by Brian Morton
It’s Cat, though, who’s hauled to stage front to rap on ‘Alphabet St’, a slice of stripped-down r’n’b built round a jangling guitar line, drums and handclaps, somewhat in the mould of ‘When Doves Cry’ and ‘Kiss’, and an obvious choice for first single. It’s also Cat who ends the song with a lascivious recitation of the alphabet, dwelling a trifle too long on ‘F’, missing out ‘G’ altogether and stopping with ‘I . . . love you’. Prince had never before deployed so many of his voices – anything from falsetto to bass, but also including the unexpected AOR tones of ‘Glam Slam’ – and what becomes obvious as the album progresses is that this is his most intensely aural album to date, a rich matrix of pure sound that often makes no obvious musical sense, yet functions musically at a very high level. Those who dismissed the album on release as a set of very ordinary tunes pointlessly embellished with sound effects were right, but right for the wrong reasons.
Prince had once again managed to invest banality with gravitas and mystery. The curious abstractions of Sign ‘O’ The Times are realised here as futuristic pop-funk. Where earlier he had used non-musical sound as an alienation device – bips and bleeps, a telephone bell, the addition of needle hiss, which later became a CD-era retro cliché, the bizarre coughing fit which precedes the ‘Raspberry Beret’ video – on Lovesexy such sounds have become part of the music itself. It’s no coincidence that the Lovesexy tour was the most elaborate he ever attempted; and the most expensive – Prince barely broke even on it.
His ability to create whole environments, even within the bounds of a single song, are tested on ‘Anna Stesia’, a slow, swooning hymn to the God of Love and to a state of mind somewhere between anaesthesia and ecstasy. It also contains a rare, explicit reference to Jesus, something Prince has usually avoided. ‘Dance On’ has a touch of Hendrix’s ‘Machine Gun’ riff, but pitched way down low in the bass and down as a dance track rather than an anti-war song. It’s Sheila E’s finest moment with Prince, vivid, multi-layered drumming that weds Ringo’s backbeat to Elvin Jones’s polyrhythms. The song ends with a rap: ‘We need a new power structure that breeds production instead of jacks who vandalise’, a perfect example of how Prince is able to change registers in mid-line. He does the same thing at the end of ‘Lovesexy’ itself when Cat morphs into Prince as she orgasms. The song also includes a sung setting of the Spirit Child’s opening recitation, showing how tightly woven an album this is: but who’s the singer? A mature ‘rock’ voice, new to the Prince canon.
The segue into ‘When 2 R in Love’ is simple but devastating. On the surface, it’s a formulaic love ballad, but it betrays its origins as a Black Album ‘shocker’ with lines like ‘the thought of his tongue in the V of her love in his mind’. Worth deconstructing carefully, because one of the implicit messages of Lovesexy is that physical love may be wonderful, but metaphysical love may be an even greater high, imagined pleasures even more intense than real ones: ‘When 2 R in love – their bodies shiver at the mere contemplation of penetration let alone the actual act.’
If Dirty Mind was all provocation and prurience, Lovesexy is brilliantly and beautifully sublimated in an ebb and flow of feeling. The soft keyboard figures and running water effects at the end of ‘Positivity’ close the circle and end the album on a note of quiet benediction and acceptance. It’s also the end of a phase in Prince’s music. Like Miles Davis again, he’d started out wrestling with a genre that didn’t quite express his fundamental creative needs (in Miles’s case, bebop), had sensed the cultural paradigm shift represented by rock, had come through a period of abstraction (Miles’s was much more savage) in order to create a new kind of musical beauty that was neither hot nor cool, neither visceral nor intellectual, but all of these at once.
Had Prince Nelson never again entered a recording studio, the records he made between 1978 and 1988 would still guarantee him a permanent seat at popular music’s high table, even if he were guaranteed to abuse the privilege. In that decade, as documented in Per Nilsen’s meticulous sessionography Dancemusicsexromance, he had written, recorded, arranged and/or produced more than 250 recorded tracks that saw official release, together with about half that number that walked out of studios, off mixing desks, or into Sony Pros at parties, gigs and rehearsals.
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It was no surprise that Prince’s next venture should be a new kind of collaborative project rather than another ‘Prince album’. It was no surprise that it centred on a figure who touches on perverse ‘Princely’ qualities. It’s also no surprise that even in character as Batman – the comic-book and TV icon who’d obsessed him in childhood – Prince should obsess about the themes which had underpinned his previous two records: past, future and afterlife.
