Rihanna, Unapologetic – Explicit Version

The title of Rihanna’s latest album begs the question: For what, exactly, is the Barbadian mega-pop star refusing to apologize? Her duet with ex-flame-and-former-domestic-abuser, Chris Brown, on the Michael Jackson-toasting “Nobody’s Business,” maybe? Or maybe a career built on a constant game of genre-grab: Last year’s dance-pop-heavy Talk That Talk rode bubbling Eurodance trends to delirious heights, and Unapologetic goes to apposite lows with this year’s downer cocktail of dubstep and Weeknd-style R&B. As usual, however, RiRi’s dumpster-diving yields of-the-moment earworms(see her latest guilty-pleasure of a single “Diamonds,” or “Jump,” aka Ginuwine’s “Pony” run through the Skrillex wub-machine). Even “Right Now,” with David Guetta’s ever-present synths working overtime, is destined for glory – if only for the next few weeks. Rihanna may lack originality, but originality isn’t her goal: ubiquity is. And as long as her music continues to reflect the moment as well as Unapologetic, there’s no apology necessary.

The North Sea Scrolls, The North Sea Scrolls

After paving the way for Britpop in his influential combo the Auteurs, and then documenting the ensuing phenomenon in his scathing Britpop chronicle, Bad Vibes, Luke Haines has beaten an increasingly eccentric — and fascinating — path.

Home-recorded solo records like last year’s 9½ Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s and Early ’80s have showcased a uniquely imaginative vision, which has less to do with contemporary pop than the magic-realist satirical fiction of German post-war author Günter Grass — or, in spirit, if not in sound, the rock follies of mid-’70s prog/metal.

The North Sea Scrolls pursues another hare-brained concept beyond the bounds of rational explanation. A collaborative record, made alongside Cathal Coughlan (ex-Microndisney and Fatima Mansions, who penned and sang a handful of the songs) and rock journalist (and eMusic writer!) Andrew Mueller (who narrates), its deranged premise is that the three of them have taken possession of some documents — à la the Dead Sea Scrolls — which tell a weird alternative history of Britain.

One of the key changes to accepted reality is that Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader who courted Hitler in the 1930s, actually got to form two governments. His ministers include Enoch Powell, the notorious racist politician who by some strange chicanery ends up joining the prog-rock band, Gong, and Tim Hardin, the heroin-addicted late-’60s singer-songwriter, who becomes Mosley’s Culture Secretary.

In isolation, the songs about these implausible developments — the wry chucklemaster Haines on Powell; the pithier Coughlan on Hardin — are baffling, and leave you hanging on for every line in disbelief. Elsewhere, Haines has Ian Ball, the man who attempted to kidnap Princess Anne in 1974, sitting in Broadmoor psychiatric prison, mistakenly believing himself to be the same Ian Ball who sang in the Mercury Prize-winning alt-blues combo, Gomez.

Mueller’s spoken-word “Scroll (Number)” tracks help ease the listener into this absurd parallel universe, but initially it’s all too much to take in at once. With time, however, these become pop songs that you hum along to, just like any other pop song, skillfully crafted, subtly textured over acoustic guitars with moody synths and muted strings. Eventually, you find yourself getting into the swing of it, imitating Haines’s malevolent whine, as he intones, say, “I know where my heart lies/ It’s back on the Broadmoor blues delta.”

What it’s all about is not so easy to discern. In the case of the Ian Ball song, Haines clearly enjoys poking fun at Gomez, who were his label-mates in the late ’90s, and who were prioritized over him in the wake of their award success.

With equal relish, Haines has pointed out that The North Sea Scrolls is “Google-proof,” by which he means that the answers to the riddles it contains are not to be found, unlike all others these days, on the internet. As such, if there is any rhyme or reason to it, we should understand it as a quiet lament for the human imagination, all but snuffed out in a digitized world — but one which gains in power and purpose with every listen.

Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, Live from Alabama

When Jason Isbell left the Drive-By Truckers in 2007 to launch a solo career, he had to learn both how to sustain a full album on his own, and how to endure and outlive comparisons to his former band — who just happen to be one of the best rock groups in the country. Five years and three studio albums later, Isbell is still grappling with these issues, but Live from Alabama sounds like a crucial step forward in his development.

