Seven lessons learned from Prince's "Graffiti Bridge" soundtrack

I’ll confess right up front that I’ve never seen Prince’s 1990 film Graffiti Bridge in its entirety. I’ve never read a single good word about the movie, and as a big fan of Purple Rain, I’ve always feared that watching the sequel would taint my appreciation of the original. (I’ve also never watched Purple Rain while even remotely sober, which may contribute to my belief that it’s a cinematic masterpiece.)

I do, however, own the Graffiti Bridge album, a weird piece of work even by Princely standards. It’s not an awful album by any means. As Prince soundtrack albums go, it ranks well below the flawless Purple Rain and the minor classic Parade (Music from the Motion Picture Under the Cherry Moon), but considerably above Batman. Whereas the first two would stand alone as excellent albums even if you didn’t know the films existed, the songs on Graffiti Bridge sound very much like pieces of a larger, disjointed narrative. It’s a mishmash of guest stars, skit-songs and tonal shifts whose whole is rather less than the sum of its parts.

Still, it’s an interesting listening experience with some scattered but worthwhile highlights. On my most recent spin, I realized that Graffiti Bridge even has a few things to teach us, some more vital than others.

Want to underline your sequel’s inferiority? Open with a weak knock-off of the original.

When Prince was writing “Can’t Stop This Feeling That I Got,” he was probably consciously trying to create a musical link between Purple Rain and Graffiti Bridge. Trouble is, he did it too well. His opening track sounds so much like “Let’s Go Crazy” (minus the awesome spoken-word preamble) that my primary reaction to it is to wonder why I’m not just listening to “Let’s Go Crazy” instead.

The concept of Prince featuring George Clinton is way cooler on paper.

There’s no question that Clinton’s brand of whacked-out space funk was a major influence on young Prince, but there’s also a considerable difference between their sounds. A confluence of these two powerhouses should have shaken the music world to its very foundation. Instead, “We Can Funk” is a pretty decent entry in the Prince dance track canon. The most Clinton-esque elements to be found are a long group chant toward song’s end and the awesome/atrocious lyric “I’m testin’ positive for the funk / I’ll gladly pee in anybody’s cup.”

Place them side by side and Morris Day can easily upstage Prince.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen Purple Rain or heard an early record by The Time, but Morris Day is one of the great showmen of his era. As wild and weird as Prince can be, Morris brings so much more manic energy to his couple of tracks, especially “Release It.” Granted he’s not half the musical genius Prince is, but when Morris starts bossing his "stellas" around and stealing nookie from his side men, I find myself wishing Graffiti Bridge had been his vehicle rather than his benefactor’s.

Once upon a time, there was Tevin Campbell.

Remember Tevin Campbell? That sweet-voiced pretty boy who ruled the R&B charts in the early ‘90s? He’s part of the bizarre Graffiti Bridge entourage, and he’s rather awesome. His “Round and Round” is both one of the best tracks on the album and a more enjoyable effort than Campbell’s future work. By this point, the Prince-Michael Jackson feud was pretty well wound down, but it would be easy to read Prince’s championing of a charismatic child star with a voice soulful beyond his years as one last shot across the bow.

Mavis Staples can do no wrong.

Prince being Prince, he probably could have recruited Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner or another top-tier mega diva to fill this role (he did allegedly pitch the part to Patti LaBelle). Instead he went with the less iconic but equally skilled Mavis Staples, and her brassy, classy presence gives the album just the boost it needs in its saggy second half. Her “Melody Cool” is an undeniable highlight of Graffiti Bridge, a swaggering slab of soul that’s one of the few blatantly cinematic moments that translates gracefully onto wax.

Prince should never dabble in hip-hop.

Sadly, Prince viewed the half-assed flow shoehorned into “New Power Generation (Part II)” not as a failed experiment in genre-bending, but as the gateway to several albums’ worth of hip-hop flirtation. It’s all pretty embarrassing stuff. “Cocaine was a thing that I took on / and Nowhere was a place that I was goin’”? Really?

“Thieves in the Temple” is no “When Doves Cry,” “Graffiti Bridge” is no “Purple Rain.”

Don’t get me wrong – Graffiti Bridge’s big single is a damned good song, maybe even a great one. But unlike its predecessor, it’s just not sturdy enough to hang an entire album and feature film on. As for the title track, it’s little more than a pleasant coda, utterly lacking in the majesty and passion of “Purple Rain.” You know that famous scene at the end of the first film, where Prince’s guitar neck erupts during the fadeout of “Purple Rain,” dousing the crowd with highly suggestive sparks? “Graffiti Bridge” is more like half-hearted wanking with no money shot.

