by Matt Thorne
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As with Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, Musicology was a self-conscious attempt at a hit, albeit with a new strategy. Instead of filling the record with fashionable guests and aping the sound of other successful artists, Prince resorted to self-parody, turning in what mostly sounded like pale Xeroxes of his past hits,1 often with troublingly conservative lyrics. I’ve grown to love title song ‘Musicology’2 through its appearance on concert recordings or hearing it in live sets, particularly when it’s part of an extended funk section of a show and linked with ‘Prince and the Band’ (which when he first played it would include a repeated line about Warner Brothers being a monumental waste of time), ‘Play that Funky Music’ or ‘Pass the Peas’, but on CD it sounds thin and dated, and that’s the best track on an otherwise largely dull record.
For the first time in his career, Prince sounded mostly uninterested in competing in the charts (his desire to match others would return with 3121), instead wanting to remind listeners of the sound he had once perfected. The title of the hip-hop-influenced ‘Illusion, Coma, Pimp and Circumstance’ is a meaningless play on a Shakespeare-coined phrase that seemingly unconsciously recalls the fear Prince expressed on ‘I Like It There’ – that he has nothing to say that Shakespeare hasn’t said first. It’s a lyric about money, thematically most similar to the songs he wrote for The Time in its depiction of the relationship between a gigolo and an older woman. The song also shows Prince still taking care to appropriate fresh ghetto vernacular, with the reference to ‘whips and chips’, which means cars and cash, and not – as a northern friend of mine surmised – Johnny Vegas trying to finish his fish supper while being flagellated.
Those fans who weren’t too disappointed by Musicology to care speculated whether songs such as ‘A Million Days’ were addressed to his second wife or his first, a question raised by the song’s focus on lovers separated by physical distance and Prince singing about packing a suitcase, recalling Mayte songs like ‘Madrid 2 Chicago’, to which I can add that H. M. Buff told me the song was recorded when he was working with Prince, which dates it to before The Rainbow Children. The sense of creative bankruptcy that hangs over this album is increased by ‘Life o’ the Party,’ the second party song in four tracks, and for once a Prince party I’d be glad to leave.
‘Call My Name’, one of two songs (along with the title track) for which Prince won a Grammy that year, features samples from Clare Fischer’s strings and is littered with clues that seem to suggest it is a song written for his new wife, although the reference to a Bridal Path door was actually inspired by the address of his new home in Canada (making reference to his various homes would become regular practice for Prince on his subsequent albums).3 The video for ‘Cinnamon Girl’ (directed by Phil Harder, a daring choice for Prince as the director is best known for his work with alternative musicians like Big Black and Sonic Youth) connected the song to the footage Prince would play live during performances of ‘Xenophobia’ on the One Nite Alone … tour, again responding to increased security (and racial profiling) following 9/11. Attacked as ‘the most tasteless video ever’ by the New York Post, it mixes live action (shot on green screen at Paisley Park) and animation and features an Arab-American schoolgirl (making this the first Prince song about schooldays and schoolgirls not to be obviously sexualised) whose family is suffering attacks describing them as ‘terrorist scum’ following 9/11 and who fantasises about blowing up an airport in retaliation. Included with the ‘NPG Enhanced Version’ of the single was a documentary about the making of the video, in which Harder describes wanting to respond to what he described as the ‘vigilante’ atmosphere in the US following 9/11.4
The love songs on the record have no clear narrative. While ‘Call My Name’ may have seemed a representation of marital bliss (albeit challenged by, in a prescient touch, hackers trying to bug his phone), two songs later on ‘What Do U Want Me 2 Do?’ Prince was singing of his marriage being threatened by a new admirer. If we had any doubt that the old Prince was gone, the threat in this song that if they were living in ‘other lands’ and she slept with him she would be beheaded is breathtakingly cruel. There was a similar darkness to ‘The Marrying Kind’ and ‘If Eye Was the Man in Ur Life’, which seem linked both musically and thematically, both being an inversion of ‘I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man’, but H. M. Buff told me he was involved in the recording of the latter. Assuming this is true, it seems that Prince might have kept back the song until he found a project that suited it, and written the first with the second in mind. It also suggests that both songs are not autobiographical but instead Prince inhabiting the character of the kind of man who would move in on another’s girlfriend (after warning him first, or rather, telling the woman that he warned her boyfriend, which is a different thing, of course). After threatening the aspiring lover with decapitation in ‘What Do U Want Me 2 Do?’, it’s jarring to hear him here doing the same thing. The reference to marriage in ‘On the Couch’ encourages the listener to read this song as autobiographical, but it’s a fairly generic representation of a domestic dispute that could just as easily be fiction.
‘Dear Mr. Man’ is the best of the album’s political songs, and Prince would release a later version of the song that features him duetting with Dr Cornel West,5 who seemed to become something of a mentor to Prince in a similar manner to his relationship with Larry Graham. ‘Reflection’ looks forward and back. The first half suggests that Prince believes he will survive long enough to import his essence into another body; the second half has him singing about his early life. A Prince-loving friend of mine believes this is bogus nostalgia, Prince not recalling his past but instead burnishing his myth.6
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The shows which followed the album were Prince’s most successful greatest-hits tours, mainly because he finally seemed at peace with his back catalogue and structured a set that showed the true breadth of his life’s work.
