Lotusflow3r (2009)
At an NPG reunion party Michael B and Sonny T chill with Prince in a lava lamp lounge. Enwombed in beanbags they put the world to rights with 4am epiphanies that fade with the morning sun. Luckily for us, the tape was rolling. That may not be how Colonized Mind came about but the song inhabits the same late night / early morning world. A time that’s neither day or night, nor today or tomorrow. A hazy calendarless cusp that allows the mind to float into less temporal climes. You need to be in the right headspace for Colonized Mind. In the cold light of day, it’s all smoke and guitar pedal mirrors. But if heard as the sun hugs the horizon you become Odysseus entering The Land of the Dead on a quest to find out the answer to the riddle of Prince’s will.
140: Lust U Always
Unreleased (1982)
It’s easy to see why Lust U Always never got released. Its hydraulic synth-funk more than justifies an album call-up but the lyrics go darkside quick. It feels like an exorcism. Or a fun ouija game gone wrong. Prince taps into his libido’s vast reservoir but dark forces pull him under, causing what should be a low-status character rendered helpless by desire to become something much more threatening. The first line warns “touch me at your own risk, I’m not responsible for anything I do” and the helter-skelter ride into psychopathy begins. Surprisingly it was offered to Robert Palmer to record in the late 80s but was obviously too monomaniacal for Mr Addicted To Love to consider. Instead, it’s doomed to linger in the darker recesses of the vault. An exorcised demon shocking newcomers with its poisonous, lascivious tongue.
141: The Truth
The Truth (1998)
I’ve never been a fan of acoustic singer-songwriter albums. Well, that’s not true; in my teens I went through a Dylan phase and a Melanie phase, trying on my dad’s and my mom’s idols on for size. Neil Young is still a thing now. But generally with every modern album of that ilk I’ve fallen asleep by track 3. The two exceptions are Fink’s Biscuits for Breakfast and Prince’s The Truth. I like to think that’s down to their superior songwriting but it could be the leftfield studio effects that nudge the tiller away from your average stone circle or open mic night performance. The Truth begins with the best intentions. Before its opening title track, Prince clears his throat to let you know this is live and intimate y’all. Raw, unpolished realness. Just you, him and his guitar. And the pretence is kept up for a good ninety seconds before his trigger word “time” has him reaching for his beloved ticking clock sound effect. “Just the one” he tells himself and “that doesn’t count” a few seconds later when he lets out a little digital flutter. The end of the track is in sight, he nearly makes it, but the abstinence proves too much and the digital dam breaks with a scream that rips a hole in the spacetime continuum. That’s not a synth wash you hear, it’s a portal into the seventeenth dimension of Blues. And now Prince is suddenly singing about moving back to Neptune. You don’t get that with Jack Bloody Johnson.
142: X’s Face
HITnRUN Phase One (2015)
I keep listening to this song planning to rate it lower, thinking well OBVIOUSLY I love it but come on, let’s put your critical hat on here. Get your eye in the game. It’s scientifically and objectively inferior to the X number of Prince songs I have left to review. Serious music heads will frown. It can’t compare. But then I play it. Loud. Through speakers. Like God intended. And it makes me feel funny. Like I could topple governments with my mind. Or fire nightclub lasers from my fingers. Unusually for a Prince composition X’s Face isn’t improved by headphones. It’s a song you have to be punched in the gut with. If dubstep hadn’t already been invented this track would have birthed a movement.
143: G-Spot
Unreleased (1983) / Jill Jones (1987)
In 1982 a new word entered the common lexicon with widespread publication of a book called The G Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality. Predictably it was only a matter of months before it became the title of a Prince song. G-spot is cold, robotic funk in the 1999 mould. The lyrics describe the singer searching for this newly-popularised erogenous zone as the exploration dispassionately spells out the word F.I.N.A.L.L.Y. The song was on Purple Rain before Darling Nikki replaced it (which should give a clue to its high quality) and was considered but ultimately rejected for Apollonia 6 (which should not). Eventually, Jill Jones released a reworked version but the hypnotic, mechanical vibe had been lost. It’s certainly not the greatest track on her self-titled album – Mia Bocca wins that accolade – but if her lp was to be made up of all the original demos instead, G-Spot would rule them all.
144: Get Wild
Prêt A Porter (1994) / Exodus (1995)
The Exodus party kicks off with this hedonistic cathedral built on sacred pagan soil. On the surface it may revere Versace and seem overly concerned with your outfit but underneath the high fashion lustre lies the sweat and beer of the mosh pit. Mosh Chic. The co-opted power of the old gods lies in the promise of the ego-stripping moment when the crowd consumes the self and you become a multi-limbed organism throbbing to the room’s heartbeat. But the only way to get that sensation is to be deep within a thronging mass and I fear the window has now passed for this song. My only faint hope is to hear a DJ pluck this NPG single out of obscurity and galvanise a primed crowd to fuse into a unified consciousness. Only then can I truly say I’ve heard Get Wild.
