Controversy (1981)
A sound so fun and uniquely Prince that he would attempt to recreate it several times over the next few years. But only Delirious would come close to bettering the neo-rockabilly lunacy of Jack U Off. It was the first live band recording on a Prince album and the first to utilise his trademark Princebonics, with his spelling of ‘U’. When he performed it to 94,000 Rolling Stones fans as part of a warm-up set in 1981 they couldn’t stomach this assault on their rigid, conservative tastes and booed him off stage. But if your notion of rock’n’roll excludes a gender-flipping hand-job singalong performed by a black man in bikini briefs then you’re doing it wrong. This is weapon-grade Little Richard and should always be deployed in areas of high pretension.
Category: Uncategorized
365: Money Don’t Matter 2 Night
Diamonds and Pearls (1991)
There’s a handful of placings on these pages that I feel compelled to justify as their ranking swims against the tide of popular opinion. Money Don’t Matter 2 Night is one such song and didn’t even feature in an early version of this list which may appal all those with it in their top 10. It certainly caused an outcry from a friend of mine who’s only familiar with the singles and partly due to their reaction it’s barged its way back in, ousting out the Stop The Cavalry bugles of Man in a Uniform. It’s not that I don’t think the music isn’t great – it is – it’s just that hearing someone with money sing about the unimportance of it all seems a little unseemly. The three verses are pitched to a gambler, an investor and the US Government in the midst of the Gulf War, but the tone, like the later Rich Friends or even the earlier Pop Life chimes as off-key, not helped by an accompanying Spike Lee video that pounds the poverty angle low and hard. But like Prince himself once said: “musical excellence, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder” and when held in the right light Money Don’t Matter 2 Night is a joy to behold. A smooth pop back-rub, with enough vocal and chord idiosyncrasies to work its fingers in deep. If I was only limited to just one Prince song a day then I couldn’t go a complete calendar year without hearing it, so it creeps back into the list at #365 to be listened to on New Years’ Eve. And if that offends your sensibilities, wait to you hear where its oft-despised, album-mate Jughead ranks (trigger warning: higher).
366: Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic
Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (1999)
Earth-Moon-Earth, an art piece by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, consists of a self-playing piano performing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata after the score was bounced off the moon’s surface as a morse code signal. The effect is a faithful rendition but with gaps. Notes and sometimes whole sections got misplaced in lunar transit. I think of this piece sometimes when I listen to Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic’s celestial, sparse arrangement. It’s as if the only parts captured on record are the ones our earthly receivers are tuned in to catch. Layers of inaudible funk as dark matter, felt by their gravitational effect on their surroundings. Beats separated by the negative space of distant planets passing in front of stars. If the 1988 original hadn’t been leaked (revealing it to be almost identical) I’d entertain theories that it was lost to time and that 1999’s officially released version was an archeological recreation made up from what could be gleaned from its references in other tracks: the mentions in 200 Balloons and Batdance remixes; the borrowed Egyptian horn riff in The Max; the sheet music spotted in the Graffiti Bridge film. A skeletal reconstruction. Incredibly though, the song was always that lean and lost only a few flourishes prior to its release at the turn of the millennium. Even though it’s over a decade old at that point, the opener sets out its stall for the shimmering, futuristic vibes the album is peppered with. Undisputed, Hot Wit U and Strange But True all share a similar aesthetic, unfortunately interrupted by tracks of less inspired and now dated mainstream chart appeals. Prince said he left the song to “marinate” as he thought it was too similar to Kiss but it still sounds ahead of its time now. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it’s an alien art-piece being reflected off our planet’s surface. The missing notes from a Martian sonata absorbed in the mind of a Minnesotan musician.
367: Dance With the Devil
Unreleased (1989)
Possibly the darkest spell in Prince’s grimoire. Dance With the Devil is a downtempo spinetingler, created for Batman but replaced on the album by the much chipper Batdance. Maybe it was too out there to fit in, or possibly it spooked Prince into burying it like the Black Album – either way the film loses out as it’s much more in keeping with Tim Burton’s gothic world than anything else recorded for it. Gregorian chants, Faustian lyrics and cinematic screams all paint a bleak picture and the horror gets ramped up when the synths go all Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. This is what it sounds like when doves cry on ketamine.
368: And God Created Woman
0(+> (1992)
The 60s sci-fi flick Barbarella rivals The Matrix in being a source of inspiration for Prince and he references it directly in the final segue of this album. However, two tracks previously it’s another Roger Vadim directed film that provides the title: 1956’s Bardot-parading, Et Dieu… Crea La Femme, translated as And God Created Woman. It’s easily missed on the sprawling O(+>, buried towards the end and sandwiched between two attention-grabbing anthems. Sometimes its three minutes pass without me registering a single note. But it thrives in isolation. A luscious, brain-massaging pampering, especially on headphones where the silken, multi-tracked vocals swell within you as if sung by all the nameless ancestors entwined in your soul. Featuring dangerous levels of smooth, it’s a Sade album in concentrate. Over three times your RDA so go easy. It’s also the third Genesis-retelling song on this list so far, showing that his favourite films still can’t match the Old Testament for source material. The Bible and Barbarella would have made an apt title for any Prince memoir of this time period.
369: Lavaux
20ten (2010)
At first acquaintance you can imagine this song in a travel segment on a morning show, soundtracking a montage of Swiss mountains and vineyards. An easily digestible ode to escapism. On closer inspection you hear suggestive hints at what Prince is escaping from and the inconvenient truth that “the cost of freedom is anything but free”. If you like your Prince served with hearty side dishes of social commentary and religiosity there’s plenty to unpack in the lyrics. Personally however, the meaning of the words washes over me as I savour the shimmying synth riff which owes more than a passing debt to The Pointer Sisters’ Automatic. A feel-good life raft in an album of few delights. In fact Lavoux is the last good song on 20ten until the hidden track at the end. If you’re really quiet you can hear it pine for the peaks of Parade.
370: It’s Gonna Be Lonely
Prince (1979)
A slow walk through young heartbreak with shimmering synths and a message of devotion in the face of desertion – a theme that his first two albums were built on. In 70s Prince bingo you’d be shouting house if you had any of the following words in a row: ‘blue’, ‘lonely’, ‘forever’, ‘baby’, ‘together’, ‘love’, ‘go’ and ‘leave’. But underneath the pre-Dirty Mind lyrics sits a solid steel ballad. A whetstone sharpening his tools in order to truly king the genre in forthcoming years. As a quiet, unassuming album-closer in a sea of ballads it’s often overlooked, but obviously not by Kanye who recycled the guitar riff to great effect in his 2007 Jay-Z love-in, Big Brother. One thing that always wrongfoots me though is the one non-falsetto line in the middle, because although I know Prince says “your accent from gay Paree”, I always hear him addressing somebody called Barry instead. Changes the song somewhat. You always want to leave, Barry, who do you think you are?
371: What Do U Want Me 2 Do?
Musicology (2004)
This high-altitude mountain flower is delicate yet hardy, able to withstand the cold, hard frost of repeated exposure. Intricately arranged and improving with age, like the rest of Musicology it takes time to get its hooks in. It’s also one of many songs on the album concerned with marriage, featuring Prince playing the part of a wedded man knocking back the advances of somebody else’s wife. A position he doesn’t exactly stick to on the next two songs where he wants to orchestrate a break-up so he can swoop in amid a flurry of gifts. The lyrics may be noble but the music suggests an imbalance in thought and deed. Gentle and airy guitars grace a tightly coiled Linn beat, creating a tension between calm composure and twisted, distorted agitation. The music Bebel Gilberto would play if she was being slowly dragged down under the Earth’s crust by subterranean brambles, silently watched by a koala bear with fire in its eyes.
