by Brian Morton
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If there was a growing consensus about Prince’s artistic ‘decline’ – and he even allowed Twin Cities journalist Jim Walsh to raise the issue in a liner note to 1995’s The Gold Experience – it was almost entirely a tabloid creation. Though his fidelity was and remained questionable, settling down with Mayte, and later marrying her, robbed the press of a regular supply of scandalous Prince stories. Eccentric behaviour like swapping clothes with her and sending her onstage as ‘Prince’ – in line with his conviction that on some astral plane they were one and the same person – had begun to pall. There were few, if any, interviews, and even photo shoots, at which Prince always projected powerfully, were passing their sell-by date.
What the press – other than the hipper Minneapolis papers – didn’t reflect was that Prince had never been more active. When he picked up a BMI award in London he muttered something about being perfectly free when he played a concert but ‘on record – slave’. At home, he and his band were jamming at Paisley Park virtually every night, often following a small-scale date at one of his Glam Slam clubs. He was making as much music and with as much enthusiasm as ever. Just not for Warner. And, if a July 1993 statement was to be believed, he was shortly to retire from studio recording to explore other media: as well as an undented ambition to make movies, there was talk of writing musicals and ballet scores.
As queues for new Prince albums dwindled away, his loyal fans relied ever more on the red light of a Sony Pro glowing dimly through a club tablecloth; audience tapes and the occasional pressed-up vinyl bootleg became badges of solidarity with an embattled artist. Fortunately, both for his label and ultimately his own reputation, Prince’s archive was so generously stocked with strong unreleased material that there should have been no need for the kind of sour contract-breaker, either deliberately perverse (like Lou Reed’s now-canonised Metal Machine Music) or full of mawkish self-pity and insider references.
Though sympathies are usually reserved for the artist in cases of contractual dispute – creative David vs corporate Goliath – it is hard not to feel for Warner; or, more accurately, to feel for those former Warner senior executives, Russ Thyret, Larry Waronker (left end 1995), and ex-CEO Mo Ostin (left just before Christmas 1994) who had backed Prince to the hilt since 1977, dealt with his tantrums and eccentricities and then had to sit back and listen as he publically blackguarded their successors for . . . not doing what Prince wanted, basically. More galling still was that his enmity seemed to increase off American soil, where it was harder for Warner to respond in kind. During 1995, he gave a string of interviews to the British press which suggested that the company had long been out of touch with what ‘the fans’ wanted. Again, read, what Prince wanted.
The reality was that since the hasty Around the World in a Day, Prince’s sales had plummeted and seemed to be in terminal decline. That record had been issued in the face of corporate misgivings and, ever since, Prince had consistently resisted Warner’s tried-and-tested formula of just one album per year. He was already in debt to Warner; some said in the region of $15 million. Redeployed, his Warner budget could have launched two or three promising youngsters, like the teenage Tevin Campbell who’d featured on Graffiti Bridge or some of the artists Prince released on his 1-800-New Funk compilation. The very fact that he was already acting as an independent while still obligated to Warner prompted discussions about legal action. Warner believed, not without warrant, that Prince had breached his contract by appearing alongside Mayte on the New Power Generation release Exodus and promoting the ‘Get Wild’ single – albeit pseudonymously and with a veil over his face – on a British television programme. The latest pseudonym had an ominous ring; by calling himself ‘Tora Tora’, was Prince conceding that he was on a kamikaze run, committing professional suicide?
Despite an August 1992 deal which provided $100 million for six albums (and included some development capital for Paisley Park), Prince was already deeply mired in financial problems. His Glam Slam chain folded and much of his merchandising went to the wall. With most of his management team long gone and his contact with the outside world intermittent at best, he continued to overspend, though to his credit most of the money went on making music rather than fast cars or cocaine. The tour to promote The Gold Experience, his last-but-one Warner record, long delayed by the label, was a naked effort to raise cash; ticket sales were slow. The label may have had irrevocable mandates on Prince’s publishing to help offset the overdraft, and they also had a potentially lucrative back catalogue, but as far as new material was concerned it was unlikely that Warner was ever going to see a return on its money. Even at a notional $10 million per album, it seemed unlikely that Prince would, either.
