thought about music?

I saw Patti LaBelle live, and she had these huge high heels and she kicked them off, and she was holding this note and slammed down on the stage and was rolling around. And I was just like: Yo, you can do anything you want. She wasn’t trying to be classy. All these people dressed in drag were giving her flowers. And I was like, I want to be like that. But I can’t sing like Patti LaBelle.

You have said that you’re interested in honoring music made by people who came from nothing, and music that is made from nothing. Can you elaborate on that?

Let’s start with tap dancing—that’s just your feet. You can put soda pop tops on and just go. I’ll sample that all day. And chain gangs—I love that all day because it’s in response to so many things: “I’m working, keeping busy at this hard task, with the chain on my ankle to the hit on the metal, like some beautiful music.” It’s every person’s history with the prison system.

One of my favorite instruments is the water drum. There’s tribes in Africa where women just play on the water. [makes sounds] There’s so many different sounds than a splash. I love that. I didn’t have instruments growing up. I didn’t know that I could ask for them. It was like this thing behind a glass case, like some Tom Hanks movie where you have to go to some fancy big store in New York to find some. So I would just fool around—pencils, desk, the wall, anything.

What was your first instrument?

A desk and a broom? I did get a broken guitar. I was using tapes to make things off the radio, but it didn’t make sense. I just didn’t know a lot. I still don’t, but it’s cool to work through trial and error. I never had a computer, but I saved up for an iPad. I used that thing up.

Do you have a personal definition of protest music?

It’s like the heartache and the troubles of the people trying to find their way. The true testimony of the people. Stuff that is heavy, that affects so many people, like breast cancer—but there’s not many breast cancer songs. Women need to be the ones doing protest music, really. I’m not trying to alienate anyone, but I feel like that would be the perfect definition: A woman singing trials and tribulations.

I read that you did a 14-hour performance to honor women who face domestic abuse and sexual assault. How did it go?

It was my protest for them. I was using sound to almost shut that man’s mouth, or make that home peaceful for that night. Because [women suffer abuse around the world] every nine seconds. That’s so much. It was an electronic set, all improv. I had a record player, this one Sun Ra record, a drum machine, every synth I had. I had this film playing the whole time, about a woman who killed her husband and was in prison for a long time; the husband was sexually assaulting the kids.

The day after the performance, I went to thank the gallery and I just cried and cried. It just all hit me what I was trying to do. The blessing was the messages of people saying: “Today, no one commented on my body going around the neighborhood.” Or hearing about the case of a woman facing 60 years for killing her abusive husband, and she got off, which never happens. That really touched me, but it was draining.

There’s a great place in Philly called Women Against Abuse, but you need a million of those. Say you finally decided to leave a [domestic abuse] situation—there’s a waiting list to find another place to live. It’s crazy. We’ve done events for people to move, to buy the U-Haul. And it’s like—why are we doing this? It happens so often, you would think [the city] had some sort of plan for this. It’s very archaic. I’ve gone to do workshops at places that are off the grid because women are in hiding from their abusers. You’re speaking to someone that had to go into hiding. It’s things that so many of us have experienced as kids of abuse. These cycles just keep coming up. It’s every woman’s story in a sense.

Have you always been interested in processing history through music and art?

Always. When hip-hop went dance, there was no story there, and that’s why I got into punk and Bob Marley, because I needed to hear the history—otherwise, where was I going to hear it from? Music is the way that I’m informed. It helps me know what is happening.

What do you want your own music to inform people about?

I’m trying to get to the level of being as simple as possible, telling a unified story. Everything is a reflection, or a ripple, a wave, the quantum mirror. It’s circular. We’re all more interconnected than we think. I’m trying to get to that every-person story. But we’re slow to honestly reveal what we’re going through. That’s one of the hardest things. We think we’re so isolated or alone in our issues. I try to tell the truth, the stories that haunt me.

It’s interesting to hear you say the story’s not linear. In your music, too, the way it’s structured is also very nonlinear.

It’s just because of my means and how I’m not that smart at this stuff. I’m just teaching myself. I listen to music that I can’t make. I can’t do Alice Coltrane. I have a heart, but I still can’t do it.

Alice Coltrane’s whole situation is inspiring to me. I just think about the time that she was making music, and artists who were making music a little before, like Billie Holiday. They stifled and continue to stifle women’s voices. Today we have Kesha, a pop star in a rough situation with a contract, and that’s very difficult—but do you know they killed Billie Holiday? Imagine the government being against you for singing a song. Imagine people trying to drug you and all these shady situations. In that time, you were used and left behind. It was such a struggle to be a woman making music. The fact that she was able to persevere touches me so much. Because so many did not. And there’s so many that are still unknown.

I saw you post on Facebook: “If we don’t forgive our mothers, we cannot forgive ourselves.” What did you mean by that?

There’s a war against women right now. There’s a war against mothers, and single mothers. I see it every day. We’re just throwing each other away. We’re breaking down roles of gender, but one simple disagreement and we will cast off our own mother. We are connected to our pasts, but we are taught to hate yesterday and hustle for the next. It’s like we’re writing off our mothers. The conversation needs to expand. What are we disconnecting ourselves from when we say these things?

So many people are hurt, hating their mothers, no respect for the elders in their community, for the elders in their art scene. Like when I was talking about Patti LaBelle—she is a rock star. She paved the way. But then she’s gonna be invited on “The View” to cook potato salad. That’s ridiculous. And I would like to eat her potato salad, too.

Is your name Moor Mother linked to this—honoring people who came before?

Definitely. I’m influenced by space and time and growing up, but that’s what it’s really all about: honoring the mother. If you just look at some of these statistics happening with women, it’s outrageous. Everything’s taboo. Menstrual cycle’s taboo, breast cancer’s taboo. Losing your hair and having to deal with that. It’s affecting so many of us. Why are we hiding?

One line that completely gripped me from the album is, “I’m bell hooks trained as a sniper/Sandra Bland returning from the dead with a hatchet.”

I wrote that, and then all of a sudden I get an email about opening up for bell hooks. So I’m like, “Oh shit. I hope she doesn’t hear this song—or maybe I should tell her about it.”

After that line, I say that “lyrically only I can match it.” It’s a very hip-hoppy thing to say, but I’m not playing when it comes to the lyrics. I’m so interested in spreading positivity, but that’s how I felt. I’m angered by feeling like I’m the only one saying this shit. I’m pissed because people who are supposed to be doing what I’m doing—their lyrics are mad soft. It’s mad basic to me. I feel like it’s getting there, it just takes time to get back to a more political place. But with this election, it seems like people are honestly worked up about it—and not just worked up as a trending topic.

I think music is going to get more literal, and then I hope that it can start getting practical, where we could actually take these songs into a workshop or into the community and be like, “This is a song that we can use to teach about history or what’s happening, not just a hook.” It’s so easy to say a bunch of bullshit and then just have the hook be “Black Lives Matter” and that’s it. That’s cheap. I want to encourage people to dig deeper lyrically. I want to encourage myself to write better. I love finding anyone better than me.

You have a new space in North Philadelphia called Community Futures Lab—what has that taught you as a musician? Has it informed what you want to do with your music?

Yeah. The whole idea is making it practical. I want to make things or create spaces where you don’t have to be on the internet and you don’t need some sort of degree. The space is there, you can just come in. We live in this community and this is where we work—the part of town I live in is one of the highest crime, lowest-income areas, and they just moved 1,300 people out of their homes. It’s this barren area at the moment.

Community Futures Lab is showing me that there’s not a lot of spaces for discussion between people of color. We do a lot of stuff—zine making, dream workshops, we have a library. We’re also recording stories of the community. We’re asking questions that deal with temporality, the memory, creating future memories for the neighborhood that we’re living in. It’s going through such rapid development. There was a house that Malcolm X spent some time in that just got knocked down. Across the street was a boxing gym where Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier would work out, but there’s no plaque. It’s really slow in North Philly as far as marking these historic moments.

That’s really what we’ve always been about: collecting memories, doing workshops to show kids and adults, “Why do you think this way about the future? Why are you not included? What can you do about it? What’s the importance of writing yourself in the future, under your own definition, not what people have prescribed for you?” So many people, when we ask the first question—“how do you see the future?”—it totally mimics popular movies. The Hunger Games is a main one. In that movie, certain people are in these districts, certain people are farmers, and all the black people die first. These movies prescribe what so many of us think about the future, especially people of color. Being so disconnected from so many of our histories, as far as what’s beyond our great grandmother. It’s very dire times for us keeping track and documenting what we’re going through and what we’ve been through. That’s what the lab is there for.

What does the title Fetish Bones mean to you?

Fetish Bones is how I think about the way we sell ourselves. Like, using each other. Being a musician, I see a lot of this. I see the way we fetishize over our skin color, over how we dress, over class. All of these ways that we toss people aside if they’re what we deem not useful. I just feel like we look at each other like meat. All across the board. We look at our own selves, our own culture, just like meat that is there to devour and not there to be preserved. Everyone wants to burn everything, and eat everything. Eat each other, the whole thing.

That goes back to the woman—just because you are the creator, you’re not everyone’s savior. At the end of the day, you’ve been used and ran through. No. I’m not even a mother of children. After I did my recent festival, I was like, “I want to go home and feel inspired. I don’t want to go home used, crying about not being appreciated.” Traditionally, mom is supposed to be in the kitchen with little whoever on their titty and daddy on their lap. It’s time for women, for everyone, to start walking in that space—we’re not going to be used. Redefining all of this. Having more compassion. Redefining what that means, when everything can be a meme of everything. That’s what Fetish Bones is. Feeling like a hunk of bones.

Five years ago, Justin Vernon interviewed one of his heroes, an artist he’s been listening to since sixth grade: DIY patron saint Ian MacKaye. At the time, the Bon Iver leader was gaining global notoriety thanks to the surprise success of his debut album and collaborations with Kanye West, and he was figuring out how far he wanted to go with this newfound fame. So he asked MacKaye, perhaps punk’s most infallible moral bellwether, why he stopped his band Fugazi in the early 2000s, when the group was still thriving culturally and commercially. Vernon remembers MacKaye’s devastatingly simple answer: “I’m not an expansionist.” Talking to me earlier this fall, Vernon says he still mulls over that response, how it can be applied to so many crossroads. “People who are into finance don’t stop to ask that Ian MacKaye question,” he says, “but I think about it in regards to almost everything: What am I doing this for?”

Vernon isn’t necessarily considering such anti-expansionism in terms of ending Bon Iver, or even when it comes to record sales—he sounds genuinely excited that his third album, 22, A Million, bowed at number two on the charts, if only for numerological reasons (his last record debuted in the same spot in 2011, the two twos neatly mirroring the new record’s title). But on the day of 22’s worldwide release, when beardo Bon fans across the planet, from Australia to Vernon’s hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, are taking in the album’s disruptive sounds for the first time, the man himself isn’t in the middle of a media blitz. Instead, he’s in Berlin, at a hulking, German Democratic Republic-era studio complex called the Funkhaus (the name is nowhere near as corny as it sounds—funk is just German for “radio”).

Vernon is here with 85 of his closest friends—musicians connected to him through every era of his life—who have been invited to come play with each other for a week, concluding with an intentionally nameless two-day music festival. The idea is to reexamine the enterprise of making songs, to show that musicians are compelled to make music whether there’s anybody to sell it to or not, and to offer a more human antidote to the preponderance of regimented and anodyne mega-fests. Vernon, along with his longtime friend Ryan Olson of Marijuana Deathsquads, the National’s Dessner brothers, André de Ridder of the Berlin chamber pop orchestra s t a r g a z e, and the French experimental filmmaker Vincent Moon, decided on the performers and are serving as head counselors for this sleepover adult music camp. They were given the complete run of the Funkhaus and its six gorgeous studios, simply named—by German engineers, naturally—Saal 1 through Saal 6, with the goal of presenting a grand finale talent show that around 4,500 fans will pay 88 euros apiece to see.

It feels like Vernon is searching to say something big with his new album and with this festival, and that perhaps he’s realized that the language we all share is inadequate to the task. Musing on the overarching ideas behind the event, he tells me, “If we run with this, I think it will help to break down…” He stops himself. “It’s not even about breaking down capitalism—it’s just about showing people a different way.” Because if we stick with the status quo, he surmises, we’re doomed to a cookie-cutter existence of corporate homogeny. 

Meanwhile, 22, A Million is covered with symbols that are strange but familiar and filled with music that can be hard to latch onto; the second a sonic idea seems to come into focus, it vanishes into noise. The 35-year-old is groping for something new—and noise is free of cultural baggage, which makes it very attractive to him right now. The clearest reason so many people identify with Bon Iver’s music is straightforward—it’s the tone of Vernon’s famous falsetto. He’s a big guy from the Midwest, but he sounds so alone, so vulnerable, so desperate to connect with somebody out there. The emotion is sincere, but it’s operating on a pre-articulate level; language has failed him enough times that he’s searching for an idiom that doesn’t quite exist yet.

Most of the time, Vernon seems uncomfortable with sweeping philosophical declarations. He’s not afraid to take a position, such as introducing Bernie Sanders at a rally in Eau Claire earlier this year or criticizing Beyoncé for selling carbonated corporate sugar water, but he can be wary of formulating any kind of manifesto. “Not to say that we’re going to be some ringleaders in some romantic revolución,” he says, “but if something is going to stick it’s gotta be sustainable economically—to show that there’s value in things that aren’t just multi-billion dollar corporate enterprises. We have to show that there’s real value in what we want to do musically.”

In the city of Brecht and Bauhaus, a place famous for a relentless reconsideration of fundamentals and a taste that leans towards a minimal aesthetic purity where form equals function, radical ideas can bubble up with ease. Vernon and his comrades came into this week with specific ideas about performance in their temporary autonomous zone: short sets, rampant collaboration, playing music an audience has never heard before, and removing money from the equation as completely as possible.

None of the artists were paid; they worked for room and board (aka round-the-clock open bar) at the nearby Michelberger Hotel. Run by artist-friendly proprietors Tom Michelberger and Nadine May, the hotel was shut down for the week, but their hospitality did not slack: Along with their staff, the two owners basically pulled double or triple shifts—attending to the artists’ every need at both the Michelberger and the Funkhaus, keeping everybody buzzed with the Michelberger’s own brand of schnapps and hydrated with the Michelberger’s own brand of coconut water. There was a little blue Funkhaus bus out front of the hotel every half hour that shuttled everybody back and forth. The artists even paid for their own schnitzel at the Funkhaus’ Milchbar canteen with marbles from a little hobbit satchel that Michelberger gave them at the beginning of the week. The only thing you needed real cash for was drugs.

Turns out, Berlin is the perfect city in which to contemplate an alternate Western reality. This is the logical result of losing back-to-back world wars before enduring another 45 years of the most repressive police state ever created. Berlin’s vibe, with its graffiti and its enthusiasm for the drug and sex culture du jour and its drab industrial spaces just begging to be (even further) gentrified, could only exist in a place where the authorities have completely surrendered. It’s still cheap enough here that you don’t have to work that much or make that much money to get by.

The DJ and producer Boys Noize is one of the townies at Camp Funkhaus, and he tells me that Berlin has always been freaky, from the bohemian anarchy of its Weimar days through its status as a refuge for anybody who didn’t want to join the army during the Cold War, to the apotheosis of minimal techno in the mid 2000s. “When you live here for a little bit you realize that you can have a good life without being distracted by capitalism or what society wants from you,” he says. “You feel less pressure in committing to that life here.”

“You should sit right here,” Vernon tells me as he motions towards an acoustically privileged corner of the cherrywood paneled Saal 1. “That way you’ll get the stereo effect of the choir.” The room, which can only fit about 500 people, is largely empty except for four Bon Iver gear cases and a drum kit. It’s early on Saturday night, the first day of the festival’s public performances.

I’m with two Eau Claire dudes Vernon has been tight with going back to middle school: Drew Christopherson, head of the Minneapolis indie label Totally Gross National Product and a drummer for the rock band Poliça, and Trever Hagen, a musicologist now living in Lisbon who played trumpet in Mount Vernon, one of Justin’s first bands. In fact, almost a quarter of the musicians at this thing come from the Minnesota/Wisconsin axis, players with a direct connection to either Vernon or Olson, the other Eau Claire guy on the organizing committee.

We’re close enough to see the strange runes stenciled onto the four equipment cases—there’s a Grateful Dead symbol, the anarchy sign, and the words “Six Six Six” and “Camel Wides.” The four different colored boxes are covered in this witchy shit, like they’re protecting Bon Iver from bad voodoo. The markings were stenciled by Eric Timothy Carlson, basically Bon Iver’s in-house visual artist, the guy who designed all of the art that went on and into the new album. He’s also responsible for the huge 500-foot-long painting that hangs in the Funkhaus’ Shed Hall—a parking garage that’s been converted into a temporary 5,000-capacity concert space. The painting features massive black Helvetica letters that spell out “PEOPLE.” (Carlson considers the font to be “humanist” because there’s still a whisper of the pressure points of a human hand in its typography.) Below the giant visual, there’s a kiosk selling white “PEOPLE” T-shirts. It’s the only merch available at the fest.

At 6 p.m., members of the incognito choir flow in and take their positions around the room. Then the audience starts to enter, and an excited pre-concert murmur warms the space. Most of the crowd doesn’t really know what’s about to go down. They were never given any information beyond a list of confirmed musicians, which was presented alphabetically in order to subvert expectations. 