372: Vibrator
Unreleased (1983)
Prince often wrote songs where a sex toy would inexplicably appear in the final verse. 18 & Over, Mellow and Supercute all feature this late stage cameo with varying levels of subtlety but there’s one song in the vault which devoted the entirety of its verses, chorus and title to the humble battery-operated boyfriend. Vibrator is musically very repetitive but insanely catchy and with some grade A lyrics – my favourite being the comparison between her old and new (electric) loves: “uncharted waters sailed with ease, land is always in sight, but with u it’s always abandon ship and we didn’t even get away from the dock 2night”. It’s when Vanity’s ten-battery “body massager” runs out of juice however when the song really gets going, with a hilarious left-turn into a comedy sketch featuring Jill Jones as clerk number one and Prince reprising his role from If a Girl Answers. Possibly influenced by Purple Rain being in the script writing phase when it was recorded, Vibrator follows a standard screenplay three-act structure, with a sung setup, a comedic confrontation and a literal, final climax. It’s the classic ‘girl meets boy, girl leaves boy for toy, toy dies, girl goes on a quest for batteries’ story. The song got shelved, along with the rest of the second Vanity 6 album when Vanity quit the band but her pleasured moans would live on, later resurfacing on a couple of Madhouse releases and throughout the Come album credited as “she knows”. As famous enacted orgasms go Vanity is only kept out of the top three by Donna Summer, the woman from Lil Louis’s French Kiss and Sally.
373: 319
The Gold Experience (1995)
Prince indulges in his favourite dessert of Peach & Cream with a snap-happy, rock vignette of a lewd photo shoot in hotel room number 319 – a combination of digits that for almost two decades now I’ve been unable to see or read without internally launching into this song. It was allegedly written about Elizabeth Berkley who would later pole dance to it in the turkey skinflick Showgirls, but I prefer to believe the photographer’s model is Darling Nikki, fresh from the lobby and heading back to her castle after posing for some snaps, that in a homage to Kiss compels Prince to dance at the start of the bridge. The fact this doesn’t rank at #319 frustrates me, as does the realisation that if only the track had started midway through the preceding segue – after the NPG operator but before the intro – it would have been 3:19 long. But the so-wrong-it’s-right Blow Up vibes more than makes amends. It’s filthy cute and you know it.
374: 3rd Eye
The Truth (1998)
Long before 3rdeyegirl and the tri-spectacle phase there was 3rd Eye – an Adam and Eve story from the sublime Truth album. Naked, save for a few digital fig-leafs, Prince’s unencumbered guitar frolics with Rhonda’s electric bass in a garden of earthly, acoustic delights. It also features his last released, uncensored obscenity before he got bashful with overdubs and malapropisms. It’s a shame the curseword’s a flimsy and shitty “shitty” though. The cathartic, air-rending “MOTHERFUCKIN’ PIECE OF PIEEEEEEE!!!” on the album’s opener would have made a much more satisfying, final nail in the swear jar. A blue murder scream so defiant that immediately afterwards you can hear the bleep machine materialising into existence. Normally more associated with Eastern religions, Prince again links the pineal gland with Genesis in Y Should I Do That When I Can Do This? when he raps “if the word was God then people need to use it with a third eye”. Coupled with 3rd Eye’s message of God being inside you, it leads me to assume the reference is to the birth of human understanding between good and evil. The inner eye that was opened with the eating of the forbidden fruit. Although let’s be honest, given the highly suggestive nature of the lyrics (“the serpent… between Adam’s thighs… tries 2 release upon Eve the nectar”) the third eye in question may very well be of a different anatomical kind.
375: Witness 4 the Prosecution
Unreleased (1986)
With its courtroom setting and theme of a relationship turned sour, Witness 4 the Prosecution sounds like The Gold Experience’s I Hate U in a former life. It is unreleased but has been leaked in three distinct flavours, morphing from bluesy rock into sparse, electronic funk. The first version is a Prince solo effort and rocks enough bells but was improved on for the second version after being left in the hands of The Revolution to overdub whilst he was overseas working on the Under The Cherry Moon film. Featuring elastic bass and gospel backing vocals they inject the funk that was previously missing, creating a Dream Factory shoe-in. A liminal state of rock/funk. The third guitar-less version was another solo recording, with synthetic steel drums replacing the band, but it’s a cold flame in comparison. The Revolution were disbanded the following day and although his next album was to be the career apogee of Sign O’ the Times, these versions of Witness 4 the Prosecution show that Wendy, Lisa et al still offered him a dimension he couldn’t always replicate as a sole trader.
