Prince
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The album’s next two songs, ‘Fantasia Erotica’ and ‘Everyone Get on Up’, came out as the third and second, respectively, of three maxi-singles (further evidence of just how important this record was to Prince). Originally recorded in 1989, The Vault suggests the former was originally intended as a song for Anna Fantastic, but I think it shares qualities similar to Prince’s work with Madonna – and not just because it shares half a title with the album she would release in 1992, the same year this album and maxi-single would emerge. A great lost pop song of the early 1990s, it is perhaps the most pertinent argument for a reissue of this record. ‘Everyone Get on Up’ is almost as good, a prime piece of early-1990s hip hop in which Prince retooled a song he’d long had a fondness for – Chicago R&B band The Esquires’ ‘Get on Up’ – and had even once performed with The Revolution (this version, recorded live, could sit easily on Graffiti Bridge), commissioning another rap from Monie Love and adding horns and scratches.
From this period on, Prince’s use of samples in his own music and in songs for other artists becomes increasingly eccentric: no longer does he just sample loops and beats, but also extracts from sitcoms and comedians, although these are often lines and routines that either refer directly to him or have some pertinent connection. ‘Everybody Get on Up’ features a sample from a routine by his old friend Eddie Murphy, in which Murphy jokes about how easy it is for musicians from Mick Jagger to Michael Jackson to ‘get pussy’. Although Murphy doesn’t mention him, there is a long riff about Stevie Wonder taking too long to pick up awards that must have amused Prince.5 In the ‘Segue’ which follows, Prince sneaks in brief snippets of a number of songs he’d written around this period, from the Celine Dion track ‘With This Tear’ to the then-unreleased ‘Hit U in the Socket’ to ‘Goldnigga’, as he pretends to tune a radio.6 The second of two tracks to feature Eric Leeds, ‘Fun’ is credited to Prince and Electra, and features a lot of Prince’s favourite imagery (the number seventeen, polka dots), but amounts to little. ‘Just a Little Lovin’’ is weak too, exposing the limitations of Electra’s rap style. The next segue is baffling – Leeds on sax over some wave FX – but nowhere near as confounding as ‘All That’, which is Prince’s most overt case of recycling (or self-plagiarism, as the academics would have it), consisting of a very slightly altered version of ‘Adore’ with new lyrics.
A segue about an oil spill sets up the environmental message for Electra’s last rap, ‘This Is My House’. The music is credited to Levi Seacer, Jr, but it’s clear that Prince had some involvement in the composition as it features a sample from his unreleased song, ‘The P’, recorded while he was working on Electra’s album and offered to Tevin Campbell.
The album was originally intended to be titled On Top and had the title track ‘Carmen on Top’, which is Electra’s origin song, tracking quickly through a pseudo-autobiography in the manner of ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’. Though unreleased, it’s as good as anything on the album, and it’s unclear why Prince decided to shelve it. The other tracks binned along the way include ‘Power from Above’, which exists in two versions and features an amusing back and forth between Electra and Prince, who’s playing a farmer, and a couple of stupid-cop characters. Again, it’s more fun than at least half the album. ‘Go Carmen Go’ is a hard-rock track, with Electra boasting about bringing rock to hip hop (pre-dating tracks like Rihanna’s ‘Rockstar 101’), and with lyrical links to another less impressive unreleased song, ‘The Juice’, built – like so many hip-hop tracks – around a James Brown sample; as is ‘Powerline’, which appears to be about line-dancing (‘Achy Breaky Heart’ was about to hit big), although the ‘chicken dance’ is also mentioned. It’s easy to see why this song was shelved.
By the time Alan Leeds resigned as president of Paisley Park records, he believes that ‘Prince was frustrated with our lack of success. I was frustrated with our lack of success. Warners were frustrated with the fact that Prince really wasn’t supplying his best work to the label. The calibre of the productions he was wanting to release really wasn’t at the same level of the stuff he had produced early on. This all corresponded with Prince deciding he was their slave and becoming frustrated with Warners and their inability to release records when and how he chose. It was a conflict that had begun with Lovesexy, and it never really stopped. It got worse with every project.’ Leeds also told me that Prince’s deal of the time stipulated that he cross-collateralise Paisley Park’s output with his own records, the result being that he decided to stop making records for the label.
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After the demise of Paisley Park, the first band Prince tried to launch on his new NPG label was his backing band, The New Power Generation, whose album he had originally offered to Warner Brothers, who declined to release it. While it is perfectly possible Warners might have rejected the album as part of their ongoing conflict with Prince, it’s also easy to see why they might have felt reluctant to put a big promotional push behind one of the most challenging Prince side projects, especially one which includes a segue that features Tony M bullying a couple of clueless record execs into giving him $6.5 million. Unlike the later Exodus and New Power Soul, both of which are appealing, commercial records, Goldnigga is an uncompromising, difficult album, albeit featuring two of Prince’s most enjoyable songs from the era, ‘2gether’ and the song introduced on the Act I tour, ‘Johnny’. Although he’ll become an increasingly prominent presence on NPG records, eventually taking over completely, on this album Prince remains largely in the shadows, handing over vocal duties to Tony M. How you feel about Tony M will shape your impression of this record, but it’s definitely his finest hour. Still, for the first few listens, it sounds like an angry man shouting while a TV plays in the background. Only after spending time with the CD do the complexities (and qualities) of the record become clear. Unlike most rap albums of the time, it didn’t rely too much on samples, instead utilising an enormous band with a big horn section and a large number of background vocalists.
The title song, ‘Goldnigga’, is split into three parts which come at the beginning, middle and end of the record, a Bob Marley-sampling mix of reggae and rap. ‘Guess Who’s Knockin’’ was removed from the track listing when the album was reissued because it used portions of the Wings song ‘Let ’em In’. Much of the early part of the record – including sketchy songs like ‘Oilcan’ and ‘Deuce and a Quarter’ – is sludgy and nondescript, the album not really sparking into life until Prince makes his presence known on ‘Black MF in the House’. After a succession of segues and non-songs (‘Goldie’s Parade’), ‘2gether’ is Tony M and Prince’s most convincing hip-hop song, almost – but not quite – of the same calibre as Ice Cube’s song of the same year, ‘It Was a Good Day’. ‘Call the Law’ is weaker, but ‘Johnny’ is so much fun, Prince making the sillier side of rap that had always amused him his own. He would carry on playing this song live until 2002, and it always slayed.
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As he’d previously done with Madhouse, Prince made the NPG his support band on the Act II tour, although they only played a few shows and not the whole run. A recording from a show in Madrid suggests it was a peculiar set, ignoring all the best songs from the album (which Prince would play in the main show and after-shows) and even including a cover of Madhouse’s ‘Six’. After selling Goldnigga at shows and at his newly established shops, Prince’s next attempt at marketing his protégés to a wider audience came with the release of a new label sampler, 1-800-NEW-FUNK. There was undoubtedly some strong material on this album – already released tracks from George Clinton and Mavis Staples; ‘2gether’ from Goldnigga; ‘Love Sign’, a wonderful duet between Prince as and Nona Gaye, for which Prince would record a video in which Nona dons a red leather cat suit to play a hit woman employed to take out the local NPG DJ, played by Prince; a cover of Bobby Womack’s ‘Woman’s Gotta Have It’ by Gaye alone; and the Madhouse track ‘17’ – but it didn’t feel as if Prince was introducing greatness to the world with the remaining
tracks: a song called ‘Minneapolis’ by MPLS, some formation of Prince associates who were never heard from in this form again (although they did also perform ‘The Ryde Divine’ on Prince’s TV film of the same name); an undeniably funky but somewhat bland Prince-penned anti-racism song, ‘Color’, by the Steeles; and ‘Standing at the Altar’ by Margie Cox.
