Today, Prince turns 54 and his air-lick of a single "Gett Off," turns 21. It was on his 33rd birthday that he delivered this song to clubs, launching his Diamonds & Pearls album, which either marked the end of the second act of his career (megastardom) or the beginning of the third (tapering off). I can't really decide which. I do know that this is the song that converted me into a disciple, and I still adore "Gett Off" as much as I did in sixth grade. I admire its impossible sleaze (23 positions is so many to fit into a one-night stand) and ability to be utterly sexual and uptempo. Prince has portrayed a lot of different kinds of sex atop a lot of different kinds of music, but his best sex is rigorous. "Gett Off" is the best of the best.

The 2001 album from Jimmy Tamborello's Dntel, Life Is Full of Possibilities, helped define IDM or "intelligent dance music." The subgenre was kind of an indie force in the early part of last decade, although everyone always agreed at how stupid the name was. Tamborello's latest, Aimlessness, is out this week and it's not a major leap from what he was doing over 10 years ago, though it is at least a few bounds away from his poppier work with Ben Gibbard as the Postal Service. Mike Powell has a great breakdown of what a difference a decade makes in his review of Aimlessness on Pitchfork. Basically, Aimlessness is what happens when time catches up with futurism. The result is kind of sleepy, kind of a nonevent, but nice like a worn-in sweatshirt. Of all that is offered, "Puma" is the nicest.

Electro Swedes iamamiwhoami launched their project in 2009 via a series of mysterious viral videos that obscured the image of the singer. There was mass speculation that this might be the work of Goldfrapp or even Christina Aguilera, but then it turned out to be singer-songwriter Jonna Lee who had released a few albums, but clearly wasn't that big of a deal.

This unreleased dub rips off Madonna's "Into the Groove" quite explicitly, and I suspect that is the point. Considering that it's coming from one of the most encyclopedia minds in dance music today, Dimitri from Paris, this track reads more like a reference to the small rash of musical Madonna wannabes in the '80s. In the hierarchy, I think "Headphones" sits somewhere below Regina's "Baby Love" but above Alisha's "Baby Talk." This guy knows what I'm talking about.

Twenty-five years ago today, George Michael kicked off his solo superstardom proper with "I Want Your Sex," the first single from his Faith album, which would follow in the fall. Notorious and shocking in its day (it was banned from the BBC), "I Want Your Sex" has aged hilariously. When I was 9 and didn't know anything about anything, "I want your sex," seemed like a plausible thing that one naughty adult might say to another. Now that I have conveyed that sentiment a variety of ways that span all the colors of the rainbow flag, I can say for sure that I never, ever, ever have uttered the words, "I want your sex" and meant them (and I am a straight shooter), nor have I heard anyone at any time do the same. Not to me, not to anyone. This song is a fantasy of expression.

This track, Hudson Mohawke's beat-blessing take on "Virus," one of the best tracks from Björk's often inaccessible Biophilia album, has been around for a few weeks now. But I kind of hate the set-it-to-post-and-forget it-tomorrow cycle that so many songs go through on the Internet. Calling it a "cycle" seems wrong, even. There's rarely any building anymore, just a kind of plopping down and letting whomever is paying attention have at it. I understand blogging momentum and how the sheer quantity of released music makes for very brief relationships (believe me, I get that), but sometimes it's nice to hold onto something for a little while.

Swaggy Doo can stop releasing this intoxicating ear candy and go back to releasing the crappy ear candy that he used to any time now. Why's it gotta be a Take 5, Justin? Why couldn't you just stick to those hard sugar dots glued to a streamer that yielded as much paper as candy for consumption? WHY?

It's the unofficial start of summer this weekend, and not much music (beyond Latin freestyle) scans "SUMMER" as explicitly as the spate of hits (and misses) from a few years ago featuring the pivoting, clap-happy Diwali Riddim. It's in Lumidee's "Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)" (one in a multi-year line of ubiquitous summer songs by one-hit wonders that I include Rihanna's "Pon de Replay" in — even though she obviously was not a one-hit wonder, she felt like one when her debut single came out).

France's Onra is obsessed with retro R&B — his beaut of a 2010 album, Long Distance, contained many a convincing foray into the post-disco offshoot of boogie, and he's also flirted with some new jack swing reediting. I relate to his obsessions! The new track "L.O.V.E.," from his upcoming EP on Fool's Gold, sounds like a fading memory of a fleeting moment at the Paradise Garage. Gorgeous. [via Pitchfork]

On the heels of last night's poignant and composed appearance of Bobbi Kristina Brown at the Billboard Awards comes a poignant and composed musical preview of Sparkle, the upcoming remake we're really excited about that will feature Whitney Houston's final movie role. "Celebrate," an R. Kelly-produced stomper is a little disco, a little gospel and a whole lot like something that would have appeared in a '70s artificial sweetener commercial. It's almost too catchy (check that momentary key change that concludes every chorus on the "You celebrate me" line). Whitney's still got her I Look to You-era hoarseness, which you can read as a soulful reflection of a hard-lived life (as I choose to) or as a tangible record of just how hard she fell (her duet partner/Sparkle co-star, Jordin Sparks, sounds utterly gymnastic in comparison).

