Unreleased (1985)
Ten days after Led Zeppelin’s much-anticipated reunion at Live Aid – a disapointing trainwreck of a performance that they wouldn’t let be included on the official DVD – Prince was inspired to go into the studio and record his version of a Zeppelin-style stadium rocker. Call of the Wild’s music is dark and menacing, evoking breached chain-link fences, searching spotlights and air-raid siren guitars alerting that someone has broken into, or out of, the compound. The drum, described as “pumping blood to your brain”, has a war-like beat and on every alternate bar there’s an amplified wind noise on the 3 and 4 that sounds like either your own exhausted panting or the guard dogs breathing down your neck. Ominously it slows down towards the end, telling you you’re cornered, options narrowing, but when it starts up again for the last thirty seconds you know somehow you’ve Steve McQueened it.
God, I wish my 9 to 5 life would sound so amazingly leather-y dystopian (an adjective I don’t often use to qualify Prince songs. For some reason, several songs from “Graffiti Bridge” sound just that to me).
Going through this list, I was wondering : as much of a fan you seem to be, there are surely some P songs that you like less (as evidenced by this ranking game). But are there songs by Prince that you really hate and just can’t listen to without grinding your teeth? As I mentioned elsewhere, some of his ballads (especially some of his more r&b ballads from the 90s and 2000s) honestly do that to me. I can also NEVER hear P cooing “their bodies shiver in the mere contemplation of penetration” and “the thought of his tongue in the v of her love” without wanting to claw my eyes out (REALLY? IN THE “V OF HER LOVE”?). It’s like watching two of your teenager friends eat each other’s mouths out in noisy and slurpy fashion while also knowing that that “Brandon Forever” heart tattoo will be forever useless three months from now.
I can take a lot of cheese for Prince, but some of it’s just too much for me.
Sure. There’s plenty I can’t listen to. I’ve picked 500 because that’s approx the number I think are truly great. But that’s not even half his overall output.
Big fan of his sex songs. But a lot of his more generic-sounding rock doesn’t get much love on these pages.