Apart from a talent for genre-hopping (dance) music, Prince Rogers Nelson* had a sublime gift for lyrics, both bawdy and affecting, often turning out great rhyming couplets. Here’s one of my favourites:
“Hot thing, barely 21
Hot thing, looking 4 Big Fun**”
I’ll post some more in the comments, but I’d welcome other fond recollections***
__________________
* Blessed with such a name, how could he not turn out such beautiful innuendo as he did?
** I think they’ve split up
*** as well as snappy dismissals and sneering disdain, of course
I like the cheek of his really long couplets:
“Built like she was, she had the nerve 2 ask me if I planned 2 do her any harm
So, look here, I put her on the back of my bike and we went riding down by old man Johnson’s farm”
and of course:
“At home there are seventeen-year-old boys and their idea of fun
Is being in a gang called The Disciples, high on crack, totin’ a machine gun”.
I was thinking about Raspberry Beret too.
She wore a Raspberry beret, the kind you find in a second hand store.
She wore a Raspberry beret, and when it was warm she didn’t wear much more.
More of the same:
How can I put this in a way so as not to offend or unnerve
There’s a rumor goin’ all round that u ain’t been gettin’ served
They say that u ain’t u know what In baby who knows how long
It’s hard 4 me 2 say what’s right when all I wanna do is wrong
“Starfish and coffee
Maple syrup and jam
Butterscotch clouds, a tangerine
And a side order of ham”
…I’ll stick with me pasty thanks, bud
This made me laugh when I first heard it.
When you were mine, I gave you all of my money
Time after time… You done me wrong
It was just like a dream
You let all my friends come over and meet
And you were so strange
You didn’t have the decency to change the sheets
His first truly great song, I think.
I’ve always liked the “intensity” of the rhyming pattern in this from Manic Monday:
It’s just another manic Monday
I wish it was Sunday
‘Cause that’s my fun day
My “I don’t have to run day”
It’s just another manic Monday.
If a man is considered guilty
For what goes on in his mind
Give me the electric chair
For all my future crimes
From that same, fine album:
Systematic overthrow of the underclass
Hollywood conjures images of the past
New world needs spirituality
That will last
I’ve seen the future and it will be
My favourite Prince album, by far.
When I’m working
At my jobba
I’m the victim
You’re the robber
What’s not to like?
I told the joke, about the woman
Who asked her lover “Why is your organ so small?”
He replied, “I never knew I was playing in a cathedral”
Vicky didn’t laugh at all.
“For someone who can’t stand TV dinners, you sure eat enough of them motherfuckers”
– from the delightful Bob George.
And, of course, “Bob, ain’t that a bitch? What’s he do for a living? Manage rock stars? Who?
Prince, ain’t that a bitch. That skinny motherfucker with the high voice?”
We did great impressions of that at school. Hurts your throat, mind.
Yeah…ain’t that a bitch?
There is a completely bizarre line somewhere on the Black Album about being “soaked in banana cologne”. I hope I didn’t dream that.
Ever one for fruity lyrics, eh?
Let’s go crazy
Let’s get nuts
Let’s look for the purple banana
‘Til they put us in the truck, let’s go!
You know what to do, good love
You got a cherry pie, apple kisses
Everything is cool
Every time you kiss me, lemon crush
Her hot pants can’t hide her cheeks
She’s a peach
Loving you in passion unmolested in this garden
Mango and nectarine, sweet honeydew, I beg your pardon
“What’s the use of bein’ young if you ain’t gonna get old? ” (Gold). Profound, that.
Then you jerk your body like a horny pony would!
You jerk your body like a horny pony would!
Now run and tell your mama ’bout that!
I love how he basically stops the song and starts sing “Cat! We need you to rap!”
My favourite Prince track of the last couple of years is June (one of three superlative tracks on HITNRUN Phase One, the rest being a bit so-so). It is wistful, steeped in regret, an older, wiser man reflecting on an old flame.
Pasta simmers on the stove in June
Makes no sense yet, but it will soon
Conversation starters come way too hard
Nobody wants to be the martyr,
playin’ the wrong cards
Why did you come to this planet?
Why did you come to this life?
How can you be everybody’s dream,
and still be somebody’s wife?
Tell me, what did you have for lunch today?
That’s right, how would I know?
How would I know?
You are off somewhere, being free
while I starve in the lonesome cold.
Our bodies got used to each other
Now they’re used to the sound
of Richie Havens’ voice on the vinyl,
spinning round and round, round and round
Sometimes I feel I was born way too late
Shoulda been born on the Woodstock stage
But I’m just here, waitin’, and waitin’, and waitin’
Somebody famous had a birthday today
All I saw was another full moon
What’s that?
Something’s burning on the stove
Must be the pasta
Must be the pasta
Oh yeah, it’s June
I have days like this all the time. The phrase ‘Richie Haven’s voice on the vinyl’ is interesting.
Shut up already, damn!
Tell me who in this house know about the quake?
(We do)
I mean really, really
If you know how to rock say ‘yeah’ (yeah)
If you know how to party say ‘oh yeah’ (oh yeah)
But if you ain’t hip to the rare house quake,
Shut up already, damn!
Green eggs and ham?
Those are some great lines, @fin59 – he really knew how to marshal his words to the rhythm.
Shakalaka -boom!
He sho did.
One could observe that Housequake is paradigmatic of Prince’s deployment of what Eliot termed the objective correlative.
The notion that poetic apogee is achieved when sound and shape and syntax collide with great force to produce an atemporal symmetry,
One could if one were a pretentious twerp.
Or one could, of course, fuck art and dance.
I have a young (25) colleague at work called Nikki. I daren’t ask if her parents own a copy of Purple Rain.
You don’t work in a hotel, I trust…
No. And the only magazine you’re liable to find lying around at my workplace is a photocopier manual.
Ooh, ‘replace ink cartridge’…Phwoar!
Here’s somebody else’s purple prose on Prince’s lyrics. Like taking magic mushrooms, they reckon….
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2016/04/22/prince_s_lyrics_were_surrealist_poetry_that_overloaded_your_senses_and_short.html
Sometimes it snows in April.
It snowed today where I live.
Yesterday, I became aware that this song, which has become synonymous with Prince’s death on April 21st 2016, was recorded on…April 21st 1985. Freaky.