‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: The Filthy Brilliance of Prince in the ’90s

Grunge. Wu-Tang Clan. Radiohead. “Wonderwall.” The music of the ’90s was as exciting as it was diverse. But what does it say about the era—and why does it still matter? 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for 30 final episodes (and a brand-new book!) to try to answer those questions. Join Ringer music writer and ’90s survivor Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 95 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering Prince and “Gett Off.” Below is an excerpt of this episode’s transcript.

Prince’s 11th album, and his last album of the ’80s—that would be Batman, the soundtrack to Tim Burton’s Batman movie—comes out in 1989. The trick on the song “Scandalous” is that Prince makes the word marvelous sound more scandalous than anybody else in pop music history singing the word scandalous, and he makes the word scandalous sound world-historically obscene.

I wanted to buy this tape, the Batman soundtrack, when I was 11, and my mom was just like, No. I get it. One more Prince song from the ’80s, though he only kind of released it in the ’80s. So, The Black Album. Prince’s mythic Black Album. Some of the hardest, toughest, and (it sounds weird when I say this word, but what do you want me to do about it?) funkiest music Prince ever made. He puts out The Black Album in 1987 for like 10 minutes, but then he withdraws it. He reconsiders. He kinda panics. He pulls it from release. Prince even orders all the copies destroyed, maybe—that part’s probably bullshit, but it’s a cool story. In 1990, Prince finally talks to Rolling Stone about The Black Album, and the article says, “Prince says he aborted the project because of one particular dark night of the soul ‘when a lot of things happened all in a few hours.’” Prince further explains that he saw the word God. He didn’t see God, he saw the word God. And now Prince says, “When I talk about God, I don’t mean some dude in a cape and a beard coming down to Earth. To me, he’s in everything if you look at it that way.” End quote.

And after seeing the word God he soured on The Black Album. Prince says, “I was very angry a lot of the time back then. And that was reflected in that album. I suddenly realized that we can die at any moment, and we’d be judged by the last thing we left behind. I didn’t want that angry, bitter thing to be the last thing. I learned from that album, but I don’t want to go back.” End quote. I’d like to direct you to a song on The Black Album called “Dead on It.”

Prince didn’t like rap music at first, infamously. Prince warmed up to it eventually, grudgingly. He perceived, correctly, that rap music posed a threat to him, a threat to all-universe crossover zeitgeist-ass pop superstars of his ilk. He saw rap music as a worthy adversary culturally, but an unworthy adversary musically. The Black Album finally came out, officially, grudgingly, in 1994, though at Prince’s insistence it was only available for like three months and it’s still not (officially) streaming now. “Dead on It,” very arguably, is the worst song on The Black Album. But what I hear, intriguingly, is one of the biggest stars of the ’80s starting to reckon with his biggest competition as we approach the dawn of the ’90s. Prince will rap way better than this, eventually.

We arrive now at Prince in the ’90s. Prince arrives at the ’90s. Do you like Prince movies? In 1990, Prince writes, directs, stars in, and releases the full-length soundtrack to the film Graffiti Bridge. Both commercially and artistically, Graffiti Bridge is less successful than, y’know, Purple Rain. But as Prince movies go, it is less less-successful than Under the Cherry Moon back in 1986. Meanwhile, the Graffiti Bridge soundtrack is way more beloved than the movie. Tell us what you’re gonna do when you grow up, 12-year-old Tevin Campbell!

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“Round and Round.” Incredible song. The phenomenal and frankly magical quality of Prince songs, when somebody other than Prince is singing the song Prince wrote, is that you can so clearly hear the personality of this other person singing—shout-out to Chaka Khan and Cyndi Lauper and the Bangles and Sinéad O’Connor (Sinéad is for extremely justifiable reasons not a Prince fan, and also “Nothing Compares 2 U” is her song now)—but over or beyond or maybe even through this other singer, Prince is still a palpable presence as well, his artistic if not physical voice, his aura, his swagger. What you’re listening to on “Round and Round” is 12-year-old Tevin Campbell sorta rapping, but you can also so clearly hear 32-year-old Prince still working out his thoughts on all this rapping that the 12-year-old kids are into now.

That’s not quite how it turned out for Tevin Campbell, but he’s doing great. He’s a cool kitty. Meanwhile, the best song on Graffiti Bridge is called “Joy in Repetition.” Hear me now and believe me later.