Recorded in Birmingham and Huntsville, this concert album moves Isbell and the 400 Unit out of the studio and onto the stage, where they’re obviously more comfortable and more commanding. It also allows him to cherry-pick some of his best solo and Truckers tunes, with a few covers thrown in for good measure. Building off their southern rock foundation, he and his band show off an elastic Muscle Shoals rhythm section on “The Blue” and punch up “Danko/Manuel” and “Goddamn Lonely Love” with some exquisitely forlorn Stax horns.

Ignoring the closer — a completely redundant cover of Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” — Live from Alabama is roughly bookended by two of Isbell’s songs, which chronicle very different experiences of soldiers returning home from war: a joyous homecoming in “Tour of Duty” and a small-town funeral in “Dress Blues.” Both showcase Isbell’s eye for humanizing detail, and their combination lends this live album its considerable gravity and makes it arguably Isbell’s finest and most persuasive solo release yet.

Nico Muhly, Drones

When 31-year-old composer Nico Muhly thinks “drone,” he is reminded less of ragas, plainsong or even La Monte Young than of people humming while they vacuum, the constant E-flat of his air conditioner. He recently distilled the buzz of the unnatural world in a compelling trio of EPs, now collected as Drones by indie-classical label Bedroom Community. As proof of concept, “Material in E-flat” opens Drones and Violin with Pekka Kuusisto, which followed Drones and Viola with Nadia Sirota and Drones and Piano with Bruce Brubaker. The title tells only half the story. Drones, sometimes edging into ostinatos, frame all manner of harmonic activity and temporal striations; nocturnal funks and spiky bursts of daylight.

Much perpetual motion lies in the commanding voices of the two string players. Sirota is dark and steely while Kuusisto is sweet and rasping; both heroically wrench out precise, unorthodox timbres when called upon. Muhly’s pianism, most distinctive at its most effortless and excitable, occasionally feels perfunctorily severe. “Material with No Tricks” could maybe use a few tricks. More often, he unleashes shining scrambles of interesting shapes worthy of his mentor, Philip Glass, who hovers like a paterfamilias as Muhly bombards a silver fog of violin with irresolvable sevenths. The collected Drones also throws in an easygoing, electronic-enhanced bonus track that reminds us, after all the enchanting yet rather sinister activity before it, of the impulse for adorableness that also attracts M83 fans to Muhly.

Alarm Will Sound, Bermel: Canzonas Americanas

Canzonas Americanas continues the new-music ensemble Alarm Will Sound’s long-running, fruitful relationship with the composer Derek Bermel, who has plied them with a series of ever-more-ambitious works testing both their boundaries and his. He is an omnivorous sort, the kind of composer who studies studied Thracian folk music, Brazilian caxixi, Ghanaian gyil and other far-reaching forms well outside the Western knowledge base, and the pieces collected on Canzonas feel, on one level, like a colorful and chaotic regurgitation of all the folk forms Bermel’s digested.

The titular piece veers between the simple, grass-scented beauty of Dvorak’s String Quartet in F (The “American”) and tangled Ivesian blurts of intruding quotes — look out for the asphyxiated “Merrie Melodies”-style interpolation of Beethoven’s Fifth early on. “Three Rivers,” meanwhile, evokes beat-poetry jazz, with its hushed tom rolls, stand-up bass and syncopated horn blurts. The meter and rhythm complicates itself playfully as Bermel confuses the piece’s momentum so thoroughly that it ends up hopping in place in a corner. Bermel never draw a straight line; pieces leap border fences and find themselves in slinky samba or bossa nova territory, and art songs suddenly stumble into cabaret and scatting. Like the best American composers, Bermel has a trickster’s impulse, an irrepressible will to scramble that makes his music such rich traveling.

John Taylor, In the Pleasure Groove

For fans of the ’80s superpop group Duran Duran (and let’s be real: Who isn’t one?), John Taylor’s sweet autobiography is much like one of the band’s songs: short, melodic, to the point and just a little dark. The band’s cofounder and bassist whizzes through his life to date, paying homage to his hard-working, involved parents and moving on to the musical obsession that led him to form a band that experienced a dizzying rise to the top. Some of Taylor’s story feels a bit predictable — sex, drugs, booze, rehab, crazed fans — but Taylor (who narrates) comes off as so earnest, sincere and pleasant that the book is an enjoyable departure from celebrity memoirs where the author takes him or herself too seriously.

