Just take Ghana-born, Australia-based musician Genesis Owusu, whose thrilling debut record Smiling with No Teeth is consistently difficult to pin down in a way that feels nothing less than vital. Genre classifications can be a helpful shorthand when it comes to understanding and engaging with new music, but nowadays, more and more artists are leaving them entirely in the dust. Listen to Paste ’s Best Albums of 2021 playlist on Spotify here. On this year’s 50 best albums, artists forced by the world’s troubles to look inwards-whether at their unanswered emotional questions or simply into their own imaginations-discovered new corners of their creative universes, and returned to show the rest of us. New faces including Dry Cleaning, Arlo Parks, Katy Kirby and Geese rode their debut albums straight to “ones to watch” status, and veterans like The Mountain Goats, Madlib and Low made formidable additions to already-herculean catalogs. Artists like TURNSTILE, The Armed and Deafheaven reimagined hardcore music as pop at its punchiest, while Pink Siifu, Remi Wolf and Genesis Owusu moved as if genre didn’t exist at all. Songwriters channeled their existential dread into their work, with climate change and COVID looming over urgent and indelible albums from the likes of The Weather Station, Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, and Gojira. Yet in spite of all this inequity, pressure and confusion, the music itself was the industry’s saving grace, same as always. Before vaccine mandates were normalized, the onus for imposing such common-sense measures fell on musicians, forcing them to go out on a limb and risk alienating fans and show promoters in order to play safely-artists did just that anyway. Bandcamp and their wonderful Fridays continued to be a vital lifeline for artists struggling to make ends meet, supporting them directly when other income streams had run dry. Worse still, a perfect storm of bottlenecked vinyl production and skyrocketing demand left many indie artists on the outside looking in when it came to getting their records pressed in 2021. Independent venues were struggling even prior to the shutdown that prompted the movement and legislation to save their stages, and the streaming economy continues to pay the vast majority of artists a pittance. Of course, it’s worth pointing out that “normal” wasn’t all that great to begin with. It enabled them to share with audiences the releases they wrote and recorded while they were stuck on the sidelines-a chance to step out of 2020’s shadow and let their eyes adjust to 2021’s sunshine. But on the whole, this year finally gave artists the opportunity to get out and support their latest records after an existential threat to their livelihoods, making their all-important returns to the road. Some artists canceled or postponed as many shows as they were able to play, as the pandemic’s summer surge, in particular, continued to destabilize the industry. After an all but tour-less 2020, this year brought bands back out of their bedrooms, basements and rehearsal spaces, off constant livestreams and back onto stages at last. So what will Beyonce's next chart-topper sound like? Diplo says we should look out for what he calls "Tribal," a style made by a few musicians in Monterrey, Mexico, that mixes African and Mesoamerican sounds with "cheesy techno riffs." You can hear his explanation of the sound below.Like stepping out of a dark room into broad daylight, or that first halting conversation after an extended silence, 2021 was a time for the music world to gradually readjust to normalcy. "That's what I care about - the people that I work with, and representing them, and helping to make their music apparent for the rest of the world." "You're not going to find an artist that I've ever collaborated with that has some kind of feelings about me," he says.
So that's always my goal - to make music that can reach people."ĭespite his rising fame, and the fact that he's become a spokesman for more obscure musicians, Diplo says that the relationships he's cultivated with artists from around the globe best represent who he is.
I want it just to reach them immediately. I want people to listen to something like 'Express Yourself' and just dance to it - not have to think about why it's interesting or what it is. He says that he aims to act as a link between musicians in niche genres and casual listeners. "I never thought I would be producing Beyonce or Usher or No Doubt." "I think that's been an argument and a controversy for me since I started, since before I had any press," he says. Some have leveled the criticism that Diplo is only a middleman - that time and again, he hijacks a sound from a culture or a place and, in pushing it toward the mainstream, becomes the face of it.