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  It has always been difficult to decode Prince’s spiritual beliefs. Before his apparent conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1990s and the quoting of the New World Edition of the Bible in the lyrics to The Rainbow Children, Prince had moved from a relatively conventional background to an eclectic, some might say pragmatic, exploration of world faiths. Certainly, Prince had a church-going childhood and when he married Mayte Garcia on St Valentine’s Day in 1996 the ceremony was conducted by the Rev. Keith Johnson at Park Avenue Methodist United Church in Minneapolis. Other rumours suggested that he was studying Buddhism, and as discussed above the photographic artwork on Prince is seemingly influenced by Hindu imagery. On Emancipation, he toys with Egyptian eschatology.

  Like John Coltrane’s on A Love Supreme, which refers to a supreme being but not to an obviously Christian God or Jesus Christ, Prince’s brand of spiritualism is knowingly eclectic and individualistic. Immediately after ‘The Ladder’, there’s a glimpse of the old, unregenerate Prince, a reminder that the album’s Summer of Love aura is little more than a front. ‘Temptation’ is nicely placed at the very end of Around the World in a Day to wrong-foot any listener naive enough to think that the libertine has fallen for the comfortable illusion of romantic love. During the song, Prince disputes with the deity, though this God sounds very much like his own octave-shifted superego. For the most part, though, it’s generic dirty funk, with a trademark guitar part.

  Taken together, ‘The Ladder’ and ‘Temptation’ are Prince’s most explicit statement of the sacred–profane dichotomy, with profanity a clear winner. An album that starts out sounding like a deliberate attempt to avoid the sound-world of Purple Rain evolves into its natural successor. However ‘different’, read ‘eccentric’, it must have seemed to the executives invited to the pastel-themed playthrough at Warner in New York, and to the fans who bought Around the World in a Day in steadily decreasing numbers after its release in April 1985, it also carries a few worrying hints of musical self-parody among its elaborate homages. To stick with the problematic side two of the LP for the moment, there is no mistaking what is being beaten in ‘Tambourine’ and it isn’t just sheepskin and bells. Here the drums are live (played by Prince himself) and prominent, but the track has a cobbled-together feel. Straight after ‘Tambourine’ comes ‘America’, a strange patriotic anthem in which one searches in vain for the least hint of irony. After that, and coming just before the ‘Ladder’/‘Temptation’ finale, is ‘Pop Life’, which is by contrast either deeply ironic or similarly literal, perhaps a dig at the way fellow musicians like to primp their vanity by powdering their noses or else a chastened celebration of the way pop music and star gossip help relieve the quiet desperation of ordinary American lives. In or out of album context, it’s a curious song and a hard one to read.

  Side one of the LP is an entirely different matter. It contains one of Prince’s most perfect pop songs, the Beatles-and Joni-influenced ‘Raspberry Beret’, but also the plain weird ‘Condition of the Heart’, a piece so insubstantial it makes thistledown seem leaden. (Around this time, Joni acknowledged her influence on Prince: specifically his use of the unorthodox harmonies generated by her guitar tunings.) Jonathan Melvoin plays tambourine on ‘Around the World in a Day’, a song written by Lisa’s brother David Coleman and then tinkered with by Prince and John Nelson. This is truly a family affair, a creative commune in which Prince can briefly pose as first among equals. ‘Paisley Park’ has a similar structure to the title track and the same almost folksy feel, but the song which was to define Prince’s new imaginative abode (and give its name to his recording studio and new Camelot) works better as an instrumental, which is how it appeared on the 12” release, than as a lyric. The words are preposterous; a sign, perhaps, that Prince’s often shaky, often perverse ability to verbalise his ideas was faltering, or taking second place to straight musicianship.

  His most explicit namecheck of The Beatles was the title of The Black Album, the notorious ‘bootleg’ which supposedly referenced the Fab Four’s so-called White Album (actually just called The Beatles), but it was widely thought at the time that Around the World in a Day was a deliberate effort to emulate Lennon and McCartney’s songcraft. If so, the model wasn’t Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as usually assumed, but A Magical Mystery Tour. The album’s polystylistic oddity – black church euphoria to gossamer pop to hard funk – calls for a connecting narrative more than The Beatles’ flawed experiment did, and more than Purple Rain did. Listeners wondered what was going on in Prince’s head, a question that became increasingly rhetorical as its contents got ever more muddled in the years ahead.

