26 prince rip-offs & the art of the steal
Roc Marciano! Whimz! Benoit & Sergio! Drug Dealer! Wild Pink!
Hi there! Welcome to the new subscribers who signed up this weekend - get ready for moderately hot takes and the best five tracks of the week picked by me every Tuesday!
Before the week’s best tracks, I was thinking a lot about stealing and artistry this week. Maybe it was the gross stereotypes of the FN Meka debacle, or Elton John’s latest weird remix/self-cover with Britney Spears, but this week felt awash in stealing gone wrong.
*Good* stealing in music is a joy - already knowing a sample flipped in a mixtape cut, a producer referencing really specific records in their mixes, or flipping a song by building on almost its entirety - it’s hard not to admire a great steal.
So in the spirit of the good AND the bad of stealing, I made OFF-PURPLE, a playlist of the good, the weird, and the terrible Prince steals from the eighties to today. It spans indie to R&B to J-Pop, and I can’t promise it’s all great, but it’s all a lot of fun. S/O to Ross Scarano for the help on this one.
Is aggregating just stealing? Regardless, here are this week’s Good Links:
Metal Machine Metacritic - Lou Reed’s record reviews are filled with incredible burns for your day-to-day life. “He's not happy with himself and I think he's right.” A+, no notes.
Like Wordle, But Somehow Even Nerdier - Deewee, the label from Soulwax, do a one-song playlist that updates every day. Follow the Dailee Deewee to keep up.
Learn to fuckin yodel-e-he-hoooooooooo - Folks have been uploading lost VHS instructional tapes, and though I’m partial to this charisma-free Van Halen tutorial, you should take 15 minutes and learn to fucking yodel.
Got specific and weird vibes? Dig the deep cut curation on this guy’s wild set of curated playlists.
And now, on to this week’s tracks - as always, you can follow along on our playlists on Spotify and Apple Music, which update every Tuesday along with the newsletter.
UNSKIPPABLES #51
Benoit & Sergio - Pars Autre Part
I was thinking I would put one of the “bangers” from this album in this week’s selects, but this slow burn vocoder jam is the one that stuck with me after listening to Benoit & Sergio’s debut(!) LP Lost Decade. Released last week on Jonathan Galkin’s Fourfour Records, the album is sleek and brooding, and the synth textures feel like they’ve been lifted from synth-pop dollar bin gems - crackling and saturated, like gossamer stretched over steel beams.
Roc Marciano & The Alchemist - Quantum Leap
The Alchemist continues his hot streak on collaborative albums, and Roc Marciano delivers maybe the best album of rapping of the year with The Elephant Man’s Bones. If the Black Thought/Danger Mouse LP is on your year-end list but you haven’t cracked this one open yet, I won’t tell anyone but stop what you’re doing and get right ASAP.
Whimz - AM2
A collaboration between Sunny Faris of Blackwater Holylight and friend of the newsletter Cam Spies of Night Heron, Whimz asks the important question: what if John Carpenter produced a Beach House album? Part dream pop and part funeral dirge, drums creak instead of popping, and synth pads loom rather than float.
Drugdealer - Someone To Love
Drugdealer exists on the edge of costume-y Boogie Nights silliness, but the dead-on playing and arrangements of his song keep him on the right side of the period piece line. His song “Suddenly” with Weyes Blood is still a go-to playlist staple from me thanks to its pitch-perfect Carpenters pull. On “Someone To Love,” it’s the dusty horns that overdeliver, along with the all-denimWurlitzer that drives the song, that keep you around and in his pocket.
Wild Pink ft. Julien Baker - Hold My Hand
A tender, affecting duet from Wild Pink about a gentle moment of humanity when undergoing cancer surgery. From Stereogum:
I wrote that song right after my first surgery, about lying on the operating table where a member of the surgical team held my hand right before I went under. It sounds kind of arbitrary, and like it shouldn’t have been as impactful as it was, but I felt very comforted and wanted to capture that loving feeling in the song.
THROWBACK CORNER
Stephen Cheng - Always Together
I’m on a group chat of fellow 30-something dudes who I’ve played music for a long time, and recently one of them fell in love with an oldies station while living upstate, leading to lively chats about Doris Troy and “A Groovy Kind of Love.” One recent chat led me down the rabbit hole on early rocksteady, leading me to this deep cut with a version of a Taiwanese folk song “Girl from Ali Shan” over a smoldering rocksteady instrumental. Stephen Cheng, the man behind the mysterious song, was chronicled lovingly by Hua Hsu in 2019 for the New Yorker, but the track itself broods in a strange limelight, evocative even without fascinating Cheng’s backstory.
And that’s all for this week, folks! Please subscribe if you’d like these opinions straight in your inbox. See you next week!