In the five years since the death of Prince Rogers Nelson, the man who just called himself Prince, 115 previously unknown studio recordings have been released from the estate, most of them songs that no one knew.
Even the alternative versions of well-known songs open up completely new perspectives on a work based on a tradition that hardly exists in the digital pop music age: the good old magnetic tape recording in analogue through rhythm, instrumentation or text changes (and sometimes all of this at once) Multi-track technology.
In front of the microphones in his private studio, which was completed in 1988, Prince König was sole ruler insofar as he usually played everything himself: lead and background vocals as well as all the instruments.
Andreas Platthaus
Editor in charge of literature and literary life.
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And he mastered the forms: funk and soul, of course, the basis of his first successes in the early eighties.
But also jazz, his parents' legacy.
Blues, rap, hip-hop, rock.
And even if he did not poach himself in the field of the classical music business - although his concerts were very big operas and sometimes even ballet performances - he admired the great old composers: "There's no vibration in rock / Meet me between the atoms / Beethoven and Bach."
Notice of download death
This is a text excerpt from Prince's new legacy record, which has now been released: “Welcome 2 America”. In truth it is old, namely recorded in 2010; it was originally intended to be published for the following year. But Prince did not release it because he was convinced at the time that the now dominant digital download business would not have a long life. His previous album (simply titled like the year it came out: "2010") was circulated exclusively as a CD supplement to three international music magazines. Other recordings had exclusively included photo books or had only been sold through a single retail chain: Prince experimented no less economically than musically since he had fallen out with the Warner group in the 1990s.However, he did not know how things would go on in any other way. Today we know that his news of the download's death was exaggerated.
The total of twelve pieces on “Welcome 2 America” add up to a little over fifty minutes of playing time. Unfortunately, the booklet is silent about the dramaturgy of the album: Did Prince decide the order himself? After all, Morris Hayes, a musician who has been part of changing backing bands on the Prince tours for almost twenty years, has recently learned a lot about the good collaboration on the recordings, and Hayes is actually co-producer on half of the songs expelled. What that means, however, remains unclear. For “Welcome 2 America” Prince brought a permanent ensemble of instrumentalists and singers back into the studio for the first time in a long time, including Hayes, but tolerating someone next to him as a producer does not suit Prince. Not excluded,that before the current release, the original recordings were overdubbed by hand, even if that would of course mean an insult to majesty.
Where are we with these songs? In the middle of turbulence - an artist and a state. In 2010, Barack Obama had been US President for a year; It seemed time to Prince to take stock. He, who had declared himself an nameless artist during the conflict with Warner and posed for a record cover with the words “slave” smeared on his face, now varied the title track of the American national anthem on “Land of the free, home of the slave”. But the last song again bears the title “One Day We Will All Be Free” and calls for the realization of the egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence. With the American astronomer and slavery opponent Benjamin Banneker, Prince calls out a black figure of identification from the eighteenth century,proudly announces a witty play on words with the name of one
founding father of
the republic: “Keepin 'it Franklin Benjamin Banneker was never born a slave.” Hope dies last; there is something liberating about this consistently politically based album being released after Prince's death. Today in the United States you can see the time has come.
Musically, “Welcome 2 America” is multifaceted, but without hit potential. Two of the songs, "When She Comes" and "1000 Lightyears from Here", are known as later arrangements that were included on the last album during his lifetime, "Hit n Run Phase 2", but were not half as interesting in each case. the latter only as part of another song. "When She Comes" is now musically again one of those highly erotic conjurations to sleep that Prince liked to record, although his faith as a Jehovah's Witness has left strong traces in the other texts.
The naming of the album after its strongest piece is completely consistent: a veritable
spoken word performance
over a strongly accentuated bass line that begins like the one in "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" by the Temptations. But the progress is more a sermon than a necrology, and from the deliberate monotony of the spoken chanting, Liv Warfield, Shelby J. and Elisa Fiorillo - three singers who were closely associated with Prince at the time - denied fragments of stanzas, once also as a jubilant scat, if Prince states: "1 of our greatest exports was a thing called jazz". Back then, in Europe, he was invited to jazz festivals. His record break lasted until 2014, longer than ever. There is likely to be some additional material in the estate.