In the Pleasure Groove, with its lines of cocaine, appearances by Robert Palmer and the recording of Live Aid, is a look back at all that was bad, as well as all that was very, very good about the 1980s. The real meat of the book, though, is when Taylor talks about his parents, especially his World War II veteran father, whose wartime experience with lice led him to help his son cure himself of groupie-inflicted crabs. They always supported their eyelinered pop idol son; this book is in Taylor’s own way a love song to them.

Björk, Bastards

It’s not as if Björk, Iceland’s avant-pop electro-princess, really needed to put out a remix album. Biophillia, her eighth studio LP, is remembered more as a multimedia experiment than a collection of songs — with accompanying video games, art installations, iPhone apps and live shows that featured a freaking tesla coil. Considering this, bastards may seem like a frivolous concept on paper, but it’s the rare remix album that actually improves upon the original, adding exotic eclecticism and percussive flair to Biophilia‘s frigid, monotonous soundscapes.

“Sacrifice” was once a droning, ambient dead-end — in Death Grips’ hands, it’s borderline danceable, punched up by in-the-red beats and a demented bassline; the creepy, crawling 16-Bit version of “Hollow” sounds like Radiohead vacationing at Bowser’s Castle. But bastards is an improvement not only due to its bountiful beats, but also its diversity: These New Puritans layer Björk’s anguished cries over dubby sub-bass, stark piano chords, and Middle Eastern chants. The collection’s most arresting moment is also its simplest: “Moon” is transformed into a haunting electro-lullaby, augmenting a single-string harp flutter with breezy electronics somewhere between The Books and The Postal Service. Biophilia‘s astral art-rock beauty commanded respect, but the more down-to-earth bastards adds a missing ingredient: fun.

Anonymous 4, American Angels: Songs of Hope, Redemption & Glory

After a decade of recording Medieval European music with a few tangents for new works by contemporary composers, this quartet of American singers surprised us in 2003 with a disc of 19th-century (one dates back to the 18th century) American folk hymns, gospel songs, psalms, camp revival songs and even one fugue. That’s a pretty big change, but going back to their cultural roots nonetheless fits their vocal style pretty well; their clear, pure voices get to indulge in a little vibrato now and then, and their impeccable intonation and pronunciation provide Platonically ideal readings of songs more often heard in rougher amateur renditions. There are many familiar favorites here — “Wondrous Love,” “Wayfaring Stranger,” “Sweet By and By,” “Shall We Gather at the River,” even two versions of “Amazing Grace,” one of which is very different rhythmically. The members’ extensive research into old sources also brings refreshingly unfamiliar and piquant harmonizations in some cases, and brings more obscure songs to a new audience.

Minnesota, Are You There

Minnesota’s Are You There represents the collaboration between veteran singer-songwriter Peter Himmelman and David Hollander, creator/producer of the CBS TV series The Guardian and other movie and TV projects: It was only natural that what they produced can best be described as cinematic. Himmelman is no stranger to filmic pursuits; he and Hollander worked together in 2007 on the short-lived TNT series Heartland, and Himmelman got an Emmy nomination for scoring the CBS drama Judging Amy. But more important than this is the footprint of his initial solo albums; though Himmelman has spent much of past decade making children’s music, his early-’90s releases From Strength To Strength, Flown This Acid World and Skin felt like albums that aspired to be movies.

With Minnesota, he seems to be picking up where he left off, joined by a backing crew that includes Hollander on piano and former Honeydogs members Noah Levy and Jeff Victor. The key collaborators are his longtime backing vocalist Kristin Mooney and accomplished singer-songwriter Claire Holley, who take spotlight vocal turns on several tracks. “Deep Freeze” sets the tone at the start with bluesy atmospherics; the mood shifts from foreboding (“Death By Snakebite”) to desperate (“Call From The Road”) to reflective (“1000 Blackbirds Fall”) over the next dozen tracks until the anthemic “Send It Up” offers a cathartic endpoint. Immediate standouts such as the slow-burning “Hitchhiker” and the hard-charging “Ash & Chickenwire” could be singles, but they’re more significant for the way they sublimate themselves to the long-form framework.

