Lotusflow3r (2009)
Stravinsky once dismissed jazz as ‘a kind of masturbation that never arrives anywhere.’ Prince, may have shared that view when he called for jazz to die on All the Critics Love U in New York but his rebellion against the music of his parents didn’t last long. Jazz soon came to represent a freedom from rules and in Love Like Jazz, far from being a directionless act of self-pleasure, jazz became the blueprint for sexual improvisation between two lovers responding to one another. “The notes u play should be a reaction to mine” he sings “nothing planned or contrived, then both of us will arrive at our destination.” Like Prince’s views on jazz, my feelings about this song have also matured, albeit at a breakneck speed. With no other song have I leapt from cringing to bewitched quite so suddenly. Right before my ears, what I previously dismissed as hotel-lobby muzak transformed into an aquatic Sergio Mendez tripping the light fantastic on Neptune. And it gets better with every listen. With the dependable Sonny T and Michael B on bass and drums Love Like Jazz is a solid and earnest pastiche like Cherry Cherry or Te Amo Corozón, and possibly a leftover from the 3121 days. That’s not to say it doesn’t have depth. It may sound breezy but it’s Strollin’ with a jazz masters degree; Do U Lie? advanced syllabus.
Category: Uncategorized
340: Shoo-Bed-Ooh
Newpower Soul (1998)
On the face of it Shoo-Bed-Ooh is a skippable track – unpleasant lyrics, lazy chorus, generic beat – but what makes it work is the glue. Sparkling synths slip and slide over the percussion, filling all cracks with effervescent elegance. Prince then ties it together with strings and leaves to harden into a Michelin Star melody. If you only listened to Newpower Soul once and discarded it because of the ‘plastic’ sound I urge a relisten. The delight is in the details.
341: Let’s Have a Baby
Emancipation (1996)
After being persuaded to stop singing about pregnancy in the 70s due to it turning off his teen fanbase, it wasn’t until this declaration of intent was debuted at Prince and Mayte’s wedding reception in 1996 that the baby embargo was broken. No ambiguity here, the message is broadcasted as clear as an elderly aunt’s nudges. Baby please! But what beauty contained within. Intimate and vulnerable, Let’s Have a “Beh-bayyyy” is stripped down more than a Peter Paul’s Almond Joy but Prince can’t resist raiding his sound library for the old faithful ‘ticking clock’ effect, making the intro sound like Countdown’s about to start. When the FX are out of his system, what follows is a sensational piano ballad evoking How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore and the One Nite Alone album. Prince tickles the ivories as bass synths flutter like white peacocks and incredible vocals melt all hearts within listening distance. Let’s Have a Baby makes for a hard listen knowing the history but its siren-like power is hard to deny. There’s a strong case for the song to be made illegal lest it causes an overpopulation crisis.
342: Welcome 2 the Dawn
The Truth (1998)
So here we are at The Dawn, the apocalyptic, new beginning Prince has been referencing since Purple Rain, and the title of a feature-film and album that never came to fruition. We’ve been welcomed here before, several times during The Gold Experience, but now it’s more of a spiritual awakening than a call centre helpdesk – birdsong and thunder replace keystrokes and airlocks. The lyrics are a good insight into Prince’s personal book of revelation, prophesying in a similar way to 1998’s Freaks on This Side, and the acoustic version (if an electric mix exists I’ve not heard it) gives the impression of a campfire kumbaya after The Fall. Bring on the four horsemen!
343: Interactive
Crystal Ball (1998)
Whether it’s the AOL sample on My Computer or the squealing-modem synths on Emale, referencing technology in the mid-nineties is a sure way to make a track date quickly. On paper, Interactive, a song released in 1994 as a CD-ROM game, always looked likely to age prematurely but luckily the music bears as little relevance to the software as it does to the Cyclops scene in Glam Slam Ulysses, where it also features. Yes, there’s video game bleeps and it birthed the NPG Operator segues found in The Gold Experience but the interacting that Prince wants to do in the lyrics is not exactly point and click. He’s more concerned with It than IT. “Baby, baby, baby, let’s do it” he begs and I don’t think he’s talking about the falling in love that birds, bees and educated fleas do. What really future proofs this rocker though is the guitar-shredding during the last 50 seconds. Prince’s timeless solo makes Interactive sound like Endorphinmachine’s baby brother and grants immunity from the ravishes of Moore’s Law.
