Prince

In 1994, one of the strangest and most notorious legal wars in pop music history was declared. Prince, perhaps the single artist next to Michael Jackson most responsible for the R&B/pop crossover explosion of the 1980s, went to battle with his parent company Warner Brothers, claiming artistic exploitation. In an effort to wrest control of his own musical and financial destiny from the label, he withheld his proposed follow-up to 1992's Love Symbol Album, The Gold Experience, and released a steady flow of other - some might say mediocre - material in its stead. He changed his name legally to the same unpronouncable glypth which had adorned the aforementioned record's cover. And, famously, he appeared in public with the word "SLAVE" scrawled across his cheek.

The result was a successful, but ultimately career-killing power play, one which freed the Artist (as he was then known) from his Warner contract, but left him with a dwindling and alienated fanbase, not to mention an almost fatal loss in his already-wavering critical support. It took ten years, the readoption of his given name, and the release of Musicology (his first major-label album since 1996's disappointing Emancipation) for Prince to regain even a shred of his former commercial and artistic clout. And while in 2006, with another, even bigger hit album under his belt in the form of 3121, it could be said that good fortune has returned to one of modern pop's true auteurs, if "his" new compilation Ultimate Prince proves anything, it's that Prince's struggles with Warner Brothers are far from over - they're just not above the radar anymore.

To illustrate my point, it's useful to look at the troubled history which brought Ultimate to shelves in the first place. The proposed two-disc collection was originally slated for release in March of this year, a mere week before 3121 came out. Just days before the street date, however, it was pulled from stores, only to return to schedules for a late May release; this, too, was cancelled. Finally the album slipped out with little fanfare late this August, but attentive fans were able to observe some pretty major changes from the original track listing - particularly the deletion of the legendary 12" mix of "Erotic City." This "scandal," mind you, was played out entirely behind the scenes; there were no public statements regarding Ultimate Prince from either Prince or Warner Brothers, no acknowledgement that the delay had occurred because Prince didn't want 3121 to compete with his younger self (which he almost certainly did not) or that the changes in the track listing were ideologically motivated by the artist's new image as a non-cursing, non-fornicating Jehovah's Witness (which they almost certainly were). But the eventual release of the compilation, and a few more subtle changes worked into its fabric, reveal that there's a bigger issue here: namely, the revision of Prince's history by two separate and conflicting forces, a newer and subtler manifestation of the tug of war that began when the artist declared himself "dead" 12 long years ago.

Of course, there's every possibility that I'm just reading into this too much. But listen to the "hits" disc of Ultimate and a distasteful blandness becomes obvious, even though all but a handful of the selections (I'm looking at you, "My Name is Prince") are stone cold classics. More so than earlier collections The Hits 1 & 2 and even 2001's The Very Best of Prince, Ultimate's first disc represents a blanding of Prince, a dilution of his more eccentric musical fluorishes in an almost certainly conscious effort to make him more palatable to the casual-listening chain coffeeshop audience. What, taken individually, is a truly staggering collection of songs - some of the best written in the last 50 years, for my money - comes off as a mealy mish-mash of lite-funk, pop ballads and falsetto crooning, pre-packaged and artificially heated for the consumption of listeners who find lyrics like "I sincerely want 2 fuck the taste out of your mouth" distasteful.

Part of the problem is that Prince just isn't really a singles artist; I know, kind of a strange thing to say about the man who gave us "Kiss," "When Doves Cry," et. al, but true. A great Prince album synthesizes a wide variety of different elements: hard, electronics-infused funk, smooth soul, touches of rock and psychedelia, and yes, even those weird, cryptic, confounding moments which have made him a "difficult" artist for just about as long as he's been a successful one. These elements need each other; they can't be separated or streamlined without losing part of the essential character of Prince as a whole. So yes, the single edit of "Do Me Baby" (not included on this set, incidentally) is a great, seductive slow jam; but without the bizarro climax, which features a post-coital Prince whimpering "hold me...it's so cold," it's a completely different song. More to the point, nobody's saying that "Uptown" (disc one, track two) isn't one of Prince's most successful forays into New Wave-influenced pop, but when taken out of the context of side two of Dirty Mind - which also featured odes to oral sex, brother/sister incest and even a hedonistic anti-war song - it's just that. These "freaky bits" - "Darling Nikki" and "Computer Blue" as opposed to "I Would Die 4 U," the eerie wedding sound effects which opened the album edit of "If I Was Your Girlfriend" - are, as Warner seems to recognize, what make Prince challenging, oblique, off-putting and occasionally unmarketable. But more often than not, they're also what make him interesting, and that's something which Ultimate Prince troublingly illustrates.

