1998 Part 3: Newpower Soul and The War EP
Image: The Prince Estate / NPG Records
As the touring schedule for Emancipation started to reach its end in late January of 1998, there was a sense of unrest around Prince. The tour was over and it was time to go home to Paisley Park. For the first time it was not a place he seemed to want to be. The death of his son had hit him harder than he dared let on in public. In fact, he never admitted publicly that his son ever died. The tour kept him afloat, but going home meant returning to rooms that were empty when they were not supposed to be, to a marriage that now had cracks in the foundation. It is not surprising that in this environment, the next couple of years produced some of Prince’s most lukewarm studio material.
We Should All Come Together
His first way of dealing with this kind of discomfort was an easy fix: he would surround himself with work. Tremendous amounts of work, if possible, and in November of 1997, he lined up as much as he possibly could. On top of his touring schedule, he began collaborating with Larry Graham and Chaka Kahn on their new albums GCS 2000 and Come 2 My House. Recording with Larry Graham was complete in January of 1998, with recording of Chaka Kahn and production on both albums continuing until June.
Overall, the Chaka Khan album has aged far better, but both albums are essentially unavailable. They’re not easy to track down, and they are not on any streaming service. However, some examination of their setlists from the gigs on the following tour suggests Larry Graham and Chaka Khan were more confident in putting a “greatest hits” set in front of the crowd than in sales of their new material prompting desire from the crowd to hear the new stuff. This might have been a little misplaced, since it was essentially a Prince show, and Prince promoted it as such, so everyone at the shows knew the new albums had his approval, and to be honest only the most die-hard fans were packing seats on that tour. All of this did, however, keep Prince as busy as he felt he needed to be for the three months between the end of the Emancipation tours and the moment the Newpower Soul tour kicked off in late April.
Meanwhile, what was going on with Mayte? It’s hard to say. Their marriage was crumbling by now. On their anniversary (Valentine’s Day) Prince played an impromptu set with Larry Graham at Paisley Park. As he did the next night. Mayte showed up for the last song and danced and sang background vocals. That’s the only evidence I can find beyond some music video appearances of her being on tour or at any performances. Considering that Prince was arranging his life to consist only of tours and performances, that means she was slipping out of his life entirely.
The New Power Generation Returns
Newpower Soul is the NPG’s final “solo” album, but it is easily the least “solo” of the bunch. Of course none of them were truly without Prince, but far more than the others this is just a Prince album. Why bother crediting the album to the whole band if you’re just going to stick an image of yourself alone on the cover, my dude? The entire history of NPG albums can basically be summed up as Prince doing an increasingly lazy job of pretending this isn’t his music. So why is this an NPG album in the first place? Honestly, I’m not sure. Part of me thinks it’s because he knows it’s a lukewarm product and is hoping to shift some of that responsibility on to the “NPG” somehow. That seems needlessly cruel, though, even for Prince.
After his next album, Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic was released, Prince went on Larry King’s show, who gave his standard intro, which, as usual, was distilled from P.R. talking points delivered by his guest’s publicist. During the otherwise standard description of Prince’s career, he said something about this being “Prince’s first album in three years.” He then asked Prince about why Rave was his first album in so long. (A legitimate question. An even more legitimate question being: “How do you show your math on that one, Prince? Because I’ve got a 5-CD Crystal Ball and an NPG album that suggest you may have, possibly released some music between 1996 and 1999.”) Prince’s answer was basically that Crystal Ball was a limited release (nope, sure wasn’t) and it was mostly old material (splitting hairs, surely, because it was old, yet unreleased, and in any case The Truth was included with every set, and Kamasutra with many, and they were all new), and then he produced an album for Larry Graham, another for Chaka Khan, and this one for the NPG.
So it seems like Prince was angling slightly here. His plan for the next few years (which would undergo a massive change) was to alternate between “big” intentionally large-selling albums and smaller, independent releases. Knowing that record companies had a distaste for Prince’s tendency to release music more frequently than they liked, it suited him to create a narrative that he had been idle for the last few years, or had at least slowed down his pace of releasing “original material.” Of course nothing could be further from the truth, but as long as Clive Davis was willing to accept the idea, that’s all that counted.
