Unreleased (1992)
Prince takes a Bomb Squad-style beat and rolls it into a scampish ball with his signature synths and the hoover sound from Human Resource’s Dominator. Ahhh that hoover sound – very much the sound of my teenage rave years and The P was written for the similarly adolescent Tevin Campell but not included on his album, presumably because the longform title is The Penis and is about somebody hitting on girls in a club asking them how many ways can they work his phallus. Admittedly that’s the context of a large percentage of R&B but generally handled with a soupçon more innuendo than “I waste no time when I take her 2 the booth, I say ‘oh, u wanna be with me, how many ways can u work the P?” Yeah, the lyrics don’t bear close scrutiny but the overall result is the uncontrollable id of a 15 year-old scallywag, grabbing it’s crotch and firing off single entendres in a bid to appear worldly – similar to Kendrick Lamar’s Backseat Freestyle. It sounds like the teenage offspring of Daddy Pop and I just want to ruffle its hair.