Prince Page 12
After that, ‘Strange Relationship’ is an anticlimax, though the accompaniment of sitar and wooden flute (Lisa) is reminiscent of Around the World in a Day, not least in that the instrumental component is no longer locked tight, but loose and almost improvisational in feel. Even ‘I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man’, a country song manqué and in every way a Prince solo effort, has a relaxed and unhurried air. It’s another song about sex versus long-term commitment, addressed to a girl who’s been abandoned with a baby and another on the way. The singer concedes he’s qualified for a one-night stand, but . . . cue title. Lustful but mature and self-denying; how to have your cake and eat it.
It would make some sense for Sign ‘O’ The Times to end with ‘The Cross’. It makes a perfect bookend with the title track, except this time redemption is promised: ‘He is coming’. It’s a slow-building song built over a simple, almost Eastern guitar line reminiscent of a welter of 1960s rock from The Byrds to Grateful Dead and The Doors. The Fugees’ hip-hop version, which delighted the composer, preserves that mysterioso feel. The initial mood is stormy, but the ghettos to the left are balanced by flowers to the right and by the promise of bread for all, ‘If we can just bear the Cross’. After monumental drum beats, a heavier guitar riff starts to cut across, rising to a crescendo reminiscent of ‘Purple Rain’’s. Here, though, the salvation is explicitly Christian and not erotic.
It’s one of Prince’s finest rock performances and was an electrifying spectacle on tour where it was done in clerical garb. The album isn’t quite over, though. Almost anything else would be bathos, but ‘It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night’, recorded in front of ‘6,000 beautiful Parisians’ on the French leg of the last Revolution tour, is a brilliant encore, uniting the whole augmented line-up (it was co-written with Dr Fink and Eric Leeds) for one last hurrah. That, too, would mark a satisfying full stop, but Prince follows it with one last song. ‘Adore’ is a more earthly expression of love, albeit expressed in a gospelly sway that underpins the final, unambiguous benediction: ‘4 all time I am with U / U are with me.’
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He’d never before made an album that touched on so many musical styles and moods so effectively. At every point, generic expectations are cranked up and then deftly subverted. Prince detourns the popular song, not just by playing his usual thematic games but by radically expanding what is possible in a popular song. Some over-emphasis on the lyrics is essential, because the music is so hard to ‘read’, full of mysterious dissonance and deceptively lightweight melodic ideas. Like the symbol he was shortly to become in place of a name, Sign ‘O’ The Times ‘doesn’t pronounce; it just is’.
It might just have been even bigger had Prince been allowed to release the three-LP set – apparently to be known as Crystal Ball – which he’d originally envisaged. Triple albums had a bad reputation, suggesting the worst excesses of prog rock, and Warner refused to countenance this one, the beginnings perhaps of what was soon to become an unbridgeable divide between the label and its most mercurial artist. He only got his way almost a decade later with the odd and overblown, but still intriguing Emancipation.
Sign ‘O’ The Times does point a way forward, even if it wasn’t quite the broad yellow highway Prince envisaged. Whereas in the past he had made records which condensed much of his listening experience, his sense of a musical past, Sign ‘O’ The Times represents a commitment to a musical future. Its strangely unfinished feel and lack of obvious hits was, as Michelangelo Matos senses in his tiny, very personal monograph on the album, part of a commitment to a new phase of activity in which history played less of a part.
The opening of Paisley Park had given Prince unprecedented creative freedom, more even than Warner’s indulgent contract (which now included an autonomous label imprint), more even than the runaway commercial success of Purple Rain. With a studio and soundstage available to him, the flow of recorded material seemed staunchless; leftover material from Sign ‘O’ The Times eventually appeared on Graffiti Bridge. A further album was slated for release in December. In the event, it only made an official appearance seven years later, and then for a limited period. By 1994, though, almost everyone who wanted to hear The Black Album owned the bootleg vinyl or a C90 copy; almost everyone else had heard of it and knew it to be the journeywork of the Devil, packed with unspeakable sexual references and diabolic invocations. Few records have gained so much in stature from not being released. But The Black Album had missed its historical moment and when it was officially released it seemed like nothing more than a basic funk album, horny but ordinary.
