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Welcome 2 America, 2011

Hot Summer

We’re now exactly one week out from the release of Prince’s shelved 2011 album Welcome 2 America–i.e., just enough time for Sony Legacy to push out one last promotional single to streaming services and, uh, TikTok. As a certified Old, I don’t have much to say about the last bit; but I can certainly share my thoughts about the song itself.

“Hot Summer” is one of a handful of tracks on Welcome 2 America that stretches the definition of “previously unreleased.” Prince premiered the song on Minnesota Public Radio station 89.3 The Current on his 52nd birthday, June 7, 2010, shortly after a heat wave pushed the temperature in Minneapolis to a record-breaking 95 °F on May 24. Initial reactions were, to put it kindly, mixed. Music blog Stereogum compared the song variously to Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” (!) and Hanna-Barbera mascot-suit bubblegum act the Banana Splits (!!), before concluding, “At least the lyrics are positive.” A 35-page thread on prince.org began with tepid praise but swiftly descended into mayhem, with arguments over whether the woman singing the hook was Janelle Monae (it’s Liv Warfield) and much hand-wringing over Prince’s “decline in writing ability.” Perhaps the most trenchant burn came a little less than two years later, when ex-Family frontman Paul Peterson responded to a subliminal swipe from Prince by remixing the track into a parody ad for Midwestern home improvement chain Menards.

Categories
Welcome 2 America, 2011

Born 2 Die

We now have just under two months to go before the release of Welcome 2 America, the album Prince recorded and shelved before his tour of the same name in 2010 and 2011. So, with the 63rd anniversary of the artist’s birth right around the corner on Monday, the time was ripe for another promotional single; and Sony Legacy has delivered with a track previously teased on 60 Minutes back in April, “Born 2 Die.” In fact, the drop appears to have been timed to commemorate not just one date, but two: Thursday, June 3 would have been the 79th birthday of Curtis Mayfield, whose early-’70s sound was a transparent source of inspiration for the song.

Categories
Welcome 2 America, 2011

Welcome 2 America

Even after the news was leaked by a French fansite earlier this year, I was still pleasantly surprised when the Prince Estate confirmed the shelved 2011 album Welcome 2 America for official release in July. Up until now, I’ve found the Estate’s posthumous release strategy to be laudable but predictable: alternating between expanded reissues from Prince’s critical and commercial peak (Purple Rain, 1999, Sign “O” the Times) and sure-thing one-offs engineered for mainstream attention (i.e., the Originals compilation of Prince’s versions of the hits he wrote for others). Even the closest thing to an odd one out, 2018’s Piano & A Microphone 1983, had the distinct commercial advantage of coming from the sessions for his most popular album.

Welcome 2 America, however, is something different: a complete album of almost entirely unreleased material, from a period of Prince’s career that even some of his biggest fans neglect. Case in point, well, me; I’d followed along with Prince’s contemporary music for 2004’s Musicology and 2006’s 3121, but fell off after 2007’s Planet Earth and 2009’s Lotusflow3r/MPLSound/Elixer threefer left me cold (for the record, I’ve since come around on Lotusflow3r and, thanks to friend of the blog Darling Nisi, even Elixer; Planet Earth and MPLSound, not so much). When the next album, 20Ten, wasn’t officially released in the U.S., I didn’t even care enough to try and pirate the MP3s. All of which is to say that Welcome 2 America is even newer to me than to many of the active fans who were following the news of its planned release at the time–and while that was my loss in 2011, a decade later it’s now my gain.

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Uncategorized

DM40GB30: Pandemonium Roundtable Panel

Last Friday, July 10, was the 30th anniversary of the Time’s fourth and (technically) final album, Pandemonium; so, to mark the occasion, the fantastic De Angela Duff has shared the Pandemonium roundtable from last month’s DM40GB30 symposium with myself, Darling Nisi, and Ivan Orr and Ricky Wyatt of the Grown Folks Music podcast.

I think it’s obvious from the conversation that we all had a great time (and if you’re looking for an extra great time, try taking a drink every time De Angela–whose favorite Time album is famously Pandemonium–pops into the live stream to interject). It was extremely flattering to be asked to share the “stage” with folks as knowledgeable about the Time and their place in the R&B scene as Ivan and Ricky, and KaNisa did a stellar job as always moderating. Can’t wait to do this again next year!

Categories
Ephemera, 1981-1982

Lust U Always (Divinity)

Note: Please be advised that this post contains frank and uncensored discussion of lyrics which explicitly reference sexual assault. 

There are any number of reasons why Prince may have left a given song in the Vault. There were, of course, the spatial limitations of recorded media: by 1982, Prince was producing more music than could be accommodated on two 12-inch sides of vinyl–hence why 1999 ended up as a double album, and why his singles increasingly came backed with non-LP B-sides. There were instances where a certain song may have been deemed too similar to another that ended up making the cut on the album: see, for example, “Turn It Up,” which some believe was left off 1999 in favor of “Delirious.” There was also an even simpler explanation, per Prince himself: “If any track is unreleased, it’s because it’s not done,” he reportedly told Dan Piepenbring, the co-author of his unfinished memoir, in 2016 (Prince 2019 16).

The particular song Prince was discussing with Piepenbring was “Extraloveable,” a widely-bootlegged track recorded at the beginning of April 1982 and not officially released until 2011. Taking Prince at his word that the song wasn’t “done” until Andy Allo rapped on it, I won’t write about it until we get to that point in our chronology; but I will posit a theory that there was another reason why it didn’t see the light of day. As anyone who’s heard the original version can attest, the song takes a turn in the last minute and a half or so. After six minutes of gently cajoling the listener to take a bath with him, Prince suddenly becomes menacing: “I’m on the verge of rape,” he grunts, repeating himself for good measure. A blast of discordant synthesizer noise takes over the mix, as if the song itself has begun to malfunction. “I’m sorry,” Prince intones in his detached android voice over the ongoing din, “but I’m just gonna have to rape you. Now are you going to get into the tub, or do I have to drag you? Don’t make me drag you.”

Prince was obviously no stranger to aberrant expressions of sexuality at this point in his career: on “Horny Toad,” he had imagined himself as an obscene phone caller, a groper, and a stalker; perhaps most notably, “Sister” had described an incestuous relationship of dubious consent. But the former song was obviously played for laughs, while the latter crucially depicted Prince as the victim of abuse, not the perpetrator. Interrupting an exuberant, sexy frolic to outright threaten sexual violence was clearly a bridge too far, even in the thick of Prince’s “Rude Boy” era. Which makes it all the more surprising that he did it again with another unreleased track recorded in the same year, “Lust U Always.”