Here we are again, my first podcast in more than a year, and I couldn’t have asked for better guests than Harold Pride and De Angela Duff to discuss Prince’s fourth and quite possibly most underrated album, 1981’s Controversy. If you’ve been listening to these deep-dive album retrospectives, Harold needs no introduction; and, since the Prince scholarly community is a pretty small one, De Angela may not need one either. Suffice to say that she’s the biggest advocate of Controversy I know, and she makes a convincing case that it’s not only a great album in its own right, but also the linchpin of Prince’s entire career.
One quick note: you will likely notice that there was a significant drop in audio quality this episode; this was due to a perfect storm of technical issues that, unfortunately, left the low-quality Skype call recording as the only usable audio source from our conversation. I think you’ll get used to it, but I will assure you anyway that I’m taking steps to make sure we sound better next time. And yes, speaking of “next time,” I do have plans for more episodes in the coming months–probably not in October, but maybe one more before the end of the year, and then more to come in early 2023. If you want to hear the episodes as soon as they drop, remember to subscribe on your podcast service of choice using the links above!
Note: I first wrote about “Electric Intercourse” in 2017, when the previously-unheard studio version was released in advance of the deluxe expanded edition of Purple Rain. That original post has been preserved for posterity, but this is now the official D / M / S / R entry on the song.
Baby Prince tells us how many years D / M / S / R has been in operation; photo stolen from the Prince Museum on Twitter.
If you visited princesongs.org over the weekend, you may have already noticed that D / M / S / R’s long-delayed migration from WordPress.com to a self-hosted blog is finally complete! Well, mostly complete, anyway: I’m still working on getting the podcast feed back up and running, and I still need to figure out how to transfer a couple of stray comments over from the old site. I’m also having issues setting up the Patreon WordPress plugin–ironically one of the reasons I originally decided to self-host–so for now we’re going to have to handle Patreon-exclusive posts the same, slightly inelegant way we did on the old site.
But still, D / M / S / R looks and feels different now, and I hope you like it. I personally think it’s a lot slicker-looking and more readable; the WordPress theme I used (their default 2020 theme, believe it or not) puts a lot of emphasis on the content, and I followed their lead by cutting back on the sidebars and other bells and whistles. Also, you may notice that “Dance / Music / Sex / Romance” is now properly capitalized; this, like my original decision to use lower-case letters, is 100% based on what I think looks better with the default font.
But enough about that. We’re here to check in on my progress on this crazy project, which I started just about four years and one month ago. Last year, you might recall, I was wringing my hands over producing only 26 posts from June 2018 to May 2019. I had hoped to improve my output for 2019-20, but, well, you know what happened; a confluence of internal and external factors, most notably but not exclusively including a global pandemic, resulted in my taking an unprecedented three months off of all nonprofessional writing. In case you’re wondering, my total number of posts for this past year was 21, counting the Patreon-exclusive “bonus track” post for “You’re My Love.”
This is normally where I would start wringing my hands and making apologies and promises and self-deprecating jokes about being done with the project in 2036 (a number, by the way, that I am increasingly considering to be a genuine ballpark estimate). Here’s the thing, though: if the last year has taught me anything, it’s that shit is unpredictable and mostly outside my control. We’re all lucky to have made it past the halfway point of 2020 at all; worrying about “productivity” in times like these is just going to make my hair go gray more prematurely than it already is.
So this year, I’m not making any apologies or promises. Instead, I genuinely want to celebrate what I achieved in the past year, which was as challenging a year for me as any in recent memory. First and foremost, I got through three albums:
Besides that, the Patreon I launched last year–despite being suspended for almost as many months as it was in operation–has held more or less steady at a very respectable 20 monthly supporters. In fact, I want to welcome two new patrons, Alexander Ostroff and Anthony John Battaglia, who came on board just in the last week. The Patreon, you might recall, was meant to help my productivity, and on sum I think it has; this year has just been such a bastard that it’s hard to point to any objective evidence to support my gut feeling. As always, I’m appreciative of any support (including non-monetary), and not in the least offended if my work is not a priority for you to pay for at any given time. Do what you’ve gotta do! But I am going to be earning those Patreon dollars this month, and in the months to come, with a mix of early and exclusive posts that I think you’ll like.