Holly Herndon, Movement

The first sound you hear on Holly Herndon’s Movement is a blurt of white noise, like a heavy garbage bag dragged across the floor. Then, slowly, it separates itself into component parts in front of your ears; now, it sounds like a million pebbles hitting a puddle. Then it glues itself back together, resembling the flicker of a dying television. It is 90 seconds before you hear another sound, so you only have this to focus on. Does this sound like fun? No? Because in a nice pair of headphones, it feels like Herndon is firing up a sound installation inside your brain.

It’s an appropriate entry into Movement, a fascinating and at times deeply disturbing album in which Herndon pulls apart sounds on a cellular level, taking forensic delight in how they can inflict acute discomfort. Her musical path began in Berlin clubs and ended with a composition degree, and Movement braids these two twisting paths into an unprizable know of conflicting impulses. Her music is a mesmerizing negotiation between propulsion and stasis. Half the time, it’s tugging coyly at your body; the other half, it’s cruelly teasing your mind. Often, it’s doing both.

The closest thing to a dance number is “Fade,” in which Herndon’s disembodied pleas (“Take my hand”) diffuse and spread like dry ice around the song’s thumping beat. The song’s pulse complicates itself endlessly, with rewound vocals, dropped beats, and small burbling little syncopations, but never takes its finger off of its own pulse. “Breathe,” meanwhile, is the opposite extreme, a six-minute work made of nothing but Herndon’s own ragged, gasping breaths, shredded into wisps and swirled together into something resembling rhythm and melody.Music made of human breath is usually a comforting, holistic notion, but Herndon’s feels more like a Cubist take on a visceral anti-smoking PSA; I found myself squirming with a constricted chest while it played. But once you’ve heard it, it is impossible to shake or forget. Movement is rigged with explosive little traps like this one throughout its relatively brief length. It is not an album for the faint-hearted; at places, it is forbiddingly severe. But it will linger in your mind long after its echoes have died.

Martha Argerich, Argerich Plays Chopin

Containing a half hour of 1967 studio recordings made for broadcasts, a ’67 live Third Sonata and the Ballade No. 1 from 1959 (she was 17 years old but had already won the Geneva and Busoni competitions), this collection boasts four pieces of which we have no other Argerich recordings (which I’ll call “unique”), and another four heard via concert bootlegs (“only studio”), including the Nocturne, Op. 55 No. 2. The Ballade (unique) has slight finger slips, of little concern given its scintillating bravura. Next comes a nearly impeccable and highly dramatic rendition of the Op. 10 Etude, No. 4 (only studio). There are eight Mazurkas, with only Op. 59′s three familiar from studio recordings and Op. 33 No. 2 and two Op. 41 Mazurkas “unique”; her chiaroscuro C-sharp minor is especially characterful. In the Sonata she blurs the Scherzo’s outer sections a tad, but the most frequently used phrase in Argerich reviews might be “force of nature,” and this live performance is a prime example why. As spontaneously inflected as her playing is, it’s done with taste, a sort of organically applied Romanticism we hardly hear anymore. Her erotically languorous Largo nearly suspends the passage of time with some deliciously juicy rubato, making this version preferable to her two studio recordings.

Pablo Casals, Bach: Cello Suites

This two-disc set contains one of the most beloved and influential recording projects of the 20th century. Listeners who insist on intonational perfection or period performing practice will have to go elsewhere, but there are many compelling reasons to acquire these discs, warts and all. And honestly it’s not all that warty, especially if you’re used to the sonics of vintage recordings (here 1936-39 — from Abbey Road Studios, no less). The charismatic Casals was a pioneering Bach advocate, and his passionate performances of these suites were an important impetus in the “Bach revival.” There was no extant performing tradition for these works when Casals (1876-1973) first started playing them at the age of 13; in effect, after a decade of private study and practice, he created his own tradition, and strong echoes of his interpretive ideas can be heard many decades later in the Bach recordings of Mstislav Rostropovich and Yo-Yo Ma, among many others. Heavily accented rhythms (with much rubato), full but varied tone, taking all repeats, and basing the overall character of each suite on its Prelude are the predominant features of Casals’s approach, and these powerfully personal readings still make for riveting listening more than seven decades after they were documented.