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  As well as flagging up his spiritual and religious concerns, hinting at a more humble and less sensual route to transcendence, ‘The Ladder’ also became an important symbol of Prince’s complex professional evolution. Not for him a terse press release. Instead, Prince announced that his next transition would take place on the final night of the ongoing Purple Rain tour, at Miami on April 7, 1985. Even those unaware of the star’s Messiah complex could not have missed the significance of the date. Prince chose Easter Sunday to announce that he was retiring, and in the process dissolving the Revolution. He told his manager that he was ‘going to look for the ladder’, presumably to move on up to some higher celestial realm. It didn’t happen, of course, but Prince had learned the market value of such gestures. He wanted to shrug off The Kid the way David Bowie had sloughed off his Ziggy Stardust character.

  Prince also told Fargnoli, ‘Sometimes it snows in April’, which might just mean ‘Shit happens’ or might contain some recognition that The Revolution and the whole Purple Rain phenomenon might be terminating before its due time. The unseasonal frost actually caught Around the World in a Day, which only managed three weeks at the top of the Billboard chart, though it lingered in the low numbers for most of the rest of 1985.

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  Purple Rain had managed to keep Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA off the top of the album charts for twenty weeks. While in reality all this meant was that one brand of irony was selling better than another, it was widely taken as a sign that wholesome working-class values and a ruggedly untroubled sexuality were losing out (in rock at least, but who knew, perhaps throughout society?) to perversity and decadence. (Prince has always enjoyed a deeply ambivalent press; ‘His Royal Badness’ was also, more sourly, the ‘Purple Pain’ and ‘Ponce’.) The tabloids made hay with his diminutive stature, effeminate appearance and tantrums, though they must have been aware that Prince effortlessly lured attractive women (and white women at that) away from substantially taller and more conventionally handsome men. When stereotypes collided with his own ambivalent presentation, the media began to portray Prince as a paranoid recluse, conducting all manner of unseemly saturnalia behind the closed gates of his mansion and in a series of tour hotels. Particularly treasured was his silent appearance at the 1985 British Phonographic Awards, one of the first fruits of international success after Purple Rain. Prince stepped out to collect his award in his flounciest clothes, fluttering his eyelashes like Gloria Swanson, and accompanied by the musclebound six-foot-six minder Chick Huntsberry whose central role in the life of The Revolution had been cemented by a cameo in the film. Huntsberry has to take some share of the blame for Prince’s weird public persona, having given the National Enquirer an interview that (as published) portrayed the boss as a paranoid wacko. Paisley Park contracts have ever since contained gagging clauses, applicable even after leaving Prince’s employ.

  The Moral Majority was quick to identify Prince as the latest threat to the nation’s morals. Back home in St Paul a pair of evangelical brothers, Dan and Steve Peters, ultrastrict constructionists when it came to biblical provisions for music (basically, Psalms of David, angelic trumpets and choirs = good, everything else = bad), waged a campaign against the local boy, asking teenagers to help save the Twin Cities from turning into the Cities of the Plain by burning copies of Dir
ty Mind and Purple Rain. Interestingly, in 2004, the brothers no longer mention Prince on their website, instead promoting the evangelical songs of born-again Mark Farner (formerly of Grand Funk Railroad) and reserving their spleen for those faux-Christian acts that camouflage their commitment to the Devil’s music with gospel choruses. For a time, though, he was their favourite whipping boy.

  Prince was about to throw the cultural conservatives a more lasting hostage to fortune. One evening in 1984, the wife of senator Al Gore, who sixteen years later would win a presidential election but still not make it to the White House, overheard their daughter listening to Purple Rain. She was shocked by the lyrical content. It would be entertaining to report that Karenna Gore was so thoroughly corrupted by ‘Darling Nikki’ (apparently the offending track) that she threw in her lot with Prince, took to wearing flimsy basques and made a career as lead singer of Karenna 6. Disappointingly, she is now a very serious and ardent Democratic campaigner, a job which presumably rules out self-pleasuring in hotel lobbies. Her bedroom listening did, however, lead to Tipper Gore and Susan Baker, wife of the then Treasury Secretary James Baker, founding the Parents Music Resource Center which now provides the PARENTAL ADVISORY stickers intended to warn families of offensive content but now more often used by teenagers to determine whether there’s anything really worth listening to on a rock or hip-hop album. Ironically, one of the first albums slated for such a sticker was the infamous Black Album, which was pulled before release.