It was hard not to feel disappointed to see something so conservative after One Nite Alone …, but if you look at it from the other direction, the shows seem better than much that followed, and they did have a unique sound. I have a particular fondness for Rhonda Smith’s bass, and was sorry when she left the band. This tour set a template that Prince has stuck to now for nearly eight years, and while there have been many innovations and changes during this period, there hasn’t been a major move away from this set of songs (at least at his stadium shows; I’m not counting the after-shows, the guest appearances or the tour when he played as a member of Támar’s band), the important tracks – ‘Musicology’, ‘Shhh’, ‘Purple Rain’, among several others – still likely to be in the set list if you go see him tomorrow. It was also a good year for after-shows, with eighteen appearances alongside the enormous number of main shows. At a series of concerts at Paisley Park (his last performances there for five years), he’d play a wider selection of songs and covers, but still work in tracks from the new album, like ‘Illusion, Coma, Pimp and Circumstance’, with Mike Philips squelching vocoder all over the music.
Evidence that Prince was moving on creatively came mainly through the acoustic section of the tour, where he introduced two songs that have never been released – ‘12.01’ and ‘The Rules’ – and a rougher version of ‘Black Sweat’, which would eventually show up on 3121. Both ‘12.01’ and ‘The Rules’ are slight, comic, bluesy, semi-spoken songs dealing with domestic triviality, similar to ‘Telemarketers Blues’ from the One Nite Alone … tour,7 included, it seems, mainly to get laughs, something which would become increasingly important to Prince’s live act. ‘12.01’ is little more than a few jokes strung together; ‘The Rules’ a more elaborate talking blues in which Prince depicts the difference between men and women in the broadest comic strokes (men’s habit of not putting the toilet seat up when they urinate; men wanting to watch sport on Sunday; men not wanting to go shopping; men not wanting to hear their girlfriends complain or ask for directions; men’s frustration that women always have heada
ches when they want to have sex).
The song, which would resurface again on the Planet Earth tour, would develop into a light-hearted (if sexist and predictable) comedy routine, but in its earliest performances, it has a more sinister structure, the whole song a conversation between Prince and a policeman who has come to his house. The singer’s repeated insistence that his girlfriend has threatened to ‘cut him in the middle of the night’, and the sense that he may have been violent towards her (not to mention the singer’s repeated imploring to the policeman to help him), gives the song a blackly comic edge similar to ‘Bob George’. The lyrics in this version are crueller, too, with the singer mocking his girlfriend’s weight. (Not that this seems to disturb the audience, who whoop with laughter throughout.) Later versions of the track (particularly during the Planet Earth tour) lose this structure, with Prince instead lecturing the audience like a hack comic, making it a much easier song to enjoy.
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The NPG Music Club remained Prince’s outlet for the less commercial side of his work: alongside the releases of The Chocolate Invasion and The Slaughterhouse there was also a handful of live releases, and tracks including ‘Glass Cutter’, a deeply weird song that sees Prince singing about baths again, appraising the beauty of a woman by suggesting that she looks so good she deserves to be shot, and free-styling about cheese. The final two songs to be released via the NPG Music Club before Prince’s move to Universal were lighter: quiet-storm jazz songs ‘Brand New Orleans’ and ‘S.S.T.’ (which were later released as a charity single by Columbia). Inspired by Hurricane Katrina, it’s a calm, altruistic end to an era when Prince was reaching out to a wider audience, and the two songs are among his most appealing recordings of this period. Both songs are inspired by Sade (who would also be an influence on Prince protégée Bria Valente’s 2009 album Elixer8), the kind of AOR singer Prince was in danger of becoming. But he couldn’t keep up the mainstream act for ever, and it wouldn’t be long before he started to make curveball business and creative decisions once again, including taking a position in new protégée Támar’s backing band and recording an album that represented his most significant creative leap forward since The Rainbow Children. Soon the hard core would have their Prince back, and the mainstream would just have to accept what they were given.
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COME 2 MY HOUSE (PART 2)
So I’m standing in Prince’s living room with the sweet, spiky-haired publicist from his then-current record label Universal, talking about how the one thing you know about any late-night Prince show is that you always have to wait, when I see Prince enter the empty room (the celebrity guests are still out on the balcony, drinking Prince’s booze and enjoying the warm LA night) and stride purposefully towards the stage. The PR and I run to the front with some other British guests that she’s shepherding, as the room quickly fills behind us. I am as close to Prince and the band – who are performing on the floor – as it’s possible to be without actually joining them, and when The Twinz do their dancing or Támar sings I can feel the body heat coming from them. The PR whispers to me: ‘I’d rather piss down my leg than miss a second of this.’ I take a surreptitious step away from her.
