Prince

by Matt Thorne

  But the most significant protégé project with regard to his career as a whole is Prince’s collaboration with Ingrid Chavez, which works as a (inferior but still worthwhile) companion piece to Lovesexy. Although it wouldn’t be released until the autumn of 1991, by which time Prince’s sound had changed considerably, Chavez’s confusingly titled May 19, 1992 also owes something to Enigma, who were in the Billboard charts while Prince was working on this album (he has also spoken of his interest in New Age music in interviews, and it seems likely that the philosophy expressed on Enigma’s MCMXC a.D., with its references to the Marquis De Sade, may have caught his attention). While the project was slightly too esoteric to capture mass attention, Prince did put some energy into it, producing three maxi-singles by way of promotion. It is one of Alan Leeds’s favourite records from his time at Paisley Park. ‘It holds up. But it certainly wasn’t the sort of thing Prince was known for or easy to promote.’

  This wasn’t the end, of course, of Prince launching projects in disguise, but the period surrounding Graffiti Bridge was definitely one of his busiest periods of composition, the process becoming increasingly fraught due to his ongoing struggles with Warner Brothers, and the paradoxical desire to hide in plain sight that had prompted so much of this work would soon grow so pressing that he’d even discard his own name, leaving ‘Prince’ to languish (temporarily at least) alongside Joey Coco, Alexander Nevermind and Jamie Starr as one more abandoned identity.

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  PLAYING STRIP POOL WITH VANESSA

  The numbers lie. From a commercial perspective, the period 1991–3 seems to be a time of consolidation for Prince. Diamonds and Pearls was an extremely successful album, and while the album saw something of a drop-off, it still had two notable singles in ‘My Name Is Prince’ and ‘Sexy MF’. The reviewers (mostly) lie too: Diamonds and Pearls received positive write-ups, and while some critics questioned whether Prince was losing his edge and originality, most seemed pleased by what they considered evidence of a newfound maturity. And there is no sense that Prince was holding back at this time: it’s clear that he was giving it his all, and both albums suffer from being over-conceptualised rather than underdeveloped. But this is the second-least interesting period of Prince’s career, behind only the nadir of 2004. While Batman and Graffiti Bridge had been disappointing in comparison to Prince’s earlier work, neither album felt conservative. Diamonds and Pearls and, to a lesser extent, the album represent the beginning of what felt like a deliberate narrowing of Prince’s world view, something that may have reflected the musical climate of the time but couldn’t help but disappoint.

  Throughout his career to date Prince had largely avoided what feminist musicologist Nancy J. Holland has referred to as ‘the limited phallic sexuality’ of rock, concentrating as much on a more free-flowing sexual discourse. Though he had often toyed with sadism, he was also quick to present himself as a victim, and while he liked to dress his muses in lingerie onstage, in the lyrics almost all of his many lovers were presented with respect. Holland believed that Prince might reshape ‘our restricted sexual economy’,1 but she reckoned without the rise of hip hop and the influence some of its codes would play in moving Prince away from the more feminine side of his personality in the early to mid-1990s (and indeed, throughout his career from then on). But Holland and her ilk were projecting desires on Prince that he didn’t want to fulfil. It’s misleading to see Prince as some sort of sexual revolutionary, and he himself has expressed several times in interviews his unease at being seen as an individual celebrating libertarianism in rock music (when doing so, he has more than once used the phrase ‘pushing the envelope’, a prosaic way of belittling his artistic achievement during the first decade of his career).

  It’s not that Diamonds and Pearls doesn’t contain songs about sex, but that the sex songs see a retreat from the polymorphous perversity of Sign o’ the Times towards the normal, male-centred sexuality Holland believed was becoming outmoded in rock music, a development driven by the lyrical playfulness of Prince in his pre-New Power Generation guise. This new emphasis on sexual braggadocio is there right in the sleeve notes, which mention ‘playing strip pool with Vanessa’, and the return of patriarchal values is immediately apparent from the first new persona introduced on this record: ‘Daddy Pop’.2

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  As with The Revolution – and indeed with most of Prince’s concepts – The New Power Generation had a slow birth. When Prince sang of the ‘New Power Generation’ on Lovesexy’s ‘Eye No’, it seemed he was referring to his enlightened followers, echoing his intention, as Dez Dickerson suggested Prince wanted to do with The Revolution, of creating ‘a mindset among the fans’. This concept seemed to be continued in the song of the same name from Graffiti Bridge, as if this was a generation-gap song, with Prince’s contemporaries kicking against their elders. But now the NPG were an entity, and have remained so – in many different permutations – to this day.3 The band would even go on to release three albums under their own name (although the third is hard to distinguish from a Prince album), along with the beginnings of a fourth that has yet to escape the Vault.

  Personnel-wise The New Power Generation included two new members, Sonny T(hompson), who took over on bass as Levi Seacer, Jr graduated to lead guitar to replace the departing Miko Weaver, and new keyboard player Tommy Elm (whom Prince renamed Tommy Barbarella). Prince’s induction of Sonny T into the group was particularly welcome, and generous, given that a couple of years earlier Sonny T’s had been one of the more aggrieved voices in Dave Hill’s Prince biography, Prince: A Pop Life, telling the author how he’d been an influence on Prince in the early days and was upset about being passed over.

  While Prince seemed threatened by rap during the first half of hip hop’s golden age, by 1990 he had started to see a way through. During rehearsals, Tony Mosley began to rap lines from Digital Underground’s ‘The Humpty Dance’, and Prince noted the lyrical similarity between this song’s chorus and that of his own song, ‘Do Me, Baby’. Digital Underground’s Shock G was one of the musicians Prince would later bring into the fold (Matt Fink confirmed to me Prince’s lasting interest in the rapper), allowing him to remix his song ‘Love Sign’ for inclusion on Crystal Ball, and Prince and his band would subsequently often incorporate the rap from ‘The Humpty Dance’ into live versions of ‘Partyman’ and ‘Do Me, Baby’ on the Nude tour. Public Enemy’s Chuck D would later tell the BBC, after making the surprising confession that Prince’s vocal delivery in ‘Sign o’ the Times’ had inspired his own rapping, that he believed Prince’s initial disdain for rap was a short-lived phase. ‘[Prince] started to get deeper and deeper into what was going on behind the scenes, that’s when Prince’s understanding of hip hop and rap started to be a little different … eventually he was able to absorb what was going on, the great aspects, and leave the bones to the side and use it in his music.’4

  The hip-hop songs Prince had originally intended to include on Diamonds and Pearls were driven by braggadocio, but the boasting was inspired by the quality of the music or heterosexual desire rather than a need to glamourise violence. ‘Something Funky (This House Comes)’ served a similar purpose to ‘The Flow’ during the Nude tour concerts, with Tony M introducing the band during a frantic rap. (At one point, Prince considered including ‘The Flow’ on Diamonds and Pearls, as well as ‘Call the Law’, dropped from the album but released as the B-side to ‘Money Don’t Matter 2 Night’ and later revised for the NPG’s Goldnigga album.) Though not an official member of the NPG, rapper Robin Power performed on another hip-hop-influenced track, ‘Horny Pony’, also later relegated to a B-side after Prince wrote ‘Gett Off’. ‘Horny Pony’ has a goofy charm and one of Prince’s funniest raps, but by abandoning these four songs Prince undoubtedly softened the album. (Its engineer, David Friedlander, believes the original version of the album was better, both in the choice of songs and in that the songs had space to breathe before the keyboard overdubs were completed.5) The most high
ly regarded song abandoned during the development of Diamonds and Pearls, however, was not a rap song but ‘Schoolyard’, a sexually explicit autobiographical track6 which moves from a graphic description of the experience of entering fourteen-year-old Carrie’s vagina (compared to a glove filled with baby lotion) to a strange sermonising about how the listener might wish to protect their own children from similar experiences. Prince biographer Alex Hahn considers the song the brilliant conclusion to Prince’s Linn drum-sound experimentation,7 but this is one song that deserves to stay in the Vault.

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  Further evidence of Prince’s unpursued creative direction can be found on recordings from one of the often overlooked treasures in his touring career: the short South American tour he undertook in January 1991, a year in which he played only a dozen shows. This three-date tour included two performances at the Rock in Rio II festival and one at the Rock and Pop festival in Argentina. Although short (75–90 minutes) and consisting largely of material from the Nude tour, the opening sections of the concerts were brilliant, including a stunning reworking of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ that made the track interesting again for the first time in years. Forty-five minutes of one show were broadcast, revealing that the quality of the music was not matched by the choreography and stagecraft. After the elegance of the Lovesexy dance-offs and the well-orchestrated sexual tension between Prince, Cat and Sheila E, it seemed strange that Prince had now decided that what he most wanted to do was a ‘sex dance’ with three men dressed as waiters.

  ‘Live 4 Love’ was also referred to at the shows, as it had been on the Nude tour (although by now Prince had written a first version of the complete song), with Prince reciting the title several times in the middle of a breakdown in ‘Purple Rain’ and telling the Rio audience that ‘there’s a war going on’ – the shows took place the day after the aerial bombardment of Iraq by coalition forces – but not singing the song in full. An earlier take of the finished song is more affecting and easier to hear (the vocals are buried beneath FX on the released version), with Prince genuinely inhabiting the mind of a fighter pilot instead of playing it for effect and also providing clearer narrative detail.

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  While Diamonds and Pearls isn’t the hip-hop album it could have been, there were four rap-influenced songs that did make the record: ‘Daddy Pop’, ‘Willing and Able’, ‘Jughead’ and ‘Push’. Spaced throughout a long album, they have limited impact. ‘Daddy Pop’ is Prince celebrating himself, this time for his work ethic, comparing recording music to a regular job, as well as the first of eight songs he would write about playing cards in the next two years (maybe he was learning poker on the tour bus: the NPG can be seen playing cards in the 3 Chains o’ Gold movie). ‘Willing and Able’ also seems to have started out as a more jazz-influenced song, opening with a drum solo snipped from the released version, which features The Steeles on backing vocals. ‘Jughead’, taken personally by Prince’s former manager Steve Fargnoli, was the first of several New Power Generation songs and skits (most of which appear on Goldnigga and Exodus) about management problems in the music business and getting paid. Lyrically, ‘Push’ (a co-write with Rosie Gaines) is an almost incomprehensible self-empowerment song, one of several that seem to be about fulfilling one’s potential. No one could accuse The New Power Generation of being self-effacing. Tony, Prince and Rosie take it in turns to rap, with Prince, bizarrely, describing himself as a child-snatching clown who travels from Pakistan to Poland stealing people’s children.

  There is little on Diamonds and Pearls that rewards deep study. In an interview with the well-regarded Chris Heath, Prince was keen to point out that the extreme variety was deliberate: while all his recent records had been connected to films, this was an album with many perspectives rather than a single theme, showing the breadth of his abilities. But considered in relation to the rest of Prince’s career, the only songs of lasting significance on the record are the first two singles, ‘Gett Off’ and ‘Cream’.

  ‘Gett Off’ felt new at the time of release, but it’s a strange, Frankenstein creation: Prince took the title from a song on the ‘New Power Generation’ maxi-disc, many of the lyrics from a previous song called ‘Glam Slam ’91’ (a remix of the Lovesexy track, with lyrics from Graffiti Bridge’s ‘Love Machine’), and introduced a selection of samples from various funk songs, including the famous James Brown line credited by Prince in the song. It exists in a bewildering number of alternative versions: at least twelve released remixes, as well as three songs with alternative names – ‘Violet the Organ Grinder’, ‘Gangster Glam’ and ‘Clockin’ the Jizz’ – based on the original track.8 Prince also released a video EP to accompany the single, thirty minutes of videos to accompany various versions of the song. Prince’s cinephilia had always shaped his creativity but recently his taste had slipped: the inspiration for these latest promos was Tinto Brass’s woeful Roman sex film Caligula. Beginning with Prince’s new dancers Diamond and Pearl being let into a brothel-cum-factory guarded by two near-naked doormen, the film is nightmarish in its relentless procession of soft-core imagery: twins, blindfolds, candles, ‘cage guests’ and topless women in pristine white panties and face paint. ‘Violet the Organ Grinder’ takes Prince’s phallocentric erotomania to a ludicrous extreme. Surprisingly, he connects the song back to the Crystal Ball, increasing the sense that this oft-mentioned occasion was a Sadean orgy.

