Notes From D.R. | Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene

While Prince’s relationship with Warner Bros. Records ended on bitter terms, it’s hard to deny that his 19-year tenure with the label represented the most fruitful period of his career. During his time with Warner, Prince not only became a pop-culture icon, he also set new standards for excellence in an industry that seemingly revered mediocrity.

The Minneapolis musical prodigy signed with Warner in 1977; the label was reportedly the only one to accede to Prince’s demand that he produce his own songs. In April 1978, he released his first album, the solid For You, which yielded the minor hit "Soft and Wet." Prince went over budget on the first album, and was under pressure to deliver a hit with his next one: his self-titled 1979 follow-up featured such a hit, the classic "I Wanna Be Your Lover" (as well as another song, "I Feel For You," which became a hit five years later when it was covered by Chaka Khan.)

Prince’s most striking (for its time) song was "Bambi," an account of a young man who discovers that the female object of his affection "…had another lover/[who] looked just like you." It’s impossible to imagine an artist getting away with this song today; "His Royal Badness" endorses an extremely carnal version of conversion therapy, declaring "Bambi, can’t you understand?/Bambi…it’s better with a man!" However, the striking sexuality of this song was nothing compared to what would come next.

1980’s Dirty Mind is considered Prince’s first true classic; it is still stunning for his raw emotion and jaw-dropping sexual imagery. The album is disturbing when one hears it for the first time; Prince seems completely consumed by the pursuit of sexual freedom, the desire to destroy anything considered "traditional," the need to remake the world according to his rules. It’s fitting that the album ends with "Partyup," an antiwar anthem; the entire album is, in essence, an attempt to rekindle the fires of the "Make Love Not War" era.

Prince backed away from overt sexuality with 1981’s Controversy; even the album’s most famous track, "Do Me, Baby," seems more concerned with making love than with mere screwing. The album is essentially Prince’s response to the Reagan Administration; Prince seemed to represent the views of those who came of age during the hedonistic ’70s, and couldn’t figure out how to function in a new, culturally conservative era. Despite its provocative title, "Sexuality" does include some "traditionalist" advice: "Parents, don’t let your kids watch television/before they know how to read/or else all they’ll know how to do/is cuss, fight and breed!"

The next year brought Prince’s second classic album, 1999, a masterwork that brought the artist to the forefront of American consciousness. The album represented every aspect of his personality: Prince the politician (the title track), Prince the sex machine ("Little Red Corvette," "Automatic," "Let’s Pretend We’re Married," "International Lover"), Prince the epicure ("D.M.S.R."), even Prince the patriot ("Free," a brilliant song that has never received its just due). Even if Prince had never recorded anything else, this album alone would have solidified his status as a musical genius.

Fortunately, he continued to record; his next album, the soundtrack to his film Purple Rain, supplanted Michael Jackson’s Thriller as the most influential album of its era. Purple Rain matched 1999 in terms of artistic perfection and scope; the album is an emotional tour, from the opening monologue of "Let’s Go Crazy" to the stirring conclusion of "Purple Rain." The album’s creative flawlessness made it even more memorable than the film itself. (Rain’s fifth track, "Darling Nikki," is one of modern music’s most infamous songs; Tipper Gore, who had purchased the soundtrack for her daughter, was so horrified by the depiction of female masturbation in the song that she led a crusade to have parental advisory labels attached to albums with sexually charged lyrics.

Prince’s next two albums, Around the World in a Day and Parade: Music from the Motion Picture Under the Cherry Moon were controversial for different reasons: some of Prince’s fans felt that he was deliberately moving away from "black-themed" music in order to pander to the white audiences he attracted between 1999 and Rain. Despite such backward criticism, both albums were memorable; in addition to such popular songs as "Raspberry Beret" and "Kiss," the albums featured such outstanding compositions as "Condition of the Heart," "Pop Life," "The Ladder," "Mountains," "Girls & Boys," and "Sometimes It Snows in April."

1987’s Sign O’ The Times was Prince’s third classic; it is still considered the absolute best album he has ever released. A combination of various projects conceived in 1985-86, Sign is the 1999 of the late-80s, a showcase of Prince’s political (the title track), sexual ("It," "Hot Thing," "Slow Love," "If I Was Your Girlfriend") and spiritual ("The Cross") sides. With this album, Prince firmly placed himself in the history books alongside James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone and Marvin Gaye as one of the most gifted artists of the post-1950s.