David Gilmore, Numerology (Live at the Jazz Standard)

First off, the band is phenomenal and deserves its own roll call. On bass, Christian McBride. The drummer? Jeff ‘Tain Watts. You simply can’t concoct a more august and authoritative rhythm section. Alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon (winner of a MacArthur “genius grant”), pianist Luis Perdomo and vocalist Claudia Acuna are three of the brightest stars in Latin jazz. French percussionist Mino Cinelu and composer-guitarist Gilmore (not to be confused with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour) round out a truly extraordinary septet.

And they need to be, because Gilmore is throwing some heavy charts at them. An associate professor at the Berklee College of Music, his ambitious agenda for Numerology is to delve into the theories of Pythagoras, who believed that numbers and their vibrations can unlock the cycles of life and learning. Put into practice, it yields music for polymaths, brimming with asymmetrical rhythms. New York Times reviewer Nate Chinen, who caught the live shows that comprise Numerology, counted out a knotty 21/8 time signature in “Seven: (Rest).”

To these less-learned but jazz-loving ears, it doesn’t feel that complicated. The shifting rhythms occasionally produce a feeling musically akin to walking on a trampoline. But the commanding talent on hand ensures that the grooves hold sway, the solos are frequently stupendous, and a context is established that allows you to appreciate the grand arc of Gilmore’s conception — the seven tracks actually fall into two movements of four and then three songs — instead of having to snatch up favorable bits.

The result is a fascinating mélange that roams from lilting chamber harmonies to blistering fusion jazz, with Afro-Cuban rhythms, bebop and prog-rock sifted in. Zenon and Gilmore are the primary soloists, and Zenon’s scalded alto jams are a consistent highlight, as they simultaneous up the intensity and concentrate the flow. Gilmore plays like a blend of John Scofield and Carlos Santana, and Acuna’s wordless vocals add a subtle but resonantly human touch to the harmonies. McBride, Watts and the underrated Perdomo alternately lock down and dexterously open the rhythms. Pythagoras would rate this five triangles.

Buckshot and 9th Wonder, The Solution

With The Solution, Black Moon/Boot Camp Clik powerhouse Buckshot has made 9th Wonder his second-most frequent production partner after Da Beatminerz: This is their third effort together, after The Chemistry and The Formula. Buckshot sounds characteristically rugged over a rotation of beats that range from guitar-inflected triumph (“The Big Bang”) to ruminative, haunted soul (“The Feeling”). By now, they’ve settled comfortably into a groove, veterans presenting themselves with unaffected authority.

Not that they don’t acknowledge the harsh reality of the game as it stands for vets these days: The gripping “Shorty Left” features Buckshot as the frustrated artist trying to maintain his underground integrity and Rapsody as the wife who’s wondering how that’ll help the family eat. And the premise of “Stop Rapping” is a pragmatic take on the classic step-up-your-rap-game challenge to pretenders: If someone years deep has to bust his ass for every ounce of hard-found success (“I’ve been at it for five joints/ And I still ain’t make a profit or pocket one point”), what hope is there for second-rate entry-level MCs who expect instant success? But a grind like that leaves no room for middle-age complacency, and The Solution knocks down everybody’s reps but their own.

Interview: Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn has a message for her readers: She is not one of her characters.

The author of this summer’s best-selling thriller Gone Girl has been mistaken for one of the seriously twisted offspring of her mind since the publication of her first novel, Sharp Objects, in 2006.

“I guess I should take it as a compliment that people assume all my books are true,” Flynn says from her home in Chicago. Sharp Objects includes a dysfunctional relationship between a Midwestern mother and daughter, and Flynn found that people were eager to read it as a thinly disguised memoir. “Everyone assumes that my mom is just this evil sociopath,” she says with a laugh. “And my mother is this tiny little blonde thing beloved by everyone. She loves it! She’ll come to my readings and give me the evil eye.”

That inclination to read into Flynn’s real life via the nasty sociopaths she gleefully conjures up has been taken to an extreme with Gone Girl, featuring married couple Amy and Nick, two of the screwiest, most unreliable narrators of recent memory. “Family and friends, the first question they get is, ‘Oh, how is she?’” Flynn says. “It’s always kind of whispered. ‘Is she OK? Are things OK with you?’ I get the sense that some people don’t believe me, that it’s, ‘She doth protest too much! She’s really messed up.’”

