Weekend Kickoff - Mar 2017
Fourteen tracks for the early-spring shoulder week — the shortest Weekend Kickoff of the year because March is a month where the daylight starts coming back but the evenings still end early, and the playlist doesn’t need to be a four-hour catalog. Fourteen tracks runs about fifty minutes, which is roughly the length of one cooking-and-eating session at home, and that’s the use case this edition was built for.
Denitia and Sene “casanova.” opens because the duo’s catalog had just landed in our group chat and it became the song we couldn’t stop replaying. Alt-R&B with the kind of vocal restraint that’s hard to find in the post-streaming era — most singers are pushing for the chorus and Denitia and Sene are doing the opposite, pulling back into the verse, letting the song breathe. “Casanova.” specifically is the cut that effectively introduced the duo to me and then to the rest of the group within a week.
Domo Genesis with Anderson .Paak “Dapper” is the jazz-rap anchor. Domo’s a Odd Future alumnus whose solo work has been quietly excellent and that the streaming-era’s working-rotation has tended to overlook. The .Paak feature elevates the cut into the kind of song that lives at the intersection of rap and live-band soul, which is the part of the genre I keep returning to.
Dag Savage with Aloe Blacc “When It Rains” is the deliberately-buried highlight. Dag Savage is the duo of Exile and Johaz — Exile’s a producer who’s been around since the mid-aughts boom-bap rebuild and Johaz is one of those rappers whose catalog rewards the long listen. The Aloe Blacc feature is what pulls this into the broader audience that the duo’s solo work doesn’t quite reach.
RAIZA BIZA “Wassup” from the COLORS show series was the cross-Atlantic discovery of that quarter. The Berlin-based New Zealand rapper’s catalog isn’t really available outside the COLORS uploads, and the platform’s specific aesthetic — single-color background, single-take performance, no edits — fits her vocal style in a way that a studio recording wouldn’t. The placement is short and tight, the way the COLORS performance is, and that’s the right move.
Anti Lilly & Phoniks “Blue In Green” carries the jazz-sampling underground-rap weight. Phoniks’s productions are the kind of thing that lives between Pete Rock’s catalog and the post-J-Dilla beat-tape tradition. Anti Lilly’s voice sits low in the mix the way the genre demands. Dizzy Wright “Killem With Kindness” follows in the back half — a deliberately-gentle title for a deliberately-confrontational track.
Alan Watts with the Holland Tunnel Project “Mr. Jazz” is the spoken-word-and-jazz wildcard. Watts has been dead for fifty years and his lectures keep getting re-edited and re-released over instrumental beds. The Holland Tunnel Project version uses the original tape recording and sits the voice low in a smoky jazz arrangement that lets Watts’s specific cadence carry the song. It’s not for everyone. It’s for the friend in the group chat who’s been into Watts since the late ’90s and who asked me to find a jazz-rap context for him.
Anti Lilly & Phoniks with Devin Miles “Blue Dream” — the Phoniks Remix — closes the front block. The remix is the version where Phoniks lets the producer side breathe more than the original mix did. Devin Miles’s verse is the kind of feature that elevates the track without dominating it. The placement at the rotation’s halfway point sets up the back half for the slower tempos that the spring-shoulder edition always pulled toward.
Fourteen tracks. Forty-five to fifty minutes. The right length for the in-between season when the days are getting longer and the evenings aren’t quite committed to porch-listening yet. The friend group passed this around on a Friday afternoon and one of them told me it was his favorite edition of the year by Sunday morning. He’d played it five times. The shorter editions always do better than they should — there’s something about the lower runtime that lets every song earn its slot in a way the longer editions can’t quite manage. Single play-through, no repeats, then dinner.
The March edition was the rotation’s quietest tape of the year — short runtime, single-listen format, no repeats. The early-spring context wanted that kind of compression. By April the editions were already getting longer as the porch reopened and the standing-Friday tradition could commit to the full long-form rotation. March was the transition.
