The act of sharing music has never been easier, but also never more important. As a means of connecting us in an increasingly disconnected world, something as simple as telling a friend about a song that you just can’t stop listening to can carry both genuine joy and serious connective impact.
Every semester, LiLi Johnson, an Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, asks the students in her seminar classes to chip in a song they’ve been listening to on repeat, which she then compiles into a Spotify playlist to share in real time. She plays the songs on shuffle while the students do a writing exercise that reflects on the semester (here’s the most recent playlist, in case you’re curious: Professor Johnson Spotify Profile - Public Playlists). She finds it’s a great way to cement the class community one last time before the semester closes.
We won’t ask for a writing exercise, but we will give you the following collection of songs and artists L&S faculty members have been rocking out to as of late. Odds are strong at least a few of these will make your favorite playlist cut.
(We’ve included audio and/or video links to each suggestion. If you enjoy what you hear and see, consider supporting the artist.)
Jazz
Brilliant Corners by Thelonious Monk
Recommended by Mark Vareschi, Associate Professor, Department of English
Brilliant Corners is not a new release, but it is an album that I have come to hear anew recently. I read Robin D. G. Kelley’s brilliant biography of Thelonious Monk during the height of the pandemic and it helped me to understand what was going on in the record and why I liked it so much. Filled with his esoteric original compositions and with personnel including Sonny Rollins on tenor sax and Max Roach on drums, Brilliant Corners is Monk’s abstract brilliance at its finest.
Rap
Un Verano Sin Ti by Bad Bunny
Recommended by Aurora Santiago-Ortiz, Assistant Professor, Department of Gender & Women’s Studies
As a diasporic subject, music functions as a direct conduit to my home islands. I am not alone in this sentiment. For many Puerto Ricans living outside of the archipelago, Bad Bunny provides just the right amount of nostalgia and sazón, batería y reggaetón to make us feel like the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea are just a stone’s throw away. Released in 2022, Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti continues to resonate, not only for Puerto Ricans, but on a global level. Featuring salsa, bomba, and dembow, among other genres, the album is an ode to the Caribbean—its music, culture, and people—but also to the ways Puerto Ricans resist colonial governance, corruption and neoliberal austerity. It is a reminder that joy and struggle are entwined and cannot exist one without the other, and a roadmap for many of us that still hope to return home.
Un Verano Sin Ti [YouTube] *Explicit Warning
Un Verano Sin Ti [Spotify] *Explicit Warning
Jazz/Funk
Choose Your Weapon (2015) by Hiatus Kaiyote
Recommended by Brittney Edmonds, Assistant Professor, Department of African American Studies
Lead singer Nai Palm creates exhilarating funk music alongside bassist Paul Bender, keyboardist Simon Mavin and drummer Perrin Moss in the Australian band Hiatus Kaiyote. Choose Your Weapon, as the title might suggest, challenges all genre orthodoxies to produce a sound that simultaneously tips its hat to neo soul, jazz and electronica. Notable tracks include “Fingerprints,” "Molasses" and the Grammy-nominated “Breathing Underwater.” This album is sure to move and groove you and offer opportunities for deep listening well into the night.
Dance/Electronica
Artist: Purity://Filter
Recommended by Ankur Desai, Professor and Chair, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences
I usually get accused by my kids of having musical tastes that lean toward “dad rock"—mostly stuck in the 90s. Therefore, I rely on their hogging of the car radio Bluetooth to keep me up to date. My college-aged daughter has recently gotten into DJing at raves in Philadelphia. On a recent family road trip, she introduced us to her scene and one of her favorite artists. Purity://Filter is the originator of a genre of Electronica called “sextrance,” built around “distortion and internet sounds,” according to my daughter. Not all their compositions are my jam. However, I found this song well-suited for a queue during a long drive on the highway at night or for staying in the zone while debugging our computer code for analysis of our lab’s climate observations.
Purity Filter [Spotify]
https://purityfilter.bandcamp.com/
Jazz
Black Radio III by Robert Glasper
Recommended by Simon Balto, Assistant Professor, Department of History
There were some truly incredible records that came out in 2022, and I’m tempted here to recommend both Willi Carlisle’s Peculiar, Missouri and Adeem the Artist’s White Trash Revelry as astonishingly good country records by queer songwriters that obliterate the norms of what people usually think of as country music masculinity. But the record of last year that I continue to listen to the most in this new one is Robert Glasper’s Black Radio III, which recently earned the pianist his fifth Grammy. Standing in the tradition of its predecessors, Black Radio and Black Radio II, Black Radio III is a blend of jazz, R&B and hip-hop featuring plenty of contributions by luminaries from the rapper Killer Mike to the bassist Esperanza Spalding. And it feels simultaneously timeless compositionally and musically, while also being very much a product of our time, infused with the grief, anger and vulnerability which so many of us have experienced in recent years. Indeed, in what is presumably about George Floyd but could as easily be about Tyre Nichols, the album’s first words come from the poet Amir Sulaiman: “I heard him call out, I heard him call for his mother.”
Black Radio III [YouTube] *Explicit Warning
Black Radio III [Spotify] *Explicit Warning
Dance/Electronica
Niineta by Joe Rainey
Recommended by Lucas Zoet, Professor, Department of Geoscience
I’ve been listening to Joe Rainey’s debut album Niineta for the past few months. Rainey is a Red Lake Ojibwe tribal member, born and raised in Minneapolis. The album’s basis is built on Rainey’s skill in traditional powwow music, and he has merged these sounds with experimental electronic techniques to create completely unique and unexpected melodies. When I first experienced Niineta I watched the album along with the visuals, which is a truly stunning experience.
Pop/Soul
Who's Zoomin' Who? by Aretha Franklin
Recommended by Paula Niedenthal, Professor, Department of Psychology
Recently I watched the historical drama, "Genius: Aretha" on Hulu. From the first moments, I thought, whoa, let’s go. The series moved me to revisit the music from our constant dance parties of the mid-to-late 1980s. At the time, I was in graduate school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and we were moving to Aretha’s Who’s Zoomin’ Who? and Freeway of Love. The series also brought back memories of a time in 1987 when I had the opportunity to hear Aretha sing gospel in her father’s Baptist church in Detroit. We sat for about three hours on an incredibly hot summer day, waving away our sweat with cardboard fans that advertised a funeral parlor, thrilling to the power of the music. If you have forgotten or never heard Aretha’s canon, go pay some respect!
