[The Soup Nazi]

Couple of articles from The Wire online that had escaped me. First:

 

Prince 1958–2016: Rebirth Of The Flesh
The songs Prince made under a female alias are the pinnacle of his career, says Derek Walmsley

He made a remarkable 39 studio albums over a 40 year career, yet perhaps Prince's most complete album, what would have been the peak of an extraordinary career, remains unreleased – at least in the form it was intended. Most of its songs are in the public domain, but its key tracks emerged on what was, at best, a pragmatic compromise and at worst, a hurried botch-job. That compromise, paradoxically, is 1987's Sign 'O' The Times – the album most frequently declared to be his greatest work, containing some of the most sophisticated and multilayered songs in Prince's long catalogue.

Sign 'O' The Times was a double album pieced together from three ultimately unfinished projects Prince was exploring as his band The Revolution drifted apart: Crystal Ball and Dream Factory were sprawling concept works that never fulfilled their potential, but Camille was a short and sharp album with a new name and (literally) a new voice. The eight songs apparently planned for it, including "If I Was Your Girlfriend", "Strange Relationship" and "Housequake" from Sign 'O' The Times, as well as future B sides "Shockadelica" and "Feel U Up", featured Prince's vocals either sped-up or fooled around with as if to shift or escape their implied gender. Camille was shelved a few weeks before its planned release, which was to have featured a plain cover and no artist picture.

It would have been his most radical album of all. The opening track "Rebirth Of The Flesh", never released but circulating unofficially in several forms, sets the agenda (and scrambles it) in its title and its opening lines. "The rebirth of the flesh is at your door”, Prince announces over a shifting, pounding kick drum, to be answered by a chorus of "Let him in y'all!". But when Prince does re-enter, it's with a higher pitched voice which suggests a woman not a man. "It's a brand new day", the voice declares – as if Prince is now a brand new person – a lyric quoted, surely deliberately, from that most masculine of sex machines, James Brown.

Camille 'herself' is namechecked in "Shockadelica", a trademark Prince exploration of desire – and where desire crosses over into the wish to control, or to be controlled (or both): "The bed's on fire, your fate is sealed/And you're so tired, and the reason is Camille". She "must be a witch", the lyric runs, which sets up the tantalising set piece of Prince pretending to be a woman who is in control of a man.

On Camille, it's impossible to say who or what Prince is – the album thus takes the subtext of all Prince's work and writes it large. "If I Was Your Girlfriend", his greatest song (and one covered brilliantly by female trio TLC), dreams to move beyond gender and perhaps transcend conventional ways of having sex. In the song, supposedly inspired by Prince's jealousy of the closeness of his guitarist Wendy Melvoin and her sister Susanna, he asks (in Camille voice) if the object of his desire would "remember/To tell me all the things you forgot when I was your man", suggesting he has already left the male state behind. He rhapsodises on the difference between sex and orgasm, and then raises the question that lurks behind much of Prince's work: "Would that get you off?/Tell me what will". The song expresses desire, but then raises it to the power of imagination and fantasy, creating other dimensions of possible desire(s) underneath. Nothing is true; everything is permitted. "Feel U Up", meanwhile, which eventually emerged on the B side to "Partyman" in 1989, is a lavacious, almost threatening demand for physical contact, set to one of Prince's most playful and freaky beats. In the Camille voice, the chauvinistic creepiness of the lyric seems to be subverted – although it raises the possibility that the Camille voice could even be a ruse for Prince to get even closer to women.

The fluidity of gender notions on the album is reflected by the fluidity of the rhythms, which is unmatched in Prince's other work. Funk around the time of James Brown and later Parliament obsessed over 'the one', the kick drum at the start of the bar that rippled through the dancefloor. "Rebirth Of The Flesh", however, announces "kick drum pounds on the two and four", but to complicate matters further, the kick drum is hitting on the one anyway. "Housequake", the next track on Camille's projected tracklisting, is Prince's most far-out rhythm, with kicks and snares restlessly triggering throughout the bar like a restless itch. This is, in microcosm, what was so radical about Prince's music as a whole – it was funky as hell, yet deconstructed funk at the same time.

The importance of Camille is underlined by its place in Prince's discography. As his band The Revolution split up, his first album after them was set to be under a woman's name. Although Prince has played with aliases and pseudonyms his entire career (a predilection analysed by Joseph Stannard in The Wire's Deep Cover issue). Camille was set to be his boldest transformation yet, and he was still referencing this alter ego in discussion around the initially shelved Black Album, which he referred to at one point as the work of his "dark side". "If I Was Your Girlfriend" sees Prince striving harder than ever for a sense of fulfilment that both sex and faith have failed to deliver, and it's the highpoint of an album that might have given the whole picture of the (wo)man.

http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/...h-of-the-flesh