For You (1978)
The song that made (he would say enslaved) Prince as it was one of the two demo tracks that secured his first Warner Bros record deal. He was very precious about this track, refusing to sell the rights to it to Tiffany Entertainment while still unsigned and he carried it around for so long that it became an impenetrable polished pebble. A sheer glass cliff-face that is difficult to get a toehold into. The lyrics offer a way in and are surprisingly sophisticated for a For You track, describing how, despite being careful, Prince has gotten his lover pregnant and is worrying about how he can financially support his family but will stand by them regardless. Not your average teen R&B fare then. In fact Prince was advised to stop singing about pregnancy if he wanted to appeal to his core market of young girls and the next time he was to explore this subject (Sign O’ the Times’ proposed baby Nate notwithstanding) was two decades later when he actually was an expectant father.
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465: Jukebox With a Heartbeat
NPG Ahdio Show #9 (2001)
Showing Prince at his most caustic, this gripe against radio programmers was written in response to the lack of airplay Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic received. The lines “why you giving people what they want when you oughta give them what they need ” are repeatedly spat out with white-knuckled frustration as Prince rails against the rigged game that charges for exposure. Of course this game served him well when he was an unknown teenager armed only with a bag of demoes, a deluxe press kit and an advertising exec behind him, but to point that out would be churlish. Ultimately Jukebox With a Heartbeat incapsulates one of the motivations behind Prince at the turn of the century turning to the internet to explore new models of promotion and distribution, appropriately enough only being released on one of his internet-only NPG Ahdio Show compilations. The beat is gnarled, highly strung and twists in complex directions as the song unfolds. Muscular but tense and full of knots crying out for a good massage.
466: Glam Slam ’91
Unreleased (1990)
Sharing only the name and vocal hook from the Lovesexy track, this unreleased gem is more of a cross between a Love Machine remix and an embryonic Gett Off. Falsetto vocals, squealing horns and a bassline that walks up and down the scales of happy hour abandonment makes this track beam with the power of a thousand sugar moons. Prince takes the beats and sax left over from the aforementioned Love Machine, turns the chorus from Glam Slam into a jingle for his Minneapolis nightclub and then lays down a vocal template for what will become the gargantuan Gett Off. It makes his nightclub sound like a 1930s neon rap palace. Duke Ellington doing windmills on day-glo linoleum. Baseball-capped flappers battle-rapping with élan. Four floors of jazz and party rap. Actually on second thoughts that sounds like a terrible place but this five minute audio-flyer is a halcyonic toe-tapper.
467: Dead On It
The Black Album (1987)
A problematic song for Prince and one often thrown back at him when he later embraced hip-hop. It’s a diss track. Not on any particular rapper, but on ALL of them. He derided their lack of musical ability which is best summed up in the lines “the rapper’s problem usually stem from being tone deaf” and “what does that have to do with the funk?”. Deep down I don’t think he ever changed his position on this – understandable from such a musical polymath – but he later excused the track saying it was only ever aimed at rappers of that period having nothing to say, with Public Enemy and NWA since changing the landscape. It’s true that he went on to work with Chuck D and Ice Cube but he also went on to release the lyrically vacuous Jughead so that argument has thin legs. Where Dead On It fails as a diss track is that Prince’s own rap suffers from the kind of cadence that blighted a lot of 80s hip-hop (and certainly on pastiches of it). It should make my critical ear cringe but, like Blondie’s Rapture or even Alphabet Street, it has an outsider charm. And as for the music – the beats are hewn from the finest Schoolly D stone and Prince’s guitar-licks funk with the power of a hundred James Brown samples. It’s just unfortunate that by the time The Black Album was officially released seven years later hip-hop had its first golden age under its belt and Prince and the NPG were playing catch-up, making the message an embarrassing albatross for him.
468: Slave
Emancipation (1996)
Slave 2 the System, an Emancipation outtake, was also going to share this slot but I would probably have had to update the name of this blog. They’re essentially two different songs but draw from the same gene pool, riding the drums from Ain’t No Place Like U and both sounding like demos of one another. Slave is the more starker of the two and edges it onto this list, however I do miss the the gentle caresses of Clare Fischer’s strings on Slave 2 the System and wonder what Slave would sound like draped in that finery. The charge of a skeletal war-horse cloaked in gossamer? Lillies of the Nile sprouting from a geodesic iron dome? As it stands though Slave is still a powerful track, raw and with superior lyrics to its contender. It’ll still be standing when nuclear winds rip through Emancipation, its more ephemeral brethren stripped away like tears in the rain.
