NWF said:

I always figured it was about celebrating God, who could make things as different as Elephants & Flowers (plus what you said about peace)

Yeah, I know what you mean….. I listened and listened trying to figure out just exactly what Life O The Party was all about!?! I can’t stand it when Prince gets all deep and introspective like this, throwing in all these oblique references and shit! Finally, I turned to post-modern political theory to help me deconstruct what it was saying.

First of all, there is the issue of what The Party represents. The Party can be thought of as signifying a Western, hedonistic, but ultimately short-lived and unfulfilling, sense of 'being-in-the-world' – quite literally a "Life of ‘The Party’". But, it very consciously invokes further uses of the phrase which describe 'the group' (as in ‘a party of 5’); and also 'The State', in the sense of a totalitarian Party-State model of government. So, what we have is a socio-political narrative of being, defined by the construction of group identity, which is politically enforced in a violent and uncompromising manner.

Within this context, the song explores the complex, mutually constitutive relationship between this group identity and the sense of ‘otherness’ (the sense of the stranger or the outsider) which exposes and threatens it. It is pointed out early on, and reinforced throughout that:

"We ain’t down with nobody who don’t party like we do" (emphasis added)

This affirms the point that (group) identity, although central, is always unstable, and must be reinforced by excluding any sense of ‘the other’, which would contradict the collectivist narrative of 'The Party'.
Yet, the song is also concerned with the desire to deal with this threat by possessing or subsuming ‘the other’, assimilating him into the group – a tendency present in Western modernity. This become obvious when 'the subject' asks:

"Why party in your own yard, when you can party in mine?"

Eventually, the song chillingly suggests how the individual’s sense of identity can become synonymous with that of the group. The refrain of "We gonna have us a party" is displaced momentarily with the affirmation that "Eye am the Life O ‘The Party’", reminding us of the sense of struggle ‘the subject’ will have to engage in, to safeguard his own sovereign space, thus retaining his own self-defined identity within this totalitarian (and yet seemingly convivial and non-threatening) environment.


Well… either that or it’s about a 46 year old divorcee trying to sound cool and "down with the kids".....

(Yes, I have waaaaay too much time on my hands. And, yes, I am avoiding work.....!)

Taurus said:

good ?

Redayh said:

I don't know but "poom poom" sounds like farting

deebee said: