Tag: Prince

Prince (1979)
Prince’s debut ran over budget and over time, so with his second album he was eager to show Warner Bros he wasn’t a boy doing a man’s job. No opening with an experimental intricate acapella workout this time around. A single drum hit to get your attention and then it’s straight to the best hook he had in his bag. Boom. A glorious disco strut to the face. Lead single. Point made.  I Wanna Be Your Lover is primed for the airwaves – sleek pop but with a cheeky wink behind the radio controller’s back via that suggestive pause in the chorus. Here on the album, as soon as he clocks up a radio-edit’s worth of vocals, Prince drops the mic and allows the song to bloom into a funk-disco instrumental for the track’s remaining majority – like the previous album’s Just As Long We’re Together but without the hunched shoulders. That clenched era’s gone. There’s now space in his grooves to climb inside. To roam free and lose baggage in. Without vocals, he gives us an unencumbered view of this majestic expanse so that he’s certain the new Prince – more confident, less over-thinking – isn’t lost on us and then he hits us with the second single immediately after, mindful of his mission to make a quick impression. That in turn is followed by another single on the third track. He’s determined to win us over. We’re being courted and it’s all too easy to believe him when he tells us he wants to be our lover, brother, mother and sister too. Yet, according to Prince’s original liner notes for The Hits compilation, the actual target of those proto-If I Was Your Girlfriend lyrics is the jazz musician Patrice Rushen, who had helped him with the synth programming on his first album. He had a crush on her at the time and reveals that not only is the song about her, but it was also originally recorded as a demo for her. He either changed his mind or she turned it down, but a couple of years later she sent him Forget Me Nots with her sole crossover hit bearing more than a passing resemblance to his intended gift. Luckily, for whatever reason he kept I Wanna Be Your Lover for himself and it became his foothold to the next strata of fame. It was his first proper hit. His first music video. His first TV performance. The world was beginning to wake up to Prince and superstar-dom would soon come… running.

Prince (1979)
There are lyrics on Sexy Dancer but they’re vestigial. The next thing to be dropped in evolution’s great rewrite, like the appendix or the nail of the little toe. No words are needed. This track bypasses the central nervous system and speaks straight to your gut, the part of your body which converses in fluent bass and contains nine tenths of the body’s serotonin. Those two biological facts must be linked. Happiness is a dope-ass bassline. Sexy Dancer isn’t a song you hear, it’s a song you feel and if this doesn’t apply to you, you must have over-ridden your body’s innate response mechanisms. If you were a newly-hatched turtle you’d sit and wait to be picked off by a seagull instead of instinctively dashing towards the roar of the protective sea. My advice would be to go Vipassanā on it. fire up the 12″ mix, ignore the lyrics and concentrate solely on the heavy breathing. Inhale when Prince inhales. Exhales when Prince exhales. Breathe Sexy Dancer. Feel Sexy Dancer. Become Sexy Dancer. Resetting faulty programming won’t necessarily save you from any airborne predators, but it will help your ear bone reconnect to your hip bone.

Prince (1979)
I’ll be honest, any attempt to pin this ethereal track down with words is futile. There’s no combination of letters that can paint an adequate picture of its majesty. I offer only a well-worn cliche. The Kawa model in occupational theory uses the metaphor of a river to describe the stages of life. At first, it is a babbling brook, lively and energetic yet shallow. Further along, the river gains depth with maturity and settles into a steady flow. With old age, before the point it joins the next realm of the ocean, it’s calm and slow-moving but has broadened and contains a powerful vastness beneath the surface. When We’re Dancing Close and Slow was written while Prince was in the shallow river stage of life but the song has a calm deepness that belies his years. The title is borrowed from one of his idols, Joni Mitchell, but the music is taken from a deep reservoir of introverted world-building. Why try to analyse it? In the words of Lennon: let’s turn off our minds, relax and float downstream.

Prince (1979)
Nostalgia is a poisonous drug but I find something vitalising about remembering the awkward fumbles of my salad days. Maybe the pH levels of embarrassment need to be just right: too little and you fall into a toxic, rose-tinted slump; too much and the recollections become unbearable. Several songs on Prince’s first two albums inhabit that puppy-love world, none more so than I Feel For You. With its falsetto and pre-Dirty Mind lyrics, it’s a song powered by the fluttering butterflies of youth and reminds me of a time I look back fondly on but would never want to relive. In 1984 Chaka Khan brought I Feel For You to the masses, selling millions and winning a Grammy in the process. I have no need for it in my life. Her cover has music industry fingerprints all over it and like a mother bird I reject it. Gone are the butterflies – the adolescent nerves of an undeveloped persona and sexual inexperience – and in are Mellie Mel, Stevie Wonder and some board-room approved breakdancers. Chart appeal over heart appeal. Give me an oxygenising hit of the OG every time, where I can tap into a reservoir of magic from a time where the air fizzed with a million frightening possibilities.