(Michael's note: I knew Prince for a few songs - love Gold - but wasn't really a fan. I know lots were though, but no worries, you're in the hands of the superb Mr Arnold for his reminisces about the Artist formerly known...)
Prince
His name
was Prince and he was, undoubtedly, funky.
Of the three pop stars born in the same year who ruled the
decade when pop exerted its greatest cultural influence he was the most
remarkable. Madonna and Michael Jackson were extraordinary performers: Madonna’s
burning ambition and work ethic covered up an unremarkable voice and no one in
the pop era has combined singing and dancing with the verve and perfectionism
of Jackson (we’ll moonwalk gently past his private life here). Prince though…
he was something else again. To the showmanship he shared with the others he
added a musical virtuosity unparalleled by any major pop star and a seemingly
inexhaustible supply of effortlessly inventive pop songs. This was a man with
so prodigious an output he could afford to gift songs of the calibre of I Feel
For You, Manic Monday and Nothing Compares 2 U to other artists and, in doing
so, revive or make their careers. I might have been a touch too young to fully
appreciate the majesty of his Purple Rain era output but I was certainly the
right age to be grateful to him for making Susanna Hoffs and the Bangles
international stars.
As with the other performers, his parents can explain some
of the explanation for Prince’s genius. Where Madonna was partly driven by the
death of her mother and Jackson’s domineering father forced his sons to perform,
Prince grew up around jazz: his mother was a jazz singer and his father a
pianist. It's easy to see the influence of jazz on his later work, particularly
if you were lucky enough to see him live when he could seemingly effortlessly
improvise new sections within the songs, his band following his lead. His given
names came from the one his father used on stage. In a very real sense he was
nurtured to perform.
He'd written his first song, Funk Machine, by the age of
seven. By the time he was 18 he'd signed a record contract with Warner Bros,
remarkably achieving creative control and ownership of the publishing rights
for the first three albums. He was still two months short of his twentieth
birthday when his first album For You
was released with one of the most remarkable credits: produced, arranged,
composed and performed by Prince. Not yet 20 he'd played every one of the 27
instruments on the record as well as undertaking every other duty in the album
bar some lyrics for the single ‘Soft and Wet’.
It's far from the most thrilling
or accomplished album he released but as a calling card for a singular talent it’s
remarkable. A case of not only write the theme tune, sing the theme tune but
make the TV series to go with it, star in it and direct it too. It sold solidly
but not enough to make a huge impact.
Impatient for success his breakthrough came with the first single from
his second album. I Wanna Be Your Lover became his first hit, falling just
outside the top ten. His success was consolidated with the Dirty Mind and Controversy,
establishing him as a successor to the likes of James Brown and Sly Stone with
often filthiest lyrics. But it was his fifth album in five years that
established him as a major mainstream star. The sultry Little Red Corvette was
followed by a re-release of his first great single, the album’s title track
1999. It paved the way for a run of albums that were to the Eighties what Bowie
was to the Seventies and the Beatles to the Sixties: a series of high class
records that married innovation with an innate pop nous.
It began with Purple Rain. The film is Prince’s best (not,
admittedly, a hotly contested accolade) but the soundtrack… the soundtrack
album remains not only one of the finest soundtrack albums of all time but one
of the finest albums of all time. If there's an album that’s peak Prince this
is it. It has everything you need to know about Prince bound up in a mere nine
songs and with no musical fat at all. It has Prince’s raised eyebrow sense of fun,
some healthy filth (Darling Nikki, which prompted the introduction of Parental
Advisory stickers, helpfully giving many teens pointers towards the stuff they theoretically
shouldn't be listening to), ladles of funk and bold, brilliant songs. Backed by
The Revolution, the finest of his many backing bands, it opens with the call to
the dance floor Let’s Go Crazy and winds through some typically lascivious slow
jams and funk before, at the point where you used to have to flip the record
over giving the finest side of vinyl there ever was.
When Doves Cry,
infamously, is a funk song without the most vital part of any funk record – the
bassline. And yet, carried by Prince’s somehow vulnerable alpha male vocals and
urgent synths it's irresistible. Time and a million imitators have dulled exactly how strange a record it is but
it remains a compelling, urgent song. I Would Die 4 U is the ultimate
profession of love, leading into the typically immodest Baby I’m a Star. And
then after that breathlessly urgent workout a languid eight minutes and forty-one
seconds that was the sound of a man reaching the peak of his talents. Purple
Rain is now a rock monument to go with the likes of Bohemian Rhapsody but the
sheer melodrama and emotion save it from museum piece status. It's not an
innovative lyric - it's a very Prince lyric of longing and attempted seduction
– but it's invested with an insane intensity and melodrama before peaking with
as great as guitar solo as has been recorded. Musicians on top of their game
are said to make their instruments talk but Prince goes beyond that here,
expressing through music what mere words would be inadequate for. There's a
good case to be made that one of pop’s greatest decades peaked with that solo
and Prince’s wordless howls of lust.