Far more worthwhile was the much higher quality second New Power Generation album, Exodus. The first was largely a showcase for Tony M, but he had left Prince’s employ by the time of the second record, with Sonny T and Prince (using the alias Tora Tora) handling most of the vocals. Not quite a Prince album in disguise – like New Power Soul – but less obviously separate from his work than Goldnigga, the album has a number of first-rate tracks: live favourite ‘Get Wild’;7 ‘New Power Soul’, which in spite of its title is actually an excellent slice of jazz; old-school funk ‘Count the Days’ (he’d perform this song on British TV’s The White Room, his face completely covered with a red scarf) and ‘The Good Life’; the creepy minimal funk of ‘Big Fun’ that anticipates the even better third album and some of Emancipation; and best of all, ‘Cherry, Cherry’ (my favourite side project song of the 1990s, featuring an exhibitionistic girl at a basketball game, it’s the closest Prince has ever come to capturing the feel and flavour of his first three albums, combined with a wonderful pastiche of early-1970s soul and a new, darker social realism). The album is as significant a record in Prince’s oeuvre as any Time or Madhouse record (and is arguably better than much of what Prince was producing under his own name at the time). There are some less accessible tracks on the album: ‘Return of the Bump Squad’ is over seven minutes of cut-price Funkadelic; ‘Hallucination Rain’ is Prince’s most peculiar song, which plays like a soul version of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ or a properly psychedelic version of ‘Purple Rain’ or ‘Graffiti Bridge’; while ‘The Exodus Has Begun’ is over ten minutes of Prince sermonising over funk using a tone box, in the manner he would on The Rainbow Children, before ending with a dedication to ‘His Royal Badness’.
The only similarity with Goldnigga is the fact that it works as a concept album, with lots of segues, sketches and chatter that swells the record to twenty-one tracks, over half of which could easily be removed (there were even more that were edited out). Still, some of the tomfoolery is amusing and revealing: the record opens with Prince playing a naive musician trying to get through to Paisley Park (‘No, this is not that record company’), before being informed by Mayte that if he wants to join NPG’s talent search, he must be free of contractual obligations so his music can be downloaded directly to fans’ computers. In ‘DJ Gets Jumped’, Prince reveals his attitude to his old music by having a DJ who was playing ‘Dream Factory’ beaten up and the track replaced with ‘New Power Soul’ (no relation to the later album of the same name). Most of the remaining segues largely involve Sonny T (and occasionally Prince as Tora Tora), who is presented as a highly strung man with a serious aversion to TV (referred to here as on the later religious album The Rainbow Children as ‘hellavision’). A full three minutes is given over to a typically unfunny (but unusually profane) Prince skit about assaulting a greedy girl in a restaurant, and another four to Prince (in a ‘Bob George’ voice) mugging himself and sneaking into a messy girl called Janelle’s house, before heading to the Glam Slam nightclub and urinating in an alley. This is followed by a weird sequence (including some segues removed from the final version) in which Sonny is poisoned and starts hallucinating. He later imagines he’s in space for a full-on intergalactic battle, before he wakes up and realises it was a dream, although there was an alternative, unreleased ending that suggested the narrative would be completed on New Power Soul.
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The final New Power Generation releases, New Power Soul and The War, were Prince records in all but name, but the band did also make three significant contributions to film soundtracks, providing an alternative version of boring socio-funk track ‘Super Hero’, a song Prince had originally given to his childhood heroes Earth, Wind and Fire, to the soundtrack of the Damon Wayans 1994 superhero comedy Blankman; ‘Get Wild’ to Robert Altman’s underrated fashion satire Prêt-à-Porter; and original song ‘Girl 6’ to the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s turkey of the same name, which was made up entirely of Prince-penned songs. The latter, a horn-driven track featuring Nona Gaye full of samples from old songs like ‘Housequake’, is a surprisingly sympathetic and non-salacious song about sex-line operators that was far more impressive than Lee’s film.
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Rosie Gaines is one of Prince’s more unfortunate associates, in that her talents have not been truly appreciated aside from the time that she spent in his employ. I approached her for interview for this book, but she ignored my request. She did, however, make her frustrations known to Liz Jones when she interviewed her for her 1997 book Slave to the Rhythm, telling her Prince ‘wouldn’t let me out of a three-year contract, which meant I couldn’t sign to Motown’.8 But she did later sign with the label, which released Closer Than Close in 1995. That album only includes two Prince songs – ‘I Want U (Purple Version)’ (there was also a single release with many mixes, in an attempt to launch Gaines as a Candi Staton-style club diva) and an autumnal love ballad with a twist, ‘My Tender Heart’ – but in 2010, Gaines released a version of an album that she and Prince had been working on beforehand entitled Concrete Jungle, which contains alternative versions of the two songs on Closer Than Close and one more, the trite ‘Hit U in the Socket’, that had been released in the meantime via Prince’s NPG Music Club.