344: Glasscutter
Internet download (2004)
“Hey DJ, hit me with some of that ol’ school Prince! Y’know, back when he was the sexy MF with a dirty mind who wrote jawns about horny ponies and creamy thighs. I’m in the mood to listen to something with bath scenes and penetration metaphors, not glaziers’ tools. I’m sorry, what? This mid-noughties song is a five-minute rock/funk ode to a woman’s pert nipples? Oh, well in that case: play on, player!”
345: 2gether
Goldnigga (1993)
Beneath Goldnigga’s ostentation and dick-joke veneer there’s an urgent appeal for Afro-American unity – a theme which is helped by the album’s removal of Guess Who’s Knockin’ and apexes with 2gether’s pleas for the ending of “black-on-black genocide”. Sporting sax as smooth as Sade, the song’s serious message is sugared by soothing soft-jazz. It’s Steely Dan In The Hour Of Chaos. Slow, hip-hop Xanax that you can file under ‘Kenny G-funk’.
346: Violet the Organ Grinder
Gett Off single (1992)
On this Gett Off refix Prince may sing “I’m the one that lives in your heart” but for a ten year period Violet the Organ Grinder lived in my brain. At least once a week the chorus would bubble up out of my subconscious and loop incessantly, choking inner monologue. Forget ear-worms, this refrain is an ear-anaconda and just hearing the word ‘violet’, ‘organ’ or ‘grind’ was enough to put me in its hold for days. The hook is so powerful that it’s served neat for the first eight bars of the song. Twenty seconds of pure, undiluted acapella which, barring the vocal workouts of Solo and An Honest Man, only the anthemic 7 has attempted to replicate and even then with a dash of finger cymbals. Other Prince intros that deploy the acapella ($ from Lotusflower, a handful of songs on Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic) usually manage no more than a couple of bars before the backing music clicks in like the dead-air trigger on radio stations. Violet the Organ Grinder stares you down daring you to interrupt. It’s a shame the track is buried on a maxi-single, lost in a sea of Gett Off iterations. The orchestral strings make up for its borrowed beat and it is one flute riff away from usurping the A-side. Maybe it’s too dangerous for mass consumption. Re-listening for the first time in years has resulted in the tourettes-like outbursts of “her name is Violet…” to return. The kraken has re-awoken and now taunting me with its mantra of “I’ll die, but I won’t go away”.
347: It’s About That Walk
The Vault… Old Friends 4 Sale (1999)
Coated in irony and full of fisticuffs, catcalls, even a Mutley laugh, It’s About That Walk is Peach for the Vegas set. It’s one of the more immediate cuts on the Vault comp and like most fast burners it has a certain number of plays before it loses its charge. Even so, it still has the capacity to surprise, as I found out this morning when my run for a bus coincided with the breakdown two minutes in. I felt like Jack Kerouac’s character in the Dharma Bums running and leaping down the Matterhorn, invincible to gravity. And as it crescendoed into horns my feet left the ground and part of me’s still flying two hours later. Ooooo-wee!
348: Make Your Mama Happy
Crystal Ball (1998)
Built from brisk horn stabs, varying vocal registers and a positive message of ‘you can make it if you try’, this is Prince at his most Sly and The Family Stone – an influence that’s confirmed by the liner notes citing the 1973 Fresh album as inspiration. Like the cartoon image of two midgets in a trench coat, Make Your Mama Happy masquerades as being double the size. It’s a two-minute song played twice, once with the vocal track and once without. A 7″ edit and an instrumental spliced together to pass unnoticed as a full length mix. It’s largely worked too as I’ve not seen this cut and shut job referenced anywhere but I’ve overlaid the two halves and, apart from the vocals, they really are identical. Whether this expediency was an artistic choice or a placeholder to be rerecorded later is not clear but as the tight, staccato funk is the highlight of this Crystal Ball track, hearing it unhindered is hardly a chore. It makes Mama, Papa and the whole Family Stone happy.
349: Jaguar
Time Waits For No One (1989)
Although its intended recipient Sheena Easton would have been a more obvious fit for this predatory funk-prowler, Mavis Staples cares not a jot for your bourgeois ageism. With a panther canter she hunts down and tears to shreds the notion that gospel singers in their fifties can’t sing about pursuing sexual prey. Melody Cool may have been “here long before you” but this powerful, lithe and unyielding “kitty wants your body fine” and she’s gonna get it, even if it means chasing you into the next lifetime. File under ‘stalker pop’, along with One Way or Another and Every Breath You Take.