When Vernon and the latest configuration of Bon Iver—Mike Lewis, Sean Carey, Matt McCaughan, and Andrew Fitzpatrick—emerge from backstage, they all face each other in the round, with their backs to us. They play a few songs from the new record: The lonely existentialist lullaby “22 (OVER S∞∞N),” the distortion-filled “10 d E A T h b R E a s T,” which culminates in a short wrestling match between Vernon and his Gibson SG. The set peaks when the secretly embedded choir rises to their feet after the drop in “33 ‘GOD’,” an anthemic sort of hymn. Vernon was right: I am in the perfect spot.

Even though I knew the choir was coming, the patterns of their voices as they ping around Saal 1 is almost overwhelming. At the end of their 25 minute set, Vernon and the entire band sit down right on the floor and look up. Everyone follows their gaze to a balcony 15 feet above the ground, where one of Vernon’s favorite bands, an experimental punk duo from the island of Java called Senyawa, begin to do their thing. Backed by Wukir Suryardi on hand-engineered bamboo instruments, Senyawa singer Rully Shabara unleashes one of the most expressive human voices you will ever hear—he screeches with the power of black metal and wails with the tenderness of opera. Shabara surfs the acoustics of the big studio, throwing Indonesian words and guttural noises around the space like a ventriloquist poet. It’s like we’re in church, and the laity are as reverent as they were for Bon Iver. After the show, Suryardi tells me most of their lyrics are about a beautiful mountain and a forest on their home island. When I point out their music sounds more radical than songs about a mountain, he asks, “What’s more radical than a mountain?”

All weekend, amidst all the warm and fuzzy intimacy between audience and artist, there are reminders of our sad Pavlovian response to fame. The lack of information available to the crowd is intended as a way to challenge the consumer-centric modus operandi of most music festivals, and while there are definitely sets that are enjoyed in this spirit, there’s also friction: Some people are frustrated with long lines, complaining that they didn’t get to see Bon Iver. And there’s an awkward moment in the middle of Senyawa’s mini-set, when a woman dashes down from the back row to where Vernon is sitting yogi style in front of his case. She comes up from behind and throws her arms around him and whispers something in his ear. He looks extremely uncomfortable but keeps nodding vigorously and giving her the thumbs up without taking his eyes off the band until she releases him. It’s weird seeing Vernon’s vulnerability punctured in the middle of this intimate setting he dreamed up for all of us.

In the week leading up to the festival, the musicians working at the Funkhaus were in perpetual motion, putting in 12 hour days. Underneath that cacophony, the place radiated a dark profundity. It was built by Franz Ehrlich, a communist architect who graduated from the Bauhaus school and was imprisoned by the Nazis in 1935. He worked at the Buchenwald concentration camp and was forced to design its gate along with a horrid sign that read “jedem das seine,” or, “to each what he deserves.” 

After the war, Ehrlich worked for the GDR on the reconstruction of Dresden before designing the Funkhaus in 1951. After reunification, the Funkhaus sat in disrepair for a few months, but has since been in perpetual use as a music studio at various levels of professionalism (both Sting and the Black Eyed Peas have recorded here). Recently, it was purchased for 13 million euros by a Stuttgart developer, and it seems fated to be the latest symbol of the gentrification of East Berlin’s glorious industrial wasteland.

The Funkhaus’ origin story is heavy, and musicians are sensitive—so all week everybody was game to smoke a joint and talk about the effect of the Stasi on socialist art, or to discuss Hitler’s uncanny voice and his phonetic powers of persuasion, or to compare the spectre of post-truth right wing politics in Europe with its Trumpy American equivalent.

From the outset, it was apparent that there were two separate cliques in attendance, both of them strongly representative of the two strands of musical DNA coiled in Vernon’s life. On one side were the folky virtuosos, including the Dessner brothers, the cool first-chair orchestra kids in s t a r g a z e, the English sisters in the Staves, and the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson. And there were the noisy punks, like Boys Noize, the grime MC Trim, Baltimore rapper Spank Rock, and Minneapolis weirdos Marijuana Deathsquads.

Squads conductor Ryan Olson has been something of a role model for Vernon for years and played an integral part in getting 22, A Million to the finish line. Back home, Olson is the one known for hiding his face from the press, and his band is known for performing in the round with their backs to the audience; now, Vernon is telling the world “faces are for friends,” and Bon Iver are setting up in a circle, dishing out noise. Vernon tells me that when he was in eighth grade and Olson was a senior, Olson’s punk band Sled Napkin was the most radical thing to ever hit Eau Claire—Vernon was so moved by a Sled Napkin set in 1995 that he actually wrote Olson a fan letter.

At one point during the week at the Funkhaus, Vernon could be found jamming with Olson and the Dessner brothers over a new National track in Saal 4. Vernon was wearing an ancient Sled Napkin T-shirt that he earned for his work on Relayted, the 2010 album released by Olson’s regional soft rock supergroup, Gayngs. “This was the payment for 10 months of work,” Vernon told me. Olson shot back: “Do you think it would’ve taken 10 months if I were paying you?”

While these collaborations went down during the day at Funkhaus, perhaps even more crucial was what went down at night on the sixth floor of the Michelberger, where Olson set up shop with his Squads a week before everybody else arrived. It was where you could find a card table set up with Vernon on his small OP-1 synth, the French musician Woodkid and the Minneapolis ambient artist Albert Elmore each manning a laptop filled with samples, Boys Noize on a drum machine, and the turntablist Fog scratching records.

This was Olson’s filthy Northeast Minneapolis bedroom transplanted to Berlin, where a rotating cast of musicians created a nightly racket which teased the dawn, with everyone else hanging out the windows blowing dro towards the train station down below as the beer bottles and cigarette butts piled up. This was where the folky virtuosos broke the ice—really fucked the ice up good—with the noisy punks. Surveying the room, it reminded me of what Brian Eno, another great thinker who spent a critical period in Berlin, was talking about when he coined the term “scenius”: musical ideas often get attributed to a master genius, but they are almost always the result of collaboration that can be traced back to a scene, a locale, a group.

Vernon is quick to volunteer how he’s been inspired by Olson’s ideas and sense of community, but he pinpoints one of his friend’s attributes above all: “He does not lie.” And Vernon believes that this truthfulness is distinctly powerful right now. “We fib to ourselves to get out of an uncomfortable situation, and I genuinely want people to feel happy and comfortable—it’s this Midwestern thing,” Vernon says. “But you’ll get it straight from Ryan—he’s all about rolling a joint, putting it in your mouth, and telling you to sing something. That’s this weekend: get drunk, get some energy going, be a person and get involved.”

When I meet up with Vernon back in Minneapolis after the festival, he had already cancelled his flight home twice and was coming down with a nasty cold. He had only been off the plane for a couple of hours, and I could tell he still hadn’t really landed. We gravitate toward the most private booth at Constantine, a fancy basement bar downtown, where he nurses a brandy hot toddy. 

He says the idea of leaving Berlin and the artistic utopia he helped create felt bad—“like sooooo bad, like almost scary bad.” He tells me he rolled on the last night of the fest—little pills with the Chupa Chups logo were being passed around back at the Michelberger, because Berlin—but “it might have been the most unnecessary drug experience of my entire life.” It helped him stay up until 10 in the morning, but he doesn’t remember anything after 3:30 a.m. Plus, his serotonin and dopamine levels were spiking that whole week anyway. “I felt like I was on rolls from Tuesday until Saturday,” he says. “The only other time I felt like that before is when I was a hormonal 13-year-old kid at Camp Manitou.” He feels like he found a new, stripped down mode in which to perform. “That’s how I want music to feel,” he says.

While the principals involved have concluded that the happening was an unqualified success, Tom Michelberger tells me he did lose between 100,000 and 200,000 euros on the endeavor, adding that it’s probably impossible to do this again without some straight-up revolutionary changes in arts patronage. But is it too ambitious to ask artists to lead the charge? Especially at the Funkhaus, where musicians were once spied on by the Stasi literally around the clock—every Bauhaus-style clock in the entire complex used to be bugged—it doesn’t seem preposterous.

“I can accept more about myself and my position when I start to really feel the tribal thing happening,” Vernon says. “This weekend I felt so comfortable—and if I was ever uncomfortable, it was because of some drunk guy asking, ‘How is it like being you, man? Isn’t that crazy?’ I’m not even close to being in that zone. I’m not worried about who I am and all these problems that I had because I’m so far away from it.”

But Vernon is trying not to shy away. Even though 22, A Million invites so much scrutiny over its internal numerology, a very considerable amount of ingenuity went into finding words and numbers and symbols that complement Vernon’s tone and expand his message. His jersey number in high school was 22. And along with the naked biblical allusions that come with the number 33, that was the age when Vernon went through the most shit, when he was really grappling with fame, when people were hungriest for what he had to say, stopping him in the street and telling him how great he was, when he never felt so alone.

Vernon is feeling better about dealing with the pressure now. He’s more concerned about the responsibility of the artist—what is the most powerful way to connect? What message should he be conveying? Are there more viable platforms than fame? 

Ultimately, he wants to explore without completely abandoning what he’s already done. “I always feel like it’s my job to give people a little something that will be weird but also give them an avenue of understanding,” he tells me. He adds that, in Berlin, he was equally excited to play with Bon Iver as he was to play with Hrrrbek, the noise project he shares with Trever Hagen, named after the folk hero first baseman for the Minnesota Twins. Because Hagen has been living in Europe for 13 years, Hrrrbek has been a catch-as-catch-can situation: random gigs in parks at night or for a handful of people in a hotel bathroom. But at the Funkhaus, in Saal 6, more than 100 people watched them perform. And, at least at the outset, the audience was rapt.

Vernon started out on the OP-1, making a loop of Hagen’s breathy trumpet sounds. Then they were joined by Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, formerly of the Icelandic band Múm, who mumbled and played the softest grand piano I’ve ever heard, and Bon Iver’s Fitzpatrick, who plinked on another piano. The four of them moved around like deranged children who had been overdosed with ritalin—at one point Vernon lost his ballcap and his wispy top hairs jumped through the discord of his acoustic guitar as noise eventually turned into a riff. Vernon then picked up his hat and set upon a piano. As Valtýsdóttir scrambled to a drum kit, Hagen began to make chicken sounds.

Eventually, the audience started to leave—in dribs and drabs at first, then in a steady stream. They obviously knew they were watching Justin Vernon from Bon Iver, but it probably appeared that he had lost his mind, or was at least indulging madness. As the discord wound down, Valtýsdóttir somehow conjured an apple and flung it into a bass drum with a satisfying thunk. End of show.

The amps are still buzzing from Japandroids’ paint-peeling performance at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern when the band’s roadie steps out to make an announcement: An audience member has lost their wedding ring in the mosh pit. A mad scramble ensues, as smartphone flashlights swoop and swirl across the club’s checkerboard floor like mini-police choppers. Suddenly, a hand thrusts victoriously into the air, a ring pinched between its thumb and index finger. A chorus of cheers and hugs between strangers ensue. And so ends this five-minute tale of chaos, drama, camaraderie, and true love prevailing—there was no encore on this October night, but at least we got to see another Japandroids song play out in real life.

Ever since they appeared in a warm embrace on the cover of their 2009 debut, Post-Nothing, singer/guitarist Brian King and drummer Dave Prowse have engendered a palpable bonhomie among their fans. From day one, they’ve wanted to be the house band for the most pivotal moments of your life, bashing out the sort of garage-spawned, arena-sized pop-punk anthems that instinctively make you want to wrap your arms around your best mate and yell like hell to the heavens.

But where Japandroids’ 2012 follow-up Celebration Rock boasted possibly the most self-explanatory album title in rock history, it was the sort of party where they always had one eye on the clock, bracing themselves for the inevitable moment when the lights were flipped on, the room cleared out, and real-world responsibilities beckoned once again. And now that time has come. With their upcoming third album, Near to the Wild Heart of Life, Japandroids have quit the adrenaline nightshift—they want to make music they’ll still respect in the morning.

“Celebration Rock might be great for driving or partying, but there are certain circumstances where it’s just not the right album!” says King. “Great rock‘n’roll albums—like The Velvet Underground & Nico—work anytime because there’s a little something for everyone.”

Japandroids’ set at the Horseshoe is part of a small, six-city club tour marking the Vancouver duo’s return to the stage after a three-year layoff. But technically, they never stopped traveling in the interim. Though Prowse is still based in Vancouver, King has relocated to Toronto, but actually spends most of his downtime in Mexico City, where his girlfriend lives. When it came time to write material for the new album in the fall of 2014, they reconvened for five weeks in New Orleans, before bouncing back and forth among all the aforementioned cities. And while the album was mostly recorded back in Vancouver with long-time producer Jesse Gander, the road to completion also included pit stops in Montreal, New York, and Bridgeport, Connecticut. 

But on this warm-up tour, Japandroids aren’t just introducing audiences to some of the songs that make up Near to the Wild Heart of Life. They’re also introducing the songs to themselves. Because, for the first time, Japandroids the live band and Japandroids the studio entity have become two very different things—and, at this point, the former isn’t quite sure how it’s going to recreate the sounds produced by the latter.

At their core, Japandroids are still very much a band that writes valorous songs about living for the moment and loving for a lifetime. But the anxious, slash-and-burn abandon of old has matured into a steadier hand and confident poise; the gritty surface buffed away for a radio-ready polish; the duo’s minimalism blown open to absorb the infinite possibilities of the recording studio. For the first time on a Japandroids record, there are prominent acoustic guitars. And synthesizers. And a shoegaze ballad. And, in centerpiece track “Arc of Bar,” a seven-minute, Haçienda-bound psych-disco epic—complete with guest vocals from their girlfriends—that will require Prowse to use a sampler pad to trigger drum loops live.

“In some ways, we’re approaching this like it’s our very first record,” King says. “We’re removing all the self-imposed rules that led to the songs and the sound of our whole career up until now. When you do that, you can try anything.” 

The evolution goes beyond those sonic embellishments. The title Near to the Wild Heart of Life is a line from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (sourced via Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s 1943 novel Near to the Wild Heart). And though King is reluctant to dwell on any direct literary influence, he was inspired to think more about crafting narratives this time, to bring more color, nuance, and dramatic purpose to a record where the booze-fuelled mania that produced his previous writing has been replaced by a clear-eyed contentment.

Really, the difference between the new Japandroids and the old Japandroids can be read through their albums’ covers. Like its predecessors, the new record is adorned by a black-and-white photo of the pair—but it’s a posed studio portrait instead of a candid backstage snap, and the guys are sporting nicer clothes and more serious facial expressions. These are subtle differences that underscore a big change: On Near to the Wild Heart of Life, Japandroids give you older us.

The setting of our interview only reinforces this growth. The day before the Horseshoe show, a band that once cut its teeth in DIY spaces andindustry-resistant festivals is holding court in a boardroom at the Spoke, a private member’s club in downtown Toronto that charges an annual fee of $800. Granted, King and Prowse aren’t actually members themselves, but the posh environs are indicative of the kind of resources that Japandroids’ new big-league labels—ANTI- in the U.S. and Arts & Crafts in Canada—are investing to push the band to an even wider audience.

True to their humble roots, King and Prowse just order a couple of waters.

Pitchfork: Given all the extra instrumentation on this new album, do you think it is going to be a lot harder to recreate live?

Brian King: That’s one of the fundamental differences between not just this record and the previous one, but from the whole first era of the band. When we started, we were trying to achieve a very specific thing: To essentially make a really great live record in the studio—to preserve the sound and the energy and the experience of actually seeing the band play. And we finally achieved that with Celebration Rock. So you’ve got two places you can go from there: Either you can continue doing that indefinitely—because you’ve figured out how to do it, and also because people like it—or you can say, “It’s time to start on a new path.” So this record is less an extension of our last one, and more the first document of whatever happens from here forward.

After you finished touring Celebration Rock, did you think, “I need a break from this kind of music”? Because people look to the band for a certain kind of cathartic song, and I imagine it’s physically and emotionally draining to deliver that every night.

BK: You get older and different kinds of music start to seep in. When we first started, we were listening to music that was closer to the music we were actually making. But in our 10 years together, our listening habits have changed, even though we’ve continued to play in a loud, energetic rock band. The artists I listened to the most while writing and recording this were Tom Waits and Townes Van Zandt. I wouldn’t say we have a lot in common with them musically, but those influences are very obvious to me. Their songs are stories. There’s a journey—it’s not just blah blah blah and then the chorus.

Thematically speaking, the first two records were very much about lamenting a past that can’t be recaptured. This record feels more comfortable with embracing the present.

Dave Prowse: That’s a reflection of where we’re at as people.

BK: Because we’ve been playing our first shows in so long, we’ve been relearning all these songs that we haven’t played in a few years and were written even longer ago—it’s like you’re almost coming face-to-face with your younger self. But I actually find that person very difficult to identify with now. At one time, perhaps I was nostalgic for being younger than I was, and it’s obviously reflected in the songs, but I really enjoy our life now, the age we are, and I’m not in any way nostalgic for being younger and anything that happened then.

How does the fact you’re both in steady relationships factor into the way you write now? There’s a sense of feeling settled on this record, of looking forward to coming home after you’ve been on the road.

BK: Domestic bliss equals great rock‘n’roll! Especially so since Post-Nothing, which was a record about being in Vancouver and dreaming of leaving it and seeing the rest of the world. But now the idea of home is more conceptual—it no longer refers to a specific city or place.

