here's another 1 I love this song it is also 1 of my fav songs so what about u

U say "Love It Or Don't" - I don't...

Love it. Can't help but feel a bit of the groove, despite it's commercial appeal.

I've always thought it was a classic but it was never one of my favorites. I like it better now than I ever did though. I read a review of it on AMG and it changed my thinking about this song. I'll post it in a minute.

AMG REVIEW: By completely dropping the bass tracks from the final version of his 1984 smash "When Doves Cry," Prince demonstrated his willingness to take chances on highly unorthodox arrangements. Yet not even he knew quite what to make of "Kiss," the chart-topping single from 1986's strange and arty Parade; reportedly, he was never completely satisfied with the version that ended up being released, nearly leaving it off the album and retooling its arrangement multiple times for live performances. Yet it's one of the most brilliant moments in a catalog filled with them. Repeating the no-bass trick of "When Doves Cry," "Kiss" essentially strips funk down to its barest essentials and then cuts a little bit more. When the song starts, there's only the sketchiest outline of a harmonic structure in the instruments behind the melody, partly because those instruments are nearly all electronic percussion. The backing is fleshed out a bit more as the song moves along, but much of the time it sounds like disembodied bits of an arrangement floating out of nowhere, especially the backing vocals during the verses. It's a weird, alien soundscape, and added to that effect is the fact that Prince sings nearly the entire song — except for the last line and one note leading into the last chorus — in the upper register of his generous falsetto range. The distance in pitch between his voice and the very few instruments playing on the track creates the impression that there's even more space left open, and at that point, all one can really do is marvel that the song works so well with so little. Aside from the drum machine and backing vocals, there's a faintly murmuring keyboard and a gently wah-wahed guitar that mostly plays seventh chords, whether during the chorus or the solo break. Lyrically, "Kiss" can be read as a plea for genuine warmth in the middle of the prosperous, image-conscious '80s, though at bottom it's probably a simpler homage to women with confidence and maturity; given those two traits, the singer of "Kiss" welcomes all comers, regardless of just about anything else. Few other songs in Prince's catalog demonstrate his idiosyncratic genius more startlingly. — Steve Huey

He funk it up when he sing it LIVE, why did he let David Z arrange it on the 1st place? He(P) could've done a betta jop since all the Kiss live versions are betta.

Well, when I was little, I loved everything that Prince has done. Now that I'm older I haved developed this thing called an opinion. Anyways, that's a WICKED ASS JAM!

This may be one of the most played Prince songs on the radio but it still kicks serious ass and it always outshines the songs of the day. When you hear that guitar in the beginning of the song, you know it's Kiss. I still love it.

it

Love it especially the extended 12" and the video is Great.

Reading Tron's post of the AMG review reminded me of this post from AMP which swiped Mix Magazine's write up of the production techniques behind "Kiss" which further evidences the kinds of risks and innovation Prince was willing to make:

From: Dereklev5 (dereklev5@cs.com)
Subject: How Prince's "Kiss" was recorded - swipe from Mix Magazine 2001
Newsgroups: alt.music.prince
Date: 2002-08-19 22:34:43 PST


By 1986, when Prince recorded this month's Classic Track, “Kiss,” he was
among the most popular and critically lauded artists in America. He hadn't
confused and outraged the press and public with the infamous name change yet,
and his career arc had been, first, a slow, steady rise, and then, following
the film and album Purple Rain, a rocket shot to the top. The Minneapolis-based
singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/producer was a true crossover artist,
blending rock and R&B in bold, inventive ways and attracting both black and
white audiences in nearly equal numbers; no easy feat. Though he was influenced
by everyone from Marvin Gaye to Stevie Wonder to Jimi Hendrix to The Beatles,
his style was utterly original and distinctive — even before he became
massively popular through hits such as “Little Red Corvette” and “1999”
(in 1983), his music was starting to influence other musicians; he was
certainly among the most imitated artists of the '80s. Then and now, Prince was
unpredictable and eclectic, with soft gospel touches on one song, followed by
another dominated by the hardest dance grooves imaginable. His first Number One
hit, the moody “When Doves Cry” (from Purple Rain in 1984), couldn't have
been more different from his follow-up Number One (also from Purple Rain ), the
rockin' “Let's Go Crazy.” Then there was the psychedelic pop of
“Raspberry Beret” in 1985. He's always confounded expectations by
juxtaposing acoustic tracks with electronic tracks and mixing styles in unusual
ways; everything was (and is) fair game for him. He's never been successfully
pigeonholed as anything, except perhaps eccentric.