145: Rock ‘n’ Roll is Alive (and it Lives in Minneapolis)
Gold single (1995)
And lo, Sir Lenny of Kravitz did declare the Rockandroll beast slain. But the Purple Prince laughed and said nay. It lives, for I have found it lurking in the land of one thousand lakes. Rock and Roll may still be with us but this song from 1995 is an example of something that would soon be extinct: the Prince b-side. Technically two more would still arrive – 2001’s Staple Sisters cover When Will We B Paid? and 2005’s instrumental Brand New Orleans – but these were released as afterthoughts weeks after being offered digitally. Phantom echoes of a bygone age, like the meaningless “virtual b-side” tag which makes as much sense as pleather or vegetarian bacon. Rock ‘n’ Roll is Alive (and it Live in Minneapolis) is the last true, legit b-side – the end of a long, illustrious line which started with Gotta Stop (Messin Around) and included some of the best songs Prince ever wrote, like Erotic City, How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore? and 17 Days. It parties with the demob abandon of a season wrap-up, or an heirless lord trashing the family manor in one night of drunken decadence. Antique furniture flies through Edwardian windows as revellers dance around a pyre of heirlooms. Behold, I will show it to thee. The Prince removed a gold box from the folds of his cloak and at his command a magnificent dragon leapt to the heavens, showering the hall with fireworks. Everyone present stood agape but I fear the display took away something from the Prince that night. Never again would such a spectacle be forthcoming.
146: The Bird
Unreleased (1983) / Ice Cream Castle (1984)
Maybe Prince thought Morris looked a little too smooth performing The Walk because for their next “brand new dance” he had The Time frontman squawking and waving his arms like a rattled rooster. On the scale of foolish to cool, The Bird sits at the midpoint between The Tweets’ The Birdie Song and MIA’s Bird Song. It’s ego-pricking daft fun – a rubber chicken thrown into Narcissus’s pond – yet it still funks seriously hard. We’re told “this dance ain’t for everybody, only the sexy people” (a line reused on Salt & Pepa’s Push It) but the beat is addictive enough to get the most self-conscious wallflower flapping along like a Bluth. What you hear on The Bird single, Ice Cream Castle album and Purple Rain film is a live recording – the only song on The Time’s third album not performed by Prince – yet an unreleased studio version exists if you want to cut out the middlemen and bask in the purple wellspring. Prince would write a third dance craze for The Time years later with Murph Drag but that only sits on the hard drives of hardened collectors. If you only want to learn one Time dance in your life there’s a reason why, in the words of that other Minneapolis band The Trashmen, everybody’s heard about The Bird.
147: The Undertaker
The Voice (1993) / The Undertaker (1995)
Mavis Staples was briefly married to an undertaker in her youth, which may be the reason Prince gifted her this song. The Undertaker’s lyrics warn against gun violence and crack cocaine – cautionary words which Mavis performs with her usual aplomb. But, as good as it is, we’re not here for that. She brings the soul but in Prince’s 1995 recording grows something immeasurable and powerful. A force that is both subterranean and super-celestial, and lies growling in the bass for six minutes before exploding from Prince’s guitar in an unleashed storm of raw, white-hot rage. The slow build and release is cleansing. A soul enema. And for a while afterwards our emotions are much closer to the surface. Colours are more colourful. Joy surfaces more readily. I was at a funeral yesterday, my first in a very long time, and what struck me were the extremes of emotion on show. Tears I expected but they were punctuated by moments of jubilation as family members who hadn’t seen each other for decades reunited. And even more memorable were the moments of hilarity. People siloed in personal grief during the service connected again in laughter as the coffin left to the sound of the departed’s favourite song: Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell. Something similar happened when we arrived and our silent solemnity was ruptured by the car radio playing Pharell’s Happy. No other artform has the ability to instantly flip your emotions like music. And no other artform works as well as a reservoir for memory. Goodbye Denise. You taught me who David Bowie was and you’ll forever live on in my heart and in his songs. I hope you’re there with him now, pulling wheelies with Prince on his purple Hondamatic.
