by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I turned on the TV last night for one of CBS’s Grammy
specials, this one called Let’s Go Crazy: The Grammy Salute to Prince. The National Association of Recording Arts and
Sciences (NARAS), the organization that puts on the Grammy Awards, has done a
number of these retrospective specials before — notably on The Beatles and
Stevie Wonder — and they timed this one to air on April 21 because that was the
fourth anniversary of Prince’s death. I went through a Prince phase in the
mid-1980’s — I was as impressed by the Purple Rain soundtrack as anyone else and I bought some of the
Prince albums on either side of it chronologically. When I finally caught up with
the movie it was ostensibly a soundtrack for, via a VHS tape in the 1990’s, I
was considerably less impressed; aside from the moving scenes between Prince
and his father, played by the tragically under-used Black actor Clarence
Williams III, it seemed little more than nine great Prince music videos with
little to connect them — and I was also put off by the heavy-duty sexism of the
film; as I wrote in my journal, “Morris Day (acting, perversely, like a
screaming queen who seemed to have intended his whole performance as an
audition piece for The Little Richard Story) literally throws a rejected girlfriend into a
dumpster, and even Our Hero makes his blindly adoring heroine (Apollonia
Kotero) take off her clothes and jump in a lake, and later gives her a good,
hard slap in the context of an argument.”
Still, Prince’s music remains
febrile, a unique fusion of familiar elements from rock, soul, gospel and disco
(though George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic had pioneered many of the same
elements in his concept albums, and when Prince started his own label he hired
Clinton to make a comeback album). The problem is that most of his songs were
tailored so specifically to his talents they don’t generate the kinds of cover
versions that become major works in their own right the way the Beatles’ and
Wonder’s songs did. Just about everyone who performed them on the big special
last night — which was obviously
filmed before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic hit since it was a traditional music show
with a lot of people on stage and a live audience of people sitting
considerably closer than six feet apart from each other (it was especially
jarring to watch this after last Saturday’s One World Together at
Home, an all-star music special done in the
modern post-pandemic manner of the various artists performing at home, many of
them in their own home-based studios) — did them in much the same manner Prince
had, in jerky dance rhythms and staccato band playing. The main difference
between last night’s covers and Prince’s originals was that virtually none of
the singers last night duplicated Prince’s excellent diction. Like Nat “King”
Cole, Prince sang his songs in a staccato voice that made their words
surprisingly comprehensible; all too many of the singers who performed them in last
night’s special turned them into legato soul moans that sometimes achieved an
emotional weight of their own but also obscured words that had been clear and
understandable on Prince’s own recordings. It also didn’t help that the
programming pretty much ignored Prince’s softer side and avoided most of his
ballads (and he did write
ballads, some of them — notably “4 the Tears in Your Eyes,” the beautiful song
he contributed to the USA for Africa We Are the World — quite good) in favor of one funky bounce tune
after another.
The show opened with H.E.R. and Gary Clark, Jr. doing “Let’s Go
Crazy” — a song that’s gained an ironic twist from the line, “Don’t let the
elevator bring you down,” given that Prince died inside an elevator between the
two stories of his home — both are among my favorite performers in contemporary
music but Prince’s funk jams didn’t give H.E.R. a chance to show off the weight
and power of her voice the way her own material does. Next up was a singer
identified only as “Miguel” doing “I Would Die 4 U” (Prince’s penchant for
using numerals and single letters in his song titles to represent words with
similar sounds has led my husband Charles to call him “the first texter”), and
then John Legend did “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the song Prince gave to Sinéad
O’Connor that became the biggest hit she ever had. I’ve frequently faulted Legend for singing pleasantly but
unemotionally, but not here; he gave the song an intense, emotional soul
reading that contrasted effectively with O’Connor’s good but more detached
reading. After that St. Vincent — who’s just one person, and a woman — did
“Controversy,” Prince’s ode to gender and racial ambiguity (“Am I Black or
white? Am I straight or Gay?”), and did it effectively but without the sheer
audacity of Prince’s original. Then another Latino performer, Juanés, did an
O.K. version of “1999,” and H.E.R. returned to accompany dancer Misty Copeland
in an estimable version of the quite good ballad “The Beautiful Ones” — a rare
bow in this show’s mostly relentless funk assault to the softer side of Prince.
Usher then came out for a medley of “Little Red Corvette” (one of Prince’s most
audacious songs), “When Doves Cry” (which would actually have been a better
vehicle for H.E.R. than the two songs she did get!) and “Kiss” from one of Prince’s most
underrated projects, Parade.
(This was a quite good soundtrack album to a film, Under the Cherry
Moon, that was a deserved box-office
failure; since it was supposedly set in the 1930’s — though Prince dressed in
all his usual 1980’s finery — Prince ordered it shot in black-and-white, and
midway through the shoot he fired the director and took over the direction
himself.)
