Dystopian Dance Party

Tag: tribe called quest

  • Dystopian New Year’s Party Podcast: Our Favorite Songs of 2016

    So we’re a few days late, but better late than never, right? Here, finally, is our annual New Year’s Party podcast, in which we summarize our favorite songs of the last year as we make way for the new one. It’s a little less self-indulgent than the first one from 2015–by which I mean that it’s only two and a half hours, instead of two hours and 45 minutes. But we actually used real microphones this time, so at least you can hear what we’re saying! Check it out for the good music and eggnog-and-Hennessy-fueled rants; and then check out our extended Spotify and TIDAL playlists for more songs we didn’t have time to talk about, including tracks by A$AP Ferg and Future, A$AP Mob featuring Juicy J, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, 2 Chainz and Lil Wayne, Trinidad James featuring Mystikal and Lil Dicky, Nite-Funk, JEFF the Brotherhood, Frank Ocean, Mac Miller and Anderson .Paak, D.R.A.M. with Erykah Badu, 6LACK, the Weeknd and Daft Punk, and the Rolling Stones. So here’s to the one thing that made 2016 tolerable–the music–and maybe, just maybe, a 2017 that won’t suck literal ass.

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  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: Memorial Day, 2015-2016

    With every passing week, 2016 feels more and more like a never-ending, real-life Grammy Awards tribute montage. We couldn’t even go the six days between recording and posting the podcast without losing another pop music icon: this time, Marshall Jones of the Ohio Players, word of whose death regrettably reached us only after we had finished editing. Clearly, this is a trying time to be a music fan. And, as I’ve found myself saying more than a few times in the past several months, the sheer volume of notable musicians’ deaths starts to feel overwhelming to a small site like ours. I’m not a full-time obituary writer, so even many worthy artists who passed away have inevitably gone unmemorialized.

    That’s why, in the spirit of the real Memorial Day holiday, we’re taking the time to commemorate those the music world has lost since last May. Unfortunately, this will almost certainly be a recurring feature: the cruel realities of the human lifespan, combined with the generational ebb and flow of American popular music, means that things are only going to get worse in the coming years. And sadly, even this tribute isn’t truly exhaustive–even aside from the aforementioned omission of Marshall Jones, we’re only really talking about musicians of whom we have some miniscule level of knowledge, so plenty of important people are still going unmourned (at least by us).  But we did our best, and we at least tried to do everyone justice. Here’s hoping we get a break, at least for a couple more weeks.

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