Bear in mind I'm not being paid for these write-ups, chaps. 
So in the spirit of the song I'll run through next, I'll 'skip' the tracks on CD1 you've no doubt all heard now and move right on to ...
SKIP 2 MY U MY DARLING
A musician, folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian and film-maker, Alan Lomax was an American polymath long before Prince’s DNA began swimming around John L Nelson’s teenage testicles.
A keen musical historian, Lomax’s belief that the 18th century American folk song "Skip to My Lou" originated with a simple dancing game which involved swapping partners (maybe the Old World equivalent of car keys in a bowl) is now accepted as fact by musicologists, even though everyone who knows for sure is dead. And forgotten by everyone who knew them. Because they are dead too. And everyone who knew them are also dead. It was a long time ago. So stop reading this and go make the most of your brief snap of consciousness.
If you’re not bothered about wasting your precious time on Earth enduring a windy, freewheeling, hugely pretentious yet wryly self-aware write-up on an obscure Prince outtake, then you can get hard on the fascinating fact that Lomax’s studies revealed the song had originally been sung by couples skipping hand-in-hand in concentric circles.
A lone boy was apparently placed in the centre of these circles and as couples whizzed past him, he would sing: ”Lost my partner, what'll I do?”. He would then take the hand of his ‘chosen one’ , pull her away from her partner and serenade her with the rather cold line: "I'll get another one just like you.” The song’s title was then chanted heartily by all participants.
Remember this was the 1700s - there wasn’t much else to do except for sing, dance and shag.
And note the "lou" in the title comes from the word "loo", a centuries-old Scottish word for “love". Which means Scotland didn’t just give the USA the Ku Klux Clan and joyless Presbyterianism. But also, in a roundabout way, this Prince song.
P no doubt first heard the ‘Skip To My Lou’ melody in school - ubiquitous globally, I was also made familiar with it at an early age and I live thousands of miles away from Minneapolis. Music connects us all, through generations, through continents and likely through space and time. Actually, that five note melody the scientists play in Close Encounters of the third Kind sounds a bit like Skip To My Lou …
So the song begins - rather blandly, truth be told - with a fairly typical early 90s R&B ’New Jack’ drum machine pattern, overpowered and pulsing with snap crackle and pop, a big testosterone-fuelled, rolling, funky yet generic Bobby Brown beat with deeply mixed samples of a masculine voice muttering ‘yep yep’ or something intended to be ‘street’.
Yet, just as fear rises that this is going to be one of P’s genre exercises (ie. Lacking that unquantifiable uniqueness that differentiates his best work from all else in popular music by a considerable margin) the groove immediately surprises by flinging the song’s main hook into the mix - a heavily processed, twangy, deeply funky, playful bluesy guitar hook (likely played by Levi, who co-wrote the tune) that repeats twice that is then responded to by a simple three-note ‘whistle’ synth hook that lends the song a dream-like, floaty vibe with it’s continual repetition.
The playful chirpiness, rhythm and tempo immediately puts me in mind of Scarlet Pussy or La La Laa He He Hee, although there’s less improvisation vocally - Skip To My You is fairly well structured. Here, P enters the song with attitude, one of his rhythmic aggressive vocals (not ‘rap’) ‘Ah been working all day! I can’t wait to get home to my baby - so we can play!’ It’s an intro reminiscent of SOTT deluxe box set’s ‘Promise 2 B True’. It’s macho … but simultaneously sassy high camp. A trick that I think only Prince Rogers Nelson could pull off.
Keeping with the attitude-filled baritone, P stays true to his early-90s habit of spelling out key words and spits out: ’S to the K, K to the I, I to the P - ooh what you do to me!’
A four-note synth interchange heralds the start of the song proper with the first verse, sang in a high sassy falsetto - elastic, omnisexual, alien, ridiculously awesome - over a wide-open, balls-out big summertime groove, evocative of a funk parade full of colourful oddities strutting with angular bodily contortions as they maraud down Sesame Street in bellbottoms and beads.
A growling, long, low single distorted bass note holds the bottom end down, juxtaposed with random stabs of one-chord funk rhythm guitar. Yet, the top ‘cream’ layer of the verses are all mid-80s psychedelic whimsy, anchored to earth by this hard 90s solid foundation. The repeated ‘yep’ samples also lend the song a little grit and edge but it’s mainly the huge snapping drum loop and growling bass that con-temporises a frothy, rainbow-spllling tune that Lisa and Wendy might have liked to get their magical mitts on.
Then, to assentuate the pastoral, antiquated vibe of the lyric, melody and harmonies, P launches into a chorus which consists of a woozy see-saw melody mega-mix of children’s nurses rhymes - ‘Mary had a little lamb, ready or not here I am’ then the song’s title, bastardised from the original Scottish title, now to be forever known as ‘Skip to my You My Darling’. Or perhaps not.
Put simply, Skip To My You My Darling is a quirky, funky, funny, knowingly-eccentric innuendo-filled jam with a number of Princely, subversively tangential flourishes throughout. It’s sonic sunshine, a glowing ready-brek head-bobbing groove with countless found sounds and clever harmonic interjections, both musical and vocally - he’s clearly having a lot of fun. I imagine it’s a complete P recording with some Levi overdubs.
It’s not deep - but it's not throwaway either. This is a heartfelt funky ode to the childlike love he feels for whoever inspired the song. The fact they can be like children together, and communicate on that pure, innocent level, is what I think he’s trying to put across. I could be wrong though and it means nothing at all and we are attempting, fruitlessly, to tattoo meaning upon it - much like life itself.
Javetta Steele’s version boasts a fairly accurate replication of Prince’s elastic lead guide vocal but the overbearing, generic production has completely erased much of the original’s eccentricity for a much blander sonic experience and - for me - rather uninspiring cover which sadly irons out the more colourful quirks and genre-bending alien oddness of P’s looser, weirder groove for the sake of some ridiculous aspirations of radio play.
It could never be a top 40 hit - but it’s a delightful, often surprising, sometimes perplexing groove that - in my opinion - had no business going to such an overpowering (in a good way) vocalist such as Javetta. It simply requires a lightness of touch which her pipes and approach are not built for. Don’t argue, it’s true - Alan Lomax would agree.
[Edited 10/5/23 17:06pm]
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