Prince’s Welcome 2 America, which was recorded in 2010 but only released in 2021, five years after his death, has a rep for being a politically aware CD that anticipated the BLM summer of 2020. Prince limned his country as “land of the free, home of the slave.” Triplets on one lyric disclosed a low line of descent – “son of a son of a son of a…slave-master.” Ten years after, it’s still bracing to hear Prince cutting through the fantasy of a post-racial America. Welcome 2 America presented a dark state of the nation as Democrats tried to enact an Obamatime agenda and the G.O.P Tea Partied: “Hope and change? Everything takes forever.”
The lost CD’s greatest miss, “Hot Summer,” mocked gridlock and its upshots. Prince road-tested that one with his bandmates after they recorded it. A backup singer recalls…
All those people were outside and I’m thinking it’s broad daylight, they’re gonna see him. But we didn’t care. We had the windows rolled down and we were playing “Hot Summer.” There’s nothing like driving in a car and listening to music and I think he agreed.
The song would’ve worked on a car radio like a Motown special. But this sound of not-so-young America isn’t just funnin’. AK-47 drum rolls (exact replicas of the weapon’s killer sound) drive the song. Those beats link the threat in the original Sixties sense of the phrase “hot summer”[2] with the prospect of “Second Amendment remedies” in open carry states after “patriots” stopped leaving their guns at home during the Congressional recess of 2009.
Not that hot fun in the summertime could ever seem trivial to Prince. When he was born in time as a pop supernova, American music had re-segregated and white rockists dissed dance party people. Songs like George Clinton’s “One Nation Under a Groove” or Prince’s own jams—from “Uptown” to “Erotic City”—mapped multi-culti liberated zones. “Hot Summer” is another “silly” pop song that points to a realm of freedom left of the extreme Right.
One song on Welcome 2 America, though, hints Prince was finding it harder to dance his way out of his own constrictions. His cover of a relatively obscure rock song by the band, Soul Asylum, “Stand up and B Strong,” calls out and responds to the addiction that would kill him—“… you take too many pills (oh too many pills).” The chorus’s marching order has been taken as a political one, but the dare in the echt Prince guitar solo (along with a final whispered “stand up”) is all about biz that wasn’t in the streets. Prince’s choice to put his own signature on someone else’s song about pills and private agony has a new resonance now.
Despite the absence of a full confessional on that front, Welcome isn’t a record of bad faith. Prince gets real and rangy too. He’s noticing what’s going on in his nation and his bedroom. Take the bare truths in “When She Comes.” Prince is alive to his lover’s particulars—“when she comes/she never closes her eyes.” He’s a rapt observer not a know-it-all.
When she comes
She never, ever
Holds her sighs
She can b so free
Occasionally, she cries
Please don’t ask me why
This is an adults’ only song because Prince isn’t satisfied to body forth a gauzy object of desire, though he lets that last mystery be. His song has a subject (“my woman”) with whom he has a history: “At first I thought she was a friend/But now she’s the first and last thing I ever want to do.” Their story doesn’t end when the doing is done. She is livingly there after the ball in the all-together: “Some people might think it’s rude/But she’s more comfortable in the nude.” Prince bows to her as she feels her post-coital oats—“She thinks her ish don’t stink.”
Prince re-did “When She Comes” on HITnRUN Phase 1—the first disk of the last double-CD he released before his death. The woman who got him going in 2010 may have been gone by 2015. Perhaps that’s why his last spin on the song is more ornate and flowery and more about him—“his artful technique/deserves a peek.” “When She Comes” (redux) begins with an artful (No doubt.) aural nod to the arrangement of Al Green’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” that horns into a riff from Denise William’s lovely, rueful “Silly.” (There are no samples of Green and Williams—both members along with Prince of R&B’s falsetto hall of fame—but their voices are in the nimbus of Prince’s highs and his bluer end note too.)
The past and a few regrets were definitely on Prince’s mind as he was making HITnRUN 1’s last summative track, “June.” Under a full moon around his birthday, Gemini Prince lit up his life and didn’t see much to look forward to. The song’s stream of consciousness bubbles on a low boil as Prince images himself cooking pasta. (Prince ® presumably.) He’s missing a woman—“off somewhere being free”—as he preps for a solo meal. Singing for himself, he grasps his (and her?) starry distance from ordinary dailiness and small talk—“Tell me what you have for lunch today?/That’s right how would I know.” He ID’s with another singer who once segued from “Motherless Child” to “Freedom” and muses about being a throwback—“…should’ve been born on the Woodstock stage.” Tired of pop life, Prince allows he’s in limbo—“waiting waiting waiting.” His resigned last verse seems to ask for a premonitory hearing…
Somebody famous had a birthday today
But all eye saw was another full moon
What’s that?
Something’s burnin’ on the stove
It must be the pasta, it must be the pasta
Oh yeah, it’s June
There’s an echo in that reminder to himself of a couplet in the title track of his 1987 album, Sign O the Times.
In September, my cousin tried reefer for the very first time
Now he’s doing horse, it’s June…
Prince wasn’t doing H., but he wasn’t dumb about addiction. Did he sense he was about to burn out from drugs even as he stayed stuck on status quotidian and past or future lovers? It’s pretty clear he didn’t have the will to resist what was consuming him. “June” makes it sound like he was waiting around to die. It’s a sign of his end time.
Note
1 Prince had a special angle on that myth given his own career, which had him pretending early on to be something other than a brother. C. Liegh McInnes has zeroed in on how young Prince dealt with the reality that demography was destiny for pop musicians when he was blowing up. Prince guessed he’d have more freedom if he came on as an exotic mulatto, though his parents were black. Back in that day, Prince didn’t shout out how his creativity had been nurtured by a black neighborhood in Minneapolis.
2 An era Prince once recalled in a 90s track, “The Sacrifice of Victor”:
Never understood my old friends laughin’
They got high when everythin’ else got wrong
(Pass the booze up here)
Dr. King was killed and the streets they started burnin’
When the smoke was cleared their high was gone