Hear Prince’s Dance Rally 4 Peace Paisley Park Concert
On May 2nd, Prince hosted a Dance Rally 4 Peace at his Paisley Park Studios outside Minneapolis to honor Freddie Gray and support those protesting in Baltimore. In very un-Prince-like fashion, the singer has now shared a soundboard recording of that 41-minute concert on his new Soundcloud page. “Thank you for putting the gray color on tonight,” Prince told fans at the dance party, a nod to Gray, the Baltimore man killed in police custody whose death inspired both Prince’s protest song “Baltimore” and his Rally 4 Peace concert.
For the Paisley Park performance, Prince and his backing band 3rd Eye Girl whipped up renditions of “Chaos & Disorder,” “Guitar” and Lotusflower‘s “Crimson & Clover” and “Dreamer” that were heavy on the funk and guitar solos. The show’s encore featured “Plectrumelectrum,” the title track off 3rd Eye Girl’s 2014 LP, and concluded with a cover of the Waterboys’ “The Whole of the Moon,” a song that’s reportedly a tribute the Purple Rain singer. “Do me a favor and take care of each other, alright? It don’t matter the color, we are all family,” Prince said as he bid the audience goodnight.
Between the Tidal live stream, his Yahoo! broadcast and the Dance Rally 4 Peace SoundCloud post, the infamously anti-Internet Prince seems to be once again embracing social media as the rocker also launched a new, verified Twitter account on the same day he unveiled “Baltimore.” (Prince’s previous Twitter lived and died in August 2013.) Prince also sent fans an unexpected mass email to promote the new album by Judith Hill, which resulted in a lawsuit.