Celebration Rock was a record about trying to condense the whole world into an album, because we’d just seen all these places and met all these people for the first time. For a while, I thought those were the only two options: You either write about home, or you write about away. And we actually, by chance, found a third option that I didn’t think existed: to somehow find a halfway point between those—to write about home, but also incorporate different cities and countries, and somehow put it all together in a cohesive way. I think we’re fucked for the fourth album…

DP: We’re going to space!

So far, you’ve enjoyed this incremental ascent on your own terms. But now you’ve traded up to bigger labels and are about to release your most produced, accessible record to date. Is this a concerted attempt to make a more noticeable leap?

DP: We’ve never been opposed to popularity or success, and with this band, there’s the constant sense of things getting just a little bigger: You come to the same city and play a little bit bigger a room the next time, and all of a sudden people in countries you’d never been to before would ask you to come there. And this feels like the same part of that evolution. We’re hoping to play all over the world again and have as many people hear us as possible. At the same time, we still want to do it on our own terms. We were very careful about who we chose to work with.

Even as the band has broadened its appeal, your choice of cover songs—Mclusky, Nick Cave, the Gun Club—suggested you still wanted to keep one foot in a transgressive rock tradition. But that doesn’t seem to fit in with the headspace you’re in now.

BK: We never consciously did that because of the image it might associate us with. It’s just what we like.

But it does feel like you’re exploring a completely different sonic language here.

BK: Well, wait until you hear the covers we’re doing this time! The B-side to the first single is going to be a cover of Talking Heads’ “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire.” One of the cool things about doing these cover songs is you approach it in a way you never would’ve thought about for your own song. So, to some extent, you accidentally expand your own sound and abilities.

Was there a moment making the new record when you listened back and said, “Whoa, I didn’t think we could ever sound like this?”

DP: Yes. “Arc of Bar” was that song. I have a very distinct memory of being in the mixing room and hearing one of the final mixes on these giant studio speakers and just being like, “Holy shit, this is awesome! I have no idea what people are going to think of this, but it sounds crazy!”

BK: With this album, the idea of what intensity means is evolving. It doesn’t necessarily mean screaming or jumping around or flailing about or being really loud or playing really fast. As a Nick Cave fan, you know you can be just as intense doing something slower or softer, and really get something that blows you away. If you go see Slayer, you will be blown away. But you can also see Leonard Cohen and be blown away. So we’re just trying to figure out how to be intense in different ways. With the songs on Celebration Rock—there really aren’t 10 ways to play them well. There’s, like, one. But that’s one of the great things about these new songs—you could approach them at different shows in different ways.

And ultimately, the kids will mosh to anything.

BK: At one of the shows we just did in Vancouver, the crowd was having great fun and moving around, but the first time I actually saw two people crowd surf at the same time was when we hit our most mid-tempo song in the set. I thought we were taking a breather!

Danny Brown is a sound archivist, compiling offbeat samples from across time and preserving them as the bedrock of his mad scientist take on hip-hop. Since 2011, he has been at the forefront of rap experimentation while remaining uniquely in tune with the genre’s roots, unifying classicists and progressives alike. His 2011 breakthrough, XXX, carried in it his tumultuous past, one riddled with drug use and distribution in his hometown of Detroit. He subsequently became a poster boy for zonked-out party rap, a role often at odds with his reality and his anxieties.

The 35-year-old Brown, a late-bloomer, has had a career paved with misfortunes, arrests, and industry machinations. He spent the first half of his 30s making up for time lost to prisons and label executives in his 20s, rewriting the rules of what it means to have a successful rap career. His new album, Atrocity Exhibition, is meant as a sequel to XXX, a living document of an eventful chapter in his life, with influences ranging from Joy Division, Raekwon, Björk, Talking Heads, and more. He is constantly using different artists, albums, and songs as reference points in his life, as he explains below, recalling the sounds that molded him as a musician and a man, five years at a time.

Run-D.M.C.: Raising Hell

Around 1986, this was the album everybody was listening to everywhere you went. You couldn’t escape it. And it didn’t sound like nothing else. I’d heard rap music before that, but this was real minimal, raw, and in-your-face. I remember my family barbecuing and playing Raising Hell on the Fourth of July—when it came on, I stopped playing with the other kids and just sat there and listened to that album, back and forth, back and forth, flipping the tape over. I almost knew the entire thing by the time that day was over.

Subconsciously, it [had an impact on the way I make music] because it taught me how to have an open mind, with them working with Aerosmith and everything. They was already crossing genres before I even thought about it. And they weren’t even being experimental like that because they didn’t even know what they was doing—they was just going with they heart and they ears. In some sense, Raising Hell was like my introduction to rock music.

Scarface: Mr. Scarface Is Back

I was just starting to write and rap then, in the fifth grade. And that’s when I heard Mr. Scarface Is Back for the first time. It scared the shit out of me. I’d never heard music that struck that emotion in me. He rapped with such conviction. I didn’t have no choice but to believe him. It was almost like a preacher type of thing; like he had a sermon going. My cousin had the Geto Boys album, too, but that didn’t strike me that same way as when I first heard the song “Mr. Scarface.” It had the Scarface sample on there and the beat was so crazy. It was shock value to me. It was like, What is this guy talking about?!

Nas: It Was Written

’96 was one of the biggest years for me, especially becoming a rapper. I actually had a job at the time, which was rare; I didn’t really work jobs. But I lied on this application at this buffet—I was 14, but you’re supposed to be 16 to work in Michigan. I’d been working there for about a year when Nas’ It Was Written came out. I was already a super Nas fan: trying to dress like Nas, had my hair cut like him. I had to go to work the day it came out, but I remember buying the album at the mall and going back home and listening to it and just instantly saying: fuck work. I called in and they was like, “If you don’t come to work you getting fired,” and I was just like, “Well, fuck it then, I’m getting fired.” I lost that job to stay home and listen to Nas. It was the best decision I made in my life. That day, just sitting at the house listening to that album, made me say, Fuck everything—I’m going full-fledged with this rap thing.

The White Stripes: “Hotel Yorba”

I went to this spot in Detroit called The Old Miami and saw the White Stripes play there, and you could tell home people was dick-riding them! They was treating them like celebrities. I was wondering why people was acting like that, because I went there to see bands play all the time and I didn’t know about them. I lived in the neighborhood and I would just go hang out there and try to pick up girls and shit. Listening to the music, I couldn’t get into it at first, but then I heard “Hotel Yorba,” and I was like, “Fuck, this is so good.” On that one you could more get into the lyrics and the song because the drums wasn’t so loud and going crazy. I fell in love with them right there. And next thing I know they was on MTV. It changed my life in that sense of knowing that I seen these guys play in a dive bar in Detroit and now they on MTV and they was winning Grammys after that. They really gave me that inspiration that I could do it on my own terms.

Gnarls Barkley: St. Elsewhere

I was in New York making mixtapes and trying to get my stuff going in 2006. It was a hard time in my life. I was going through a lot of shit. I wasn’t where I wanted to be. I was fucking poor. And because I was so depressed and going through shit, the album that really sticks out to me was Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere. That’s a classic to me. It helped me out. I went to jail like not too long after that, and that Gnarls Barkley shit was in my head all the time. I sang [The Odd Couple’s] “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul” to myself and was really feeling like that. Imagine singing that to yourself in jail. I was really going through it, man. That’s not an easy time to relive.

Around then I was really getting into Dilla, too, starting to respect how much of a genius he was, going back and doing my homework. Before that, I knew of his work from a distance, but I was probably being a hater; I wasn’t into Detroit rappers because I was trying to get my own shit going. But I came back to it because I didn’t have a sound and I didn’t know myself musically. So the best and easiest thing to do was to adapt to my environment. And what’s the sound of Detroit: J Dilla.

At the time, [label reps] was trying to get me to do whatever was trendy. I wasn’t being able to spread my wings and be artistic. So I was like, “Fuck that, I’m gonna start rapping off these Dilla instrumentals.” That’s how [mixtape series] Detroit State of Mind came about—because I didn’t want to rap over fucking 50 Cent instrumentals.

St. Vincent: Strange Mercy

I listen to Strange Mercy a-fucking-lot. It’s so beautiful, man. She made something so fucking crazy. It’s a story to me. It’s a movie. It’s like the album’s a dominatrix. It wasn’t nasty and dirty like XXX was, but it was pretty much hitting on some of the same topics. There was some freaky, sexy-ass shit going on in that album, but you wouldn’t know that in layman’s terms—you had to dive inside of it. I liked her for that. I’m a huge fan of St. Vincent. Annie Clark’s a bad muthafucka, man.

During that time I was experimenting, too. I don’t even remember [making XXX], but I do know that I wasn’t done with it. They forced me to put it out, they took it from me. But I’m glad they took it from me because I probably would’ve fucked it up. I’ve learned that you can overdo stuff just thinking about it too hard. XXX taught me just to rap, make songs, and don’t overthink shit. I recorded that album in two days. I didn’t have a budget. I just got with my friend who was working at a studio, and he would let me come in late at night once his shift was over and we would just record until six in the morning. The first night I tried to go as far as I could, but my voice went hoarse, so the next day I came back and I finished the rest.

David Bowie: Blackstar

Blackstar is definitely the biggest album to me this year. That album is fucking creepy. It scares the shit out of me. And those videos. Fuck. I kind of relate to it, to him. When you put that much of your life into music, can’t nobody ever take that—you can’t rate that. You can’t review this. He died for this. This is his life right here. When people talk about the best albums of the year, I be like, “Y’all don’t realized Bowie’s album came out this year and he fucking died? What is y’all talking about?” We should hands-down know what the best album of this year is. Shouldn’t be talk of nothing else.

More than 130 million people are expected to vote in this year’s U.S. election. Polls suggest the race for the White House will be close. It has certainly been divisive. And yet if supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton agree on anything, it’s the power of voting. Democrat or Republican, casting a ballot instills a sense of pride, of civic involvement, of being a part of something historic and humbling. With Election Day finally upon us tomorrow, we asked a range of musicians—of differing ages and backgrounds—to reflect on their first voting experiences, how it felt, and what it meant to them.

Eleanor Friedberger

My first memory of voting was in nursery school in 1980; I was 4 years old.  Our class was seated on the floor, and our teacher sat in a chair, holding up two magazines, each with a different old man on the cover. She asked us to raise our hands to vote for either Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan. I remember thinking “Ronald Reagan” sounded like “Ronald McDonald,” so I voted for him.

I voted for the first time (legally) in 1996 when I was 20 years old and a junior at the University of Texas in Austin. Bill Clinton’s candidacy in ’92 was the first time I remember feeling genuinely excited about an election—probably, and mostly because, my parents truly loved him; it felt like a friend of my parents was running for office. When it came time to re-elect Clinton in ’96, I was grateful to be a part of the experience and join the club. It felt good to be a registered Democrat in such an overwhelmingly conservative state. Although I still wasn’t old enough to drink, I could vote, and that made me feel like a grown-up.

Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart

When I turned 18 I registered as a socialist. My parents thought I was being a grandstanding ass and that I would be arrested by latent McCarthyites. They were hippies when being a hippie meant something and they had seen the worst of what a dissenting opinion could bring upon a person.

It was Bob Dole vs. Bill Clinton, and I waited by the mailbox to receive voting information from the socialist party. Nothing came, of course. I thought I was entering some sort of progressive club that would be happy to have me. It was the beginning of realizing that politics was a much thinner game that I had been led to believe.

I was living in a weird stucco apartment complex that had enough people in it that there was a polling station right in the laundry room. My next-door neighbor was in line in front of me. As it was my first time, I was very excited, despite the recent understanding that “my” political party seemed to not care if I voted or not. My neighbor seemed annoyed by my vibratory anticipation.

However, once in the booth, the gravity of what was taking place was clear, and I slowly and carefully went over the ballot. It was a tiny thing for a tiny person to say, but it felt important, and I felt fortunate in a way that up to then I had not. My mother had a friend who had been murdered in Guatemala for registering people to vote. The laundry room, at least on that day, was orderly and quiet. I wore my “I VOTED” sticker all week.

John Prine

I didn’t get to vote until ’68—I was 22 and already out of the army. This was before they passed the amendment to let 18 year olds vote. They finally figured out that if a kid could be drafted and sent to fight overseas, they should probably be able to vote too.

Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace

I’ve never actually voted in a voting booth. In my whole adult voting career, or whatever you want to call it, I have voted via absentee ballots. It’s strange: I have no memory of that experience of going into a polling place and filling something out. I’ve always been on tour.

But the first time I voted, I voted for Ralph Nader. In 2000, more than any subsequent election, it seemed like there was more of a possibility of there being a third party, instead of there just being the same two parties every time. Voting in U.S. presidential elections in particular, you go into it with this feeling of real optimism, like it’s finally gonna make a difference. And then slowly, every four years, that feeling of optimism is kind of beaten out of you. The past eight years were restorative in a way, but having George W. Bush be the winner the first two times I voted was a disillusioning way to start things out.

Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood

My first time voting was quite unfortunate as it was 1982 in Alabama, and both options were unspeakably bad. George Wallace was running for an unprecedented fourth term as governor as a Democrat against hardcore right-winger Emory Folmar, who was running as a Republican. I had spent my entire life despising Wallace and all that he stood (in the schoolhouse doors) for; so it seemed like an easy choice. I enthusiastically campaigned for Folmar. Life, however, is complicated. And Alabama politics was and is a treacherous thing.

Wallace won that election with over 90 percent of the black vote and served his final term as possibly one of the closest things to a progressive that Alabama ever elected. This was a few years before all of the so-called Southern Democrats defected to the Republican Party. Alabama is now a deep-red state, and although strides have certainly been made in terms of my home state’s reputation for racism, much of the institutionalized barriers to racial and social progress still exist, albeit cloistered in softer tones and words.

I voted for one more Republican two years later when I voted for Reagan’s second term—a choice I have always regretted but learned much from. Much of my liberal and progressive positions are informed by my having been a reluctant and misguided conservative in my formative years.

Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic

It was 1984 in Aberdeen, Washington. I was 19 years old and did not realize I had to register to vote. I simply walked down the hill to the polling place. It was a union hall. The people there were friendly and gave me a provisional ballot. On the wall, there was a giant, somber portrait of Lyndon B. Johnson. I took my ballot and voted for Walter Mondale because I was really into American hardcore music, and there was a lot of anti-Reagan rhetoric. Mondale lost bad. I have voted in almost every election ever since.

Superchunk’s Laura Ballance

It was in 1990. George Bush was president, and North Carolina was represented in the U.S. Senate by Jesse Helms, a most repugnant racist, homophobe, and general turd. It was a tough time for those of us with any political awareness in North Carolina. Superchunk had played a concert for an organization called Vanish (Voters Against North Carolina Incumbent Senator Helms) to try to help raise awareness among the rockers that they needed to get out and vote, and also raise money for [challenger] Harvey Gantt’s campaign. So I was really hopeful and excited to go vote against Helms myself.

Once I got to the polls, though, I realized I was woefully unprepared. There were all these other races on the ballot that I did not know anything about, and I wound up voting for a lot of candidates based on their party. And if I had to choose between two Democrats, or if it was a nonpartisan race, I would vote for the woman. Not the best method. I felt pretty stupid. I had not realized that there were voter guides I could use as resources to prepare myself. My advice to all voters: Either do a lot of research before you go, or find an organization that you trust to help you figure out who to vote for in the down ballot races. All of them are really important!

Heems

I voted for the first time in 2008. The idea of a POC president who could potentially become a liberal equivalent of Reagan enthralled me. At the time I was working at a Wall Street research firm to pay off what financial aid didn’t cover at Wesleyan University. On Election Day I took the train home with a former boss of mine, a stockbroker who had always voted Republican, in many ways to appease his clients. He told me he had voted and that I was the one who convinced him to lean left this time, stressing a better future for his kids and a world where they could grow up having experienced a president who looked like them.

But I actually hadn’t voted yet that day—after a round of taking Goldman bankers out to drinks, I was rather exhausted and figured: It’s New York, we’ll vote Democrat. But it was my mother, who worked so hard to become a citizen and gain the right to vote, who urged me to vote. She said I would regret it if I didn’t. So I went to the voting booths in Long Island to vote for Obama and every Working Families Party nominee there was.

Mark Eitzel

I first voted in Columbus, Ohio. I had just moved there from living in the UK for years and thought I was doing something very adult. I had registered as an independent because I thought that was the right thing to do. I’ll never forget this angry old man at the voting booth telling me that I was just throwing away a vote; odd how I have recently become that angry old man. I really don’t want to be him, but everything I have learned in my life tells me that Trump will be a complete disaster—both to the economy and to democracy. The best people are the ones who can tell a great story. The worst are those who think they are the great story.

Local Natives’ Taylor Rice

The first time I voted was in 2008. I was a senior at UCLA, and the Obama excitement was palpable. But it was a different vote that held the most weight for me: Proposition 8 of California, which aimed to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry.

I grew up in South Orange County, the ruby red capital of a blue liberal state. California may be known for its diversity, but the OC is not. With rare exception, people there are white, upper middle class (or rich), and they go to church. In my high school, “gay” was still an epithet, and not even really a harsh one. A mild slur, something like “you suck.” Except of course, there was something darker underneath it, a wink that you were being associated with a sexual deviancy utterly rejected by our conservative culture. Like so many of us, I had been taught that being gay was wrong. God didn’t want that, Jesus didn’t want that. So when Prop 8 came out, the “YES” signs went up on lawns all over my neighborhood.

