VMP Magazine

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

I. 9mm Goes Bang

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.

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.

There were only five years left. When Busta Rhymes made his mark in 1991, on A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario,” almost instantly heads were clamoring for his full-length debut. A playful and furious whirling dervish of baby dreads and gruff boisterousness, Busta made a quantum leap on Tribe’s single with bars that were so forward-looking that, in the video, even the colors on his shirt seemed to be in perpetual motion. Busta Rhymes was suddenly occupying everyone’s world just off of one unforgettable verse. 

Humans have always had a fascination with magic. In the world’s current chaotic climate, many cultural channels have had to switch to a more “new age” approach, satisfying a rising populace solving their disillusionment with witchery. Nowadays, you can find charged rose quartz chips swirling in perfume (to attract love) sold by en vogue shops. Online publications like Broadly and Refinery29 frequently release content spotlighting the best tarot spreads and crystal grids. You can even scroll through social media and browse the growing collection of Twitter astrologists, meticulously picking apart Beyonce’s birth chart in a bid to discover what exactly makes her Virgo-sun, Scorpio-moon and Libra-ascendant dominants tick.

But this sudden mass-exodus toward the use of tarot, spellcasting and dried sage isn’t new for one faction: music. Witchy women have always been a staple archetype in that world.

Last week, VMP editorial and music staff traveled to Austin, Texas, for SXSW Music. Here’s the 10 best artists we saw — between the tacos, mechanical bull riding (for one of us) and unexpected thunderstorms.

VMP editorial had an ulterior motive at SXSW: To not only see the best bands and eat the best food in Austin, but to poll attending artists about their favorite records of all time and the memories attached to those albums. We caught up with five artists during the hectic festival week — read below to find out all about their picks.

The latest release from VMP Anthology, Miles Davis: The Electric Years collects seven albums in Miles’ electric period from 1969 through 1974 — the first of his career where he literally plugged in and used electric instruments. These albums exploded what jazz could be in the wake of rock music, and set the path for the future of many, many genres.  

Read below for excerpts from the box set’s liner notes, written by author, jazz critic and historian Ben Ratliff, and click here to learn more about The Electric Years. 

Photo from Shakira’s El Dorado World Tour, via shakira.com

Born as Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll in Barranquilla, Colombia, Shakira has become known as the Queen of Latin Music. Having planted her feet in the industry for over three decades, Shakira has remained authentic as she navigated a tightrope balancing act between remaining genuine with her music and appealing to wider audiences, especially in the early 2000s when she ventured to make a footprint in the U.S. landscape. But, as we now know, her steadfast dedication to vocalizing her own blend of backgrounds has spoken to many. She draws inspiration from both her Colombian and Lebanese heritage, infusing a multitude of diverse styles and instruments into her music and her live performances, eluding commercial demands. From the beginning, Shakira shook the industry and the world with her authenticity, setting the stage with a unique set of sounds that would indicate her greater cultural impact in the U.S. music market and crown her a queen.

VMP’s Truth Is Where It’s At: The Best of Gospel Truth marks the first reissues of six LPs from Stax Records’ gospel imprint meant to “bridge the gap between the street corner and the church pew.” Read below for an excerpt from the box set’s liner notes, written by Memphis journalist Jared “Jay B.” Boyd, and click here to learn more about Truth Is Where It’s At.

Photo by Braylen Dion

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is DEACON by serpentwithfeet.

SXSW is almost coming to a close, but the music doesn’t have to stop here. We put together a list of records you can buy from the VMP store now to take home select sounds from the many, many artists performing at the festival this week. Read below to learn more and shop the full collection of SXSW-related titles here.

Welcome to the second edition of “Personal Playlist,” a recurring interview series at Vinyl Me, Please, where one artist picks one song from each of their albums to talk about (or one song from every band that they’ve been in). Here are the six songs Jonah Falco and Mike Haliechuk chose from each Fucked Up LP, including their Zodiac singles series and new album Dose Your Dreams.

Moses Sumney, 26, is only interested in making people feel shit. Frankly, he’s interested in the presence or absence of feelings, and the tensions created by societal norms around which expressions of our feelings are encouraged and silenced throughout time and space. His music is interrogative, soulful, rooted in folk and difficult to define, but feelings and intimacy drive the core. Sumney revels in minimalism; he recorded earlier work on a four-track, focusing heavily on acoustics with choral arrangements centering his otherworldly falsetto into layers upon layers of what sounds like a fallen angel shrieking for help as he falls into an abyss he’s yet to name. It’s the same voice that’s spent the past few years captivating festivals across the country; with a loop pedal and perhaps one other person backing him, Sumney reigns a gentle supreme, facilitating enough exposure of himself and comfort in others to to leave his audiences stunned to silence and moved to tears.

Welcome to the third edition of “Personal Playlist,” a recurring interview series at Vinyl Me, Please, where one artist picks one song from each of their albums to talk about (or one song from every band that they’ve been in). Here are the four songs guitarist and producer Tom Brenneck chose from each album by the late Charles Bradley, including Black Velvet.

