I got into Prince just as everyone else was exiting the
Prince train.
It was 1990, Graffiti Bridge was in theaters, where it was
crashing and burning like no one’s business, despite the fact that it was a
sequel to the very, very successful Purple Rain.
My world had changed a little bit since Purple Rain. I mean, it came out when I was eight. I knew the song When Doves Cry because even
if I didn’t consume much in the way of pop culture, it was hard to miss. And also my older, female cousins were obsessed
with the song. I spent a long summer
afternoon watching them listen to it over and over at a family reunion, trying
to choreograph some kind of dance routine to it.
Except neither of them had taken any kind of dance
lessons. Or had a natural gift for
choreography. As I recall they came up
with about three moves they thought were cool, and repeated them pretty much
endlessly.
The song didn’t really register with me that much. My parents rarely listened to the radio, and
I didn’t have one of my own. My music
was whatever they were listening to.
Then in 1988, I turned 12, and my dad thought it was time I
had a stereo receiver. I had wanted
LEGO, but really, that was because I was between ages. When you’re 12, you can’t figure out if it’s
still okay to Trick or Treat. You are
beginning to get the concept of being attracted to people but the idea of
dating, or being in a relationship is still tangled up with the idea of being
in elementary school and playing house, or dress-up, or imagination games where
you run around with a plastic gun and pretend you’re Han Solo.
In 1989 Batman happened.
I really loved Batman, though I couldn’t tell you why. I wasn’t really a superhero kind of kid. I didn’t read that many comics or watch a lot
of superhero TV shows. I had liked
Superman when I was younger, because I liked the movie, but for some reason, I
just had to see Batman.
Every kid did, I think.
I loved it. I needed
a Batman T-shirt. I needed to own it on
video. And I needed the Batman
Soundtracks. Both of them. The one by Danny Elfman, which had amazing
theme music I fell in love with and then started collecting Elfman film music,
and then the music by Oingo Boingo, the band he wrote all the songs for.
And I needed… well, I needed Batdance, I guess. I mean, I guess I could pretend I needed
Partyman, but really, Batdance was the huge hit song/noise compilation, and I
needed that.
The thing is, I liked that record. People try to put it down as a non-Prince
Prince record, but that’s unfair.
Ultimately, Prince put out 39 records. I’m willing to wager that zero people love
all of them. They may like most of them,
they may dig a song or two off each, but there’s literally no way they love
every one of those records, back to front.
If that person exists, I have not met them.
But I’ll come back to that.
I was trying to get back to Graffiti Bridge, which is where
I started. By then I had a radio I
listened to much of the time. I had
Batman, my first Prince record, but the thing of it was, I liked Batman. Not Prince.
At the time I had a sense that Prince was, you know, not
really for kids. Or maybe I just didn’t
really feel compelled to pick up his records at the library, as they often
featured Prince in, like, his underwear. Or less than his underwear.
I mean, don’t get me wrong.
I would have skipped over most records featuring ANYONE in their
underwear at that point. Because I was
12. (Or 13. You understand.) Carrying around a picture of someone in their
underwear in a public place was not an easy thing to do.
Then Thieves in the Temple came out.
Sometimes a song just
hits you. That one hit me. I’m not sure why. I wasn’t in the middle of a bad breakup or
anything. I just loved it, because it
was a great groove, and had a million fiddly bits (all those background
vocals!) and… I don’t know. I just loved
it.
I got it from the library, and listened to it over and over
and over. Not just the song, the record.
And then… something sunk in.
I needed more. I love Graffiti
Bridge. There are people who hate songs
on it, like the title track, but they are wrong and bad. It’s a great record. All of it.
It was the record that made me want more. I went back to the library and got Purple
Rain, which is, of course, a perfect record that everyone can agree on. There’s not a note out of place.
And I immediately discovered I was a Prince fan unstuck in
time.
People liked Thieves in the Temple, but they didn’t love
it. Not like I did. Graffiti Bridge was not a touchstone for pop
culture. It was an odds-and-sods
collection of Prince songs, recorded by a bunch of different people, from a
movie that not only failed, but was roundly considered a joke.
And no one wanted to talk about Purple Rain, either. That time had come and gone, and I had been
eight and no one cared anymore.
Diamonds and Pearls came out. I was in high school. The singles did well, and the album wasn’t
bad. I was learning about being a music
critic. But even then, I knew I didn’t
understand the context into which Prince was emerging. I loved Graffiti Bridge and Purple Rain, but
my local library was missing most of Prince’s other records.
