Exodus (1995)
This entire list is subjective but if there’s an lp more susceptible to the vagaries of personal taste than any other, it has to be the second NPG solo album. At an impressionable age, the leylines of my fondness for Prince and my obsession with George Clinton merged, resulting in the Exodus album blowing my tiny little mind. Has the history of music culminated here? Does anything more need to be recorded? It’s hard to tear away from my initial, jaw-dropped, smitten devotion and impossible to retain a cold, critical ear. So I’ll just say Return of the Bump Squad is better than all of y’all cerebral ballads and I have nothing to back it up except the song itself. Let my placing it mid-list be my one concession to the hilarious concept of impartiality. A fig leaf of respectability. My p-funk-loving id has placed it much higher.
241: Somewhere Here on Earth
Planet Earth (2007)
The track 3 ballad spot on Prince’s 32nd album goes to Somewhere Here on Earth – a song that would receive much more gushing over if on almost any other lp of his. The year it was released, Joshua Bell, one of the world’s greatest violinists, performed for 45 minutes in a New York subway disguised as a busker. In this experiment, only 7 out of over 1000 passersby stopped to listen to the Grammy award-winning musician, who sells out theatres for $100 a seat. Setting certainly counts. Those who stop and give Somewhere Here on Earth the time of day will recognise it as a world-class slow jam. A maturer cut to discover and bask in when we’re ready. Live performances help with the setting (especially Montreux 2009 and the same year’s Jay Leno appearance) but I do miss that synthetic vinyl noise. It adds a nostalgic warmth. To anyone growing up in the CD or mp3 age the added pops and crackles may seem gimmicky, but to these vinyl-weened ears they’re a comfort blanket. A little analogue seasoning to bring out the embedded flavours.
242: 2morrow
Crystal Ball (1998)
Poor 2morrow. It doesn’t receive a lot of attention buried in a 3CD set of outtakes, with a name easily mixed up with 2gether or 2nite. But what class is hidden within. Prince puts The Most Beautiful Girl in the World and Come into a cocktail shaker and pours out a smooth blend of horn-infused, jazzy R’n’B. A Pink Lady with hints of lavender and Ella Fitzgerald. The song, according to the liner notes, is about the girl from the Love 4 One Another movie whom a member of the band had a crush on, but who cares for context when you’re hearing angels dance the language of scat. If you haven’t lost all rational thought by the time the synths start singing along to Prince’s falsetto then you’re made of sterner stuff than I. 2morrow oozes sophistication and could easily be a Montreux showstopper but I don’t think I’ll ever fail to giggle like a schoolboy when I mishear the third line as “I wanna kiss your butt…”
243: The Marrying Kind
Musicology (2004)
Sandwiched between the two political songs on Musicology lies the infidelity quartet – a suite of songs forming the dark heart of Prince’s marriage breakdown album. The Marrying Kind is the second song in this section and is full of Yeats’ lust and rage. It’s the anger stage that follows the denial stage of What Do U Want Me 2 Do, and precedes the bargaining stage of If Eye Was the Man in Your Life and the begging-for-forgiveness stage of On the Couch. Prince covers a lot of ground in its 2 minutes and 49 seconds – spending the chorus mendaciously buttering up the woman he has this sights on, and the verses firing warning shots at her boyfriend. He also manages to find time to take retaliation at Missy Elliot for her 2002 Work It video that featured an unflattering Prince lookalike. Diamonds and Pearls this ain’t. The guitar adds a menacing undertone and the amount of malice he fits into the phrase “purple satin laces” alone could strip paint. My advice to the unnamed woman can be found in the closing lines: “run away!”
