Tag: The Rainbow Children

The Rainbow Children (2001)
If you’re wondering about the title, it describes the ‘theocratic order’ which means any relationship with Prince has to also include God. The Pharoah is implanting this equation in his lover’s mind during her post-coital snooze, shortly before the Banished Ones (introduced in track 3), surround the palace but get chased off by the Rainbow Children, setting up the destruction of the Digital Garden and allowing the ensuing marriage between the Pharoah and Muse that brings closer the arrival of the Everlasting Now. Are you keeping up? Its slightly more complex than the last maths equation Prince used as a song title which was basically him tallying up his band members’ breasts. Like the rest of the album though, you don’t need to follow the narrative to enjoy the music and for me 1+1+1 is 3 is not only an album highlight but one of the last great funk tracks he released. It’s up there with that other 4-digit freak-out, 3121. Two studio tracks that also saw a live release that sounds mediocre in comparison. The One Night Alone version of 1+1+1 is 3 is missing all the off-kilter elements that make the track special: the sped-up guitar, the manic keys, the harmonica, but I’m sensing Camille’s voice is like Samson’s hair. There’s only a small amount of it in this song but once it’s cut all power is lost.

The Rainbow Children (2001)
The Last December may be the last song on the album but it soundtracks the already rolling end-credits. The Rainbow Children’s true final-act wrap up is The Everlasting Now. It’s where the Vader-voiced narrator (unintelligibly) concludes his story and where Prince reveals the secret unlock codes for paradise (spoiler: it’s “accurate knowledge of Christ and the Father”). The lyrics are possibly about Prince – that’s certainly the impression he wants to give on the Live at the Aladdin DVD – but the Sly Stone references in the second verse are inescapable. Sing a Simple Song, Everybody is a Star and Everyday People get referenced, as does the controversy over the altered star-spangled banner on the cover of There’s a Riot Goin’ On. It may be about mentor Larry Graham instead of Sly, but knowing there’s a Family Stoner in there makes you want to crack the other verses. People have suggested the first is about Little Richard but there’s not enough to go on. Even less for the third. I give up at this point and concentrate on the music but that’s an even bigger rabbit hole of references. There’s the Santana section… the bassline is close to Banbarra’s Shack Up… the “We Want Prince” chants were the basis of a song by Sexual Harassment… Maybe I’m distracting myself from Prince’s proselytising because I don’t want the shine taken off this epic offering of five-alarm chilli funk. Yeah yeah, preach the good news but I’ll share the truth: you know the only line people remember from this is the one about plastic boobs, right?

The Rainbow Children (2001)
I couldn’t get into The Rainbow Children when first released, although I now struggle to think how. I gave the album several goes but my younger self must have carried too many naive expectations to meet it on its own terms. It was too experimental and had no obvious singles. Nowadays I rate the lp his second best since reverting back to Prince (behind the equally experimental Art Official Age) and how the hell did I miss The Work pt. 1 which has killer single written all over it? With this album, Prince said he wanted to retreat from pop and make music he was happy making, which in this track’s case was classic funk born from a childhood spent idolising James Brown. Will a part 2 ever surface or was the second part of The Work the door-to-door evangelism he practiced with Larry Graham and other Jehovah’s Witnesses? Or is he handing over the baton: “I’m willing 2 do the work; tell me now, what about u?” What’s likely is the title was aiming for an air of funk A-side authenticity. One half of a dusty rare-groove 7″ slipping through a wormhole and landing in the wide expansive fields of wherever the Rainbow Children live. The Digital Garden? MendaCity? I admit my grasp of the plot is sketchy – it’s just as baffling as it was in 2001.

The Rainbow Children (2001)
Prince’s new found faith isn’t just found in The Rainbow Children’s lyrics and spoken monologues. The whole album is born of it. It’s in the music, the artwork, the concept, the whole damn package. This puts many people off but it caused a focused Prince to write his most cohesive lp in years. Opening track Rainbow Children (note the missing definite article) is the album in miniature. It starts with some smouldering jazz, a groove which toys with gospel and a guitar workout before ramping up towards a hard funk climax, followed by a smooth Fender Rhodes vamp. The album’s whole suite of characters are in attendance with Prince in various guises telling us his version of Genesis or whatever. He could be reciting Finnegans Wake for all I can make out, or indeed care but the words aren’t important. The atmosphere is king. His beliefs built this amazing world and I’m privileged to be allowed to visit.