But by that point I had spent nearly four years in a liberal university, where I had met and befriended several gay students (there was only one openly gay kid at my high school). Simply by getting to know some gay human beings and questioning the cultural assumptions I grew up in, the issue had become so clear to me: Everyone deserves to be able to love who they love. When I cast my “NO” vote to protect the rights of gay people on November 4, 2008, it officially marked my emerging personal political identity, and a rejection of ideas I had been taught throughout childhood.

When I think about how divided our country is right now, how incredible the extremes, it can be difficult not to feel bewildered and cynical about the future. It can feel difficult to not want to demonize millions of people as selfish and unthinking. But most aren’t. They just don’t know any Mexicans, or Muslims, or women (just kidding—harder to understand that one, but let’s not go there right now). How do you begin to see a refugee in need of help instead of seeing a potential terrorist? One way is that you meet one, or 10, or a hundred. Thousands of people band together, create a movement, and fight for every foot of ground. Gay rights were not achieved overnight, they were the culmination of decades of incredibly hard fought activism. The struggle continues today and there’s still a lot to do, but we can feel that we are at a tipping point. We lost the Prop 8 vote in 2008 and gay marriage became illegal, but that loss has since reversed and now love is the law of the land nationwide.

Amanda Palmer

I remember walking into my first polling station, a school, in 1994 and feeling a mixture of awe and disbelief. First thought: This is REALLY how it works? I fill in this little piece of paper and my opinion actually matters? Second thought: But that’s impossible. This all must be some giant voting joke that’s being played on us. Surely this one vote on this one piece of paper won’t actually count towards anything. Third thought: But obviously, if everybody thinks that, that’s why we’re fucked. A journey begins with a single step, a revolution begins with a single vote. And if you’d told me when I first voted that the country would see both a black and a female president by the time I was 40, my jaw would have hit the floor of that school. I hope we’re not so caught up in the bullshit of this election cycle that we don’t pan wide and realize how much progress we’re making incrementally. No, it’s not ideal. Like the people it’s supposed to represent, this democracy is bizarre, messy, imperfect. I’ll take it.

Moor Mother

The first time I voted was in 2000, the George W. Bush vs. Al Gore election. The Republican convention was in Philly that year, and my friends and I felt disgusted that Bush was there. My friend Civil and I went to a rally that turned very violent, with so-called cops on horses running through the city with aggressive force and no respect for free speech or human beings. I learned a lot during that protest and left with the sense that no matter what happens or how we voted, Bush would be elected president, continuing the injustices his father and every so-called forefather started before him. I learned that we have a better chance at shaping local politics than presidential elections. I learned that there are a few good services and nonprofit lawyers that advocate for change at the local level, but even local governments can be corrupted. Examples of this corruption has shown itself in Philadelphia, from mass school closings, to the lack of housing rights for domestic violence survivors and single mothers, to the high lead amount in our water. But solutions to problems at the local level tend to sometimes inspire the federal level.

Xiu Xiu’s Angela Seo

I became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. when I was in college. My naturalization ceremony was at the Staples Center in L.A., and there were literally thousands of new citizens and their family members there, each waving a tiny plastic red, white, and blue U.S. flag. The flapping was incredibly loud.

I voted for the first time a few months after that. As I did so, I could hear the sound of the thousands of tiny plastic flags flapping in the air, and the national anthem playing over a crackling PA as we took our Oath of Allegiance to the United States of America. I felt pretty darn American casting my ballot that day.

Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner

I recently shared a ride to London’s Heathrow Airport with a British/Pakistani dual citizen who, like most foreigners I have encountered recently, was eager to talk about the U.S. election. He kept asking me, incredulously, why so many Americans don’t vote. I told him the story of the first election I participated in, which was 2004—the first presidential race since the ill-fated, drawn-out legal clusterfuck of 2000. I explained to him how the electoral college worked, and how George W. Bush took the 2000 election on a technicality that did not represent the popular vote (or my own preference). He was surprised that, even in America, the execution of democracy is not as pure as we are led to believe. But I also assured him that, despite my first opportunity to vote being overshadowed by the (extremely discouraging) previous election, and my choice not winning in 2004 either, I had voted in every election I could and would continue to do so. I understand the feeling of being so angry that you want to just burn the whole damn thing to the ground. But that’s not how life works. You do what you can.

DJ Shadow

The presidency had been in Republican control for the vast majority of my life in 1992, so casting a vote for Bill Clinton felt meaningful and empowering—like a generational mandate.

Lucy Dacus

I was too young to vote in the last presidential election, so I tried to compensate for it by campaigning for Obama and getting people registered to vote at festivals in Richmond, Virginia. Personally, I don’t think a U.S. citizen should have to register to vote—it should be a right that is granted once you turn 18, but you have to work with the rights you’ve got.

This year I voted in the primary and left frustrated on all fronts. They sent me from polling station to polling station, unsure whether I should vote in the district of my old or new address. It seemed disorganized and pointless. And, in a way, voting is pointless as an isolated act. Its meaning relies so heavily on others that it’s easy to view your vote as negligible.

Our system could use a makeover. The idea that our election process is democratic is essentially a farce, upheld by the general public’s ability to vote. But there’s an undeniable element of regret in the case of not voting and watching someone you don’t trust take office. That’s enough to encourage me to continue showing up at the polls.

Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner

The first time I voted was in 2008, for Barack Obama. I was attending Bryn Mawr College and the backdrop of one of my first East Coast autumns, and the beautiful, old stone buildings of my Seven Sisters’ campus made it feel all the more empowering and important. At Bryn Mawr, you’re especially aware of the rights you fought for as women. They took all the students in buses to go vote in machines at some stone church. For most of us, it was our first time voting, and it was an incredible experience to share.

Priests’ Katie Alice Greer

I have never voted for a president of the United States before. This was a matter of choice and not negligence. I canvassed for Barack Obama’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee in 2008 but eventually felt too uneasy and frustrated to cast my ballot on Election Day. I am still disenchanted with the idea of achieving useful change for people living in the U.S. through voting for one of two choices for president, but I am voting on November 8 because I do not want to see Donald Trump become president.

The choice to vote and who to vote for is a very personal matter. Shaming people into voting is disgusting to me—it is in complete opposition to the struggle of voting rights activism that has extended this right for women, people of color, and anyone still disenfranchised by our country’s history of voter suppression. Voting is not a mandate. Voting is a choice that should be afforded to all adults living in the U.S.

I’m typically uncomfortable with rhetoric that casts non-voters as ignorant and spoiled, or ingrates who should shut up after the election is over because they didn’t participate. It does not benefit you or anyone else in this country to believe the myth that the only single way to participate is to vote for a president once every four years. When taking into account daily actions, relationship to community, the ways we make and spend money, the ways we consume media and more, it seems clear to me that all of us are participating all the time. There are so many more matters that need attention from eligible voters long after the election is over. I am voting, strangely, because I do not believe in the system that brought us here. I am voting because I want more choices for our future.

Bratmobile’s Molly Neuman

My father was involved in Democratic party politics in Washington D.C. before I was born; he worked for some giants—Mo Udall, Jimmy Carter—and then the DNC. So I always wanted to vote and couldn’t wait until my first chance to do so. In 1990, I was 19 and voted for Congressman Peter DeFazio while I was a student at the University of Oregon, where Bratmobile first formed. I vote in every primary, local referendum, and national election. I can’t recall missing one. I can’t wait to cast my ballot on November 8. I’ll be lining up with my daughter at 6 a.m.

Before it happened, it seemed like just another day. As usual, Sean headed to the gym. Partway through his workout, though, the 22-year-old came up from a squat and felt what he thought was a burst of water in his head. As blood began seeping into his brain, Sean wobbled over to the bench and struggled to keep himself upright. He was rushed into emergency surgery and spent 36 hours lying in a coma before waking up to discover that, following his stroke, he couldn’t move the left side of his body.

After a few harrowing weeks last spring, Sean slowly began to regain mobility and started sessions with Brian Harris, an innovative music therapist at the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston. Their biggest focus was getting Sean to walk again. The pair slowly padded up and down the hospital hallways, Sean tentatively moving forward as he retaught his body what had once been second nature. Harris walked backwards in front of him, playing the guitar to help Sean’s legs find their rhythm.

Sean progressed quickly, and at the urging of Harris, he eventually took off his leg brace, discarded his hulking quad cane, and took proper, unassisted steps again for the first time. “It’s been so incredible for me,” Sean says about incorporating music into his rehabilitation therapy. Six months after that fateful day at the gym, he’s able to move relatively freely, as he did before. “It was huge in getting me to walk again.”

While new findings coming out of labs continue to help us learn more about the health-related effects of music, the notion in itself is not new. Rhythm and melody have been part of ritualistic healing practices as far back as ancient times—in his book De Anima, Aristotle suggested that flute music could purify the soul. Music therapy as an organized clinical profession was conceived more fully after World War II, in response to the demand to treat returning veterans. And subsequent research has shown that most of us intuitively regulate our moods with music, from listening to a playlist that motivates us to run faster, to playing songs to help us relax before sleep.

As the field moves forward, a number of tech companies are starting to make their way into the space where music and medicine meet. Their approaches are as diverse as the many ways that music can be applied to health and wellness, but their higher purpose is largely unified: to combine science and technology to empower people to self-medicate with music on an unprecedented scale.

Sean’s therapist, Brian Harris, is part of this vanguard. Last August, he co-founded MedRhythms, a Boston startup that specializes in neurologic music therapy (NMT), a new field that officially emerged in 1999. The practice is centered around developing treatments based on research into the effect music has on nonmusical parts of the brain, like language, cognition, memory, or movement.

Harris’ dedication to the field was acquired firsthand as an undergrad at the University of Maine, assisting the only private practicing music therapist in the state at the time. His first session was with a developmentally delayed boy in his late-teens who was functioning at the level of a toddler. Harris says that only 10 minutes into the music therapy, everyone witnessed higher levels of behavior than the patient’s everyday carers had ever seen.

“At that moment I realized my calling in life was to do this work,” Harris remembers. “It wasn’t a magical response—we could figure out why this boy was having this response and we could really harness that power and replicate it for a lot of people.”

NMT as practiced today is based on two main principles. The first is music’s ability to stimulate a whole range of different parts of the brain. “There’s no other stimulus on earth that provides such a global activation of our brains as music,” Harris says. The second is that music helps with neuroplasticity, that is, the way our brains constantly create new connections and strengthen old connections throughout our lives. Harris says research has even proven that music helps the brain heal itself by creating these new connections.

Right now MedRhythms provides in-home NMT services, as well as in- and out-patient treatment out of Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, where Sean was treated. The company’s team of therapists works with people recovering from brain injuries, diseases such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s, and stroke. A series of videos on MedRhythms’ website show stories with what appear to be profound results—a man who couldn’t speak rediscovers his voice; after one session, another who could only muster up stilted steps with a cane takes strides without it.

With a system in place to treat patients one-on-one, Harris is now focusing on using technology to take this treatment further than is currently humanly possible. The aim is to give people access to highly specialized therapy almost everywhere using a platform that’s as easy to play with as an everyday app. “We’re actually building software and hardware products that can do what our therapists are doing and think like our therapists think, but without the need of a therapist,” he says.

The goal is to create an entire digital medicine platform, but to start, MedRhythms’ first prototype involves gait training similar to the therapy Harris conducted with Sean, helping people relearn how to walk. Paired with a small, customized tablet that MedRhythms will send out, patients will wear off-the-shelf sensors that feed data about the way they’re walking into the platform, which will then be able to interpret that data. For example, it will look at the speed at which they’re moving and change the music in real time based on exactly what they need to help them improve. According to Harris, the product will be up for FDA approval and clinical trials in the coming months.

The ability to scale treatment like this while keeping it relatively cheap presents promise in a system where expenses consistently barrel much deeper than the pockets of the average American. “What we’re finding is that 30 percent of people who have had strokes still have deficits after their insurance benefits have run out,” Harris says. “We’re really empowering people in a low cost way to be able to continue their rehab.”

The Sync Project is another music and health startup based in Boston that CEO and co-founder Marko Ahtisaari describes most simply as “a biometric music recommendation engine.” They believe that music can be listened to for purpose as well as pleasure. For the past year Sync has been gathering data from multiple sources, like Spotify and voice-activated virtual assistants including Amazon’s Alexa, to make music recommendations based on a range of everyday health needs. This could mean generating playlists to help you focus and be productive, destress and relax, or gear you up for exercise and activity. Going deeper than a regular Spotify “sleep” playlist, these songs will be personalized while also having the right acoustic properties to do the job properly, as proved by biometric data.

Sync’s team is propelled by considerable heavy-hitting power, led by Ahtisaari, the former head of product design at Nokia. And they’ve partnered with a smattering of category-defining researchers from top universities to ensure their work is steeped in hard science. On the music side, artists who use technology creatively, including St. Vincent, Peter Gabriel, and Jon Hopkins, sit on the board as advisors on product strategy, or how to package the music recommendations to people.

“The Sync Project taps into two longstanding fascinations of mine,” Hopkins explains, “the ability of music to positively influence mood and consciousness, and using the mind-body connection to improve health and wellbeing. We as a species have long had an intuitive understanding that music has physical benefits, but now the science exists to back this up. The Sync Project is at the forefront of putting these findings into some kind of practical, usable form.”

The platform can only make recommendations as good as the data they’re based on, so Sync has taken a very serious approach to collecting it. On the biggest end of the spectrum, this means analyzing tens of millions of public playlists that have names offering up health cues—such as “sleep” and “relaxation”—as well as inviting people to make music recommendations through their website. At the smallest end, Sync is looking at very specific and targeted studies in partnership with various researchers about how music can make a high intensity interval workout more effective, or how it can help to reduce physical pain. “There’s strong directional evidence that having music intervention after an operation leads to people self-administering less opioids,” Ahtisaari explains.

Meaningful relationships with the scientific community are important to Sync, because when the chemistry is just right, it can be beneficial for everybody. Last summer they gathered 30 key players together for a convention around tech, music, health, and neuroscience. “We said to them, ‘What can we do to accelerate your research, and what are you missing in order to make breakthroughs?’” Ahtisaari recounts. The answer was a way to collect data at scale, in a natural setting that stands in contrast to a stark lab environment. Sync’s platform does just that.

Dr. Jessica Grahn is an associate professor and cognitive neuroscientist studying music at Western University in London, Ontario, who’s developed a working relationship with Sync punctuated by mutual admiration. “They’re PhDs and they don’t want to sell crap,” she laughs. Grahn has devoted long hours to researching how the brain perceives rhythm, and how it helps people with neurological disorders like Parkinson’s to initiate movement. Together, Grahn and Sync are developing algorithms to accurately monitor the way people walk using information from their phones.

Instead of trying to get participants to come to the lab, Grahn and her team can come to them—virtually. This essentially opens up a huge new way to collect information from people at home on a scale Grahn has never been able to achieve. “This will help us help individuals, because we’ll just have so much more information about different varieties of patterns that people have in their responses to music,” she explains.

Sync’s platform is meant to be something you use every day; it’s designed to seamlessly fit into your life as you know it, and make it a little better. But as much as the platform is a product, it’s an ongoing experiment too. As more people begin using the recommendation service, the Sync team and their partnering scientists will receive more and more data to learn from—both from people giving feedback about how effective they found particular sets of music to be for a certain purpose, as well as over time with biometric sensors offering listener data during more targeted experiments. Equipped with this information, they’ll be able to strengthen their research and the effectiveness of the very platform itself while it’s being used.

“The whole distinction between what’s an experiment versus a product kind of fades,” Ahtisaari says. “We’ll be continuing to gather data, but people will be able to use this and benefit from it at the same time.”

BioBeats, a company that uses artificial intelligence to support wellbeing, essentially started when CEO and co-founder David Plans’ life nearly ended. A few years ago, the one time AI researcher arrived at an airport in Brussels running on very little except high stress—he hadn’t slept for 36 hours. He went into cardiac arrest then and there. As he was rushed to the hospital, paperwork pertaining to his death began to be prepared; after he was revived, a nurse gave him those same documents as a mortal reminder and told him it was time to make some changes.

Plans started thinking about how he could have prevented the entire episode from happening. With his background in AI, he began exploring how algorithms could be written to monitor people’s bodies and minds to become an alarm system that would tell them when they were getting close to a breaking point before it happened.

BioBeats’ focus is “adaptive media,” a term they’ve coined to describe technology that adapts and responds to a person’s physiologic data in real time. This new vernacular excited big-name interest early on, with Justin Bieber's manager Scooter Braun and Will Smith both signing on as investors. New York City-based Cantora, which started as a record label, putting out MGMT’s first EP, and has since grown its interests to include a smart tech portfolio, is also an investor and advisor.

Pulse, BioBeats’ first release in 2013, was an experimental app that let you literally listen to your heart by creating music unique to your heartbeat. Their second, more established product is Hear and Now, a mindfulness and stress-reducing app released as a public beta earlier this year. By putting your finger on the camera flash of your phone, the app reads your heart rate. It then uses this data to guide you through breathing exercises, with generative music to help you relax, and graphics that sharpen the more accurately you’re able to follow along.

Clinical trials that BioBeats recently completed with 600 bank employees in the UK emerged with promising findings. “Now we have data that shows that doing breathing exercises with that sort of biofeedback, both at the music and graphics level, definitely curbs stress by around 23 percent,” Plans says.

Based on this recent study, the BioBeats team is working on developments for the next version of Hear and Now, such as several more music systems to expand the library of the existing app. A future iteration will also start targeting people who display particular emotional profiles with specific types of music, which will change depending on how they’re feeling.