To set the record straight in time for the holidays, Flynn talks to eMusic about how a non-sociopath would handle the most stressful time of the year. Good news! She passed with flying colors. Here are the results:

She would never spit in your food, no matter how obnoxious you get during dinner.

Say a family member is getting poisonous at the table. What would Flynn do? “Well, Amy would definitely make quick work out of those people,” she says. “There’s that one great scene when she gets annoyed with Greta in the Ozarks and when Greta goes into the bathroom, she goes into her fridge and spits in everything. Gillian would not do that. Gillian would probably duck out quietly, talk behind the person’s back briefly, and return to dinner with a smile on her face.”

She goes full bore with Christmas gift prep, but won’t buy anything intended to make the recipient look like a murderer.

One of the treats of Gone Girl is watching seemingly innocuous occurrences slowly reveal themselves as the work of a master manipulator. The most elaborate of these is a treasure hunt for a series of anniversary gifts that have a blackly comic double purpose. So how does a non-sociopath shop for Christmas? “I actually do have a weird little Amy streak in the sense of my crazy preparation,” Flynn admits. “I’m one of those people who buys gifts throughout the year and hides them away with little cards. My family has weird collections. My mom collects heavy metal, anything made out of metal. It just has to have a weird shape and weigh a lot. My dad collects cereal stuff and comic books. My aunt collects Chessie, a mascot for a train company. So I have a drawer full of this hodgepodge of items.”

She is an inveterate list maker, like Amy, but her lists are never part of an intricate, sinister plot.

“I have these crazy to-do lists that just go on for pages and pages,” she admits. “For a while, when we were moving into our house, I had ‘Unpack,’ ‘Really unpack,’ ‘Final unpacks,’ ‘Final final unpacks.’ Sometimes I put something really simple on the list, like ‘Answer that email,’ just to feel accomplished.”

You never have to worry if you’ve been poisoned at her house.

Anyone is capable of anything in Gone Girl, but you never have to subject the food at Flynn’s house to a sniff test for the bitter almonds of cyanide. That’s because Flynn isn’t the cook of her family; she’s the eater—though she does stock the table’s lazy Susan. “There have to be olives,” she says. “But not the fancy kind. The cheap black olives from the grocery store.”

She most definitely did not write Gone Girl as a genius double bluff like the one pulled off by Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Probably.

When asked if she wrote the book just so she could turn around and tell the police no one would be so dumb as to write in a book what they planned to do in real life, Flynn laughs. “[My husband and I] are coming up on our five-year anniversary. So if you hear that my husband has gone missing…”

Six Degrees of Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city

It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the [...]

Interview: Kendrick Lamar

“The world looks at this album as very personal,” a tired-sounding Kendrick Lamar explains over the phone en route to a concert in West Virginia. “But I don’t think they would understand how personal it is unless you grew up around the cats that’s on the actual skits. Those are my real homeboys on those skits, those are my real parents on those skits.”

It’s been a few days since the release of good kid, m.A.A.d city, Lamar’s challenging and much-praised debut. It’s the only thing I can listen to right now, and always from the beginning onward. It’s a totally immersive experience, the kind that rewards the careful listener. Or maybe it necessitates obsession, over analysis. Listening to Lamar talk about its creation — and it’s strange to hear him just speak, given how many different voices he adopts in his songs — this effect was clearly by design. When I remark that it’s an album that doesn’t work as stray tracks on a shuffled playlist, he sternly agrees. It’s an album for people who like albums, he explains. “It’s a cassette tape on disc. No skipping to the next track.”

Hip-hop will always make room for a young talent with Lamar’s backstory. His parents went from one frying pan to another, escaping Chicago’s violent streets for Compton in the 1980s. He was a toddler when his hometown, once a model of American suburbia and now a gangland image factory, became one of the most famous places in America, thanks mostly to N.W.A. and Boyz N the Hood. This was his birthright. He watched Dr. Dre and Tupac film the first “California Love” video. He was eight years old. Lamar released a series of charismatic mixtapes through his late-teens, eventually carving out a niche for a self-aware South Central new wave alongside Black Hippy comrades Ab-Soul, Jay Rock and Schoolboy Q.

