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Roger McGuinn @ the Huntington IMAC, Long Island, NY - April 4, 2008
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Paul McCartney – The McCartney Years (DVD)
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Various Artists
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Day and Night Driving
Seven Mary Three
InterMedia Arts Center 2/2/08
Huntington, NY
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Prince
"You had a pocket full of horses, Trojans, and some of them used."
A love song to a girl who is funky enough to save used condoms? Well, there's a lyrical topic that hasn't been broached yet. When Prince came on to the scene, he brought topicality (some would say vulgarity) to a whole new level. He's written songs that deal with being seduced by his sister, practicing for a career in male prostitution, seducing a stranger in a wedding dress (who wants to preserve her virginity so she offers him fellatio instead)...and this was within the space of two songs from one album, the aptly titled "Dirty Mind". When taken out of context (as I have just done), these themes sound mindlessly vapid and resemble little more than a childishly cheap means to shock people. On record, though, Prince approaches his subjects with such religious fervor that he manages to convince us that his lyrics are as harmless, and maybe even as positively constructive, as the fantasies that inspired them. Unlike 2-Live Crew, whose immaturity is as immeasurable as their songs are irrelevant, Prince somehow conveyed a sense of responsible conviction in his outlook. His lyrics may shock us, but the real reason that they inspire such controversy is because we aren't used to hearing somebody, especially a man, sharing his fantasies with us. Prince's songs may sound as though they are emanating from the bedroom but they are actually emanating from his overactive imagination. He's not doing or saying anything that doesn't already reside somewhere in the recesses of our own thought patterns (Am I revealing too much of myself here?) I'm not saying that we are all suffering from a heady dose of immorality (Weren't you paying attention when Dr. Ruth explained that fantasies are normal and healthy?) What I'm saying is that it is the nature of a sexual fantasy to be a bit weird and thoroughly fantastic.
You might think that this kind of talk wouldn't exactly endear Prince to the traditional R&B audience, who prefer their sex to be considerably more traditional, at least on vinyl, yet they held on. He started out as a fairly ordinary R&B artist, but Prince quickly found himself moving away from the run-of-the-mill expectations of the dance-based charts. After the relatively tame "I Wanna Be Your Lover" became a #1 R&B single in 1979, Prince's style moved more toward contemporary hard rock and new wave, and the R&B audience followed him wherever he went, giving him over a dozen Top 10 R&B hits in ten years. His subject matter was hardly conducive to FCC (Federal Communications Comission) rules, but he continued to wow the critics, while becoming a conservative radio programmer’s worst nightmare (until Eminem, of course).
When he released his double album 1999 seventeen years before the album’s title date, Prince was being marketed to a rock and roll audience that was mostly unfamiliar with him. The three singles that were culled from this album soon changed that. Prince maintained more than a few traces of modern R&B while casting a sideways glance at new wave's stylish limitations. Instead of sinking in the mire of punk's anarchy, he immersed himself into the hedonism of contemporary dance music, with a dose of pre-apocalyptic fear thrown in for justification. The subject matter (of the singles- not the rest of the album) kept its sexuality steeped in well-chosen metaphor (reference the above-quoted gem) and this time, radio offered Prince no resistance at all. "Little Red Corvette" emanated out of car radios and Walkmans all over America. By concocting a deliberate blend of hard-core funk with the crossover sound of album-oriented radio and new wave styles, Prince salvaged pop music from itself and once again integrated it. At a time when MTV's extremely limited playlist was dangerously ignorant of black music styles, he and Michael Jackson became their token black performers.
Prince’s previous efforts suffered slightly from claustrophobic production but 1999 sounded more spacious and commercial, especially on the 45s. While the other two singles ("1999" and "Delirious") are excellent, as well, "Little Red Corvette" might qualify as the best single of Prince's long and varied career. Of the three, it benefits most from his improved production techniques. Full of self-doubt and electricity, the song is overflowing with a sexual tension that builds and builds until it breaks down in a post-orgasmic shudder, only to pick up all over again just a few moments later. This time, the intensity rises even further as the song 'fades to black', presumably to grant the couple a bit of privacy. Now that's stamina.
Was Prince nothing more than a self-obsessed loon who brought onanism to new aural heights, or was he a driven visionary who wove a diorama of God (the backdrop) and sex (the foreground) into a workable philosophy for a post-modern society to live by? Naturally enough, it depends upon your point of view concerning the new morality, and that would probably depend on whether or not you sympathized with his uninhibited and insatiable sex drive. Either way, Prince was certain to get your attention. By his next album and the corresponding movie, Purple Rain, he'd be unavoidable.
 
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