The 2012 cover that Prince couldn’t stand listening to: “Art is about building a new foundation”
There will never be another person who plays any song as good as Prince.
Even when ‘The Purple One’ was performing material written by someone else, he could inhabit any melody and turn it into something unique, from performing versions of Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’ to doing his own versions of songs he wrote for others, like ‘Manic Monday’. Although Prince may be able to knock out any song easily, he didn’t take it kindly when one band tried to perform one of his songs.
Then again, Prince always had an issue when working on covers. When he later performed a version of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ during his performance at Coachella, he later landed himself in legal trouble when he tried to bar the performance from the Internet, after which the British rock band stepped in to allow the song to be available to the public.
The fact that Prince played a Radiohead song in the first place showed how far he was willing to take his music. While he may have gotten his foot in the door by playing a strange concoction of everything from soul to rock to R&B, every piece of his material always sounded like him, culminating in the massive success of albums like Purple Rain.
That uncompromising attitude is part of what made Prince such a singular artist. He wasn’t interested in preserving songs in their original form or paying polite tribute. If he touched something, it had to be transformed, bent into a new shape that justified its existence all over again.
It also explains why he held other artists to the same standard. For Prince, a cover wasn’t just a performance, it was a statement of intent. If there wasn’t a fresh perspective or a new layer of meaning, then there was no point in doing it at all, which is exactly where his frustration with more straightforward interpretations began to surface.
After having a huge hit film alongside his blockbuster album, Prince had the idea of doing it all over again with the album Parade, which served as the soundtrack to the movie Under the Cherry Moon. While the movie would be critically panned at the time, the album would become another standout in his discography, boasting the beautiful ballad ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’ and the knockout single, ‘Kiss’.
Embracing his funky roots, ‘Kiss’ is one of the more emblematic songs from this era of Prince’s career. Featuring his signature falsetto, the song is a workout for anyone to try to sing properly, with Prince sounding like some overly sexual spirit aching for some affection.
While this kind of music wasn’t out of the question for Prince to be making, that didn’t stop others from trying to make their own versions of the song. Decades after its release, pop rockers Maroon 5 wanted to try their hand at recreating the Prince classic, having already covered everyone from The Beatles to Sly and the Family Stone on record.
Once Prince listened to the final version of the song, he wasn’t exactly thrilled with what Adam Levine and co. had conjured up. Instead of giving his approval, Prince thought there was nothing unique that Maroon 5 did to his song, thinking that it would be better suited not to have been recorded.
When asked about the track by Billboard, Prince talked about how frustrating it was seeing his song being performed with no inflexion, saying, “I do pay performance royalties on others’ songs I perform live, but I’m not recording these songs and putting them up for sale. Why do we need to hear another cover of a song someone else did? Art is about building a new foundation, not just laying something on top of what’s already there”.
Listening back to Prince’s takes on cover songs, it’s easy to see where he’s coming from, warping songs like Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and Foo Fighters’ ‘Best Of You’ into his own unique artistic statement during his Super Bowl halftime show. Prince may have loved to pay respect to music that he loved, but if you were doing a cover for a quick buck, you were doing it for the wrong reasons in his eyes.
