Planet Earth (2007)
Fragile piano steadily loses ground to terraqueous bass and eco-religious lyrics before the cherry-picker view pans out, revealing Barry Manilow’s Could It be Magic (or Take That depending on your vintage). Well that was unexpected – it’s like watching documentary footage of an arctic tundra and seeing Claire Rayner wander into shot. Meanwhile the view is still panning out (drone camera now) and the track culminates in the kind of stratospheric guitar drench-out that Slash hears in his head whilst miming on a mountaintop for a disinterested helicopter.
490: Dolphin
The Gold Experience (1995) / The Undertaker (1995)
This closes the more saccharine of the four sides of The Gold Experience lp and probably wouldn’t have made the top 500 if it hadn’t been carried over the line by the low East wind of the Undertaker sessions. The unpolished version included on that rehearsal album dials down the cloy and gives over half the track to the steady, brooding 30 second leadout of the original minus the dolphin clicks. The lyrics are unchanged but world-wearier and the underwater, panning effect of the guitar shimmers with a sleazier intensity.
491: Sleep Around
Emancipation (1996)
There are swathes of Prince’s back catalogue that stand beyond time but this infectious house banger off Emancipation is a perfect summer capsule of a care-free 1997. You can imagine it simultaneously blooming amongst a thousand Yates’ Wine Lodges before withering at the hard winter onset of cinnamon vodkas and Jägermeister promotions. The NPG Hornz lift this track out of mere house territory, gilding it with flighted bravado and the breakdown three and a half minutes in sounds like the world has stop spinning as Gaia catches her breath. If this had replaced D:Rream in soundtracking Tony Blair’s electoral victory then the afterglow would be so strong we would still be crowning him with fillets of wool and anointing his head with myrrh. Yes, I’m saying this song is so powerful it can be used to whitewash war crimes. Despots take note.
492: Martika’s Kitchen
Unreleased (1991) / Martika’s Kitchen (1991)
A version exists of this track with Prince on vocals. And also a version, renamed Work The Fat, which is a plus-size paean by a gun-toting Bob George-esque alter ego. Despite what I said previously in Ain’t No Place Like U, this time round the released Martika version actually outshines Prince’s take. His heart doesn’t sound in it, although she never can quite reach the right level (who can?) of raw Princeness on the “Baby when we get started we won’t e-e-ever stop.” part. Yet she makes the track her own (if the title didn’t already do that) on the “Boom Box kick kick kickin” line. Prince obviously agreed as he later based a whole track around that sample. But the least said about that the better.
493: Ain’t No Place Like U
Unreleased (1993) / Mayte: Child of the Sun (1995)
Prince distills 1993 into a beat and loops it relentlessly until 30 seconds from the end when it finally gives way to rave synths. Howling, night-drenched guitars and insanely catchy lyrics of barely restrained lust leave you under no illusion as to who’s behind this unreleased track and the drum pattern turns up again in Emancipation‘s Slave, stripped of the guitars and sounding more funky for it. Ok, ok, it’s not quite unreleased as it was used on a Mayte album in 1995 (and again by Jevetta Steele) but a Prince track without Prince’s vocals can be a pale imitation, lacking glimpses into an internal sun. Ain’t no piece like the original – plus it has rave synths. Mayte – where are the rave synths?
494: Look at Me, Look at U
HITnRUN Phase Two (2015)
A sturdy, jazz-funk ode to a sight-giving Nefertiti. Flute, sax and keys trace the outline of a late night seduction, played out amongst neon bar-signs rippling in midnight puddles while Prince fills in the outline with lyrical shades of honeyed confidence. Fun fact: The late night phone-in DJ talking over the end doesn’t actually exist – it’s all in your head.
495: Beginning Endlessly
20ten (2010)
This mid-tempo, robotic, jitter-funk anthem is adorned with dirty synths that has Prince on restrained mode to keep us tantrically charged, teasing us with flashes of When Doves Cry. Either that or he’s held back on turning it up to 11 on a throwaway freebee album that was bundled in with The Mirror newspaper. The lyrics contain some classic Prince pick-up lines, smoothly pirouetting on cosmic contemplation that we’re all “minerals and chemicals of space you carry within your womb” into an invitation to go home with him to “get nice, till serious is gone.” Both celestial and corny, it’s Eros’s seduction of Psyche acted out by replicants with magnetic eyes of tempered steel.
