shadows between moonbeams (or if U don’t like that title, in the fashion of a Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon, try the alternate title: “if we didn’t have dark, we wouldn’t need light” a quote from the dream warriors first record - a band tangentially tied to Prince since the artist known as Ninety-9 - the female slam poet on a few Prince tracks, herself shouted out in typically Prince fashion as “the upside-down double 6” in ?was it Days of Wild or Now? - she appears on the 2nd Dream Warriors record)
I don’t wanna be a downer. I’m neuro-chemically prone to the depressive side of the force, that is, if modern medicine knows half of what it claims to know about me. But I don’t wanna actively bring anybody down. That’s the backwards of my purpose here -which I hope is clear- as grandma would say, from the get-go.
I just wish to take a brief moment to remember things I have seen with my own eyes in the past ten years or so. Not just the shiny moments like going to see Prince in Oakland last February. The electricity of anticipation as we sat facing a lone piano in the center of the stage. The infectious way that we all kept singing ‘Free Urself’ for several minutes after he left the stage. Nobody wanted the evening to end, even after that long second set.
I also remember the pile of Lotusflow3r-MPLSound-Elixir triple-CD sets on the rack in central California Target store shelves marked down to $4.99 and then $2.49 before they disappeared completely. I grabbed two I didn’t need and have since only opened one when I’d misplaced my very first copy, but I should’ve grabbed a bunch more before they either hit the dumpster or the Goodwill.
Going back a little further I remember multiple occasions stopping at the New Power Generation boutique in Uptown, Minneapolis and seeing the various remix versions of TMBGITW each on their own single, at least five different ones. Staxowax, Mustang Mix, etc. They were all marked down to 99 cents in their OWN artists’ store. I could have, were I not the broke-on-top-of-broke teenager at the time, bought a pile of 10 copies of EACH one. I just saw somebody selling the Mustang Mix remix CD for $38!
Heck, I could’ve bought the TMBGITW “greeting card” format single, on CD or cassette, for just a couple of dollars each. Those are going for ridiculous amounts of money on various e-commerce websites because most people don’t really know what they are. So the nefarious profitmonger can post a single picture of the gold symbol on the front cover and promise their item is “rare and unreleased” when it’s anything but. *smh* I mean, yeah, it’s rare NOW, but at the time they were slashing prices just to get them out of the door and anybody with paper could have walked out with a handful.
I’m not trying to throw a bone to the haters, either. TMBGITW was huge in the world, a little less so in the US because WB had already done some damage to the relations between Prince and O(+> and the fans. That was in February and March when it was full of springtime vibes, fresh and new and still getting video and radio play. Come September it was yesterday’s news and the single was being marked down even at the NPG store.
By contrast I remember feeling blessed when I happily grabbed The Rainbow Children on CD at Best Buy in Rochester, Minnesota when it had been marked down to 99 cents. If there had been more than just the one, I would have bought a handful at that price. It wasn’t an album that deserved to be relegated to last-week’s-news, it deserved far better than that. I already had it digitally since I paid for the NPGMC, but I’d never hunted down the actual CD till that day.
There were moments between 2008-2015 when I first heard digital one-off singles Purple & Gold and Rich Friends. Rich Friends is like a bad sequel to The 1 U Wanna C. I don’t hate the music of that song, but a refrain of “I gotta lotta money” in the era of the W.T.O. protests and ever-worsening income inequality in America is a glaringly tone-deaf moment from somebody who ought to know better. Rich Friends is worse - Vegas schmooze oozy enough to leave a snail trail. This track provides probably the best argument of anything Prince actually released (digitally, I know not physically) that should have stayed in the vault.
While I personally like Purple & Gold, there seems to be pretty much universal opinion against it online and in podcasts, commentary, and on the whirl of rabid knives known as the org. It could have stood the more layered majestic approach given to 3 Chains O’ Gold rather than the flat digital production it got, but that’s all opinion. There’s honest inspiration underneath that old-fashioned fight-song, but not so much with Rich Friends.
Le sigh. This world be what this world be - if I didn’t choose or help to make it that way, I won’t feel guilty for the sadder things it does without my consent. It’s like domestic politics. We were all screaming as loud as we could before it got this bad. How do you scream any louder? We’re already at 11.5 on a scale that ended at 10. In the grand scheme of things, compared to glacial topics like war and peace, life and death, the miniscule fact that your favorite artist didn’t do what you expected them to do on ONE danged song? Boo-to-the-hoo to the hoo-hoo-hoo!??!
Back to the topic of the post, the sad truth is that the general public grew a fair amount of distance between themselves and the Prince we fams/fans have been loving since the 80s or before. Not enough younger music listeners know the stuff that’s been making us happy and enriching our daily lives since the 90s. I can’t help but want to correct this -relatively minor- injustice.
I want the Purple-Rain-level casual-fans to know the NPGMC tracks as well as those of us who happily paid for them in 1999 and 2000, and I want them to know those songs N-O-W! (I don’t want the NPGMC tracks only available from Tidal, either! That’s pop-fascism! Spread them far and wide to increase the general public’s awareness of them, and cast the moneychangers out of the Vault forever and ever, amen!) I want the kids who think ‘wow Prince sure was funky back in 1983!’ to know how ferocious Billy Jack Bitch, M.P.L.S., the cowbell-free version of Endorphinmachine, F.U.N.K., Mad, Funky Design and Screwdriver can be!
Just because the rest of the world was going gaga for 2pac at the time, why wasn’t everybody else I knew trading cassettes with people on the internet in the spring of 1994 and getting their first exposure to Now, Days of Wild, Pheromone, Acknowledge Me, and 319? Nothing about radio at the time was compelling. These songs were infectious, catchy, and immediate. They were of-the-moment. It was incredible to roll up to Paisley Park for a show and have the songs they were gonna play to bump out of your car while you waited with everybody else for the doors to open and the line to start forming.
Hard as it can be to imagine for a hermit-curmudgeon like me, I actually went out to a dance-club no-cover ‘Prince tribute’ night nearby. A few hours later I left inspired to make an every-other-track-is-Prince type of mix myself. I’m just reaching for Daft Punk and Kip Blackshire and plenty of Minnesotan music at least as much as their disco-heavy night or any of the plastic-pop-music stuff most of the young drinking-and-dancing crowd was probably expecting to hear this past Thursday night.
I don’t even think, no matter how much I’d normally be itching to, that I’d include any of what the whiners would decry as ‘bootleg’ material in this mix. So it will only feature tracks that were actually released, no matter how limited the CD pressings were, and anything available in the present day ending-April 2016 on the various digital platforms. And just bc the status is still iffy, I would steer clear of the newest Deliverance EP or the Purple Rain Deluxe coming soon but not yet officially released.
My intent is to prove a point and big-up the 90s-00s at the same time as being a funky-ass mixtape I’d hope to amaze a few friends with. I don’t know how it would fare if dropped at the club I was in the other night. I’d like to hope it would go over great, but I wouldn’t sweat it either way. The doing of the thing itself is its own reward.
