Tag: rick james

Patreon Exclusive: Review – On Time: A Princely Life in Funk

Patreon Exclusive: Review – On Time: A Princely Life in Funk

(Featured Image: Cover art for On Time: A Princely Life in Funk by Morris Day and David Ritz, from Amazon.)

Folks, I know I’ve been very quiet around these parts lately, but I promise it isn’t because I’m lazy–I’ve just been spread so thin at my day job that I’ve come dangerously close to burning out. If you’re a supporter of the Patreon, don’t worry: I am cancelling payments for the month of November to make up for my inactivity this month. Everyone else, I will be back on track soon–and I’m happy to announce that the next song post is “Purple Music,” which should be a lot of fun to write!

In the meantime, patrons can now read my review of On Time, the new autobiography by Morris Day with David Ritz:

Patreon Exclusive: Review – On Time

The short version: it’s a fun read, but a little on the slight side. If you want to check out the book and also provide some modest support to dance / music / sex / romance, feel free to use my Amazon affiliate link. Otherwise, I will see you–cross my heart, etc.–soon.

Free

Free

(Featured Image: A family picnics with giraffes in a 1982 ad for the Soviet VAZ 2101; photo stolen from Soviet Visuals.)

In late April 1982, the majority of the tracks Prince had completed for his fifth album fell under one of two categories: extended electro-funk grooves (“All the Critics Love U in New York,” “Let’s Pretend We’re Married,” “D.M.S.R.”) and slippery R&B slow jams (“International Lover”). But the song he recorded on April 25, just five days after “D.M.S.R.,” was an outlier both on the album and in his career to date: a theatrical rock ballad with vaguely propagandistic undertones called “Free.”

From its opening moments, “Free” lays on the grandiosity, with the sound of a heartbeat overlaid by marching footsteps and waves crashing on the shore–clips raided from Sunset Sound’s library of sound effects, the same source as the traffic noise from “Lady Cab Driver” and “All the Critics.” Just as these sounds fade away, Prince enters the mix, his gossamer falsetto accompanied by a crystalline piano line. Bass and drums slip softly into formation, followed by dramatic guitar chords when he hits the chorus: “Be glad that U are free, free to change your mind / Free to go most anywhere anytime / Be glad that U are free, there’s many a man who’s not / Be glad for what U had baby[,] what you’ve got.”

Freedom, of course, was an emerging theme of Prince’s long before he’d decided to dedicate a full song to it. “It’s all about being free” had been the mantra of “Uptown”; “Sexuality” had exhorted the listener to “let your body be free.” Then there were the songs that preached freedom without using the word–notably “D.M.S.R.,” with its calls to “screw the masses” and “[d]o whatever we want.” But something about “Free” feels fundamentally different. Rather than an exhilarating promise of liberation, here Prince describes freedom as a solemn duty, more in keeping with the “freedom isn’t free” bromides of American conservatism than with the radical traditions that informed his earlier work.

Continue reading “Free” →

Nasty Girl

Nasty Girl

(Featured Image: “D.D. Winters,” a.k.a. Denise Matthews, a.k.a. Vanity, in Tanya’s Island, Alfred Sole, 1980; © Jef Films International.)

While Prince wasn’t nominated for any American Music Awards in 1982, the night of the ceremony would turn out to be fortuitous for another reason. It was at an AMAs after-party on January 25 when he first met Denise Matthews: a 23-year-old model who, under another name, would soon become the most infamous of his 1980s paramours.

Born in Niagara Falls, Ontario to a German Jewish mother and an African American father, Matthews shared with Prince a tumultuous childhood: her parents divorced when she was young, and she and her six siblings grew up without their mother in their lives. In Matthews’ case, however, the trauma also extended to sustained physical and, it’s been alleged, sexual abuse at the hands of her father, who died when she was only 15. “For 15 years, he beat me badly,” she later told Aldore Collier of Jet magazine (Collier 1993 58). “I wish I could see my father in heaven, but I won’t. He’s in Hell” (59).

Despite–or perhaps because of–the low self-esteem she suffered as a result of this troubled upbringing, the stunningly beautiful Matthews went on to pursue a career in modeling: winning the Miss Niagara Hospitality pageant in 1977, and competing for the Miss Canada title the following year. She signed with New York’s Zoli Agency and appeared in a few ad campaigns in the U.S. and Japan. Under the pseudonym “D.D. Winters,” she acted in the 1980 Canadian slasher film Terror Train, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and had the dubious honor of playing the title role in Tanya’s Island: a truly bizarre erotic fantasy about a model embroiled in a violent love triangle with her painter boyfriend and a bestial, apelike creature (no, seriously, see photo above).

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All the Critics Love U in New York

All the Critics Love U in New York

(Featured Image: 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 mid-January 1982 concluded with–and was most 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 1980’s 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 Favorite Soul/R&B 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. Records, 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.”

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