Playlist: Prodigies of Pop Music

The Chicago-based Muslim rapper (with the support of Jay Z, renowned hip-hop producer L.A. Reid and Kanye West) has certainly earned exposure and accolades. But his first album was shifted from label to label, then leaked onto the Web months before its completion. Sales and promotion suffered. Nevertheless, he was nominated for three Grammys for his debut, “Food and Liquor,” and released the sparkling, well-reviewed follow-up, “The Cool,” in December 2007.

As Lupe’s biography on allmusic describes, the rapper is a unique presence on a scene dominated by sexualized subject matter, meticulous itemization of wealth and gangster nostalgia. There is only a sprinkling of this in Lupe’s content. He prefers to discuss jet-setting, illness, gender issues and politics, as does his senior partner on this spring’s tour, Kanye West. Lupe’s most explicit reference to wealth might be on “Paris, Tokyo,” where he sings, “Let’s go to sleep in Paris /Wake up in Tokyo.” His sole nod to celebrity is “Superstar,” a sobering look at the side effects of moving from everyday obscurity into the spotlight.

Lupe is more down to earth than his friend Kanye. His online identity is glamorous and just a touch sinister, as indicated by his Web site design, a tribute to Chicago and the themes of “The Cool” that echoes the Gotham design of the “Batman” movies. Lupe gazes confrontationally at the camera, but his blog is playful and personable, suggesting that even fame and friends in high places haven’t made a deep impression. Listen to clips from his albums (Note: some songs contain explicit lyrics) on his site.

Lupe’s page on MTV.com includes videos, live performances, a short bio, news, tour dates, ringtones and more of the usual accessories for music fans.

Eureka, California native Sara Bareilles began her journey with a slot in the iTunes Music Store’s “Free Single of the Week,” where “Love Song” found a home. The track stayed around iTunes for months. In February, perhaps in light of Valentine’s Day, it catapulted into the store’s top five single downloads. At the same time, Bareilles was touring, making stops at indie venues and playing with musicians like Rachel Yamagata and David Ford, her current tour mates on a mostly sold-out, cross-country schedule. Often compared to Norah Jones and Fiona Apple, Bareilles is wittier than both and considerably less bitter than Apple. Her piano-based pop songs are accessible, yet complex and sophisticated.

Bareilles is uncharacteristically personable and at ease with her audience. Her Web site runs an autobiography of her career, cataloguing the ins and outs of producing an album, gathering old demos and perfecting new material, and reconciling a long, hard fight for exposure with sudden fame. Bareilles is modest and sometimes self-deprecating. But there is a highly intelligent and determined “little voice” behind her diffidence, and Bareilles’s account of her life here is as candid and ornate as her lyrics on “Little Voice.” Learn more about this original singer from her site, which also has live videos, music videos, tour information and a tour journal.

Bareilles has songs from “Little Voice” available for streaming on her MySpace page. Scroll down the page for video blog entries from her tour.

And on her YouTube channel, mimicking the design of her Web site and MySpace page, you’ll find dozens of videos of the singer, including live performances, candid interviews and videos of some of her favorite peers’ work, such as Anna Nalick.

There are certainly other bands like Paramore on the rock scene, but this longstanding, self-taught, self-authored and very young group has already gone the distance. Paramore is lead singer Hayley Williams, a 19-year-old redhead with a larger-than-life voice; brothers Zach and Josh Farro, who play guitar and drums; and Jeremy Davis on bass. With a mixture of feminine wit, romantic reflectivity and sheer metallic power, Paramore makes music that is beautiful, silly and serious.

Originally from Tennessee, Paramore has been playing together since Hayley was 13 years old. The group signed with the independent label Fueled by Ramen and released their debut, “All We Know is Falling,” in 2005. It came out on the tail end of the emo craze pioneered by bands like Linkin Park and Evanescence. But Paramore wasn’t as dark, and their sophisticated arrangements, as well as Hayley’s vocal power, caught the attention of revered magazines like Kerrang! and NME. The band continued to play with like-minded groups such as Simple Plan and toured at events like the Vans Warped Tour. Their late-2007 release, “Riot!” resided on the Billboard charts for months after debuting at #20. More biographical facts are available from the band’s Web site.

One ingredient of a band’s staying power is perseverance. The fact that the band played long and hard through their adolescence is one qualifying factor. But a second ingredient is sheer talent: Paramore writes all their own material (“Riot!” was produced by the well-known David Bendeth), and live acoustic performances prove that Hayley Williams requires no vocal effects to impress us.

