We The Purple
An unforeseen burst of funky social commentary from The Vault. By Danny Eccleston.
MANY PRINCE fans will have foreseen some of the secret gems to have emerged so far from The Vault (notably, 2020’s bumper Sign
‘O’ The Times). Few but the most devoted or insider-informed, however, are likely to have expected an unheard belter from as late as 2010, seemingly contemporaneous with the sub-par 20Ten, a freebie given away with the Daily Mirror and deemed “as good as Purple
Rain”… by the Daily Mirror.
Because Welcome 2 America is classic Prince, built on a band – Tal Wilkenfeld on bass, Chris Coleman on drums, Morris Hayes on keyboards – that turns out to have been his most straightforwardly funky since 1988’s
Lovesexy, and with similar nods to ParliamentFunkadelic. The opening title track is Prince’s
Chocolate City: dark, loping and carrying a spoken-word litany of American ills – greed, corruption, tech-overload – leavened by wit and wordplay. Meanwhile, the exquisite Born 2 Die is a soul-stirring Curtis Mayfield homage, replete with soft falsetto, wah wah, and a killer chorus.
This is Sign ‘O’ The Times territory – Prince looking to articulate funky social commentary in the style of black music’s ’70s pioneers. The low-riding Running Game (Son Of A Slave Master) complains of the white entertainment industry’s ownership of black artists. 1,000 Light Years From Here imagines a society free of inequality, perhaps under the ocean, way in the future. Maybe Prince, notorious for shelving music he decided was too negative (cf. The Black Album), thought all this too much of a bummer to lay on 2010. Or more likely, he just got distracted by the next day’s brilliant idea.
When Prince wanders from the funk path the results are more mixed. The new wave pop of Hot Summer could bear an extra polish. Of the ballads, Stand Up And B Strong, a cover of a 2006 Soul Asylum song, is more than a bit soppy. Possibly, we get too much of co-singers Liv Warfield, Shelby J. and Elisa Fiorillo. Yet there’s strength in Welcome 2
America’s commitment to the idea of the Classic Prince Album (again,
Lovesexy comes to mind): a multi-hued merging of funk and pop and rock and soul into something sui generis, and it’s epitomised by closer One Day We Will All B Free. A reprise of the album’s political theme and the mid-’70s R&B milieu in which it is most comfortable, it’s also one of the great Prince songs.
A fancy-schmancy Deluxe Edition of
Welcome 2 America includes a 24-track Blu-ray of an April 28, 2011 Prince show at Inglewood, California, part of a 21-night stop on his Welcome 2 America tour. It’s a typically maximal affair starring a hair-raising Let’s Go Crazy and a wild pair of furry white boots, but there’s no hint of the album that Prince had recently finished or the next one we’d hear, the Hendrixian Plectrumelectrum.
It was another day, another Prince – one of an infinite variety.