148: Do it All Night
Dirty Mind (1980)
Prince’s third album isn’t all the trench-coated, bikini-briefed, daughter-corrupting taboo-breaker the cover suggests. Yes, Head and Sister could still get Moral America hand-wringing today, but elsewhere there’s scarcely a tut to be found. Instead, we’re treated to endearing jams like this one which begins with the words “pardon me”. Granted, he then goes on to tell you he wants to do it all night, but he is also concerned about doing it to you right. Hugging and kissing and drowning in your arms is as racy as this song gets. Prince takes pains to tell you he’s “kind of shy” and usually so chaste (“giving up so easy is something that I never do”). Even the way he drops in a couple of “bloody”s is sweet, like he wants to show passion but goshdarnit that’s the wildest cuss he’ll allow himself. He’s uncontrollable with lust but he’s not an animal. Totes adorbs!
149: Crucial
Unreleased (1986) / Crystal Ball (1998)
A ballsy ballad written for Prince’s uncompleted musical and considered for Sign O’ the Times before losing out to the Slow Jam Zeus, Adore. Crucial was released a decade later buried in the centre of his Crystal Ball compilation, meaning it never made the splashes it deserved but not for the want of trying. In I986 Prince kept tweaking the track, and various variations exist where Eric Leeds is on sax, Susannah is on vocals, Clare Fisher’s orchestra is overdubbed. But then his spotlight moved on, leaving us to discover it ourselves. A Roman coin hiding in shrapnel beneath the earth. This one’s just for us. The fans who dig where the weeds are overgrown.
150: La, La, La, He, He, Hee
Sign O’ the Times single (1987) / The Hits/The B-sides (1993)
The Hits liner notes tell us Prince wrote La, La, La, He, He, Hee after Sheena Easton dared him he couldn’t compose a song around this simple refrain. A bread and butter request for somebody who had already turned his bandmate’s phone number into a hit so the story always sounded suspect. And in 2012 Sheena confirmed her contribution was indeed more than providing those six syllables. She revealed La, La, La, He, He, Hee started as a song she had written about a cat teasing a dog from a tree and the chorus was suggested by her as a joke. Prince, having sensed the Atomic Dog potential in her feline/canine tale, sprinkled on a bit of p-funk dust (something he did more overtly with Scarlet Pussy later that year) added a sax solo (courtesy of Eric Leeds) and a bass solo, and the result was an 11 minute Saturday morning cartoon. Not your modern CG strobe of noise and colour – something subversive and timeless, like Looney Tunes or The Pink Panther. Although you may want to cover your kids’ ears when the licking noises start.
151: Dance On
Lovesexy (1988)
The Lovesexy album is a kaleidoscope of intricate wonder but at the midpoint sits a sparse and jarring track – the machine gun funk of Dance On. Sheila E’s drum beat (possibly cut up and rearranged by Prince’s sampler) is too angular to hang anything off except the most bowel-loosening bass rumble. And with the lyrics forgoing the album’s celebratory brief to paint a picture of societal decay, you realise the song has its sights on becoming Sign O’ the Times part 2. Dance On is skittish and awkward and moves like a brick in a washing machine, yet against all known physics it’s also deeply funky. If you’re dancing to it you need a 5th dimension to fully do it justice.
152: Peach
The Hits/The B-sides (1993)
It may over-ripen by the umpteenth listen but for the first dozen bites, Peach is the juiciest fruit in the 12-bar blues tree. Like Zannalee, recorded a year later, it follows a tried and tested format so Prince holds your (and his) attention with a cavalcade of comic sound effects and Kim Basinger’s moan every four beats (sampled from the Scandalous Sex Suite). Peach is shallow and dumb – the polar opposite to his follow-up single, the rich and respectful The Most Beautiful Girl in the World (the Jessica Rabbit to Peach’s Roger). But I know which I’d rather be blindsided by on a dance floor.
153: All My Dreams
Unreleased (1985)
Hear ye! Hear ye! One and all. The double speed playhouse is making a call. This unreleased epic – a common vault favourite – is an ambitious dream sequence with shifting and slipping walls. Prince, with megaphone pressed to lips, plays the role of the man in the moon or King of Toy Town. Amid fanfares and music hall pizazz he rains down marriage proposals and cereal recommendations (Cap’n Crunch will get another shoutout on his similarly epic Joint 2 Joint). And that’s one of the more lucid moments. To document all the twists and turns would be exhausting and make as much cohesive sense as an actual dream… so it was about a submarine but we were on a train… which was also a sailboat… so I’ll just say if you’ve not heard All My Dreams, find a copy and dive in. When the vocals slow to half-speed and the bassline becomes quicksand it may seem there’s no way back but the planets never fail to realign. You’ll always wake to the rousing chorus on the opposite shoreline, remembering only fragments of what just happened.