  The tabloid stories were a mixed blessing for Prince, part irritant, part short-term free publicity. In the longer perspective, the image they created of the star as an eccentric outsider, involved in just about every conceivable perversity up to but not including child molestation (that was a charge reserved for his biggest market rival in black pop-soul), alienated any sympathy Prince might have received during his later corporate tussles. For the moment at least, he was riding on a wave of intriguing headlines and still enjoying the indulgent patronage of the parent label.

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  Warner Brothers were indulgent enough to humour their star in a fresh and expensive game of charades. Having followed Purple Rain with a wonky new musical direction, Prince was again minded to dabble in film. Almost everything about Under the Cherry Moon is wrong. Without the fragile anchor of autobiography, the story creaks and the script lumbers. Prince’s obsessive direction – he took over from first-timer Mary Herbert once the film was in production – gives a fine and largely British cast the air of a well-drilled am. dram. group. His own performance, as the piano-playing gigolo Christopher Tracy, isn’t so much wooden as plastic. Again, the one redeeming feature is a lively soundtrack. Released in March 1986, not as an OST, but as if it were a freestanding album (‘Music from the motion picture . . .’ is relegated to the small print), Parade still suffered from its association with a film that barely cleared $3 million in its opening week, a first taste of public failure. It did, however, yield another classic single, perhaps the last in Prince’s career to deliver the paradigm-shifting slap of a ‘When Doves Cry’ or a ‘Purple Rain’.

  Filmed on the French Riviera and originally in colour, later reprocessed to black and white in accordance with Prince’s wishes, the movie acts out a strange social and ethnic ritual which is interesting enough to counterbalance its obvious dramatic insufficiencies. The basic premise is that heiress Mary Sharon (played by the glacial Kristin Scott Thomas) stands to claim the trust fund set up by her father (Steven Berkoff, visibly contemplating how he’s going to spend his fee), but only when she marries. Christopher decides he’s the man for the job and dedicates himself to taking some of the white middle-class starch out of her.

  The monochrome release actually sharpens the story’s racial subtext; to that extent at least Prince’s directorial instincts were spot on. In shaping his character (actually not much more than a series of still portraits animated by attitude) Prince seems to have returned to the mixed-blood glamour he projected in rawer form on Dirty Mind. It’s one of the few occasions where he deliberately uses street language and argot as a signifier. He even debates the possibility of ‘passing’ for white with his friend Tricky (Family member Jerome Benton in a role that seems tailor-made for the estranged Morris Day), though their dramatic function seems to be mischief rather than assimilation: two sharp young blacks bent on putting a bit of sexual and musical oomph into strait-laced and unfunky whites, as they do when they clear a smart restaurant with the joyous funk of ‘Girls & Boys’. What to make, then, of the climax, when Berkoff, outraged that his daughter has fallen in love with this archetypally protean Trickster, guns him down? Is miscegenation such a potent taboo, or are we merely being spared the complication of a married (and wealthy) hero and the dismal sight of him succumbing to stiff-backed domesticity?

  If Under the Cherry Moon is clunky as social anthropology, its historical underpinnings creak alarmingly. Ostensibly set in 1930s France, where its black and half-caste exoticism has a certain authenticity, the film is unmistakably 1980s in its emphases and, for all the dressing-up, hasn’t left Uptown and Paisley Park. The anachronism is perhaps more clever than first appears. The film’s nostalgic overtones both disguise and point up the avant-gardism of the music. Prince also seems to be exploring an older, certainly pre-1960s construction of black identity, projecting himself as a jive-talking outsider who is nonetheless so fascinated by white society that he seems to identify with it. There have been many mixed-race entertainers in American popular culture, but the default position has always been that if they possess even a quarter element of non-Caucasian blood, they are defined as black. What Prince did was to create, for the first time, a genuine biracialism. It’s one of the central axes of his imagination, and alongside it his own personal version of the Saturday night/Sunday morning dichotomy. What makes it personal is that Prince eroticises spirituality rather than using it as a redeeming contrast.

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  The commercial failure of Under the Cherry Moon and that film’s obvious fantasy structure and period setting probably meant that fans and reviewers were less inclined to mine Parade for autobiographical references. Perversely, though, it also led to a certain musical inattention. Though individually, and with one obvious exception, the album’s tracks are less striking than those on 1999, Purple Rain and even the maverick Around the World in a Day, Parade is arguably his most sophisticated work structurally.