Later that year, Prince planned to release the so-called Black Album, an apparent response to those who felt Parade and Around the World in a Day were attempts to abandon his black audience. However, one week prior to its planned November release, Prince ordered all copies of the album to be destroyed, supposedly because he had a vivid dream in which God told him not to release the album. (The album was widely bootlegged, and was ultimately given an official release in November 1994.) Prince decided to "replace" the Black Album with 1988’s Lovesexy, another brilliant album depicting Prince’s struggle between his devotion to God and his devotion to sex. The tracks "I Wish U Heaven," "Anna Stesia," "Glam Slam" and "Dance On" rank among Prince’s finest work. While Warner Bros. hoped that the album would be a Purple Rain-style success, Lovesexy underperformed, largely due to controversy over the album cover, which depicted Prince completely nude, with his thigh hiding his genitalia.

Prince’s next two albums were solid but unspectacular soundtracks: 1989’s Music from the Motion Picture Batman and 1990’s Music from Graffiti Bridge. Other than "The Future," "The Arms of Orion" and "Scandalous," the Batman soundtrack is unremarkable. Graffiti Bridge is a manifestly uneven work, featuring moments of greatness (the energetic "Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got") and garbage (the wretched "We Can Funk," with such profound lyrics as "I’m testin’ positive for the funk/[And] I’ll gladly pee in anybody’s cup…")

Prince got back on the ball with 1991’s Diamonds and Pearls, an underrated album featuring such superb tracks as "Thunder," the title track, "Cream," "Gett Off," "Daddy Pop," "Insatiable," "Willing and Able," and "Strollin’." While there is some filler on the album (the horrendous "Jughead" and "Money Don’t Matter 2 Night," an anti-George H. W. Bush track that comes across as the world’s worst protest song), the good far outweighs the bad.

The only truly substandard album of the Warner Bros. era was 1992’s Love Symbol, a bizarre attempt at a Tommy-style rock opera that failed to satisfy either casual Prince fans or devotees. Despite such solid songs as "Love 2 the 9s," "And God Created Woman," and "Damn U," Love was a creative step backward overall. It seemed as if Prince had nothing left to prove musically, and had now decided to devote himself to oddball interests.

That same year, Prince signed a new, highly lucrative contract with Warner Bros. Shortly thereafter, the relationship between the artist and the label fell apart; Prince reportedly felt that Warner Bros. had deceived him on issues such as the number of albums he would be allowed to release during a calendar year (Prince, one of the most prolific artists of all-time, had wanted to release more than one album a year; Warner Bros. apparently felt otherwise, claiming that releasing more than one album a year would damage overall sales). The feud between Prince and Warner became quite bitter; at one point, Prince declared himself a "slave" to the label, and performed with the word painted on his face. He also announced that he would no longer record under the name "Prince," since Warner Bros. legally "owned" the name. (He would use the so-called Love Symbol as his name; since the symbol was unpronounceable, the press referred to him as "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.")

In 1993, Prince released a greatest-hits box set; the next year, as he attempted to get out of the contract, he released Come, another underrated album whose dark, sexual lyrics led some reviewers to declare it the Dirty Mind of the 1990s.

By 1995, there were reports that Prince would be released from the contract after producing two more albums. That September, he released The Gold Experience, another classic album; it was hailed as a comeback and his finest work since Sign O’ The Times. The album could be considered the concluding portion of a trilogy of "personal" Prince works, the first two being 1999 and Sign. The political, spiritual, and sexual sides of Prince were on display again, but this time with a new maturity: "We March" was a more energetic sequel to Sign’s title track, "Gold" matched "Purple Rain" in its emotional depth, and "P Control," "Endorphinmachine," "Shhh," and "319" depicted Prince as an older but far wiser lover. "Billy Jack Bitch," "Eye Hate U" and "Dolphin" (which Prince debuted in a stupendous December 1994 appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman) should be included among Prince’s top 25 greatest compositions.

Prince’s final Warner album, 1996’s Chaos and Disorder, was critically trashed upon its release, but looking back it wasn’t nearly as bad as Love Symbol. Other than the rap-rock botch job "I Rock, Therefore I Am," the songs are uniformly good; the album was likely condemned because people expected all of Prince’s songs to be uniformly great. "Into The Light" is a solid a spiritual song as Prince has ever produced, "Dinner with Delores" is a light, humorous track, and "I Like It There" is Prince with a slightly less Dirty Mind ("And like an embryo, baby/Don’t abort this dire need for you…")

Four years after Prince left Warner, the label’s legal rights to his name expired, and he dropped the Love Symbol as his official billing. By the mid-2000s, Prince had returned to major commercial success on the strengths of his albums Musicology and 3121. He is still an innovator, a risk-taker, a record-breaker, a classic-maker. He is still on the throne, continuing a reign that began with Warner nearly thirty years ago. When it comes to music, he was, is, and always will be American royalty.