Tag: Come

Come (1993)
There are a trillion versions of Come. Luckily the opening track on Prince’s 15th album is the only one you need. Earlier drafts experimented with dance, hip-hop and bass-heavy funk but when the song got the R&B treatment it slipped into something more comfortable. If you’re looking for subtle wordplay you’re in the wrong place. Prince goes full-on XXX sexline, even using the word “tallywhacker” which is as sensual as a Carry On film. But entwined throughout the dirty talk is a spiritual message. Explicit verses get interrupted by choruses of spirits calling and the philosophical question “if you could see the future, would you try?” The version on The Beautiful Experience film begins with the message that’s also written in reverse on the album: “this is the dawning of a new spiritual revolution”. It’s his sex as salvation trope still going strong after almost a decade and a half. Prince the profane priest giving his sermon of the mount. I understand that this song is not to everybody’s taste. It lasts almost a quarter of the entire album and has noises that are like having the inside of your head licked. But I find the spirits, sucking and sleigh bells melt into the background when the horn section laps at the song’s shores like an ocean of cream. If the divine can be found in sensual pleasures then these horns are like mainlining beatitude.

Come (1994)
I am writing this four days before the winter solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year. It’s Monday, I have a head full of cold and I’m commuting into work. The conditions then are perfect to unleash Dark on my earphones. Yes, it’s another of Prince’s hurty slow jams and lyrically if I Hate U is the anger stage of grief then Dark is the depression, but the luscious backing vocals and full band performance are like hot lemon drink to my ears. Thematically it’s Ain’t No Sunshine and like the Bill Withers classic you can feel the pain and loneliness in the words but also the warmth in the music. In the interlude, where Prince sings about sunshine and dark clouds, the key change lifts the mood like shafts of sunlight piercing an overcast sky. We may be in the depths of Winter (and Dark was recorded on the second day of January) but there are sunny days ahead. Unfortunately, I’m so enraptured I forget to stop the album before it progresses to the next track – the maudlin wallow-fest Solo. Spring has now never seemed further away.

Come (1994)
Once upon a time, poodle-haired lizards with loud guitars roamed the charts. Then God said “let there be rave” and the immaculately-coiffed dinosaurs were hit by an MDMA meteor of electro energy. Those least able to adapt were wiped out by the yellow smiley-faced fireball but the resilient absorbed the blast and mutated into something bigger, faster, stronger than they were before. Loose! was once a heavy rock number soundtracking Hades in Prince’s dance production of The Odyssey. It wasn’t terrible but probably best left in the Land of the Dead. A year later Prince reworked it into a pandemonium of hoover synths, industrial guitar and rave abandon – music for the jilted generation – and outlines of its impact can still be found scorched onto walls in Pompeii. A choir-sampling dub version called Get Loose turned up on Crystal Ball five years later – a leftover from a Loose! single that never happened (So Dark also comes from this non-release). Despite its screamed obscenities and Prodigy-style “let’s go!” samples it had its Day-Glo battery acid drained. Come’s version still sounds as devastating as the day it hit Earth.

Come (1994)
Long before Disney weaponised the phrase, Letitgo reached number 30 in the UK charts and was one of the few Prince songs I enjoyed before I became a fan. At the time I may not even have been aware who sung it, but it has merged with memories of long summers in the early to mid-90s, where R&B and soulful hip-hop drifted out of car windows like cigarette smoke. Even now I find it indelibly linked to tunes like SWV’s Right Here and Domino’s Ghetto Jam. Which raises an interesting dilemma. Do I rate these songs’ greatness on past feelings or their continued power to surprise and delight? I’m leaning more towards the latter. I still enjoy Letitgo but its moment in the sun has passed. Now it serves as a cloud of nostalgic fuzziness to sink into and reminisce. Nostalgia’s a fun drug but it will mess your life up. Just say no, kids.

Come (1993)
Prince once said the inspiration behind Pheromone was Carmen Electra and a Parisian burlesque club. But none of that matters. What matters is where you take it. The Artist paints an imperfect picture – a picture of voyeurism, sexual domination and pulp fiction – and on his last stroke hands you the brush to finish the canvas off. It’s a sleight of hand that sidesteps any complaint about the song’s dark imagery – the listener’s not just an accomplice, they become the author. Was it all a game? An act of violence? Both? You’re the storyteller now my friend. “What happens next: it all depends on your style”. And whether or not you believe in Chekhov’s gat.

Come (1994)
The story of one of Prince’s most hauntingly beautiful creations starts with him seeing the play M. Butterfly. The Broadway show must have left an impression because five years later, when planning a musical, he asked the play’s writer David Henry Hwang to provide a script and to also compose a poem about loss. The musical never happened but a few days after receiving the poem, Solo was born. A version exists with the dream duo of Sonny T and Michael B on bass and drums, but why overegg the lily on the cake? Solo’s power lies in its minimal simplicity. Harps and thunderclaps – summoned by the words ‘angels’ and ‘rain’ respectively – help augment the vocals, but the track’s an acapella through and through. And having dismissed the band and outsourced the lyrics, Prince diverts all his creative energies into letting his voice craft a monument to melancholy. He glides over the vocal registers like they’re black ice. In an alternate universe, countless reality tv contestants are murdering this song instead of the gymnastic melisma of I Will Always Love You.

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.