The official name-change presented Warner with yet another, expensive problem. In order that press copy should correctly identify their maverick artist as, a special logo had to be devised and sent out to newspapers and magazines on floppy disks. The company also put out a press release aimed at laughing their recalcitrant star out of countenance. Full of hearts, stars, dollar signs and smiley faces, it basically said ‘We don’t care what our stars call themselves but for God’s sake, just to keep the peace, do us a favour and don’t call him Prince, eh?’
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With an air of losses being cut, The Black Album was released commercially in 1994, just after the rain-soaked ‘memorial album’ Come. Of the two, Come is unquestionably the more dangerous, in subject matter if not in treatment. Though it features one intriguing experiment, ‘Solo’, co-written with David Henry Hwang, its musical material consists largely of found riffs and accompaniments from the Paisley Park archive, reworked with new vocal lines. Though not credited to the NPG, it features essentially the same line-up as, but now minus Levi Seacer and with Morris ‘Mr’ Hayes on keyboards, and an array of guest horns. ‘Horny’ is probably the right word to describe both the musical arrangements and the overall tone. With the Warner situation all but terminal, Prince saw no need to hold back and this last album as himself is an extended and explicit seduction, punctuated by murmured invitations to ‘come’. The title track runs to a sleazy eleven minutes, with Prince going through his usual half-amused, half-threatening cajole. The brief final track, ‘Orgasm’, is a wry confirmation of the guitar-as-phallus cliché, an unhinged and distorted solo over a girl’s ecstatic moaning; the ‘vocal’ credit merely reads ‘She knows’.
‘Papa’ gives domestic violence a surreal edge, almost as if Prince had been reading Peter Reich’s The Book of Dreams, and its air of menace saves it from bathos. The terse titles – ‘Space’, ‘Pheromone’, ‘Loose!’, ‘Race’, ‘Dark’, ‘Letitgo’ – exactly reflect the record’s spare arrangements and offhand delivery. They also reflect Prince’s determination not to give Warner anything remotely resembling a chart single; he’d proved to his own satisfaction with ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ that he could turn those out overnight, if needed.
A brilliant, instinctive pastiche of Philly soul, it was the outstanding track on The Gold Experience, which was eventually released in 1995. Warner’s decision to delay the record had been what prompted Prince to write SLAVE on his cheek. By then, of course, he was no longer Prince and it was two years before he made his debut as. The oddity of Come was that it appeared under the old name, though given that the back-story was Prince’s ‘death’, this made a certain sense. The Gold Experience has a loose storyline as well, though not one that anyone remembers and the between-track passages are no more than an awkward armature for another effortless but also cheerless synthesis of pop, rock, funk, jazz, gospel and soul. ‘Dolphin’ is as unalloyed a pop song as he’d written since ‘Alphabet St’, while ‘Endorphinmachine’ suggested that he still hadn’t given up on distorted guitar rock.
The following year’s Chaos and Disorder took that side a step further on ‘I Rock, Therefore I Am’ and the heavy ‘I Like It Here’, but otherwise worked a familiar seam (the jazz-funk of ‘Dig U Better Dead’, the near-pe
rfect pop of ‘Dinner with Delores’), with just a few magpie-ish forays into hip-hop, ragga and other contemporary beats. Prince’s standard reaction to the suggestion that the Minneapolis sound had been overtaken by hip-hop was, predictably, that he’d done it first. It was just that he could actually sing. As ever, though, he was a brilliant, instantaneous assimilator, pulling together influences in real time, counterpunching challenges to his dominance, improvising new wrinkles on a vast body of black American music.
For the moment, though, he was something other than an agile thief. Though some pointed out that SLAVE was also the word used for copying machines in recording studios and thus possibly a hint to would-be bootleggers out there, there was a disturbing irony in seeing a light-skinned black man, who for a time commanded a market presence equalled only by Madonna and Michael Jackson, publically declaring his enslavement to the system. Film director Spike Lee, who had crossed paths with Prince at various points, asked him why he only seemed to work with white girls. Prince’s tricksterish answer was that that only applied to the ‘successful’ stuff; the implication being that, as on Under the Cherry Moon, he’d play the exotic to knock the starch out of whitey, but that he knew where his real loyalties and his real audience lay. He also seemed naively disturbed that while Cassius Clay’s transformation into Muhammad Ali, or O’Shea Jackson into Ice Cube, were all accepted as political gestures, the transformation of Prince Rogers Nelson into was dismissed as publicity.