It’s not that I think Prince was intentionally putting less effort into the independent releases, necessarily (I think The Truth and several later releases prove that), but I find it hard to believe that Prince was unaware that Newpower Soul wasn’t up to the same standard as the rest of his prior 90’s work.
Is This A Bad Album?
That is the question, isn’t it? Since 0(+> in 1992, most of Prince’s albums have been easy recommendations. Solid classics, their main fault usually lying in their glut of material (Emancipation, Crystal Ball) or their intentional lack of quality (Chaos and Disorder). Even Diamonds and Pearls is regarded by most people as a classic, it’s mostly just my opinion that it’s a tremendously uneven album. This one, however, is the first time in a long time that Prince seems to have put out an album that is just…meh. One thing you can say for it is that, like much of his post-80’s work, none of this album came from the vault, and all of it was written between Spring of 1997 and Spring of 1998 specifically for this project.
There is no particular reason why this album is not so hot, it just isn’t. It’s not that he is rebelling against anything nor does he have a movie project distracting him. It does have some good stuff, but it never hits either the stratospheric highs or the catastrophic lows that Diamonds and Pearls subjects the listener to. Ultimately, Newpower Soul’s greatest sin is mediocrity. It’s the thing Prince is worst at.
TRACKLIST
Newpower Soul
In case you’ve been wondering why this album has been spelling it “Newpower” instead of “New Power,” you might recall that way back in 1995, there was a track on Exodus called “New Power Soul,” so it is suspected that this portmanteau is intended to differentiate the two. Anyway.
Unfortunately, there are a few warning signs that you might be listening to a Prince album that is less than top quality. One red flag is when he finds himself mangling the English language in order to get the lyrics to play along with the meter of the song. The more he has to do this, and the earlier in the song he has to do this, the redder the flag. The most troubling form of this is when he not only has to make grammar do backflips, but he also has to start smooshing words together. With that in mind, here is the first verse of “Newpower Soul” :
“Every while in a great once There comes to town a show That lives up to all your funk-spectations No matter how high or low A reason to get your freak on In a way you never freaked before New Power Soul lay claim to the booty Come on, let's go”
Uh-oh. Funk-spectations? The other big warning sign, and it is far more reliable than any of the others I’ve mentioned so far, is when he throws a rap verse into a song that is only there to name drop every song in the tracklist in order. Guess what?
"Gemini raising on the seventh day Making /mad sex/ until you're in my arms / , okay Cause / when you love somebody / like that it's cool We gots no need for / shoo-be-doo-be-doo / The good life yeah we'll be livin' / Pushing up / on every / freak this side / of heaven / Come on /, come one, shake it, come on You know I be's / the one / with the / funky music /, hun And I'm laying phat claim to the booty Phat claim to the new power booty Keeping the crowd moving ya'll Is my one and only duty Oooh-wee With the New Power Soul"
And the worst part is, he couldn’t do enough lyrical gymnastics to actually get the exact titles, so he cheated most of them. And he didn’t even get the hidden track. So yeah. Don’t ask me how to claim something in a phat manner. No clue.
Mad Sex
One of the highlights of the album, it’s elastic-band bass line and honky-tonk piano hook give the song just the right amount of drunken swing. It did not get played live beyond July of 2000, and to be honest there are songs that superseded it, but on this album it stands out as an indicator of where Prince’s sound might have been going at one time. I suspect there are more in the vault like this.
Until U’re In My Arms Again
It is speculated that this ballad is about the loss of Prince’s child. I don’t buy that, the context of the song is just too romantic. At most, the chorus may have come to him from that place, but not the rest of the song, and that’s not the same as the song being “about” that.
As it stands, really this is a fairly generic ballad that holds the place on the album of the classic Side 1 ballad. And it does that. But, like so much of the album, it does the job, but not much else.
