I still consider it a masterpiece.

The intro only is mesmerizing : that wiplashed, explosive organ glissando.
That first, soft pads chord that rises from it.

Tonight I've been surprised again.
It's been a few years since I listened to "Something In The Water (Does Not Compute)",

and I'm baffled but how modern it still sounds, not to mention no one has ever sounded that sexy on tape, since.

I mean menacing sexy.
SITW is "Annie Christian" with the politics and murders taken out of it,
still remains a song that makes you wonder if Prince is truly okay in tha head.

The (double) kick to the mike @ 2:57 — Skipper's pissed off at his Done Me Wrong Woman of the Week, evidently.
I would maybe - I repeat, maybe - trade the "I'd buy you clothing" scream,
and the more-sad-than-mean "bitch!" exclamation,
for all the screams in the coda of "The Beautiful Ones". That's how much I love SITW.


He would later sing in more neurotic and scary ways ("Tamborine", "Temptation",
"What's My Name", "Others Here With Us", they all are to be found in the koo-koo section of the Vault),
but here, it's the honest frustration, pissed sadness all mixed with the unrentless urge to fuck the girl that gets me.
Like love was the only solution that he has to stop the torment of not understanding her.
That speaks to some men in great ways.

We're not sure if Our Hero loses or keeps the girl at the end of the song,
but the only sign of brightness appears, at last, at the very end, that last modulation.
It's the chord of a new day, the chord of what will come next.
These futuristic last chords, and these "Heartbreak Hotel" sobs "I Love U... I do...",
it's like all that paranoid, frantic rants that preceded were there so these last seconds would resonate more.
The "Do Me Baby" coda was kinda akward. Here, it's fully realised.


SITW has the rare privilege to be one of Prince's songs that rightly exist in two distinct versions.
The first is weird, almost as much as "Purple Music", and my guess is that he hesitated between SITW and "Little Red Corvette"
as to which one would become the album's killer track. But he needed another catchy refrain,
and the paranoid atmosphere of SITW would be perceived as too deranging to become a popular hit anyway.

But we have the Miami 1985 soundcheck and the "Noon Rendez-vous Rehearsal",
to prove that SITW was also a killer track in its original, slightly more radio-friendly form.

Maybe one evening he removed all the City Lights atmosphere from it, he lowered a lot of faders,
cut almost all reverbs and overdubs, jazzified the synth hook and had his eureka : "this sounds like someone who's losing it!"


It's the beginning of a very acute "less is more" feeling, that everyone tried to replicate since.
SITW is the prototype of "When Doves Cry", and deserves to be recognized as such.
From a production point of view, it has the same specifications :
heartfelt vocals whispered, screamed at a girl over a cold, robotic, futuristic sonic landscape.
It's a revolution in music production at the time, such stark contrast.
A human voice sounds more human, next to machines.

In comparison, Kraftwerk, Human League, OMD and other cold-wave synth bozos and geniuses, sound ice cold alike,
except maybe for Brian Eno and the Talking Heads.
Maybe Skipper had a fear of computers taking over relationships (and in a way, he was right, just count the relations started through internet),
and "The Beautiful Ones", "Computer Blue", "My Computer" and other cold-wave experiments are there to suggest this.
They're probably syptomatic of the relationship he had as a musician with electronic mediums.
You have to fight with the machines, experiment, they're less obvious for an instrumentist.

Heck, Prince mastered the samplers before everyone else did, on Lovesexy and Batman,
but after Graffiti Bridge, it was time for synths and drums to be played by humans again. Like he had squeezed every drop from the Linn.


The problem with hit singles, as he speaks in the Paper interview, is not only that they fall from number one eventually,
but more importantly, that they're played to death, until every vibrant, initial feeling has become a faded photograph.
Album gems don't suffer that fate. They go through time incognito in a way.


But back to the lyrics.


In "The Beautiful Ones", the woman is in the room.
Prince sings to her.
He's proposing on tape, for crying out loud.
Skipper talks marriage, but this time it ain't no "Let's Pretend We're Married".
The Man sounds serious about it.
After all these years, I'm still not sure if it's Prince singing the "if we got married" line.
Like it was too early to really dig into it, and so he makes someone else whisper the line. Would be typical of him...
There's a rival, he confronts him, and wins (after such vocal prowess, the girl is his, no doubt).

In SITW, Prince is going mad right from the beginning.
The hi-hat is frenetic, there's no bass (so much ruckus about "When Doves Cry"),
and the synth is fucking out of batteries, there's something wrong with it.
Prince is banging his head on a wall because of his woman, but he still doesn't get her.
She just drives him mad. Litterally and sonically.
We even don't know if there's a rival, or many,
but it sure feels like Skipper is all alone sobbing and screaming at his microphone.
Next stop is the padded room and the straightjacket.



SITW is a song that women should study : especially the ones who rant off about how they,
poor feminine souls, suffer about love in much deeper ways than men.
Prince is terrified of losing his girl, he's madly jealous, and remember, Skipper doesn't sleep much, and there you have it :
"this fucking hi-hat in my head is on repeat for days, I'm gonna go mad, where can you be at this late hour".
When he screams "I'd buy clothing", he sounds more like he wants to rip her apart.

SITW is Insane Skipper, driven mad by desire unfulfilled.



But the real genius of it all, the one that truly evokes The King and The Killer,
is how carefully the words are chosen in "Why else would a woman wanna treat a man so bad".
Try to sing it, on the spot, at original speed, right now.
Ha! I'm sure that most of us don't get it right the first time.

To end a chorus like that, it's fucking Rock'n'Roll all the way.
It's "Heartbreak Hotel" and Jerry Lee's "Breathless" meet "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

Try it again : "Why else would a woman wanna treat a man so bad".
Either you failed again, or it was not convincing.
You've got to be ballsy to sing it out there the right way.

