Tag: The Truth

The Truth (1998)
Cool like the other side of a pillow: a catchphrase coined by the late sports commentator Stuart Scott and the self-descriptive hook of this sparkling acoustic spritzer. The Other Side of the Pillow’s lyrics are full of similes for cool, allowing any review to write itself. But beyond the champagne charm lies a bedrock coolness that entire industries spend billion-dollar budgets chasing. This is no ersatz cool, worn like branded sportswear – “a logo that sticks to the roof of one’s ass” as Prince sings in Style. This is cool born of blood, sweat and tears. Cool born of the Blues. You don’t get to sound this care-free by growing up free of cares. This refreshment could only come from the previously parched.

The Truth (1998)
Knock back Prince’s advances and with acoustic ninjutsu he’ll rub your nose in all the things you’re set to miss out on. This is what you could have won: a trip to the Champs-Élysées; your name whispered; a shared martini and a dance to the songs of Henry Mancini till dawn. The consolation prize is having your name forever canonised in Prince’s oeuvre so I think Dionne will bounce back. And who is she? Dionne Farris, the vocalist on Arrested Development’s Alphabet St-sampling Tennessee, believes it’s about her and has written an as-yet-unreleased book and album about their friendship. She received Dionne in the post from him in 1997 and believes the line “did u get the tape I sent u?” in One of Your Tears references this. Even if she’s mistaken it’s a shame those two Truth tracks weren’t sequenced together as they make a great pairing. One wears a mask of I’m-doing-great forced joviality; the other sketches the broken-voiced moment the mask slips. Perfection crafted from rejection. Along with classics like When Doves Cry, The Beautiful Ones and How Come You Don’t Call Anymore, Dionne makes the convincing case that a spurned Prince is the best Prince.

The Truth (1998)
There are two back-to-back songs on The Truth concerning souls returning from the dead, but the motivation behind them couldn’t be further apart. Comeback, written around the time Prince lost his son, features the heart-wrenching line “never say the words they’re gone, they’ll come back”. Nature abhors a vacuum and belief that death isn’t final is welcome solace. Yet the album’s preceding track One of Your Tears is more concerned with inflicting pain than relieving it. The music may be as light as air, but unpack the lyrics and a hydrogen cloud of hurt, revenge and suicidal nihilism blooms out. The singer is tormented by mental images of his lover’s infidelity and wishes to “disappear; cease 2 exist; cease 2 be here” after she sends him a used condom in the post. Both Nietzsche and Freud believed aggression and cruelty were fundamental parts of human nature and when we’re unable to satisfy our violent urges we turn on ourselves. The act of willing nothingness is our death drive (Freud) or will to power (Nietzsche) taking the short route to escape life’s suffering, but it’s also a stifled form of aggression. The singer wants to respond to the cruelty inflicted on him and retaliates the only way he can: he wishes he was dead but still wants to be around to see the upset it would cause. I want to die and come back as one of your tears. Reincarnation as revenge. And yet this line still reveals a desire to be close and intimate with his tormentor too. What amazes me in both these songs is how much Prince paints with so little. They’re barely more than a verse and a chorus each but the grief is three dimensional. In One of Your Tears especially, the line I just quoted contains a world of conflicting emotions in just twelve words, and I consider it one of the greatest lines of poetry he ever wrote.

The Truth (1998)
So here we are at The Dawn, the apocalyptic, new beginning Prince has been referencing since Purple Rain, and the title of a feature-film and album that never came to fruition. We’ve been welcomed here before, several times during The Gold Experience, but now it’s more of a spiritual awakening than a call centre helpdesk – birdsong and thunder replace keystrokes and airlocks. The lyrics are a good insight into Prince’s personal book of revelation, prophesying in a similar way to 1998’s Freaks on This Side, and the acoustic version (if an electric mix exists I’ve not heard it) gives the impression of a campfire kumbaya after The Fall. Bring on the four horsemen!

The Truth (1998)
Long before 3rdeyegirl and the tri-spectacle phase there was 3rd Eye – an Adam and Eve story from the sublime Truth album. Naked, save for a few digital fig-leafs, Prince’s unencumbered guitar frolics with Rhonda’s electric bass in a garden of earthly, acoustic delights. It also features his last released, uncensored obscenity before he got bashful with overdubs and malapropisms. It’s a shame the curseword’s a flimsy and shitty “shitty” though. The cathartic, air-rending “MOTHERFUCKIN’ PIECE OF PIEEEEEEE!!!” on the album’s opener would have made a much more satisfying, final nail in the swear jar. A blue murder scream so defiant that immediately afterwards you can hear the bleep machine materialising into existence. Normally more associated with Eastern religions, Prince again links the pineal gland with Genesis in Y Should I Do That When I Can Do This? when he raps “if the word was God then people need to use it with a third eye”. Coupled with 3rd Eye’s message of God being inside you, it leads me to assume the reference is to the birth of human understanding between good and evil. The inner eye that was opened with the eating of the forbidden fruit. Although let’s be honest, given the highly suggestive nature of the lyrics (“the serpent… between Adam’s thighs… tries 2 release upon Eve the nectar”) the third eye in question may very well be of a different anatomical kind.

The Truth (1998)
A PETA-approved response to a Spike Lee Got Milk? ad, from a newly-converted vegan Prince. Co-written by Rhonda Smith, who also contributed bass, the lyrics are as preachy as The Artist gets but because they’re sung in a distorted, inhuman voice it tempers the hectoring finger-wag and makes them sound instead like a sermon being transmitted by the entire biomass of the ocean. It even features a verse sung in what sounds like Dolphinese. Your reaction to this song may depend on whether you agree with the sentiment or not. I eat meat but I also do truly believe that vegetarianism is the next rung on our evolutionary ladder, that better people than myself are already scaling. Veganism however is a different kettle of tofu. Who in their right mind would voluntarily give up that “funky, funky blue cheese”?