376: Silicon
The Slaughterhouse (2004)
Silicon (n): a hard and brittle crystalline solid with a blue-grey metallic lustre. A description that seems to sum up this song’s flavour well. Who knows what the lyrics are about; whether its tech, Hollywood, veganism, blood transfusions or all of the above, but in the words of the maestro himself “never mind the rhyme just relax and wax the song”. Not that you can relax much in its company though. Jagged and exposed, it’s machine funk without a protective safety guard. Don’t get too close or you may lose a hand.
377: No Call U
Unreleased (1982) / 1999 Super Deluxe (2019)
A three minute slice of synth rockabilly in the Delirious / Jack U Off mode. Obviously Delirious is an infinitely greater song, meaning that demos like No Call U and Turn It Up are often overlooked, but even so they still retain a dark, unhinged power. Nuggets of delirium found in the vault’s backwaters. If Elvis’s twin brother Jesse had lived to see the eighties I like to think that he would be on a dive bar tour, mimicking his sibling’s gyrations to sleaze funk like this. Half-heartedly leering / sneering at the sparse crowd, as wall-sweat drips from the light fittings into the beaten-up synths. Later, Jill Jones and Vanity also tried lending their vocals to the track but without Prince’s Presley lip snarl they were doomed to fail.
378: Guitar
Planet Earth (2007)
This catchy rock-pop song is one of two obvious singles on Planet Earth (the other being Chelsea Rodgers) and is certainly not afraid to wield a rock’n’roll trope about women, cars and, yes, his guitar. Great to sing along to but it came at a high cost of entry, requiring a purchase of The Mail on Sunday and with it a chunk of your soul. The album version (there’s also acoustic and alternate versions in circulation) is a collage of pre-loved parts: a U2 guitar riff, a Beatles Back in the USSR chorus and if Rolling Stone are to be believed, a Duran Duran bassline. Following hot on the heels of the album’s Barry Manilow-showcasing opener it becomes clear Prince isn’t afraid to reuse and recycle at this point. Maybe it’s all part of the Planet Earth eco theme. Or more likely a calculated marketing attempt to cast his net far and wide into the British mainstream’s psyche in order to fill his shows for the upcoming London 21 Nights gigs. And it worked. It’s still tamed down for polite company and I often wish this particular guitar would feature a dirty switch, like the one he turns on in Mad. But for Middle England it was a lit pinwheel thrown into their Hitachi CD trays.
379: Get On the Boat
3121 (2006)
An end-of-times revelry, completely unlike songs such as 1999 and 3121 in that it’s still an invitation from Prince to party like the apocalypse may arrive tonight, but this time it’s on a boat! Totally different! If I dwell too long on the Watchtower-inspired lyrics it can begin to sound like the kind of religious recruiting literature handed outside train stations but I do like the idea that this vessel currently has, going by the JW’s heavenly quota, 143,900 partying souls aboard. Room for a hundred more though. The music is straight-up funk. A Latin-double-dipped rumpshaker performed by an all-star band, immaculate in its execution with Shelia E on timbales and Maceo Parker and Candy Dulfer on horns, but slightly lacking that disruptive piece of grit to grow a true pearl. Although it survives the taxidermied ordeal of being pressed flat into CD form, its natural habitat is live and on stage, not trapped in recorded amber. The song ends with the party ark sailing off without the incredulous conga player, leaving him on the dock, locked into a groove desperately trying to ward off the darkening night.
