Crystal Ball (1998)
Prince songs often have a long comet tail of demos, tweaks and revisions trailing behind them. In some cases this spans decades. Extraloveable was released 29 years after it was first written but the song’s journey didn’t end there. Two years later Extraloveable Reloaded was released, and two years after that it was renamed Xtraloveable and included on an album for the first time… a third of a century after its conception. By contrast, 1995’s Da Bang had a much shorter gestation. Created out of boredom and mixed and recorded in a day I doubt Prince ever gave the track a second thought other than dusting it off for a couple of compilations. It has never been performed live but Crystal Ball‘s liner notes tell us after he recorded the song Prince rode around in a limo replaying it 32 times. This wasn’t made for posterity, it was made for the moment and got discarded after it served its transient purpose. It sounds far from disposable though. Da Bang has a raw, unpolished energy. The choruses are a landslide of hard rock with traces of metal in its ore, falling into a lagoon of aquatic blues. It’s here for a good time, not a long time, and what’s better: to go out with a bang bang bang or a multi-decade whimper?