Prince had a new band, but I barely understood his old
one. How they kind of came together on
1999. How they fell apart later.
I had a job by then, though, so I scrounged the money
together to buy Diamonds and Pearls. I
wanted to love it, and didn’t, and put Bridge and Rain back into my
semi-permanent musical rotation. Diamonds
sat.
The Love Symbol record came out, and things got… really
weird. Let down by Diamonds, I didn’t
buy it right away. A friend of mine at
work, an older guy who seemed to have all the money in the world, who bought
records every week… he loaned it to me.
I listened to it twice.
It was, and is, a mess.
Many great songs, which were supposed to be a cohesive whole, but
aren’t, really. Parts of the connective
tissue, the narrative “stuff” was removed to add in other songs, and so the
story doesn’t really make sense.
My friend didn’t dig the record, and sold it to me for ten
bucks. I kept listening. I felt like there was something there I was
missing.
I eventually realized that, yeah, the narrative was missing,
but what I was listening for was a series of great pop songs, and instead I
got… some other stuff. A Lounge Lizard
style track. Odd religious songs that
weren’t quite church ready and weren’t quite pop radio ready.
It was a song where the big hit single was about
Revelation. Kind of. Maybe.
It was the first case, I think, where I learned to love a
Prince record, instead of just loving it right away. And for just a second, when 7 was, like, a
thing, I was allowed to be excited about Prince again.
But I soon learned that, well, I could be excited about 7,
but that was about it.
Prince changed his name to a symbol. People didn’t want to talk about the
record. They wanted to talk about that.
When I met a Prince fan, which was almost never, they were
not a Prince fan. They were a Purple
Rain fan.
The Hits/The B Sides came out. I was getting to be a better critic (for a
high school kid, anyway), but I claimed that the hits were less important than
the B sides, and failed to back that up as well as I could have in print.
Today I can back it up, I think, because The Hits mostly
featured the shortened, “single” versions of the hit songs. Some of them are… not improvements, but they
turn epic funk tunes into pop singles, and in some ways that’s good.
But it also took When Doves Cry and chopped it off just as
the song is about to build to a literally perfect climax. It’s a genuine shame.
The B sides, on the other hand, are mostly almost-lost
gems. I remain angry today that they
haven’t been remixed and remastered, because most of them sound terrible. These are songs that Prince almost threw
away, and many of them could easily be massive hits. I have no idea how Another Lonely Christmas
hasn’t managed to slither its way into the occasional Christmas playlist.
That collection was, sadly, the last time Prince really felt
relevant. The last time you could walk
into a crowd of music lovers and ask if they’d heard the new Prince.
That was more than 20 years ago.
I need to pause here.
I don’t get to be a hipster very often. Almost never, really. For the most part, I find it ridiculous when
someone gets upset at first because no one knows about their obscure indie
band, and then they get even more angry when that little band suddenly gains
some pop culture traction.
But it reminded me, a bit, of how I felt at that family
reunion I was talking about earlier. I
was too young to hang with the adults.
The girl cousins were just a little too old to be able to relate to
me. The boy cousins were a little too
young.
So I watched from the sidelines.
As high school was drawing to a close, I was coming to see
Prince as a musical artist that was, perhaps, just for me.
And then the Internet happened.
Or rather, America On Line.
My dad had some small number of minutes every month, and he
let me use some of them, under my own screen name. And here, finally, were the Prince fans who
weren’t near me.
But they weren’t talking about his most recent records,
either. They were making (to me) obscure
references to his 1970s work. They were
comparing concerts they had been to.
They were talking about bootlegs.
Which I guess brings me to the vault, and to the hipster
factor.
When Prince died, there were two things that seemed to
happen. There was the outpouring of
sadness from casual fans, which all seemed to start and stop at Purple Rain – a
record and film that was 32 years old.
And why not? It’s a
Prince touchstone. An inarguable classic
of a record. (The film itself is… well,
let’s say it has its flaws. I finally
saw it in college, removed from years of hype.
Prince onstage was electric. The
concert footage may have been staged, but it still “got” Prince. But a lot of the movie featured non-actors
acting, and while they weren’t MST3K level bad, there’s a reason most them
haven’t gone on to storied acting careers.)
And then there was the cry – people wondering just what,
exactly, was going to come out of the famed Prince vault.
And that’s where I kind of lost it.
I don’t think I went full hipster, but I could feel it
rising.
Because… well, mostly just because, but really because so
much had already come out of the vault, and people roundly chose to ignore it.
In 1992 and 1993, I was trying to follow along in the
bootleg conversations, and so, to some extent, was Prince.