380: There is Lonely
The Vault… Old Friends 4 Sale (1999)
I’m lucky to have lived a charmed life where there’s been incredibly few times when this song would have keenly resonated. But it’s good to know that There Is Lonely and Solo are there to wallow in should that dark hour arrive. In fact, in order to purge all residual grief from this shipwreck of a year I may play them on December 31st, along with Bowie’s Blackstar and Cohen’s You Want it Darker and dissolve into the floor, waking up reassembled in a better year. A year of compassion. A year where you turn on the telly and every other story ISN’T telling you somebody died. Written for the same film soundtrack as The Rest of my Life and My Little Pill, There Is Lonely suffers from a similar affliction of sounding like a sketch of a song, but hey, a fragment of a Prince song trumps anything found in your average discography and wanting it to be longer is barely a criticism. Featuring his lowest register and sandwiched between two more songs about loneliness, it forms the dark, melancholy heart of his The Vault comp. A Spanish-guitar laden black dog. It’s not only the lights that go down after track five.
381: Turn It Up
Unreleased (1982) / 1999 Super Deluxe (2019)
A highly infectious 1999 off-cut that got bumped by the similar-sounding Delirious. Turn It Up is a whole lot more than the sum of its parts. Elementally there’s not much to it: a simple LinnDrum beat, a few synth lines (including one that sounds like dripping water) and Prince pleading you to turn it up for five minutes. A guitar does sneak in at the end (and the intro) to add some variety but the bulk of the song is just one man with some old, cold technology creating a bumping groove that would keep the JBs up at night. The magic can’t be found in its dissection but there’s some crazy funk neutrinos at play here. Emulators must despair.
382: Free
1999 (1982)
Given his high-profile slave rhetoric in the middle of his career, it’s interesting that even back in the early eighties Prince was writing songs based around the concept of freedom. The previous two albums featured songs about freeing your mind (Uptown) and body (Sexuality), whereas Controversy, like Sign O’ the Times after it, included a line about some people seeing death as the ultimate freedom. This theme obviously culminated in 1996’s Emancipation where in particular artistic independence had become the muse, but given that not long before he wrote Free Prince had felt, for maybe the first time, his creative autonomy restricted with his label’s refusal to put out Let’s Rock (later retitled as Let’s Work) as a one-off single, it’s not unthinkable that the frustration with his label may have first found its outlet in this piano-rock, power ballad. Free acts as 1999‘s escape valve, a socially conscious slow jam releasing the pressure built up from three sides’ worth of hypnotising machine funk. An insulator between what feels like the album’s cold and hot sections. After this clearing of air, the music begins to sound looser and warmer. Less nihilistic. The intro starts with the sound of armies trudging over foreign soil but this time Prince isn’t telling them “to fight your own damn war” he’s wanting everybody to “fight together… 4 the right 2 be free”. And Prince marches over the battle line with this message of optimism and unity until his voice descends into anguished screams, to be tended to by the backing vocals which appear like the lady with the lamp emerging from the fog. A national anthem for the lonely and downspirited, reminding them to count their blessings and silver linings as “there’s others doing far worse than us”. By the way, it may seem planned but it’s purely coincidental that I’m posting this song which ends with the lyric “be glad 4 what U had and for what U’ve got” today on Thanksgiving. Or is it I wonder? Kismet is a mysterious maiden.
383: Y Should I Do That When I Can Do This?
The Slaughterhouse (2004)
I think it was Machiavelli who once said that the best fortress a prince can possess is a Camille-voiced smackdown over a James Brown break and this is exactly what we have here. A percussive stickleback with Prince playing the elder statesman of funk, wearing his credentials as a peacock tail and belittling newcomers about their “little” grooves and over-reliance on music software. Y Should I Do That When I Can Do This? also doubled as a retort to any concert goer expecting him to just churn out the hits and was probably written in Latin on his family crest, being an apt summary of his modus operandi and echoed in lines such as The Max’s “when they tell me 2 walk a straight line, I put on crooked shoes”. The six minute lesson in paying dues ends with a Hide the Bone style scat of the horn riff and the feeling that you’ve just been schooled by a sensai motherfucker.
