VMP Magazine

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

I. 9mm Goes Bang

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.

“As hip hop… blossomed into the radiant center of youth culture, a lot of white kids found in it a way to flee their own orderly world by discovering a sexier, more provocative one.”

Two blocks from the Wisconsin state capitol building, and 150-odd feet away from Lake Monona-- an eight square mile lake that, along with neighboring Lake Mendota, creates the isthmus that forms the downtown of the city of Madison--is the Monona Terrace Convention Center. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Monona Terrace Convention Center has two matching, four story pillars as its anchors, each of which features a beautifully maintained rooftop garden. On the northern pillar--near where you can enjoy a $6.95 plate of snap peas from the Lake Vista Cafe-- are three benches, centered around a solitary plaque that begins “Otis Redding: King of the Soul Singers.”

In December, members of Vinyl Me, Please Essentials will receive an exclusive deluxe edition of Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You, the singer’s breakthrough album. This new edition was remastered all-analog from the master tapes by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound and pressed on pink and purple swirl vinyl at GZ. You can sign up to receive it here.

To celebrate our reissue, we're republishing this essay written in March of 2017, before Aretha's death, when I Never Loved A Man turned 50.

It begins with the sound of the space-time continuum being twisted and bent. The echoing beeps and blips of Herbie Hancock’s kaleidoscopic jazz number “Rain Dance” is the soundtrack of you falling through a forbidden vortex and spiraling into another dimension. Final destination: a bizarro version of New York City. Your guides: hip-hop hippies Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler, Mary Ann “Ladybug Mecca” Vieira, and Craig “Doodlebug” Irving. The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway once described Roaring Twenties NYC as “always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” Almost seven decades later, Digable Planets daring debut album repainted Gotham in a way that would have caused F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mind to swell.

There’s a certain amount of pro wrestling self-promotion involved in pop music. We want our pop stars to have self-confidence, and in order for them to carve their own part of the pop landscape, they often need to kill idols and trash peers. Even though we’ve seen it a million times, it’s an inevitability. But 30 years ago, when the artist then known as Terence Trent D’Arby started promoting his debut LP, and started taking the name of the Beatles in vain, it felt positively shocking.

It’s hard to understate the level of fame Lauryn Hill carried on her shoulders, that day in July in 2001, when she strode into MTV Studios in Times Square, ready to perform on MTV’s Unplugged series. The show, meant as a storytelling and acoustic live performance, had hosted rappers before (LL Cool J was actually one of the first performers ever), and had artists making appearances that ended up outranking some of their studio material (Nirvana chief among them, but also, uh, Eric Clapton). But Lauryn had something bigger in mind. At the time, she was the most famous rapper on earth not named Eminem--your mom can hum “Doo Wop (That Thing),” ask her--but was in danger of getting left behind as rap became the defining music of the 2000s. Since she had cleaned up at the Grammys in 1999 for Miseducation of Lauryn Hill--she and Outkast remain the only rappers to win an Album of the Year Grammy--she had disappeared in a cloud of rumors and smoke, moving to Jamaica with her partner Rohan Marley (yes, Bob’s son) and apparently had no plans to do a new album anytime soon. Instead of doing her old songs and shitting on the microphone like Nina Simone, Hill wanted to give her listeners something different at Unplugged: a look into the interior life of a performer who made it to the mountaintop of fame, and who found it as empty as the “regular” life she left behind.

Pink Floyd's Animals turns 40 today. Often set aside when considering the band's "best" album in favor of Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall, we make the case that it's the band's most resonant album.

We celebrate Justin Timberlake’s sophomore solo album, FutureSex/LoveSounds, which turns 10 today.

OutKast's ATLiens is our August Hip-Hop Record of the Month, celebrating its 25th anniversary. You can read new Listening Notes for the record here and below, you can read the essay we published in 2016, celebrating ATLiens on its 20th anniversary.

We look back at Fiona Apple's Tidal, on the day it turned 20.