Prince wisely never tried to make Purple Rain again. His
output was too prodigious for him to consider resting on his laurels – by the
time of his death he’d made 39 official albums, a slew of associated projects
and allegedly still had vaults full of unreleased material. Between the sex and
the song writing you wonder if he ever slept. Many artists either waste their
prime or fall into the album-tour-album grind. Prince? By 1992 he’d released
Around the World in a Day, Parade, Sign O’ the Times (a double album cut down
from a triple!), Lovesexy, a soundtrack for Tim Burton’s Batman movie, Graffiti
Bridge and Diamonds and Pearls.
He released enough classic singles to shame the
entire careers of artists happily enshrined in the Hall of Fame: Raspberry
Beret, Kiss, Sign o’ the Times, If I Was Your Girlfriend, U Got the Look, I
Could Never Take the Place of Your Man, Alphabet St, Batdance, Partyman, Gett
Off, Cream… and that’s without touching the surface with album tracks such as
Sometimes it Snows in April, The Ballad of Dorothy Parker or Starfish and
Coffee. He rocked, he rolled, he funked and rarely put a foot wrong.
Commercially he still had it too – Diamonds and Pearls was his bestselling
album since Purple Rain.
If there's a point at which Prince fell from grace it came
in late 1992, with the release of an album with a hieroglyphic squiggle for a
title (it’s a stylised combination of masculine and feminine symbols and means
‘love’). It began with a couple of classic Prince funk workouts, Sexy MF and
the self-sampling My Name Is Prince. During the campaign for the album he began
to claim his name was no longer Prince and was now the ‘love’ symbol. This was
part of a contractual dispute with Warner Brothers, who became possibly the
first record label in history to ask an artist to slow down. Prince, enraged
began to actually press to release more material to fulfil the terms of his
contract and allow him to be free. He took to appearing with ‘Slave’ written on
his face (parodied at one awards ceremony by Blur’s Dave Rowntree who wrote
‘Dave’ on his cheek).
Amidst this chaos, amongst other albums came the
underrated The Gold Experience which featured his sole UK no 1 (The Most
Beautiful Girl in the World) and late period masterpiece Gold, which features
Prince’s second great solo. After fulfilling his contract with Warner Bros he
was free of his contract and immediately celebrated by marrying Mayte Garcia
and releasing the triple disc Emancipation. It’s remarkable not only for the
volume of music but for it being the first time Prince had included covers on
his albums (naturally they’re terrific: recognisably the same songs but
unmistakably Princed up). His first marriage was short lived and touched by
tragedy, in the three years of marriage the couple suffered a miscarriage and a
child who died when only a week old.
By 2000 he reclaimed his old name and returned to a major
label and giving interviews (although he continued to play the purple love
symbol guitar he’d had made) as well as becoming a Jehovah’s Witness. By 2004
his showbiz rehabilitation was complete. He played at the Grammy's and was
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At the latter ceremony he took
part in an all star version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps with Tom Petty,
Stevie Winwood and Dhani Harrison as a tribute to George Harrison. It’s a fine
version and then at three and a half minutes Prince takes over. You haven’t
heard what you might think is a guitar weeping until you’ve heard it. I showed
this to a guitar playing friend of mine and his jaw hit the floor. Not just for
the extraordinary solo but but because he was doing things that the model of
guitar simply shouldn't be capable of.
All the time he was producing music at the same prodigious
rate as well as remarrying and divorcing. He opened a club in Las Vegas,
released an album via the Mail on Sunday and in 2009 played what Billboard
later named as the best of the Super Bowl halftime shows. Performing on a neon
love symbol stage he interspersed his own greatest hits with bits of We Will
Rock You, Proud Mary, All Along the Watchtower and a version of Best of You
which Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins described as ‘actually doing it
better than we did’. It was arguably Prince’s last great world conquering pop
culture moment. Soon after he announced a 21 night residency at the O2 arena in
London: a run with no setlist, no autocue and where the band would only find
out what they were playing by the use of codewords. And all that before a
nightly after show party (a regular feature of his gigs).
He continued to be prolific, releasing four albums in the
final two years of his life and reconciling and resigning with Warner Bros. It’s
likely that his inability to slow down contributed to his death: despite being
hospitalised in April (his plane having to make an emergency landing to get him
there) he returned to his workaholic habits instead of resting and recovering. Unlike
David Bowie, whose Blackstar had been written in the full knowledge of terminal
illness, Prince’s demise was sudden, an accidental overdose of the drug
fentanyl. The showman simply turned out the lights rather than providing a
satisfying climax: the only time in his career he could be accused of doing so.
Like Bowie it felt as if the world had stopped, even Presidents and Prime
Ministers were reduced to grieving fans. As the man himself put it ‘…all good
things, they say, never last.’
Although there, he was slightly wrong, because
we’ll always have some of the most remarkable music of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries.
Baby, he was a star.
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