thoughts & first impressions of Deliverance EP

Trying to make sense of all this. Only about a year ago we were hearing about how Prince very quietly wanted to redefine “p2p” and sell records independently, the way they initially distributed Judith Hill’s album. Digitally direct from the artist, but if any physical copies were to be made they’d be all indie from the pressing/printing to the Subaru trunk the boxes rode to the store shelf in, and the storefront handing over merchandise for paper.

For those who’ve been down with midwest rap and hip-hop music since the 90s, it was like he woke up to how Doomtree have been doing everything, and Rhymesayers before them. Even down to Judith Hill’s album and the Hit’n’Run Phases being pressed by the same Minneapolis based Copycats Media that does in-house promotional materials for Doomtree. It looked like there could be a new trail being blazed by Prince, distribution-wise, is what I’m getting at.

Then this week like a bolt from the blue, an engineer announced and seemingly instantly released tracks Prince recorded about a decade ago already, a mini-suite they’re calling the Deliverance EP. It has cover art both distinct enough to mark a new project, yet similar enough in scope to his most recent indie online digital releases. On the website are the lyrics, laid out spatially so that they’re slowly meandering down the screen in a fashion not unlike the original lyric-video for One Song. 

Equally surprising is that within two hours of having discovered the EP was available and having bought myself a copy, news comes crushing down from all sides that the litigious corporatists are suing to stop this music from being released by anybody but a corporate interest. While they may have a legitimate point, I still bristle with outrage at the same old WB-mindset taking the side of Tha Man rather than the individual artist who made the songs. 

I couldn’t help but wonder as I clicked through paying for and getting the files...just who is getting this money and where is it going. I didn’t see any indication it’s being donated 100% to Yes We Code or any of the artist’s other favorite charities. So that’s still a mystery.

I just think it’s to Prince’s lasting credit as an icon and a visionary as well as an upsetter and a determined independent, that somehow even now he’s bringing music to his audience whether any of the powers-that-be want him to or not!

I haven’t even played the whole EP for myself yet. I’m taking a very slow approach to the new music, like a friend I made at college who listened to all his new albums for the very first time at the rate of one-and-only-one song per day. So I won’t finish it until this weekend. (I must express my dismay at being sold joint-stereo mp3s at premium prices and having the proper flac lossless files priced at nearly 3x the lossy version. $20 for flac? Even Tidal doesn’t charge that much! What purpose could this have other than short-term profit?!?!)

I am very pleased to hear new Prince music playing in my home again. I can hardly begin to form opinions about it. I’m reminded of several other songs with similar sounds and lyrical content. ‘I Am’ already has the feel of something I’ll remember for a long time. I’ve only heard it once, trying to savor it instead of play it 20x in a row the way my teenaged self would have surely done.

I’m certain there are dozens of these kind of new music experiences awaiting our thirsting ears, still cloaked in the veil of the legendary Vault. I hope that all of them are not in the tight clutches of the corporatists. I hope there are many scattered among the common people waiting to be discovered in their own proper time.

Honestly, knowing how Prince and The Artist Formerly Known as Prince disliked the corporate culture of America and the larger world, I find myself hoping he spent the majority of the time between 2005 and 2010 cutting one-off sessions like the Deliverance EP. I hope it rains down new music from all sides to bring chaos to the corporatists, the profit-minded, profit-motivated people attempting to reinvent Paisley Park as Graceland North. 

I support a Paisley Park museum, yes, but not affiliated with Graceland, thank you. And they could have waited an entire year before opening it, wouldn’t have hurt anything but the zeroes. The critics of the suddenness of the tours starting last fall aren’t making arguments without merit. Money should not be the central guiding motive behind what remains at Paisley Park, is all I’m saying. It reflects poorly on the man who knew enough about inequality to write more than a few songs with the depth, tragedy, and common sense present in Money Don’t Matter 2night.

The tickets for the 2017 Celebration at Paisley Park are far more than they ever were during Celebrations Prince held there in the past. This time around they cost as much as a plane ticket costs if you’re 1000+ miles away. That isn’t what fans experienced while the man himself was here to keep the costs down. Furthermore, his own Celebrations took place nearest his June birthday, not April - the month when -if anything- death itself died defeated by music which lives forever.

So owing to my lifelong anti-capitalist streak, I sincerely hope Prince left tons of unreleased, uncatalogued music laying around all over the world to jump up and enrich the lives of his fanbase while they keep the legal department chasing their tails.

That is what I choose to make of the Deliverance EP before I’ve even heard more than 2 songs of it.

