Why We Picked This Record

Andrew Winistorfer: How did this one come together?

Cameron Schaefer, Vinyl Me, Please Head of Music: This one I have to give credit to Nate Auerbach, who does some work with us, who is a huge fan of this album. I don’t think I’d listened to this before, and about 9-10 months ago, he brought it up as something we should look at. I knew the name Handsome Boy Modeling School, but hadn’t taken the time to listen to the record; I’m glad I did, because it’s an amazing album.

And then I did some research on the vinyl, and realized it hadn’t ever gotten repressed, and has a loyal cult following; it felt like a perfect album to spotlight for us. I filed it away in my mind; then we started talking to Tommy Boy about our De La Soul reissue, and I realized it could be perfect to run at the same time as this Handsome Boy Modeling School album.

Yeah, and I had listened to this a bunch when I was in college, but hadn’t thought of it much since. I listened to it again and said this one was a no-brainer for us. It feels like a precursor to Gorillaz, and to collaborative albums with multiple guests. And then when I started talking about us maybe doing this, the people who knew about this record were all super excited we’re doing it. People who are in the know are pumped for this. This is an underground sensation, and it’s been a minute since we’ve done an album like this for Rap & Hip Hop.

This feels similar to our release of Main Source’s Breaking Atoms; people who know are excited, but maybe it’s not super well-known. Doing these kind of crate-digger albums, underground albums is part of what VMP stands for.

Package Details

Color-wise, this one is almost like our Townes release, where it’s a really dark color that if you look at it on a table it looks almost black, but then you hold this one in the light, and it’s this super dark green.

Yeah, we tried really hard to match the shade of green from the cover. And this one comes in a wide-pocket jacket. It was sourced from the original masters and cut DMM at GZ.