It took director Tim Burton and star Jack Nicholson some time to persuade Prince that he should take on the soundtrack for Warner Brothers’ movie version of DC Comics’ this-worldly superhero. From the studio’s point of view, it was a perfect association, with or without a suggested input from Michael Jackson, and a subtly covert way of bending its most wayward star to corporate will. It also diverted Prince from work on a new album – eventually Graffiti Bridge – which Warner thought was premature. If Jackson’s suggested contribution was shelved, so were some of Prince’s initial ideas, produced as usual at white heat. A new ‘Batman Theme’ was turned down, as were a couple of songs that resurfaced later, notably ‘Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic’. In the event, Danny Elfman provided an instrumental score for the film, while Prince created a body of songs which instead of underscoring set-pieces in the film were his own dramatisation of the characters, including ‘Gemini’, with whom Prince would have identified astrologically. It was a decision which, coupled to Prince’s maverick reinterpretation of Batman/Bruce Wayne, the Joker and Vicki Vale, established the album as a separate creation, not just an OST. It’s a relationship that somewhat parallels that between Parade and Under The Cherry Moon, except of course that Batman was a smash.
The opening track, ‘The Future’, is marked by one of Prince’s most overt anti-drugs messages: take Ecstasy? ‘I’d rather drink six razor blades from a paper cup.’ A pop sentiment for a pop record. The chorus is astonishing and might have fitted on Sign ‘O’ The Times: ‘Systematic overthrow of the underclass / Hollywood conjures images of the past / New world needs spirituality / That will last . . .’, before repeating Batman’s mantra about looking into a future that – in that time-honoured conclusion of Lincoln Steffens – ‘works’. Ever since Parade, Prince had been obsessed with the relationship of past and future and the Gotham City created by Tim Burton, writers Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren and their designers was the perfect blend of futurism and the 1940s neon retro glimpsed on the cover of Sign ‘O’ The Times. Prince spent some time on the set and wrote quickly: ‘Electric Chair’, the briskly upbeat ‘Trust’ and ‘Partyman’ for the Joker, ‘The Arms of Orion’ as a love duet for Bruce and Vicki (it was co-written with Sheena Easton, but wisely dropped from the soundtrack, as was the weak and sleazy rap ‘Lemon Crush’), and ‘Scandalous’, written with John Nelson, for Batman. The movie’s stars – Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton and Kim Basinger – are guest ‘presences’ and Prince co-opts Jack’s ‘Don’t dance with the devil in the pale moonlight’ line as the pay-off to his longer than usual list of thanks.
All the cast characters come together on the concluding ‘Batdance’, which includes a brilliant part for the Sounds of Blackness Choir, a legendary St Paul outfit produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and band-led by Levi Seacer after his departure from Prince. The track wasn’t used on the soundtrack but it gave Prince his fourth number one hit and a fine video, directed by Albert Magnoli.
Despite a few other guest spots – engineer Femi Jiya and Anna Fantastic on ‘Partyman’, Matthew Larson on ‘Batdance’ – Batman was pretty much a solo Prince project, though he samples Bliss, Leeds, the choir and Clare Fischer’s orchestral parts in his dense, swirling musical collage.
Elsewhere, the line-up was evo
lving. Sheila E moved on and was replaced by local Minneapolis drummer Michael Bland. There would also soon be a trio of male rappers, who featured strongly on the downbeat ‘Nude’ tour that introduced Graffiti Bridge, toughened up the female singing with the recruitment of Rosie Gaines and marked a switch from Prince’s previous concept of rock-concert-as-sex-show. He hadn’t yet completely tired of accessorising his entourage with talented blondes and called up Dutch saxophonist Candy Dulfer. Though she was featured on the ‘Partyman’ video, she declined to tour, perhaps unwilling to join Easton, Sheila, Susannah, Cat and the others in the roster of ‘Prince’s women’, as Rolling Stone headlined a cover feature.
