Unreleased (1986)
In one of the Greek legends, a god impregnated a woman and told her their child would be born a god if she kept quiet about the affair, otherwise the child would be born a mortal. Similarly, I like to think Prince wanted to retain Rebirth of the Flesh‘s divinity by keeping it under wraps. Okay, so it’s never been completely secret. Bootleggers gonna bootleg. But Prince thought highly enough of it to place it as the opening track on both the aborted Camille and Crystal Ball albums, and then decided to rehouse every single track apart from that one. Why else, other than to keep the song elevated above the mortal world? Remaining shtum about such funk finesse is hard though and Prince several times almost gave the game away. He recycled the opening couplet on Escape, and the la-la-las on Walk Don’t Walk. The “we are here, where are you?” line became a common refrain at concerts around the start of the millennium, teasing the hardcore fam who thought they would get to see this unicorn in the wild. They never did. The closest he came to buckling was in 2001 when he made a rehearsal version available via the NPG Music Club. What effect this live version has had on the track’s celestial status is unclear but in his pantheon of unreleased studio songs Rebirth of the Flesh reigns supreme at the top. Unless, of course, there’s better we don’t know about.