Having declared his enslavement, Prince could only recover his credibility with an Emancipation Proclamation.
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On May 16, 2000 Prince reverted to his original name. In the past, such announcements had acquired a mystical significance by being made on his birthday. On this occasion, the circumstances were more pragmatic. That was the day his publishing contract with Warner-Chappell finally ran out; Prince’s songs were his own again. It was a bittersweet return since the same month marked the end of his marriage to Mayte Nelson. The internet buzzed with rumours about the reason for the breakdown – his infidelity, her infidelity, the failure of her career (thousands of copies of her Children of the Sun album lay boxed and unsold in the warehouse) – but the bruising effects of tabloid speculation, to say nothing of the very public birth and death of baby Gregory, can’t be underestimated. Prince’s optimistic, offhand prediction that there would be other children hadn’t come to pass. The utopian family predicted on the cover of the album had given way to a spotlit loneliness.
Years of cancelled gigs, abortive interviews and pointlessly enigmatic appearances had alienated all but a hard core of fans. His 1999 record Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic was a familiar blend of styles, all effortlessly delivered but lacklustre as a package and without a single defining track. Significantly, the album was remembered for guest spots from rapper Chuck D, harmonica and harmony vocals from Sheryl Crow (whose own songwriting style owed something to both Prince and his mentor Joni Mitchell) and No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani (a fine duet on ‘So Far, So Pleased’).
As far as the record-buying public was concerned – those who still visited stores rather than surfing the fast-developing internet or hip to Prince’s mail-order set-up – Prince hadn’t made a convincing record for three years; 1998’s New Power Soul was a lightweight, meat-free flop. For those who kept abreast with 1-800-New-Funk and with his www.love4oneanother.com website, that same year had also yielded The Truth, a mostly acoustic album, and a final appearance of the three-CD Crystal Ball, a grab-bag of mostly older material whose title piece was a brooding, almost depressive song originally slated for Sign ‘O’ The Times, but apparently vetoed by Warner. Prince also found room for ‘Cloreenbaconskin’, which he had written with Morris Day for The Time, the stunningly good ‘Days of Wild’, and ‘Dream Factory’, one of several songs from this period which take sideswipes at the chemical and emotional perils of rock stardom (i.e. swipes at Michael Jackson). There is left-over material from Parade (‘Sexual Suicide’ and ‘An Honest Man’) and from the Ulysses project. The Truth also included some gems, but more importantly it represented an artist growing up in public, prepared to be serious, prepared to be nostalgic (as he is on ‘Circle of Amour’), and prepared to let the songs themselves do most of the work; the title cut is just Prince, guitar and a few keyboard flourishes, and it’s electrifying. The abiding impression was once again amazement at how much material – new, old, reworked – Prince could command.
These records did eventually make an appearance in record stores, but for the most part they were subscription releases, not pressed until orders had passed a break-even point. Many of the tracks had circulated as bootlegs for years, but by 1998 Prince had once again an overground presence and major-label backing. Clive Davis of Arista had in a previous incarnation at Columbia been an important supporter of the often ill-served Miles Davis; ironically, when Miles left behind his Columbia contract, he spent his last few years with Warner. There was a further irony in that Prince had campaigned fiercely for singer Toni Braxton and earlier for TLC in their money battles with LaFace Records, a subsidiary of Arista. Clive Davis’s reward was Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic and the knowledge that more Prince product was circulating by other means than by straight retail sales. His artist’s frequent proclamations about karma must had an uncomfortable resonance.
There had been an earlier saviour. In 1996 Charles Koppelman signed Prince to EMI Capitol and gave him leave to release a triple album. Not Crystal Ball, but every bit as significant in Prince’s effort to free himself from creative slavery.
