Songs For Sybarites

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Songs For Sybarites

December 15 2021

Deep House / Disco / Hip Hop / Jazz / R&B / Soul

Another installment in what I fear is fast becoming a second job for me, mixtapes for my homeys. This was made for my very dear friend Vittoria “Vicky” Serao, as a substitute for me not making it out there to DJ in person at her 50th Bday party in The Netherlands last month. Vicky lives in Utrecht with her baby daddy Menno Kouveld and their two lovely kids, where she graciously indoctrinates her family in the ways of 90s Hip Hop with dusty old DJ Julian CDs on the family car stereo. She’s a mover and shaker in the Dutch film industry, running creative development programs and getting feature films funded and the like. Whens she’s not attending Europe’s most chic film festivals, where she annoyingly sees every cool movie on earth 2 years before me, Vicky and the fam can often be found galavanting around Tuscany, effortlessly re-creating scenes from Franco Zeffirelli films like it’s their second job.

Vicky and I met in 1992 at the short-lived but tres cool Soho club, Sybarite, where I was a bartender and DJ, and she was working the coat check. I think we mostly talked about Prince in those early days. Prince bootlegs. Prince outfits. Favorite track on “Sign of The Times”, etc – as well as what was the best dish on the Lucky Strike menu (it was the Penne with pine nuts and rosemary potatoes, for the record). She moved back to Amsterdam in the mid 90s and we lost touch for a few years, until the arrival of this wacky new thing called “the internet” put us back in touch.

We’ve remained great friends ever since, briefly interrupted by an ill-fated attempt at a bi-continental relationship somewhere towards the end of the 20th Century. We’ve spent about 30 years exchanging phone calls and texts and tapes of our favorite albums and Bday cards and baby announcements and essays and movie reviews and friendly debates and wedding invitations and a whole shelf of amazing books from Foucault to Prince biographies that I may or may not have actually finished reading.

Vicky has impeccable taste in music, so when her man Menno reached out and invited me to fly over and DJ her half-century throw down, the least I could do was conjure a collection of bangers for the event. Hence, this mix has a bunch of Prince on it, a ton of other records I used to spin at Sybarite around 1993, and a smattering of other stuff, old and new, that I think she would love. The word from Utrecht was that the party was a smashing success, and OMG her baby daddy Menno even proposed, right on the dance floor! Congrats old friend. I hope y’all saved me some cake.

D’Angelo - Brown Sugar (Heartbreak Remix)