WK: Alt/Pop/Rock #716
Twenty-nine tracks from July 2016, leaning toward the rock side of the Weekend Kickoff. The standard July edition had the broader cross-genre survey; this one was the cousin version that pulled toward Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Jayhawks and the indie-rock-revival singles that one of the friends in the group chat specifically requested when the standard edition felt too pop-leaning for the porch.
Red Hot Chili Peppers “Dark Necessities” opens because the album cycle was at its peak that month. The band’s late-career material gets dismissed by critics and the dismissal is wrong — “Dark Necessities” has the bassline of the year, the chorus is the kind of slow-burn the band hadn’t pulled off in a decade, and Flea’s playing throughout is the reason this band still matters. The track was inescapable on alt-radio for a stretch of months and the playlist’s choice to lead with it is the right move.
Drake “Controlla” follows because it’s the slick-pop-rap pull that the friend group couldn’t agree on for the standard edition and that everyone agreed should be on the rock-leaning variant. The song is a vibe, not an anthem, and it works better as a between-songs breather than as a closer. The placement at second-track is doing the work of acknowledging that the rock-leaning edition still respects the year’s broader catalog.
Marian Hill “Got It” was the discovery of the year for the friend group. The duo’s electronic-pop minimalism is the kind of sound that doesn’t fit any obvious genre — somewhere between trip-hop, alt-pop, and chamber-electronic — and the song landed differently every time it played. The Jayhawks “Comeback Kids” sits a few tracks deeper as the roots-rock anchor of the rotation. Thirty years of recording history and the album that year was their best work in a decade. The song is unhurried, which is the entire point.
Kungs vs Cookin’ On 3 Burners “This Girl” is the dance-pop concession that the rock-leaning edition makes because the song was unavoidable. Originally a Melbourne soul track from 2011, the Kungs remix turned it into the kind of summer-radio anthem that doesn’t usually survive into the post-summer rotation but did. Destructo “Techno” is the wildcard from the dance-floor side, sequenced for the moment in the porch-listening session when someone leans over and asks who this is.
Jay Vilpin with Lavishly Nasty “Again” is the deep-cut pull that elevates the rotation past the radio-friendly singles. Jay’s catalog is the kind of streaming-era discovery that almost nobody has heard of and that the friend group adopted as our own — every time we played a Jay Vilpin track at a gathering, somebody asked who it was, and that was the entire selling point. The Strokes “Under Cover of Darkness” closes the front half with the early-aughts NYC-rock anchor. The song is from 2011, not 2016, but the band’s 2016 EP brought their catalog back into rotation and “Under Cover of Darkness” was the cut that everyone replayed.
Mid-rotation pulls in some of the year’s other peaks — Mac Miller with Miguel, Anderson .Paak features, a couple of A Tribe Called Quest cuts from the comeback album that landed in October but that the group chat had been anticipating since July. The back half leans softer — slower tempos, more indie-folk, the kind of music that fits the late-evening porch context after the dance-pop block has done its work.
The two-track-Sir-Sly placement carries through to this edition the way it does on the June 2018 edition — “&Run” and “High” sequenced apart, because the band’s catalog rewards the back-to-back-not-back-to-back placement. Glass Animals “Black Mambo” closes the front-half block with the indie-rotation anchor that was about to cross over but hadn’t quite yet.
Twenty-nine tracks lands at about ninety minutes. The right length for a July-evening porch session that runs from dinner-prep to the post-dinner cleanup, with the music doing the work of holding the room. Built for the cousin in the group chat who wanted the rock-leaning version. He played it on a Friday night and texted back at 2 a.m. that he was still listening to it. That’s the metric I use.
The variant tape worked because the friend group’s trust in the standing rotation by mid-2016 was high enough that the audience could commit to a single-genre variant without worrying that the cross-genre survey would be missing. The cousin who requested the rock-leaning edition played it continuously through the weekend. The texts came back through Monday morning.