The Rainbow Children (2001)
Behold an epic, rousing closer to make Andrew Lloyd Webber disown Jesus Christ Superstar as tawdry junk. Last December starts off like Gold or Purple Rain minus the fireworks or frisson. A tame but pleasing, spiritual send-off to finish the record on a gospel high. A happy ending. Closure. And on a lesser album, that would be your lot and you would be thankful. But on The Rainbow Children Prince goes that extra mile and here he gives a turbo injection of guitar just before the three-minute mark. A blistering solo, thrown in like a smoke bomb to disrupt the wholesomeness and tear holes in the Earth. And when the mist clears we hear glimpses of Santana and whispering, fiery-eyed djinns. The four horsemen of the apocalypse perform dressage while the entire cast of human civilisation, living and dead, rejoin the stage for the final curtain call. Prince told us in The Same December that in the end that’s where we’ll go, and now that time has come. The choir returns to hold our hand once more, while we leap into the ravine, Thelma & Louise style, and leave the parting word ‘one’ reverberating in the air for an unnaturally long time, like the last note in A Day in the Life or the final word ever spoken on Earth.

The Rainbow Children (2001)
Emancipation and The Rainbow Children have a lot in common. Both are deeply personal yet wildly experimental and see Prince flying with unclipped wings, high over mainstream tastes. But a lack of constraint means both have their indulgent lulls. Emancipation has listless soundscapes, added solely to pad out each disc to 60 minutes, while The Rainbow Children has a computer delivering a lengthy, impenetrable sermon at the beginning of Family Name. If Prince had ditched this intro along with the preceding three tracks – the atmospheric but disposable Deconstruction, a jarring show tune The Wedding Feast and the sweet but energy-sapping She Loves Me 4 Me – I honestly believe The Rainbow Children could stand shoulder to shoulder with his early classics. Eight minutes is all it would need to lose, but this desire of fans to meddle is probably why early releases of The Rainbow Children came as one single long track. Regardless, I’ll now do what Prince should have done and skip straight to part two of Family Name, which starts two and a half minutes in with a short skit about the slave trade. This sets up the central premise that African-Americans have had their ancestral names taken from them and when the vocals finally begin you realise the song’s worth the long wait. The lyrics, with its stereotypical Jewish surnames, may be responsible for the “controversial new album” sticker slapped on some copies, but what tends to be lost amid shouts of anti-semitism is that the lustre of the words “Gold-“, “Pearl-“ and “Rose-” highlight how slaves were given names, like Clay and Brown, that were deliberately demeaning. Controversy aside, Family Name grooves like a Burmese python. Then at 5:27 Prince spits on the floor and dark clouds of Maya Angelou’s rising dust start to block out the sun. The track soon gets obliterated by a ferocious guitar sandstorm, which hits us with the power of the moral arc of the universe finally colliding with justice. Car alarms go off. A broken-winged blackbird sings like it’s the dead of night. Thomas Jefferson appears through a wormhole to tell his fellow Americans “we’re going to pay for this”. A hurting world confronts its past. Then suddenly we find ourselves on the other side, amid a wondrously clear daybreak. Martin Luther King recites his dream as we stand on the verge of The Everlasting Now. Moments like these eclipse the entirety of Emancipation. And possibly everything since. You just have to wade through a lot of album overgrowth to get there.

The Rainbow Children (2001)
The falling ash of the album’s opener settles into a steady, soft-jazz groove for track 2, where the softest caresses of electric piano, bass and drums dust a spacious landscape for the layered vocals to roam freely in any direction they choose. Muse 2 the Pharaoh has all the ingredients to become the most achingly beautiful slow jam in his whole canon but this is Prince at peak piety and a AAA pass allows him to realm into confusing remarks about the Holocaust, slavery and NATO. The lyrics are cryptic enough to glean your own message, causing some fans to get angry at their personal interpretations, but regardless of the artist’s intent, no-one relishes hearing genocide referenced in a soothing ballad. This is Prince though and as The Max informs us, you tell him to walk a straight line and he’ll put on crooked shoes. It’s his party and he’ll sermonise if he wants to. If you prefer your Prince laced with scripture and History Hot Takes instead of naked lust then Muse 2 the Pharaoh could very well be your Insatiable. But for the rest of us, it’s not hard to tune out the message while still absorbing the gentle Fender Rhodes ambrosia.

The Rainbow Children (2001)
Prince went to his workshop with a recorded drum track and emerged with an energetic hosanna to paradise, bestowed with luscious vocals of milk and horns of honey. A hymn in the hands of a believer with rhythm. Everywhere may be one of a handful of short songs on The Rainbow Children that wouldn’t last long in the wild but for momentary rapture, crank up and dance to the drummer’s beatification!

Rainbow Children (2001)
The narrative at the start provides the context: The Wise One (Prince) and the Muse (his second wife Manuela) become flesh of one flesh in the “sensual everafter” and what follows is an instrumental soul-bath. Exfoliating guitars stripping away emotional dirt from your pores. A jazz-funk deep clean. Two minutes in and you’ve left the Isolation tank and roaming Venus, pulled by black swans and jamming Green Manalishi with Jimi and Jesus, as Saint Santana riffs on the Song of Songs. Then it ends. It’s brief. But for an ecliptical moment you’re in the shadow of greatness.