He got out of his label contract and released a 3 CD
collection – all new Prince music, and lots of it! And it sold well, but mostly it “sold” two
million copies because a 3 CD set is considered three records.
This means he probably sold a little over 500,000 records –
or rather, he tumbled over the “Gold” line, not the double platinum line.
Then the vault cracked open.
He finally released The Black Album, one of the most
bootlegged records of all time. I had a
copy, because I was a fan trying to fit in, and I bought a “real” copy just to
same. But all of the real fans didn’t,
and it sank and vanished.
He put out Crystal Ball, a 5(!) CD set of lost vault
material. It sank like a stone.
Later he put out Old Friends 4 Sale, a collection of even
more vault material. Sank like a
boulder.
Chaos and Disorder was a tossed-off record consisting of
songs he wouldn’t have otherwise released, just to get out of his contract.
Sank like a brick. It
didn’t help that, at least to my ears, there wasn’t much to recommend it.
And in the middle of all that vault material? The Gold Experience.
What a stellar record, and I mean that with all my heart. Catchy, funky, fun, a little saucy, a little
feminist.
I dug his “real” record before that, Come, but it was
honestly a little too out there to make it on mainstream radio. If what I’ve read is correct, all the things
that could have been hits ended up on The Gold Experience.
It felt like it.
I suspect that Gold didn’t do better because it was delayed
a bunch of times. The biggest hit off
the record was The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, which was in equal measure
a lovely song and a piece of processed cheese.
If The Gold Experience had followed it up a month or two later, perhaps
it would have shot to the top of the charts.
Instead, Gold came out two YEARS later. And instead of Now or Endorphinmachine, two
fun, funky, smash hits in the making… they tossed out a ballad as a single.
I still love that record.
I used to convert friends to fandom with it. I’d loan it to them, and they’d stare at me
in awe… it was like they had forgotten Prince had ever existed, and here he was
with a totally stunningly fun record. In
1995? Who knew?
And then?
Then it got weird.
Then Prince created the NPG music club, promising to send
fans records if they’d just give him money every month.
I was a broke college student. And I knew that Prince didn’t always follow
through on his projects. And at the time,
I had decided I refused to have a credit card on my person, as it seemed to
lead to trouble for every single college student I knew.
So I missed some records.
And I bought some oddball records he put out other ways. Like The Rainbow Children, was supposed to be
about how he was a Jehovah’s Witness now, or something. There was some good stuff on it, but I
couldn’t love it like Gold.
And then… then records kept coming out.
And critics were weird about it.
There’s a great old VH1 special about Weird Al Yankovic,
where he opines that even though he put out a record every two years at the
time, people always seemed a little amazed he was still around, as if it had
been decades.
That’s what was going on with Prince. He would release a record, and critics would
go crazy trying to convince themselves that Prince was back, baby! This was the one with the hits, the one that
would get his name out there again, would put him back and the charts.
And sometimes they did.
When you could buy them.
More often, they didn’t.
Or you couldn’t get a copy.
Or… well, let’s look at the releases, year over year:
Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic – has a couple of great possible
singles (and a hilarious coda of a song) but to me, it felt like it was trying
too hard, pulling songs and artists from the current mainstream and sticking
them on the record. Prince was not leading
the charge on this one, he was following, and I felt it keenly. He had decided to prove himself and the whole
thing felt forced.
The Rainbow Children – This was the Jehovah’s Witness
record, a collection of songs beloved by some and, in my case, mostly just
forgotten. Little of it registered with
me. Maybe I’d like it more today.
I’ve since read he didn’t even want to publicize that this
record was out. Given its sales, that
choice seems to be not great.
One Nite Alone... –
Finally we get a full live recording… and it’s mostly stuff from The Rainbow
Children. I couldn’t justify the cost of
an expensive box set.
Xpectation – Released only to people in his record
club. I still haven’t heard it.
N.E.W.S – Four instrumental tracks, I was amazed to find
this one in an actual record store and bought it on sight. I listened to it once and almost forgot it
existed. There was nothing there to
cling to, musically.
Musicology – Prince attempts another comeback. This was where I was ready to check out. I wasn’t going to bother picking up a copy,
but some of them contained a so-called Golden Ticket to see Prince’s house and
studio, Paisley Park.
I did not get a ticket.
The Chocolate Invasion – People putting money into his bank
accounts every year got this. Never
heard it.
The Slaughterhouse – Yet another almost unknown
release. How many people own a copy of
this, I wonder? Is it in the six digits?
3121 – Prince attempts a comeback record… again. The critics were crazy for this one. This one, they swore, was Prince back doing
what he did best. I listened to it at
the time and didn’t hear it. After his
death, I pulled it out again.