Life in record stores can be frustrating. From happy couples who have never patronized your shop taking engagement photos in the aisles, to bargain shoppers photographing items just to walk out and buy them online, the brave souls who devote their lives to selling records face specific challenges in addition to the usual retail headaches.

It’s happening sooner and sooner every year. An entire section of your local record store has been taken over by crates of backstock Christmas albums visibly dusty from the 11 months they spent stashed away in the basement. Dollar bins overflowing with Firestone Christmas albums, themselves stuffed wall to white-wall with festive schmaltz from Bing Crosby, Leonard Bernstein, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. If you’ve been keeping count, and why wouldn’t you have been, there are now seven(!) different variations of the Now That’s What I Call Christmas! collection to be had. Maybe you even get inspired to search around the floorboards of your car for that battered copy of The O.C. Mix 3: Have a Very Merry Chrismukkah.

Originally published in 2017, we remember Christina Aguilera’s Stripped, which turns 20 this week.

Musical cinematography — the evocation of a place in time, of time in a place. Ernest Hood made good on the vivid label that he’d designated to the searching, surveying sounds of his pioneering 1975 album Neighborhoods. Loping synthesizers and moony-eyed zithers sauntered its boulevards, mingling with the sublimely ordinary field recordings of cans kicked and errands ran to unfurl as suburban sepia tone poems. Hood’s private-press prize was statedly nostalgic, his strums and stipples knowingly foxing the auditory documents of daily life, implying a warm return to an ambered yesteryear.

If you’re sentient and been to a multiplex, you’ve noticed a reliable movie trope happening: since Ray won Jamie Foxx an Oscar, every year has seen a smattering of biopics on musicians. Just this year saw films on Nina Simone, Miles Davis (which I actually loved), Hank Williams (which I hated), Chet Baker, and that time Elvis met Nixon. Next year promises a threatened Tupac biopic, a Def Jam records biopic, Morrissey, and Death Row Records biopic.

Now, some of these movies might be enjoyable. But odds are most of them will suck, and most of them will be an insult to you, the people that made them, and the artist whose life they’re based on. And more importantly, none of them will ever stack up to a biopic of a fictional folk singer in New York in the early ‘60s, in a Coen Brothers movie hardly anyone saw. I’m talking of course, about Inside Llewyn Davis, the 2013 film starring Oscar “Yeah, I’m in Star Wars and X-Men” Isaac in the title role. The film is far and away the best, and realest movie, about being a working musician ever made. It’s better than any biopic you’ve ever seen.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is Few Good Things, Saba’s long-awaited third studio album and follow-up to 2018’s CARE FOR ME.

Selected and written by members of the VMP team, below is an unranked list of albums that we felt were among the best to come out in 2022. On it, you’ll find 30 records that meant something to each of us, ranging from ASMR&B to hyper-futuristic pop, hardcore to house, and plenty of hard-to-label sounds in between.

Read on to find out why we picked these albums, listen to our Best of 2022 playlist and discover your new end-of-year soundtrack.

Editor's Note: Today, we're reissuing the Max Roach Trio's album with the Legendary Hasaan. The album came to our attention from Ben Ratliff, who wrote the Listening Notes booklet for our Vinyl Me, Please Classics reissue of Max Roach's Percussion Bitter Sweet. Hasaan only made one album, and when Ben told us about it, we looked into the album and helped organize this reissue. When we realized we could have new liner notes for the album, we knew who to ask.

You can buy the album, which has been remastered by Kevin Gray, here.

SZA told Vogue last year, “I use the anniversary of Ctrl as an opportunity to cry and reflect every year.” This time, to celebrate the undeniable album turning five, she’s opted to cry, reflect and release a deluxe version of the record, with seven previously unreleased tracks. According to a tweet from the artist, the new songs — including an alternative version of “Love Galore” — were all made between 2014 and 2017.

Many country songwriters chronicle a search for something bigger, a need to escape from their small towns in order to make it in Nashville or spread out into wide open spaces. It’s been a different journey for Katie Crutchfield and Jess Williamson, who, on their first album as the duo Plains, make music that wanders homeward. Both of these artists come from the South — Crutchfield, who also makes music as Waxahatchee, hails from Birmingham, Alabama; Williamson is an Austin, Texas native. Both musicians also cut their teeth in indie rock for the majority of the last decade. But by 2020, they found themselves in similar spots on their new records, Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud and Wiliamson’s Sorceress, leaning toward the Americana, folk and country music they rebelled against in their youths. “If you only knew how hard I was trying to suppress that Southern accent for so long,” Crutchfield told the New York Times. 

Each week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is The Long Way, The Slow Way, the debut LP from Camp Trash.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is The House Is Burning, the long-awaited record from Isaiah Rashad.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is Santigold’s fourth studio release, Spirituals.

Though J Dilla is praised by the likes of producers Kanye West, Pharrell Williams and Q-Tip, at his creative peak — and after his untimely death in 2006 — he was seen as an underground marvel and one of music’s best-kept secrets. He didn’t have the high profile of his peers, yet he kept shifting the frequencies of hip-hop and soul, crafting sounds that inspired them. Still, he didn’t get substantial credit until he was gone, leaving his fans to wonder what would’ve happened if he had major-label support. He almost found out in the early 2000s.