Last but not least, the blog relaunch finally gave me the opportunity to make those revisions to old posts I’ve been promising for, oh, about two years now. I made a bunch of tiny formatting tweaks to almost every post, but if you’re interested in seeing some more substantial revisions, they’re linked below:
Now, for what to expect in Year Five: I recently put together a rough plan for what might be called the “long Purple Rain era,” which includes Purple Rain proper along with Around the World in a Day, the Time’s Ice Cream Castle, Sheila E’s The Glamorous Life, and the self-titled albums by Apollonia 6 and the Family. It comes to a total of 75 posts–roughly three years of writing, at my recent pace. My ambitious goal is to get it done a lot sooner: I’d love to wrap up Around the World in a Day by December 2021, so I can be writing about Parade by 2022. I think it’s technically possible if I can stay close to a post a week in the next 17 months; but, again, I’m not going to make any promises. A lot can happen (or not) in a year.
What I can say is that I’m feeling more invigorated about this project than I have, probably, since the year I launched it; and whether I make my ambitious goal or not, I want to make the fifth year of D / M / S / R its best yet, in terms of quantity but also (and more importantly) quality. Thank you to everyone who has supported this blog in any way since 2016; I hope you keep reading and enjoying it in the years to come, however many there end up being. I’ll leave you with this video I put together for last month’s DM40GB30 symposium, which I think does a good job of encapsulating my current philosophy about the blog:
(P.S. One last bit of housekeeping: the move to self-hosting unfortunately means that, if you subscribed to email alerts for my old WordPress.com blog, you’ll need to resubscribe for this one. Scroll down to the footer and you should see a box that reads “Subscribe to Blog via Email.” I promise this is the last time I’ll be relaunching like this in the foreseeable future, so this should be a one-time inconvenience!)
In case you missed it, yesterday I finally closed the book on the 1999 era for dance / music / sex / romance (well, almost… I still plan to write “bonus tracks” posts on “Vagina,” “Colleen,” “You’re All I Want,” and “Money Don’t Grow on Trees” for Patreon readers in the near future). This was the blog’s biggest undertaking to date: comprising 33 track posts and three albums, and taking almost 16 months from the first post (“International Lover,” way back in November of 2018!) and the last. As you know, I can be pretty tough on myself; but right now, I’m letting myself take some pride in what I’ve accomplished.
1999, as I’ve mentioned a few times before, is one of my favorite Prince albums; on a good day, it may even be number one, and it’s certainly near the top of my favorites by any artist. I won’t be so arrogant as to claim that I’ve done this masterpiece justice with 11 blog posts, but I sure as hell tried my best; so here they are now, in ascending order of my favorite tracks:
11. “Free” No surprises here, I’m guessing; I was pretty rough on “Free” in my original post, and it’s still the song I’m likeliest to skip when I’m listening to 1999 on a skip-friendly format. It ain’t so bad, really–any song as weird as this one is hard for me to outright hate–but it’s the weak point on an otherwise near-perfect album.
10. “International Lover” This ranking I feel a bit guiltier about, because “International Lover” really is a lot of fun: a chance for Prince to be sexy and silly in more or less equal measure, all while showing off his increasingly virtuosic vocals. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the live-in-the-studio first take on 1999 Super Deluxe, complete with barely-suppressed giggles by Prince and little-known session drummer Morris Day.
9. “Lady Cab Driver” This isn’t going to get easier, is it? Before you send me hate mail, know that I adore “Lady Cab Driver”–it’s just the textbook definition of an album track, there to add mood and menace (and, yes, funk) to the back half of 1999. If you’re wondering what I thought about “Rearrange,” one of the highlights of 1999 Super Deluxe, this post answers that question, too.
8.“Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)” Another of those moody disc two tracks: indispensable to 1999’s dystopian atmosphere, but not the first thing that comes to mind when I’m looking for a single track to play. I gave this the edge over “Lady Cab Driver” for the new life it took on in concert; see the long list of live reinterpretations at the end of the post.
7. “D.M.S.R.” It should tell you just how high in my esteem 1999 is as an album when the song I named my blog after doesn’t even make the top 50%. A great dance track, and an even better repository of weird little details: from “Jamie Starr’s a thief!” to Lisa’s blood-curdling scream for help.
6. “All the Critics Love U in New York” I know I might get some flack for ranking this above “D.M.S.R.” (and “Something in the Water,” and…), but “All the Critics” needs the boost. It’s an underrated snapshot of Prince at the cutting edge; a pitch-perfect homage to Detroit techno while the genre was still in its infancy.
5.“Delirious” As an avowed fan of Rockabilly Prince, who am I to deny the subgenre’s peak? “Delirious” may be 1999 at its most ’80s-dated, but I defy anyone to listen and not walk away with those damn keyboards stuck in your head.
