Heat Rocks

The Album: Otis Redding  The Very Best of Otis Redding  (1992) Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart is the son of a record producer and session player who blessed him with the gift of  The Very Best of Otis Redding,  the 1992 compilation of sixteen of the best songs from the late Otis Redding's catalogue. His father gave him instructions for listening - the charge to learn all about feel. We talked about the n...

The Album: Ol Dirty Bastard:  Return to the 36 Chambers  (1995) "Ain't no father to his style." That's how Ol Dirty Bastard was introduced to the world on 1993's  Enter the 36 Chambers  by hip-hop's posse supreme, the Wu Tang Clan. At the time, we got an inkling of ODB's eccentricity but on that first Wu album, so overloaded with personalities, it was hard to pluck him out of the stream and think...

The Album: Cyndi Lauper  She's So Unsual  (1983) She's So Unusual  dropped October 14th, 1983, and introduced much of the world to Queens' pop punk tough girl Cyndi Lauper. She presented as a colorful character with colorful hair and colorful homies and charmed her way into pop culture with ten tracks recorded for CBS at the Record Plant, NYC. The former front woman for rockabilly band Blue Angel...

The Album: Parliament:  The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein  (1976) In the 1970s, no single artist was as influential in transforming the sound of funk as George Clinton. If the funk of the late '60s was embodied in the sparse, frenetic rhythms of James Brown, Clinton filled out and polished the sound across the '70s, with beefy banks of horns and raucous guitars. By the time  The Clones of Dr. Funkenst...

The Album: David Bowie  Young Americans  (1975) Super cool Grammy winning writer and archivist Lynell George came to know David Bowie's music through celebrated Los Angeles radio station  KGFJ . KGFJ blasted the sounds and she received them courtesy of a wrap around Panasonic radio. (Salute!) She was attracted to the Philly soul sound ever present on David Bowie's Young Americans because Philly so...

The Albums: Vince Guraldi's  A Charlie Brown Christmas  (1965) Andy Williams'  The Andy Williams Christmas Album  (1963) Stax Records'  Christmas in Soulsville  (2007) Heat Rocks was hyped to have film critic Alonso Duralde  (The Wrap) , one of the hosts of Maximum Fun's movie podcast  Who Shot Ya?  guest with us to talk about our favorite Christmas songs, holiday fare, songs that should play when...

The Album: Kanye West  My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy   (2010) 2018 has been a tough year for Kanye West and Kanye West fans. He's showed up in unlikely places and waxed problematic about  virtually everything  , earned the ire of some of the West Coast's  most loyal representatives , inspired  critical analysis , all the while releasing Ye, his eighth solo album, an album as part of a group, a...

The Album: Kanye West:  College Dropout   (2004) Kanye has had a... not great year . From a public relations standpoint, it's been nothing short of a disaster. And yet...'Ye remains one of the most intriguing (if not also infuriating) pop acts we have, evinced to us by the fact that two different guests - rapper G Yamazawa and R&B legend Macy Gray - both asked to talk about Kanye West albums when...

The Album: J*DaVeY  The Beauty in Distortion  (2008) Heat Rocks co-host Morgan Rhodes is a huge fan of J*Davey and a huge fan of Iman Omari. Naturally she was beyond thrilled when Iman accepted an invitation to come on Heat Rocks and chose J*Davey's 2008 brilliant debut album "The Beauty In Distortion" to discuss. J*Davey's breakout project was one of the jewels in LA's emerging future soul scene...

The Album: Drakeo the Ruler:  Cold Devil  (2017) When we invited L.A. music writer Jeff Weiss to join us, he was adamant that there was only one release he wanted to talk about:  Cold Devil,  the full-length, acclaimed mixtape that the upstart Los Angeles rapper, Drakeo the Ruler, dropped nearly a year ago. Drakeo is part of the Stinc Team and is helping lead a wave of emergent talents that also i...

The Album: George Michael:  Faith   (1987) In the fall of 1987, it wasn't a foregone conclusion that George Michael's solo debut,  Faith , would be a hit. As successful as Michael had been as half of the Wham! duo, going solo was always going to be a risk but as it turns out, it was one worth taking.  Faith  turned out to be a runaway hit, not simply a #1 album but spawning four different #1 singl...

The Album: Janelle Monae:  Dirty Computer  (2018) To close out our Women Behaving Boldly mini-series, we brought things all the way up to the present by tackling a 2018 album. Our guest, music writer and journalism professor Evelyn McDonnell wanted to talk about Atlanta's Janelle Monae and her recent LP,  Dirty Computer. Between her various alter egos and concept-driven albums, Monae's been a crit...

