by Matt Thorne
‘Have a Heart’ is an angry song in which Prince justifies his behaviour towards an ex. ‘Objects in the Mirror’ (surely one of his least inspired song titles) is an unofficial sequel to ‘Insatiable’, describing Prince and his lover brushing their teeth together after filming a sex tape, notable mainly for the synths accompanying the piano. The collection’s most significant song, ‘Avalanche’, focuses Prince’s fury on figures of larger historical import than the occasionally anonymous girlfriends, drawing a surprising parallel between Abraham Lincoln and the CBS producer John Hammond as figures who have exploited black Americans. ‘Pearls B4 the Swine’ (another uninspired title and song) features Prince comparing his ex-lovers to pigs. ‘Young and Beautiful’ is a gentler, but still slightly creepy, variation on ‘P. Control’. The final song, ‘Arboretum’, is an instrumental seemingly inspired by the arboretum at Paisley Park. Steve Parke remembers that Prince liked to take photos in and around this garden, although it was never clarified whether they were for an actual project or for Prince’s personal use. ‘It was outdoors in the woods and it was really casual. We’d shoot at five in the morning with static lighting that would cast bad shadows.’ It would be hard to come up with a more telling example of the more fruitless side of Prince’s generally worthwhile workaholism than this.
30
NEW DIRECTIONS IN MUSIC
In 2003, Prince also put out three original jazz albums: the download-only Xpectation and C-NOTE, followed by the full-scale CD release of an album, N.E.W.S., that served as the follow-up to The Rainbow Children. For jazz saxophonist Frank Griffith, an enormous admirer of the work of Dr Clare Fischer, Prince’s jazz-influenced records are solid and worthwhile, the main influences, he believes, coming from the 1970s. For him, the first release, Xpectation (recorded in 2001, but held back until 2003), is well-played 1970s-influenced fusion – with Candy Dulfer the strongest soloist – although he considers the language and improvisational vocabulary not particularly deep or well-researched. The presence of the classical violinist Vanessa-Mae on the record works particularly well, indicating a continued desire to blend jazz and classical influences in the manner achieved by Clare Fischer. It’s a shame that Prince removed the best song from the album, the aforementioned ‘Xenophobia’, which was also the original title of this record, as it might have given it some much-needed bite.
Only a couple of days after this record, Prince released his second jazz CD, C-NOTE, which owes something, Griffith believes, to 1970s CTI label influences. Recorded at soundchecks by the One Nite Alone … touring band, the album contains four songs named after the location where they were recorded (Copenhagen, Nagoya, Osaka, Toyko), and curiously, an official release of a live version of the long-lost song ‘Empty Room’, also recorded that year in Copenhagen. ‘Copenhagen’ feels less well thought through than the Xpectation tracks, the record-scratching from Dudley D giving the track an ersatz feel, more ‘Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)’ than ‘Cantaloupe Island’. ‘Nagoya’ has a similar problem, only this time it’s what sounds like a whistle that disrupts the sound.
There’s an anxiety in the C-NOTE tracks that betrays the circumstances in which they were recorded: even though the music was performed in front of a sympathetic, fan club-only audience, their presence seems to stop the players going as far as they might. ‘Osaka’ is far better: along with ‘Xenophobia’, it’s one of the highlights of Prince’s jazz recordings, an atmospheric piece with a sense of dread that feels much more significant than the band just warming up. A relatively under-celebrated feature of Prince’s post-2002 shows is the interplay between Prince and Renato Neto, and this is at the forefront here, as the two of them dual on piano and guitar. ‘Tokyo’ has vocals, after a fashion, Prince singing the name of the city in a way that suggests less a shout-out to the audience than an attempt to get the spirit of the city into his music.
Clare Fischer gets a credit on N.E.W.S., the only jazz record of Prince’s to get a full-scale official release, but his son Brent believes: ‘I would just guess that he again took snippets of string recordings that we’ve made for him over the years, stuff that my father had written, just lifted it and placed it on an entirely different track. So I would say this is a case of Prince sampling Clare Fischer’s orchestral track, and it may not even be the entire orchestra; it may just be part of the orchestra.’ This sampling of Fischer’s work indicated how much of an influence he remained on Prince’s jazz, and a source who wishes to remain anonymous told me that a couple of people who were close to Prince and worked with him in the 1980s and 1990s observed him listening to every single individual track of a Fischer arrangement, as if trying to crack the code of the composition and unlock the Clare Fischer secret.