To make Butterfly, Mariah Carey had to dismiss what fans previously expected from her. It meant shedding traditional pop ballads for urban adult contemporary and a harder hip-hop edge. Trading her dark-hued ringlets for a glamorous blonde blowout. Wearing thigh-baring gowns instead of conventional high-waisted jeans. Filing for divorce from music executive Tommy Mottola. By 1997, Mariah had broken all the rules to revamp her career on her sixth album, flying her into genre-defying heights.

Here And There, the touring festival curated by Courtney Barnett, wrapped up with a final show at Denver’s Mission Ballroom on September 3. Whether you were there and want to relive it, or missed out and are hoping to catch a glimpse of the performances now, see below to explore the event, with images of Barnett, Japanese Breakfast, Arooj Aftab and Bedouine, captured by photographer Richard Edens. (And click here to hear more from Barnett herself on the festival and her curated collection of VMP titles.)

For 18-year-old Usher Raymond IV to meet a career-defining moment, he had to prove critics wrong. Released 25 years ago today, Usher’s sophomore album, My Way, delivered his first multi-Platinum album and crowned him as R&B royalty in the making. Flipping the 1969 Frank Sinatra classic “My Way” with a Gen-X edge, Usher’s 10-track 1997 album gave him a launchpad into stardom, setting the tone for the rest of his career.

Each week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is The Other Side Of Make-Believe, the seventh LP from Interpol.

The musical world around vinyl has changed beyond recognition in 20 years and, with it, the reasons for people buying it. What keeps it going?

For my sins, I am 41. Born in 1980, there are niche but keenly contested arguments as to whether I’m a tail-end Gen X, early Millennial or part of a cohort that doesn’t belong to either larger group. I start this piece with this information so that you may contextualie my efforts to talk about people rather younger than myself with the appropriate amount of patience, condescension or derision; the choice is yours. In an effort to minimize the latter, I will be limiting myself to talking about vinyl.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is Brijean’s new EP, Angelo.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is Stella Donnelly’s sophomore record, Flood.

There are almost no other living artists who have had as vast an impact on jazz music as saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Nor are there many other artists of his age (85) that are still trying to push at the boundaries of the genre, as he did on his most recent album Emanon, a multi-part epic including one disc of sweeping, magisterial work recorded with his current quartet and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and two discs of bold post-bop recorded with the quartet in London. Oh, and it came with a sci-fi graphic novel co-written by Shorter that imagines a “rogue philosopher” attempting to rid the universe of evil and spread a message of peace and enlightenment. The resolute strength of his playing has dimmed somewhat as a result of his advanced age, but his mind remains agile and curious.

Every week we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough’s soundtrack for The Northman. 

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is ODESZA’s The Last Goodbye, the electronic duo’s first album in five years.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is Beyoncé’s long-awaited seventh record, RENAISSANCE.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is Farm to Table, the second record and 4AD debut from genre-bending indie rocker Bartees Strange.

Below is an unranked list of 30 albums that we felt were among the best to come out in 2022, so far.

Somehow, we’ve reached the midpoint of another year, and 2022 is halfway behind us. In these first six months, artists and listeners alike have done their best to reckon with the grief, joy, angst and euphoria we are all collectively experiencing. Selected and written by members of the VMP team, this list contains the albums that resonated with us most — from pandemic rap to folk, emo rock to electronic and everything in between — and hopefully you can find solace and inspiration in them, too.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is the self-titled third record from MUNA, the band’s debut on Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records.

Each week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is Beatopia, the sophomore LP from Beabadoobee.

It’s unclear whether Death Cab For Cutie’s modest origins were hiding the band’s big ambitions, or whether those ambitions were only realized when they started to find some well-earned success. But at the beginning, they were college-rock guys from a college town: Bellingham, Washington, is about 90 miles north of Seattle, closer to its northern neighbor, Vancouver, than Grunge City, USA. Singer-guitarist Ben Gibbard was studying environmental chemistry at Bellingham’s Western Washington University when he started playing and recording his own music, first with a band called Pinwheel and eventually as Death Cab For Cutie — the name is taken from a song by British weirdos the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, who performed it in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour film.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is Drill Music in Zion, the eighth album from Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco.

Jorja Smith might be known so far as a feature artist, after collaborations with Drake, Kendrick Lamar and Kali Uchis, among others. But the range of her debut album, Lost & Found, proves she is so much more. At times rasping and plaintive, then soft and rapturous, Smith’s first full-length has mood shifts and an ambivalence toward genre that only someone with a voice as singular as hers could balance.

Despite being unique, captivating and definitely Smith’s own, this record feels familiar in that it echoes the honesty and intimacy of women in R&B who came before her, and resonates with the accessibility of her contemporaries. R&B has always been an avenue for emotional expression, with a history of powerful women within the genre speaking out about sex, relationships and, radically, themselves.

It’s no secret that record stores — and the music industry, at large — have often gained a reputation throughout their histories for being “boys clubs,” which is just one reason why many choose to actively seek women- and LGBTQ-owned and operated stores whenever possible.