When U Love Somebody
I know what Prince is going for here. In 2005, he would refer to this kind of up-tempo danceable song as a “roller skate jam,” and in that regard “When U Love Somebody” succeeds. It just feels a little flat, and the lyrics feel just this side of problematic. The lyrics are from the perspective of someone who is perpetually cheated on, and here’s the chorus:
"'Cause when U love somebody Every now and then it might rain When you love somebody With every sun shower there's pain Whenever something's lost, Something's gained When U love somebody When U love someone"
Which is maybe not the best advice. Just sayin’.
This song was written and recorded in late August of 1997 at Paisley Park, except for the horn arrangements. Yep, that plural was intentional. The first was with his usual horn section, the Hornheadz, and the second was with the horn section from Days of Wild, a Prince tribute act that was based in New York. Both arrangements were used in the final track. As far as anyone seems to know, this is the only time Prince ever used a tribute act in any of his tracks.
Shoo-Bed-Ooh
Pronounced “Shoo Bee Doo,” this is another highlight of the album for me. It does have a dark edge to the lyrics that most Prince songs don’t have, and I think without realizing it, Prince does show his deep unhappiness during this time in his life. That said, it does work as a song, and if the album had been more successful, it absolutely should have been a single.
Push It Up
This is probably one of the earliest songs created for the album. Unlike the rest of the record, this one was not created entirely for the album. In fact, in the early summer of 1997 this song originally came into being as a remix of “Jam of the Year.” Along with a lot of other promotional material for Emancipation, the single for that song got cancelled, and so those backing tracks (with their verses by hip-hop legend Doug E. Fresh) became “Push It Up.” The remnants of “Jam of the Year” still remain with a chant of “Ooo, everybody’s here, this is the jam of the year” in the background.
Again, this one is intended to bring the house down, but it just falls far more flat than Prince must have wanted. And it is very obvious he had faith in the song when he recorded it, there are guest appearances not just from Doug E. Fresh, but also Larry Graham and Chaka Khan.
Freaks On This Side
This song segues from the last song and again, Prince intended these to work together and be the kind of barn-burning numbers that he could pull out during aftershows at least. But it never actually reached that level because the spark of inspiration that pushes Prince’s hits to the next level just is not here. He recognized this, because while he would often lead crowds in “freaks on this side” chants, the song itself never really entered the live set in heavy rotation.
Come On
Image: The Prince Estate / NPG Records
This was the only commercial single released from the album, and it’s a solid choice. It is another album highlight, and has a lot of common elements with “Shoo-Bed-Ohh,” thematically speaking. Again, it does show (probably without his knowing it) Prince’s unhappiness and insecurity at this time in his life. The video is a strangely low-effort production, with Prince pretending to be a busker sexually harassing women interspersed with what looks like concert footage and Prince and Rhonda Smith in a close two-shot in front of a kind of sloppily produced green screen.
The One
Image: The Prince Estate / NPG Records
The Side Two ballad, is also the song that lasted the longest from this album. Prince played it live for the rest of his life, often in combination with other songs, usually “The Question of U,” which he did when I saw him in 2004, and it definitely tore down the venue in Chicago.
(I Like) Funky Music
Another concert memory: Prince played this as his final encore when I saw him in January 1998. It was a cool moment, because I had always wanted to be at one of those shows where you hear a new song before it gets released. I didn’t even care that it was a song that was only ever going to work live. Which it did-people danced in the aisles, Prince danced in the aisles, the song rocked.
On the record, the energy is simply not there. It becomes another song about a style of music, which hasn’t worked since disco died. It is supposed to be a strong close to the album, and the recorded chants from a Paisley Park show almost get the listener there (when I was young I was convinced it was from the show I was at – as if Prince would throw in chants from Evansville, Indiana), but ultimately the song, like the album, ends up being “just okay.”
[Hidden Track]
Wasted Kisses
It’s a hidden track! You guys! Remember hidden tracks? It’s a thing from the 90’s, CD’s had them from time to time. Looking back on them now, it’s kind of annoying they ever existed. This one is a dark, brooding song that really does what it says on the tin. Weirdly, it might be the most compelling music on the album. It was only performed live one time, at an aftershow on the early morning of February 10th, 2007.
The War EP
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