Over the coming weeks we will surely be hearing so much
Prince you’ll think it’s 1984 again. The reason is an undeniably sad one, but
Prince’s music is almost scientifically designed to make people happy, so there
has never been a better time to spin the hits. And there’s no doubt the hits
will get the most spinning. Prince had enough that it shouldn’t get too
repetitious, but he was an artist through and through, and his album tracks and
B-sides were very often as spectacular as the stuff that got lots of radio
play.
So now would be a good time to roll out 21 underrated Prince
songs for those who’ve never gone deeper than The Hits. In fact, my sole criterion for determining what might be
underrated was to simply eliminate anything that wasn’t on volumes one and two
of that compilation series (the bonus disc of B-sides, however, was fair game).
My one other exception was “Batdance”, a number one hit that somehow got left
off of The Hits, possibly because
it’s enduring reputation is not quite as respected as that of, say, “1999” or
“When Doves Cry”. Nevertheless, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,
“Batdance” is the most bizarre and experimental song to ever take Billboard’s
top spot, and in it’s own way, it is completely underrated. Yet I’m pretty sure
you’ve heard it… at least you did if you were alive in 1989, and if you
weren’t, why are you reading Psychobabble? Unless you’ve served as a foot
soldier in the Purple Legion, there’s a fair chance you have not heard all 21 of
the following underrated Prince songs.
1. “Sister” (from
the album Dirty Mind) 1980
Ever since those primordial days when Jackie Brenston warned
you ladies he was gonna introduce you to his “Rocket 88,” Rock & Roll has
had a very dirty mind. In the sixties, guys like Mick Jagger and Lou Reed upped
Rock’s pornography quotient, but none of those cats had the sheer audacity to
do what Prince did on his third album and first true mission statement. Dirty Mind pirouetted over a series of
sexual taboos, culminating in “Sister”, an ode to incest screeched in gospel
rapture that not only memorializes losing one’s virginity to a sibling but also
tosses in references to S&M, blow jobs, blue balls, and getting one’s
underwear caught in one’s pubes. It was as if Prince wanted to separate the
fair-weather “I Wanna Be Your Lover” fans from the real freaks who would follow
him down any dark alley he chose. Those who did were rewarded a-hundred fold.
2. “Private Joy”
(from the album Controversy) 1981
Compared to “Sister”, a love song about sex toys is positively
G-rated, but Prince’s delighted squeal makes “Private Joy” sound just as dirty.
On Controversy, he opened up his
sound with less homemade production values, making “Private Joy” also sound
more accessible than “Sister” or the rest of Dirty Mind. Perhaps that also makes it more subversive, but as is
always the case with Prince’s songs, after the shock value wears off, the sheer
infectious danceability lives on infinitely.
3. “Automatic”
(from the album 1999) 1982
Prince’s ultimate epic of debauchery arrived on the album
that made him a superstar, so perhaps “Automatic” is his most subversive song
of all. It begins as a fairly conventional love song, though the mechanical
rhythm is an early hint that something strange is afoot. As the song develops over
nine and a half mesmeric minutes, Prince and his newly acquired Revolution take
a slow decent to Hell, ending up in the eighth circle of sexual torture where
souls tormented with pleasure cry out at the mercy of their cruel Purple
Master. “Automatic” is Prince at his most awe-inspiring and disturbing. It is
Prince at his greatest.
4. “Something in the
Water (Does Not Compute)” (from the album 1999) 1982
Prince’s experimentalism slipped into a strange new cube
with “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)”. No longer were his mechanical
rhythms danceable. They were the sounds of a system running on its last bit of
RAM, headed toward a digital scrap heap. The sounds function as the backdrop
for Prince’s nasty reaction to a woman’s iciness, matching his most progressive
music with the most retrograde-blues sentiments. Prince’s tendency to lapse into
misogyny was never one of his most admirable traits, but “Something in the
Water” is still a striking and frightening chip of anti-funk.
5. “All the Critics
Love U in New York” (from the album 1999)
1982
Prince is still wielding a blade on this groove from his
breakthrough album. This time his problem is critics, but it isn’t that they
don’t dig his music; it’s that NYC critics dig everything. Prince turns up his nose at anyone who would praise punk
or hippie jams… strange considering that he was more than a little influenced
by big-time hippies such as The Beatles and Hendrix. Once again, Prince’s anger
seems misdirected, but his funk is focused as a laser beam and twice as hot.