384: The Rest of my Life
The Vault… Old Friends 4 Sale (1999)
A canapé of honky-tonk piano and jazz saxophone written for the doomed I’ll Do Anything soundtrack but fortunately one of the few contributions to be saved from its destined obscurity. Plucked, scrubbed, gilded with horns and placed gleaming bright at the start of his Warner Bros kiss-off album, The Rest of my Life is a brisk, in-charge-of my-own-kismet, pep talk. Although not long enough to get its hooks in deep, the production (as with the rest of the album) is faultlessly pristine and doesn’t mess around, throwing you straight into the Vegas-style action with a series of focusing, self-applied cheek-slaps. For all of its forward facing lyrics it lays out the album’s retro blueprint – a warm, analogue nostalgia. Perky in isolation but when compared to the otherworldly Beautiful Strange that Prince unveiled on the same day, you can begin to detect the musty smell of seven years’ storage.
385: Sexmesexmenot
The Chocolate Invasion (2004)
Prince sends this daisycutter of a synth groover low and hard into the front row, exploding a hundred ripening libidos with his filthiest song since he rewrote the Kamasutra on 18 & Over. First surfacing in 2001 and released in full three years later, it’s one of a surprisingly high number of songs that shatter the common illusion that Prince cleaned up his act after becoming a Jehovah’s Witness. The swear words may have ceased but the sex songs certainly didn’t and if anything they got even more immature, with Sexmesexmenot featuring lines such as “I’m gonna wet your pants” and a less than subtle pepper grinder euphemism. It’s the fourth dirty song on the album and we’re only on track 5 but all hopes that he’s regained his filthy mojo to 1994’s Come levels are dashed during the album’s next track Vavoom, a sterile Peach where he’s wearing his O face but totally faking it.
386: What it Feels Like
Art Official Age (2014)
Putting aside the lyrics for a moment, this duet with Andy Allo perfectly embodies the nervous feeling of going back to somebody’s house for the first time while the game of seduction is playing out. The bassline chokes like a knotting in the throat and the staccato beat evokes the heightened self awareness that occurs as two tentative players swap loaded, strategic movements amid a white-out of adrenaline-pumped, screaming nuances. When you pay attention to the lyrics it’s clear that the song’s a long-distance conversation between the duettists, but when you would sell the moon to know exactly what’s going on in the other person’s head, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the same room or not – the chasmic, cosmic separation becomes wider than any time-zone divide. I could gush for days on the way this song makes me feel but I agree with the Russian writer Turgenev who once commented that there are feelings that can only be expressed via music, and What it Feels Like generates that churning mix of promise and anxiety better than any impoverished words could.
387: Life o’ the Party
Musicology (2004)
Self-centred, inorganic, but deeply and weirdly funky, this bullish song about high-status partying sounds like a 21st century reimagining of how the upper decks on the Titanic would soirée after hearing about what happens after-hours below in steerage. A jealous, monied reply to the real life o’ the party beneath the Plimsoll line. Three minutes in when the much lauded party arrives, it’s a spiky, staccato Latin affair that quickly descends into barbs thrown at Prince’s critics (“‘he don’t play the hits no more, plus I thought he was gay'”) and Michael Jackson (“my voice is getter higher and I ain’t never had my nose done, that’s the other guy”). This mix of disdain, ego and forced joviality creates a delectable cocktail and Prince plays the pouting preenster so well – a side of his psyche that he can tap into for devastating comic effect. Clattering percussion, spat lyrics and a jarring chorus presents you with a party that you wouldn’t ever want to attend but as long as this isn’t your world it makes for a great listen.
388: Make Believe
Unreleased (1992)
This wee slip of a song is another I’ll Do Anything refugee. A 100 metre dash of full-tilt organ and fret-roaming bass, with lyrics that go meta with a fourth-wall-breaking “it’s only a movie” line. A “funky” remix exists with the musical backing of NPG’s Black M.F. in the House but is far outpaced by the original which crams in ninety seconds of the kind of jazz performance you’d expect to see a 360 spin of a double bass in. Rough around the edges but beautifully arranged, it’s both the dazzle and dilapidation of a film-set combined. It would have been sung by Nick Nolte in the movie (although thankfully I’ve avoided hearing this version) and without the context of the plot I’m unsure whether the lyrics are literal or an echo of the sentiment that we’re all play-acting. I’m going to go and guess the latter. The world’s a stage and like Marilyn Monroe said: “it’s all make believe, isn’t it?”.