244: Hello
Pop Life single (1985) / The Hits/The B sides (1993)
The story is well known: Prince refused to sing on the charity supergroup single We are the World, instead offering to play guitar and eventually contributing a song for the album. Shyness and illness were both claimed as excuses but Wendy later revealed the real reason was that he thought the Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie-penned song was lame and would tarnish his image. Prince’s non-attendance caused controversy, especially as later that night (a night he was advised to keep a low profile on to let the illness alibi stick) his bodyguard beat up a reporter who allegedly tried to get in Prince’s car. This whole episode is chronicled in the surprisingly outspoken Hello, a b-side more likeable for the music than the hastily-assembled damage control. The uptempo beat is underpinned by an urgent synth line, which sounds like a beeping alarm clock your sleeping mind has woven a narrative around instead of waking you to hit the snooze button. A fantasy world you’ve escaped into, to flee the cold morning accusations. Duvet solace. Hello may, like its magazine namesake, dress up stage-managed PR as a candid glimpse behind the celebrity curtain, but behind the words lie some prime peak-Prince pop that you could live and die in. The extended mix where he withers incoherently about shoes is even better.
245: Funknroll
Plectrumelectrum (2014) / Art Official Age (2014)
The song that comes in two distinct flavours: Aerosmith-lite and hyphy. I care nothing for the Plectrumelectrum former, and everything (despite its unpopularity) for the Art Official Age latter. Prince and (producer) Joshua dose up on Swizz Beatz, steal his radar pings and throw in guitar stabs for fun. It’s a recipe that could easily go wrong but to these ears they totally kill it. And that’s before we hear the final minute! If, like Cher, I could turn back time I’d jump to before I heard this remix, because to relive the unexpected switch-up for the first time again would be a thing of joy. After three minutes of them getting hyphy with it, the synths arrive, exploding the track into an epic EDM stadium-filler; a Deadmaus career condensed into a 60-second showreel. In the context of the album, it’s slightly jarring (the sudden gearshift to the amazing but simmering-boil of Time afterwards is abrupt) but in isolation, it’s a hip-height firecracker. This version of Funknroll is a powerful reminder of Prince’s relevancy while his contemporaries languish in their dotage. He promises to “get it turned up, get it out of control” and damn right he delivers. You probably disagree, but then again you probably like your ice cream vanilla and your pizzas margarita. Like the man himself says: “get into the rhythm, it’s good for your soul”.
246: Satisfied
3121 (2006)
Long ago Prince was insatiable, but now he’s satisfied with his ballads as long as you are. And why wouldn’t you be? This is bluesy soul perfection. Okay, his slow jams are no longer intrepid walks through long undergrowth, that disturb and fill the sky with brightly coloured birds you’ve never seen before. Satisfied is well-trodden territory, but so’s the Inca trail and that doesn’t make the sight of Machu Picchu any less spectacular. There’s nothing wrong with knowing what you’re good at and executing it flawlessly, especially if the next generation are trying to steal your crown with their Voodoo. Satisfied is an Al Green-kissed message to D’Angelo, telling him “if you liked On the Couch, here, try it with honey”.
247: Mr Goodnight
Planet Earth (2007)
Since Mr Happy Prince has rewritten his playboy playbook. No longer the bluntly unromantic “dinner at eight, then intercourse at my place” – now it’s all private jets and mouthfuls of chocolate-covered raisins. Is this a sign of maturity or is he making amends for calling his date a Future Baby Mama? Mr Goodnight is smooth with fourteen O’s and it’s the attention to detail that lifts the beat above your standard hip this-one’s-going-out-to-all-the laydees hop. The synth washes are like being bathed in milk, and the twinkling “3121” leitmotif is a purple-wrapped gift left for you to discover. Add in lyrics that make James Bond look gauche and you have the finest fan fiction Cyrano de Bergerac never wrote.
248: 2 Nigs United 4 West Compton
The Black Album (1987)
Prince and Sheila E’s instrumental funk jam is an elbows-out, jostling tour de force. If you need to move through a crowd with haste, put this in your earbuds and go hell for leather. It reminds me of a time in France when I was followed by a friendly goat for several miles. I couldn’t escape him. No matter how often I thought I’d shook him off, within moments I’d hear the familiar bleats and he’d appear around the corner. Part of my journey home included a walk along a beach; my perfect chance to outrun the pursuer, especially as it was the hottest day of the year and the world and its wife were there. I ran full tilt, leaping over holidaymakers and sandcastles, certain that I’d lose my caprine admirer in the crowd. But no, after five minutes I looked back and saw the goat steadily trailing me, trampling surprised sunbathers underhoof. That’s what 2 Nigs United 4 West Compton is to me: a persistent and unpredictable bundle of art and mischief, with a wake of destruction that only an amorous goat could leave.
