Rap and Prince have had a bumpy relationship. When rap was coming up in the mid 80s Prince pretty much ignored it. His most rap-conscious record, The Black Album, was mostly a putdown of rap, and it got canceled anyway.

In my mind, Prince ignoring/slamming rap was the biggest creative miscalculation of his career. The few rap numbers he had were more like tacked on epilogues that he delegated to his female singers ("Beautiful Night," "Alphabet St.") and
later to Tony M.

After Purple Rain, which was the climax of his musical fusion experiment of combining funk, rock, punk, and R&B, the next logical step would have been to absorb the fledgling new black musical movement: Hip hop.

But he didn't do that. He dissed it. Snubbed it. He went off and made Euro trippy art records and a black and white movie instead. So all his supposedly hard rappy stuff carries the stigma of his initial reaction.

The 90s Tony M. stuff sorta exposed Prince as an appropriator of established traditions. He wouldn't embrace rap until it developed a strong and influential identity that it took years to cultivate. Which makes Prince the guy at the potluck who picks off foods others prepared, that he didn't help make.

Hm, now that I think about it, maybe he canceled the Black Album because he intuitively understood that dissing rap so publically would hamstring him in the future....

Hmmmm...

padawan said:

And why do folks hate TOny M's Rapping? Certainly it smacks well of Prince type of stuff, which isn't considered "rap" and by default Tony's wasn't either?

Not sure if Prince NOT going towards hip-hop hurt him artistically. Commercially...yes. Maybe he didn't see anything worthwhile musically in the style and genre. I mean it was rapping over a drum machine. Hip hop being as sparse as it was probably wasn't appealing to all the interesting music he was getting turned onto in other countries (esp France)...not to mention the music Wendy and Lisa turned him on to...Jazz and Classical.

superspaceboy said:

I agree 100%. I have never thought of Prince's rapping as bad. In fact I think his style of it is really cool. We all know that Prince has to be unique in whatever he does and his rapping works.

superspaceboy said:

Check out "Face Down".

superspaceboy said:

I think people hate Tony M for what he represents, which is Prince's belated attempt to be street like hip hoppers. No one bought it. Not hardcore fans, not casual fans, no one.

In the 80s I think Prince thought rap would just go away. He didn't foresee the force it would become. He drifted into psychedellia and jazz and cabaret--all safe, established musical traditions--while snubbing his nose at rap. He was acting like a stuffy white person who felt vaguely threatened by this new black "problem." He even cloying apes a "white" voice on "Dead On It."

It was a huge commercial AND artistic blunder for Prince to take this attitude. The synthy bouncy 80s sound and racially indifferent attitudes were shifting. With the emergence of rap and grunge, the racial divide in popular music was returning with a vengeance. It would have been a creative and commercial goldmine if Prince had focused his energies on incorporating and reconciling these current movements instead of falling back on longstanding traditions like classical and psychedelic pop.

He had blinders on to the current music scene around 85-91, and after that it was just furious catchup, trying to appeal to the new crowds now split between despairing white grunge and militant black rap. He couldn't connect with these audiences because he wasn't sufficiently schooled in the nuances of either genre. He just aped the hardcore gangsta rap pose, and he hardly touched grunge.