Prince by Brian Morton

Author:Brian Morton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

9

If Prince’s utopian/dystopian Uptown was originally conceived as a dark urban stew, defined by aggressive libertinism and ghetto politics, the next album transformed it into a curious psychedelic paradise called Paisley Park. The change of location and mood, which must have alarmed the Warner executives who attended the tapes’ ritual unveiling, is marked by a new sound-world, into which flute, violin, oud and darbuka all make an unexpected entry, and which dispenses to a degree with the synthesized drums which had been such a distinctive aspect of Prince’s music. For the first and only time in Prince’s career, the electric guitar is not emphasised, sometimes omitted in favour of piano, and rarely distorted. The atmosphere is muted, and wry rather than sardonic, the eroticism low-key, the politics utopian rather than apocalyptic. In production values and sound-world, it might almost be a Beatles album.

Released in April 1985, Around the World in a Day is not just the first record to be released under his own Paisley Park imprint (still part of the Warner family) but ironically given later statements the first record on which the members of The Revolution play a full collaborative part. That’s partly because much of the material was worked up, not by Prince alone in his Lake Minnetonka fortress, but by the whole band during rehearsals for the marathon Purple Rain tour. The chronology is important. Talking to Rolling Stone, Prince suggested that moving on to the new album so quickly was in retrospect a smart move: ‘I didn’t wait to see what happened with Purple Rain. That’s why the two albums sound completely different.’ Had he or The Revolution known then how unprecedently successful the album and tour were going to be (a gross of $22 million in the latter case), there might have been more pressure to make Purple Rain Mk II. Might have been, were not the leader gripped by a hex that insisted on unpredictable novelty: ‘It’s almost like a curse 2 know U can always make something new,’ as he expressed it later. Consciously or unconsciously, Prince was echoing Miles Davis’s often-quoted (and in his case misleading) claim, ‘I have to change. It’s like a curse.’

Like Miles, Prince often signalled a new direction with a radical shift in his cover art. Doug Henders’s surreal montage marks a 180-degree turn away from Allan Beaulieu’s stark monochrome but also from the steam and neon of Purple Rain. The Revolution are portrayed as a gentle tribe, living out an idyll under cotton-candy clouds. The female form is celebrated, but this time almost subliminally in the outlines of an anthropomorphic landscape. The brutal nihilism of past records is replaced by a gentler transcendence: a stepladder rises out of a wave-lapped pool and into the sky. This was the symbolism Prince chose to clothe himself in when he turned to video direction for the first time. ‘The Ladder’ is also there among the songs, a quiet, gnomic harbinger of the plainer religiosity of ‘The Cross’ on Sign ‘O’ The Times.

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