496: Girl 6
Girl 6 OST (1996)
This Spike Lee tie-in starts with a Paisley Park (or is it Raspberry beret?) lead-in and then we’re led on a pavonine tour through a phone-sex call centre permeated with ringing phones, unmoored sax and breathy samples from the movie of the same name. Prince wrote the lyrics but not the music (credited to Tommy Barbarella) and it’s a soothing, smooth ride with a welcome cameo from a “SHUT UP ALREADY! DAMN!”, although the sample cuts out too late, leaving in a fraction of the first bar of Housequake. But then there’s no true beauty without some slight imperfection. It’s Marilyn’s mole. Brad’s chipped tooth. Catherine Zeta Jone’s tracheotomy scar. It’s the sound of the Great Spirit entering the Navajo rug as Persian weavers and Amish quilt-makers bow down before the infallibility of Allah and God.
497: Art Official Cage
Art Official Age (2014)
In 2014 two new Prince albums were simultaneously released, heavily enshrouded with the usual media spiel as a return to form. You’ve been burnt before but the press is all “fo’ realz this time” so you have hope in your careworn heart. A hope that diminishes during the artless rock of Plectrumelectrum and sinks completely when this Art Official Age opener begins. A new plateaux has been reached. Prince has gone full Eurovision. You should never go full Eurovision. And if you switched the album off at that point and unflinchingly walked away, not looking back at the exploding fireball of Prince’s career you would have missed his most creative, interesting and damn right listenable album since 1995’s The Gold Experience. What follows track one is such refined, purple genius that repeated exposure worms this eurodance pastiche into your soul. It’s ridiculously bombastic. I stand corrected – you should never go half-measures Eurovision. Crowd noise. Electronic hand claps. Ricardo Da Force style rap. The whole shebang. And just when you think he has emptied the entire Eurovision toy box, the pyrotechnic operatics kick in, followed by 16 bars of dubstep, Egyptian guitar and a waterboarding sketch??? The song buckles under the weight and shuts down like HAL 9000 singing Daisy Daisy. Istanbul plunges into darkness as the Israeli lightshow trips the city’s power. Douze points!
498: We March
The Gold Experience (1995)
Partyup‘s grown up, holding down a job and now wants to fight for social justice instead of the right to party – and it starts superbly. Shimmering, celestial murmurs and a power chord beamed straight in from Saturn kick it off. Mayte quotes the 3 musketeers en Espanol and Prince punctuates with “We March” vocal stabs. But then the beat kicks in and it’s weaksauce. More Samantha Mumba than Selma. It would sound at home in any generic 90’s pop fluff and reminds me of the neutered Led Zeppelin break propping up Sophie B Hawkins’ Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover – the sound of John Bonham spinning in his stairwell. The overlaid screams and siren samples fail to mask the balsawood build and the marching samples seem out of place and out of step. An army that’s more Salvation than Seven Nation. He dabbled with this sound before – Free‘s intro begins with it but has the foresight to fade out before the song starts – yet I can’t help comparing it to other artists’ military backed rhythms. We March would rout at the threatening onslaught of Bjork’s Earth Intruders “grinding skeptics into the soil” or the steadily encroaching, off-stage tattoo of Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting (Organon Mix). But this is a song about cohesion rather than threat. Prince may throw in the odd “watch your back” and “we’re kicking’ down the door” but more importantly “All is what we’re marching for”. It’s the sound of the world marching to the beat of just one drum. And in 1995 it is not an all-inclusive drumbeat if you can’t imagine it being used to soundtrack a macrobiotic yogurt advertisement. The man’s a genius.
499: Love Machine
Graffiti Bridge (1990)
A misleading pop ditty with lyrics of pure filth. Elisa Fiorillo fires off bubblegum higher/liar rhyming couplets while a lusty Morris Day swaggers around in the background talking about how he’ll “Drink. U. Til. Dawn.” The Highlight being the conversational Q&A style on the final verse, later used on Love 2 the 9s. Like most Time tracks, Prince’s usual tension between sex and spirituality isn’t at play here – it’s more of a tension between sex and cartoon sex. This machine would never pass the Turing test.
500: Venus de Milo
Parade (1986)
This list’s only purely instrumental track (apologies Madhouse fans) mostly makes the cut by being imbued by the aura of Parade. It’s the cooling zephyr at the end of side 1 after you’ve been pummelled by mind-altering, percussive bad-assery for 18 minutes. A decompression chamber filled with all the notes Miles didn’t play. A respite before you’re plunged straight back into the pulverising, new funk of Mountains on the reverse. It’s hard to keep in your mind – very much like the film it featured in – but when experienced in its album’s habitat it can feel like that scene in Trainspotting when Renton dives into the lavatorial, blue azure.