Tag: susan rogers

Moonbeam Levels (The New Master)

Moonbeam Levels (The New Master)

(Featured Image: Outtake from the 1999 photo sessions, by Allen Beaulieu; © the Prince Estate.)

Note: Incredibly, it’s been just over three years since I first wrote about “Moonbeam Levels” for dance / music / sex / romance. That post focused on the song’s status as the first posthumously-released track from Prince’s Vault, and was colored by the then-recent passings of both Prince and David Bowie, who I still consider to be an unsung source of inspiration for the song. You can still read that version if you want; but here is what I now consider to be the official d / m / s / r take on “Moonbeam Levels.”

In early July 1982, after spending the latter half of the spring back home in Minnesota, Prince returned to Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. His goal, almost certainly, was to put the finishing touches on the album that would become 1999. But in typical fashion, he overshot that goal: instead, launching himself into the stratosphere with the appropriately extraterrestrial outtake “Moonbeam Levels.”

In some ways, “Moonbeam Levels” feels very much of a piece with the other songs Prince was recording in mid-1982. Like many of the tracks that would end up on 1999, it opens with a prominent Linn LM-1 beat: in this case, the mechanical pulse of a bass drum, punctuated by a hiss of synthesized exhaust. To this futuristic foundation, Prince adds Blade Runner synth pads and lyrics evoking space travel: his narrator fantasizes about “a nice condo overlookin’ the rings of Saturn” and asks for the titular “moonbeam levels,” a poetic turn of phrase that conjures up images of interplanetary transmissions and cosmic rays. Meanwhile, the ever-present threat of annihilation looms: Prince imagines a never-written novel with the capsule summary, “Boy loses girl in a rainstorm, nuclear World War III,” his pet themes of personal and global apocalypse summed up in a single, devastating line. The whole package feels custom-built for precisely the kind of science-fiction pop-funk epic Prince had spent the past six months assembling piece by piece.

Continue reading “Moonbeam Levels (The New Master)” →

Prince Track by Track: “U KNOW”

Prince Track by Track: “U KNOW”

(Featured Image: Prince presides over Paisley Park on the back cover of ART OFFICIAL AGE, 2014; © NPG Records.)

We’re down to my final three appearances on Darren Husted’s Prince: Track by Track podcast! This time, the subject is (probably) my favorite track from Prince’s last three albums:

Prince Track by Track: “U KNOW”

Also, as promised, my review of Lizzo’s new album is up on Slant Magazine! She’s come a long way from “BOYTROUBLE”:

Lizzo’s Cuz I Love You is a Vessel for Pure Exuberance

Hoping to have another Vanity 6 post up by the end of the week–and, of course, it being Celebration week, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a “new” track to write about sometime in the next couple of days. We’ll see what happens!

Prince Track by Track New Year’s Roundup

Prince Track by Track New Year’s Roundup

(Featured Image: European 12″ cover for “A Love Bizarre,” 1985; photo by Rebecca Blake, © Warner Bros.)

As usual, I took the last couple weeks of December off for the holidays, which meant I didn’t post the links to my last two appearances on Darren Husted’s Prince: Track by Track podcast. So here they are now: one of my favorite tracks from Prince’s extended universe, as well as one of the most forgettable. I’ll let you guess which one is which:

Prince Track by Track: “Hynoparadise”
Prince Track by Track: “A Love Bizarre”

With this bit of business out of the way, I’m now officially on track to kick off the blog for 2019. We’ll start tomorrow with a belated post from one of our alternate timelines, then it’s back to the Time’s second album next week. Happy New Year!

Dystopian Dance Party: The Prince Issue Podcast with Guest Erika Peterson

Dystopian Dance Party: The Prince Issue Podcast with Guest Erika Peterson

(Featured Image: One of Callie’s rad stickers for Dystopian Dance Party 1.)

As you may or may not know, Dystopian Dance Party is the other, more irreverent project I do with my sister Callie. We recently launched a physical magazine, the first issue of which is dedicated to art and writing inspired by the music of Prince. On this episode of the DDP podcast, Callie and I are joined by our friend Erika Peterson to talk about her work for the magazine–an exhaustive guide to the 3 Chains O’ Gold film–the most absurd/surreal moments of Celebration 2018, and our ongoing beef with Questlove. It’s definitely a bit looser and sillier than the average d / m / s / r podcast, but if you enjoy my other stuff, you should enjoy it:

Dystopian Dance Party: The Prince Issue Podcast with Guest Erika Peterson

For those of you who haven’t picked up the magazine yet, we’re also offering the opportunity to get it for free, along with a set of rewards otherwise exclusively made available to our Kickstarter backers. All you have to do is follow Dystopian Dance Party on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and/or Tumblr, and share a link to this episode with us tagged so we know you did it. Toward the end of May, we’ll choose one or two people to receive a free copy of the magazine, a sheet of custom-designed stickers, three buttons, and a poster of the cover art by Callie. None of this stuff is available anywhere else, so take advantage of this chance to get your hands on it!

And if you can’t get enough of Erika, remember that she also recently appeared on our friend KaNisa’s excellent Muse 2 the Pharaoh podcast. Take a listen if you haven’t already:

Muse 2 the Pharaoh #1

Finally, an update on my next post for d / m / s / r. I had been planning to get something out by the end of the week, but I decided to make some changes which resulted in a delay: basically, I was writing separate posts on “The Stick” and “Cool,” but I decided to combine the two and just write a longer post on “Cool” that also touches on “The Stick” (and “After Hi School,” in case anybody was waiting for that). I fully expect to have this post out next week–which means that we’re finally going to be done with the Time’s first album! After that, we’ll turn to another 1981 outtake, and then back to Controversy. I also have plans for a few podcasts in the pipeline, so there’s plenty to look forward to!