The Album: Lauryn Hill:  The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill  (1998) On August 25, 1998, Lauryn Hill, the breakout rapping/singing star from The Fugees released her first (and only) solo album,  The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.  On August 25, 2018, exactly 20 years later, the Heat Rocks crew invited author Joan Morgan to join us to talk about that album and her new book  about  that album,  She Begat...

The album: Madonna:  Like a Prayer  (Sire, 1989) For the fourth installment in our Women Behaving Boldly mini-series, we spin the clock back to an episode we first aired a year ago: Ann Powers, talking about Madonna’s Like a Prayer from 1989. From the beginning, we knew this episode in particular would make a perfect fit with the WBB series. After all, few pop artists, female or male, have done mo...

The album: Betty Davis:  They Say I'm Different  (1974) As part of our "Women Behaving Boldly" series, we decided to re-air the episode that launched Heat Rocks: our interview with future soul trailblazer and architect Joi Gilliam. This was one the pilot episodes we recorded in the spring of 2017 and when we left the taping, we turned to one another and knew this show had potential. The pairing of...

The Albums: Aretha Franklin: Young, Gifted, and Black (1974) Aretha Franklin: Jazz to Soul (1994) Aretha Franklin: Rare & Unreleased Recordings from the Golden Reign of the Queen of Soul (2007) Heat Rocks had always planned to sit down with DJ Lynnée Denise, an LA-based DJ and music scholar, but when Aretha Franklin passed on August 16th, we invited her to come talk with us about the Queen's life...

The Album: Millie Jackson:  Caught Up  (1974) Some months ago, Oliver and Morgan kicked around the idea of celebrating women over the course of a few Heat Rocks episodes. We decided we'd package it as a series and Oliver came up with the name "Women Behaving Boldly". Gotta love it. To kick off the series, we chose the incomparable, ahead-of-her-time, OG provocateur Mildred Virginia Jackson known p...

The Album: The Rolling Stones:  Exile On Main Street   (1972) In 1972, The Rolling Stones were at the peak of their success...and excess. In order to flee British tax collectors, Keith, Mick and the crew fled to France where, over the course of many months - and a ton of drugs - the group pieced together what would become an epic double album. It would take Mick dragging the tapes to Hollywood to...

The Album: "Mosquita Y Mari"  soundtrack  (2012) Aurora Guerrero is a Chicana filmmaker whose 2012 sweet coming-of-age story about two young Chicanas falling in love in Huntington Park was hit at Sundance that year. The Hollywood Reporter called it "...a robust work of self-discovery for two girls at the most awkward and confusing years of their young lives, and a testament to Aurora Guerrero's st...

The Album: Minor Threat:  Minor Threat  (1984) In 2003, James Spooner released  Afropunk , a personal love letter/manifesto dedicated to people like him: punk fans of a different shade whose acceptance in the scene was often hard-fought and tenuous. That became a movement, with annual afropunk festivals becoming entities unto themselves, across the world. Spooner is now a tattoo artist and graphic...

The Album: Joni Mitchell:  Court and Spark   (1973) In 1973, Joni Mitchell was in the midst of one of the greatest pop music runs of the decade. By that time, the Canadian-turned-temporary-Angelino had already put out  Ladies of the Canyon, Blue  and  For the Roses , establishing her as one of the very few women that the rock establishment of the era would deign to even recognize. But with  Court...

The Album: Björk:  Homegenic  (1997) Josiah Wise aka serpentwithfeet joined us to talk about one of his biggest influences: Björk and 1997 album,  Homogenic . First introduced to her as a child, serpentwithfeet found a kindred spirit in the eclectic creativity of the Icelandic star. That especially extends to  Homogenic , which, thanks to Björk and producer Mark Bell, would mark a hard turn from t...

The Album: Destiny's Child "The Writing's on the Wall" She sings about love and about longing. Hometown heroine and triple threat (singer/songwriter/producer) Tiffany Gouché (Inglewood, CA) sang her way into our playlists with silky smooth vocals and a production style that reminds us of R&B’s glory days in the 90s, mixed with the eclectic futuristic sound LA music has come to be kno...

The Albums:  Alé Kumá:  Cantaoras   (Alé Kumá, 2002) Mary J. Blige:  What's the 411?  (Uptown, 1992) The Smiths:  Louder Than Bombs  (Rough Trade, 1987) Kendrick Lamar:  To Pimp a Butterfly   (TDE, 2015) We wanted to dedicate an episode to talking about the music of summer, easily the one season that people have the deepest sonic associations with. To that aim, we invited the two founding members...

The Album: De La Soul:  Three Feet High and Rising  (Tommy Boy, 1989) I (OW) mention this on the episode but this album changed my life. It wasn't my introduction to hip-hop but it was the album through which I fell in love with hip-hop and that set me down a path that shaped the rest of my professional (and even personal!) life: as a writer, scholar, DJ and of course, humble podcast host.  It cle...