With first posthumous album, Prince pierces the American condition
NEW YORK: Prince’s estate will soon issue a completed record from the mercurial artist’s storied music vault, the first never-before-heard album released since the musician’s shock death five years ago.
‘Welcome 2 America’ – a 12track album finished in 2010, but shelved for reasons unknown in the famous vault at Prince’s Paisley Park compound near Minneapolis – offers a prophetic window into social struggles at today’s forefront, delving into racism, political division, technology and disinformation.
Melding urgent lyricism with languorous funk, the pop shapeshifter Prince sings of America as the ‘land of the free / home of the slave.’
The artist, who died at 57 on April 21, 2016 following an accidental fentanyl overdose, could not have known that in the years following his death his beloved home city would explode in furor and protest after the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man.
But Prince was a career activist, advocating for the empowerment of Black people in the recording industry and beyond.
“You go to school just to learn / about what never existed,” Prince sings on the closing track ‘One Day We Will All B Free.’
“But if your history only burns / it’s better to resist it.”
The album, out July 30, sees Prince level “a laser-focused assault on the condition of America,” said Morris Hayes, Prince’s longtime keyboardist and musical director.
“What’s going on with social media, social justice, and social consciousness... this is a concerted effort to really speak about these things,” said Hayes, who co-produced the album.
“I really dug how raw it was, and as far as my production, I just wanted to keep it to where its raw and I don’t get in the way of what he’s trying to say.”
For Hayes, the singular artist ‘was way ahead,’ like a ‘sage sitting in the Himalayas somewhere,’ in foreshadowing the current moment.
“He wanted, I believe, a country that actually stood for what it said it stood for: liberty and justice for all,” Hayes told AFP in an interview. “And we painfully know that that’s not the case.”
For Prince a key component of freedom was ownership, according to Hayes: “if you don’t own your own things, you don’t have any freedom.”
The artist was well known for taking labels to task, famously scrawling ‘slave’ on his cheek and changing his name to an unpronounceable ‘love symbol’ in the 1990s to protest Warner’s bid to rein in his prolific musical output.
Hayes said Prince – who didn’t carry a cell phone and memorised necessary phone numbers – also discussed freedom in terms of technology and devices, which he saw ‘as something that handcuffed people.’
But while the album tackles decidedly weighty topics -‘Running Game (Son of a Slave Master)’ centres on racism, while “Same Page, Different Book” touches on religious strife – the album also includes vintage danceable and carnal slow jam Prince in the