The sumptuousness of this song, the headphone detail, the pristine wooziness, the knowledge that Prince is responsible for every sound you’re hearing other than backing vocals from the singer and songwriter Susannah Melvoin—to whom Prince was once engaged, and for whom Prince maybe wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U” in the first place, though maybe not. “Joy in Repetition” kicks ass, man. “Joy in Repetition” is Prince bringing his world-famous indomitable unmistakable ’80s energy into the ’90s. Commercially or artistically, Prince will not be as successful in the ’90s as he was in the ’80s, but nobody else will be that successful either, and “Joy in Repetition” extends his streak and adds to his incomparable collection of God-tier songs, and starts the new decade off on (it sounds even weirder when I say this, but too bad) The Good Foot. What Prince really needs, though, here at the dawn of the ’90s, is a new band.

In 1991, Prince releases his 13th album, Diamonds and Pearls, credited to Prince and the New Power Generation. Who we got? We got Michael Bland on drums, we got Sonny T on bass, we got Tommy Barbarella on keyboards, and last but not least, we got singer and keyboardist Rosie Gaines wailing her ass off on the song “Diamonds and Pearls.” I love Prince’s last harmony line right here.

Prince started calling his live backing band the New Power Generation in 1990. They’re named after a song on the Graffiti Bridge soundtrack. The band—also often including the vocalist Mayte Garcia, who married Prince in 1996, though they divorced in 2000—will endure, off and on, in some form until Prince’s death in 2016, and they’ll play some tribute shows thereafter. Membership in the New Power Generation is hilariously fluid and random in a Rotating Diner Pie Rack sort of way. There are three hard-to-find ’90s albums credited solely to the New Power Generation. Prince himself is an extra-enigmatic presence on those; the whole situation is tremendously charming and just unbelievably chaotic. The usual Prince-type shit, in other words. It’s awesome. On this 1991 Diamonds and Pearls record especially, it’s crucial that Prince has a band, has a gang, has an army, has a whole new generation backing him up. I picture him always, in this era, on-stage amid 35 to 250 other radically underdressed people. One time I’m driving with my mom—I’m a teenager—and we’re listening to the car radio, innocently, as we do. And here comes a new song by Prince and the New Power Generation that somehow you can just immediately tell is called “Cream.”

The moaning. You can immediately tell this song is called “Cream” due to all the moaning, I suppose. It’s a dead giveaway, the moaning. And so “Cream” starts, on the radio in my mom’s car, and this song is just absolutely unfathomably filthy. It’s chill and rad and comically X-rated. And there is a palpable rigid silence betwixt me and my mother in the car. We do not speak, we do not move, and as this song plays we are both making ourselves as small as possible, so as to not acknowledge how mortifyingly embarrassing it is to be listening to a Prince and the New Power Generation song called “Cream” together in a moving vehicle. We need to get the hell out of there.

This is the last no. 1 song of Prince’s lifetime. I just realized that. Prince had five no. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100. That feels low, but at least he had five, I guess. “When Doves Cry,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Kiss,” “Batdance” (really? “Batdance”? cool), and “Cream.” Huh.

Hard pivot: Have you ever wondered what the deal was with Prince and Weird Al Yankovic? Weird Al, famously, politely asks an artist’s permission before he does a parody song. So, like, he asks James Brown if James minds if Al turns “Living in America” into “Living With a Hernia,” and I’d pay probably $200 to see the look on James Brown’s face at the exact moment that he heard the song title “Living With a Hernia,” but Prince would never give Weird Al permission. According to Ben Greenman’s 2017 book Dig If U Will the Picture: Funk, Sex, God and Genius in the Music of Prince, Weird Al wanted to turn “Let’s Go Crazy” into a song about the Beverly Hillbillies, and Weird Al also wanted to do “1999” but make it the price “$19.99,” like a bargain-bin infomercial sorta-spoof about how the product only costs $19.99. Prince rejected both of those. God dammit.

Also, Weird Al did an interview with Wired in 2006, and Al says, “One of the oddest things to ever happen between me and Prince was the year that he and I were at the American Music Awards at the same time. Apparently I was going to be sitting in the same row as Prince that year and I got a telegram—and I wasn’t the only one—from Prince’s management company saying that I was not to establish eye contact with him during the show. I just couldn’t even believe it.” And Al says, “So immediately I sent back a telegram saying that he shouldn’t be establishing eye contact with me either.” And that’s why Weird Al is the best.

Prince’s mic stand is wobbling a little bit, at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards, as he starts singing “Gett Off,” so allow me to inform you that the Prince and the New Power Generation song “Gett Off” begins with Prince singing, How can I put this in a way so as not to offend or unnerve? And then Prince informs a lady that he hears that the lady is engaging in unsatisfactory sexual relations and Prince is therefore suggesting to the lady that she have sex with him instead. Not to belabor this, but that’s the conceit of “Gett Off.” All right?

To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.