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the album that has ruled my week (and is a strong contender for my favorite album of the year so far), Killer Mike's sixth full-length, R.A.P. Music. Produced by El-P and sporting an acronym that represents Rebellious African People, the album is marked with clarity — in Mike's voice and lyrics, in its homage to the past 30 years of hip-hop, and in its agitated spirit. Chris Weingarten says it best on Spin: "It's an impossible rap record that appeals directly to 'golden era' purism (i.e., 'back when rap was good' for people aged 35 and up), but is still noisy enough to shake off the cobwebs and scare the squares. They really should put it out on cassette."

Hortlax Cobra is the dance project from Peter Bjorn and John's John Eriksson (not to be confused with Smile, the new side project from Peter Bjorn and John's Björn Yttling). Here's a perfect example of the reach of "I Feel Love": the way the arpeggiated bass line propels and steers this track is pure Moroder and unmistakably so no matter how mumbly the indie vocals get. Stylistically, this is nicely balanced.

Today's Janet Jackson's 46th birthday, so I'm taking that excuse to post this song that everyone's heard a million times but that I've nonetheless been obsessing about recently. Have you listened to this song lately? Like, really listened to it, not just took it for granted as the pop wallpaper that megahits can become over time? It's worth it.

About three years after its originally scheduled release, Baltimore rapper Rye Rye's debut album, Go! Pop! Bang!, has at last been released. It's a hoot that sometimes skews a little too close to radio trance, but otherwise has the ability to tease wild things out of her collaborators like Bangladesh — the dude who produced Lil Wayne's "A Milli" flips into full-on dance mode with Rye Rye.

There are a slew of young, talented rappers coming out of New York these days, but none of them sound very "New York." The A$AP crew of Harlem, which recently toured with Toronto's Drake and Compton's Kendrick Lamar, have a "placeless and universal" sound that seems more influenced by Houston's chopped and screwed beats than DJ Premier's horns; Azealia Banks has a distinct enough flow, but her tracks are more electronic than anything practiced by New York's hip hop gatekeepers. And out of Brooklyn, Kilo Kish has outsourced beats for her casual, monotone rhymes to The Internet, Syd the Kid's spaced-out L.A. duo.

An inevitable but not unwelcome compilation of the D.C.-based funk offshoot go-go is coming out via housemaster Joey Negro's Z Records. It's by (and let's face it for) outsiders and the stream below is a mix of its contents so you can drop by the dropping by. Funkiness abounds. The songs often sound like post-disco boogie with a skip, although the cowbell-heavy, winding go-go sound popularized on a national level by E.U.'s "Da Butt" (from Spike Lee's School Daze) pops in throughout.

Today, M.I.A. announced on Twitter that her bangin', raucous "Bad Girls" was spawning remixes featuring contemporary female rapper heavyweights Missy Elliott, Azealia Banks and Rye Rye. If it turns out that they're all on the same track (and not separate remixes), that "Bad Girls" remix will be the equivalent of this remix of Brandy's debut single, which featured the bigs of the female rap world in 1994. (In 1997, Lil' Kim went for the same effect by drafting Missy, Left Eye, Da Brat and — haha — Angie Martinez for the "Not Tonight" remix.) For as much of an event as gathering titans together to flip a Brandy track (way before her vehicular death debacle), what I admire about the "I Wanna Be Down" remix is how laid back it is. There's a matter-of-factness about women coming together for the sake of hip-hop that we're just getting back to, almost 20 years later.

Speaking of male R&B crooners, here's something more sleazy than soulful from Usher's forthcoming, inanely named album Looking 4 Myself. Despite the tactile production of satisfying synth smears, tough thwacks and insistent ticking, the track kind of falls apart when Ursh flips out of his longing falsetto to a whining lechery. This comes after the underwhelming release of the by-the-numbers house of Usher's "Scream" — here's hoping that Looking's first single, the lovely, Diplo-produced "Climax" is, isn't in fact its climax.

The fourth album of Detroit's Jimmy Edgar, Majenta, is out today, and it's one of the most easily enjoyable dance releases of the year so far. Its production is clean and sparse, its references are broad, identifiable and respectful as they pump away ("Sex Drive" owes a debt to Frankie Knuckles and Jamie Principle's Chicago classic "Baby Wants to Ride," while "Let Yrself Be" is pure Inner City homage). But my favorite of its tributes are those paid to slow jams. The track above, "In Deep," is the album's concluding opus, which tips its hat to both Timbaland and Teddy Riley by way of Roger Troutman (it's kind of like an alternate scenario as to what it would sound like if Timbaland and Riley followed up their collaboration on the remix of Janet Jackson's "I Get Lonely"). It unfurls in a musky haze for a few minutes and then come some bass-music shuffles and a breakbeat. And then the real magic: "In Deep" breaks into a section riffing on the Art of Noise's "Moments in Love," maybe the definitive quiet-storm radio jam. (I almost was tempted to label that a spoiler alert because it feels like such a revelation.) "Moments" is a song that for years has say easily next to Phyllis Hyman and Freddie Jackson and Meli'sa Morgan and Teddy P., and Marvin, despite being created by a bunch of white people who had otherwise little to do with soul music. Nonetheless, it crossed over to the canon. Edgar's aspiration to do the same is palpable, and in a perfect world, he would.

"Has anybody out there lost someone that kinda meant the world to you? My, my, my, my lord. My, my, my, I had a sweet love. I had a good love!"