249: Laydown
20ten (2010)
Aeons ago, a diminutive humanoid calling himself The Purple Yoda performed We Will Rock You at the Intergalactic Super Bowl. Against a night-coloured backdrop sequinned with galaxies, the silver-clad singer fired off flaming arcs of future funk which lit up the surrounding star systems and caused new religions to be founded. One of these astral volleys eventually reached Earth in the year 2010AD; the music dimmed like distant starlight, a faint echo of its fiery past. The inhabitants were unsure what to do with this strange specimen and to prevent a mass panic decided to bury it as a secret track on a largely ignored album. And there it still lies, occasionally greeting travellers exploring the outer reaches of Prince’s discography and rewarding them with a gift of a conch shell which will instantly transport the listener back to Cassiopeia and the greatest half-time show in the universe’s history.
250: The Sacrifice of Victor
O(+> (1993)
Despite having the climactic anthems of 7 and 3 Chains o’ Gold at his disposal, the mid-tempo Sacrifice of Victor was always Prince’s pick for album closer. It’s a puzzling sequencing choice, possibly influenced by the storyline that used to course through the album before key segues were removed. Or what’s more likely is the song was always destined to bookend My Name is Prince, a track referenced in the final segue by Vanessa Bartholomew before she says “tell me your real name”. Prince answers “My Name is Victor”. This was his last album before the name-change and a bewildered media started reporting that this is how you pronounce the unpronounceable symbol, causing him to respond in live shows that “my name ain’t Prince and it damn well ain’t Victor”. Indeed. So who is Victor? “What iiiiiiiiis Sacrifice?” There are whole books you could write about the lyrics in what is probably the most candid song in his repertoire. After a decade and a half of myth-building was this finally a glimpse of autobiographical truth? Did his dad beat him? Did the assassination of Martin Luther King and the ensuing riots help sober his clique up? Was he really epileptic ’til the age of seven? Prince did admit in a 2009 interview that he was born with epilepsy (a disorder that has also afflicted fellow songwriters Neil Young, Ian Curtis and Lil Wayne) and says his “flashy and noisy” persona was crafted to compensate for this struggle. It was a sacrifice he had to endure to make him the man he is today. He’s had trials and tribulations, heartaches and pain. Survived them all baby. And now to the victor belong the spoils.
251: Still Would Stand All Time
Graffiti Bridge (1990)
Debate rages on as to whether the unreleased The Grand Progression would have been a better inclusion on Graffiti Bridge. Personally, I don’t see the appeal of this outtake and keep expecting it to break out into The Monkee’s Early Morning Blues and Greens, although more than one person has told me that it’s their favourite Prince song. Still Would Stand All Time replaced The Grand Progression as the slow ballad in both the film and album, possibly because it made more narrative sense but to these ears it’s clearly the better song. The gospel touches (courtesy of the Steeles) are divine but the real power lies in the atmosphere. It feels like a frozen moment; a death-knell beat ringing out. Or possibly it mimics the slowed perception of time and prominent heartbeat of an adrenaline rush: the build-up to a high dive; the elongated pause before a winner’s announcement; an imminent marriage proposal. Then the Debussy flute samples flutter in and your heart swells with emotions you have no name for. I wasn’t always a fan. In my youth, I lumped it together with the title track as mawkish gospel schmaltz but the live aftershow version on the infamous Trojan Horse bootleg won me round – memorable for his admonishment “who’s the fool singing ‘will’? It’s ‘would’!” Now the album track soars in my estimation every time I hear it. By the time you read this, I’m probably wishing I put it amongst the double digits.