469: Broken
Unreleased (1981)
Sounding more at home at a Jools Holland Hootenanny than a Glam Slam nightclub, this boogie-woogie piano ditty swings along at a rockabilly pace. A young Prince showing off his chops and rock’n’roll smarts. The lyrics are typical of his early career – he’s alone and heartbroken – but unlike, say, Gotta Broken Heart Again or So Blue they’re so at odds with the underlying, uptempo music that the effect is an enjoyable cognitive dissonance, much like Nina Simone’s Go To Hell. It reminds me of when your mind wanders whilst reading a book. Your thoughts and the story travel to different destinations on the same tracks. Later that year he wrote Jack U Off in a similar style which consigned the less subversive Broken to the back of the vault.
470: Walk Don’t Walk
Diamonds and Pearls (1991)
With its Sesame Street melody, child-friendly lyrics and an open heart, this harmless track sets off on a superego-filled, buttoned-up jaunt down an unmemorable side-street. Things start to get interesting when it reaches the main road and has to fend for itself amidst revving engines, bleating horns and LL Cool J’s jeep with his boomin’ system adding to the general cacophony. The superego falls to the id encaptured in a hail of “Sha-na-na-na-na”s – a vocal hook taken from the much superior, unreleased Camille track Rebirth of the Flesh – and our walker emerges more confident, worldly and with a gait and attitude more reminiscent of the album’s earlier track Strollin’. Narratively these two tracks would have made a fitting couplet but I get the feeling that Walk Don’t Walk, along with the gospel-led Willing and Able, was used on Diamonds and Pearls to wrap the explicit lewdness of Gett Off up in a taming embrace. Two songs carrying strong positive messages of ‘being yourself’, sandwiching Prince at his most dionysian.
471: The Sensual Everafter
Rainbow Children (2001)
The narrative at the start provides the context: The Wise One (Prince) and the Muse (his second wife Manuela) become flesh of one flesh in the “sensual everafter” and what follows is an instrumental soul-bath. Exfoliating guitars stripping away emotional dirt from your pores. A jazz-funk deep clean. Two minutes in and you’ve left the Isolation tank and roaming Venus, pulled by black swans and jamming Green Manalishi with Jimi and Jesus, as Saint Santana riffs on the Song of Songs. Then it ends. It’s brief. But for an ecliptical moment you’re in the shadow of greatness.
472: Boyfriend
Internet single (2013)
Armed with horns and thistles Prince skips across a bog of squelchy bass to suggest you keep your boyfriend away from him so he can take responsibility for where you sleep tonight. A cockerel collecting conquests. Male ego in war dress. Sold through his 3rdeyegirl site and labelled as a demo this sleek funk number is slow and sparse but with intricate playfulness happening between the beats. This offsets the lacklustre pick-up artistry of the lyrics which sound both creepy and bored. Lothario on auto pilot. Although the line “With the deepest mark of magic. My name upon your walls.” sounds like an incantation worthy of Calypso.
473: Extraordinary
The Vault… Old Friends 4 Sale (1999)
Prince in Vegas mode. The consummate professional at matinee, walking amongst the audience, dragging his fingertips across the backs of chairs and ruining your expectations for every hotel lounge band you’re ever likely to experience henceforth. Extraordinary was originally earmarked for a Rosie Gaines album but recalled to be the closer on Prince’s The Vault… Old Friends 4 Sale collection, an overlooked track on an overlooked album and the requiem for his Warner Brothers contract. Later it was given a new lease of life on his live disc One Night Alone at double the length and incorporating a sax solo by Candy Dulfer. Happy, Shiny brilliance that never loses its sheen. I’ve had it on repeat in order to write this and it gets better every time. Never been a fan of the word ‘extraordinary’ though – that silent middle ‘a’ is an abomination. Pronounce it or ditch it!
474: The P
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.
475: Hypnoparadise
The Slaughterhouse (2004)
A dizzying ensemble of piano and synths that swirl around like hyper-real confetti in a technicolor dream sequence. Fade in. Eddies of cherry blossom get thrown up by a car speeding down an empty Parisian boulevard. Dissolve to love interest. Heart wipe. Scenes of whirlpool attraction. Cloud time-lapse. Rose petals raining down on a bridal bed. Fade to white. Fin. It’s tooth-achingly rich and I couldn’t eat a whole bag but listening to this track on headphones makes me feel like Karen in Goodfellas on her wedding day, meeting an endless parade of Maries, Peters and Pauls before passing out due to a heady cocktail of pink icing and vertigo.
476: Shake!
