The main thing to understand about Prince is that he is very great, amazing, the best.
Back in the '80s, music was just foaming up out of Prince, it couldn't be checked. If he was down at the dry-cleaners on a Thursday morning having his lavender banana sling cleaned and pressed in time for the weekend, and he started drumming his fingers on the counter while he waited for fifteen seconds, by the time he pulled up the purple Honda 400A into the big driveway at Paisley Park he would have that shit worked up into a dancefloor banger, then lay down and mix all the tracks before lunch and just turf the master tapes atop a huge pile on the back lawn. Followed by an entire afternoon of sex, topped off with coconut rum mojitos by the pool at sundown.
Warner Brothers weren't trying to release nine Prince albums every weekend, so the man generally had a few side projects on the go under the pseudonym "Jamie Starr", just dashing off classics like 777-9311 for The Time. Reportedly Prince not only composed and produced this tune but laid down all the tracks except Morris Day's lead vocal and Jesse Johnson's guitar solo - not that they couldn't have played it themselves, the band having been put together by Prince primarily so that he could go on tour with a support act that was capable of competently playing the songs that he wrote for them (you get the sense that there's not really any such thing as "collaborating with Prince").
Today's track is from another Prince side-project, "Vanity 6"... this LP includes the excellent "Nasty Girl" but I'm featuring the little-heard "When A Girl Answers (Don't Hang Up)", built around an entertaining call-and-response quasi-rap in which a couple of "party girls" bitch each other out over the phone - save that one of the "girls" is transparently Prince just affecting a sassy voice. Oh Prince, you delightful little faun!
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| Pretty sure Prince drew this too. |
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