Tag: morris hayes

Categories
Uncategorized

#PrinceTwitterThread: “Endorphinmachine”

As I’ve alluded a few times recently, the last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic in my neck of the woods; but I still had to make the time to participate in this month’s #PrinceTwitterThread series on 1995’s The Gold Experience. I know I remain, somewhat unfashionably, an ’80s Prince guy, but The Gold Experience is one of my faves from the ’90s and “Endorphinmachine” is an absolute banger. Check out the thread below, and be sure to also make your voice heard on the poll I posted pitting the raw original mix against the clunktastic album version. Also, stay tuned to @PrinceThread on Twitter; the series just got started, and is going all the way through the Record Store Day release of The Gold Experience on Saturday the 18th!

Continue reading “#PrinceTwitterThread: “Endorphinmachine””
Categories
Welcome 2 America, 2011

Hot Summer

Photo by Mike Ruiz; © Sony Legacy/the Prince Estate.

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.

Continue reading “Hot Summer”
Categories
Welcome 2 America, 2011

Born 2 Die

Photo by Randee St. Nicholas; © Sony Legacy/the Prince Estate.

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.

Continue reading “Born 2 Die”
Categories
Uncategorized

Prince Track by Track: “The Morning After”

Jane Fonda in The Morning After, Sidney Lumet, 1986; © Twentieth Century Fox.

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:

Prince Track by Track:
“The Morning After”

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.

Categories
1999, 1982

All the Critics Love U in New York

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 January 1982 concluded with–and was 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 the 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 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., 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.”

Continue reading “All the Critics Love U in New York”