Forgotten Albums: Dump – “That Skinny Motherfucker with the High Voice?”

Yo La Tengo bassist James McNew recorded four-track projects as Dump beginning some time around 1991, temporarily pausing to focus on the band’s albums before resuming his alter ego in 1998. The result was That Skinny Motherfucker with the High Voice?, a cassette tape comprised of seven Prince cover songs (its title a reference to a track from Prince’s infamous Black Album, which had been, for years, an unreleased — and highly bootlegged — rarity from The Artist’s Warner Bros. years).

In the years since, Prince has been somewhat canonized by the hipster community. But back then, he was largely perceived as an easy target by most music fans. The climate had shifted from ’80s pop to alt-rock, and Prince was at his commercial decline. McNew’s recordings, in hindsight, were not just ahead of their time — they were gutsy. That the music itself is so wonderful is even better.

Off the bat, you can tell McNew is a real fan, because he chose relatively less popular songs — B-sides such as “Another Lonely Christmas” and “Erotic City,” for example. This is someone who knows the musician’s catalog quite well — well enough to purposefully change a few lyrics or remember the exact moments to bend his falsetto during “The Beautiful Ones” (one of the record’s many highlights).

The cassette was re-issued as a CD with bonus tracks in 2001, but has once again gone out of print. You can easily ascertain a copy through the usual means (for educational purposes only, of course). It is definitely worth a listen, and a testament to the strengths of Prince’s songwriting that these ’80s pop songs can be so easily converted to lo-fi indie-rock and still retain their power.

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