Take Note: Juke
Do you know how many genres of music there are on Spotify? That’s what my cousin, Matt Cronin asked me over Christmas dinner last winter.
“300,” I guessed.
“1,400,” he answered. Matt works at Spotify and is in his own band, Jet Black Sunrise. He’s dedicated a large part of his life to music and I’m not sure it was all by choice. Matt had always been exceptionally talented at the piano and songwriting before ever taking lessons. He did this with other things like learning Russian simply by having conversations with her grandmother who immigrated from Russia a wicked long time ago.
We started talking about some peripheral genres that I liked or artists that I was listening to today and one genre kept popping up called “Juke.” Chance the Rapper uses Juke-influenced tracks on his new album (among a bazillion other influences that make one big Coloring Book).
Months later, I sent Matt a new artist I couldn’t take off my queue named Smino. He said he also had a lot of Juke influences sprinkled through his album BlkSwn (Debut Album was BlkJptr that came out in 2015). Enough was enough. I needed to know more about this Juke that all the kids are talking about. So he sent me a playlist that one of his co-workers at Spotify made.
I took one listen of this playlist and was completely thrown for a loop. This sounded NOTHING like Smino or Chance the Rapper. What the hell was Matt talking about? So, I decided to have him on the inaugural episode of Take Note to help me break this down and get us all a little learnt.
Enjoy our Take Note: Juke Playlist on Spotify: CLICK TO LISTEN
And here’s a map of how every genre of music relates to each other: