Yes, I know, three Prince: Track by Track posts in a row isn’t exactly a testament to my productivity, but I’m still aiming to get “Nasty Girl” out by the end of the week. Meanwhile, here’s me and Track by Track host Darren Husted on a nice little tune from Prince’s underrated 20Ten album:
Thanks for your patience as I continue to work on the next chapter!
As I continue to work on my next proper post, I’m happy to share another collaborative effort I had the opportunity to participate in with popular YouTubers Prince’s Friend, Nightchild-Ethereal, and Mr. Ant. We discussed the eight main drummers Prince worked with during his career–Bobby Z, Sheila E, Michael B, Kirk Johnson, Cora Coleman-Dunham, John Blackwell, and Hannah Welton–and ranked them based on our performances. I hope you enjoy it, even if for some reason I was not looking at the camera in the first clip! Thanks to Prince’s Friend for the opportunity, and to Darling Nisi for recommending me.
Happy New Year, everyone! I’m starting 2018 more excited about this project than ever, and I think you’ll enjoy what I have planned. But first, here’s something I did for another chronological Prince project: Darren Husted’s excellent podcast Prince: Track by Track. Our topic this time around is a bit of a guilty pleasure: the Diamonds and Pearls album cut “Daddy Pop.” But you should still listen, if only to hear my surprisingly spirited defense of Tony M:
While I’ve got you here, I guess I might as well talk about a few of those things I have planned for the months to come. First up will be another, imaginative look at what might have been for Prince’s relationship with André Cymone; then, starting next week, I’ll be jumping into the songs that became the debut album by Prince’s first official protégé group, the Time. On the podcast, you can also look forward to an interview with Kimberly Ransom, whose work appeared both at last spring’s University of Salford Prince conference and in last fall’s special Prince issue of the Journal of African American Studies. I’m also in the early brainstorming period for a series of podcasts on each of Prince’s albums I’ve covered in writing so far, beginning with the 40th anniversary of For You in April. If you have any ideas for that–including suggestions for possible guests–you know where to find me.
“To me, disco was always very contrived music,” Prince told NME’s Chris Salewicz in 1981. “It was all completely planned out for when the musicians were recording it in the studios.” In contrast, he claimed, “what I do is just go in and play” (Salewicz 1981). I don’t know if Prince had his own 1979 song, “Sexy Dancer,” in mind when he gave this interview. Most likely he did not; the two years between the song’s recording and his conversation with Salewicz, after all, represent basically an eternity in Prince time. But his comments are nevertheless instructive for understanding the song’s approach to what is–sorry, Prince–clearly an engagement with disco, if not strictly a disco track.
His stated distaste for the genre aside, Prince was clearly no stranger to disco in 1979. In his interview with Martin Keller of the Twin Cities Reader early that year, he mentioned that he “used to hang out at the Infinity,” a dance club in suburban St. Louis Park (Keller 1979). What he shared with many other musicians of the era, however, was a healthy skepticism for disco’s emphasis on the role of the producer. Disco, Prince told Salewicz, “was filled with breaks that a studio musician would just play and fill up when his moment came.” But Prince was his own producer–and, for that matter, his own studio musicians. “It’s easy for me to work in the studio,” he claimed, “because I have no worries or doubts about what the other musician’s going to play because that other musician is almost always me!” So, rather than playing to “fill up the breaks” in a producer’s master plan, Prince would “just play along with the other guy”–himself (Salewicz 1981).