Browse the video selection on YouTube to see some wonderful guitar-and-vocal performances between Hayley and her bandmate Zach. Most of these are songs taken from their latest album, which displays maturity and sophistication that was at times lacking on the band’s debut. Browse the “Related Videos” from the link below to see more videos, including the band’s official video for their single “Misery Business.”

The band has its own YouTube channel promoting the live set they recorded for L.A.’s KROQ, their “Almost Acoustic Christmas” set for KROQ and their New Year’s Eve performance on MTV.

Get the critic’s scoop on Paramore’s unique take on pop-punk with Metacritic, a site that gathers all the online-music magazine and blog reviews of “Riot!” (and thousands more albums) in one place. Not all the reviews are favorable, but they recognize the promise and potential of the band and the particular star quality of Hayley Williams.

Watch an interview with Hayley and Zach on Veoh, courtesy of Altitude TV, that includes clips of a live performance and nostalgic photos from the band’s early days.

The Dirty Projectors, principally the 26-year-old Yale dropout David Longstreth, is a post-punk outfit from Brooklyn with several twists. Dwelling in the quiet, ungentrified neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Longstreth makes his living interpreting punk albums refashioning what he learned about music while in academia, and connecting the musical traditions of the East with the musical legacies and preoccupations of the West.

Since the early 2000s, Longstreth has been making music with several backup instrumentalists. Since early 2007, he has toured and recorded with the same trio: guitarist and singer Amber Coffman, bassist Angel Deradoorian, and drummer Brian Mcomber. Visit the band’s MySpace page to find out where to catch them, to hear the music, or to watch a video.

Daytrotter, one of the most widely read indie music blogs, interviewed Longstreth last summer as the band toured the U.S. and approached the release of its most anticipated album, “Rise Above.” Longstreth explains the allure of Black Flag, the punk band that inspired the album, and sheds light on the process of remembering and recording (“Rise Above” is essentially a retelling from memory of Black Flag’s “Damaged,” a seminal album for Longstreth while growing up.)

The Daytrotter Session with Dirty Projectors yielded several free mp3s that you can still stream on the site.

But one of the most visually appealing ways to get to know this idiosyncratic band is through live outdoor recordings, Concerts à Emporter, produced by a French blogger who has done about 100 such videos of various indie bands. Recorded around the NYU area of Manhattan, the videos reveal the Dirty Projectors live show to be constantly shifting and evolving but rarely sloppy. The complex guitar riffs and intricate vocal harmonies just won’t let it be. Watch the videos on Dailymotion.

The harpist Joanna Newsom spent much of her childhood sitting behind her instrument, practicing for hours, even when adolescence beckoned her to try other things. These days, she pokes fun at herself for such religious attachment to this centuries-old instrument, yet her dedication has clearly paid off.

There is no one even remotely like Newsom in contemporary music; she is both the hated and the most adored female musician of this decade, with a squeaky voice like Kate Bush and songs the length of symphony movements. Her album was virtually the best reviewed of 2006, according to Metacritic, and her recent tour, which took her to Asia, Australia, Europe, and back to the U.S., was mostly sold out. Both enigmatic (she has no Web site) and passionately expressive, Newsom proved with “Ys” that she is a musician bound for ever greater things.

Get familiar with Newsom’s music with a live concert video from her 2006 tour promoting her second full-length album, “Ys.” The song here is “Bridges and Balloons,” taken from the album “The Milk-Eyed Mender.”

Also worth watching is her 2007 performance on the BBC’s longstanding, late-night music show, “Later with Jools Holland.” The song here is “Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie,” which was released on the EP “Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band” in 2007. And for a sampling of material from “Ys,” watch a performance of “Sawdust and Diamonds” from a 2006 show in Philadelphia.

An unedited, seven-page transcript of an interview with Britain’s renowned The Wire finds Newsom unleashing her imagination and her philosophies on critic Rob Young while still maintaining a private air about what her songs actually mean. Her ornate, poetic lyrics recall the poets Sylvia Plath and H.D.—bound to nature, full of colorful metaphor, and only hinting at the sinister effects of mortality and love. Read the interview on The Wire’s site.

A pithier interview is available from Pitchfork Media, a site that interviewed the singer around the release of “Ys” in late November 2006. In it, Newsom discusses the “deeply biographical” nature of the songs, her musical equipment, the “four big events” that led her to write “Ys,” and the intimidating quest to get the composer Van Dyke Parks to orchestrate an accompaniment to the album’s tracks.