cat daddy said:
How in the hell did I miss this thread today?? Damn, I guess I was really working today.
Ditto! Somebody said this, and it's so true: Prince was a wild fusion of funk, rock, new wave, and soul, an original and maverick talent from the first. That makes picking difficult. Here are some also rans ...
Sign O' The Times (Same, 1987). Bass.
Sexy M.F. (The Symbol Album, 1992) Move over, JB.
Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad? ("Prince," 1979) Had a basement-recording brilliance.
Right Back Here in My Arms ("Emancipation," 1996) Groove. GROOVE.
Lady Cab Driver, ("1999," 1983) The middle. The MIDDLE.
Darling Nikki ("Purple Rain," 1984) One of his great "meltdown" songs with the Revolution.
Pop Life ("Around the World in a Day," 1985). Really spoke to the times.
Anything off his first masterpiece, 1980's "Dirty Mind," which is absolutely filthy - and played as cleanly and perfectly as most any R&B record ever.
Anna Stesia ("lovesexy," the disc where the whole thing is tracked as one song, 1988)
*
Love those. But the best ever?
Soft and Wet ("For You," the debut, 1978).
His next album, as a whole, was far better. But this one single, put out in the summer of '78, summed up what was so brilliant about Prince - then especially, but also now. He's all alone here, blending soul and funk ... and something else, his own recipe. This was before the Revolution, but Prince's *personal* revolution in R&B was underway already.
What could be next - but this??:
White, black, Puerto Rican/Everybody's just a-freakin'.
To me, Prince's best work is from his first three albums, when he was in his early 20s, when he was both so blunt and (then, it seemed) perfectly ambiguous. There was something simply thrilling about hearing the line "I wanna be the only one you come for" on AM radio. Didn't everybody KNOW what he was SAYING? I felt sure I might be the only one back then. As he went on, he got more calculating, to me. And the world became different, I guess, too - less easy to shock, more critical of his talents.
Still, this song - and, are you kidding?, anything from "Dirty Mind" - could never make it onto even the most liberal radio-station playlists these days. I turn it all the way up when I hear that synth part on "Soft and Wet." Strip away all of the junk from the past two decades, all the changing-your-name-to-a-symbol stuff, and this song is a perfect example of what made Prince so great.
