Friday, Aug 29, 2008
To the Artist, though, the '90s have meant one thing: freedom. Were he to make a movie about his life in the decade, it probably wouldn't be all that different from his hit film "Purple Rain": talented, sensitive rocker gets in trouble with the money men, focuses, trusts, finds redemption through his art. Ah, "Purple Rain," -- the 1984 record that ended up selling 13 million copies, the movie that, on a budget of $7 million, made $60 million. Anyone seeking a map of the Artist's formative psyche should rush out and rent this little flick. It's all in there: troubles in love, troubles with ego, control issues with his band-mates -- and, perhaps most revealingly, troubles with his father.
In the film, Prince's dad, a tortured pianist played by Clarence Williams III, beats his wife, beats Prince and ultimately shoots himself. Prince, in a rough patch with his girlfriend Apollonia, smacks her around a few times, then in horror realizes what he's become.
Ten years after the film, in Prince's song "Papa" from the album "Come," a furious father beats his 4-year-old and locks him in a closet.
As the door closes, baby starts 2 cry
"Please don't lock me up again without a reason why!"
Papa just went outside and pointed a shotgun up in the sky
He said -- "How come I don't love my woman?"
Then he took aim and died
A few verses later, Prince warns, "Don't abuse children or else they turn out like me ..."
While it's unclear whether Prince as a boy was truly abused, we do know that his father never committed suicide. John Nelson was a jazz pianist, and named his son, born June 7, 1958, in Minneapolis, after his group, the Prince Rogers Trio
Prince Rogers Nelson's mother, a singer named Mattie Shaw, divorced John Nelson and married Hayward Baker, who is most famously credited with rocking the 12-year-old Prince's world by taking him to see a James Brown concert. But Prince's relationships with both of his dads were conflicted, and he drifted around until he was taken in by an altogether different family.
In junior high and high school, Prince, already a whiz at piano, guitar, drums and who knows how many other instruments, played in bands with cohorts who would stick with him for much of his career, including Andre Cymone, Terry Lewis, Morris Day and Jellybean Johnson -- a crew that would develop the preening disco-funk style that came to be known as the Minneapolis sound.
Disco reigned in 1977, the year Prince, then 18, summoned the chutzpah to convince Warner Bros. to sign a contract guaranteeing him complete control over the music. Warner Bros. proved prescient, because the hits started coming quickly -- "Soft and Wet" from Prince's 1978 debut "For You" cracked the R&B Top 20, and the follow-up LP, "Prince," did better, with a No. 11 hit in "I Wanna Be Your Lover." Another song from that album, "I Feel for You," began the long tradition of other artists' getting hits with Prince tunes (including the Bangles, Sinead O'Connor, Madonna, Kenny Rogers, Patti LaBelle, Joe Cocker), when Chaka Khan took it to No. 3 in 1984.
Playing all the instruments on these records, Prince proved he could make catchy dance hits single-handedly, but the music lacked depth. On his next two, "Dirty Mind" and "Controversy," he evolved from lover boy to sex toy, and started tricking up the music as well. When he unveiled the double album "1999" in '82, his artistry opened up on a number of fronts. One, the falsetto that dominated his singing turned out to be just one facet of a mighty vocal arsenal. Then he showed he was as adept at writing ballads as dance tunes. In the album's biggest hit, "Little Red Corvette," he displayed vulnerability, even insecurity.
Throw in a little pathos, and -- boom -- you have arena rock On "Purple Rain" Prince let it be known he could get down on his knees and make his guitar cry with the best of them. The soundtrack album dominated the pop charts, becoming one of the biggest sellers of the '80s, so huge that Prince must have known he would never top it. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly Online, the Artist discussed his feelings about the record:
"In some ways, it was more detrimental than good. People's perception of me changed after that, and it pigeonholed me. I saw kids coming to concerts who screamed just because that's where the audience screamed in the movie. That's why I did "Around the World in a Day," to totally change that. I wanted not to be pigeonholed."
That was never something Prince would have to worry about. "Around the World in a Day" -- all introverted and mannered where "Purple Rain" was extroverted and bombastic -- taught his fans never to expect the expected. Prince's entire career has been a case of evolution and experimentation, trusting his song-craft to create music people wanted to hear. And they did, because no matter how bizarrely florid or strangely dense the music got -- and "Around the World's" follow-up, "Parade" (the soundtrack to the much-maligned movie "Under the Cherry Moon") was pretty out there -- he always slipped in a hit or two, like "Kiss."
In this he was like the Beatles. But he even one-upped the Beatles, because he understood the funk. Imagine if "Rubber Soul" actually had soul, and was three times as long to boot? Then you would have something approximating "Sign 'O' the Times," Prince's '80s masterpiece. For this 1987 double album, Prince took all the rock 'n' roll moves he had cultivated on his previous four albums and wrapped them in his R&B roots. He put more slink in his bass playing, aired out his grooves, ladled on the background vocals, cranked up the horn arrangements and took the music's dance quotient into the stratosphere. Mainly, his singing told the story -- he finally let loose the full power of his voice, and what an awesomely versatile instrument it proved to be. His singing on the ballad "Adore" -- as passionate a profession of love as has ever been penned -- is breathtaking, with harmonies (his own voice overdubbed) as gorgeous as a deep South gospel choir.
Interestingly, "Sign" found Prince in his one-man-band shoes, the first case of this since he introduced a band, the Revolution, on "Purple Rain." And so continued a dialectic that would energize him throughout his career: albums made solo, followed by collaboration. His greatest band, the early '90s version of the New Power Generation, showed up first on 1991's "Diamonds and Pearls," which, even though it went double platinum on the strength of the hit "Cream," got assaulted because he added rap to the mix. The cries that arose must have reminded Prince of the time Dylan went electric. But as a legitimate R&B genre, rap was fair game to Prince, just another ingredient to be used in his elaborate concoctions. And on some tunes, like "Love 2 the 9's" on the follow-up "Symbol" album, it served his sexual purposes well, creating friction between sentiment and thrust.
These two discs, plus the preceding "Graffiti Bridge," constituted a period of deep experimentation for Prince, almost a public wood-shedding. It was as though he was trying to see how many tricks he could pull out of his magic bag -- strange, spooky, bent blues on "The Question of You," uber P-Funk on "We Can Funk" (co-written and performed with George Clinton), orgasmo guitar pop on "Cream," grand canyon grooves on "Sexy M.F." His best tunes were like flowers, starting with the seed of melody, then blossoming into all manner of orchestration and filigree. The worst collapsed under their own weight like supernovas.
Bottom line for Warner Bros., Prince moved product, and in September of '92 he signed the richest recording contract in history, one that promised funding for his own Paisley Park production company. Soon, though, he began to act like his pact was Faustian.
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