VMP Magazine

VMP and 12on12 are working together to bring listeners highly exclusive and quality vinyl that function as both music and art. RUN DMC’s collaboration with 12on12 — a limited-edition curated album of handpicked songs that inspired the ground-breaking group’s music, with bespoke album art and an exclusive beanie — is available in the VMP store now.

As VMP approaches a decade of creating transcendent, tangible experiences with music, we are thrilled to announce that we will be opening a new audiophile-grade pressing plant in Denver. The new plant is scheduled to open by the end of 2022 for production, tours and special events.

VMP and Pearl Jam’s Ten Club are partnering to release the first-ever deluxe 2LP reissue of Pearl Jam’s Yield, as part of Legacy Recording’s celebration of the album’s 25th anniversary and VMP’s 10th anniversary this year. Click here to pre-order Yield and read below to find out more.

In 2019, Minnesota indie rap mainstay Brother Ali embarked on a 15th anniversary tour in celebration of his second album, Shadows On The Sun. The project has since become a hallmark for underground hip-hop both from the Rhymesayers extended universe and in the genre more generally. But to hear Ali (neé Jason) Douglas Newman tell it, he wasn’t sure whether anyone outside of himself and the project’s producer, Atmosphere’s Ant, would ever hear it. Speaking about the recording process in a reflective interview with Wordplay Magazine, Ali said, “When I made that album, I hadn’t been on tour yet. I really didn’t know if anyone would ever hear it.” The low-pressure environment regarding the album was freeing for Ali, who turned in an indie rap masterpiece, one that remains a sterling opus in his impressive discography. 

To start, there’s the formal constraint of naming your record after one of Gertrude Stein’s least accessible works. But then again, when were Broadcast interested in legibility? Tender Buttons, the band’s third and arguably final record, delights in opacity and in the kinds of kindness Stein writes about in her book of poems. “Out of kindness comes redness,” she writes, “And out of rudeness comes rapid same question.” In other words: prose that, while not exactly easy to parse, unlocks something in you.

If you’re a blues or R&B fan, it’s likely that you’ve heard Katie Webster’s swampy boogie-woogie without knowing it. There she is playing piano and singing along with Otis Redding on In Person at the Whisky A Go Go. There she is hammering the keys for Lightnin’ Slim. There she is on Slim Harpo singles from the late ’50s. Webster’s story is like 20 Feet from Stardom in miniature: Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, she was always on the periphery, just out of the heat of the spotlight, supporting stars as they hit the big time.

In December, the VMP Essentials Record of the Month is the 15th anniversary edition of Neon Indian’s delightfully lo-fi, chillwave-pioneering debut, Psychic Chasms. On occasion of our reissue, VMP chatted with Alan Palomo about how Neon Indian came to be, reflections on Psychic Chasms, his synthesizer collection, Italo disco, and much more.

The idea of a career being held up, of being stuck in a Sliding Doors moment where an alternate universe breaks in an alternate way, is one of the most alluring and enduring in all of music lore. It’s what the cratedigger economy is built on: Promise unrecognized, grooves underappreciated, talent overlooked. It’s a story that brings out the romantic in all of us; by listening to an artist once shelved and consigned to the dustbins of history, we are correcting wrongs and righting evils, Captain America giving Red Skull a fist of fury to the domepiece.

For hip-hop culture, the turn of the 21st century marked several sudden dips into uncharted waters. A climate still reeling from the untimely losses of 2Pac and Biggie, and the remnants of the so-called East Coast/West Coast war, there were several vacancies in both coasts’ superstar pantheons. 

Strictly speaking, Willy And The Poor Boys didn’t need to exist. Not as quickly as it arrived, in October 1969, only three months after Creedence Clearwater Revival’s previous album, Green River. And Bayou Country, featuring “Proud Mary,” the song that made Creedence’s national reputation, only came out in that January. It was a magical, breakout year for the southern-sounding quartet from the Bay Area, who spent spring and summer performing on every major festival and television stage while a succession of double-A-sided singles climbed the charts. They had conquered the world by August; why rush a third album by Halloween?

Freeway — born Leslie Pridgen, the titan from Ice City — is a man of Allah who’ll do it all to make the ends meet. A true technician with a hustler’s spirit, his North Philadelphia upbringing brought him from the lunchroom to the battle circuit to the world stage, marked by a full-throttle mic presence that’s unmistakably gruff and vulnerable, voice dancing between octaves and landing bars like heavyweights do body blows. 

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“People go to Mississippi to look at things that aren’t there anymore.”

— Francis Davis

“Baby let your mind roll on.”

— Gus Cannon

The sacred jazz subgenre presents a misnomer. At its core, jazz is already divine. The quiet holiness in the relationship between the artist and their instrument plays out as hands glide across strings and keys and lips purse against horn in a musical invocation — a prayer. The audience is both witness and participant to notes that fill the space and the soul. With luck, they can see how the sound gives shape to the artists’ relationship with a higher power, whether it be a cosmic connection with art or communion with an actual deity. When this happens, the spiritual and the secular, the body and the soul come together in an inseparable force, one flowing into the other between musician and listener.