After Usher’s disappointing medley came one of the best songs of the
night, “Manic Monday,” the song Prince wrote and contributed to the Bangles’
second album (and first success; indeed, until I just checked it on Wikipedia
I’d thought it was their first release!), Different Light, signing it under the name “Christopher.” The
performers last night were Chris Martin of Coldplay and Susanna Hoffs, The
Bangles’ original lead singer, and it started slower than the original record —
one of the few times anyone on
last night’s special tried to put a different “spin” on a song than the famous
recording that introduced it. (According to the Wikipedia page on Different
Light, the song was originally written for
Prince’s then-girlfriend and co-star of the Purple Rain movie, Apollonia Kotero, for her Apollonia
6 album.) Then Morris Day and the Time, a
subsidiary band in Prince’s bizarre menagerie of different singers and groups,
did an O.K. medley of “Jungle Love,” “Cool” and “The Bird” (the last was not
the Charlie Parker tribute I would have hoped for but a song about a new dance
much like the ones that glutted the airwaves in the early 1960’s in the wake of
the success of “The Twist,” song and
dance). Morris Day came off, as usual, as a sort of more butch version of
Prince. Then the Foo Fighters came on and did their own version of “Darling
Nikki” — the song that Al Gore’s wife Tipper made Exhibit A in her short-lived
crusade against sexually explicit pop-song lyrics (“I knew a girl named Nikki/I
guess you could say she was a sex fiend/I saw her in a hotel lobby/Masturbating
with a magazine” — a line I’ve always loved for its ambiguity, since it can be
read either as Nikki pleasuring herself and using the magazine’s photos to turn
herself on or Nikki actually rolling up the magazine and directly having sex
with it) — which was one of the best pieces on the program since Dave Grohl and
his band were able to fit it into their usual metal-meets-punk sound instead of
just copying Prince’s rhythmic, staccato singing style.
Then what’s left of
Earth, Wind and Fire — a beautiful group but one that should have packed it in
when their founder, leader and principal composer, Maurice White, died — did
one of the few slower songs on the program, “Adore,” and Prince’s collaborator
and on-again, off-again girlfriend Sheila E. came on for a series of guest
appearances. First was a collaboration with Common, the unusually eloquent
rapper who was featured with John Legend on the theme song from the 2014 film Selma.
Then Sheila E. joined Beck, of all people,
for a credible version of “Raspberry Beret” from Prince’s self-consciously
“psychedelic” album Around the World in a Day (the immediate follow-up to Purple Rain and one which threw a lot of people for the density
of its textures and its obvious bows to middle-period Beatles in general and Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in
particular), and then she and Gary Clark, Jr. teamed up for “The Cross,” a
little-known Prince song that qualifies as out-and-out gospel both musically
and lyrically (“Black day, stormy night/No love, no hope in sight/Don't cry, He
is coming/Don't die without knowing the cross”) and was one of the high points
of the evening. After that Sheila E., who had played drums in Prince’s band The
Revolution (which featured a surprising number of women members) took to
timbales (the high-mounted drums used prominently in Latin American music) and
vocal for a medley of “America,” “Free” and a quite good song called “The
Glamorous Life.” Then came a band billed as “Princess and the Revolution”
featuring an excellent female lead guitarist dressed in a salmon-colored
pantsuit; I was quite taken by her singing and playing and wish I knew who she
was so I could hear more of her. Then what’s left of the Revolution band joined
gospel great Mavis Staples for “Purple Rain” — Mavis Staples’ voice isn’t what
it was in the glory years of the Staples Singers (of whom she seems to be the
last survivors; unlike the Carter Family, they don’t seem to have kept the
group going with the descendants of the originals) but it was powerful enough
to get the point across.
That is where the show should have ended — I remember loving the Purple
Rain album because, among other things, it
ended, powerfully and brilliantly, with that un-followable song, then being
disappointed in the movie because after the final bars of “Purple Rain” they
played a tacky electronic medley of the film’s other songs over the closing
credits — but instead the makers of Let’s Go Crazy brought back the entire ensemble for “Baby, I’m a
Star.” Prince’s music remains one of the most eclectic, bizarre and frustrating
catalogs of any major artist, at least partly because, unlike most modern
artists, he relentlessly over-recorded.
Most record companies have the problem of getting their artists to produce the
amount of music they’ve contracted for in the time the contract allots; with
Prince, his label, Warner Bros., had the opposite problem — he gave them way more material in a much shorter time period than his
contract provided. When he finally broke free of his Warners contract (a
break-up so acrimonious that during the legal action he appeared on the David
Letterman show with the word “Slave” written in black make-up across one cheek)
and started his own label (with the band he formed after the original
Revolution broke up, the New Power Generation), he zipped out two three-CD sets
called Emancipation and Crystal
Ball and made it clear he was no longer
going to let himself be limited by the “suits” at a record company telling him
not to release so much material that he’d glut the market for new Prince music,
with the result that a lot of his later records sounded sloppy, like he was
releasing them too fast and not showing too much concern either about
separating the good songs from the chaff or honing the songs until the good
ones became great.
Prince also started alienating his audience through sheer
weirdness — that whole business about changing his name to a hieroglyphic
symbol of his own design and insisting on being referred to as “The Artist
Formerly Known as Prince” (which led me to joke that if Charles Windsor were to
give up his hobby of painting, he’d be “The Prince Formerly Known as Artist”) —
and through a series of illnesses and cancellations he dropped off the radar in
his later years and a lot of people were surprised by the announcement of his
death simply because they’d wondered, “Was he still alive?” Prince was
undoubtedly a major artist — though it was sheer bad luck that Purple
Rain and Bruce Springsteen’s Born
in the U.S.A. split the vote for quality
music in the 1984 Grammy Awards and thus allowed Lionel Richie to take the Album
of the Year prize for a piece of MOR treacle like All Night Long — but also a frustrating one; he got pigeonholed
into that neo-funk mold early on and most of his efforts to break out and do
other sorts of music were commercially ignored. Prince died too soon but was not the sort of Byronic flameout of Hendrix, Joplin,
Morrison, Cobain et al., and his
best work is brilliant but he was also given to sloppiness and he didn’t always
have the instinct true geniuses have of being able to discern which of their
creations are wheat and which are just chaff. Still, much of his catalog
survives as brilliant music even in these less-than-brilliant performances
which, with a few exceptions (like the Gary Clark-Sheila E. “The Cross”) added
little to Prince’s own renderings of these songs.