But none of this was guaranteed, as any number of post-Death Row Los Angeles rappers who never made it past an ad in XXL will tell you. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact reason Lamar succeeded where so many others didn’t. Perhaps it’s a coincidence of timing. A previous era — just a few years ago, even — wouldn’t have granted a charismatic purist — the kind who speaks of returning hip-hop to previous “eras” and “climates” — full creative control. Maybe Lamar was lucky enough to emerge at a time when the album has been devalued as a concept, for the thrills and profits lie somewhere else. He worked closely with his producers (“I’m very hands-on”) to insure that good kid had a cohesive and consistent sound, and then he spent “months” sequencing it. “It’s real critical, you have to sit and live with it.

“In the early stages, I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to do what everybody else was doing. I’m sorry, I couldn’t. I was already in the back of my mind thinking people wouldn’t understand it…or I knew they would catch on, but I figured it would be gradual over time. Not instantly. And that’s what’s surprised me. It’s like, ‘Whoa. This dude just went somewhere totally different, and I totally understand it.’ The person that really put that fear aside when I played him the album was Pharrell. He told me, ‘It ain’t no need for them to understand. Understanding comes with thought — and they fear that.’”

Good kid is, as Lamar admits, a demanding piece of art. You may have heard “Swimming Pools” as a single, but it takes on a new meaning within the context of a deeply spiritual album and the possibility that the only thing saving him from that teetering into a bottomless drink is holy water. The skits are long and meandering, until you find yourself wondering what his father is up to, whatever happened to his friends. Fragments of conversation are recalled later in the night, and someone gets shot mid-verse during “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” the beat going on without him. It’s one of the most chilling things I’ve heard in a long time — a different, quotidian version of “reality” than you’re accustomed to hearing. The album closes with “Compton,” the reckless teen K-Dot reborn as the affected rapper Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre cosigning him over Just Blaze’s fanfare. As the tape nears the end of the spool, the story-cycle resets itself.

“I didn’t write (good kid) in order,” Lamar explains, “I just knew what I wanted to talk about, the actual concepts I wanted to talk about and how I was going to tie them in. There were five specific ones I wanted to tie into a 12-track album.

“I wanted to hit the points of my parents — their character and morals as well as their faults. I wanted to hit my homeboys — their characters as well as their faults. I wanted to hit the use of drugs. I wanted to hit the use of peer pressure — being surrounded by peer pressure. And I also wanted to hit the sense of feeling the need for spirituality within myself growing up.”

Despite these broad themes, good kid‘s sense of scale is minuscule when compared to most other so-called classic debuts, where the tales of struggle merely anticipate the present-day’s presumed riches. “That album really represents everything that happened within one day that changed my whole life. From meeting up with a girl named Sherane,” he explains, to chilling with his homeboys to “something happening to my homeboy,” to “the actual lady coming up and saying, ‘What are you guys doing? You got to change your life.’”

As he explained this, I realized that what I find haunting about good kid is that it feels totally bereft of fantasy. When he was 17, Lamar explains, his life was oriented around “money, hoes and whatever else evil in the world.” And while there are brief glimpses of possible futures — “dreams of living life like rappers do” (“Money Trees”), visions of being “the man on these streets” (per Young Jeezy, on “The Art of Peer Pressure”), the possibility of “wifin’” his girl Sherane (“Sherane aka Master Splinter’s Daughter”), the righteous path’s vague promise — the only horizon that truly matters is tomorrow. The album’s single, unstated fantasy: “Getting past this one day.”

The 13 Best Rolling Stones Songs You Don’t Know

As they branded themselves in a deserved fit of future-pique, the Rolling Stones are the world’s greatest rock ‘n ‘roll band, with singles too numerous to name dominating our hearts and loins from 1962 on. Though that burst of dangerous, sexual charge that impregnated “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” “Jumpin ‘Jack Flash” and others has subsided some 50 years after the fact, the throbbing energy of London’s favorite bad boys will never completely diminish; those first 13 ABKCO titles from 1964-70 are damn-near perfect, even in their flaws.