“Kiss” was part of the stylistically diverse, art-rock album Parade, which
also served as the soundtrack to Prince's second film Under a Cherry Moon .
And, while the album as a whole sprawls in a multitude of directions,
“Kiss” is firmly rooted in the funk milieu that Prince used as a foundation
to launch himself out of the anonymity of the back streets of North Minneapolis
in the mid- to late '70s. And speaking of foundations, “Kiss” managed to
achieve radio hit status and dance club immortality without benefit of a bass
part! More on that in a minute.

In 1986, Prince was working at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. Engineer David Z, a
staffer at Prince's Paisley Park Studios in Minneapolis, remembers getting a
call from Prince, asking him to come out for a weekend of work. “I packed
three days' worth of clothes and went,” recalls Z. “When I got there, I
went in and saw Prince in Studio C, and he told me I would be working in Studio
B to produce a new group he had signed [to his Paisley Park label] called
Maserati. Then he says, ‘You'll probably be here about a month.’ So I went
out and bought more clothes.”

“Kiss” was originally intended for Maserati and came into the studio in the
form of one verse and a chorus, on a cassette tape, written, sung and played on
an acoustic guitar by Prince, who assured Z that the rest of the song would be
forthcoming. It wasn't an auspicious start. “The song sounded like a folk
song that Stephen Stills might have done,” Z recalls. “I didn't quite know
what to do with it and neither did the group.”

Z began in his usual manner by creating a beat on a Linn 9000 drum machine.
“The groove began to get complex, especially the hi-hat pattern,” he says.
“I ran the hat through a delay unit, set about 150 milliseconds, printed that
to tape and printed the original hat to another track and then alternated
between ‘source’ and ‘blend’ on the delay unit, recording those passes.
It created a pretty cool rhythm that was constantly changing in tone and
complexity but was still steady. Then I played some guitar chords and gated
them through a Kepex unit and used that to trigger various combinations of the
hi-hat tracks. That gave us the basic rhythm groove for the song.”

Session bassist Mark Brown laid down a bass part, and one of the members of
Maserati recorded a piano part that Z says he copped from an old Bo Diddley
song called “Hey, Man.” The group's singer put down a lead vocal track an
octave lower than Prince's original tenor, and some background vocal parts were
invented, based on some ideas Z says he remembered from Brenda Lee's “Sweet
Nothings.” “This is what we had at the end of the first couple of days,”
Z says with a sigh. “We were trying to build a song out of nothing, piece by
piece. It was just a collection of ideas built around the idea of a song that
wasn't finished yet. We didn't know where it was going. We were getting a
little frustrated, we were exhausted, so we all went home for the night.”

That, however, would prove to be enough. At least for Prince. When Z returned
to the studio the next day, he found Prince waiting for him. Sometime that
morning, The Artist had apparently come into the studio, asked an assistant to
put the track up and then recorded his own vocal and electric guitar part. Z
was stunned.

“I asked him what was going on. He said to me, ‘This is too good for you
guys. I'm taking it back.’” From that moment on, “Kiss” became a Prince
record. Z remained with him in the studio as Prince took what sparse elements
there already were on the track and made it even more minimalist. “He said,
‘We don't need this,’ and pulled the bass off,” Z says. The low end was
filled up instead by using a classic Prince trick: running the kick drum
through an AMS 16 reverb unit's reverse tube program. “It fills up the bottom
so much you really don't miss the bass part, especially if you only use it on
the first downbeat,” says Z. The hi-hat track was similarly dispatched,
leaving only nine tracks of instruments and vocals on the record, which
certainly made it easier to mix. Z recalls, only half jokingly, that the mix,
which was done on an API console, took about five minutes.

