#193) Prince - So there were a few Prince songs further down this list that I'd have gotten to eventually, but given his sudden and shocking death yesterday, I figured I'd pay homage to the Purple One with my Top 5 picks from his incredible body of work, much like I did with Smokey Robinson a few months back.
I must confess, I was never a HUGE fan of Prince (primarily because it was hard to relate; as a young man I nurtured a cinematic vision in my mind of my own existence, and I never felt quite as closely acquainted with God or sex as Prince's screeching and wailing seemed to suggest he was...;-), but it can be said honestly that I never failed to acknowledge his talent, and I am now gripped by a strong posthumous impulse to recognize it openly.
In the studio, the guy was pretty much the sum of creative energy. He did it all, played virtually every instrument (starting with his outstanding voice) on every album, produced and mixed himself, and over time carefully (some would say jealously) guarded his image and his music, a practice that couldn't help but become confrontational as society entered the age of the Internet and social media, and copyright slowly (lamentably) became a gray area....and in doing so successfully branded himself. He was "Prince", and there were few who didn't know who that was, or what that was.
And yet, what that was, exactly, in his vast, trans-genre music, was kind of hard to define.
Okay, for a while he was "The Artist Formerly Known As...", but he came back eventually, and that contrived protest against his record label - though it lasted nearly a decade - never appeared to hurt him, or his legacy. For any artist of lesser greatness, lesser identity, it might have proven laughably fatal to change your name to an unpronounceable symbol and still expect to be taken seriously (some 80s has-been trying to stay in the limelight). But when he came back, he was still "Prince"...still as deserving of one-word name recognition as any artist who has ever grabbed our attention for even ten minutes.
Honestly (and I don't mean this in a mocking way at all), I barely thought of him as male or female, much less black or white. To me, artistically speaking, he really WAS just "Prince" - trans-everything - MORE than worthy, in the music world, of the sense of royalty inherent in his name. Not to mention the color purple. He was simply good...very, very good...at what he did. I guess it didn't really matter if I could specifically relate to what he was screeching and wailing about in his music, or what he happened to be calling himself that day. I listened. You can't not listen to Prince.
"When Doves Cry" is, for my money, the greatest pop song ever recorded. It's not even a pop song, really, it's something else all-together. It's in a class by itself, like the artist who created it, and listening to it is an experience. Really, who on God's green Earth could "When Doves Cry" BE, other than Prince? And by all accounts, the artist really did create it...put the whole damn thing together on his own. "Produced, arranged, composed and performed by..." Un-fucking-believable, if you really sit and think about it...really sit and listen to it.
Often with icons of Prince's caliber, you hear people say, "Forget the radio hits, seek out deep tracks and you'll REALLY be impressed!" Indeed, there's plenty of deep trackage worthy of exploration in the musical plane of existence Prince left behind, but for brilliance - musical iconography of the highest order - you needn't dig much deeper than what he put out on the radio.
Any one of these (and others) I'll be proud to jam to while I drive 14,000 miles. To be clear, it's just a small sampling, but I think it accurately represents the incredible range and talent of The Artist Forever Known as Prince.
"When Doves Cry"
"Kiss"
"Peach"
"The Beautiful Ones"
"Sexy MF"
"It's not about the body it's about the mind / Sexy motherfucker shaking that ass, shaking that ass, shaking that ass..."