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Prince’s relationship with (and marriage) to Mayte transformed his performance style and prompted him to write a ballet, Kamasutra, which Brent Fischer suggests Prince believed was one of his most important works, but it must have been challenging for an artist who almost always treated the women he worked with as sex objects to compose a record, Child of the Sun, that managed to be both uxorious yet suggestive enough to ensnare a new audience of Mayte fans. The criticism I’ve read about the weakness of Mayte’s voice strikes me as beside the point: what’s most significant about this record is how Prince approached it and what he wanted from Mayte, not how well she fulfilled the role asked of her.
The album was released a few months before they were married, and it’s significant that it was a much less strip-club-friendly album than Carmen Electra’s, opening with a heavily rave-influenced party track, ‘Children of the Sun’, followed by the most spiritual song Prince had released since Lovesexy, ‘In Your Gracious Name’.
Neither are particularly strong, and are immediately eclipsed by a much older song, The Rebels’ ‘If I Love U 2Night’ (the record’s strongest track, which Prince must have realised, as he had Mayte sing it twice on the album; it has since been renamed ‘If Eye Love U 2Night’). Asked about the song’s previous life by Prince’s in-house NPG magazine, Mayte referred to the Mica Paris version of the track but not the Rebels version, telling Raven Worrell: ‘I knew about it. I was sort of curious, but I didn’t want to hear about it and get any ideas … I translated it into Spanish and it’s totally different.’9
‘The Rhythm of Your ♥’ is another techno house track, with Prince (not for the first time) building a song around a sampled heartbeat. Tagged in the sleeve as an ‘industrial love’ song, ‘Ain’t No Place Like U’ is a peculiarly downbeat song of devotion built around heavy guitars and featuring Mayte willingly singing of separating herself from the world to be with a man. A dreadful cover of The Commodores’ ‘Brick House’, which Prince renamed ‘House of Brick (Brick House)’, seems to be on the record only because Prince noticed the ‘mighty’ in the chorus sounded like ‘Mayte’, and for some inexplicable reason it samples Back to the Future.
Maybe going after the Mariah Carey dollar, much of the record is twee, lacking the bite of Prince’s best work either for his protégés or for himself. ‘Love’s No Fun’ and ‘Baby Don’t Care’ are both bland songs about losing a man,
while ‘However Much U Want’, a self-empowerment song about extending life and the one track that credits Prince as as singer, opens with him using back-masked lyrics for the first time since ‘Darling Nikki’. ‘Mo’ Better’ is a grim song about sexual secretions which rhymes ‘wetter’ with ‘better’ and, more worryingly, ‘rush’ with ‘gush’, and after the Spanish version of ‘If I Love U 2Night’, the record ends with a switched-gender version of Prince’s first UK number one, recorded here as ‘The Most Beautiful Boy in the World’. The album was not a success, and Liz Jones suggests the record ‘largely remained in boxes in record warehouses’.10
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Just as he had done with Paisley Park, Prince also used the NPG label to attempt to relaunch the careers of two old musical heroes (and close friends), Chaka Khan and Larry Graham. As with Mavis Staples, there are some who consider Prince’s work for Chaka Khan a case of her adapting to his style, but theirs is a closer fit, perhaps because the two were linked from early in Prince’s career. They had a long history, from Prince covering ‘Sweet Thing’ on his early demo tape, to Chaka doing ‘I Feel for You’, and then the two of them collaborating with Miles Davis on ‘Sticky Wicked’. In the sleeve notes to Come 2 My House, Pepsi Charles makes much of Khan’s role in the record, quoting her as saying that it is unusual in her oeuvre because she wrote the majority of the songs, but it’s not the lyrics that mark this out as a Prince production but the sound.