252: Musicology
Musicology (2004)
Tight and clinical funk is all well and good but for the real deal you also need to add a bit of rough treatment. Like roast potatoes when you first shake the pan: the flavour lies in the fuzzy edges. In Musicology this fuzz is provided by the synths battering the track towards the end. Those who prefer their old and new schools segregated will probably disagree but in my opinion Prince didn’t go far enough, and I would have loved another couple of minutes for the song to disintegrate into a total synth freakout: a tribute to the analogue days consumed by a digital wildfire. Prince may have built an impressive sandcastle of Mother Popcorn inspired funk but hearing it jumped on is the fun part. Speaking of The Godfather of Soul, when Prince was ten his stepdad briefly put him on stage at one of James Brown’s concerts before security intervened. In the Musicology video there’s a scene that alludes to this, and the accompanying crowd screams that begin to drown out the music is the kind of cacophony the album track misses – a delicious raucousness that echoes the giddy high of being swept up in events you have no control over. You’re about to be bundled off stage at any point but for this glorious moment you’re dancing in the presence of the Godhead.
253: Race
Come (1994)
At the start of his career Prince heavily avoided the subject of race. Fighting off pigeonholes and labels, he only sang about ethnicity to celebrate a utopian rainbow crowd partying together (DMSR, Uptown) or to deliberately obfuscate his background (Controversy). In Sexuality he even sang “we don’t need no race”. But at the end of 1991 Prince wrote his first song tackling the subject head-on. This track, titled simply Race, was almost three years old when it appeared on the Come album, and had already been aired as part of his Glam Slam Ulysses project and The Beautiful Experience video, but that doesn’t lessen the impact of this tightly-woven sample jam, featuring a bassline so deep and low it could be background radiation from an exploding galaxy. The tight drumloop makes the track sound claustrophobic – a defiant dance in a small space cleared of eggshells – but when the horns surge as he delivers a line about being a role-model, it’s like the opening of a butterfly’s wings for the first time. It’s the stuff award speeches are made of and crescendoes with his guitar dissolving underneath the sea in a wahwah meltdown. All of this is uncontroversial and hardly in danger of alienating anybody in the tinderbox that is race-relations in America. One verse echoes Nelson Mandela’s sentiment that “no one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin” – a quote which when tweeted by Barack Obama earlier this year became the most liked tweet in Twitter’s history – and musings that everyone bleeds the same red blood and “we all bones when we dead” aren’t going to make anybody but the most dyed-in-the-wool racist feel uncomfortable. But his self-imposed embargo had been lifted and four weeks later he recorded the unflinching Sacrifice of Victor, his most honest and intimate account of growing up black in one of America’s whitest states. The following year he wrote Color for The Steeles and the bulk of the Goldnigga album, including the riotously un-PC Black MF in the House. A new dimension was made available for his songwriting which lasted until his final album, as heard in the magnificent, totemic, Black Muse.
254: All Day, All Night
Unreleased (1986) / Jill Jones (1987)
I’ll happily listen to the Jill Jones version but my heart will always be with the unreleased original, with Prince on vocals and The Revolution on fire. Initial tracking of this vault A-lister was recorded at the same 1984 birthday concert that gave us Our Destiny and Roadhouse Garden, plus the finest version of Noon Rendezvous ever committed to tape. Overdubs were added two years later and I can only hope we see a cleaned-up posthumous release when the inevitable remaster of Parade emerges in the future. All Day, All Night begins with Wendy doing her best Nina Hagen impression, then, with a nod to Oklahoma!, Prince delivers possibly his greatest opening line: “oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful ass.” Even Rodgers and Hammerstein must have doffed their caps at that couplet. The music that follows is prime Revolution hotsauce and when the toms go into overdrive four minutes in, you’re already planning your ‘SHOCKALAKA!’ tattoo.