Prince records live and die by their singles, I think, and
3121 contained a lot of good material and a few songs that whiffed. The single was a whiff.
I can’t prove that another song might have saved the record,
but that one did it no favors.
Beautiful, Loved, and Blessed is gorgeous, though. It’s worth a listen just for that track.
Planet Earth – released for free in the UK. Barely released in the states. I listened to it twice. The record is a mystery to me today. I can recall the opening lick of the opening
song, and nothing else.
Lotusflow3r / MPLSound (released as a 3-CD set together with
Elixer by Bria Valente) - In which Prince offers three records for the price of
one. A couple of critics I read on a
regular basis talked about the return of the Prince sound.
Inasmuch as he pulled out his old drum machines, they were
right. Inasmuch as he created memorable
songs, they were wrong.
I really enjoyed this one for about two weeks after it came
out, but I came to like it less and less the more I listened to it.
20Ten – released for free in the UK, and never in the
US. After being burned again and again
by releases I had paid 10-15 bucks for, I couldn’t justify coughing up thirty
or forty for what was sure to be a disappointment.
Things got quiet for a while. Prince stopped releasing records for four
years, and in a lot of ways it felt like a relief to me.
The open question was, in a way, did I want more Prince
music? For that matter, did the world
NEED more Prince music? Just perusing
the list above, I can find five records I didn’t own and wasn’t willing to
spend the time scouring the earth for.
When Prince died, no one dug one of them up and declared them a lost
classic.
Even the record I could have gotten my hands on easily, by
shipping $40 off to the UK to acquire something someone got there for free in a
newspaper… I couldn’t be bothered. I
just doubted there was $40 worth of happiness to be heard.
For that matter, he still had some early so-called classic
records I’d never bothered to buy. Why
would I blow hundreds of dollars on a live record with mostly songs I didn’t
find that interesting in the first place, when I had never even heard most of
his early output, and could get it for five or ten bucks?
At that point, Prince had spent decades cranking out
material, sometimes looking to craft hits, sometimes seemingly just putting out
records just to put them out.
On a more pragmatic level, it was hard to miss the guy
because he never seemed to go away.
So yeah. Four
years. No records.
I’ve talked about how Prince seemed to stage a comeback
every few years. How the critics would
get amped all over again, ready to talk about a return to form.
Even Prince seemed to want to come back in a big way,
releasing two records on the same day – the kind of thing not usually an option
for a guy whose sales had slacked off so significantly.
But those four years did build a little excitement. He had a new band, made up entirely of women
who absolutely knew how to play. He got
out there and did interviews. The
headline was supposed to be that Prince was back.
And from that, we got:
Plectrumelectrum – a record Prince didn’t even put his name
on, just that of his new band. It was…
it was a group of really talented musicians playing songs I could barely
remember just after listening to it.
I won’t argue that Prince put his B material on this record,
and his A material on the other. I’d be
more inclined to say that Prince just plain produced less A material by then.
Art Official Age – That same A material issue is here as
well. I can at least hum a couple of songs
off of the record, but to have a real comeback I think Prince needed a flat-out
killer single, and Prince didn’t create one for this record.
He instead created a strange little concept album, similar
to some of his past concept albums. The
record hangs together, and got a lot more listens from me than the other record
he released the same day.
That said, it was not a comeback record.
A year went by, and then, big news, Prince decided to throw
some more material out and see what sticks… and that helped, in a way.
HITnRUN Phase One – This one still had a bit of heat on
it. Prince actually brought in another
producer for the first time in long time, and tried to make a record with
modern sounds on it.
I mean, he tried. But
the modern sounds angle didn’t really work.
He instead ended up with an odd little stripped-down thing that often
sounded like un-fleshed out demos.
That said, it was the first Prince record in a long time
that I really, truly, enjoyed.
More than any other record in recent memory, I could
actually RECALL the songs. My kid would
sing along. I would sing along.
And with a touch of trimming, I totally think 1000 X's &
O's could have been a hit single. Maybe
not a huge one, but it certainly could have wandered the R and B charts for a
while, and that would have been nice.
HITnRUN Phase Two – This one was released right on the heels
of part 1, but wasn’t put out in a physical edition for months, which made me
insane.
In fact, the actual physical version came out the week he
died, and no one was carrying it, because, who knew? So I had to order it from Amazon instead of
my local record store.
And in a lot of ways, it was a fitting cap on the story of
Prince. In particular, it dragged a
long-lost classic (Xtraloveable) into the light and finally put it out for all
to hear.
