Prince and the surprise element of success: “’Lovesexy’ was supposed to be a failure”
From the moment that he first arrived on the scene, Prince seemed to embody everything that music is supposed to be. Even though he was never the easiest person to understand, he seemed to have music being channelled through him every time he got onstage, whether that was his jaw-dropping solos in Purple Rain or trying his best to make a funky groove on a song like ‘Kiss’. While someone with as varied a career as ‘The Purple One’, he knew he was in the right when everyone else said that this album was dead in the water.
As far as Prince’s career goes, though, the number-one rule was to do as much as he could as long as it sounded great. Going through his run of albums from his debut to the end of the 1980s, it’s staggering how many classics he could fit onto one record. Sign O The Times is still one of the strongest double albums made by any artist, and making an entire soundtrack album all about the wonders of Batman doesn’t deserve to go as hard as the original 1989 Batman soundtrack.
But it was all about the pure excitement of music for Prince. Never for one second did anyone believe that he was singing to fulfil a contract, and even when he found himself in a bind with Warner Bros and was forced to put out more records, hearing him dabble in jazz and put out some of his old material on The Black Album made for one of the most insane release cycles in recent history.
The road to getting The Black Album into the world wasn’t exactly easy, either. The whole point behind the record was for Prince to say his piece on what it means to be a black man, but right as he was about to release the record, he knew that he had hit upon something truly evil and shelved the entire project to put out Lovesexy instead. There were still a few tunes left over from the original, but compared to the pitch-blackness of the former, Lovesexy feels like a ray of sunshine.
Prince wasn’t subtle about stamping out The Black Album, either. When promoting the record, one of the music videos featured Prince as different pieces of text flashed in the background, one of which was a quick apology for not putting out the original version of the album on time.
Despite his label saying that he wrecked his own record cycle, Prince felt vindicated when tracks like ‘Alphabet St’ began rocketing up the charts, saying, “Lovesexy was supposed to be a failure. But I’ve heard people say that record saved their lives, so I don’t care what the media says. I know how I am and what really counts. I just want it more to be like the old days. In the old days, you used to buy an album, not a single. I want my records to work as a whole, not as a collection of unconnected little bits.”
And considering how Lovesexy plays out, he delivers on that promise. Throughout its runtime, there is never a time to take a breather, almost like listening to Prince and his fellow musicians jamming in a studio for one long continuous piece. Given how they rarely stop, it’s practically a miracle that ‘Alphabet St’ was even able to be paired down at all.
Even though everything about a long continuous album should have been the kiss of death for a pop star, Prince always proved to be the exception to the rule. You can try your best to have the odds stacked against him, but ‘The Purple One’ will always find a way to come out on top whenever he has a microphone in his hand.
