This one hurts. We’re barely done mourning Bowie
and now the spectacularly bad music year of 2016 sends another of my icons off
into the purple rain.
Prince was in the stratosphere of my very
favorite artists (he was number 2 just below Madonna, to give you an idea of
how big a fan I was and am). I have loved his music since the ‘80s and he was
one of the first musicians I really got into. I just got done listening to all the Prince in my collection again.
After getting a new laptop, I lost all the play counts in iTunes so I figured it
would be fun to listen to all of my music again and I took some time just to play
all the Prince.
And I have a lot of it. With as vast a discography
as Prince has, you can’t ever say you have everything, but I have all the
official albums, standalone singles, most of the B-sides and a lot of the
remixes. I have almost everything you can get legally and there’s still more
out there. I was just last week lamenting that there are a few stray tracks and
bootlegged albums I don’t have (look up “List of unreleased Prince projects” on
Wikipedia and weep at a world that might have been) and I was wondering how
best to get those, just to get my collection as complete as possible.
Listening to all that music again recently, it
was overwhelming to me to hear the breadth of his accomplishments. Prince could
play pretty much every instrument. He teamed up with amazing bands such as the
Revolution, the NPG and 3rd Eye Girl but so much of those albums
were all him. Everytime I bought a Prince album, I would see this familiar
credit in the liner notes: “Produced, arranged, composed and performed by
Prince.”
There was so much music that it’s hard to know
where to start a eulogy but you have to start with Purple Rain. The album is just about perfect, nine lean-and-mean
tracks without an ounce of fat on them. My favorite Prince song, “When Doves
Cry” is, I think, still one of the most bizarre songs ever to become a hit.
It’s a dance song without a bassline, cold but erotic, a psychological
minefield. Album opener “Let’s Go Crazy” starts with a church sermon and ends
with an avalanche of apocalyptic guitars. I still get goosebumps to this day
when I hear Prince shriek “Baby baby baby I want you” at the end of “The
Beautiful Ones.” “Darling Nikki” is raunchy and “I Would Die 4 U” is beatific.
And of course, there’s the title track. “Purple Rain,” recorded live in one
take, still destroys me whenever I hear it, all the anguish and catharsis in
the song melting into the strings in the coda and a gorgeous sense of letting
go.
Prince was on such a torrid streak in the ‘80s
that Purple Rain was just the
centerpiece of an amazing stretch of albums, each different from the last, from
R&B ballads to funk to rock to new wave to psychedelia. It astounds me to
think he released this murderers row of albums back to back: Dirty Mind, Controversy, 1999, Purple Rain,
Around the World in a Day, Parade, Sign ‘o’ the Times, Lovesexy. And those
are just the albums. No collection would be complete without the B-sides of
that era, like “Irresistible Bitch,” “17 Days,” “Shockadelica,” “She’s Always
in My Hair,” “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore” and more, sometimes just as
good as the A-sides. He was on such a hot streak in 1984 that he could afford
to throw the brilliant “Erotic City,” which many other artists could have hung
a career on, onto a B-side.
It’s difficult for me to rank Prince albums but
my second favorite would have to be 1999.
It’s a fever dream of an album, so smutty and murky that the sound of it feels
like sweating in a dark bedroom. It not only has hits like “1999” and “Little
Red Corvette” but amazing, bizarrely erotic album tracks like “Automatic,” “Let’s
Pretend We’re Married” and “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute).” Then
there’s the messy double album Sign ‘o’
the Times, another of my favorites. Prince recorded the whole thing by
himself, yielding the stark title track, the guitar-fueled “U Got the Look,”
the head trip “If I Was Your Girlfriend” and his most underrated single, the
most joyous brush-off in a bar in history, “I Could Never Take the Place of
Your Man.”
Those three albums don’t even include some stone-cold
classic singles and album tracks from the era: “Raspberry Beret,” “Kiss,” “Head,”
“Gett Off,” “Alphabet St.,” “Controversy,” “Thieves in the Temple,” “Sexy MF,” “Sometimes
It Snows in April,” “Crucial,” “Batdance,” “Annie Christian,” “Pop Life,” “Uptown,” “7,” etc.
Then there was the sex. Robert Christgau’s review of Dirty Mind was so impressed with Prince’s
sexual charisma that he concluded that “Mick Jagger should fold up his penis
and go home.” We have Prince to thank for parental warning stickers on albums,
after Tipper Gore heard her kids listening to “Darling Nikki” and flipped out.
I always thought it was funny that it was that song she objected to when Prince’s
earlier work was really filthy.
Prince was also not stingy with writing songs for other
artists. He famously wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U” for Sinead O’Connor
(originally for the Family), “I Feel for You” for Chaka Khan, “Manic Monday”
for the Bangles, “The Glamorous Life” and “A Love Bizarre” for Sheila E, “Love …
Thy Will Be Done” for Martika and (oh God) “Sugar Walls” for Sheena Easton.
Closest to my heart, he dueted with Madonna on “Love Song” and played guitar on
“Like a Prayer.”
I stuck with Prince long after he became O{—> and while
you weren’t guaranteed a front-to-back classic album anymore, there was still
plenty to love on albums like The Gold
Experience and Emancipation. I
even bought The Rainbow Children —
hated it but still bought it. I enjoyed some of his more recent stuff, like MPLSound, LotusFlow3r, Art Official Age
and PlectrumElectrum. He had released
some good standalone singles in the last few years like the hilarious
“Breakfast Can Wait” (good-naturedly playing off the “skirts vs. blouses” skit
by Dave Chappelle), “Groovy Potential” and “Ain’t Gonna Miss U When Ur Gone.” I
had just gotten his last album from late last year, Hitnrun Phase 2. The last thing he released during his lifetime, as
far as I can tell, was the recent single “Free Urself,” which is kind of bouncy
and ‘80s. When I heard it, I thought, “If this is what we’re doing now, I could
get used to this sound.”
No, I never did get to see him live. There was always some
reason why I couldn’t go or there was no publicity and I missed the show.
There’s no excuse and I’ll always regret missing him. Like Bowie, I
half-thought he would live forever, or at least his death would be going up in
a spaceship in a glamorous cacophony of purple velvet and gold glitter to the
sound of crying doves.
The one advantage when an artist you love dies is that you
already have all the music so you don’t have to acquire anything; you can just
hit play. So that’s what I’m doing now: reliving almost 40 years of music for
the umpteenth time, the incendiary, maddening, jaw-dropping genius of Prince.
May U live 2 see the Dawn.
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