In closing and in brief, if the rumored tracklist for Purple Rain Deluxe is accurate, there’s plenty of wasted space on 7-inch edits where there could be more content that’s not already present. The edits are already represented  in the proper full length versions. If you didn’t hear the outcry from the ‘we hate edits’ chorus when WB’s obligatory ‘The Hits/B-Sides’ came out loaded with them, get ready for a whole new recital from that perspective.

3 Maxi-Singles that should have been, could have been MORE

First there was New Power Generation, then Gett Off and Cream. There was a brief window there when everything could have been really, really sweet.

I know a lot of today’s audience hadn’t even been born yet at the time, but I don’t care. In this life you KNOW what you KNOW. I was there in the room for a bunch of Paisley Park performance dates in 1994 and 1995 and I remember how it felt then and in the years between 1986 and 1992 before I'd ever seen them play, where I just wore out the few cassettes I'd been fortunate enough to own. 

Prince’s best years were right there before our eyes and ears, and we watched as the profit motive and the love of money (*cough* WB *cough*) crushed what could’ve been a stellar artistic achievement and redefined a culture or two. Unfortunately for the rest of us, almost as soon as it started it was over. 

A few familiar glimmers of hope trickled out in the following years, but then this particular brief period of stunning original achievement slammed back shut again. Or at least IF the process of splitting a single into half a dozen wildly creative, enjoyable variations of itself continued, the results of that process never made it past being sealed in the vault.

We were offered a brief glimpse into the process of music-making for Prince and the New Power Generation. The very first Maxi-Single/EP of its kind almost snuck off like a fluke. From what the general public seems to remember as an unfulfilling moment, the Graffiti Bridge film spawned an excellent ensemble soundtrack album. 

The song from which the New Power Generation take their name was the very first maxi-single with expanded, extended, remixed, and otherwise jammed-on, varied, jazzy, funky takes on the source material proved it could be a viable form of expression worthy of merit independent of the album itself. But like I said, it came at a time when there were a lot of other logistical balls in the air, so to speak, and even this could have been so much more. 

The wealth of material from the GB sessions could have easily blown the NPG single into a full mini-album type of affair. Instead, cuts like Elisa Fiorillo’s Oobey Doop and Mavis Staples’ My Tree ended up as snippets in the outro of the album track and scraps on bootlegs for fans left to collect. If they had appeared on this maxi-single there could have been one more format the 1980s would’ve been known for.

In 1991 the Diamonds and Pearls album came out with a series of stellar hit singles and chart topping music videos. Alongside this popular success was the fact that each of the singles from the D&P record had a maxi-single attached which truly defined the artform. The maxi-singles in question turned out to be nearly stuffed with content. Remixes, re-imaginings, dub-style, instrumentals, laid-back solos and rapping variations on the lyrics. 

Just about anything that might happen in the process of any band practicing and rehearsing got included, a very wide net was cast on the session that brought about the single songs and this resulted in a cornucopia of various approaches and attempts to re-cast the original music in new and interesting forms, imaginative directions.

Cases in point, the maxi-singles for the tracks Cream and Gett Off. Following the first-of-its-kind, at least in the Prince discography, the previous single for the track New Power Generation from the Graffiti Bridge soundtrack had also toyed with remixes, re-interpretations, and flat-out reinventions of the source material presented on the maxi-single.

The pinnacle of the listener being invited behind the velvet rope and into the music-creation process remains the Diamonds and Pearls maxi-singles. The sheer infectious energy and forward momentum in the product is of enduring quality, memorable and innovative. The later singles from D&P didn’t have such impressive variety, perhaps due to the fact that the band was touring and supporting the record at the time. More dramatic challenges laid in wait for Prince, who would change his name in the coming years. 

From a sociological perspective, I recognize there’s inherent bias in the music which was most important to you when you were blossoming from a youth into an adult. Psychologically it makes sense that we’d be attached to what was our support at such a dramatic, dynamic time in our lives. I just also know that my defaults were dialed in, my tastes were whet, and my expectations set for a new normal where Prince would bang out an hour or more of variations on his new singles as a matter of course. 

To say that I wanted more is mere understatement, I expected it because Prince and the New Power Generation as a sheer force of nature coached me to expect they always sounded that loose, oozing with creative collective energy the way they did on those maxi-singles.

The albums were workouts and rip-roaring headlong attacks of innovation and emotional honesty. But the singles could be a similar space for a different, spontaneous creation growing outward in the drift of the original songs, if Gett Off and Cream were any indication. I yearned for the day when I’d have a heap of singles just like them in a pile next to my stereo, slowly getting worn-out from regular use.