Recorded, the sleeve notes claim, on 6 February 2003, N.E.W.S. is by no means a bad album, but it has fewer of the dynamics of Xpectation and is less distinguished light jazz, representing something of a dead end instead of a fresh start. Now that Prince has returned to making conventional albums, it’s possible to see this era as a self-contained period of experimentation, but at the time it seemed perfectly possible that Prince had turned his back on a wider audience and might go on recording jazz albums for ever. If all the Prince albums from Lovesexy onwards force the listener to make a mental readjustment – this is what Prince sounds like now – N.E.W.S. was, for all its smoothness of sound, his most radical gesture yet.
While Prince would remain more open to jazz influences in all of his subsequent bands, perhaps the most lasting evidence of his continued interest in making jazz part of his sound is his regular performance of jazz drummer Billy Cobham’s ‘Stratus’ (famously also sampled by Bristol’s Massive Attack) in his live shows. Cobham covered ‘Sign o’ the Times’ in the year of its release, and Prince has repaid the compliment by covering ‘Stratus’ live over thirty times. Indeed, in recent years, hearing what Prince decides to do with this song on any given night is usually a concert highlight.
*
The NPG Music Club era came to an end – at least as far as releases were concerned – with two compilations. For all his protestations of innocence, Prince would never fully abandon sexual innuendo in his songs, later even evoking ‘Song of Solomon’ as evidence that devoutness and desire need not be incompatible, but The Chocolate Invasion is his last truly sexually explicit record, even featuring a song about a sex toy that recalls the unreleased ‘Vibrator’. In a month’s time, the release of Musicology would see the emergence of the newly mature Prince with a largely inoffensive (and bland) record; The Chocolate Invasion and The Slaughterhouse represent Prince at the opposite extreme, two collections that, while not particularly challenging musically (although The Slaughterhouse has its moments), feature some of Prince’s darkest and most claustrophobic lyrics.
Aside from one angry anti-industry song (‘Judas Smile’), which would have made more thematic sense on The Slaughterhouse, one party song (‘High’) and an instrumental (‘Gamillah’) which shares its name – ‘beautiful’ in Arabic – with his then-wife Manuela’s company (which now sells candles and other paraphernalia), The Chocolate Invasion is entirely about love, lust and sex. It begins with one of Prince’s greatest tracks, ‘When Eye Lay My Hands on U’ (a song he’s frequently revisited in concert since). He released a strange video for it which features a close-up of his Bible (with ‘The Truth’ emblazoned on it), before Prince appears to force a dancer to fellate him, the promo cutting out barely a minute into the song. I don’t know whether this was to tease the fan club or if a complete version of the video exists, but fortunately we have the song (and several live performances) to display how even in the midst of his most secretive period, Prince could casually access the best of his abilities and produce a love song as cryptic and yet affecting as his most well-known releases.
The other love and sex songs are mostly good, but more prosaic. ‘Supercute’ is one of several songs Prince has written about lovers arriving home on aeroplanes. ‘Underneath the Cream’ begins with studio c
hatter and turns into a track about cunnilingus and a somewhat oppressive-sounding ‘eternal wet dream’. ‘Sexme? Sexmenot’ is Prince doing R. Kelly again, with lyrics about after-parties and an inexplicable line in which Prince threatens to wet someone’s pants. ‘Vavoom’ is a pale Xerox of a hundred other Prince songs, a vague lyric enlivened only by what seems like a request to be allowed to orgasm inside his lover. ‘U Make My Sun Shine’ is a duet between Prince and Angie Stone that was released as a single. Nothing to do with the standard of the same name, it is an attempt at an old-fashioned soul song that falls flat due to the familiar-feeling lyrics.