As delighted as I am to be here, it’s undoubtedly a strange point in Prince’s career (although this only makes the connoisseur in me even happier) – his most recent tour has seen him playing as one of the band for his protégée Támar – and when he starts playing tonight, the first set is primarily a Támar show, made up mainly of songs from the as-yet-unreleased album that Universal execs have been listening to before I arrived. The only song Prince takes vocals for in this first set is a cover of Ani DiFranco’s ‘To the Teeth’. It’s the only time Prince has ever played this song live – he and Maceo Parker play on the album this song is from, but not on this track – and it’s an extraordinary number to play in front of Bruce Willis, David Duchovny and Sharon Stone, ending with the suggestion that the best way to improve the world is to open fire on Hollywood. Prince smirks as he plays the song. I wish you could hear this performance; I know the show was recorded, as the cameraman came over to tell me my head (I’m a good foot taller than most of the celebrities present) was blocking his shot.
When Prince returns after the interval, he plays a set that includes five songs from the new album. Maybe it’s the experience of hearing the songs this night that makes me like this record more than most people. It seems to me that the reason why Prince’s work over the last half decade has not seemed to capture the public imagination in the way his songs once did so effortlessly is not so much that the quality has dipped, but that the songs no longer have all the accompanying support that fix them in the listeners’ imagination. Universal worked hard (for a while) with 3121 but ultimately seemed defeated by Prince’s apparent unwillingness to truly push the record. Although he had seemed pleased to join the new label, announcing that he didn’t consider Universal ‘a slave ship’, it was clear that this time round he didn’t want to adopt the approach he’d used for Musicology, instead going for a more unusual publicity campaign, where rather than going out to woo the world once more, he would encourage the world (or at least the world’s press) to come to him.
Though well-reviewed, the album undoubtedly didn’t get as much attention as it deserved. It’s Prince’s last masterpiece to date. ‘3121’ is a truly great song, Prince’s best album opener since ‘Sign o’ the Times’, and he’s played it over a hundred times (occasionally in a longer version referred to as ‘3121 Jam’, and it’s now come to serve the purpose that ‘Head’ once had in his shows – the song that the band use to stretch out and experiment). The band also frequently work in old ragtime songs into the track, as Prince encourages us to realise the connections between dance music from the beginning of twentieth century and dance music from the beginning of the twenty-first.
The studio version features a reunion of Prince’s New Power Trio, the stripped-down line-up of Prince, Sonny T and Michael B that had previously recorded ‘The Undertaker’. They recorded the song as part of a session that also resulted in tracks for subsequent albums. As well as re-engaging with his past, 3121 is the only time in the whole of the twenty-first century’s first decade when Prince has really tried to record a mainstream album, a record that could be played alongside Outkast and The Neptunes and Kanye West’s ‘Gold Digger’ (which Prince’s DJ Rashida spun this evening).
As quixotic as promoting a record with private parties seemed (hell, I wasn’t complaining), this theme is apparent throughout at least half the album. ‘Lolita’ begins with Prince telling the object of the song she’s a VIP to him, then in the same breath demanding to see ID (presumably to determine age rather than credentials). But it’s a scary party. You can never leave, the first song warns, and by the fourth song (‘Black Sweat’) his love-making is making his partner scream. While lyrically these songs are nothing new for Prince, there was a new, minimalist sound to them that seemed to update the sound of his earliest records without becoming a pale imitation of his past. ‘Black Sweat’ had originally been introduced as an acoustic blues song on the Musicology tour, but this electro version was the first track since ‘Gett Off’ to truly take a contemporary club sound and move it forward. Outside the party gates are angry, scorned women (‘Fury’, an old-fashioned Prince rocker with clichéd lyrics but a suitably hard guitar which he performed on Saturday Night Live and at the Brit Awards) and the ‘Wicked One’ (‘The Word’), who even has his own evil spiders. Falling in love here (‘The Dance’) can lead to you losing your mind. Before playing ‘Fury’ at his house, Prince equivocated about it, saying he wasn’t sure if he wanted to play this angry song when he was in such a good mood.
The other half of 3121 consists mainly of love songs, including one that Prince played in his house that night, an old-fashioned soul belter called ‘Satisfied’, which would remain a highlight of his shows for years afterwards, eventually birthing a comic sequel of sorts (‘Beggin’ Woman Blues’) on Indigo Nights. The
se love songs are largely collaborations with Támar. Considering his own interest in Latin jazz, I asked Brent Fischer if his father was surprised to hear Prince going in this direction on ‘Te Amo Corazón’ when he sent the song to them for their input. But Fischer insisted: ‘We had heard him do funky things like “Te Amo Corazón” before. Even wilder things. I would venture to guess that some of the very unusual things that we’ve heard Prince come up with recently are due to the influence that Clare Fischer’s writing has had on him. We were sort of supposing that Prince would eventually get more involved with [Latin jazz], that’s just a whole part of the process of the Latinisation of northern America as more Hispanics move here, and Latin music in general is higher up on the radar in mainstream culture. And I believe also at that time he had a Latin girlfriend, so that may have been part of it.’