255: Johnny
Goldnigga (1993)
This live favourite is a ten minute slow funk jam that fills the oceanic space between its two rap verses with a smorgasbord of background chatter, call and response shouts, an ode to safe sex and even a borrowed chorus from the same album’s A Deuce and a Quarter, all lovingly wrapped up in a blanket of receptive crowd noise. If you wade past the first minute of scripted skittage, Johnny begins to feel very organic, an after-show vibe preserved in CD amber. The title’s another dick euphemism but one the whole family can sing along to. Prince later regretted the “NPG in the motherfuckin’ house” chants though, once retaliating “We ain’t doing nothing to nobody’s momma!” Try as he might, that genie wasn’t going back into the bottle.
256: God is Alive
Unreleased (1988)
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche may have given us the phrase ‘God is dead’, coined in a parable about the drying up of spiritual meaning and designed to cause shockwaves to ripple through a sleeping populace bereft of guidance. But a century later Prince returns serve with a powerful volley of sample-heavy gospel pop, with a guitar line that rends the air like a peal from a bell tower, or a muezzin from a minaret, waking the town and telling us very much that God is Alive. Your move Freddy! And if you don’t believe an 80’s song can be as shocking as the suggestion of deicide in the 19th century, then watch Mavis Staples’ face on the BBC Omnibus documentary Prince of Paisley Park, when she relives the moment she heard the opening lyric was “God is coming like a dog in heat” (later changed to the infinitely less provocative “news is coming…”)
257: Pope
The Hits/The B-sides (1993)
It’s hard for me to believe now but there was a time when Pope was one of my favourite tracks off his Hits compilation. It had everything my teenage self craved: catchy chorus; hip-hop beat; sweary samples; rapping that didn’t suck; dick jokes; plus the added allure of being new and unreleased. The song, originally created for Glam Slam Ulysses, may not have weathered the years as well as most of the others on the 1993 compilation, but when the nineties sound becomes en vogue again Pope’s going to king it like a papal boss. Time is a loop is a loop is a loop is a loop is a loop huh!
258: Partyman
Batman (1989)
For a long time, I found the Batman album synonymous with the two songs that shared the title between them: Batdance and Partyman. Initially, they were the only tracks that left any lasting impression. After a second listen the thin end of Electric Chair‘s wedge entered my skull, helped by the chorus’s cameo on Batdance. And it was a few more plays before the stark beauty of The Future presented itself. Vicky Waiting took longer still. And now as I feel the fruits of Scandalous ripen I sense the first harvest begin to wilt. Partyman has served me well. It performed the same role as Prettyman – keeping my enthusiasm high for an album that I didn’t automatically fawn over. But as I begin to say my farewells believing there’s only a finite number of plays, I come across the Purple Party mix. And the video – how have I never seen this before? And there’s a William Orbit mix? There’s life in the old dog yet. Gentlemen, lets broaden our minds…
259: Condition of the Heart
Around the World in a Day (1985)
From the initial piano flutterings until the dying timpani heartbeat, Condition of the Heart is a breathtaking composition. The first two minutes are Edenic in their beauty and paint a campestral paradise with frolicking deer and darting butterflies. Béla Bartók dreaming of our animal past. Ninety seconds in and this idyllic scene is disturbed by a laser beam that cuts the atmosphere in two. It’s the bite of the apple. The opening of the box. The stealing of the gods’ fire. Man awakens from his Arcadian slumber and after blinking the sleep out of his eyes falls into a downward spiral of shame, heartbreak and loss. A terminal condition of the heart, without which the history of music would just be nursery rhymes and military tattoos.
260: Billy Jack Bitch
The Gold Experience (1995)
The “treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen” school of thought may have been vandalised by pickup artist shitbags, but it seems to work if you want Prince to write a song about you. Billy Jack Bitch is Prince’s diss track aimed at gossip columnist, Cheryl Johnson, who wrote years worth of disparaging remarks about him in a Minneapolis newspaper and nicknamed him Symbolina. After she gets asked “what if I called U silly names, just like the ones that U call me?” she gets treated to a barrage of “bitch”s, courtesy of a Fishbone sample and a Lenny Kravitz-backed chorus. Of course due to the ingenious way he structures the lyrics Prince could always claim the “CJ” mentioned is only an instruction to “see J” in the dictionary. But you’re fooling no-one Mr Plausible Deniability. The music behind the malice is a George Clinton-esque funk monster – a Knee Deep written to wound – and features horns from the HornHeadz’ New Dell Inn (and their version of Thelonius Monk’s Well You Needn’t on the full-length mix). It funks hard for a columnist pile-on but the real CJ admitted it helped her notoriety and later in the song she gets offered to be flown to the moon to “see how love will bloom” so if she was negging him it looks like it worked.