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Fans and critics awaited the release of Emancipation with the understandable conviction that were it anything other than a major statement, Prince/ could be judged to have suffered a technical knock-out. EMI presumably waited for the tapes with similar trepidation. Prince’s website confirmed that this was a lifetime project, its three discs modelled on the building of the pyramids and thus aligned with the star-fields overhead. Songs like ‘Da, Da, Da’, ‘Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife’ (written for his wedding reception), ‘Slave’, all suggested that this was a record with a strong autobiographical slant. So, too, did references to Mayte’s expected baby and the sound of his foetal heartbeat on ‘Sex in the Summer’, originally entitled ‘Conception’. Mayte’s swelling belly – overprinted with music staves, just to show that Prince considered both conceptions of equal importance – is built into the surreal anthropomorphic landscape of the liner booklet, along with a poignant collage of black-and-white family photographs. The presence of a rare cover version, the Stylistics’ ‘Betcha by Golly Wow!’, suggested strongly that more than ever Prince wanted to inscribe himself on the history of black American music. He would later tour with former Sly Stone bassist Larry Graham and members of Graham Central Station, and play Sly’s very Prince-like ‘Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)’.
That might have been a more appropriate cover version for the Emancipation set list, except that the publishing shackles would not fall away for another few years and that for the time being he was still and not Prince. It was obvious, though, from the party sounds and tightly knit beats of the opening ‘Jam of the Year’ that whatever he was called, he was still very much the same artist who had started out nearly two decades earlier with a new synthesis of funk.
Impending fatherhood and a fat cuttings-book whose contents ranged from hyperbole to vitriol were the most obvious reminders that here was an artist approaching the age of forty. The official back catalogue, greatest hits anthologies and bootleg compilations were a reminder of how the intervening years had been filled. But what becomes increasingly obvious on Emancipation is that, fresh directions like Parade and Sign ‘O’ The Times apart, and efforts to merge black r’n’b and white pop-rock aside, Prince did not so much ‘develop’ as steadily unfold a single coherent vision which depends on a deep and instinctive understanding of a whole continuum of black American music and its often problematic, sometimes antagonistic continuities with the cultural
mainstream. For all his Zeitgeist-checking flourishes – a hint of ragga on Chaos and Disorder, a foray into techno on Emancipation’s ‘The Computer’ (a guest vocal by Kate Bush) – Prince is interested in a music that is beyond fashion and that might last as long as Giza.
He has been pop’s most successful tomb-raider, an innovator only technically. His early use of synthesizers and Linn drums was pragmatic rather than central to his vision. As soon as he made contact with musicians able to convey his ideas in real-time, or who could be moulded to his needs, he ceded reponsibility to them. Though at times the backing musicians seemed little more than set-dressing, though he has often ruthlessly colonised ideas for which others claimed legitimate credit, and though after The Revolution and New Power Generation he once again declared himself onlie begetter of his records, Prince has always had a profound need of others. His almost obsessive need for approbation goes beyond vanity (and beyond Vanity, that toy-box, puppetmaster phase when he treated people as means rather than ends) and stands ultimately as the downside of his intense spiritual engagement.
Prince is as ever teasingly unspecific in terms of actual religion – he appears in the liner booklet as what can only be described as a Franciscan Hindu dervish, in modified cassock and wearing a bindhi mark on his brow. So personal a statement, it belongs to him alone. Like Lovesexy before it, and in a more obviously secular way Sign ‘O’ The Times, Emancipation is a spiritual testament. What makes it different is that in marriage to Mayte, and in the imminent prospect of bringing forth a child, Prince objectified his longstanding male/female dichotomy – misleading to call him androgynous – and his compulsion to produce. The sheer physicality of his musical conception was never limited to doing the splits and backflips on stage. It also had something to do with the actual means of production, laying hands on guitars, drums, keyboards, all the instruments he could actually play. When he made fluid jet from the neck of his guitar he was obviously bent on titillating, as he was when he French-kissed and dry-humped female members of the band, but he was also unconsciously striving for a kind of creative jouissance that went beyond the usual highs, lows, fads and formulae of popular music performance.
