And Prince, even when he was giving away table scraps, had a body of work unlike any other.Only songs and videos released within the last 30 days can be posted. As with the other tragedies that surround his passing, however, we can at least console ourselves with the work.
It is one tragedy among many that his untimely death prevented us from seeing more of this new, more generous Prince: a Prince whose first instinct on seeing three beautiful young women was to give them instruments, not camisoles. With 3RDEYEGIRL, though, Prince was finally willing to share the spotlight-even if he was still writing and singing every track. Groups like Vanity 6, the Family and even the Time had been puppet acts, the Oz-like presence of their mastermind behind the curtain only strengthened by his conspicuous absence from the credits. But I’m including it here to show something of the evolution of Prince’s approach to collaboration since the 1980s. One of the few side projects from this period to be released on wax was not strictly a side project at all: 2014’s Plectrumelectrum was marketed as Prince’s 36th studio album, with backing band 3RDEYEGIRL receiving co-credit just like the Revolution and the New Power Generation in the past. But he continued to foster talent, more in the role of a mentor than a Svengali, right up until the end of his life. Things got quiet on the Prince protégé front for most of the ’90s, as the artist (soon to become “the Artist”) focused his energies on escaping his contract with Warner Bros., rather than recording even more music for them pseudonymously. # Prince and 3RDEYEGIRL: Plectrumelectrum (2014) It’s not for everyone, but if you’ve ever wished the spoken-word interludes on Lovesexy went on for 45 minutes, this is the album for you.
Not a traditional pop record so much as a series of spoken-word poems set to music, May 19 has a sensual, house-influenced vibe reminiscent of Madonna’s “Justify My Love”-which makes sense, as Chavez happened to co-write that song. A year later, Prince returned the favor(s) by releasing Chavez’s debut album, May 19, 1992, on Paisley Park. She was also, for better or worse, the muse for his third and by far most bonkers feature film, 1990’s Graffiti Bridge.
Legend has it that an encounter with the free-spirited artist prompted Prince to cancel the release of his dark, angry Black Album, replacing it with the post-psychedelic (but still kind of dark and angry) funk gospel of 1988’s Lovesexy. Ingrid Chavez spent only a brief time in Prince’s orbit, but exercised an outsized influence on his musical and, indeed, spiritual direction in the late ’80s. But for listeners willing to go even a little deeper than the surface, these 10 Prince-in-all-but-name LPs are well worth your crate-digging time. Not all of Prince’s shadow discography was as essential as his “real” catalogue: like many artist-producers before and after him, he had a knack for saving the best material for himself.
Sometimes, he used his “protégés” as outlets for the kind of straightforward R&B and funk his own pop crossover ambitions led him to downplay other times, they were experimental detours, dry runs for forthcoming shifts in style, or thinly veiled expansions to his own concurrent projects. Prince’s side efforts weren’t just curios or vanity projects (though they were also that-literally, in the case of Vanity 6). I’m referring, of course, to what VMP’s own Andrew Winistorfer calls the “myriad of albums” Prince wrote, arranged and produced for other artists. Fortunately for us, there’s yet another side of the purple canon worth discovering, one that remains overlooked, even by many longtime listeners. His Royal Badness released 39 studio albums between 19: a staggering output nevertheless representing only a fraction of the music still locked in his storied “Vault.” For many fans, these unreleased recordings remain Paisley Park’s Holy Grail-which makes it all the more frustrating to see their official release being delayed by legal scuffles within the Prince estate. Everyone knows that Prince was as supernaturally prolific a recording artist as he was a supernaturally talented one.