261: Wall of Berlin
Lotusflow3r (2009)
Lock Prince, Sonny T and Michael B in a recording studio with a chalk outline of Jimi scrawled on the floor and they’ll summon this swirling vortex of rock from a forbidden sphere where God’s laws no longer apply. Wall of Berlin has no discernible chorus but switches to double time in between the verses, where the three struggle to control the rampaging daemon and constantly cross streams to quell its fiery rage. “The power of NPG compels you!” This 2006 outtake would have segued seamlessly into 3121 after the “wall of Berlin” shout, and possibly once did, but amongst Lotusflow3r it found kindred spirits to RAWK with. I can’t help wondering what devilry lies beyond the early fade-out.
262: Go
Unreleased (1985)
Inspired by Prince’s tempestuous relationship with girlfriend Susannah Melvoin, Go is a pain-filled heartbreaker that mechanically ratchets along destiny’s click track. The sound of a departure neither person wants but both are powerless to stop. Go desperately wants to break out into vistas of swooping strings amid declarations of love, to grab onto Fortune’s celestial rudder and steer the moment towards reconciliation, but onwards it plods towards the silence that follows the closing seconds. The closing door. The closing chapter. Shall we try to imagine what silence looks like? Can it be the back of a slammed door seen through tear-blurred eyes?
263: Do U Lie?
Parade (1986)
About 20 years ago I read a magazine article where musicians described their favourite Prince albums. I still remember this because the dumb shock of hearing Do U Lie? described as “throwaway” seared that remark into my memory. This was the first opinion I encountered of this Gallic singalong – a breezy mood lightener that wouldn’t sound out of place in a whimsical comedy set on a harbour (or evidently set in a nightclub on the French Riviera) – and I couldn’t understand how anybody could have anything other than unremitting love for it. To be fair the guy interviewed used the modifier “kinda throwaway” and only then as a counterpoint to how Parade was as close to a perfect Prince album you could get. But still the word resurfaces cloaked in disbelief whenever I hear the song. The track may be slight – all 2 minutes and 40 seconds of it – but it has an outsized impact on the atmosphere of Prince’s 8th studio album. It’s the only song fully in the French chanson style and how many times have you heard that genre thrown about when Parade‘s been mentioned? The interviewee did say he still enjoyed Do U Lie? and that it made him laugh, and with Prince’s over-the-top vocals you can see why, but the feeling that to at least one person it’s a distraction preventing Parade from attaining pure pop perfection makes me want to burn down the concept of subjectivity and install in its place a golden accordion. Besides Venus de Milo is much more expendable.
264: Ain’t About To Stop
HITnRUN Phase One (2015)
If you’re a Prince fan, chances are you’re used to his quicksilver output, and can roll with the twists and hairpin bends – not always on board but rarely shocked – but who could have predicted Ain’t About To Stop? This may be the bucking bronco that throws you off. If it doesn’t sound like a Prince song that’s because it initially wasn’t. This club banger was slated for Rita Ora’s album with the London singer providing lead vocals, but for whatever reason it got dropped. Luckily Prince salvaged it for his penultimate album, promoting himself to lead vocal and changing the hometown shoutout to North Minne. To West Indian ears the lyrics are dirtier than Rita’s $100 nails, making this a contender for his sweariest release since Larry had a word in the late 90s. Not that Prince may have known as he still censors out the word ‘ass’, but my money’s on him turning a blind eye to Rita’s potty mouth. The lyrics are best ignored anyway – millennial angst in Prince’s hands becomes Grandpa Simpson yelling at a cloud – but the music is pure fire. If this is indicative of the rest of her oeuvre then consider me a Ritabot.