6. “Take Me with U”
(from the album Purple Rain) 1984
Case in point regarding that Beatles love. “Take Me with U”
is Prince in full-on flowery mode with a sixties psych pop vibe vibrant as
Lovely Rita’s meter maid uniform or Mr. Kite’s fairground. His reference to
spending the night in his “mansion,” however, is pure Reagan-era
bigger-is-better materialism. Prince’s Earthly desires were always at the other
end of the seesaw from his loftier needs. On this particular track, Apollonia
is on the other end too, providing sweet counterpoint to this
sixties-meets-eighties valentine. It is a piece of perfect pop, and my personal
Prince favorite, but it was not one of his most successful singles. Released after
everyone on Earth already owned a copy of Purple
Rain, it was doomed to miss the top twenty and its rightful status as one
of Prince’s greatest hits. The airwaves’ loss is this list’s gain.
7. “The Beautiful
Ones” (from the album Purple Rain)
1984
Prince’s greatest album begins in a state of euphoria,
immediately hitting the listener with the frenzy of “Let’s Go Crazy” and the
felicity of “Take Me with U”. On track three, everything halts. The pace slows
to a snake slither. Prince’s voice disappears into the helium ether. Gone is the
joy that began the record. Gone is the delicious melody. Only pain remains.
Prince ignites the ultimate slow burn, and as the inferno swells, he loses it.
Completely. He cries. He begs. He screams. Utterly chilling, utterly
spellbinding, utterly real.
8. “Baby, I’m a Star”
(from the album Purple Rain) 1984
By the end of the album, the joy is back in a mammoth way,
peaking with another crazed plea. But instead of begging for love, Prince is
begging for the recognition that he is a superstar. He’d already become one
with the smashing success of 1999.
With Purple Rain, he became a fucking
galaxy. This get-off-your-ass-and-tear-down-the-ceiling-with-your-teeth freak out
is all the proof of that you need. As the B-side of “Take Me with U”, “Baby,
I’m a Star” also completes one of pop’s great double-sided does of amphetamines.
Doctor!
9. “Erotic City”
(B-side) 1984
The flip of “Let’s Go Crazy” got plenty of radio time in
1984. This was a pretty radical choice considering how delightfully filthy
“Erotic City” is. DJs rationalized it by choosing to hear “we can fuck until the dawn” as “we can funk until the dawn.” Even if that was
what Sheila E. was singing, the next line would still be “making love ’til
cherry’s gone”! The FCC was not as easily fooled and made quite a bit of bread
on the fines it handed out to American radio stations. As always, Prince is not
content to just go for shock, and he raises one of his gnarliest funks around
one of his gnarliest lyrics.
10. “Around the World
in a Day” (from the album Around the
World in a Day) 1985
Prince had made one of the
massive smash eighties pop albums with Purple
Rain. On his next album, he blended his own special brand of pop with that
of pop’s all-time massive smash group by dressing up his songs in multicolored Sgt. Pepper’s uniforms. Actually, the
title track of Around the World in a Day
(a collaboration with Lisa Coleman’s brother David) may owe more to Satanic Majesties-era
Rolling Stones than The Beatles, with its spiraling arabesques and “Sing This
All Together” community vibe. The concept of “a government of love and music
boundless in its unifying power,” however, is one of the most perfect
summations of Beatles ’67 imaginable. It’s one of the most perfect summations
of Prince ’85 too.
11. “Paisley Park”
(from the album Around the World in a Day)
1985
Prince pulls back the pace. The funky acid is kicking in.
His voice swells and thins. Your heart bursts into paisley confetti. Prince
welcomes the abused and the homeless to a trippy wonderland where everyone’s
smiles speak “of profound inner peace.” He imagines a Utopian shelter in song
and builds one for himself in reality with the estate/studio of the same name. “Paisley
Park” is another intoxicating piece of eighties psychedelia, and an early
indication of the social consciousness that was beginning to roll through
Prince’s music with greater frequency.
12. “Tamborine”
(from the album Around the World in a Day)
1985
After the psych fancies of the last two songs, Prince is
back in more familiar territory with a good old sexual metaphor. The instrument
in the title isn’t really a round thing with jangles. It’s the thing on his
baby and the thing on himself he wants to play with all day. The jerky groove
forgoes all psychedelic doodads, playing out as one of Prince’s purest,
clearest recordings.
13. “She’s Always in
My Hair” (B-side) 1985
The B-side of “Raspberry Beret”, perhaps Prince’s most
enchanting Beatles tribute, has more of the psychedelic flavor of Around the World than “Tamborine” does.
The heavily phased drums are disorienting. The lyric will re-orient you,
though, with a simple and sweet celebration of a woman who makes everything bad
good again. Though it has some truly great songs, Around the World in a Day is a bit of an uneven album as a whole.