Another way to think about adaptive media is simply as preventative healthcare. With applications across almost everything that we interact with, from smart wearables and cars to products we use at home, the area feels big and promising. And as one of the most effective tools to help people understand what their own data is saying about them—and to tell them what to do next—music plays a key role. “Music actually helps at a biofeedback level where almost nothing else can,” Plans says, “including medical attention.”

While there is a lot of research pointing to music’s effectiveness as a mood and emotion regulator, it’s also being adapted to target very specific illnesses. Tinnitracks is a prescription app currently available in Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria to treat tinnitus with a patient’s own music from their smartphone. Led by Joerg Land, the co-founder and CEO of app development company Sonormed, the Hamburg-based team has maneuvered through the stringent rules and regulations of the country’s government-controlled health insurance system to become the first app reimbursed by a health insurer.

Similarly to the other companies, Tinnitracks is built on research. The clinically proven therapy was originally created by the University of Muenster in Hamburg, but the task for Land and his team was to build technology to bring this treatment to people beyond the lab.

The university’s studies, which have emerged over the past 10 years, posit that ringing in the ears is actually “ringing” inside the brain. The findings suggest that symptoms of tinnitus are due to hyperactivity of nerves within the structures of the brain that process sound. Thanks to neuroplasticity, this means the damage can be partially (or, in some cases reported by users, completely) reversed by using certain frequencies to precisely stimulate affected areas.

So for around $20 a month, you can upload your own music to be analyzed by Tinnitracks to see if it’s suitable for treatment. And if it is, it will be filtered so that you can play the tracks on your phone as a form of treatment.

Land says that the main challenge lay not in developing the technology, which took a year, but in getting German healthcare players onside, which took double that time. “In many cases, our product was the first digital product within the health system, so we needed to answer many questions,” he explains. Both the privilege and obstacle of being first meant interpreting regulations for physical medical devices and applying them to software and apps. There was also a large element of education for doctors, the gatekeepers recommending Tinnitracks to patients, who typically hadn’t seen apps being used in this way before.

Land wouldn’t reveal Tinnitracks’ user numbers in full, instead saying that it’s currently “in the thousands.” Germans are used to getting their money back on most medical devices, and now with country-wide reimbursement from the largest health insurer, Tinnitracks anticipates interest and users to increase quite rapidly. “We have this big discussion in Germany around the quality of medical apps,” Land says. “Americans always talk about chance; Germans always talk about risk.”

Tinnitracks has been eyeing the U.S. market for some time, and with the blessing of the German government in the form of funding, is preparing to bring the app Stateside.“The U.S. market is very interesting to us, but it’s also a very challenging market, because we basically need to start from the beginning,” Land says. It’s hard for him to pinpoint exactly when Tinnitracks will be available as the timelines shift and change, but he hopes to treat American tinnitus patients some time next year.

As varied as these startups are, all of them take a very careful approach to dispensing music as medicine, creating products steeped in science. Together they’re working to make music part of our health and wellbeing at a cost that everyone can afford, for everyone to enjoy.

But as interest in this area expands, and more companies join in, not all of them will have the same noble intentions. A scientific voice of reason, Dr. Grahn also points out that as much as it presents possibility, we always have to be smarter than the technology we’re using—especially when it comes to our health. “It also opens up a lot of garbage unfortunately,” she says with a laugh. “So much of what is out there is not based on any sort of evidence whatsoever. The trick will be for people to be able to tell the difference.”

The following story is featured in the new Music and Politics issue of our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review.

Draped in lime green and black plastic, choked by necklaces made of electrical cords and alligator teeth, Caetano Veloso was ready for the Festival International de Canção, a year-old original-song competition meant to foster cultural exchange. It was September 15, 1968, and the singer and his backing band Os Mutantes—looking and sounding like they had just crashed to planet Earth—were set to perform before a boisterous crowd of students. But “É Proibido Proibir” (“Prohibiting is Prohibited”) was no ordinary song. The pop provocation, which was inspired by leftist riots in Paris earlier that year, opened with atonal noise, and Veloso had his sights on the conservative student audience as he began to sway his hips provocatively. As he wrote in his 1997 memoir Tropical Truth, “The hatred... on the faces of the spectators was fiercer than I could have imagined.” As the strange new song started, the crowd turned their backs on the band.

Veloso’s friend and close ally Gilberto Gil had already been booed and instantly disqualified from the contest for his Jimi Hendrix-inspired new single “Questão de Ordem” (“Points of Order”), yet Veloso brought him onstage to protest the festival, its audience, and the future of Brazil itself. As you can hear on “Ambiente De Festival,” a live recording of this moment, the performance was as raw as any punk single, the audience’s roar a terrifying din. In turn, Veloso launched an invective at the crowd: “So, you’re the young people who say they want to take power! If you’re the same in politics as you are in music, we’re done for! Disqualify me with Gil. The jury is very nice, but incompetent. God is on the loose!” The musicians were then pelted with cups, fruit, eggs, and chunks of wood. As they left the theater to screams, they worried about what other forces had shaken loose that night.

Tropicália was a movement that lasted just short of a year, spanning from Hélio Oiticica’s 1967 art installation of the same name, wherein viewers walked along a tropical sand path only to come face-to-face with a television set, to the debut of a TV show, wherein its constituents buried the movement on-air. But Tropicália’s influence was vast. A loose collective that included Veloso, Gil, Os Mutantes, vocalist Gal Costa, songwriter-composer Tom Zé, bossa nova singer Nara Leão, Brazilian-pop performer Jorge Ben, arranger Rogério Duprat—along with visual artists, experimental poets, playwrights, and filmmakers—these creatives modernized Brazilian culture just as the country’s ruling military junta began to strangle democracy and expression. Tropicália produced only a handful of albums and a compilation, but it went on to transform Música Popular Brasileira (MPB), along with future generations from Brazil and around the world. As author Christopher Dunn put it in Brutality Garden, his 2001 book on the movement, this was “simultaneously an exciting period of counter cultural experimentation and severe political repression.”

The ’60s were a fraught time for Brazil, and the Tropicalistas struck a precarious balance between political extremes. In 1962, Brazilian president João Goulart took office and attempted to move his country to the left with a series of reforms. By April Fool’s Day, 1964, a CIA-assisted military coup d’état toppled his administration and moved the country to the far right. In this climate, artists had to walk a thin line between the communist left and the increasingly prohibitive military regime on the right.

On one side, students and intellectuals protested that their art and music was insufficiently political, crassly embracing American pop culture instead of Brazilian music, while the other side was concerned they weren’t nationalist enough. Imbibing the heady works of Bob Dylan, Jean-Luc Godard, Pink Floyd, Luis Buñuel—as well as taking in the revolts in France and the rise of the Black Power movement in the U.S.—the Tropicalistas amalgamated the countercultural trends of the decade and brought them to bear on their own heritage. Os Mutantes’ 1968 ritualistic rocker “Bat Macumba” succinctly contains the collective’s concerns: Written by Veloso and Gil, it evokes Bahian religious cults macumba and candomblé as well as Batman. On paper, the lyrics reveal their concrete poetry roots; the words even look like bat wings.

“The idea of cultural cannibalism fit Tropicalistas like a glove; we were ‘eating’ the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix,” Veloso said later. “We wanted to participate in the worldwide language both to strengthen ourselves as a people and to affirm our originality.” In the lineage of 20th century Brazilian music, Tropicália intermingled with outside sounds in much the same ways as its predecessors had: Samba took in Argentinean tangos and American foxtrot; bossa nova dug West Coast jazz; and Jovem Guarda was the sound of American rock’n’roll. Tropicalistas chewed the blotter of ’60s psychedelia and brought these kaleidoscopic visions to bear on their love for colorful film star Carmen Miranda, the drunken drums of Carnival, and underpinning it all, João Gilberto’s bossa nova.

The movement took root in the oppressive shadow of the junta. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine describes disposed president Goulart as “an economic nationalist committed to land redistribution, higher salaries, and a daring plan to force foreign multinationals to reinvest a percentage of their profits back into the Brazilian economy”—three notions that sought to bridge the gap between rich and poor. It was a plan decidedly at odds with the American government and economist Milton Friedman’s influential theories, which instead touted deregulation, hyper-inflation, and the privatization and outsourcing of a country’s natural resources to multinational corporations, plus cutbacks on all social programs.

From the mid-’60s into the ’90s, throughout the Southern Cone, the brutal, CIA-approved, corporation-funded, U.S.-friendly regimes of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Jorge Videla in Argentina, and President Artur da Costa e Silva in Brazil were in firm control, and Friedman’s caustic theories were mercilessly put into practice. Hundreds of thousands of deaths and “disappearances” followed those who opposed such measures throughout South America—be they union leaders, academics, or students.

But according to Klein, President Costa e Silva almost made a tactical error, imposing these punitive measures in half-steps: “There were no obvious shows of brutality, no mass arrests… the junta also made a point of keeping some remnants of democracy in place, including limited press freedoms and freedom of assembly. By 1968 the streets were overrun with anti-junta marches… and the regime was in serious jeopardy.”

At first, the military’s measures didn’t overtly affect Tropicália—the movement’s inherent playfulness allowed artists to elude censors with urbane pop cultural references and to comment slyly on the state of affairs. Tropicália’s incisiveness might be best summed up in the title of Tom Zé’s “Catechism, Toothpaste and Me,” where the newly instilled consumer capitalism replaced Catholicism in the minds of middle-class Brazil. Similarly, an early Veloso love song subbed in the glow of an Esso gas station sign for the moon, seemingly embracing the American multinational petroleum giant, yet also winking at how increased consumerism had altered the landscape in the wake of the coup.

And then there was Os Mutantes’ “Panis Et Circencis” (“Bread and Circuses”). It was both the band’s dizzying debut and the subtitle of the epochal Tropicália compilation album, which featured Veloso, Gil, Costa, and Zé—and served as a loose group manifesto, the Sgt. Pepper’s of Brazil. “Panis” took the title from Roman poet Juvenal’s line about the means of appeasement for mass culture (perfect for a three-minute pop song). Even if you don’t speak Portuguese, it’s a stunning sonic confection: triumphant horn fanfare, dreamy vocal pop that turns into a psychedelic fuzz bomb. Midway through, the song suddenly melts like film stuck in a projector, ending in a chaotic din of silverware, musique concrete noise, and Strauss’ “The Blue Danube Waltz.” But under that racket lies Rita Lee’s pointed critique of the bourgeoisie class, complacent during the coup: “I tried to sing/My illuminated song… but the people in the dining room are busy being born and dying.”

Even amid the whimsy of the Tropicalistas, the local air of violence began to creep into their lyrics. Gil’s “Miserere Nóbis” tucked in references to stains of wine and blood and ends with gunshots and booming cannons. Dulcet bossa nova singer Gal Costa, later an adult contemporary MPB superstar, grew wilder and more psychedelic, roaring out a warning on “Divino Maravilhoso” about paying attention to the blood on the ground. (Her 1969 album Gal is the equivalent of Barbra Streisand recording with Boredoms and remains one of the heaviest documents of Tropicália.)

As 1968 dragged on, the situation in Brazil worsened. Industrial strikes and student marches became frequent and armed guerrilla groups formed in the jungles. Veloso, Gil, and other well-known Brazilian singers, actors, and authors participated in Passeata dos cem mil (March of One Hundred Thousand) in Rio, which the police violently crushed. The climate turned increasingly fraught as the military struggled to keep control. Death squads began to prowl the streets and, as noted in Brasil: Nunca Mais—a report published in 1985 that reckoned with the dictatorship’s torture record—extralegal police forces renowned for their sadism also appeared, funded “by contributions from various multinational corporations, including Ford and General Motors.” By December, President Silva instituted AI-5, a bill that shuttered the National Congress, imposed strict censorship on media, and suspended habeas corpus.

“Military authorities either ignored Brazilian popular musicians or exalted them as international representatives of Brazilian culture,” wrote Dunn. But as the year went on, the Tropicalistas began to garner unwanted attention from the authorities. As Veloso told Dunn: “The military didn’t know what to make of it—they didn’t know whether it was a political movement or not—but they saw it as anarchic and they feared it.” The Tropicalistas and their irreverence were more dangerous to the regime than any protest song.

Two weeks after AI-5 went into effect, the police arrived at Veloso’s home to arrest him and Gil. The two singers were imprisoned for two months, put into solitary confinement, unable to contact their friends and family. In Veloso’s recollection, he verged on madness during that time—neither interrogated nor charged with any crime, instead left in a purgatorial state that he compared to a bad ayahuasca trip, uncertain if normalcy would ever return to his life.

Only near the end of their imprisonment did Veloso finally learn how they had run afoul of the dictatorship. Soon after the riot at Festival International de Canção, the disqualified Veloso, Gil, and Os Mutantes played a concert in Rio under a banner also designed by Oiticica. It featured the body of slain favela gangster Cara de Cavalo, one of the first victims of the death squads, with the caption “Seja marginal, seja heroi” (“Be a criminal, be a hero”). In the weeks after, that performance became distorted by radio and television personality, Randal Juliano, “a demagogue in the fascist style who courted the dictatorship,” as Veloso put it. Juliano embellished the details of the night to stoke the flames of outrage, saying the Tropicalistas slandered the flag and national anthem. Juliano directly asked the military to make an example of them, and it complied.

Ultimately, Veloso and Gil were released without incident, but forbidden to perform in public (a far worse fate befell singer Victor Jara in Chile, who was tortured and executed, his body left in the street). Unable to play concerts—outside of one performance to raise money for their plane fare out of the country—they were exiled from Brazil and, for the next four years, resided in London. Both recorded English albums while living there, but that bright, vivacious sound of their earlier work was noticeably muted, even as they drew on English rock and a sound picked up from Caribbean immigrants, reggae.

In January 1972, no longer perceived as a threat by the military, the two were allowed to return to their homeland for good, now hailed as heroes by their fans. But much like their fellow Tropicalistas, they too had moved on from that era-defining sound. Gal Costa became the most famous of the collective, while Os Mutantes frontwoman Rita Lee struck out on a successful solo career, and the remaining members of the group delved more into complicated progressive rock moves. The irascible Tom Zé continued to make itchy, prickly, idiosyncratic music, at times rendering samba rhythms out of blenders and belt sanders.

Even as the country’s nationalism was at a peak (thanks to the Pelé-led national team winning their third World Cup title in 1970), it was a depressed time for artists. As torture, exile, censorship, and murder suppressed anything approaching outspokenness, the post-Tropicália years became “vazio cultural” (cultural void) or “the suffocation.” And while the Tropicalistas became beloved stars in Brazil and even enjoyed acclaim in the U.S., as the recent impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and the near-calamitous 2016 summer olympic games make clear, the rampant corruption and great disparity between rich and poor maligns the country to this day.

But even in its immediate wake, the sonic example of Tropicália continued to resonate. A new generation of Brazilians sprang up and made adventurous MPB, from rocker Raul Seixas to commune hippies Os Novos Baianos and the feather-boa-clad Secos & Molhados. And when David Byrne reissued a compilation of Tom Zé’s music in 1990 (and Os Mutantes’ in 1999), he opened up a new generation of alternative and indie musicians to Brazil’s sonic delights, with artists ranging from Beck to Nelly Furtado to Panda Bear all smitten by its charms. More recently, São Paulo’s “samba sujo” scene has garnered notice, contributing to Elza Soares’ acclaimed 2016 LP A Mulher Do Fim Do Mundo (The Woman at the End of the World)—and acts like Passo Torto, Thiago França, and Metá Metá prove that Tropicália’s mutant spirit is still vital.

The art experiment enacted by these young musicians didn’t conquer the dictatorship, though it provided hope and light in the country’s darkest years. As Veloso noted, he and his friends strived to get out from under the shadow of the American Empire and to elevate Brazil to world prominence: “Tropicalismo wanted to project itself as the triumph over two notions: one, that the version of the Western enterprise offered by American pop and mass culture was potentially liberating… and two, the horrifying humiliation represented by capitulation to the narrow interests of dominant groups, whether at home or internationally.” Almost 50 years later, the vibrant sound and indomitable spirit the Tropicalistas conjured is still out there, ready to be activated.

Holiday music gets a bad rap, understandably. The way it saturates radio and commercial spaces, seemingly starting earlier each fall, it can feel inescapable—and a lot of it can be trite. So it’s easy to feel disenchanted. But when it came time to put together a list of our holiday favorites, we were surprised that even some of our most dedicated freaks of outré sound still had a warm place in their hearts for this music. So we polled our contributors for the best and most interesting holiday tracks, and here are the results.

But first, here to share her earliest holiday memories is a legend of Christmas music...

SANTA ON MY MIND
By Ronnie Spector

There are two passions that have remained with me since I was a little girl growing up in Spanish Harlem: performing, specifically singing rock’n’roll onstage, and Christmas. I don’t recall which came first.

I guess entertaining my family did. My uncle would put a lightbulb in an old Maxwell House coffee tin; that would be my spotlight and I would jump up on the table and sing. I was 5 years old.

Around that time, I remember reading a book about Christmas in our apartment. On the page was Santa with his snow-white beard, in his red suit with fluffy white trim, sitting on his sleigh with a giant sack of toys. Wow! I flipped a few more pages, and I saw Santa’s black boots coming down the fireplace. Oh no—I didn’t understand this. How would I get my toys if we didn’t have a chimney, let alone a fireplace? I jumped up, ran out of the room, calling, “Daddy, Daddy!” My dad answered: “Yes, Butchie?” I asked frantically, “How is Santa going to get here with my toys, Daddy? We don’t have a fireplace.” Daddy looked at me and said, “Don’t worry, Butchie, when Santa is in New York City, he uses the fire escape.” Oh boy, what a relief! I ran into the kitchen, got out the milk and cookies, put them out on the fire escape, and went to bed dreaming of Santa. And I have been dreaming ever since.