Unfortunately it wasn’t meant to be. I can tell that the years-later awkward attempt at recreating the magic, The Beautiful Experience, could have been stellar. The pieces of what should have been are still with us. There’s an impressive version of TMBGITW by Brian Gallagher solo on his saxophone, there’s the remix-ish 2morro that ended up on Crystal Ball, and one can only imagine what else might have been planned for TBE before it became clear it would be just a by-the-numbers bore-fest.

The Artist Formerly Known As Prince wanted TBE to be far better than what we eventually got. Warner Brothers squashed TBE into being a strictly by-the-numbers affair featuring no new material. Not a hint of 'Violet the Organ Grinder' to be found, this was chaste as a perfume advertisement.

The Space maxi single from the Come record a brief time later was also a glimmer of what could have been. This did contain two different remixes that were as good as the material from the D&P maxis. It’s just that the connective tissue wasn’t there. No solos, no jazzy noodling around, no house remixes, and very little of the loose, playful, fun-spirited band party we’d come to expect shows up here. One can assume there could’ve been the original more skeletal demo-like version of Space from The Glam Slam Ulysses dance review. The one with the NASA samples fully out in front of the music louder than on the album version.

Of course there are the myriad versions of Come, in addition to the 10+ minute pimptastic smut sandwich that came out as the album version of the track. (The first time I heard the ten-minute Come mini-suite drifting into self-parody as it tread on soft-pornography is the very first time I doubted Prince’s artistic sense. Unfortunately it also would not be the last...)

If TAFKAP hadn’t been feuding with his label at the time, we might have gotten the Come EP with 18 & Over in its proper place as a remix, rather than filler on Crystal Ball. We could have heard the original skeletal techno styled version of Come with the original demo-ish lyrics, or the more polished, later version included on The Beautiful Experience broadcast film in Europe.

Still, I remember thinking during the Symbol record and the long, long haul to The Gold Experience a few years later that these songs still deserved the D&P maxi-single treatment. I didn’t care if P had legitimate differences with his wrecka company. I was a loyal listener and music buyer and I wanted the same high quality material I’d grown to expect and love with Gett Off and Cream giving us Gangster Glam and Do Your Dance. 

I wished that instead of the boring, repetitive, dull 7-versions-of-7 promo single, instead there had been a real retail 7-versions-of-7 that wowed us the way Gett Off and Cream had done. A fully acoustic 7, a fully acapella 7, an all-sitar 7, a chorale arrangement of 7 focusing on the background parts in all their celestial glory, maybe some other things I hadn’t even dreamed of. But nope, it never happened.

I remember thinking that I Wanna Melt With U could’ve been a sick, ridiculous remix of 7 on a maxi-single. Then a few years later I remember reading that it was what it had been originally intended for, but then Prince scrapped the story-line segues from the Symbol record and stuffed Melt With U in the middle of side A where it didn’t really belong.

Another blown opportunity.

The years are scattered with moments when I thought, however briefly, that Prince might resurrect the continually rewarding experiences provided on the D&P maxi singles. I remember thinking that Emancipation would have been a perfect time to drop an earthshatteringly huge record and then slap some sick maxi-singles out to just floss and pimp and wow the world with how solid your skills are. Imagine how 45 minutes with wild remixes and variations on Face Down could’ve been underground dancefloor fire?!?!

There aren’t even that many people around who know what I’m talking about now. Things are just different.

Years later when the NPG’s New Power Soul record came out we got another few glimpses of the best maxi singles in the D&P era when Come On got a few decent turns in the remix department. I am reminded by my younger bros that Breakfast Can Wait and Rock & Roll Love Affair got similar maxi-single treatments, but with only minor variations of the source material - nothing like Gangster Glam or Do Your Dance to be found among them - at least not to my ears.

Prince could’ve not just briefly been at, but STAYED at the forefront of the maxi-single remix culture, blowing the walls down and the possibilities wide open for what an artist could do in reinterpreting their own art while it's still fresh and new in the hearts of their audience. To some limited degree the form did survive and flourish for a while, but nothing like what could’ve been. 

I still imagine hearing Prince’s own variations on his singles, as we got in the all-too-brief heydey of the NPG version 1.0. I can’t help but imagine what wonders lay in his vault... or if I’ll be lucky enough to live long enough to hear any of them.

[editing still in progress. I've been kicking this post down the road, rather redundant, unfinished, unedited and unposted long enough. time to whittle it down to size...]