It would have been a lot more even if one of the weaker tracks were replaced
with this one.
14. “Girls & Boys”
(from the album Parade) 1986
Prince’s next album was more consistent than Around the World in a Day. That’s a
relief considering that it’s also the soundtrack of an abysmal movie. However,
if Parade would not have existed
without Under the Cherry Moon, it’s a
good thing that movie got made. Otherwise, there would be no “Girls &
Boys”, a cheeky little pop funk full of grunty horns, chiming percussion, and
French kissing.
15. “Mountains”
(from the album Parade) 1986
On “Mountains”, Prince builds an ascending riff as towering
and massive as the title objects. His songs are often emotionally raw, often
depraved, often unsettling, often absurdly hummable, often dance-inducing.
However, they are rarely as majestic
as “Mountains”.
16. “The Ballad of
Dorothy Parker” (from the album Sign
O’ the Times) 1987
Prince’s talent is outsized. So is his output. During a
decade when artists were expected to take a few years to generate new product, he
released a new album nearly every year. And nearly all of them were great! He released
one of the greatest toward the end of the decade when you’d think his resources
would have been kicked… and it was a double album! And that double album, Sign
O’ the Times, stands as one of Prince’s defining statements. One of its
most unique tracks is the vertiginous “Ballad of Dorothy Parker”. Funnily, the
song does not pay tribute to the famous Algonquin Round Table wit, but it does
feature a shout out to one of Prince’s favorite artist’s, Joni Mitchell.
17. “It” (from
the album Sign O’ the Times) 1987
Alright, Prince has a song called “It”, and I’ll give you
three guesses what the “it” in question is, even though you only need
one, because almost every Prince song on this list has been about “it.” Does he
really need to add “fuckin’ on your mind” after shouting “think about it all
the time”? Probably not. So what if the lyric is predictable Prince horniness
when the music is also a predictably stellar Prince groove. He could still make
it sound fresh.
18. “Strange
Relationship” (from the album Sign O’
the Times) 1987
He could still make pure pop sound fresh too, though he
sours it with a lyric about an emotionally abusive relationship. Prince must
have taken great delight in impelling you to dance to songs with really fucked-up
lyrics.
19. “The Cross”
(from the album Sign O’ the Times)
1987
Prince lived by the cross as much as he lived by the cock, a
concept that apparently disturbed him enough to drive him to write
“Temptation”, one of his most revealing (though, frankly, ham-fisted and unmusical) songs.
Yet Prince did seem to feel that eroticism and spirituality are not mutually
exclusive, otherwise a song like “It” couldn’t sit on the same record as “The
Cross”. Instead of flogging himself for his sins during an explicit battle
between angels and devils as he did on “Temptation”, Prince goes the subtler
route on “The Cross”. Using that Christian symbol as a basic symbol for hope in the face of poverty is as explicitly
religious as the song gets. Musically, it’s one of Prince’s most enthralling piece of psychedelia, a
droning raga rocker that rises from a hush to build to a glorious climax.
20. “Electric Chair”
(from the album Batman) 1989
When Tim Burton got the gig of directing what would be the
biggest blockbuster of 1989, he wanted his usual partner, Danny Elfman, to
write the score. Producer Jon Peters had a more original idea. He wanted
Prince. Burton and Peters compromised; Elfman would write the proper score and
Prince would contribute a couple of pop songs. Prince, however, does not know
what a compromise is, and when he wrote an entire album’s worth of songs, Batman found itself with two tie-in albums. Prince’s LP may not
be as fondly remembered as 1999 or Purple Rain, and its smash single
“Batdance” tends to get thought of as a mere novelty today (you already know my
feelings on that topic, Dear Reader), but Batman
actually has its share of excellent songs. The grinding “Electric Chair”, which
would end up getting ground up and sprinkled into “Batdance”, is one of them.
21 “200 Balloons”
(B-side) 1989
In fact, Prince recorded so many great songs for Batman, there wasn’t enough room on the
record for all of them. Because it was somewhat similar to “Trust”, and because
it was originally supposed to appear in the film where “Trust” ended up, “200
Balloons” ended up getting cut. So, once again, a terrific track—and really, one
superior to the track to which it lost its spot—landed on a B-side, adorning
the rear end of “Batdance” (as was the case with “Electric Chair”, shards of it
also landed in “Batdance”). That’s too bad, but if that hadn’t happened, “200
Balloons” might not pack the same thrill of discovery that the other twenty
underrated tracks on this list do.