Their number was shortly to be increased when Basinger became a regular ‘presence’ in Prince’s bed as well. More than most of his actual or putative girlfriends, the blonde actress seemed to fall completely under his spell, and seemingly believed that they would marry. He seemed equally infatuated with her; apparently 9½ Weeks, in which she had starred opposite – or under – Mickey Rourke, was one of his favourite films. As well as paying off her make-up artist husband, Basinger fired her management and gave the account to Albert Magnoli, who had replaced Steve Fargnoli as Prince’s representative on earth. There were rumours that Basinger’s family were so concerned about the relationship and her new boyfriend’s behaviour that they more or less kidnapped her back. ‘Scandalous’ had been Prince’s love song to her – appropriately titled, given what the tabloids made of the relationship – and she contributed a few ecstatic groans to a twelve-inch version, an eighteen-minute ‘suite’ which includes some of his most turbulent, even angry guitar playing. Any further plans to encourage her singing career came to nought when the relationship foundered, though it did have a creative legacy in the shape of a draft movie script.
In the event, Candy Dulfer stuck around longer than Kim Basinger, long enough to record ‘Release It’ with The Time for the next album. It was to feature yet another cast, some new, some familiar, and given Prince’s recent dabbling in film – and film stars – it was no surprise that it had a cinematic component.
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In the final sequence of Under the Cherry Moon the words ‘may U live 2 see the dawn’ appear onscreen. Fans assumed that, James Bond fan as he is, Prince was announcing the next film in an unstoppable sequence. Most of the film critics who’d panned his directorial debut, and that means most film critics, prayed that it wasn’t. Despite the panning, Prince wasn’t yet done with the movies. His involvement in Batman had rekindled an enthusiasm, but Graffiti Bridge, released in 1990, wasn’t the quick follow-up he might have wanted. Like its predecessors, it was both film and album. Like Purple Rain, it featured old friends, rivals and protégés. The same blessing, word for word, appears on the soundtrack album sleeve. The new dawn hadn’t yet broken, it seemed.
At the cusp of a new decade, Prince was growing up, and growing a beard. One cynic suggested that he wanted to look like Jesus when he hit the age of thirty-three. On thephotographic evidence, he looks more like illusionist and endurance artist David Blaine. Unlike Blaine and contrary to his reputation as a driven loner, Prince wasn’t solitary in Paisley Park. Graffiti Bridge is similar to Parade in sounding more like a revue soundtrack than a rock album, and it’s unique in the Prince canon in that it features other acts, albeit shaped and soundtracked by the director/auteur. Perhaps another of the tiny ice ages that swept across his creative personality from time to time was receding.
However, on a business level, Prince’s career was drifting towards crisis. After parting company with Cavallo, Ruffalo and Fargnoli, he had hooked up for a time with Albert Magnoli, who, however improbable a relationship it seemed, might be said to have understood Prince’s strengths and weaknesses better than anyone. Magnoli was tempted away, though, and after a brief period with Randy Phillips and Arnold Stiefel, Prince made the fateful decision to manage himself. Significantly, his nominal president was his old friend and security consultant Gilbert Davison, while the role of executive VP went to publicist Jill Willis. (Davison left Paisley Park in 1994 and bought out Prince’s debt-laden Glam Slam club, renaming it Quest.) Graffiti Bridge was the first casualty of Magnoli’s absence and the starkest sign that, when he had no one to butt ideas up against, even Prince’s legendary creative judgement was flawed.
The original idea had been to create not so much a sequel to Purple Rain as a parallel line that told the story of The Time. Prince was concurrently working on the group’s third album Pandemonium, for which, as Jamie Starr, he again wrote all the material, sharing a nominal credit on ‘Jerk Out’ with Morris Day, Jellybean Johnson and Terry Lewis. No one knows how the original script, drafted with Basinger, was supposed to run, but the film that emerged was a drab vanity feature with the thinnest of storylines and in which The Time had only a secondary part. Prince did hint that Warner weren’t interested in a Time biopic. At first, it seemed that an older and ever more sombre Prince might have abandoned the wobbly futurism of Purple Rain and the anachronistic fantasy of Under the Cherry Moon in favour of something more realistic, even literal – ‘Graffiti Bridge’ is, after all, a real location in Minneapolis, where the taggers hung out. The finished film inhabits neither a recognisable reality, nor an engrossing fantasy realm. It is virtually plotless, badly acted, and appallingly edited, despite the best efforts of Steve Rivkin, who was helicoptered in to save the project after the test screenings. Rivkin provides yet another sibling connection in the Prince story; he is the brother of long-time drummer Bobby Z and David Z from the early days. Neither he nor de facto director Peter McDonald could make much of a muddled and boring script, filmed and recorded at speed and in notably paranoid circumstances. Graffiti Bridge bombed in America; Europe only ever saw it on video.