We know the hits; classic-rock radio has made sure of that. But beyond the big cuts — which are wonderfully collected on numerous compilations, including Hot Rocks, Big Hits and the latest, GRRR — there are many more songs deserving of your undying fandom. Below are 13 favorites, in order of preference, running the gamut from their first recordings to their triumphant Madison Square Garden set collected on Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out.

El Perro Del Mar, Pale Fire

When Swedish singer-songwriter Sarah Assbring last made a record, 2009′s gorgeously sad Love Is Not Pop, she referenced electronic dance music while purposefully not making it. This time around, she undercuts melody to make rhythm as her primary muse, yet nearly every synth pulse and machine rhythm on Pale Fire sounds as though it was recorded somewhere between 1986 and 1991.

The key influence here is Larry Heard, the super-influential but under-recognized Chicago musician who pioneered the heady, jazz-influenced vibes of deep house with Mr. Fingers’ “Can You Feel It,” a record the sound of which all over this one. As you might guess from an album that shares its name with Vladimir Namokov’s classic novel of metafiction, this is house music about house music: The lead single, “Walk on By,” leads with a sample of drag icon Dorian Corey from Paris Is Burning, the landmark 1990 ball culture documentary, and ends with Assbring quoting a line from Massive Attack’s similarly contemplative and fierce 1991 single “Unfinished Sympathy” as her chorus repeats to its fade. However, she mostly avoids house’s characteristic four-to-the-floor kick. When it does appear, there’s another wrinkle: “Love in Vain” bubbles with dub reggae syncopation; the culminating instrumental “Dark Night” avoids snare.

But there’s more going on here than intertextuality and subversion. After the cataclysmic breakup chronicled in Love Is Not Pop, Assbring sometimes still licks her wounds. In “To the Beat of a Dying World,” she vows to keep moving, but the track shuffles back and forth between two melancholy chords, suggesting stasis. Mostly, though, she reaches out to embrace a nocturnal kind of love, even if she can’t yet entirely trust it. “Can we make a new past if we run away from the day?” she asks in “Hold Off the Dawn.” Fire makes multiple appearances, symbolizing desire, destruction, and the life force that drives her. In “I Was a Boy,” love is so powerful that it changes her gender. Assbring can pull off a grand statement like that because her delivery remains delicately understated; she thinks like a woman but still sings like a child.

El Perro Del Mar, Pale Fire

When Swedish singer-songwriter Sarah Assbring last made a record, 2009′s gorgeously sad Love Is Not Pop, she referenced electronic dance music while purposefully not making it. This time around, she undercuts melody to make rhythm as her primary muse, yet nearly every synth pulse and machine rhythm on Pale Fire sounds as though it was recorded somewhere between 1986 and 1991.

The key influence here is Larry Heard, the super-influential but under-recognized Chicago musician who pioneered the heady, jazz-influenced vibes of deep house with Mr. Fingers’ “Can You Feel It,” a record the sound of which all over this one. As you might guess from an album that shares its name with Vladimir Namokov’s classic novel of metafiction, this is house music about house music: The lead single, “Walk on By,” leads with a sample of drag icon Dorian Corey from Paris Is Burning, the landmark 1990 ball culture documentary, and ends with Assbring quoting a line from Massive Attack’s similarly contemplative and fierce 1991 single “Unfinished Sympathy” as her chorus repeats to its fade. However, she mostly avoids house’s characteristic four-to-the-floor kick. When it does appear, there’s another wrinkle: “Love in Vain” bubbles with dub reggae syncopation; the culminating instrumental “Dark Night” avoids snare.

But there’s more going on here than intertextuality and subversion. After the cataclysmic breakup chronicled in Love Is Not Pop, Assbring sometimes still licks her wounds. In “To the Beat of a Dying World,” she vows to keep moving, but the track shuffles back and forth between two melancholy chords, suggesting stasis. Mostly, though, she reaches out to embrace a nocturnal kind of love, even if she can’t yet entirely trust it. “Can we make a new past if we run away from the day?” she asks in “Hold Off the Dawn.” Fire makes multiple appearances, symbolizing desire, destruction, and the life force that drives her. In “I Was a Boy,” love is so powerful that it changes her gender. Assbring can pull off a grand statement like that because her delivery remains delicately understated; she thinks like a woman but still sings like a child.