- Ira Brooker

"The Man in the (Rear-View) Mirror" or "World Without Glove"

I’m feeling a little left out of the whole Michael Jackson mourning process. Much like Kurt Cobain, Jackson never really impacted my life the way I’m told he was supposed to.

A lot of that has to do with my upbringing. Where pop culture was concerned, the ‘80s hardly even happened in my neck of Wisconsin. During Jackson’s peak years of media dominance, the majority of music being played in the Brooker household fell into either the Contemporary Christian or Oldies genre. My main exposure to the King of Pop came via jokes in Bloom County strips and the Z93 DJs who yammered away during my morning school bus commutes. The former taught me that he was a creepy freak straight out of some macabre children’s book. The latter made him emblematic of the depravity, decadence and unbearable annoyance I came to associate with Top 40 radio.

I was familiar with some of his songs, sure. Half the girls in my fourth grade class were enamored of him (really not that impressive a feat, as there were 12 students total in my fourth grade class). I really didn’t have much of an opinion on his music, but my inborn contrarian streak made me dis him at every opportunity, to the chagrin of the young ladies of Leon Elementary. I specifically recall Katie Pottinger getting rather upset with me for insisting that there would not be any Michael Jackson songs played at my wedding. (For the record, there were not.)

When I reached my twenties, I started piecing together my Lost Decade by listening to some of the music I’d ignored at the time. Compared to a lot of other musical decades, I still find the ‘80s pretty lackluster, but there’s a lot of greatness there. Digging into the archives led me to quite a few amazing artists, from Talking Heads to Kurtis Blow to Laurie Anderson, not to mention a mighty impressive string of one-hit wonders (one area where the ‘80s truly dominated).

And eventually, I even got around to exploring the works of the Great Gloved One. Listening to Michael Jackson 15 to 20 years after the fact was a peculiar experience. There was no denying the man had recorded some great songs – “Billie Jean,” “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” “Black and White,” just to name a few. There was also no denying he’d recorded a lot of saccharine dreck full of subpar lyrics and ostentatious chirping. Taken as a whole, though, the Michael Jackson oeuvre really made me appreciate the vision, drive and dedication of a deeply troubled, endlessly electrifying musical genius. A genius named Prince.

To me, Michael Jackson’s most important musical legacy is inspiring Prince to spend more than a decade soundly and consistently kicking his ass. Accounts vary on whether their rivalry was friendly or bitter (my absolute favorite Prince and MJ anecdote suggests some acrimony), but there’s no question that each man pushed the other to greater heights. In my estimation, Prince’s heights soared far, far higher than Michael’s. Jackson dominated headlines and ruled the charts, but Prince’s output was more prolific, his skill set more versatile and his sound more timeless (Batman not withstanding). When Jackson started making revolutionary music videos, Prince went ahead and made a groundbreaking feature film. And Thriller may be the all-time best seller, but Purple Rain is a perfect album.

In my mind, it’s clear that Prince wins this contest, but I also doubt he would have reached those peaks if he hadn’t been constantly glancing at Michael Jackson in his rear-view mirror. I know that Jackson deserves plenty of credit in his own right – heck, his Jackson Five vocals alone would earn him a place among the greats – but where my own personal musical education is concerned, I’ll think of him most fondly as a supporting player on the path to Sign o’ the Times.

- Ira Brooker

Getting a bad rap: Five failed hip-hop crossovers

[Originally posted at MadeLoud]

(I'd hoped to have some original content up this week, but I have too many looming deadlines to make that happen. Next week!)

These days, hip-hop is a thoroughly ingrained part of our musical culture, and possibly even the defining sound of an era. As such, it’s been integrated and co-opted into nearly every genre imaginable, from the alterna-funk of early Beck albums to the meathead metal of Limp Bizkit to the country twang of Bubba Sparxx.

But it wasn’t so long ago that the world of rapping and record-scratching seemed weird and exotic to musicians outside the hip-hop sphere. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, adventurous rock and pop artists started to explore the outskirts of this upstart genre with wildly varying results. There were a few successes – Run-DMC’s collaboration with Aerosmith comes to mind, as well as portions of the Judgment Night soundtrack – but, as usual, it’s the failures that were truly fascinating.

Lou Reed – “The Original Wrapper”

Back in the ‘80s, mainstream white America seemed to be of the opinion that rapping was little more than rhyming quickly over a beat. That prevailing notion led to any number of painfully unfunny parodies, and a career low point for at least one rock icon. Much of Lou Reed’s much-maligned Mistrial album comes off like Lou doing a bad John Hiatt impression, but on “The Original Wrapper,” the former Velvet Underground front man embraces his inner Chuck D.

