Prince: Nothing Compared 2 Him
Every Prince fan has a song that sums up his genius, and for me it’s “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker,” one of the tormented strange-relationship soul laments from his 1987 masterpiece Sign O’ the Times. There aren’t any other songs like this one. Prince is fighting with his girlfriend, so he stomps out and goes to a restaurant to sit by himself and sulk. (“Yeah, lemme get a fruit cocktail, I ain’t too hungry.”) The hipster boho waitress working the night shift picks him up. “You’re kinda cute — wanna take a bath?” For a girl in a Prince song, this is the subtle approach.
They decide to spend the night together but not have sex, so he keeps his pants on in the bubble bath while listening to Joni Mitchell. They trust each other, which is a new and scary experience for him. Hanging out with Dorothy teaches Prince how to be a friend to his girlfriend, so he goes back to her and takes another bath with his pants on. All the fighting stops. Next time it happens, he’ll know what to do.
This song fucked me up in 1987, fucks me up now, never will stop fucking me up. No other male songwriter of his or any other generation wrote songs about women like this. In an alternate universe, Prince retires in 1987 the day after he writes “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” and he’s still the coolest man who walked the earth.
Prince spent nearly 40 amazing years on the frontlines, as the most maddenly brilliant and unpredictable artist in the game. He built his own pop gospel out of his sexual and spiritual concerns, yet with a voice that was full of intimate affection, pushing farther emotionally than anyone else. When he sang, he came on like kinda sorta your best friend. He made the Eighties’ best single, “Little Red Corvette,” and the decade’s two best albums, 1999 and Sign O’ the Times. He changed how music felt and sounded. The news of his death today, at just 57, is truly heartbreaking because he seemed built to thrive into his golden years, an artist we all expected to remain prolific and independent and stubborn and gloriously himself for years to come. We all deserved a chance to hear Old Man Prince. This is what it sounds like when doves cry.
Prince was an utter original from the moment he arrived at the end of the Seventies and dawn of the Eighties — “I Wanna Be Your Lover” might seem polite compared to what came a few years later, but back when it was the only Prince song anyone knew, it was genuinely shocking to hear on the radio. The feminine ache in his vocal, the way he sighed “don’t wanna pressure you, baby,” his melodic disco guitar (more Chic than he’d ever sound again), the witty way he paused for the hook — “I wanna be the only one who make you come … running” — it sounded like nothing else on the airwaves in 1979. And even though Prince already had his own unmistakable sound, this was just the beginning. He was breaking us in as gently as he could.