Every September, I started getting the Christmas itch. I couldn’t wait to go with my Dad over to Broadway to pick out our tree, and then I made my mom take me down to Macy’s so I could sit on Santa’s lap. There was a long line of people—I couldn’t even see Santa. My mom was a waitress, and on her feet all day, but she didn’t want to disappoint me. When I finally got my chance, wearing my red dress, I’d jump onto Santa’s lap and start telling him about the doll I wanted for Christmas. Then he told me I would get it if I was a good girl—but instead, once, I got a Kewpie doll. Oy!

Back in the late ’40s, the Christmas music on the radio was all standards, such as Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. My parents liked that, but not me. I think the first Christmas record I liked was “White Christmas” by the Drifters. It tells you both things you need to make a great Christmas record: a good singer and a great arrangement. You hear that deep voice of Bill Pinkney of the Drifters in the beginning, and then, all of a sudden, that joyful and amazing voice of Clyde McPhatter coming in: “I-yay-yay I’m dreaming…”

I was lucky enough to record about nine or ten Christmas records, and six of them get played on the radio still. But it’s the ones I recorded with my group the Ronettes in 1963 that will probably outlive me, and it’s because of the incredible arrangements of Jack Nitzsche. Just listen to “Sleigh Ride”—that says it all.

Just like when I was a kid, I still wait for Christmas each year—for the brightly colored lights, Frosty the Snowman, and Santa. And the best Christmas gift for me is when I am driving at home in Connecticut to get milk and cookies for Santa, I turn on the radio and hear my version of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”…and I think to myself, Santa has been pretty good to me all these years.

Ronnie Spector is a singer-songwriter, author, and the lead vocalist of the Ronettes.

Contributors: Stacey Anderson, Ryan Dombal, Cady Drell, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Jayson Greene, Jason Gross, Edwin “STATS” Houghton, Jesse Jarnow, Quinn Moreland, Sheldon Pearce, Liz Pelly, Mark Richardson, Ryan Schreiber, Laura Snapes, Seth Colter Walls, Chris Willman

This year, music videos proved once again to be one of the malleable mediums we’ve got. They could last for a few minutes, or an hour. They could explore issues of identity and race, or show off some tight dance moves (or both). They could take the form of DIY goofs, or Hollywood extravaganzas. They could offer budding talents an outlet to splash their aesthetic, or give legends a way to say goodbye on their own terms. Here are the 25 videos that had us clicking the “replay” button over and over in 2016.

25. Rihanna: “Work” [ft. Drake]
Directors: Director X/Tim Erem

And here I was thinking Rihanna and Drake clinking wine glasses in the video for 2010’s “What’s My Name” was their best are-they-or-aren’t-they moment. But then “Work” came along, and new peaks of Riri and Drizzy steaminess were reached. In not one but two videos, Drake lustfully watches Rihanna dance, first in a smoky club and later alone in a pink-lit room. Bottom line: Whatever their status actually is, Drake continues to follow Rihanna around like a puppy, and she continues to relish being his boss. —Quinn Moreland

24. PUP: “Sleep in the Heat”
Director: Jeremy Schaulin-Rioux

PUP frontman Stefan Babcock wrote “Sleep in the Heat” about his pet chameleon Norman; for the video, “Stranger Things” hero Finn Wolfhard fills in for Babcock, and Norman is recast as a big hunk of lovable pooch. It’s the sympathetic take that this song about helplessness in the face of loss deserves. The clip wrings out every last tear as the relationship between boy and his pet builds before quickly disappearing. The punk melodrama ends with a montage of PUP and their late pets, but it’s not easy mush. The takeaway rings strong and true: Grief is OK, grief is necessary. —Matthew Strauss

23. Mitski: “Your Best American Girl”
Director: Zia Anger

In which Mitski Miyawaki embraces her outsider status and takes part in an empowering make-out session with her own hand. The song is about how Mitski, who hopped from country to country growing up, had a relationship unravel because she couldn’t fully connect with her boyfriend’s rooted Americanness. That idealized identity is brought to life here in the form of a lilywhite couple straight out of Coachella’s VIP tent, who kiss with dumb abandon, looking like a parody of young love in the U.S.A. Mitski, meanwhile, slings her guitar, crashes her chords, and stares down the camera. She looks like a star. —Ryan Dombal

22. D.R.A.M.: “Broccoli” [ft. Lil Yachty]
Directors: Nathan R. Smith and Hidji Films

So you made a great song. And it’s called “Broccoli”—and it’s obviously not about the vegetable. So what’s the video for “Broccoli” supposed to be about? Well, there are a few broccoli stalks inD.R.A.M. andLil Yachty’s clip, but it mostly goes for a psychedelic funhouse vibe. There is a white piano in  swampy water. There is a gleeful homage to Vanessa Carlton’s iconic “A Thousand Miles” video. There is Yachty doing his best pied piper, blowing into a bright red recorder. It’s a deep exhale that nods to the song’s nonsense, with D.R.A.M. flashing his infectious smile throughout. —Matthew Strauss

21. Aphex Twin: “CIRKLON3 [Колхозная mix]”
Director: Ryan Wyer

Aphex Twin shouldn’t mean much to a 12-year-old. The producer’s ambient triumphs and nihilistic beat massacres predate a child’s existence, and even a major contemporary nod like Kanye’s “Blame Game” sample is couched in a track far too risqué for such innocent ears. So what’s left is a pure love of music. Pre-teen YouTuber Ryan Wyer had made a few homemade Aphex videos when Richard D. James and his label asked him to make this official one. The kid’s formless exercise in youthful enthusiasm gets to the heart of what Aphex Twin means to him: dancing with friends and family, that silly mask, and lots of colors. It’s an honest expression. Analyzing it is futile. Just enjoy it.  —Matthew Strauss

20. Cass McCombs: “Opposite House”
Director: Jonny Look

Cass McCombs’ “Opposite House” is all about setting up clichés and then pulling the rug out from beneath them. Soft rock underpins wry, knotty turns of phrase, and slyly self-aware moon-June-spoon-style rhyme schemes give way to extra-dry sarcasm: “Which is why/I’m all sunshine.” The video only extends the song’s counterintuitive logic. The black-and-white scheme doesn’t scan as “moody” so much as it recalls instructional films of the ’50s and ’60s, and every detail seems intended to confound. Is competitive tea-spurting an actual thing? Is there something wrong with me if it all makes me think of golden showers? And who’s going to clean up all that spilled liquid? File under “houseboat rock”: cozy yet oh so damp. —Philip Sherburne

19. Jenny Hval: “Conceptual Romance”
Director: Zia Anger

A women dressed in beautiful autumnal clothing bounces on top of a yoga ball. A lady in red runs through a graveyard with a sense of mysterious urgency. People cavort in the nude outside a grand Victorian home. It’s ridiculous to write out, but those are the significant scenes from the “Conceptual Romance” video. You’d be hard pressed to find a unifying thread in director Zia Angler’s work here, but if you’re one for symbolism and theory, there is a lot to ponder. The video responds to all kinds of subversive artistic strategies, from dadaist to situationist, and it’s absurdity is particularly affecting in the way only an exquisite corpse can be. But no matter how many interpretations this clip may invite, there’s no escaping the feeling of pure blissful oddness that comes with every frame. —Kevin Lozano

18. Francis and the Lights: “Friends” [ft. Bon Iver and Kanye West]
Director: Jake Schreier

The precision of the camera movement and Kanye West’s prominence in the opening shot suggest a major production, but Francis Farewell Starlite spends as much time as he can trying to prove otherwise in this one-take clip. The Francis and the Lights mastermind breaks the set’s boundaries as the camera follows, ultimately doing an amateur boy band-type dance with an unlikely partner: Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. The choreography is dead simple, almost juvenile, and the end result is an endearing frame that echoes the sentiment of the song’s chummy hook. —Noah Yoo

17. Lil Yachty: “1 Night”
Directors: Glassface and Rahil Ashruff

There’s a YouTube comment on this clip that pretty much sums it up: “this music video was made off of Snapchat filteres.” That’s not literally true, but it seems possible in the near future that Snapchat will indeed find a way to put you in fisherman’s overalls, and that you and your friends would then dance like you are holding in your pee. (Maybe toss an inflatable shark and a lifesaver in there too, just to mix it up.) What’s the point in trying to be slick when you can be weird? —Matthew Schnipper

16. Japanese Breakfast: “Everybody Wants to Love You”
Directors: Adam Kolodny and Michelle Zauner

The colorful dress that Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner dons in this video is an unmistakable symbol of Korean cultural heritage called a 한복 (“hanbok”). To see Zauner wearing it atop the hood of an 18-wheeler while soloing away at her Stratocaster is marvelous, but also heart-wrenching; the hanbok was originally the wedding dress of her mother, who lost her battle against cancer as Zauner worked on the songs that would form her 2016 album Psychopomp. In a sense, the video is a final celebration of her mother’s life, a piece of her now memorialized forever in two-and-a-half joyous minutes. —Noah Yoo

15. Radiohead: “Burn the Witch”
Director: Chris Hopewell

Radiohead have always been pretty good at reading the room when it comes to surmounting dread. Amidst a year marked by Brexit and Trump, the band used this video to comment on the frightening ramifications of the growing nationalist panic across the globe. The parallels are made clear by the twisted setting the band and director Chris Hopewell portray in this stop-motion clip, which welcomes viewers into an “idyllic” English village similar to the ones that served as backdrops for the beloved “Trumptonshire” British TV cartoons—except with more nooses and fire and human sacrifice. Spoiler alert: Things do not end well. —Jillian Mapes

14. Kanye West: “Famous (Unofficial Official Video)”
Directors: Aziz Ansari and Eric Wareheim

For his official “Famous” visual, Kanye made an art piece about celebrity. It was pure provocation, bookended by naked mannequins of Donald Trump and Bill Cosby, and it got the world talking. Which is, you know, fine. But Aziz Ansari and Eric Wareheim made a superior video for the song, and it’s all about how much they love pasta. When Swizz Beatz exclaims “goddamn!” Aziz lip syncs along, overcome with passion as noodles spill out of his face. The two comedians dance in the streets of Italy, humping either side of a tiny car. They’re sloppy boys with all that pasta lining their mouths, but they perfectly illustrate the bacchanalian elation that comes along with blessed infamy. —Evan Minsker

12. Kendrick Lamar: “God Is Gangsta”
Directors: Jack Begert and the little homies

K-Dot cuts a demonic figure in this seven-minute clip, which combines two To Pimp a Butterfly tracks into one blunt, lacerating look at sin and temptation. Opening with “U,” Lamar writhes like a man possessed, screaming his self-loathing into an ever-draining decanter; at the end of his rope, he’s submerged in a baptismal pool, but his angst isn’t washed away. “For Sale” has him hazily meeting Lucy, Butterfly’s satanic incarnation, and drifting dazedly above a club fracas. Call it Kendrick’s Inferno, and pray he finds his way back out. –Stacey Anderson

11. Kaytranada: “Lite Spots”
Director: Martin C. Pariseau

This video contains the best use of a robot since Wall-E. Kaytranada’s little automaton buddy is a big time dancer, copying the styles of everyone it meets throughout the day. There’s a dance at the bus stop with an adorable little girl with a big bow in her hair, a dance at the beach in front of a perfect sunset, even a dance in the driveway with an impressively limber Kaytranada himself. That’s basically it. Don’t come for the plot. But do come for a refreshingly optimistic take on the incoming robot revolution. —Matthew Schnipper

10. Angel Olsen: “Shut Up Kiss Me”
Director: Angel Olsen

Guess what: Angel Olsen is funny. Her self-directed video for “Shut Up Kiss Me” does many things, but bringing out Olsen’s sly sense of humor is the most important. A singer-songwriter bored of being miscast as a “country-folk sad-sack lost in a forest,” she uses the soft power of persuasion here: How can you not love a record that’s obviously so much giddy fun? The visuals ensure no one misses the wink, as we see Olsen in a silver wig goofing around with her starring role: She’s at the bar, she’s skating at the roller-rink, she’s in a parked car clutching a rotary phone. She ends, unforgettably, by asking someone off-camera if she needs to “give more attitude”—as if that is even possible. She is whoever she wants to be now. —Marc Hogan

9. Grimes: “Kill V. Maim”
Directors: Claire Boucher and Mac Boucher

A Grimes video is always inspiring in its muchness. Here, Claire Boucher gives her Art Angels mobster anthem “Kill V. Maim” a fittingly grand visual—a maximalist, fantastical thriller featuring a motley crew of freaks from her Montreal underground. These are mad geniuses in their element, which is to say, the underbelly of a seedy subway station: a caged dark angel, a mystical modern dancer, blood rituals. They hang out of a fucked up pink car; elsewhere, Boucher dons pink boxing gloves and fangs. It is a surreal appeal to the margins, a strangescape in which logic does not apply. —Jenn Pelly

8. Jamie xx: “Gosh”
Director: Romain Gavras

Romain Gavras, the director behind jaw-dropping clips like M.I.A.’s “Born Free” and Justice’s “Stress,” specializes in the kind of music video that makes you go: How the fuck did he do that? With “Gosh,” he uses Jamie xx’s slow-building breakbeat anthem to soundtrack a disorienting epic that resembles an Olympics opening ceremony from an alternate universe. Hundreds of Asian boys march and dance in sync with each other through the streets of Tianducheng, China—a city built as a replica of Paris, complete with its own Eiffel Tower and Champs-Élysées. The video’s magnetic star, Hassan Kone, is a 17-year-old albino kid Gavras cast off the street of the real Paris—a stranger in a very strange land. The entire thing was made using no CGI or special effects. Just a whole lot of people and a whole lot of crazy ideas. —Amy Phillips

7. ANOHNI: “Drone Bomb Me”
Director: Nabil Elderkin

Bleakness meets beauty—aggressively, subtly, devastatingly—in ANOHNI’s clip for “Drone Bomb Me.” In it, the supermodel Naomi Campbell tearfully steps in for the song’s distraught narrator—a young girl pleading for death after a drone attack kills her family—translating the harrowing imagery with languid, elegant movements. It is a gorgeous, excruciating act of empathy, one that brings intense personal scrutiny to the anonymous masses slain by drone warfare. —Stacey Anderson

6. Frank Ocean: “Nikes”
Director: Tyrone Lebon

After false teasers and months—years!—of silence, “Nikes” marked Frank Ocean’s proper, full-color re-entry into the world at large. He was back, older, bolder, leaning against a car in heavy eyeliner, lip syncing while drinking from a styrofoam cup. Here was his overflowing introduction to Blonde, presenting a world of fast cars, rapping chihuahuas, white horses, devils, glitter erupting from between thighs, and lots of flesh. It’s a place of passion and imagination, and it’s exactly the kind of Frank we were hoping would return. —Evan Minsker

5. Solange: “Cranes in the Sky” and “Don’t Touch My Hair”
Directors: Alan Ferguson and Solange Knowles

These sister A Seat at the Table pieces elevate something largely uncommon in the realm of music videos: stillness. Solange and her husband Alan Ferguson create regal yet delicate tableaus of black women and men here, from an indelible shot of seven bodies connected by one purple dress, swaying against a mountain, or the guys bouncing around a temple in burnt orange Akademiks velour tracksuits and finger waves. As the lyrics to “Cranes in the Sky” suggest, keeping busy isn’t necessarily the best cure for loneliness—slowing down and discovering one’s own power, on the other hand, can be a subtle declaration of control.  —Quinn Moreland

4. Radiohead: “Daydreaming”
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Is this video, as some online wonks have suggested, a nerdily referential trip through Radiohead’s own visual history? Is it Thom Yorke’s attempt at unsettling autobiography, with each new doorway opening up to a scene from his past? Is it director Paul Thomas Anderson’s most strangely moving piece of work in about a decade? Is the clip a comment on our inevitable environmental destruction? A symbol of the endless internet, with each new path representing a proliferation of links and tabs and rabbit holes? Does it show a content middle-aged man who’s never met a knob he couldn’t turn, or someone terrified of the choices he’s made? Is it willfully perplexing or deservedly complex?

The answer to all that and more, of course, is yes. — Ryan Dombal

3. Kanye West: “Fade”
Director: Eli Linnetz

Teyana Taylor’s sculpted form is the kind that stands a testament to hard work—which is why people lost their shit when the G.O.O.D. Music signee recently admitted that she doesn’t even work out. “All I do is dance,” she told Vogue, and her breathless, vaguely Flashdance-inspired performance in a sweat-soaked thong and sports bra is apparently what came out when West asked her to freestyle to “Fade.” But just when you think this is simply a mesmerizing dance video, there’s that bizarre family portrait: Taylor naked in cat prosthetics alongside her baby and husband, all of them surrounded by actual sheep. As a wise man once said: “No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative—gets the people going!” —Jillian Mapes

2. David Bowie: “Lazarus”
Director: Johan Renck

The symbols came so fast and furious, you barely knew what to do with them all: the hospital bed, the fountain pen, the buttons on bandaged eyes. Then, three days after this video was released, all those fraught objects suddenly became as clear as a syringe full of morphine. David Bowie was gone after secretly battling cancer for 18 months; death’s hand, clawing up from beneath the bed, was no metaphor. Anyone who has seen someone die of a disease like cancer will be intimately familiar with the world of this video—Bowie, his skin like parchment, turning hospice care into high art. Biting his nails as he faces a blank page, he makes no bones about the fact that he’s a man who’s run out of time.

