Dystopian Dance Mix Vol. 1: It's a Mother('s Day Mix)

Stolen from somebody's Pinterest, but I'm willing to bet this is Public Domain

Editor's Note: Way back in the distant past of my early twenties, I co-ran a pop culture blog similar to this one called the Modern Pea Pod. It was a great experience overall: I got some modicum of exposure for my writing, interviewed people like rock'n'roll pioneer Wanda Jackson and Kid Congo Powers of the Gun Club, and built up a backlog of content that I can now exploit for Throwback Thursdays when I'm too busy and/or lazy to write something new for this blog. Probably my favorite thing about the whole project, though, was our monthly Mixtape: an actual blueprint for making an actual, two-sided, 90-minute cassette tape of songs around a particular theme, complete with timecodes. It was, like most other things related to the Modern Pea Pod, a ludicrously anachronistic and overly complicated exercise (I'm pretty sure we were the only blog ever to advertise via black-and-white flyer, too). But it was also a lot of fun, and a chance to write about music that we loved but that wasn't necessarily "relevant" for a traditional review.

So, in my ongoing effort to strip the Pea Pod's corpse of every last bit of its salvageable flesh (ew), I'm pleased to introduce the spiritual successor to the Modern Pea Pod Mixtape: the Dystopian Dance Mix. The main difference this time around is that it's not meant to be a cassette tape, because this is 2014 and I'm not an insane person. Instead, we're taking advantage of real live 21st century technology and making the playlists streamable via Spotify. My one concession to the old anachronistic format is that each playlist will come in under 80 minutes, the idea being that you could burn it to a CD if you were so inclined (and if you owned all of the music, of course). I plan on getting these playlists out every month or so; the themes for the first two months are a little clichéd and predictable (Mother's Day and Father's Day for May and June, who'da thunk), but you can look forward to more inspired entries after I've gotten warmed up. So here it is, folks: my gift to all the mothers and motherfuckers out there reading this. Enjoy! - Z.H.

4 His Royal Badness's Consideration: 14 Rarities That Need to Be on the 30th Anniversary Purple Rain Reissue

© Warner Bros. Entertainment

Let me begin by doing away with any pretense of critical distance or objectivity. I am an unapologetic, frothing-at-the-mouth, dyed-in-the-pink-cashmere Prince fan. My little two-bedroom apartment has no fewer than four pieces of framed Prince-related art--including the fold-out shower poster from the original 1981 Controversy LP, which I have hanging in the bathroom across from my actual shower. So when I heard late last week that Prince was burying the hatchet with Warner Bros., the label under which he released all of his best work, and planning a series of expanded reissues beginning with 1984's Purple Rain, I reacted pretty much the way you might expect: with sheer, unbridled, childlike glee.

But I'm also a realist. There's a reason why I am this damn excited about a reissue project: a record-industry practice that has become so habitual for virtually every other catalogue artist of note that it's now officially tedious. Because Prince isn't a normal catalogue artist. This, after all, is the guy who stuffed his long-promised 1998 outtakes collection Crystal Ball with a bunch of patently inessential remixes of '90s-era album cuts like "The Continental." This is the guy who, as recently as 2006, made Warner revise the track list of the hits/rarities collection Ultimate Prince to remove the 12" version of "Erotic City" because, presumably, it had naughty words. So as thrilled as I am to see his catalogue maybe finally getting the, ahem, royal treatment it deserves, I still feel the need to accompany my initial reaction of fist-pumping ecstasy with that second of totally natural fan responses: a list of demands.