Vanity 6 (1982) / Unreleased (1983)
Let’s include Wet Dream Cousin in here too as the unfinished instrumental sounds way too similar for me to separate them. Prince’s early-eighties side-project was Vanity 6, a female trio originally daubed The Hookers, and the ensuing album still remains my favourite Prince protégé release. Wet Dream is an electro-pop study in the delirium of teen deification. Vanity (Prince wanted to call her Vagina but she refused) sings “If he combs his hair, all my girlfriends start 2 scream”, bottling up Beatlemania and Bieber fever and fire-hosing it onto the school crush. Half way through the heavens open and purple rain descends, drenching the song in Proust’s “musical, innumerable, universal” rhythm but doing nothing to quench puppy love’s desire. Wet Dream Cousin was written for the abandoned Vanity 6 follow-up album and takes the action far away from life’s tumult and foam, to an astral plane where unrequited love seems more like a heightened state of consciousness. The dance of tremulous youth played out against a backdrop of shooting stars.