*
The Slaughterhouse brings together the darker, more aggressive NPG Music Club songs. Even in its earlier version, ‘Silicon’ – as in ‘rope of’, as in movies – began with Prince welcoming the listener to ‘The Slaughterhouse’, suggesting that he had always perceived the song as part of this planned larger project, and although some songs stem from different eras, there’s a uniformity of vision to this collection. As with ‘One Song’, ‘Silicon’ has Prince once more turning his back on popular culture, seeming in this song to attack Hollywood. Appropriately for a dark album only released over the Internet, Prince makes a comparison between computer and human viruses, apparently suggesting that a poor diet is comparable to not having a firewall, only more fatal. In the final two verses, he seems to address someone else, either the listener or a woman who has approached him in a club. He seems to find his audience wanting, believing that they (or we) are getting bored by his sermonising as he invokes Armageddon and indicates that he has gained thicker skin since taking on (and now abandoning) a pseudonym. He also gives a second, punning interpretation of the song’s title, suggesting that film (or life, or the recording industry) is just a ‘silly con’.
‘S&M Groove’ is less serious than it sounds, less a continuation of his interest in dominance and submission than Prince celebrating his sound, this time even resorting to reading out newspaper reviews of his concerts: the only freaks here are the ones on the dance floor. ‘Y Should Eye Do That When Eye Can Do This?’, the aforementioned riposte to his lawyer (named in the song), doesn’t really make a great case for what Prince wants to do instead of playing his hits: as much as I’m bored of hearing him play ‘Cream’, I don’t really want him to become Doug E. Fresh either. ‘Golden Parachute’ is an update of ‘Avalanche’ concerning Prince’s ire at the retirement package given to a music executive and the concept of intellectual property not belonging to the artist who created the music.
Prince’s attitude towards contraception has changed drastically over the years. Describing himself as a ‘very careful man’ when he accidentally impregnates someone in ‘Baby’, but intimidated by Trojans when he finds them in the pocket of his lover in ‘Little Red Corvette’, he later sold his own condoms (Purple Raincoats, packaged in an imitation CD sleeve, with Prince, Mayte and the rest of the NPG staring out at the purchaser) through the NPG Store and advised his male listeners to practice monogamy on the 1989 B-side ‘Sex’, as well as singing of ‘safe sex, New Power Generation style’ on ‘Eye Wanna Melt with U’ and recommending condom use in the Emancipation sleeve notes to ‘Joint 2 Joint’.1 But Prince clearly had had a complete change of attitude by the time of 2004’s ‘Props N’ Pounds’. (This may have been prompted by the scenario in The Truth’s ‘One of Your Tears’, where the girl he’s addressing sends the singer a used prophylactic as punishment.) As he is occasionally prone to doing during this period, he breaks the word down into its ‘prefix’ and ‘suffix’, Gil Scott-Heron style, suggesting that alert people should have picked up on the fact that safe sex is a ‘con’ to ‘dominate’ people. Prince seems to suggest that we should be more concerned about what’s in Trojan Horse lubrication than the possibility of sexual disease, although, in a sneaky piece of doublespeak, he presents this as a chivalrous intention to control what goes into ‘his woman’. There is also, of course, the possibly religious and certainly moralistic additional concern that contraception may lead to promiscuity. Sheesh, where did the fun go?
‘Hypnoparadise’ is completely disposable, a dance track with speeding-car sounds that resembles the migraine-inducing worst of Come. ‘Northside’, though just as slight lyrically, is more appealing, a more approachable song reminiscent of the best of New Power Soul. While ‘Peace’ and ‘2045: Radical Man’ were originally intended for a fourth NPG album, and originally released as a single under the NPG name, ‘Peace’ opens and closes with jokes about Prince’s alternative identities, the song itself sounding like an extension of Rave’s ‘Man o’ War’. ‘2045: Radical Man’, the song he gave to Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, has a good rebuke to anyone discussing (writing about?) music without musical ability of their own, suggesting that such a practice can only be done from a consumerist point of view (Prince has so little respect for the critic he doesn’t exist), and imagining a future dystopia where any ‘radical men’ get destroyed by the year 2045. Prince recorded a video for the last of The Slaughterhouse songs, ‘The Daisy Chain’, filled with clues and visual puns (a guitarist clutching a can of ‘chicken grease’), as well as featuring Prince in one of his weirdest looks, with braided hair.
As variable as the music released during this period could be, it remains a golden era for Prince fans, the Internet years as fertile a period as Dylan and The Band’s recording of The Basement Tapes. It would be a while before the NPG Club was completely phased out, and Prince would continue to think of ways to increase his accessibility to his audience, but it’s undoubtedly the case that his next move was away from the hard core and back towards mainstream significance.
