Raiding the lost Ark

The trouble with posthumous albums is one of suspicion. There’s an inherent fear that material of any merit would have been released by the deceased during their living years, and that anything issued post-mortem is only ever going to be a cynical money grab by the expired’s estate. 

Legacy album deluxe box sets frequently fall into this category, promising all sorts of “previously unreleased” baubles which are invariably outtakes left off the original record for good reason. Too often they’re no more than pointless souvenirs, the gift shop T-shirt you see on the way out of the museum. These are curiosities for completists who feel their collections of a given artist’s work are lacking the alternate versions that you would probably only listen to the once in exchange for that hefty wheelbarrow of cash left behind for the privilege.

Posthumous releases, on the other hand, fall into a category of their own. In some cases they are grave digging exercises or, at least, examples of poor editorial decisions by surviving family members, lawyers or both claiming to represent the dead artist’s interests and enduring legacy. Occasionally, however, a genuine gem will be uncovered, such as Jeff Buckley’s Grace, Joy Division’s Closer or John Martyn’s Heaven And Earth. In other cases the estate finds a way to fulfil the artist’s previously unrequited wishes, such as Tom Petty’s Wildflowers & All The Rest, which was released last year as the full double 1984 album Petty had intended (before record company types chopped it in half), along with a complete live performance and acoustic demos. It is a wonderful document of a much-missed musician at his creative best.

So this brings me to Prince. When he died in April 2016 he left behind two legacies: firstly, the extraordinary body of work committed to record after signing to Warner Bros at the age of 19 - around 40 albums in all - and secondly, the even more extraordinary body of work rumoured to be lying in a supposed vault. Like the Lost Ark, the Paisley Park archive became the subject of myth, but also, it is alleged, wrangling amongst those closest to Prince over how to open it up and access the supposed riches within. But now it has, with the release today of Welcome 2 America, the first ‘proper’ posthumous Princ release (in so far as 2019’s Originals compiled demos written and then given away, and 2018’s Piano And A Microphone, lifted from a single cassette tape, and comprising 35 minutes of - you guessed it - vocals and piano takes of more unreleased demos, with the exception of one of Nothing Compares 2 U). 

Prince was a restless creator. Complete albums were recorded and then abandoned, often on a whim. Thus, it’s believed that the Paisley Park vault contains at least ten completed albums committed to tape between the early 1980s and 2000. Among them are two albums recorded (but not released) from each of 1986, 1987 and 1989, and all titled - though no one really knows whether these are working names or not. Welcome 2 America was recorded - and abandoned - in 2010, four years before Prince’s death, but it remains unclear as to why, beyond the belief that he just didn’t want to release it. Certainly quality wasn’t the issue as it is, frankly, divine. 

If there are any questions about it, it’s to try and figure out what Prince was aiming at, with a record owing more to the Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder or Curtis Mayfield soul of his youth. Actually, it probably owes even more to Gil Scott-Heron, such is the central theme of social conscience that runs through the 12 tracks, making statements on the country’s racial and political divisions a full seven years before Donald Trump moved into the White House, and four years of recriminative madness ensued, much of which can be looked upon as prophesied by Prince on this album. “Land of the free, home of the slave. Get down on Ur knees. Hit me” he says on the partly spoken title track. “Hope and change, everything takes forever. And truth is a new minority”. If it had been written and recorded a day after 6 January this year, it wouldn’t have been a better fit.

Prince's estate has called the album a "powerful creative statement that documents his concerns, hopes and visions for a shifting society”, in fact drawing on reflections of the issues facing black Americans during Barack Obama’s first term as present. Morris Hayes, one of Prince’s longest-serving musical collaborators (and something of a creative consigliere) recently revealed that, musically, the album’s origins came from a challenge. After seeing a speech by activist and thinker Cornel West, in which he professed the view that, as much as he loved his “brother” Prince, “he’s no Curtis Mayfield”. So, Hayes recently told BBC 6 Music, Prince set about proving West wrong.

Picture: Prince Estate

While there is plenty of Mayfield-style R&B on Welcome 2 America (Born 2 Die, with its falsetto vocal and synth grooves being a prime example) it is in stark contrast to his late career dalliances with a variety of genres (and not always satisfyingly so). As a result, it feels more complete, more consistent, and while musically incongruous to contemporary music in 2010, feels like the Prince album you would have wanted to hear in any era. 

Jazz-funk mixes with playful pop fare like Hot Summer, and more contemplative, sombre pieces like Stand Up And B Strong, which features the New Power Generation’s Shelby J as co-vocalist. It’s one of several tracks that Shelby likens to Broadway numbers, with theatrical lyrics and a sense of ensemble performance. Imagine a show like Hamilton, but written and composed by Prince. There are traces of pure soul on 1000 Light Years, and nods to hip-hop with Running Game (Son Of A Slave Master), but the overall vibe is more of an easy-going stroll through urban American styles, peppered with statements that are clearly (but sometimes subtly) designed to make a point.

Prince, as I think we all know, was an enigma. Even now, five years after his death, we probably know as little about him as we have any pop star since Elvis Presley. We think we know him: he cultured an image that partly allowed him to hide behind character - the “Purple Perv”, as Smash Hits once styled him. But right from the get-go, from that 1977 signing to Warners, we were clearly dealing with a talent of outrageous proportions. The much-shared video of him performing the solo on The Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps in an all-star line-up showed just what a precocious gift he had. It was a preposterous performance that also reminded the world that Prince was more than just a flamboyant eccentric who once changed his name to a symbol out of protest.

Here is what maintains our fascination in Prince, or at least, what maintains mine. Musically he was derivative, as all pop stars were, but also he was pure original. Like all good progressive artists he never stood still, which is why he built this vast collection of unreleased material. 

Picture © Marc Ducrest

I only ever saw Prince live twice: the first, at Wembley Stadium in the 1990s, in which he rattled through the hits, was, frankly, underwhelming. The second was all the more different: an exhausting (for me) three-hour funkiest in 2013 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in which he hardly touched the hits, 1999 and an encore of Purple Rain notwithstanding. And it was fantastic - easily one of the greatest gigs I’ve ever been to. This was brought home by the fact that I’d got my Stravinsky Auditorium strategy right that Saturday night, planting myself for the full 30-track extended set right up against the stage, with Prince himself performing a matter of feet in front of me. It was a schooling in catalogue depth, but also the extent of his musical references, inventively covering relative obscurities by Aretha Franklin, The Impressions, James Brown, Mary J. Blige and even Rufus & Chaka Khan’s Ain.’t Nobody. 

Three years previously Prince had the foresight to see where the country of his birth, the country that produced these same musicians, was going. Some have said he’d always had that vision, and that Welcome 2 America is merely a sequel to Sign O’ The Times, but I would disagree. After a period in which he was every bit as prolific but nowhere near as commercially successful, largely due to a restlessness in finding a defining new identity for his music, on Welcome 2 America he seemed to find it.