https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/arts/music/playlist-meek-mill-benny-blanco-juice-wrld.html

Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos.

Benny Blanco featuring Juice WRLD and Brendon Urie, ‘Roses’

Many threads of emo get woven together by the savvy pop producer Benny Blanco on the eerily effective “Roses,” from his new album “Friends Keep Secrets.” First comes Juice WRLD, the leading petulant emoter in hip-hop, his voice an exhausted peal: “Still feeling dead when I think about you/I can’t do a damn thing when I’m without you.” Then comes Brendon Urie — frontman for Panic! at the Disco — who arrives with an almost sensual, R&amp;B; take on heartbreak, groaning, “Every look you give it’s like I’m see-through.” This successful collaboration across generations and styles is a reminder that they were never that far apart to begin with.

Galactic featuring Miss Charm Taylor, ‘Clap Your Hands’

Here’s nothing more or less than a euphoric three-minute New Orleans funk romp from one of the city’s long-running bands: a backbeat, some bluesy harmonica, a rowdy horn section, a busy tambourine and Miss Charm Taylor sassily declaiming, “It’s something in the beat/that makes me feel so free.” No further explanation needed.

Jacob Collier, ‘With the Love in My Heart’

A virtuoso singer and multi-instrumentalist, Jacob Collier raids musical tombs, yanking ideas from across the natural world. But he doesn’t stir everything into a chilled-out groove; instead he shines a bold light on every trick he uses, moving from reference to reference as if flipping tabs on a browser. This is beat-driven music that’s meant for headphone listening, not the dance floor. On “With the Love in My Heart,” you might catch a few direct references: to J Dilla-influenced jazz drumming, the wagging synths of 1980s funk (à la Zapp &amp; Roger), high-school drumlines. The track comes from “Djesse, Vol. 1,” a new album he recorded with the Metropole Orkest. This is the first in a four-disc package that Collier plans to release, one album at a time, over the coming year.

Meek Mill, ‘Funk Flex #Freestyle118’

“Championships,” Meek Mill’s first full-length statement following his release from jail this year, didn’t fully capture what makes him so invigorating as a rapper. He’s an orator, and anything that prevents him from talk-rapping — namely, the dictates of song construction, especially when it comes to working within a melodic framework — is a distraction. So it’s appropriate that the most vital Meek Mill moment of this cycle comes on this freestyle, part of Funkmaster Flex’s ongoing series. He begins with a stroke of comity, speaking about reconciling with Drake, and then exuberantly raps over “Back to Back,” the song Drake used to dismantle him so effectively three years ago: “My old opps, they super mad, we left them pouring Henny up/'Cause they homies got whacked, we bought Maybachs/Came through they strip, no tint, laid back.” But it’s later in the 10-minute performance that Meek Mill’s talents truly shine through. He’s become something of a cautionary tale, and he wants to warn others. For about five minutes, much of it aimed directly to the camera, he raps about the futility of the drug game, about the hopelessness that leads to poor decisions. “They tried to bury us, ain’t know that we was seeds/We had to trap, ain’t get no toys on Christmas Eve/Play that corner made you rich, what we believed,” he raps, with understanding and exhaustion. And then he goes on, telling people that there’s another way.

Cactus Blossoms, ‘Please Don’t Call Me Crazy’

The sound is retro but the words are up-to-the-minute in “Please Don’t Call Me Crazy,” by the Cactus Blossoms, who have the vocal harmonies, reverb guitars and rockabilly backbeat of the Everly Brothers but live in the present. Singing over echoey guitars and a few chords, they confront digital life as lived now: “Computer in your pocket/Nobody has to know,” they sing. “What you want/not what you need.”

ÌFÉ, ‘The Tearer (Bembe)’

ÌFÉ is a Puerto Rican electronic group led by a high priest of the Afro-Caribbean religion of Santería; a bembe is a drum-driven Santería ritual. But “The Tearer (Bembe)” is far from folkloric. The steady but ever-varying beat mixes percussion, piano, synthesizer and quick hisses of white noise behind rapping, singing and, about halfway through, an Auto-Tuned woman’s voice leading a traditional-sounding call-and-response. The song glances at current events as it praises Oya, “she who tears,” the Yoruba goddess of storms, winds and transformation; the video presents her Marvel Comics equivalent, Storm of the X-Men. But what makes the track compelling is the beat.

Holly Herndon and Jlin featuring Spawn, ‘Godmother’

Holly Herndon is an electronic composer who often uses her speaking and singing voice; Jlin is a producer and DJ who has pushed the skittish momentum of Chicago’s footwork into even more hectic abstractions. “Godmother” was generated without editing by Spawn, an artificial-intelligence device that was trained on Herndon’s voice and Jlin’s tracks. It unleashes Herndon’s vocal syllables as percussion for a kind of hissy, feminine, multilayered, glitchy beatboxing, human input dispensed with inhuman timing.

Eddie Palmieri, ‘Quimbombo’

After the death of his wife, Iraida, Eddie Palmieri found himself revisiting the songs they had shared in their youth. Eventually, it led the Latin music eminence into his next project: “Mi Luz Mayor,” an agile record featuring big-band arrangements of old Afro-Caribbean dance numbers and boleros. At the center is Palmieri’s scathing piano. On “Quimbombo” — originally recorded by Willie Colón and Hector Lavoe — vocalist Herman Olivera volleys with his backing chorus in a gleeful paean to okra stew. The vocalists and orchestra offer a sunnier, smoother take than the original recording (closer to the Hermanos Moreno version), but Palmieri has another thing in mind. His piano teases against Olivera’s vocals with subtle displacements until he finally breaks into a full-on solo, laying waste to the song’s simple four-chord pattern.

Toby Keith, ‘Don’t Let the Old Man In’

Of course late-career Toby Keith would find poignancy at the intersection of deflated bluster and a stubborn clinging to the past. “Don’t Let the Old Man In” is from the new Clint Eastwood film “The Mule,” about an older military veteran turned drug carrier. Keith’s song is slow, grounded, with an air of tragedy that gives way to defiance.

Mark Stewart and the Maffia, ‘Liberty City’

“Liberty City” was on the 1983 debut album by Mark Stewart and Maffia, a post-punk band that topped funk and dub-reggae vamps with atonal spoke-sung vocals, noise and free-jazz horns. Its lyrics still apply 35 years later, in an era of hypercapitalism — “Struggling to pay the rent/The main worry’s job security/The busier you are the less you see” — and in this new video, Mehmet Sander’s choreography groups a team of dancers to punish themselves on a Sisyphean slope.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/arts/music/playlist-meek-mill-benny-blanco-juice-wrld.html" id="2fea233b-6101-3518-a1f9-6ab5855f4453">The New York Times</a>.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/arts/music/playlist-meek-mill-benny-blanco-juice-wrld.html

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Emo's Past Meets Its Future, and 9 More New Songs