Graffiti Bridge (1990)
Rattling along like a steampunk George Clinton, Morris Day rides this daft Time number all the way to Cheesetown. Shake! is one of the weaker tracks on Graffiti Bridge but anybody doubting the song’s credentials should check out Prince’s Rock in Rio performance of the song. The sound quality of this extended live version does nothing to rescue the cheesy 60’s organ which still retains a faint cologne of cruise-ship, but the track is unwound as a looser Delirious-style shakedown which gets even Christ the Redeemer clapping double time and Day’s original vocal limitations are shown up as Rosie Gaines casts the lyrics in bronze. That’s not to say the studio version is without its charm – the hydraulic beat is rock solid and the pretension-free straight-up party vibe acts as a counterbalance to the album’s more cerebral fare such as the alluring mystique of Joy In Repetition or the soaring cry for help of Thieves in The Temple. It’ll never make anybody’s desert island discs but it rarely fails to raise a smile and a toe tap.
477: Goldnigga
Goldnigga (1993)
Snaking its way through the NPG album of the same name this three-part groove was originally one full song but got carved up into intro, interval and outro. It acts in a way similar to the ginga in capoeira in that it’s a fluid state of movement, readying for an attack that bursts forth from the album’s more energetic tracks. Or at least that would be the case if the album wasn’t bogged down with those useless skits (or segues) that litter the genre (thanks for that De La Soul!) resulting in a stuttered flow. They even bleed into parts 2 and 3 of this triptych too but ignore the vocals it’s all about the languid but poised undercurrent. Sax and DJ scratches drift by as welcome flotsam and jetsam while Tony M swaggers about as if he owned the sea. Tony, it’s not about you.
478: Play
Unreleased (1990)
Doubling down on the play euphemism familiar in songs like Controversy and Play in the Sunshine, this track from the vault is a deceptive beast – summery pop with an atavistic darkness lurking within. A wolf in sheep’s beachwear. You can feel the beat physically panting as it projects an X-rated screening of The Warriors, with Prince prowling the streets, beer bottles on fingertips, howling into the night. A lupine boogie monster picking off the village’s daughters. In the second verse when the jaunty guitars and handclaps melt away leaving only an a cappella “I wanna kiss you, more or less” refrain, the raw, white-hot desire that courses through Play’s veins is exposed and a volley of “I wanna”s light up a monomaniacal internal dialogue before exploding in a snarling, skyward scream to Ishtar. Play in the Sunshine it’s not.
479: Free Urself
Internet single (2015)
Prince reportedly shelved his Black album because he felt it was too dark and didn’t want it to be left representing him if he suddenly died. Appreciate then the beautiful poetry that the last single he ever did release was the most positive song out of his entire canon. This bubbly ball of pop bounces buoyantly with an unstoppable force like the boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark if it was made of pink marshmallow and really, really wanted a hug. And just when you think there’s nowhere else for it to go the vocals side step into gospel and you want it to last forever. Instead it cuts out way too soon in the middle of an uplifting peak. Much like the man himself. Rest in purple peace Prince.
480: The Love We Make
Emancipation (1996)
A sleeper cell of existential skullfuckery. Hidden towards the end of the third disc on Emancipation, this rock ballad is easily overlooked and at first acquaintance you can feel it weakly dancing up and down graphic equalisers of Ford Mondeos across the country. Wearing the skin of Chris Rea and taking vague lyrical inspiration from Abbey Road closer The End, it invites dismissal as being baby boomer AOR. But on the seventh listen the high fidelity varnish cracks and numb horror leaks out. The tide of the lyrics tug you towards a single blinding light, as the beat echoes across the primal void and guitar rains down like heavenly fire. Written for the brother of Wendy (and tambourine player on Around the World in a Day) Jonathan Melvoin after he died of a heroin overdose, the more you listen to The Love we Make the more it morphs from bland sermonising, through painful poignancy, into the eventual heat death of the universe sandwiched between the album’s upbeat title track and Joan bloody Osbourne. Beware ye – if you gaze long into album orientated rock, album orientated rock also gazes into you.
481: Boytrouble
Plectrumelectrum (2014)
By all accounts 3rdeyegirl are a fierce live act, holding their own against Prince’s more venerated backing groups. But in the studio, the raw energy is tamed and can show up a lack of experimentation. Growing out of this dusty, rocky ground, however, are occasional flowerings of R&B pop, like this head-nodding, funk-hop cactus with a guest rap somewhere between Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes and Princess Superstar. Having championed TLC in the 90s and calling them his favourite group at the 1995 MTV music awards, it’s not surprising Prince is a fan of Left Eye’s rap-style and Lizzo delivers with delta force dexterity. Fellow The Chalice group members also provide vocals (including several bars of what sounds like Samuel Beckett’s Not I reciting advertisement disclaimers) but it’s the freedom of 3rdeyegirl throwing off their hard-rock shackles for the first time on the album that really lifts Boytrouble into the troposphere. A brisk monsoon of funky guitar licks and bright-eyed bass that clears the air and makes the second half of Plectrumelectrum a more interesting experience.