The song’s title is clearly meant to remind us of the biblical Lazarus, whom Jesus brought back from the dead after four days. And Bowie, a master showman until the very end, pulled off his own perverse sort of miracle in reverse here, retreating backwards, trembling, vanishing into that shadowy armoire: On the fourth day, when we flung open the door, there were only mysteries left. —Philip Sherburne

1. Beyoncé: Lemonade
Directors: Kahlil Joseph, Beyoncé Knowles Carter, Melina Matsoukas, Todd Tourso, Dikayl Rimmasch, Jonas Åkerlund, Mark Romanek, and Warsan Shire

Teeming with visions of black feminist fortitude, remixed American history, and ancient sources of strength, Beyoncé’s latest world-halting opus is dense enough to warrant an entire college course devoted to unpacking its multitudes. In fact, that’s already happened: This fall, The University of Texas at San Antonio offered a multimedia class called Black Women, Beyoncé & Popular Culture that used Lemonade as an intellectual springboard. This is Beyoncé’s power. She is the world’s most awe-inspiring pop star and she’s using her mind, money, and reach to challenge, to teach. Michael Jackson, the forefather of statement music videos, revolutionized the form with ambition and imagination, but his rise as a visual powerhouse coincided with the gradual erasure of his own physical blackness; as her ideas become more intricate and grand, Beyoncé is placing her blackness—and the overarching struggle of black womanhood—to the fore.

Part of this film’s genius is how it packs all of its heady allusions and personal politicking into something that, on its surface, would make TMZ drool. But the tabloid theatrics—will the real Becky please stand up?!—essentially serve as a Trojan Horse, with Beyoncé leveraging her fame and (supposed) family drama into something much more far-reaching. She cuts a Nefertiti silhouette and transforms a historical place of slavery and suffering into a bastion of liberation (and twerking) in “Sorry”; she flaunts her Southern heritage while standing atop a drowning police car in “Formation”; she unleashes torrents of fire wherever she sets her feet. Lemonade conjures a world where women of color are omnipotent and where men are swept to the side, barely-there—it’s graduate level pop art that mulls the past while setting its sight on what’s to come. —Ryan Dombal

[Watch Lemonade in full on TIDAL.]

There was a lot to be disappointed with in 2016—more than we could have ever imagined. Here’s a bunch of shit that may not have mattered in the grand scheme of things but still kinda sucked. On to the next one!

Watching DJ Khaled get massages no longer fun

Beyoncé still married to Jay Z

Guess none of Drake’s friends comfortable telling him patois is not a thing you can just do

Ever having had to read the phrase “YACHT sex tape”

Swish really was the perfect album title

Feel like Desiigner may be in over his head

New Joyce Manor sounds like Everclear

Not sure what’s worse: Kendrick Lamar needs money so bad he did a Maroon 5 verse or he doesn’t need the money and did it anyway

Bon Iver’s apparent influences for new album were Dan Brown and a graphing calculator

Brian Eno’s Velvet Underground cover

The Chainsmokers

Taylor Swift apparently had better things to do than endorse Hillary

Le Tigre reuniting for Hillary couldn’t quite push her over the edge

Turns out Solange didn’t actually say, “I sext it away, I Reddit away”

Was hoping Chance more a Reese’s guy

Always wanna read it A Moon Shaped Poop

Rihanna’s Tame Impala cover

Frank Ocean only released two albums

Only thing better about Preoccupations as a band name than Viet Cong is that it’s not racist

Grateful Dead toured—again—with John Mayer

Rostam and Ezra broke up

Possible everyone good now dead

Experts have been anticipating the dominance of streaming audio since the days of Y2K and nu metal. In 1999, the first customizable online radio service, Launchcast, was introduced. In 2001, seven years before Spotify, Rhapsody was unveiled as the first proper on-demand streaming music service. But those early streaming dreams were squashed when the iTunes Store opened its virtual doors in 2003,  giving way to a downloads-based digital music economy, which has held fast ever since. Until now: If current patterns hold, 2016 will mark the first time subscription streaming revenues will meaningfully overtake download sales.

So it’s worth noting both the significance of streaming music’s accomplishments this past year as well as how historically fragile those accomplishments remain. Going into 2017, streaming will no longer be a niche for music but the new normal. The big question is no longer whether streaming is the future, but what form that future will take, who will benefit, and what that might mean for listeners.

Through June, the U.S. music industry as a whole was on pace to grow for the second straight year—its first consecutive years of growth since the late ’90s, at the height of the CD era—and subscription streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music deserve the credit. The rest of the industry has increasingly legitimized streaming as well, led by longtime holdouts the Beatles finally embracing the format late last year. The Grammys opened up their eligibility rules to include streaming-only releases, the RIAA started counting streaming toward platinum and gold certifications, and even Radiohead, whose Thom Yorke previously compared Spotify to “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse,” released new music on, yes, Spotify. Looking to make the most of this new landscape, artists like Beyoncé, Chance the Rapper, and Drake toyed with the artistic and commercial potential of releasing new music exclusively through a particular streaming service. Underlying all that, though, is another, even bigger question dating back to the turn of the millennium: Can the economics of streaming become sustainable?

Given streaming’s triumph, some of the debate has moved to divvying up the spoils of that victory. This year, labels, artists, songwriters, and managers called for an overhaul of copyright law to close what they saw as a “value gap” that allows the “user upload” sites like YouTube to unfairly earn revenue from their work (YouTube, of course, viewed the matter differently). Another industry target was “stream ripping,” the process of turning a stream into a downloadable file, which became the subject of a massive lawsuit. And songwriters, left wondering about their share of streaming payouts, used their recently formed advocacy group, Songwriters of North America, to sue the Department of Justice.

The streaming services themselves had feuds, too. After Senator Elizabeth Warren called out Apple Music as an example of concentrated corporate power that can harm competition, news broke that Spotify had been challenging Apple’s app-store practices, which include taking a cut from Spotify’s monthly subscriptions. Apple Music and Jay Z’s Tidal vied over exclusive album releases, prompting multiple Kanye West tweets complaining about that “Tidal/Apple bullshit” and leading Universal to swear off global streaming exclusives after Frank Ocean managed to break out of his contract with the label through a savvy exclusive deal with Apple Music. Spotify, in turn, reportedly gave less promotion to Apple and Tidal exclusives.

Overlooked in this by pretty much everyone (but Kanye) were music listeners, facing a reality where they may need to subscribe to multiple services if they want to hear every high-profile new album. Reassuringly for consumers, music-biz analysts don’t foresee exclusives being as crucial to music streaming services as they are to TV services like Netflix or Amazon. “There will continue to be exclusives, but there’s only so many you can put out and still have impact,” says Mark Mulligan, founder of London-based MIDiA Research, a digital-music market research firm.

What’s next for streaming is, in a word, more. More streaming services continue to hit the market, with Pandora, iHeartRadio, and Vevo all prepping their own on-demand platforms, Amazon recently introducing Amazon Music Unlimited, and SoundCloud rolling out SoundCloud Go. The crowded marketplace should also keep spurring more talk about deals, whether that’s Spotify potentially buying SoundCloud or Apple being rumored as a suitor for Tidal. More streaming services may find themselves having to simply shut down, too; Rdio filed for bankruptcy at the close of last year, and this year Samsung shuttered its Milk Music streaming service.

All the while, the existing players are butting heads over how to give listeners the best personalized, automated listening experience. They’re launching lower-priced services with less functionality and looking beyond smartphones toward smart speakers and, in the longer term, smart cars.

For all the intriguing evolution taking place for streaming music, precedent in this space suggests keeping an eye on the bottom line. In an earlier streaming era, Launchcast went to Yahoo in a $12 million deal and survived an important legal challenge, only to end up getting absorbed into CBS’s (non-customizable) radio network. Rhapsody, which arose as the music industry was grappling with file-sharing services like Napster, this year rebranded its U.S. operations as Napster, and only holds fraction of the subscribers boasted by Spotify and Apple. Profitability is still a challenge for the streaming business, to put it politely: Pandora has not yet managed to be consistently profitable; Spotify has never turned an annual profit; Tidal lost twice as much money in 2015 as they did the previous year; and it’s nocoincidence that players like Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet, the corporate parent of Google and YouTube, have other, more lucrative businesses. And there aren’t many other companies left to write a check for a music streaming service. The labels, too, have to hope that streaming can grow fast enough to offset an ongoing decline in downloads and physical sales. Ted Cohen, managing partner at digital entertainment consultancy TAG Strategic and a former EMI digital executive, sees hope in a growing number of label executives with experience in the streaming world. “We have a playing field that’s littered with casualties,” Cohen says. “If this is going to go long-term, the deals [between streaming services and labels] have to get a little bit more sustainable. We’re close.” In other words: Labels need to cut deals with streaming services that won't put the streaming services out of business.

Here’s a look at 10 streaming services, what went well and what went poorly for them this year, and where they might be headed in 2017.

Pros: The biggest subscription service for on-demand music streaming is only getting bigger. In September, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek tweeted that his company had passed 40 million paid subscribers—double the amount it had in June 2015. The fact that Spotify is chiefly a music streaming company—and not a tech giant with other products to sell—may give record labels added reason to support it. It won’t hurt Spotify’s relationships with the labels, either, that it has remained steadfastly opposed to exclusives. In June 2016, the company hired Troy Carter, the founder/CEO of artist management firm Atom Factory and former manager of Lady Gaga, looking to bolster its relationships within the music biz. And the service continues to expand its offering of personalized playlists, widely seen as the most intuitive out there. The company has also branched out into video, entered the Japanese market, and swiped right for a partnership with Tinder.

Cons: Spotify’s growth hasn’t translated into profits. The company posted a net loss of nearly $200 million in 2015, the most recent year for which numbers are available. Plus, Spotify is in the midst of negotiating new licensing contracts with the majors, so its bottom line going forward is less than certain. And debate still rages over the platform’s payouts to songwriters and publishers for the use of songwriters’ compositions, which are legally separate from the royalties they pay labels for the songs’ recordings. A year ago, artist rights advocate and Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery sued Spotify for copyright infringement; the case is still ongoing.

What’s Next: Spotify’s most crucial challenge will be going public. The company is under a time crunch because of the deal terms for the $1 billion in convertible debt it raised in March, which encourage it to make an IPO sooner rather than later. “If [the IPO] hasn’t happened by this time next year, then something hasn’t been going right,” says MIDiA Research’s Mulligan. Separately, Spotify has reportedly been considering buying SoundCloud, an acquisition that would potentially further entrench the company in the streaming marketplace, but the price would have to be right. Spotify clearly remains the streaming service to beat, but it will soon have to convince Wall Street that its model can eventually turn a profit.

Pros: Apple Music solidified its role as the No. 2 subscription on-demand streaming service this year, making up for its lack of market dominance with an emphasis on artist exclusives—and Apple’s massive cash hoard should make profitability less of an immediate concern. In September, the company announced that Apple Music had acquired 17 million subscribers since launching in June 2015. A redesign with the new iOS 10 operating system went after Spotify’s home turf—algorithm-based, personalized playlists—with additional features. Most significantly, Apple had the initial exclusive on several of the year’s most commercially—and, in some cases, artistically—successful albums, from Drake’s VIEWS to Frank Ocean’s Blonde/Endless twofer.

Cons: There’s a dark side to exclusives, too. After Ocean followed his contract-fulfilling Endless visual album with the self-released Blonde, both at first available only on Apple Music, Universal Music CEO Lucian Grainge put a kibosh on his company doing any more single-platform, global streaming exclusives. And Apple can often appear either unwilling or unable to avoid angering music fans (and artists), from its elimination of the iPhone headphone jack, to Apple Music’s clunky interface, which led to Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon tweeting in July that it was a “literally horrid platform.” There were other artist-related snafus: Apple featured Shamir in an ad, then used a Shamir soundalike in another commercial; ANOHNI has complained that taking Apple’s money for the “Drone Bomb Me” video made her feel “like a house cat that had been declawed.” Though having the Beats team of Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre, and Trent Reznor on board was supposed to position Apple Music as artist-friendly, the company still has a ways to go in keeping artists happy.

What’s Next: Apple will keep doing exclusives, Iovine has said. And despite the service’s initial trumpeting of its human curators, more algorithm-based playlists are on the way. Apple was too late to streaming to hold anything like the stranglehold iTunes had over downloads (at least, not yet). Instead, Apple Music’s battle with Spotify may be more like the Mac vs. PC debate: a corporate presentation of chic tastefulness versus an ostensibly techier rival.

Pros: SoundCloud is at a crossroads. The mostly free streaming site claims to attract 175 million monthly listeners. In March, the company launched a paid subscription service, Soundcloud Go, and it’s reportedly under consideration as a takeover target for Spotify.

Cons: In recent years, as SoundCloud has cleaned up its offerings amid the label deals that led to SoundCloud Go, the site has lost some of the Wild West allure that originally made it a preferred destination for DJs and artists. Apple and Spotify have both struck deals this year with a company called Dubset, which should enable these services to offer some of the unofficial remixes and multi-song DJ mixes that had been SoundCloud’s distinguishing feature. And it’s surely possible that talk of a Spotify deal could be just that—talk.

What’s Next: If SoundCloud doesn’t sell to Spotify, it could still end up in the hands of another bidder—the company was reportedly considering a $1 billion sale as recently as July. And investors like Twitter, which poured $70 million into SoundCloud earlier this year, will eventually be looking to cash in on an exit strategy.

Pros: Pandora may be a newcomer to on-demand streaming, but the company is a pioneer of streaming music more generally. It counted 77.9 million active listeners in its most recent earnings period, mostly for its free service. This year, Pandora announced that its personalized Thumbprint Radio had reached more than 5 billion spins since launching in December 2015. The company is also out in front of the industry’s efforts to hook subscribers who aren’t willing to pay $10 a month for music, recently relaunching its $4.99-per-month radio subscription service. The company’s basic conceit—a hands-free, personalized listening experience—is one that Spotify and Apple have been moving toward.

Cons: Pandora’s total user count has fallen 2 percent since last year. And so far it has only been able to acquire about 4 million paid subscribers.

What’s Next: In September, Pandora executives said the company could release its on-demand service as early as this month, though January may be more likely.

Pros: Though less known in the United States, Deezer has been one of the more successful streaming companies in Europe. It’s similar to Spotify and other on-demand platforms, right down to a feature that promises users a “personal soundtrack” based on algorithms, music experts, and listening context. The French company has been quiet about its numbers lately, but it has said that as of mid-2015 it had 3.8 million revenue-generating subscribers, whether through standalone subscriptions or bundling deals from wireless service providers. In January, Deezer raised about $100 million in funding from Warner Music parent company Access Industries, giving at least one of the three majors a vested interest in its survival. In July, Deezer officially launched to all U.S. listeners.

Cons: Deezer’s U.S. invasion has been a long time coming (Spotify arrived stateside in 2011). And its sales pitch may confuse: The company previously soft-launched here in recent years as a high-resolution audio service for Sonos users, a “mass-market” service for Bose users, and as a bundled tie-in for Cricket Wireless prepaid phone plan customers. In 2015, Deezer became the first of the on-demand streaming services to file for an IPO, but it abandoned the plan due to “market conditions.” In August, only a month after Deezer went wide in the U.S., its North American CEO left to run a weed vaporizer company. Even antitrust authorities have expressed doubt that Deezer’s ties with Warner Music will give it much of a leg up in the crowded streaming marketplace. And like most streaming services, Deezer isn’t exactly profitable: It disclosed losing about $13 million in the first six months of 2015, the most recent period available.

What’s Next: Deezer has some breathing room, as the company recently renewed a lucrative partnership with French telecom company Orange for another two years. Ultimately, though, the service will need more listeners to sign up for standalone subscriptions, which tend to generate more revenue than phone bundles. Where those subscribers will come from, however, remains to be seen.

Pros: Bandcamp isn’t a streaming service in the sense of Spotify or SoundCloud, but streaming through its website is a great way to discover—and, Bandcamp hopes, eventually buy—music that’s too far afield for playlist algorithms and even human playlist curators. Bandcamp, which takes a 15 percent cut on digital sales and 10 percent on physical merch, says it has been profitable since 2012 and has helped fans pay artists $186 million to date. Acts nurtured on the platform, including Mitski, Car Seat Headrest, and Alex G, saw new levels of success this year, and the service has added legacy content like the Dischord Records catalog. The site also received a favorable profile in The New York Times as a possible “Holy Grail of online record stores,” and hired an editorial staff to bolt on at least some of that expert-curation component. (Full disclosure: Some of Bandcamp’s editorial staff members are Pitchfork contributors.)

Cons: Digital download sales keep dropping overall. As the Times noted, Bandcamp also faces the risk that, as it helps direct listeners to new music more purposefully, its once-defining pleasure of randomly stumbling across, say, Sebadoh co-founder Eric Gaffney’s unreleased material, or a no-fuss EP by a beloved indie-pop bandleader, could be lost.

What’s Next: The company appears to be hunkering down in its enviable position as, in its apt words, an “alternative” to the subscription-based streaming giants. “As long as there are fans who care about the welfare of their favorite artists and want to help them keep making music, we will continue to provide that direct connection,” Bandcamp wrote in a blog post this year. “And as long as there are fans who want to own, not rent, their music, that is a service we will continue to provide, and that is a model whose benefits we will continue to champion.”