We had staff writer Michael Penn II reflect on Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor, which turns 10 today.

John Prine is the comedian who can make a room dissolve in laughter without getting mean or going blue. John Prine is wry without being cynical, tender without being sentimental; simple but not simplistic, basic but not boring. He is deeply empathetic, able to tell a character’s story without turning it into a platform for his own thoughts and beliefs—yet you can always feel his presence in his songs, like Hitchcock appearing as an extra in his films. John Prine can shrewdly pinpoint and thoughtfully describe life’s myriad absurdities and hardships but does so in a way that’s whimsical and humble, not weighty or self-involved. His is a talent that’s simultaneously easy to describe and hard to pin down—and it can be easy to miss the depth and dimension hidden in his songs.

I. 9mm Goes Bang

VMP Rising is our series where we partner with up-and-coming artists to press their music to vinyl and highlight artists we think are going to be the Next Big Thing. Today we’re featuring the debut release from Cleo Reed, Root Cause.

Keep reading below to learn about the first quarter of records coming to VMP in 2024. 

VMP Rising is our series where we celebrate up-and-coming bands and put their music on vinyl, often for the first time ever. Our newest VMP Rising artist is Bruiser and Bicycle, whose sophomore album, Holy Red Wagon, is in our store now.

In celebration of International Women's Day this year, VMP's staff gathered a list of our favorite albums from women and women-identifying artists and why they're special to us.

Keep reading below to learn about the second quarter of records coming to VMP in 2024. 

The rules of being a country music star used to be simple: you sing the songs the label picks for you, you show up to sing at the Opry when the label tells you to, and you’ll be off on a nice little singing career. This factory-esque system flourished — with a couple of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash shaped exceptions — from the first time a poor southerner with mandolin skills walked into a recording booth.

But rock music, particularly the Beatles and Dylan, had showed a generation of performers in every genre that it was possible to choose what you sing, and furthermore, be the one who writes it. You could be a star by following your own gut and doing what you wanted to do not only in the bars of Nashville, but in the recording studio too.

That’s how outlaw country was born; a whole wave of young stars — who liked the weed those hippies from the coasts were smoking — decided to take agency over their own careers and make the music they wanted to make, some of them even in a major label system. The genre title wasn’t clever: a lot of the songs were about how they saw themselves as outlaws, smoking dope and pillaging the American south on their tours.

Despite all odds, outlaw country has become an ensconced genre conceit in country music. Anytime a country singer does an album that doesn’t sound like mainstream country, it gets labeled as outlaw country. That doesn’t mean that it’s not outlaw country; it’s just hard to imagine Waylon Jennings trying to make an album that sounds like 1933 in 1973 like the people labeled outlaw country in 2016 are making albums that sound like 1976. That said, there are some modern albums that ascend the outlaw country throne. Doing what you consider to be “true” is the only hallmark of a good outlaw country album, and these 10 are the most true.

“I can’t think of two more dissimilar women than Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton, and yet I hear they’re going to make a movie together,” wrote one would-be critic in a 1979 nationally syndicated Q&A column, summing up the views of plenty of skeptics when news broke that Parton would me making her Hollywood debut alongside Hanoi Jane herself. What could the activist-actress possibly have in common with the self-professed Backwoods Barbie?

In October and November, Vinyl Me, Please flew me to Atlanta, Memphis, and Nashville to interview artists and writers for the fourth season of the Vinyl Me, Please Anthology Podcast, this one centered around Stax Records. When I was putting my list of artist requests together, there was one artist I wanted to talk to, but not just for what he could tell me about one of the records in our Stax Records box set (Hold On I'm Comin' in this case): David Porter.

With hindsight, time has a way of collapsing — off the top of your head, what’s the difference between 1933 and 1935? When we’re dealing with years closer to the present, the sheer number of threads that can come unspooled in 24 months becomes clearer. The beginning of 2007, for example, bears virtually no resemblance to the fall of 2009. With music, though, sea changes rarely come that quickly, and almost never happen at a pace where things that might sound fresh in 1986 are made to sound drab and dated in ’88. But that’s exactly what happened to Run-D.M.C. with Tougher Than Leather, the group’s misguided fourth album, which turned 30 this week and which, in most ways, signaled the end their dominance over rap, and confirmed the status of a new, younger guard.

This September marked five years of VMP Hip-Hop, VMP’s third Record of the Month subscription Track. To celebrate, we asked Hip-Hop subscribers who are still members today after receiving the first-ever Hip-Hop Record of the Month — Noname’s Telefone in 2017 — to reflect on what the Track means to them. Read below to hear from them about why they’ve continued to subscribe, their favorite VMP Hip-Hop records and more.

Read below to see the upcoming Records of the Month in Essentials, Classics, Hip-Hop, Country and Vinyl Me, Parton coming to VMP in July, August and September of 2023. We already shared the first six months of Rock here.