482: High
The Chocolate Invasion (2004)
Like the bunny of Energiser this wound-up, robotic drum beat stutters along at half tilt, tussling with restless keys while a highly strung Prince sings about his music getting you high (a common boast found in previous songs such as Now and Purple Music). The result is a jittery, cocaine-fuelled jackalope full of nervous energy and braggadocio. When the vocal track is outpaced, the beat runs ever onwards towards an unknown destination and free of supervision the chords get playful, channelling salsa and Thieves in The Temple.
483: Ronnie, Talk to Russia
Controversy (1981)
Prince’s political songs (Annie Christian, Sign O’ The Times…) are usually restrained, calculated affairs, coldly spoken more than sung. However Ronnie, Talk to Russia is a rockabilly nursery rhyme with gunfire and dated Cold War lyrics which thankfully explodes in a mushroom cloud before it can take the Controversy album down with it. You have to admire its chutzpah. It flies in through an open window, crashes about, upsetting furniture and decorum and just as suddenly defenestrates itself not two minutes later in a flurry of feathers and feedback. It’s the wild excitement of “There’s a dog in the playground!” There’s a whale in the Thames! A disruption that’s felt long after side two finishes, leaving you with a feeling of “what just happened?” which is an impressive achievement on an album that also features the flippant bustle of Jack U Off.
484: Your Love is So Hard
Unreleased (1989)
A Batman-era outtake. Sparse and raw but a fantastic framework with a great chorus. The sample machine overfloweth, creating a cutlery-drawer sound that’s as awkward and disjointed as folding a fitted sheet, but keeping an upbeat, quirky character that could be mistaken for Art of Noise (a group who scored a hit with a cover of Kiss the previous year). Here Prince is once again the spurned lover wanting to know Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad but this time he likes it. The third verse starts in a similar way to Batdance‘s “Hey Ducky…” and certainly this track wouldn’t sound out of place on the Batman soundtrack – in fact I’ll go as far as to say that if it had replaced the woeful Arms of Orion no doubt the album would ascend a few rankings in the general consensus. Instead Your Love Is So hard has to live forever in the vault, regretting it’s dateline tattoo of 1989 and secretly enjoying the neglect.
485: So Blue
For You (1978)
An innocent and naive soul-purge hailing from a time before Prince was marketed as a sexual peacock. So Blue is both timid and self assured. It’s the first b-side of Prince’s career, being the flip to Soft & Wet, and the lyrics can basically be summed up with a colon, an open parenthesis and a sun emoji (if he had called it Sad & Sunny and made it an instrumental you would lose nothing of the lyrical meaning). However, the music is a delicate lacewing. A fluttering reminder of the heart wrenching melodrama of gauche self absorption played by a teenage prodigy. The Shangri Las without the dark drama and free of any studio svengali shadow tainting it with their nostalgias and olds. Teen self-pity has never sounded so pure and beautiful.
486: Emale
Emancipation (1996)
A hip-hop tempoed tale of a sexual e-predator. Prowling West Coast beats underpin cautionary vocals and a chorus of “www dot emale dot com” (a URL that disappointingly draws a blank). The hook sounds dated now but it was released a full eight years before Fatboy Slim’s hit Slash Dot Slash and 13 years before the Black Eye Peas were still singing that they’re “all about that h-t-t-p”. Remember, the internet was brimming with untapped potential back in the mid 90s, email being a novelty instead of the suffocating, stagnant water that office-workers have to swim in nowadays. The song is cold, full of the detachment of technology, but shivering with frisson. It’s the sound of the space between two strangers. G funk modems dry humping and dreaming of a broadband future.
487: The Same December
Chaos and Disorder (1996)
Coming from a contractually obliged album that’s strewn with scorned roses, high on filler and veering close to Ugly Kid Joe on a couple of occasions, this has never been a darling of the critics. However, being one of the first Prince albums I owned, released in the era of my indoctrination, it will always remain close to my heart. The Same December moves fast through shallow-rooted country-rock, not stopping long enough at any idea to ossify into saltpetre. A motion blur over hot coals. Swallows swerving and diving for mosquitos between a verdant swamp and a sky of lapis blue. Its components have an air of the dank but the composition is divine. Like the month itself I guess. People I happen to be born in the same December as: John Legend, Nelly Furtado, Katie Holmes, Jodie Marsh and a fleeting first love who half a lifetime ago was my spirit guide beyond the pomp, possibly permanently pickling purple a wide-eyed, teenage mind.
488: Wow
Plectrumelectrum (2014)
Some nicely crafted, good ol’ rock n’ roll, swaying with whiskey and vibes. This would be the zenith of many a Hot New Thing’s rocketing career, before the implosion into nostalgia and good times. But this is Prince we’re talking about and he has a mountain of seraphic output that looms over such climes, so Wow gets to live around the foothills, getting teenagers drunk on its worldly bonhomie, handing out moonshine and free hugs.