31
TRUE FUNK SOLDIER
After all the years of experimentation and reconnection with his fan base, Prince seemed to decide that what he wanted, most of all, was to be a big star again. So how did he do it? Promotion, mainly, with a new publicist and a new record label (Columbia) as part of a canny and well-orchestrated return to the top, which he achieved with, astonishingly, one of his weakest albums, a record that, seven years later, even his most diehard fans struggle to say anything positive about.
In the year before the release of Musicology – the same year that he put out the largely jazz-influenced and experimental albums described in the previous chapter – Prince embarked on a short tour of Hong Kong, Australia, Honolulu and Kahului. The set list he played on these dates was, after the well-thought-out and experimental One Nite Alone … tour, a return to a mainstream, hits-heavy, crowd-pleasing show structured largely around songs from Purple Rain. Though never explicitly acknowledged as such, the shows can be seen as a warm-up for the marathon ninety-six-date tour he would embark on to push his new record, and was commemorated with a book of photographs taken by Afshin Shahidi, Prince in Hawaii: An Intimate Portrait of an Artist. These simple but high-gloss pictures are accompanied – as in Prince’s other books – with a text made up of lyrics from throughout Prince’s career and maxims emphasising the newfound simplicity in his stage show (something Bob Cavallo would certainly have appreciated) and the change in his sartorial demands, as Prince notes that all he needs now is a well-cut suit: indeed, in one of these pictures he’s wearing one of his own tour T-shirts.
In 2004, Prince would do everything he needed to do to promote an album and make it a hit, including old-fashioned strategies like playing his hits at the Grammys and duetting with the then-superhot Beyoncé; performing ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ with Tom Petty, Dave Grohl, Steve Winwood and Jeff Lynne at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Prince’s performance of the Eric Clapton solo is an astonishing display, although there was something a little dismaying about Prince’s triumphant end to this George Harrison tribute, as he clearly relished kicking the asses of the rest of rock’s elder statesmen); contributing a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Red House’, retitled ‘Purple House’, to a Hendrix tribute album, Power of Soul; and new approaches such as doing a deal with Sony to distribute the album in shops, while als
o producing an NPG version (containing the same songs) to build into the ticket price at shows. He would appear on TV shows including The Today Show and The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and blitz radio shows, doing twelve phone-in shows in one morning. He wanted back.
While some (including former manager Alan Leeds) were critical of this new approach, Brent Fischer has particularly fond, yet also slightly bittersweet, memories of the 2004 Grammys, where he had personal involvement in the proceedings, and which represented a rare opportunity to see Prince performing with a live string orchestra (as well as Beyoncé and the NPG). ‘It was great’, Brent says, ‘to be able to put strings to “Purple Rain”,’ something that had never been done before. But making the deadline for this arrangement involved Brent having to use a new collaborative process that allowed he and his father to work to the same extreme creative schedule that Prince often uses.
‘Dad would write an arrangement during the day, and when he was finally exhausted at the end of the day, he would set down his pencil, even if it was in the middle of a phrase, and I would come over after I’d eaten dinner and stay there then for the rest of the night and I would pick up right where he left off. And I would also lay down my pencil around four or five in the morning, when I finally couldn’t stay up any more, and even if that was in the middle of a phrase, he would just pick it up the next thing the next morning …’
When the piece was finished, Brent got an extra treat. ‘They decided to have percussion in there, so I actually got to perform onstage with Prince as part of the orchestra, playing some of the percussion parts.’ After the performance, he met Prince for the first time. ‘I did meet him and talk to him and I found him very easy to work with, and we just talked for a few minutes but we got that whole thing done, we had rehearsal and soundcheck completed in under thirty minutes. But even though they were together in the Staples Center, he didn’t meet Dad … And I guess now I understand why some of the other artists who performed that night who had orchestras backing them up also had conductors, and we had fully planned that my father – or I, if he weren’t feeling well that day – would be conducting the orchestra. And they didn’t have a conductor’s podium set up on the stage. And I guess we found out later, or we surmised later, that it’s because Prince still didn’t really want to have any contact with Dad, not wanting to jinx the relationship because it was still working so well all these years later. I understand his reasoning, but just thought it was perhaps sad that Prince did not get to meet Clare Fischer.’