Almost as soon as it was withdrawn, rumours began to circulate that the album was far more extreme, far more sexually graphic than anything Prince had previously attempted. It was even suggested that its increasingly mature and responsible creator was shocked by what had erupted from his own unconscious. (He put a secret message into the video for ‘Alphabet St’, the hit single from Lovesexy, that read ‘Don’t buy The Black Album. I’m sorry.’) More convincing than self-censorship was the possibility that Prince was unwilling to see his work issued with one of the new PARENTAL ADVISORY stickers. Others said that he was merely dissatisfied with the work and that The Black Album was being stripped down to its components to create a fresh mix. Some claimed, on no solid evidence, that it was actually so bad as to be unrescuable. Engineer Susan Rogers has hinted that it was never intended for commercial release in the first place, and that it was no more than a collection of oddments only put on vinyl to be deejayed at a party for Sheila E. An imaginatively paranoid spin on events suggested that Warner actually regarded the bootleg culture that had grown up around Prince – such as the Camille cassettes – as useful back-channel promotion, cheaper than a full-scale ad campaign, and actually encouraged ‘suppression’ of the record. Prince told USA Today that he’d been inspired to replace the record with Lovesexy after seeing the name of God spelt out in clouds over a field . . .
The Truth is almost inevitably more banal, but with enough of Prince’s capricious streak in play to make a story of it. Given that he had already released a double album in 1987, and that sales for Sign ‘O’ The Times were relatively slow, it would have been commercial folly to release another disc in December and dent the earlier record’s chances of making up some ground in the Christmas market. Why, once the decision had been taken, Prince didn’t simply bump The Black Album down the issue schedule a matter of months isn’t clear. Whatever the reason, it acquired an instant mystique; leaked original vinyl copies are alleged to have changed hands for more than $10,000.
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The danger of pumped-up reputations – and black market prices – is that the debunking and the market devaluation usually go too far. Having billed The Black Album as the biggest, baddest, horniest yet, the media were all too quick to write it off as a soft-centred flop. Mainstream reviewers, though, only had a chance to review the album when it made a brief official appearance between late November 1994 and late January 1995, seven years after it was recorded. By then, the music industry had seen grunge come and go, and gangsta rap come and stay, and behind them a steady throb of sexually graphic r’n’b inspired by Prince but often maturely confident enough to bypass his adolescent flagrancy. What parents’ groups charmingly refer to as four-, seven-, twelve- and thirteen-letter words were no longer a novelty in popular music.
Prince’s creative decline is significantly counterbalanced, possibly even outweighed, by his remarkable consistency and prolific longevity. As Stuart Cosgrove shrewdly pointed out in the NME, he was the antithesis of the self-destructive rock star, a controlled and controlling figure who could no more have stopped producing music than he could have put a shotgun in his mouth, plummeted into drug abuse, or driven around looking for rivals with an Uzi in the back of his white T-Bird. A further, unexpected factor in his seeming drift was the steady disintegration of Michael Jackson. Two masters of self-transformation, but only one of them wise enough to go down a non-surgical route. Whe
re Prince played at being a pervert, Jackson ended up in court. While Michael tried to develop an androgynous persona by mimicking Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Ross, Prince invented Camille and then put her back in the box. He also found a way of sublimating his creative femininity into work for other artists and letting his own work flow unstaunched, without the painstaking obsession that restricted his rival to an album every three or four years.
Unlike Jackson, Prince has confronted the most difficult creative dilemma there is in popular music, that of growing old. For all the over-publicised traumas, tantrums and oddities of the 1990s, he has done so with remarkable authority and self-possession, the ludicrous cover of 1988’s Lovesexy notwithstanding. Sign ‘O’ The Times was the first earnest expression of a desire to mature artistically without betraying his most basic energies. The Black Album’s curious history and curious, displaced position in the Prince discography is the sharpest reminder of how treacherous a concept artistic ‘development’ can be. Its initial shadowy status warped critical expectations; its eventual appearance made it seem, perversely, like a backward step rather than a defiant response to the criticism that with Sign ‘O’ The Times he had moved too far in the direction of mainstream pop. That is, by whatever measure, an absurd criticism. The record sustains a free-flowing, almost improvisatory style over four sides, a quality that was even more evident when he toured the record and changed songs, often quite radically, night after night. The habit of playing club dates straight after rock shows had become standard practice on the Parade tour, perhaps because the music there had been got down too tight. With Sign ‘O’ The Times Prince perhaps needed less of that jazzier outlet.