To its credit, however, Ultimate does give us a glimpse at the less marketable side of Prince; even in the midst of disc one's homogenous hit parade, the compilers made the excellent choice of including the full-length album version of "Controversy," robotic, multi-tracked recitation of the Lord's Prayer and all. And the entirety of disc two redeems itself by including 11 extended mixes, most of which are previously unreleased on CD and most of which are far superior to the more frequently heard single or album cuts. We've got the version of "Let's Go Crazy" that played over the opening sequence of Purple Rain, complete with that "crazy" dissonant piano solo. We've got a "Fresh Dance Mix" of "Pop Life" which adds an entire extra verse, making up for the oddly truncated edit on Around the World in a Day. Hell, even the extended remix of "Thieves in the Temple" actually forces me to appreciate the song in a way that the album version never did, turning its precious theatricality into something a little more lithe and danceable. But the real discovery has to be the "Dance Remix" of "Little Red Corvette," a more guitar-heavy eight-minute cut which seems to feature an entirely different - and, arguably, better - vocal performance from Prince. It's one thing on this collection that I'd never had the pleasure of hearing before, and as far as I'm concerned, it leaves the shorter, better-known mix in the dust.


In fact, almost all of the alternate mixes which appear on disc two of Ultimate are a much more enlightening, holistic look at the ethos of Prince than the tried-and-true hits of disc one. So why didn't Warner go all the way and just put out a disc of 12" mixes, something which has astoundingly never been done for an artist who virtually revolutionized the format? Why, with two other Prince collections still in print, do we need to hear the same old radio tracks trotted out again for our nostalgic enjoyment, while the masters of classic extended cuts like "Mountains," "America," "Anotherloverholenyohead" and, yes, "Erotic City" are still relegated to the turntables of hardcore fans willing to seek out the original vinyl? Certainly not because Warner wanted to expand the scope of their previous Prince compilations - Ultimate, like The Hits and The Very Best before it, closes the curtain with the hit-and-miss early '90s era of Diamonds and Pearls and Love Symbol, choosing to ignore the last four years of Prince's career on the label (including the vastly underrated Gold Experience) in what could only be described as decade-old sour grapes. Seriously, people, you're trying to tell me "My Name is Prince" is a better-loved song than "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World?" Let's get real.

But not even Prince's old "slavemasters" can take all the blame for the carelessness which has been afforded his catalogue since 1994; indeed, it's just as frustrating that the man himself won't set aside his own petty grudges, be the better man, and establish a new precedent for the way his music is evaluated and consumed. In the midst of this 21st-century revival, Prince could easily put together a killer compilation of underlooked sides from the Symbol Era and beyond, maybe try and salvage the good tunes from the admittedly overwhelming sea of filler which defined his output from 1994 until 2004. Or better yet, he could open up that legendary vault (of which, if 1997's Crystal Ball set is any indication, he still has control) and give the people what they really want: you know, like Dream Factory. In any case, until both parties can concede to their better instincts and represent the Prince who was - rather than either the family-friendly spiritual entertainer favored by Mr. Nelson, or the commercially contrived hit machine suggested by this compilation - there will be no truly "Ultimate" Prince collection. Instead, we'll just have...well, Ultimate Prince.

- Zach Hoskins

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See Also: Stuff Prince could be releasing right now.