(Featured Image: “Pampered by all the finest amenities life has to offer, beautiful and wealthy Kristin Scott-Thomas is much sought after by two young men who are newcomers to life in the French Riviera in Under the Cherry Moon, a Warner Bros. release.”)
As promised/warned back at the beginning of the month, I’m intentionally taking my sweet time on the next post (though I will commit to getting it out by the end of the month). In the meantime, here’s my latest guest appearance on Darren Husted’s Prince: Track by Track podcast:
The last time I shared an episode of Prince: Track by Track, I promised that my next post would be something more substantial; so, to keep that promise, I held back on sharing this latest episode until now.
I have to confess that I wasn’t familiar with “The Morning After” until I signed up to talk about it; I bought my copy of LOtUSFLOW3R on CD (from Zia Records in Tucson, Arizona), so I was only familiar with the configuration of the album that included “Crimson and Clover” instead. I literally listened to the song seconds before recording this, so you’re hearing my unfiltered first impressions here:
Also, this week I noticed a curious spike in views for one of the most obscure songs discussed on the blog: a late 1978 demo that has been circulating under the title “Nadeara.” Turns out the reason for all the attention was one of Prince’s old notebooks, currently up for auction, which contains (among other things) a breakup letter from the real woman who inspired the song. Also, it turns out we’ve been spelling “Nadira” wrong all these years. Oops. Anyway, I’ve added a photo of the note to the post on “Nadira,” the song, and also included it below for those who might be interested:
From a notebook formerly belonging to Prince, circa 1979; photo stolen from RR Auction.
This is usually where I would make some kind of vague promise about when I’ll be posting again, but I’m actually not going to nail anything down yet because I know that the next piece I write is going to be longer and more research-intensive than usual. I will just say it’s a pretty significant chapter of the “story,” and I hope you’ll enjoy it once it’s ready.
(Featured Image: With an old friend at the American Music Awards in Los Angeles, January 25, 1982; that’s Steve Fargnoli in the background. Photo stolen from Consequence of Sound.)
Prince’s Los Angeles sojourn in mid-January 1982 concluded with–and was most likely scheduled around–the ninth annual American Music Awards, held at the Shrine Auditorium on January 25. He attended as a guest, not a nominee: the “Soul/R&B” category, for which he would have been nominated, was led by old-guard artists like Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson–as well as his rival of two years prior, Rick James.
Since the conclusion of the Fire It Up tour in May 1980, Prince’s and James’ career fortunes had diverged in unpredictable ways. Prince, as we’ve seen, had become a critics’ darling, trading the commercial success of his second album for the underground credibility of Dirty Mind and Controversy. James, meanwhile, had faltered with 1980’s flaccid Garden of Love–the album he’d allegedly recorded with a synthesizer stolen from Prince–but bounced back with the following year’s Street Songs: a masterpiece that finally made good on his “punk-funk” credo while leapfrogging his one-time usurper on the charts. Prince may have won 1980’s “Battle of the Funk,” but at the AMAs it was beginning to look like he’d lost the war, with James nominated for three awards–Favorite Soul/R&B Male Artist, Favorite Soul/R&B Album (which he won), and Favorite Soul/R&B Single for “Give It To Me Baby”–plus a proxy Favorite Soul/R&B Female Artist nomination for his protégée, Teena Marie.
It’s thus intriguing that only a few days before the awards, on January 21, Prince recorded a song that both satirized and propped up his critics’ darling status, while also lightly mocking the cultural rivalry between L.A.–home of Sunset Sound, Warner Bros. Records, and the AMAs–and its older, snootier cousin to the East, New York City. The song, one of the highlights of his fifth album 1999, was called “All the Critics Love U in New York.”
Just one more piece of housekeeping before I get back to proper posts–here’s my latest appearance on Darren Husted’s Prince: Track by Track podcast, where I got to talk about what has, in what feels like an escalating series of bets with myself, somehow become my favorite song from 2007’s Planet Earth:
Also, given the obvious overlap between fans of Prince and Chaka Khan, I thought there might be some interest in my review of her very good latest album for Slant magazine:
This is actually my last Slant review for a while, as I’m trying to focus my extracurricular writing time on this blog. And on that note, the next time you hear from me, it’ll be with a new post on “All the Critics Love U in New York.”
It’s been a little bit of a crazy week, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait a while longer for my next real post on “All the Critics Love U in New York”; but I haven’t been completely lax in my Prince-writing duties. Over at Spectrum Culture, where I occasionally lend my pen, I reviewed the new batch of vinyl reissues from Prince’s mid-2000s “comeback” era:
These weren’t my favorite albums when they came out, and to be frank they still aren’t (though 3121 aged pretty damn well); but they cover a period of great historical interest, and I’m glad they’re being made available for a new audience. If you haven’t picked up your own copies yet and you want to support d / m / s / r, you are welcome to do so through these Amazon affiliate link: Musicology, 3121, Planet Earth.
On a somewhat Prince-related tip, I also wrote a piece for Spectrum this week about Beck’s Midnite Vultures, which is turning 20 this year in what I can only interpret as an act of personal aggression against me. You can read it here and find out why I think it actually owes less to Prince than to David Bowie, specifically 1975’s Young Americans:
Next week, I’ll finally have a little more time to do some writing for himself (a.k.a., this blog). I’m also recording another batch of Prince: Track by Track episodes tomorrow, the first of which you should be hearing very soon. Perhaps, at some point, I will also get some sleep.