4. “Automatic” My favorite of 1999’s darker, weirder second half, and maybe even the peak of New Wave Prince (another of my personal favorites, as readers are no doubt aware). If I had to pick a single track to explain why 1999 speaks to me personally–not the best or the most important song, but the one that scratches my own particular, deeply subjective itch–“Automatic” might be it.
3.“Let’s Pretend We’re Married” …Or, it might be this one. “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” is the album’s strongest showing for Dirty Prince, with his late-song monologue containing the most explicit language on the record; but for my money, the dirtiest thing about the track is the chugging, pumping bass-synth line, a retro-futuristic approximation of the world’s creakiest bedsprings.
2. “1999” Honestly, just call it a tie for first place. I’ve already expended a little over 4,700 words on “1999”–my longest single post to date!–so today, I’ll just say that the album version is a totally different beast from the radio edit: freakier, funkier, and still totally vital, even with the year 1999 (never mind the song) over 20 years in the rear-view mirror. Accept no substitutes.
1.“Little Red Corvette” Look, I’ve said before, my tastes as a Prince fan are pretty basic; and why not, since his biggest mainstream hits were as inventive as most artists’ avant-garde? “Little Red Corvette” may be the normie’s choice for best track on 1999, but that shouldn’t detract from the fact that it’s a fucking masterwork: as much a work of literature as it is an exemplar of pop songcraft. To paraphrase my appearance on Jason Breininger’s Press Rewindpodcast, if “Little Red Corvette” doesn’t outlast us all on this planet, then the planet was overrated anyway.
To no one’s surprise, my 1999 posts had the highest average word count of any album to date: 1,964, versus 1,758 forControversy, 1,653 for Dirty Mind, 1,383 for Prince, and 1,379 for For You.
So, what’s next? In terms of the main blog, it’s on to Purple Rain; I’ll be starting that chapter with “Baby I’m a Star.” As noted above, I’m also tying up some loose ends from the 1999 era with Patreon-exclusive posts in the near future; and, speaking of Patreon, it’s past time that I wrote my first patron-requested post: an alternate-timeline scenario requested by Darling Nisi, which will handily help set up the Purple Rain era. Finally, speaking of Nisi, I’ve already recorded a long-belated Dirty Mindpodcast with her and Harold Pride, which I’ll be putting up (first for patrons, and then for everyone) once I’ve finished editing it.
All of which is to say, there’s a lot in the pipeline; I just ask for your continued patience as I work on it. The international COVID-19 pandemic has injected a lot of instability into my day-to-day routine: I didn’t even have the chance to write on the blog that I would be presenting at the DM40GB30 symposium, originally scheduled for next month, before it was postponed until an undetermined later date. And while you might expect a self-imposed quarantine to be a boon for my productivity, the fact that I’ll also be juggling remote work with entertaining and educating a seven-year-old whose school has been shut down means that I’ll probably be spread thinner than usual. These are strange times, and I don’t know what is going to happen next. All I can promise is that I will keep writing, and I hope that you’ll keep reading, too.
In the meantime, here are those growing playlists.
A real-life "Lady Cab Driver," circa 1919; photo stolen from pastpictures.org.
Of the 11 songs that would eventually make their way onto Prince’s fifth album, “Lady Cab Driver” appears to have had the longest gestation period. The song was completed at Sunset Sound on July 7,1982, the day after “Moonbeam Levels”; but, as the recent Super Deluxe Edition of1999 revealed, its seeds had been planted during a break in the Controversy tour over half a year earlier on December 8, 1981, in the form of a different song called “Rearrange.”
According to an interview with sessionographer Duane Tudahl for the Minnesota Public Radio podcast The Story of 1999, “Rearrange” was long known to researchers by its title alone: “it was one of those songs that we’d heard existed, but I didn’t think it was actually a song,” Tudahl told host Andrea Swensson. “I thought it was just some shuffling of his stuff”–a studio note indicating a literal rearrangement of tapes. As it turned out, of course, it was real–though it was also little more than an admittedly funky sketch: a stark, mid-paced groove with a slick rhythm guitar hook similar to the Time track “The Stick.”
Given this similarity–not to mention Prince’s guitar solo, which plays neatly to Jesse Johnson’s combustive style–it seems likely that “Rearrange” was at least provisionally mooted for that group. But this is just speculation; ultimately, says Tudahl, we “don’t know whether it was intended for 1999, whether he was searching for a voice for 1999, or whether he was saying, ‘I gotta record another Time album soon.’ But either way it was something that was not planned. He just thought, ‘I’m in the studio, I gotta record… This is what I’m gonna do’” (Swensson 2019 Episode 2).
