Tag: purple rain film

Moonbeam Levels (The New Master)

Moonbeam Levels (The New Master)

(Featured Image: Outtake from the 1999 photo sessions, by Allen Beaulieu; © the Prince Estate.)

Note: Incredibly, it’s been just over three years since I first wrote about “Moonbeam Levels” for dance / music / sex / romance. That post focused on the song’s status as the first posthumously-released track from Prince’s Vault, and was colored by the then-recent passings of both Prince and David Bowie, who I still consider to be an unsung source of inspiration for the song. You can still read that version if you want; but here is what I now consider to be the official d / m / s / r take on “Moonbeam Levels.”

In early July 1982, after spending the latter half of the spring back home in Minnesota, Prince returned to Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. His goal, almost certainly, was to put the finishing touches on the album that would become 1999. But in typical fashion, he overshot that goal: instead, launching himself into the stratosphere with the appropriately extraterrestrial outtake “Moonbeam Levels.”

In some ways, “Moonbeam Levels” feels very much of a piece with the other songs Prince was recording in mid-1982. Like many of the tracks that would end up on 1999, it opens with a prominent Linn LM-1 beat: in this case, the mechanical pulse of a bass drum, punctuated by a hiss of synthesized exhaust. To this futuristic foundation, Prince adds Blade Runner synth pads and lyrics evoking space travel: his narrator fantasizes about “a nice condo overlookin’ the rings of Saturn” and asks for the titular “moonbeam levels,” a poetic turn of phrase that conjures up images of interplanetary transmissions and cosmic rays. Meanwhile, the ever-present threat of annihilation looms: Prince imagines a never-written novel with the capsule summary, “Boy loses girl in a rainstorm, nuclear World War III,” his pet themes of personal and global apocalypse summed up in a single, devastating line. The whole package feels custom-built for precisely the kind of science-fiction pop-funk epic Prince had spent the past six months assembling piece by piece.

Continue reading “Moonbeam Levels (The New Master)” →

Don’t Let Him Fool Ya

Don’t Let Him Fool Ya

(Featured Image: Automotive engineer/cocaine trafficker John DeLorean and wife Cristina Ferrare, circa 1981; photo by Tony Korody/Sygma.)

Of the many unreleased tracks Prince recorded in 1982–enough to fill at least two additional double LPs beyond the one that actually did come out, as the new Super Deluxe edition of 1999 demonstrates–“Don’t Let Him Fool Ya” is not the most exciting; nor is it the rarest, the most ambitious, or the most thematically compelling. As the 500 Prince Songs blog noted back in 2017, it’s “barely even a song, more a tantric joy in bass-led repetition.” To say that it’s the kind of thing Prince could have written in his sleep does Prince, and sleep, a disservice; after all, we know by his own admission that “Little Red Corvette” came to him between “3 or 4 catnaps” (Dash 2016).

But for all that, it’s easy to see why “Don’t Let Him Fool Ya” was chosen as a pre-release single to promote Warner Bros.’ aforementioned 1999 reissue, following a live version of the title track from Detroit’s Masonic Temple and the live-in-studio first take of “International Lover.” Simply put, “Don’t Let Him Fool Ya” is a banger, with an infectious bassline and a sparkling, rhythmic keyboard part not unlike the one from the Time’s “I Don’t Wanna Leave You.” And while it’s also clearly a throwaway–the chorus literally goes, “Hey, hey / Hey, hey / Hey, hey, hey, hey”–I defy anyone to get through it without at least a head bob and a smile.

Continue reading “Don’t Let Him Fool Ya” →

Patreon Exclusive: Review – The Beautiful Ones

Patreon Exclusive: Review – The Beautiful Ones

(Featured Image: Cover art for The Beautiful Ones by Prince, from Amazon.)

As promised, I’ve sorted through my thoughts on The Beautiful Ones, the new part-memoir, part-scrapbook from the Prince estate, and have made them available for patrons here:

Patreon Exclusive: Review – The Beautiful Ones

TL;DR version for non-patrons: it is what it is, I’m glad it exists, but it’s inescapably dwarfed by the possibilities of what a completed memoir might have been. On the other hand, this is Prince we’re talking about, so who’s to say that the book would have ever come out even if he’d lived to finish it?

I’m sure a lot of readers have also been digging into The Beautiful Ones this last week, so I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment and let me know how you’re processing the book, what you think of it, what’s most (or least) compelling to you, etc.! And of course, if you haven’t bought the book yet, feel free to do so using my Amazon affiliate link.

A few housekeeping-type notes before I go: first, now that I’m pretty sure I have my shit together again, the blog is moving back to a Patreon-first schedule: I’m hoping to have the next post (on “Horny Toad”) up for patrons tomorrow, to appear on the regular blog next week. After that, I’m once again leaving the next post up to patrons: the choice is between “Lust U Always” and “Don’t Let Him Fool Ya,” and as of this writing the former is winning. If you have a dog in this particular fight and want your voice to be heard, you can become a patron at the $5 level or above and vote–preferably by the end of the weekend, as I’ll need to start writing soon!

Finally, you might have noticed that the blog is now ad-free; this is an intentional choice, both because I’m shilling the Patreon enough without involving other revenue streams and because frankly today’s Internet ad rates are too low to justify the ugliness of advertisements all over the website. Thanks for tolerating them while they were here.

I think that’s it for now. Looking ahead, if I can keep to my current schedule, we’ll be closing out 2019 with a real big one. I can’t wait!

Automatic

Automatic

(Featured Image: Jill Jones and Lisa Coleman act out Prince’s sapphic S&M fantasies in the too-hot-for-TV “Automatic” video; © Warner Bros.)

By the beginning of May 1982, Prince had recorded more than enough quality new material to fill a single LP; but he was still only a little more than halfway finished with the album that would become 1999. “I didn’t want to do a double album, but I just kept writing and I’m not one for editing,” he later explained to Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times. “I like a natural flow. I always compare songwriting to a girl walking in the door. You don’t know what she’s going to look like, but all of a sudden she’s there” (Hilburn 1982).

The “girl” that walked in the door of Sunset Sound on May 2 was “Automatic”: the third–and, at nine and a half minutes, longest–of 1999’s extended electro-funk jams. Like its siblings “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” and “D.M.S.R.,” “Automatic” unfolds over a rigid, knocking Linn LM-1 beat and a deceptively simple synthesizer hook–in this case, a sing-song four-note pattern perfectly honed to penetrate the cerebral cortex. But with its lyrical themes of emotion as technology, the song is ultimately closer in spirit to its more introspective neighbor on the album, “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute).” The key difference is that, while “Something in the Water” is all about (perceived) malfunction, “Automatic” finds both pleasure and unease in the machine working exactly as designed.

Continue reading “Automatic” →