The challenge was to show that he could still make a record in the mould of Dirty Mind, but invest it with something new. He also needed to show that he could function at all levels without The Revolution. The band was disbanded before Sign ‘O’ The Times and isn’t credited, though band members appear on various tracks. At the final show, in Yokohama Stadium, he’d done something unprecedented and smashed all the guitars on stage; just as Keith Richards had a different guitar for every number, Prince liked to say he had one for every emotion, except presumably nostalgia. He’d probably seen Richards’ line-up on the ill-fated Stones tour, and he wasn’t going to be allowed to forget the connection, when some critics suggested that the double album Sign ‘O’ The Times was his Exile on Main Street.
Prince’s productivity had never been greater – he’d also written all the material for new Paisley Park signings Madhouse, a part-time fusion band featuring Eric Leeds and others – but The Black Album was again very much a solo project, without the collaborative energy he’d drawn from the band; drawn, and perhaps drained. Prince has an uncanny ability to take what he needs from a situation, introject it, and then move on. It can look callous, but it more often comes from creative imperatives than a lack of personal loyalty. His image as a man whose only friends are employees is misleading, but hard to argue against. Some thought there were circumstantial parallels between The Black Album and idol Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Going On, which was also made at a moment of isolation, or, as Gavin Martin put it in a January 1988 issue of New Musical Express (even a Prince bootleg got the full review treatment), the record was a ‘definitive example of a star’s support system caving in around him as he came to terms with the outside world’. Martin’s implication was that Riot was a masterpiece, and The Black Album was not.
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It isn’t a great album, but it’s more than good. There’s an air of haste, a lack of finish to the whole package, but it contains some of the best and most adventurous songs Prince had made in his whole first decade. Originally to be called The Funk Bible, it was a bid for a more stripped-down, blacker sound than the looser, rock-tinged work of recent years. It doesn’t always come up to snuff. ‘Cindy C’ is a dull ‘love song’ to model and MTV jockette Cindy Crawford. ‘Bob George’, though, is hysterical, not least for its growling reference (a slowed-down vocal) to ‘that skinny little motherfucker Prince’. It is one of his cleverest satirical personae, a cartoon gangster snarling at girlfriend Cathy Glover – known on tour as dancer Cat, and the object of some of Prince’s most blatant onstage antics – for hanging out with rock’n’roll types. Much of the record, though, is pure dance material. The opening ‘Le Grind’ (with Sheila E, Cat and new recruit Boni Boyer on backing vocals) is a delight; sexy and smart. ‘Supercalifragifunkysexy’ is pure P-Funk and an anticipation of later dealings with George Clinton, while ‘Rock Hard in a Funky Place’ is as hard as Prince gets. ‘2 Nigs United 4 West Compton’ is a fine instrumental that mixes and mangles stylistic elements with almost insulting ease. It also contains a reference to the growing boom in rap and hip-hop, something he comes back to in ‘Dead on It’. It’s often said that this is where Prince shows he’s backed the wrong horse by dismissing all rappers as tone deaf. Listen carefully, though, and it’s clear that he means the New York posse only, fit only to be cut to ribbons by the new Minneapolis crew. The only real ballad on the album, ‘When 2 R in Love’ would eventually appear on Lovesexy.
Before it was withdrawn, The Black Album had appeared in the Warner Brothers release schedule as by ‘Somebody’. Whether its title was a further attempt at anonymity, an affirmation of colour, or a reference to a famous Beatles bootleg (and by extension to the so-called White Album) is open to speculation. Whatever the case, it enhanced the record’s curious glamour. Ironically, it was Prince’s next album that was to be subject to market censorship.
