Wednesday, January 26, 2005
I really wish I could find an image online of the back cover of this album, which features a picture of Prince naked (or at least shirtless) and riding a winged horse. Do people know how good this album is? I'm really not sure. It's hard to describe anything Prince did before say, '89 or '92 as underrated. But as far as Prince's first 4 albums, even though it was his biggest selling album at the time and had his biggest pre-1999/megastardom hit, "I Wanna Be Your Lover" (#1 on the R&B chart, #11 pop), it feels really slept on, critically at least, forever in the shadow of Dirty Mind and Controversy, which are themselves in the shadow of the rest of his 80's catalog. But if I had to choose between Dirty Mind and Prince, there'd be no competition really.
Dirty Mind introduced Prince as he's best known: the sexually confrontational lyrics, the LinnDrum rhythms, the almost clausterphobically spare arrangements, the beginning of his status as a critical favorite. Prince is relatively free of his defining eccentricities; he still knows how to spell "you", and the most sexually explicit he gets is when he pauses for a beat to suggest the double meaning of "I wanna be the one that makes you come...running!". DM has a few good songs, but to me it's always sounded flat and tentative compared to later albums, while Prince is fully realized in its own way, even if it’s not in itself a full realization of the genius he would later reveal. At the time, for all anyone knew he was just another kid with a falsetto riding the wave of disco. The arrangements aren't particularly daring; there's some synth swooshes, but it's otherwise mostly traditional piano and guitar sounds over live drums. Even "Soft And Wet", the previous single from his debut album, more closely resembles his later work more than anything on Prince. Which is not to say that nothing here foreshadows his later, bolder records. "Sexy Dancer" and "Bambi" introduce what would become 2 of his favorite song archetypes: the sweaty minimalist funk workout, and and the pop metal jam full of wailing solos.
My shit, though, is "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?", which has even better solos, and a tremendous chorus. I had heard plenty of Prince songs before, but that's the one that hooked me, when my friend Mat played it for me when we were hanging out at a friend's place in New York for the weekend, and pointed out that little 2 note keyboard hook that pops up in the 2nd verse, and told me about how when he played it on American Bandstand, he did this little move in time with the riff where his hands and knees moved in opposite directions. Against conventional wisdom, I made this the first Prince album I ever heard, and I suddenly wondered why I'd been ignoring this guy's music for the first 18 years of my life.
Besides my favorite songs, Prince is rounded out nicely by "Feel For You", which was a hit for Chaka Khan in 1984, and of course "I Wanna Be Your Lover". The album's greatest weakness is the dominance of ballads, which account for 4 of the last 6 tracks on the album. But even among those, only half of them don't really work. "Still Waiting" is a bit too saccharine, and the schmaltzy, dragging "With You" feels esepcially lightweight directly following the hypnotic "When We're Dancing Close and Slow", which drifts along on acoustic finger picking and gorgeous tinkling pianos. But they perhaps all pale to the fantastic album closing power ballad "It's Gonna Be Lonely", which rides out the last chorus so many times and pulls so many stops -- that parts where everything but the vocals drop out and he hits those high notes, "it's gonna bee-hee-hee!" -- that you never want it to end, which is exactly what the last track on an album should do.
Labels: Prince, R and B, rock'n'roll