  The most immediately obvious musical difference that separates Parade from its predecessors is that Prince seems to have overcome his dislike of horns. There are hints of classic swing right from the start, presumably the influence of John Nelson, who co-wrote ‘Christopher Tracy’s Parade’ and ‘Under the Cherry Moon’. Saxophonist Eric Leeds is strongly featured on ‘Girls & Boys’ and along with trumpeter Atlanta Bliss (originally Matt Blistan) became a member of the touring band, giving The Revolution a tighter funk sound, less dependent on synths and distorted guitar. Prince also uses strings on the album for the first time (beautifully arranged by Clare Fischer, who had worked on The Family’s album), while the brass and woodwind rosters reveal some highly marketable jazz names: trombonists Garnett Brown and Bill Watrous, trumpeter Ray Brown and reed specialists Gary Foster and Jack Nimitz. Unusually, Prince uses another rhythm guitarist, the enigmatically named Mico (actually Miko Weaver), on ‘Mountains’. Percussion is added here and there by Sheila E and Jonathan Melvoin.

  The other voices include his sisters Wendy and Susannah (picture Prince’s delight at having white twins on his record and in his videos), Lisa and Sheila on ‘Girls & Boys’, which also features a spoken ‘French seduction’ by Marie France. A solitary backing vocal from protégé Mazarati on ‘Kiss’ and ‘a little gypsy girl’, actually Sandra Francisco, on ‘Do You Lie?’. He’s still very much in control of the music, but Prince increasingly wants to differentiate character and to explore different shades of vocal colour. His own falsetto is less in evidence and there is more of a Billy Eckstine croon to his voice,
again a period touch.

  That said, the album’s strongest track is very much a reworking of the formula that made ‘When Doves Cry’ such an iconic track. For a start, Prince reverts to falsetto but like the earlier track ‘Kiss’ has no bassline and hangs on a single devastating rhythm guitar track. Apparently, there was a fuller version put together with the members of Mazarati (a side project of Mark Brown’s), but in one of his brilliantly minimalist coups Prince dismantled it. Cleverly again, on the video Prince consigns the guitar part to Wendy Melvoin. In fact, she takes the male role. She ‘plays’, mugs, winces and flirts indulgently as he dances with a semi-naked partner draped in black; in a clever sight gag, the anonymous dancer mouths the only deep-voiced sound. The whole thing is ironically framed by a TV set. It’s a great song, joyous, attractively lewd and for all its stop–start quality, utterly danceable and undimmed by Tom Jones’s later cover version.

  Ever the master of exclusion, Prince leaves off the percussion on ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’, the melancholy ballad which ends the album and finally explains that enigmatic remark to Steve Fargnoli. It’s constructed around piano and acoustic guitar. ‘Venus de Milo’ is another piano track. ‘Mountains’ is a bit of mystical nonsense that might have sat just as well on Around the World in a Day. ‘Life Can Be So Nice’ is another homage to The Beatles, albeit in their darker and more ironic incarnation. ‘Anotherloverholenyohead’ is brilliant, brittle confessional pop. Much of this sandwiched between the fanfare opening that immediately precedes ‘Christopher Tracy’s Parade’ and ‘End’, which frames the original LP A-side.

  Parade only yielded one stone classic in ‘Kiss’ (though ‘Anotherloverholenyohead’, ‘Girls & Boys’ and ‘Mountains’ were all modestly successful singles), but it is a masterpiece in terms of album construction and a sign of his growing confidence in looking beyond the singles charts. If the movie served no other purpose than to provide a loose narrative structure, mood and sense of place for the record, then it succeeded. Unlike Purple Rain, where film and album were mutually reinforcing, Prince seemed inclined to play down the connectedness in the case of Parade. The cover art – a monochrome Prince in tiny black crop top over a crucifix and in dancer’s pose – recalls the stark setting of the ‘Kiss’ video; it was to be the album’s most successful supporting visual. Prince had at last learned to dance convincingly and to load his videos with playful references to the group. Parts assigned to the ‘wrong’ player have become a promo cliché (REM were represented by four Japanese non-lookalikes for the video of ‘Crush with Eyeliner’, a song which might just be Michael Stipe’s half-conscious homage to Prince), but the play of black and white, twinned personalities and actual twins – an equally playful ambiguity as to whether the whole enterprise is dead serious or a put-on or both – is part of the subtlety that surrounds Parade. As a compilation of songs – and Prince at the time claimed to have more than 250 lying in his studio – it is in no way exceptional. As an album, though, it has for all its bewildering diversity an extraordinary coherence. The only expected element missing from Parade is a hint of the mystical transcendence, the overt spirituality, that runs through earlier and later records like a vein of quartz; missing, that is, unless one interprets ‘Mountains’ as a metaphor along the lines of the ladder on Around the World in a Day, and the video does point to that interpretation.