154: P Control
The Gold Experience (1995) / Crystal Ball (1998)
I first heard this song half my lifetime ago. Since then, with the majority of my cells replaced, I’ve become on a molecular level a whole different person. But the thoughts and emotions I experienced then will forever be part of my make-up. Adolescence and early adulthood is such a rich time for the universe to shape your soul. It’s when we are pushed out into the adult world to fend for ourselves and need to be armed with as much information about this strange terrain as possible. We become rabid consumers of music, film and literature, and are at our most susceptible to art penetrating our defences and leaving its mark. Life will never be as vibrant and illuminating again. If I came across P Control for the first time today I’d file it as one of Prince’s lesser-successful club hip hop experiments. His first release under his new symbol but a continuation of what his birth name had done for two albums already. But back then I was at the start of my journey of hoovering up everything he ever put out. I was playing catch-up. I borrowed The Gold Experience CD from the local library and played it for the first time, having no detailed context for how this fitted into his oeuvre. My entire Prince collection consisted of two recently bought 80s albums – 1999 and Purple Rain – and this was my first dive into something more contemporary. The opening track started with Emerson, Lake & Palmer synths announcing a Fanfare for the Expectant Fan. A snippet of a guitar riff and a foreign tongue kept me guessing which direction it would take and then BOOM! The beat starts and I’m being spoken to in a familiar language. A Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics rap that immediately connected and told me Prince was still relevant. I didn’t need repeated listens to acquire the apparatus to digest this. It was instant nutrition. The raw thrill of that first encounter still lingers with me. Twitter storms and broadsheet thinkpieces can debate whether the lyrics are empowering or demeaning (the word pussy may have once had enough of a wink to crop up in pre-watershed sitcom catchphrases and Bond films, yet the track isn’t that old) but my early exposure means I’ll still scream along with every single word.
155: Zannalee
Chaos & Disorder (1996)
What started life as a sketch on The Undertaker became the pinnacle of Prince’s 18th album and a masterclass in how twelve bar blues is done. Zannalee, the monster-riffed daughter of Bambi, is too on-genre to be played completely straight so ***KCHH*** the police radio from All the Critics Love You in New York gets an extended rollout ***KCHH***. He has to keep himself entertained somehow right? It’s just too easy for him. Funny and filthy with Faustian levels of RAWK, this is the only Prince blues you’ll need. You can discard 5 Women, smash up The Ride (well, maybe not The Ride), destroy your false idols; today we have a new primal goddess and her name is Zannalee.
156: The Dance Electric
Unreleased (1984) / Purple Rain Deluxe (2017)
This site is a hodgepodge of critique, history and anecdote. For every entry, I begin by reeling in the song’s fishing line and see which sea creatures get plucked from the depths of memory. Afterwards I’ll research further to plug any holes or corroborate my fickle recollections and then I’ll write a paragraph on whatever I find the more interesting. With The Dance Electric, I’m pulling the line up but all I can think about is the present. I’m currently listening to it on a busy commuter train – one of those without inter-carriage doors – and I stand with one foot in one compartment, and one foot in the other. Both train carriages are jerking me in different directions, trying to knock me off balance. But I retain my core and fill it with this song. I feel I’m dancing the dance electric. Pulled by sporadic forces I have no control over. Vague memories swirl up of a rumour André Cymone has his mom to thank for Prince giving him this song. But I can’t even recall what his version sounds like. Nor the version with Wendy and Lisa on backing vocals. The Prince solo recording, the one released on Purple Rain Deluxe, is all there is in the world right now and I’m living in it like I’m trapped in an 80s Tron computer soundscape.
157: Prettyman
Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (1999)
Like Partyman channeled Prince’s inner Joker (or Gemini), Prettyman is a comic-book exaggeration of his inner Narcissus. Initially written for Morris Day, Prince said: “it was so funky, I kept it”. And he’s not wrong. Buoyed on the wind from Maceo’s horn, Prettyman flies to the heights of The JB’s finest. The lyrics are as funny as Movie Star, another song reclaimed from the pile marked for The Time frontman, and the line “when no-one’s around, I smell myself” is deserving of an Emmy in itself. The extended version may only be a minute longer but includes the missing kicker: the sound of the mirror smashing. A punchline that tells you Prettyman may not be the fairest of them all.