350: Digital Garden
Rainbow Children (2001)
Prince liked to prove that time is an illusion by creating songs where the experiential and running times don’t match. Digital Garden is over far too quickly for you to believe four minutes have passed and yet still feels like an aeon-spanning epic. Like the rest of the album it has a readymade narrative – something about the Rainbow Children breaking through the digital garden, a surrounding barrier built by the Banished Ones – but for those not playing along at home you’re free to construct your own backstory. Serving suggestion: visualise the history of evolution, starting with single-celled organisms popping into existence and ending with the relentless, discordant voracity of the Anthropocene. Primordial soup to nuts. If Crazy You was a fragment of Brahma’s breath then Digital Garden could contain the whole lungful.
351: Crazy You
For You (1978)
This short breath of a song could fill albums, oceans, lifetimes, but when you’ve said all you need in the first ninety seconds, why spin it out? Keep the listener wanting more, or at least craving silence after the fade out so they can internally loop the acoustic guitar and water-drums, eyes shut, as hours pass, seasons cycle and civilisations fall. That laser you hear? It could be your ringtone or a collapsing galaxy. Nothing matters within the cosmic egg of Crazy You.
352: 2045: Radical Man
Bamboozled OST (2000) / The Slaughterhouse (2004)
There’s plenty to delve into with the lyrics on this laidback funk sermon and on internet forums I’ve seen them become a catalyst for discussions on everything from Spinoza to pyramid conspiracy theories. At its core though 2045: Radical Man is a lash out at the music industry and a call for an uprising against its non-musician gatekeepers and corporate venality. An impassioned, rallying cry at odds with the easy listening, lounge-band backing. The only time it receives a rocket and moves out of cruise (ship) control is during the alien interference that descends after the “oh my god, it’s the Green Mile!” shout and even then the keyboard noodling carries on in the background unfazed by the cacophony. It’s a calm, steady undertow pulling along a bizarre assortment of radio tuning, milkshake slurps and pitched-up Camille vocals. A gallimaufry that fascinates me much more than the soapbox word salad. The revolution will not be televised but it will sound like it was soundtracked by Money Mark.
353: Strange Way
Unreleased (1981)
An electric piano love letter to Lisa Coleman, acting as an apology for kicking her out of the house during a falling out. Strange Way (aka Strange Way of Saying I Love U) is one of the more melodic ditties to be found within the cracks of Prince’s discography and even though its roots aren’t strong enough to overturn the major flagstones, surely there’s nobody immune to its choppy, McCartney-esque charm. I have a feeling that Lisa would have forgiven murder if this was the mea culpa. To paraphrase his later Stylistics cover: doo-we-ooo-we-ooo-wee-oo means I love you.
354: The Good Life
Exodus (1995)
A tribute to the 1976 episode of The Good Life in which Tom and Barbara parry Margot’s condescending remarks that their relentless optimism is “fantasy” by replying it “never hurt nobody” and “whatever chills the illin'”. Margot then begins to lecture the couple about double negatives before slipping over in pig manure much to Jerry’s guffaws. Or at least in my Britcom-addled mind it is. The reality is that this ball of 90s pop was the only single from Exodus to see the light of day in North America (the album itself was only released in Europe) and its mainstream appeal is strong. The single featured two hip-hop remixes from Kirk Johnson, with the Big City mix being the stronger of the two and sounds like a new song in its own right, complete with different lyrics and a smoky jazz bassline that Digible Planets would be proud of. This mix (no relation to the Big City swan song on HITnRUN Phase Two) smashes the two nondescript house remixes that were released in the UK two years later and is a challenger to the original’s pop crown. But its grumbling, profanity-strewn lyrics sound curiously lacking in bonhomie, making the OG the one to turn to if you’re after a hit of la dolce vita.
355: Everywhere
The Rainbow Children (2001)
Prince went to his workshop with a recorded drum track and emerged with an energetic hosanna to paradise, bestowed with luscious vocals of milk and horns of honey. A hymn in the hands of a believer with rhythm. Everywhere may be one of a handful of short songs on The Rainbow Children that wouldn’t last long in the wild but for momentary rapture, crank up and dance to the drummer’s beatification!
