‘Partyup’: Prince’s most prescient song
Maybe Prince was a god. That might seem like an obvious thing to say for some, because of course the man had ethereal genius seeping from his veins, but this applied even further than just the music itself. It was in everything – his persona, his sonics, his psyche, his outlook on life, and even his vision for the future. As far back as the 1980s, Prince was warning us of the perils of life we would face today, even if not many people heeded the call at the time.
It does seem eerily coincidental, in this sense, that Prince tragically lost his life in 2016, just as the world was starting to veer down the dangerous path it has seemingly never come back from. Perhaps it was a subliminal message that he could no longer be there to save us from our fate, or a moment emblematic of our darker collective future. But regardless, the musician had lived a life whipping up a sonic storm, and in one song, also imparted a particular dose of truth.
That was in 1980 with the song ‘Partyup’, taken from his album Dirty Mind. Yet for a funk rock groove that you can imagine filling up dancefloors the world over, the tune also carried a searingly prescient message that Prince was keen to pass down to the masses, and in doing so creating a terrifying eye to the reality of the future, as if he could have envisioned it four decades in the past.
He confirmed this in an interview the year after the song’s release by saying: “Songs such as ‘Partyup’ – it deals with a 75-year-old politician type guy who’s got one foot in the grave and sipping Pina Coladas in Palm Springs and he’s ready to press the button and start a war that the young people are going to have to go out and fight for him.” Does this remind you of anyone in particular? It is quite terrifying that Prince spoke about this in 1981, long before Donald Trump as a political leader ever crossed society’s minds, but within it, he also demonstrated that problems like these have always existed.
“It’s never his son,” Prince continued. “Oh, no, he pays off the right people so that his son doesn’t have to go! I just believe that this kind of a decision shouldn’t be left to one person to make – especially someone of that age.”
In a way, his vision for ‘Partyup’ is one that is equally unnerving as it is possibly a little inadvertently comforting – figures like the current US president are not as much of an anomaly as they might seem, and although the concept of that person being the world’s most powerful leader is enough to keep you up at night, it’s nothing the we haven’t overcome before.
In this respect, despite Prince’s powerful premonitions, there is a dose of optimism that emanates from songs such as ‘Partyup’, as a floor-filling rebellion to the state of the world and a true testament to the weapon that music can provide us with, even in the darkest of times. We might not be able to stop wars, but at least we can dance in spite of them.
It does, however, still leave the question of Prince’s bizarre futuristic mind. Many people would say he was more than a musician, but classifying him as an overlord or psychic opens us up to a whole new realm in which one of the world’s most important artists may have taken on a much more spiritual role than we might think. Never mind Trump – that’s truly enough to send shivers up your spine.