Pros: Google’s parent company Alphabet has two plays on music streaming. One is Google Play Music, which is a full-on music streaming subscription service similar to Spotify. The other is YouTube, the giant video site, which in addition to its free, ad-supported level also offers an ad-free YouTube Red subscription service. Though Alphabet hasn’t broken out subscriber numbers, YouTube’s biggest strength is the sheer reach of the free service. A U.S. survey earlier this year showed more music consumption via YouTube than with any of the music-only services, a finding that was especially pronounced among younger listeners. In September, YouTube named record mogul Lyor Cohen as its global head of music, a move that could help mend the company’s relationship with the industry.

Cons: YouTube, like other streaming services, generates few if any profits. Its battle with the music industry could also weigh further on its bottom line, especially if fed-up artists and listeners move toward less controversial listening platforms. Of course, for as long as the price is free, that’s a big “if.”

What’s Next:YouTube’s chief business officer, Robert Kyncl, told me earlier this year that “what’s next is more ad revenue.” Alphabet has the resources to play a long game here.

Pros: Tidal, like Apple, has largely sold itself on exclusives, including Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo and Rihanna’s ANTI; West’s periodic updates to Pablo challenged the definition of the “album” itself. In May, Tidal said it signed up 1.2 million new users during its first week exclusively streaming Beyoncé's Lemonade, adding to the 3 million paid subscribers the service claimed in March. Plus, Prince’s invaluable catalog is, with minor exceptions, Tidal-only. There’s also the matter of artist ownership, not only in the form of Jay Z, whose business group acquired Tidal’s parent company last year, but also its announced co-owners, including Beyoncé, Kanye, Arcade Fire, Daft Punk, and Jack White. Tidal has also claimed to pay the highest royalty rates of any subscription streaming service and, unlike its main rivals, offers a high-resolution audio subscription alongside its standard streaming service. Further distinguishing Tidal, the company has announced donations to Black Lives Matter and other nonprofit social justice groups. And former SoundCloud exec Jeff Toig, who became Tidal’s third CEO in eight months when he was hired last December, has stayed at the helm throughout the year.

Cons: Tidal’s parent company recently disclosed a $28 million loss for 2015, more than double the $10.4 million it lost in 2014. It’s the subject of multiplelegalactions. Rihanna’s ANTI notoriously appeared on Tidal early by mistake. And Apple’s Iovine has dismissed reports that his company might be negotiating to acquire Jay Z’s service.

What’s Next: Even if Beyoncé is able to release a headline-grabbing visual album every year, Tidal clearly has some catching up to do if it’s to remain an artist-owned company.

Pros: Amazon has already quietly become a leader in paid music streaming, at least technically. Although the company doesn’t disclose subscriber numbers, customers who sign up for its Amazon Prime service have access to Amazon Prime Music, which arrived in 2014 with a limited catalog. According to market researcher Parks Associates, 15 percent of U.S. broadband households subscribe to Prime Music, versus 7 percent for Spotify Premium, 5.9 percent for Pandora’s paid tier, and 2.7 percent for Apple Music. The new Amazon Music Unlimited service offers an expanded catalog similar to those of its rivals and, for Prime members or owners of Amazon’s voice-activated Echo speaker, comes at a discount to the other subscription streaming services. As for exclusives: Amazon is the only place you can legitimately stream Garth Brooks. “The streaming services so far are doing a really good job of [appealing to] the really engaged music consumer who gets why paying 10 bucks a month for a subscription is worthwhile for them,” says Russ Crupnick, founder of research firm MusicWatch. “Amazon looks like they’re trying to get to the more casual music consumers.”

Cons: Tools like Amazon’s Alexa may not have the greatest taste in music. For example, saying “Alexa, play that song that goes ‘put up a parking lot’” has been reported to result in the speaker playing Counting Crows’ cover of Joni Mitchell’s classic “Big Yellow Taxi.” And Amazon’s lower prices for streaming subscriptions may lead consumers to expect to pay even less than they already do for music, further shrinking the pot that’s left for songwriters and musicians.

What’s Next: If Amazon has its way, Alexa will be taking many more questions. Amazon’s vice president of digital music, Steve Boom, has said that music streaming’s next phase of growth will come via connected smart devices in the home. Alexa, where did we leave our smartphones? Never mind, we won’t need them anymore.

Pros: Napster used to be Rhapsody, which has more experience than anyone else at subscription on-demand streaming music. The company, which had marketed itself abroad as Napster for several years, fully rebranded its U.S. operations as Napster in July as well. The company last claimed almost 3.5 million paid subscriptions. And sharing a name with a famous file-sharing service has its advantages: Metallica’s “return” to Napster made headlines in November, 17 years after the band sued the company’s less legally scrupulous predecessor. Plus, Napster has been on the deal-making prowl, recently announcing partnerships with Sprint, Lufthansa, and grocery chain Aldi. Most importantly of all, the business swung to a surprising $1.6 million profit for its most recent quarter, according to a regulatory filing.

Cons: Napster’s latest subscription figures, which date to December 2015, would still put it far behind Spotify and Apple Music. And in the longer term, it has continued to lose money, posting an $11.4 million loss for the first nine months of 2016.

What’s Next:The grandaddy of subscription streaming services will need to prove it can still compete today. The company named a new CEO in April, and confirmed a round of job cuts in June. As with the old Napster, streaming is a tough business.

In the time of streaming media, when everyone has access to nearly everything, music people can be especially hard to buy gifts for nowadays. With that in mind, we’ve avoided the typical cash-in box sets and basic concert T-shirts this year, instead trying to track down items that are as unexpected as they are welcomed.

Big Boi Dog Shampoo ($15)

If you want your dog to feel as loved as Big Boi’s dogs—I mean, just look at these littleguys—you’ll want to check out the rapper’s signature line of dog shampoos. There are many different styles—from “Scrumptious” to “Invigorate”—and all of them are made with natural ingredients like rosemary, lavender oil, and cucumber extract. It might not be the next OutKast album, but we’ll take it.

David Bowie Shorts ($185)

Zara Mirkin’s Merch Junkies clothing label takes simple vintage pieces like cotton tees or varsity jackets and embellishes them with logos of bands like Hole, KISS, and AC/DC. Shorts like these green ’70s Bowie ones are a mainstay on the site—and what better place to express your fandom than on your booty?

Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture by Jace Clayton ($11)

How did Auto-Tune find its way into the music of Morocco’s rural Berber communities? How did a cracked copy of FruityLoops come to soundtrack the fallout from Egypt’s Arab Spring? And why did Fugazi always tour with an electric clothes dryer in the back of the van? Pitchfork contributor Jace Clayton, aka DJ/rupture, answers all these questions and more in one of the year’s best books about culture: a fiercely intelligent, surprisingly moving look at the interrelation between music, technology, and ethics in a networked world.

Rihanna Punk N Patch Socks ($18)

Spooky Rihanna socks! Perfect to wear with those elusive Rihanna Puma creepers! And speaking of creepers, check out the dismembered hand near the toe—very “Bitch Better Have My Money” murderous.

Innocence Perfume by Father John Misty ($75)

Take a whiff of “Innocence,” with its notes of sweet orange blossom and vanilla bourbon, and your mind just might call back to that time you tried your dad’s cocktail as a kid and suddenly felt very warm and happy (and kinda sick). Crafted bySanae Intoxicants, the same company that boasts aHotbox fragrance, this Eau de Parfum concocted by Father John Misty is the perfect gift for the romantic cynic in your life, or just someone who needs a reminder of their fleeting youth.

21 Savage “Issa Knife” T-Shirt ($7)

Earlier this year, when asked what his forehead tattoo—misidentified as a cross—signified, Atlanta upstart 21 Savage famously responded: “Issa knife.” The moment of literalism made for a great Vine, but the full interview reveals that the permanent sharp object between his eyes is also a tribute to his late brother. So now fans can wear this shirt with pride, and in solidarity with Savage.

The Incantations of Daniel Johnston by Ricardo Cavolo and Scott McClanahan ($14)

This dazzling graphic novel casts a wide and empathetic net in its look at the life of troubled folk iconoclast Daniel Johnson, as well as the burdens of mental illness and the tetchy romanticism society affixes it. In its vivid, folkloric style, it even seems to appraise you, the reader, via a hundred-strong repetitions of scattered eyes, peppering every page amid beautiful depictions of Johnston’s rise to pop infamy. It’s a complex, worldly journey worthy of his own.

The Dilla Turntable ($120)

J Dilla’s record collection was massive—the subject of rabid fan fascination and eBay bidding wars. While you might not be able to pick up any of his records at this point, the late producer’s estate has designed a new turntable to kick off your own crate digging explorations. The portable player features a sumptuous graphic of a black-and-white cloudscape, a pair of built-in speakers, software to record music directly onto your computer, and an exclusive 7" single of “The Sickness,” Dilla’s collaboration with Nas.

Donut 45 Adaptor ($16)

Speaking of Dilla… these vinyl adaptors aren’t officially associated with the Detroit legend, but it’s easy to see how his classic album Donuts—which was largely based off of songs sampled from 45s—inspired their design. Your dusty old singles have never sounded this delicious.

Illimat: The Decemberists Board Game

After raising $418,628 on Kickstarter—nearly 10 times its original goal—a new board game co-created by the Decemberists is now officially in the works. The beautifully designed hybrid card/board game, which looks like something you might find in an ancient fortune teller’s lair, is due for release next year, but you can sign up for pre-order info right now.

Samsung Gear S3 frontier

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It’s time to leave everything behind, starting with your phone. Call, text, navigate, and pay right from your wrist with the Samsung Gear S3. The Gear S3 is water resistant with military-grade durability and a battery that can last for days—so you can venture on. [Requires separate qualifying wireless plan. Check out all the requirements and carrier for details.]

Todd Terje Underwear ($30)

The don of Norwegian space-disco joyfulness has long made music that evokes the beach, the tiki lounge, and other locales with notably permissive dress codes. Do skivvies telegraph fandom as publicly as a T-shirt? Obviously not. But there’s something to be said for letting nothing come between you and your Todds.

Saint Lemmy Votive Candles ($10)

Following Lemmy’s passing earlier this year, listening to Motörhead records can now feel like some kind of divine sinner’s ceremony—so down some Jack and Cokes, light up a cigarette, and set one of these Saint Lemmy candles aflame.

Noel Gallagher Potato Phone iPhone Case ($30)

In May, Liam Gallaghertweeted a photo of his brother Noel and memorably captioned it: “Potato.” It was a scathing insult that required imagination—much like this glimmering phone case. The item is an unofficial ode, but even so, you can imagine Liam slaving away on Photoshop, trying to find a balance of realism and caricature, potato and human. Diehard Oasis fans, this spud’s for you.

ModularGrid Modular Synthesizer Poster ($41)

Record collectors, book hoarders, cat fanciers—all obsessives pale in comparison to the modular-synth nerd, who measures happiness in well-soldered circuits, and for whom nirvana is always just one banana plug away. In a salute to fellow geeks, the people from Modular Grid—a kind of social network for modular hobbyists—have assembled more than 870 popular Eurorack modules, or some $200,000 worth of gear, into a gargantuan, drool-inducing poster. #rackgoals

Pitchfork Music Festival 2017 Tickets ($65-$165)

As the winter freeze approaches, take your mind off of all that snow and ice by picking up advance tickets to this coming summer’s 12th annual Pitchfork Music Festival, which will take place July 14-16 at Chicago’s Union Park. Three-day passes are now available for $165, along with single-day tickets for $65.

A Poster of Comic That Wilco’s Schmilco Album Cover Is Based on by Joan Cornellá ($16)

The brilliantly perverse illustrator Joan Cornella is an artist whose gentle misanthropy is matched only by his fondness for bodily fluids. Now you can get a print of the original six-panel gag that he turned into the cover of Wilco’s Schmilco straight from the artist himself. Ironically, it’s among the least shocking pieces in his archive.

Handwoven Guitar Straps Named After Indie Rock Stars ($60-$85)

You might not be able to pick and wail like Kurt Vile, Ty Segall, Kevin Shields, Dimebag Darrell, and Tina Weymouth, but thanks to Nashville gear gurus Original Fuzz you can at least wear a comfortable, handwoven strap named after such mighty guitar gods.

Remidi T8 Wearable Musical Instrument ($350)

Combining the look of Nintendo’s Power Glove, the musical acumen of tapping your fingers on a desk, Michael Jackson’s fashion sense, and some good old-fashioned Harry Potter-style wizardry, the Remidi T8 allows you to turn any surface into a tricked-out keyboard. Hardware and software add-ons let you remix and DJ with this versatile glove as well. Plus: Keeps your hand warm in frigid winter months!

Music Is… by Brandon Stosuy and Amy Martin ($9)

Music is the sort of thing that tiny humans love—all screaming feelings and banging stuff. There’s a lot more to it, of course, but for that insight translated into kid-friendly terms, we suggest the charming picture book Music Is… Former Pitchfork editor Brandon Stosuy and illustrator Amy Martin capture everything that music canbe, with an eye towards diversity and whimsy.

Mitski Mug and Coaster Set ($20)

On her song “Happy,” Mitski sings about a dude who comes over for sex and slips out while she’s peeing. All she sees after emerging from the bathroom is their empty cups and cookie wrappers, sighing, “Again I have to clean.” It’s a sadly relatable tale—but you’d probably just have to laugh if the mugs staring back at you in this clear moment of defeat were emblazoned with Mitski and her cat, right?

Moog Schematic Notebook and Synthesis Pencil Set ($17)

In electronic music, the Moog brand is synonymous with old-school, analog cred. And it doesn’t get much more analog than paper and pencil. Ten pencils come emblazoned with terms like “attack,” “decay,” “sustain,” and “release,” while the 64-page notebook features schematics on the front and back covers. Perfect for electrical engineers, cursive aficionados, and coldwave fans.

Beyoncé Lemonade Patch Set ($25)

When Beyoncé’s Lemonade arrived earlier this year, it brought with it a fantastical array ofinstant merchandising opportunities, enough for many a lemonade stand (or Etsy cart). With that in mind, credit these iron-on patches for their restraint—a reference to Bey’s “Formation” hot-sauce swag here, a “Sorry” (not sorry) “boy bye” there, and, naturally, a literal lemon.

Guitar Pick Punch ($25)

Picture this: Your credit card expires. You throw it out. Some asshole swipes it from your trash and steals your identity. Then you sit down with a guitar to lament your terrible fortunes—and you realize you lost your last pick! Luckily, this unlikely nightmare scenario can be easily avoided thanks to this handy tool, which turns almost anything—including your old Amex—into a guitar pick.

The Pitchfork Review Holiday Bundles ($60-$120)

Revisit issues of our print quarterly with a bundled collection that includes four, six, or all 11 issues. The Pitchfork Review features high-caliber, long-form music writing, photography, design, and comics. These special holiday offers are only available through December 12, with guaranteed delivery by Christmas Day.

From the bleak and pitiless nihilism of 21 Savage, Skepta, and Danny Brown to the exuberance of Kamaiyah and Chance; from the gnomic, inward musings of Ka and Kendrick to the rough, open-book humanity of Joey Purp: In 2016, rap albums splintered into a million different and thrilling forms, overflowing the edges of mundane details like normal release dates (hello, Kanye) and heteronormativity (hi, Thug!). If you haven't been glued to Hot 97 or Livemixtapes.com, here, in alphabetical order, are 20 of the most urgent, most partying, most excellent albums to come out of hip-hop this year. No shade to Macklemore.

This week, we’re doing year-end genre lists that correlate with how genres appear on Pitchfork. The following list of 20 records includes both pop and R&B, but it’s fair to say that in 2016, the lines between these spheres (and others) were blurrier than ever. R&B continued to embrace electronic textures, while pop pushed the limits of commerciality further. Many notable albums, from Blonde to A Seat at the Table, reinvigorated the use of interludes, oftentimes in its spoken-word form. Perhaps this was because these genres—from Beyoncé all the way down—were exceptionally political this year, so the necessity to be understood was high. In addition to reiterating that Black Lives Matter, pop and R&B still had room for meditations on love and joy and sadness and going out and everything else music has been soundtracking since the dawn of time. Here, in alphabetical order, are 20 of the most electrifying pop and R&B records of the year.

Certain topics seemed to bubble to the surface in many of the on-the-record chats we recorded over the course of 2016, things that were floating around in everyone’s mind: the U.S. election, the death of icons like David Bowie and Prince, the way technology continues to warp our brains and change our lives, the legitimacy of political art, the potential paths forward for a rebuilding music industry, and the possible effects of this often-ominous year going into 2017.

Here are some words of wisdom that helped us navigate such big ideas courtesy of Danny Brown, David Lynch, M.I.A., RZA, Sonny Rollins, DeRay Mckesson, Dev Hynes, Lykke Li, and more.

Here’s a brief list of what could plausibly be considered “rock” in 2016: digitally manipulated sound fragments, free-jazz freakouts, emo spoken-word, octogenarian baritone, a song that sounds like a vintage Disney soundtrack, and warped variants on all manner of light ’70s sounds—plus, of course, plenty of punk, post-punk, and Thin Lizzy-style guitar licks. Practitioners of the genre might not even have defined themselves as rock. But the best knew how to mine music history’s overlooked veins, wherever those could be found, and hammer them into fresh and singular shapes all their own. Here are Pitchfork's favorite rock albums of 2016—whatever that means.