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Lovesexy was Prince’s tenth release in ten years. Some – even the most ardent fans – mark 1988 as the year when the wheels came off the wagon, yet his powers were still undimmed; in purely structural terms, Lovesexy was the most ambitious album to date, part of an ongoing cycle of experiment triggered by the deliberate backlash of Around the World in a Day, the avant-garde funk of Parade and the gradual disappearance of rock from his sound. The only forceful evidence that there might be something amiss at Paisley Park or rather in the ever more securely defended place that was Prince’s head was the way he chose to appear on the cover. Wal-Mart’s buyers took a look at it and decided this was one album they wouldn’t be stocking.
If there really is a meaningful distinction between the nude and the merely naked – as art historians insist – Prince collapses it. If Jeff Koons were ever commissioned to design a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this is how he might imagine Puck, part forest spirit, part bum-boy, and whether human-scale or elfin depends on how you view the perspective. Prince reclines on the petals of a giant flower, surrounded by lilies, one of which turns a phallic purple stamen towards his pouting mouth. The left leg is raised to conceal his groin. The expression is remote, the sort of gaze one sees in eroticised images of martyrdom. The right hand rests on his heart, hiding what is presumably a crucifix, perhaps covering one of St Sebastian’s wounds. The narrow beard and moustache are male, but the legs are elegant, clean-shaven, feminine; the hair is swept back to reveal a widow’s peak that gives the whole ensemble a strangely Mephistophelian air.
The title track features an extraordinary moment where Cat’s voice speeds up in an orgasmic chatter only to morph into Prince’s as it slows down again. Elsewhere, he portrays himself as surrounded by women – they’re constantly audible in the background – but they behave more like sexy choristers at the Rev. Al Green’s church than a bunch of funky girlfriends. Lovesexy is Prince’s most thoroughly spiritual album, packed with references to the power of love and sex to bring us closer to God; but it is also his most Manichean statement, portraying a world in which love, embodied by Lovesexy, faces the physical and metaphysical challenge of Spooky Electric. This mysterious adversary appears in the album’s opening and closing tracks in a role somewhat similar to ‘Annie Christian’, but there are hints that Prince doesn’t simply intend the usual unholy trinity of drugs, alcohol and violence, but something more subtly psychological. Spooky El
ectric feeds on our flaws, or as Prince puts it, hang-ups, but only if we let him: ‘Hold on 2 your soul / Don’t kiss the beast’.
It’s actually misleading to refer to ‘tracks’ on Lovesexy since the album is sequenced as a single continuous suite. It is the first Prince album conceived of and delivered as a CD, rather than as two – or four – vinyl sides, and the first to explore the new and by no means universal format. In retrospect, the other defining character of Sign is that it marks Prince’s farewell to vinyl. Made in just seven weeks, Lovesexy was his attempt to sustain certain ideas – heaven/hell, nature/artifice, good/evil – and a carefully modulated mood over forty-five minutes. He did so by perversely introducing more new versions of himself than on any other record to date.
The other defining presence of the record is the Spirit Child, played by Minneapolis performance artist Ingrid Chavez, who turns up at the very start of ‘No’ to recite one of Prince’s nursery rhyme funk lines in a dreamy voice: ‘Rain is wet and sugar is sweet / Clap your hands and stamp your feet.’ Prince then cuts in with a strangely sarcastic message – the reason his voice is so sweet is that there’s no smack in it – delivered in the kind of tone you might use to endorse shampoo. What follows is an orthodox ‘Just say no’ anti-drugs riff, but delivered in Prince’s funky preacher mode to a strange accompaniment of party noises and found sounds.
It also provides him with a platform to announce the coming of ‘the New Power Generation’, here intended as a concept – the incarnation of New Power Soul – but soon to be the name of his third successful band. On Lovesexy Prince uses essentially the group that had launched Sign ‘O’ The Times at First Avenue in March 1987 and had been seen around the world on a successful tour film. The longest serving member was now Dr Fink, but building up some mileage with Prince were Eric Leeds and Atlanta Bliss, Miko Weaver and Cat. Sheila E brought in two new recruits from her own band, Levi Seacer Jr on bass and Boni Boyer on organ and vocals. Seacer became an important collaborator, sharing writing and production credits on some of the non-Prince tracks for Graffiti Bridge. Boyer, who died suddenly in 1996, gave the album some of its rapt, churchy quality.