SITW is a very masculine song, but it wouldn't sell a lot of shavers.
Sorry heirs.


I think Prince is going after the sounds of the words,
and that is why he's been often mistaken for a poor lyricist.
The vowel has to be right. The consonant can be caressing, or harsh,
so pick your word carefully, because it has to serve the melody or the groove right.
I think he's a better musician than lyricist, but his limitations as a writer
were compensated by the musicality of the hook the word could bring ("Surge-a-rie", from "I Love U In Me" comes to mind).

Not many hit-makers wrote standards out of single syllab words.
"Help", "Jump", "Vogue", "Creep".
Skipper made his popular words like "cream" and "kiss".
Which are way sexier than the aforementioned.


So maybe Prince's lyrics need to be reconsidered.
When he looks like he's going for the easiest, simple and quick phrase,
he's maybe more interested in how the words sound.
That's why they sound simplistic when read without the music.

You can read Dylan's, you can read Lou Reed's, and Bowie's lyrics, and many others, apart from the music.
To Prince, lyrics are intended as song lyrics, not great text or poetry sung over some chords.

It's like a deliberate decision to KISS.

No wonder he had a fascination for rockabilly and the fifties in general ("He wanted to become Elvis", Alan Leeds would say) :
to obtain a beautiful song with simple words is much harder than looooong, surely beautiful,

but loooong and syllab-overcrowded songs like "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands".

The title only sounds like something coming from the class dork, not a Rock'n'Roll star.

All fifties and most of the sixties hits carry this simpleness, you can sense the goal of maximum impact

with the least amount possible — and don't start me on the music : in these blessed times,
anything longer than 3 minutes was a blasphemy, just have a look at the "Rubber Soul" album track timings.



Oh, and, of course, in the single-syllab word hooks category, we have a winner : "Head".
Skipper always had a great sense of humour.
I'm pretty sure "Pop Life" was at first an excuse for singing "Pop" in a way that vocally... pops.
But it's also proof that Prince could use simple, POPular words and be deep at the same time.


So whaddaya think?
Is Skipper just a lame lyricist when compared to lyrics gods like Bob Dylan,
or was he aiming for the simplicity of the initial Rock-n-Roll swindle?

I like every live version I've heard but have never been able to get into the album version at all.

Briliant post!

I love SITW for all the reasons you've said. It captures such a frustrated/cold/loney/haunted/hurt feeling so perfectly. I think the lyric, 'You think you're special / Well so do I', encapsualtes everything you're saying. On paper, it's pretty simple, but its expression within the song, against the music, is charged with such malice and meaning that it sounds profound. Prince is a great lyricist when he wants to be, and this song is ample evidence of that!

NorthC said:

Never really looked at it that way. Compared to Dylan, everybody is a lame lyricist, but maybe he my made music critics look at the words a little too much. As if you're only a good writer if you're eloquent with words. (Yeah, let me throw in a big word myself.) If Bob was the class dork, then he made dorkiness cool. Prince lacked the cultural baggage to write another Desolation Row, but he is also showing that you don't really need it. And I like the imagery here: why would a woman treat a man so bad? It can't be my fault!! Must be something in the water they drink that makes 'em so crazy. Yeah right, brother. You really are a little self-centered, are you? It also shows his obsession with water once again. I'm not sure if Prince wanted to be Elvis because he liked 50s rock & roll so much or if he just meant: as famous as Elvis. James Brown is another example of someone who could say a lot with just grunts and groans and we all know Prince learned from him. Prince's lyrics can be great.( Or silly, but a song like Poom Poom isn't meant to be taken seriously anyway.) [Edited 7/23/16 5:56am]

Bob is up there, and I personally think no one has topped him yet.
Bob can do miracles with simple, monosyllabic words too.

Funny how Prince and Bob share the same cult status when it comes to bootlegs, live, alternative versions.
Bob confirms his genius by the way he can rewrite entirely new verses, that not only fit the song,
but bring new autobiographic blood.
Have a look at this great paper.

Prince had to go (or probably was going intentionally to distinguish himself from other artists)
for some kind of sticker punchlines ("Dirty Mind", "Controversy", "1999", are genius as album titles),
where Bob had to just to let it flow out of his typewriter.
But Prince lived his twenties in the eighties, the dawn of slogans "Just Do It", and brands ubiquity (" " is the logical segue).
The Purple Rain typo is designed as a logotype (like in the sixties : Led Zep's IV, Rubber Soul, Jimi Hendrix Experience, etc.).

Prince was more of a chants writer. Sometimes he wrote a song with the crowd's response in mind,
and maybe that explains why some songs that sound lame to some on album get all the votes when played live.
I love the "Days Of Wild" studio version, but this shit is meant to be performed, and basta.
I guess he liked monosyllabic words because they can fall on the one.
Or else, they can be easliy placed on musical phrases.

Prince is very precise in his compositions for the lead vocal part.
Bob slows and speeds his syllabs in freestyle, managing to get the important words on the beat too.
But, like he said, it's freewheelin'.

As for Prince going for the 50's - 60's, come on, it's pretty obvious :
All of the Purple Rain outfits evoke the 60's London rock stars fashion.
The make-up comes from Little Richard first (50's), then James Brown.

"Be with me darlin' to the end of all time" : Skipper doing his best Elvis.
Sing it a capella this phrase, you hear it's a pure 50's rock'n'roll melodic descent.
Repeat it, add a 6/8 swing to it (which "Adore" is : a swing slowed down to death),
and you get something resembling "Heartbreak Hotel".

"Delirious" on the Purple Rain Tour is pretty "Jailhouse Rock" to me.
"Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On" on the 1986 Birthday Show, you can't get more 50's that that...