For three-and-a-half baffling minutes, Reed delivers a monotone ramble on AIDS, yuppies, Jerry Falwell and other hot-button issues of 1986, all the while employing waffle-making as some sort of inscrutable metaphor. Odd though it may be, there’s a certain surreal appeal in hearing the man who wrote Berlin deliver a choice couplet like “Ooh-poo-pah-doo and how do you do? / Hip-hop, gonna bop till I drop.”

Bo Diddley – “Kids Don’t Do It”

It’s tough to imagine a more spectacular failure of good intentions than the great Bo Diddley’s sole venture into the genre for which he laid much of the groundwork. Unfortunately, every element of this 1996 cautionary tale seems miscalculated. Employing a flow that would have sounded played out a decade earlier, Diddley and guest rapper Philosopher G (actually Bo’s grandson) lay down the heavy-handed saga of Willie Junior, who starts running with a gang and pays the ultimate price.

Trafficking in clunky rhymes like, “Being in a gang is really lame / Being in a gang ain’t doin’ your thang” and “Don’t take your Mom and Daddy’s gun to school / Because the one that gets shot just might be you”, Diddley gets his message across with all the subtlety of the guest speaker at a middle school anti-drug assembly. The elderly blues man’s heart was clearly in the right place when he delivered this missive to at-risk urban teens – who obviously represent a huge segment of Bo Diddley album-buyers – but the end result is about as effective as a “back in my day” rant delivered by someone’s agitated grandpa.

Buckshot LeFonque

Over the past few decades, DJs have sampled and scratched up countless jazz tunes, and jazz producers have incorporated raps and break beats to great effect. It’s somewhat surprising, then, that full-on efforts to meld the two genres have yielded such spotty results. For every success like Guru’s Jazzmatazz series, there are a dozen failed efforts by artists who just didn’t quite seem to get it.

Case in point: Branford Marsalis’ Buckshot LeFonque project. Over the course of two forgettable mid-1990s albums, the trumpeter and former Tonight Show bandleader crafted a blend of jazz, R&B, rock and hip-hop that was considerably less than the sum of its parts. Even the assistance of DJ Premier couldn’t elevate an undistinguished MC like Uptown, and the constant genre-hopping makes for an unfocused, disorienting experience that provides a glimpse of what hip-hop might be like if Bill Cosby ran the world. Save for the catchy title track from 1997’s Music Evolution, the group’s output proves that as a hip-hop auteur, Marsalis makes one hell of a horn player. At least it stands as a cautionary example for future producers: there aren’t many surer ways to destroy a hip-hop track’s credibility than incorporating samples from Jay Leno’s monologue.

Blondie - "Rapture"

Hating on “Rapture” is a tricky proposition. On the one hand, it’s a major single by one of the more significant bands of the early ‘80s, and one of the first hit songs to bring rap to a mainstream audience. On the other hand, it kind of sucks.

A number one hit in 1981, “Rapture” at least has its references in order. Debbie Harry’s enthusiastic rap does right by hip-hop history by name-checking founding fathers like Fab Five Freddy and Grandmaster Flash. Unfortunately, those shout-outs are mixed into a bizarre, mildly embarrassing second-person narrative involving a space invader with a penchant for eating unlikely objects that rhyme with “Mars.” The lyrics may have been forgivable if they’d been part of a freestyle flow, where the immediacy of the performance excuses occasional lazy rhymes and awkward phrasing, but Harry presumably sat down and penned “Rapture” well ahead of time. Were lines like “And you don’t stop / You keep eatin’ cars / Then when there’s no more cars / You go out at night and eat up bars” really the best she could come up with?

Prince – Diamonds and Pearls and the “Love Symbol” album

You’d think Prince would be the last guy who’d feel the need to enhance his funk quotient, but at some point in the early ‘90s, the Man in Purple apparently decided his sound was losing its street cred. His solution? Recruiting New Power Generation dancer and amateur MC Tony M to bust some sub-par flows on his next couple of albums.

One might assume that music as funky as Prince’s signature style would lend itself easily to a hip-hop coupling, and perhaps the experiment would have worked with a more talented rapper on board. As it stands, the otherwise solid Diamonds and Pearls and “Love Symbol” albums grind to a halt every time Tony M’s thoroughly generic rhymes take center stage, dragging down even a semi-classic like “Sexy M.F.” Give Prince credit for nurturing homegrown talent instead of bringing in big-name guest stars, but Tony M’s legacy is more Apollonia than Sheila E.

[Note: Prince has apparently ordered all Prince video clips removed from the internet. What's up with that?]

- Ira Brooker