Prince's vocals had been recorded using a Sennheiser 441 microphone. According
to Z, Prince's preference for that particular mic stems from a conversation he
had with singer Stevie Nicks, who had suggested it to him. “There's a
roll-off on that microphone that actually ends up boosting the high end,
spiking it around 3 kHz,” Z explains. “It also has good directionality;
Prince liked to sing in the control room, so he would set it up on a stand
right by the console. When he wanted to sing, he would just put on headphones.
He also liked doing his own punches, too.”

The track was left as ambiently dry as it was elementally sparse. In the mix, Z
says the starkness of the track actually made him a little uneasy. “I reached
over and snuck in a little bit of the piano back in,” he says. A small amount
of tape delay was also put on the guitar track. “Otherwise, the mix was just
a matter of Prince pulling back and turning off faders. It's more than the bass
that you're not hearing on that track.”

Z says he recalls being alternately fascinated and excited by this turn of
events. Maserati was to be his first full production for Prince's company. (Z
had recorded parts of records for Prince in the past, as well as having
recorded his original demos in Minneapolis and being the engineer at the live
benefit recording that ultimately became Purple Rain.) In the course of an
evening, while he had been sleeping, he was now Prince's co-producer for at
least one track. In addition, the deletion of the bass was stirring. It added
an element of danger, a frisson to the record-making process.

In fact, it did produce some drama before it was released. Z says the feedback
that came to him from Prince's record label, Warners, was palpably negative.
“The A&R guy said it sounded like a demo,” Z remembers. “No bass, no
reverb. I was devastated. But Prince had been selling big numbers, and he had a
kind of power that few artists at that time did, probably more than any artist
ever will again. He told Warners that that's the single they were getting, that
that's the one they were putting out. He basically forced Warners to put it
out.” Lucky Warners. The record went to Number One in the spring of 1986, and
solidified Prince's stature as The Artist To Be Reckoned With.

The beauty of “Kiss” is not just in what's not heard, but what's simply
implied. “The power of that track is its ability to pull people in,”
observes David Z. “The listener has to provide a lot of what's missing. You
have to use imagination to listen to that record. It really makes the listener
part of the process.”

Prince had experimented with pulling the bass on other songs, such as “When
Doves Cry” from the Purple Rain album. As Z suggests, removing the bass and
leaving the lyrics naked with percussion and a few other instruments transforms
the song into what he likens to Beat poetry. It also provides a new perspective
on the role of bass in contemporary music, by not allowing its presence to be
taken for granted.

But most telling of all the aesthetic confrontations that “Kiss” provoked
was how it functioned as a point of contention between an artist and a
corporate entity. “You could really see the resistance of the corporate power
of a major record label to something that was so different from what they were
expecting,” says Z. “That record was up against the paranoia of radio and
the power of corporate record labels. That time, the record and the artist won.
These days, neither one would have had a chance in hell.”

Love it. Always will. And the video is a CLASSIC.

Even back then the seeds were being sown.
.
[This message was edited Mon Dec 2 21:12:55 PST 2002 by NuPwrSoul]

Love it, but... the sound doesn't fit in with Parade. It makes Parade sound like one of those re-release CDs with a remix put in the middle.

Love it, as the reviewer said above, it pulls you in, it aint easy listening thats for sure. class!

How can you even ask??!

Turned me on to the musical love of my life: funky guitar. Still one of the grooviest - if not THE - greatest funk solo's ever imho. And such a perfect song too.

Love Kiss. Not just 'cos it's a great song--the bit in the video where Wendy bites her lip and looks upwards (right on the lyric "You gotto not talk dirty babe") is brilliant. It shows how Prince involves the listener--that bit is so sparse that we react the same way that Wendy does.

But another reason that I like it is that Prince shows us that he can yet again master a genre of his choosing. In this case, it is raw pop. The man is a genius.

As a matter of taste, though, I do prefer Mountains.



andyf