356: That Girl Thang
Internet download (2013)
Sold via the 3rdeyegirl site in 2013, That Girl Thang is a demo at heart, having only been written and recorded six hours before it went up. Raw as cookie dough (you can hear the mic knocks) and unadulterated with no edits, backing or overdubs, it’s as pure a hit of Prince as you can get. An intimate Polaroid allegedly intended as a flirtation device for a member of his harem (the dancer from the Chocolate Box video) after she sent a late night request for him to sing her to sleep. Beautiful, passing glimpses into unobserved, secret worlds of pillow talk.
357: I Wanna Melt With U
0(+> (1992)
During the first few bars of this dance track you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d scrolled one artist too far on your MP3 player and are instead hearing a slowed down version of The Prodigy’s Everybody in the Place. It may not be “the ultimate rave” as he later calls it but if you were dosed up on cough syrup it could come close. When the vocals kick in though there’s no mistaking the purple maestro as he purrs his way through the verses. A lustful, feline satyr that quickly turns canine with the full moon, panting in heat as the La, La, La, He, He, Hee dogs bark in encouragement. I (or Eye if we’re being exact) Wanna Melt With U was a late inclusion on the 0(+> album, crowbarred in at the expense of several segues and a coherent storyline. I’m not normally one to bemoan the removal of phone skits (I had to edit them out of Kendrick Lamarr’s good kid m.A.A.d city in order to render it playable), however their loss does make the remaining interjections and some of the album’s lyrics baffling without the aid of the spin-off film or comic book. Not that this particular song carries much of the plot. In the 3 Chains O’ Gold film it’s only used as a gratuitous dream sequence where naked girls writhe in-between Mayte’s flashbacks of her father’s murder. This lends it a dark, warehouse bacchanalia vibe that doesn’t come across in its album setting when sandwiched between pop reggae and a syrupy ballad. To obtain the full intoxication, ingest the fluid from a glow-stick and watch the boundaries between you and the room melt while you play this track at chest-reverberating levels and party with demonic revellers of your own imagining.
358: Wasted Kisses
Newpower Soul (1998)
Coming from an album that isn’t short of detractors, this brief, hidden track receives an unusual amount of praise. Unmentioned in the tracklist and buried after 38 tracks of silence it can feel like an uncovered gem and the way it sounds like nothing else on the CD will only endear it further to those who aren’t fans of Newpower Soul’s one-man funk (a camp that included myself before a fifth listen finally seduced me). Wasted Kisses is certainly the black sheep of the album and does not play well with others. The dark lyrics on their own could be passed off as lighthearted metaphorical play if they were not wrapped in disturbing sound effects of bloodcurdling screams, wailing ambulances, hospital chatter and flatlining monitors. It’s a radio drama adaptation of your suppressed traumas and is best stored where it was found – cushioned by several minutes of insulating, protective silence.
359: Da, Da, Da
Emancipation (1996)
In my youth, in order to feed an unquenchable thirst for mid 90s hip-hop I would spend weekends raiding Our Price bargain bins and buying up anything sporting a Parental Advisory sticker (the very one that was outraged into existence by Darling Nikki a decade earlier). The results were mixed. Stone cold classics got unearthed alongside cynical cash-ins and I acquired enough unchallenging g-funk and gangsta rap to fill a bath. And bathe in it I did, constantly. If you could take a median average of this collection the resulting song would sound something like a Scarface b-side with a competent yet easily forgettable rapper. Or, in other words, the first half of Da, Da, Da. Even Scrap D’s verses sound like a hip-hop word cloud. But two and a half minutes in, Prince steps out of the catchy (yet lyrically lazy) chorus to deliver a brief verse of positivity and then at the point where most producers would be on repeat-to-fade mode, he unleashes the guitars which sends the beat into spasms and elevates this track from hip-hop plaything into one of the album’s standout songs. The meaningless title becomes a nation of Russians chanting ‘yes, yes, yes’ as Kali, goddess of the boom bap, sits on a bed of jewel cases, rattling her gold rope of human skulls and scratched CD singles in time to a Funkmaster Flex mixtape.
360: 18 & Over
Crystal Ball (1998)
It was touch and go as to whether this made the cut or not, as you could argue that 18 & Over is a Come remix in all but name. It certainly started off life that way, having been made for a Come EP that never materialised. Too good to sink without trace and armed with its own lyrics, this sex track found its way onto the Crystal Ball compilation along with fellow album remix So Dark and forges an identity as a whole new song. Out go the horns and in come the cosmic g-funk keys. It’s still “real dirty like” but the graphic intimacy of Come is now comic braggadocio with “bone ranger” punnery and underwear-eating vibrators. More sex-com than sex-cam. If it had been an original composition it would have charted leagues higher – but that’s the price of its remix origins. Something Violet the Organ Grinder will find out in due course.
361: Another Lonely Christmas
I Would Die 4 U single (1984) / The Hits/The B Sides (1993)
This b-side is the only Christmas song Prince released although (barring the final few seconds on the extended mix) it certainly doesn’t sound festive. The sleigh bells on Come surprisingly make that R-rated cunnilingus ode a much better contender for a holiday mixtape than this drunken tearjerker. It unfolds darkly and much like The Pogues’ New York its wind goes right through you, it’s no place for the old. The increasingly out-of-control narrator may not have spent Christmas Eve in the drunk tank but we’re told Christmas Day was spent drinking “banana daiquiris till I’m blind”, as he has done every December 25th since his girlfriend died seven years ago. Cause of death: “your father said it was pneumonia, your mother said it was strep.” Winter Wonderland it definitely is not. What it is though is classic Prince storytelling, with the muffled screams of the guitars downwardly spiralling, perfectly mirroring the singer’s deteriorating state. Head to the extended mix to hear the superb lyricism in all its unedited, reverb-drenched glory with lines such as “I’d pay money just 2 see your laughin’ dancin’ silhouette upon the pier.” Boxing Day, when this song takes place, is often used to contrast with Christmas Day cheer. It’s the day George Michael had his heart given away and the day of Elvis Costello’s St Stephen’s Day Murders. Even Good King Wenceslas is full of cruel frost, freezing blood and winter’s rage. This is the soundtrack to that post-Christmas comedown. A day when the tinsel loses its glitter and you’re left hungover with a wilting, dead pine in your living room and the deferred sense of existential ennui returns. Merry Christmas!
362: Mutiny
The Family (1985)
Ostensibly written about the singer taking back control of his own life after a no-good relationship, Prince’s low-in-the-mix shouts out to Morris (and also Jesse in the Prince-sung original) reveal the true thrust behind the lyrics. It’s Prince’s diss-song to those who leave his retinue, particularly Morris Day as the final lines are a direct quote of his from a year previously, when a collection plate was passed around the audience during rehearsal while Morris shouted “Prince are you out there, did you give? You TOOK! Did you give!?” This comment obviously riled Prince as it’s also referenced in the preceding track High Fashion. Things between them only got worse from that point on and when Morris and Jesse jumped ship from the Time, Prince formed The Family from the wreckage. Rescued band members Jellybean, Jerome and Paul were commandeered into new roles with the latter taking charge of the ship’s helm under his new name of St Paul. So it was more Prince reshuffling his remaining deckhands than a genuine mutiny but like Old Friends 4 Sale it was a way to communicate his feeling of betrayal and became a good stick to beat deserters with. As St Paul found out himself when he later left The Family and had an irate Prince dedicating a performance of this song to “Paul, punk of the month”. Mutiny has Morris stamped all over the vocals, making it a particularly poignant missile to throw his way. But without the real deal at times it can sound like a Time pastiche. In an alternate universe a bona fide Time version of this song is rocking the high double digits of this list.
363: Make-Up
Vanity 6 (1982)
A woman sits at her vanity mirror lost in her own reflection as an electrical storm, pregnant with the future seeds of Detroit Techno and Chicago House, growls malevolently outside. My answer to André 3000’s question of ‘what’s cooler than being cool?’ would be this ice cold beat which shivers with a detached intensity and the equally robotic-in-delivery lyrics are asinine yet strangely menacing when anti-sung over the ahead-of-its-time techno rumblings. It’s Weird Science meets Bladerunner. A YouTube make-up tutorial given by the Kraftwerk shop dummies. The album’s high-point Nasty Girl may have reinvented Janet Jackson but Make-up inspired whole genres, making it an icy crucible of dance music worlds.