And since I was on Amazon, I coughed up a bunch of money and
filled in all the Prince gaps I could in my collection. There were a LOT of them, and some still
remain. A few because there’s no real
way to get my hands on them. A few
because now out-of-print records were suddenly worth much, much, much more
money.
And I couldn’t justify buying a couple of records I didn’t
like that much in the first place.
I started this essay months ago now, opening it, updating
it, forgetting about it. Writing huge
chunks and then tucking the essay away again for weeks at a time. When I started, I thought I knew where I was
going.
But I don’t.
I listened to those early records when they arrived. I had wanted to spread them out, maybe listen
to one a week. But instead, I’d listen
to each one for a day or two, then move on to the next. Always restless. Always wondering what else I missed, or was
missing.
That’s the issue, I guess.
The most common number of records I heard associated with
Prince with 39. That did not include all
the lost songs tucked into various singles.
It did not include the dozens (hundreds?) of songs he gave to other
artists.
It doesn’t include lost cover versions, concerts, or the
hundreds of songs left in the vault.
I would argue that I kept buying Prince records because,
even if I didn’t love what came out, I had to know what else was there.
When you’re a kid, you pull pop culture in on yourself. Those songs are about you. You love them harder than you’re ever able to
love them as an adult. They speak to
you. Sometimes, they speak FOR you.
I came out of my teen years with three major musical loves
and influences: Frank Zappa, Oingo Boingo/Danny Elfman, and Prince.
Prince was the one who survived.
Frank Zappa was dead by the time I was out of high
school. I had to dig into his music, to
hunt, to search, to find more, but in the end, the music out there was more or
less finite. Yes, his family kept
releasing records, but they weren’t Frank records anymore. Not really.
They were expansions and odds and sods.
They were no longer musical statements, and while they interested me to
a certain extent, I knew I could never justify buying them because I couldn’t
really love them.
Oingo Boingo disbanded when I was in college, recording
their last few shows and releasing a double live album that I just loved. I literally own everything they put out,
including weird little rare things that are impossible to find.
But the band is gone now.
And Danny Elfman, who I loved and collected for a long time,
well… I don’t know, really. He used to
create amazing themes that I could listen to forever. But as he got older, and got “better” at his
job, his scores became less memorable to me, and more auditory wallpaper. To this day, I can sing large chunks of the
music to the early Pee-Wee Herman movies.
But I remember listening to The Hulk and remembering nothing
at all. I think the last score of his I
got was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, because I really liked the
songs. (Apparently, I was the only one.)
Prince was still out there, though. Still slugging away.
While I didn’t have a ton of love for his new records after
a while, there was great stuff there sometimes.
He gave me hope.
2016 was a rough year, with a lot of artists I enjoyed
taking their final bow. Prince died a
few months before I turned 40, and the records he was going to release, the way
he wanted to, came to a sudden halt with his death.
Honestly, I was even more saddened to learn that he had
started writing his memoirs. I’m sure he
had 100 stories, sharpened to a fine point from telling and retelling them, and
now those stories are gone, along with the man.
As I type this, I’m realizing only a handful of artists I’ve
really loved are still putting out records on anything resembling a regular
basis. I mean, I may enjoy Adele, but
I’m not waiting for the next thing, cash in hand.
At this point, it’s down to Ben Folds and Aimee Mann, both
of whom are still out and working, but who seem less and less interested in
creating their next record.
I suppose that’s the other thing. So few artists ever create a career that
really lasts. When you think about an
Elton John (almost fifty years) or a Prince (almost 40), and then think about
the musical artists of today, can you actually see them releasing something new
thirty years from now?
Or twenty?
Or ten?
Prince is gone. The last band/artist I carried from my
teenage days is no longer a musical force.
He sold a lot of records after his death, but he still didn’t manage the
comeback that he clearly wanted. He
isn’t going to climb to the top one last time.
Bowie ended his career on his own terms, with a record that
was well-reviewed both before and after his death. Prince’s last record was barely reviewed at
all, and his old label spit out a fresh best-of with one lost track just in
time for the Christmas season.
Even that was hard to look at, the last major single rolling
all the way back to my high school days.
Zappa knew he was almost done, and put out a couple of
records that nicely capped his career.
Oingo Boingo did a few more shows and put out a final live
album just for the fans.
But Prince didn’t know the end was coming. His final record, in some ways, felt like a
cap, but it wasn’t one. Prince didn’t go
out on his own terms.
That’s what’s going to haunt me in the coming years. We’re never really promised tomorrow.
We do not always get to write our own ending.
Sometimes we just go, and the shock never erodes.