158: Anotherloverholenyohead
Parade (1986)
You know you’ve been writing about Prince too much when Anotherloverholenyohead appears in your phone’s predictive text after only three characters. Parade’s penultimate track and final single has Prince pleading his departing lover, whose eyes have wandered, to stay with him. He tells her she needs another lover like she needs a hole in her head. Is it too much of a stretch to believe this is really a restless Prince toying with the idea of going solo? By the next album, The Revolution would be disbanded and this song’s video is the last they ever feature on. Was he thinking about other bands when he wrote this? Is he reasoning with himself in an attempt to quell his wanderlust? In the second chorus Prince’s vocals almost completely drop out while The Revolution sing “We were brothers and sisters united all for love. Now all of the sudden U try 2 fight it. U say you’ve had enough”. The band would stick together for several more months but if Prince smashing up his guitar at the end of the Parade tour was seen as the final nail in the coffin, this song may be one of the first.
159: The Glamorous Life
The Glamorous Life (1984)
Sheila E spins her debut album’s highlight into an extended mix of percussive, tantric bliss – a trick she’ll perform again with A Love Bizarre on her follow-up lp. The Glamorous Life single was Ms Escovedo’s first release and to mark the occasion Prince christens it by popping his saxophone cherry and also giving Lisa’s brother David his first outing (on cello). In 2005 the Pussycat Dolls threatened to tarnish the melody with their taunts of “don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me…” Don’t Cha may have climbed higher in the charts and reached more ears but The Glamorous Life is impervious to such base attacks. It exists on a higher plain. An eagle soaring above the muck and thistles of chart fodder. I heard it playing in an antique market once and it was like spotting a kingfisher. Forget the glamorous life, I’m happy with this one where mundanity can be punctured by a moment of beauty darting out of the shadows at any time.
160: Empty Room
Unreleased (1985) / C-Note (2004)
Empty Room is a colossus of brooding loneliness. Written shortly before Prince was due to leave his girlfriend Susannah to film in France, it takes a moment of private inner-turmoil and scales it up to fill the void of an empty concert hall. A soundcheck staple of amplified anguish. It was considered for many projects over the years before finding a home on an otherwise forgettable album of instrumental jazz, proving once again there’s a purple diamond in every rough. Surprisingly this official version, recorded on the One Nite Alone tour, holds its own against the 80’s original. The guitar no longer thrashes around like a downed power-line but there’s no escaping the devastating gamma rays of long-distance relationship pain. His Montreaux performance in 2009 is a different beast and has a guitar solo that sounds like a polar wind has snapped away the tent fabric, exposing us to the icy elements of an unforgiving universe. Not your usual crowd-pleaser but I envy every single person at that concert with an inhuman intensity. That’s one room I’d trade my aura to be in.
161: Play in the Sunshine
Sign O’ the Times (1987)
After the dystopian vision of Sign O’ the Times we’re hit with a solar blast of pure vitamin D. The warm all-enveloping fuzz of sunlight on closed eyelids blocking out a decaying city. With an Elvis lip snarl, Prince sings about dancing as if it’s the last time and having fun before his life is done. Is time running out? Is this a 1999 style party-ocalypse? Will the world stop when the music does? Or is it his last dance with Susannah during their final recording session together? Whatever the urgency, Play in the Sunshine works as a better memento mori than your usual oil painting of a skull. We’re all gonna die someday so forget your earthly worries and lose yourself in this surreal garem masala of sunny positivity. That POP you hear in the right channel at 1:47 is the departure of your last remaining negative thought.
162: Fascination
The Truth (1998)
Anna Karenina’s opening sentence – happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way – could also be applied to songwriters. Spite can be a more creative muse than love. Love is universal and can find expression along pre-existing furrows. Spite has to needle out its own path. This is why Fascination, found on The Truth, compels. Its frantic flamenco style could only be born of a bitter fury looking for its acoustic-album-appropriate voice. Prince takes out his resentment by shredding his fingers to the bone and drawing lyrical daggers that offer little to suggest where they’re pointing. Michael Jackson was thought to be the target, mainly for the line “so-called king gives birth 2 to so-called prince”. But Fascination is believed to precede Jackson’s son Prince by several months. Regardless, the real story is better hidden in the shadows. Tales of spite may titillate but its sublimation into art is to witness the divine.
163: Wonderful Ass
Unreleased (1982/1984) / Purple Rain Deluxe (2017)
Wonderful Ass brings all the boys to the yard with a gait that shimmies more than a catwalk queen. If ever a song could sashay then it’s this one. It struts with the confidence of the song’s muse (Vanity?) if they only paid attention to the chorus. Listen to the verses and it’s clear Prince hasn’t built a totem to these unattributed buttocks of intrigue. He believes they are the subject’s single redeeming feature; a counterweight to balance out her many faults which he details in a long litany. Less of a tribute and more of an over-zealous negging bonanza. At least I think that’s the gist. To be honest I’m usually too distracted by those curvy synths to notice. I can see why they call that drum a snare, amirite fellas!?