With the departure of Basinger, Prince hastily rewrote the female lead and cast poet Ingrid Chavez, for whose debut album, May 19, 1992, he was also writing songs. The redoubtable Jill Jones was cast as his girlfriend and is one of the film’s (very) few redeeming features. Its main problem isn’t the result of haste so much as of seriously divided attention. Prince couldn’t give the project the same hands-on approach that so incensed the professional cast of Under the Cherry Moon because he had too many other commitments bubbling under.
The soundtrack album reflects that rather more positively. As well as ten new Prince songs and three by The Time, there are cuts featuring P-Funk godfather George Clinton, whose mothership staging made an impact on Prince’s concept for the later Diamonds and Pearls tour, and from new Paisley Park signings Tevin Campbell and Mavis Staples, whose appearance on the scene confirmed what later became obvious with the recruitment of Rosie Gaines: that Prince was tiring of merely decorative female singers and anxious to match his own growing confidence in normal register singing (less and less falsetto in evidence) with appropriately strong women’s voices. Staples and Campbell take the lead on the title track, backed by Levi Seacer, Boni Boyer and Sheila E, and on a second version of ‘New Power Generation’, where T.C. Ellis and old friend Robin Power are also featured.
New Power Generation had started as a concept. It was now a song and was shortly to be the new group as well. Its first appearance on Graffiti Bridge is an interesting example of Prince looking backwards and forwards. The drummer is Morris Day, unexceptional in comparison to the peerless Sheila E or the funky Michael Bland, but adept enough and a link back to old times. Gaines is on hand to provide what’s credited as ‘vocal icing’ (actually more substantial than that) and the other backing voices are the first acknowledged appearance of the NPG.
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Most of the work was done at Paisley Park, with heavy input from engineer Martin Koppelman and some valuable troubleshooting by David Z. Campbell’s ‘Round And Round’ was recorded at Electric Lady studios in New York and George Clinton’s overdubs on ‘We Can Funk’ were FedExed in from Detroit. It might look as though Prince went back to a favourite studio, Sunset Sound in L.A., and the old engineering partnership o
f Susan Rogers and Coke Johnson for one of the album’s two genuine classics, but ‘Joy in Repetition’ – pure, archetypal Prince genius – was actually a holdover from the abandoned Crystal Ball project. In some circumstances, using old tracks might be taken as a sign of current staleness, but Prince had an unfailing instinct for where a song might work and, besides, his rejects are generally better than most artists’ best takes. ‘Joy in Repetition’ is where Graffiti Bridge takes off.
The album opens with ‘Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got’, a workmanlike groove headed up by a sardonic spoken intro. ‘New Power Generation’, The Time’s ‘Release It’ (featuring Candy Dulfer) and ‘The Question of U’ all follow before Prince delivers a quirky gem in ‘Elephants & Flowers’, one of the first tracks put down after the epic Lovesexy tour. However, along with the album’s most successful single, the taut, asymmetrical ‘Thieves in the Temple’, it’s ‘Joy in Repetition’ that stands out. Prince has rarely been more knowing, more self-referential, more allusive and more nakedly emotional in a single song. It also features one of his most unfettered guitar solos. The party clatter at the opening is a familiar enough Prince device, but coupled to the song’s bluesy opening measures it’s reminiscent of Miles Davis’s You’re Under Arrest, crossed with a Carlos Santana track. The Miles record is one of the anachronisms in Under the Cherry Moon, where it features prominently in one scene, but Prince’s debt to the guitarist is confirmed by what sounds like a stalled reference to ‘Soul Sacrifice’. The title ‘Joy in Repetition’ has an obvious erotic thrust, but it refers to the joys of music first and foremost. Its genius is to pare down hectic rhythm shifts, a complex vocal and a harmonically tense melody to a swaying, twochord figure on the repeated words ‘love me’. There are other agendas in the song – prayer, nostalgia, love as performance rather than intimacy, a strong sense of place and occasion – that suggest it’s a very personal piece. It builds satisfyingly, somewhat in the manner of ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘The Cross’, but just as the storm subsides Prince cuts the track off dead with a soft giggle. It’s a totally disarming moment.