  The problem with ‘Cream’, if we’re considering it as art instead of produce, is that much like ‘Kiss’, it seems precisiontooled for mass success, yet feels empty. I’ve heard Prince play it so often in concert that I’ve long grown to hate it – it’s always a dead spot in shows and audience recordings – but just when I thought that this was the one song that Prince could never improve by changing the arrangement, last year he began playing it at after-shows, slowing it down, letting occasional New Power Generation member Frédéric Yonnet gussy up the song with harmonica solos, changing it from its original Marc Bolan or Chuck Berry feel into loose jazz. Often when he plays it live Prince boasts about writing the song while looking in the mirror, saying it’s all about self-celebration, but it’s undoubtedly a love song too, and in its original form not merely masturbation. As with ‘Gett Off’, it prompted a whole album of remixes and spin-off songs.9

  The tracks on Diamonds and Pearls that don’t further build on Prince’s myth are curiously lightweight. ‘Thunder’ is Christian heavy metal; ‘Diamonds and Pearls’ sickly sweet. ‘Strollin’’ expanded Prince’s sound into light jazz, but couldn’t compare to the jazz-influenced work he’d done with Dr Clare Fischer. I’ve never forgiven Prince for cannibalising one of his greatest ever songs, ‘Rebirth of the Flesh’, for one of his most forgettable, ‘Walk Don’t Walk’, but at least now ‘Rebirth’ has received an official, albeit limited release. Prince didn’t play ‘Money Don’t Matter 2 Night’ live when it came out, but did exhume it eleven years later for the One Nite Alone … tour. The song feels similar to ‘Pop Life’ in its confusing mix of sneering at the less fortunate and its questioning of material values. What’s unclear in the song – as it often is in Prince’s work – is whether he’s attacking the feckless, or the mercenary, or both. ‘Insatiable’ feels like an even sillier companion song to ‘Scandalous’, marred by that eternally embarrassing ‘Carry On’ moment when he uses sound FX to signify sexual organs. But the record’s evident weaknesses didn’t stop me (or millions of others, as it was Prince’s most successful release since Purple Rain) playing the album to death at the time of release. Most Prince records only improve over the years. Diamonds and Pearls is one of the rare exceptions, and for all its period charm, there is little to bring the listener back to it.

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  With the release of the new record, Prince appointed a new European publicist, Chris Poole, whose company, Poole Edwards, had been doing the publicity for David Bowie’s unfortunate Tin Machine project. Poole says that he didn’t realise when he started working for Prince that this was ‘th
e start of the war with Warners’, which he believes was beginning even at this point. ‘I think he grew superior,’ says Poole. ‘He didn’t want to be told what to do any more.’ Poole says by the end of his time working with Prince, he was ‘the closest thing he had to a manager anywhere’, and remembers of his boss: ‘He has this kind of real mischievous, in some ways impish side to his character. At times he could be downright bloody nasty, but other times he could be very thoughtful and very generous.’

  After the stripped-down Nude tour and the South American concerts, the Diamonds and Pearls tour, which went to Japan, Australia and crossed Europe but missed out the US, was a return to the grand showmanship and stagecraft of the Lovesexy shows. Poole believes Prince couldn’t mount a successful tour of the US at this stage. ‘I don’t think he was big enough. His career had really slipped.’

  The shows were well received by critics and audiences at the time, but it’s not an era remembered especially fondly by most fans. The only official release that records live performances from this period is the Diamonds and Pearls video collection (since released on DVD), which contains concert footage of Prince performing ‘Thunder’, a cover of ‘Dr Feelgood’ with Rosie Gaines, ‘Jughead’ and ‘Live 4 Love’. Some of these performances are taken from one of two professionally shot (but incomplete) videos of the eight Earl’s Court shows Prince played on this tour, one of which was originally, it was rumoured at the time, intended for a Christmas release.