I'm going to a Prince concert tomorrow and I'm thinking about my favorite albums and songs of his. As I upload my collection of almost 3GB of Prince music to Amazon's Cloud Player I happened across The Jughead.
This was, without a doubt, the very last dance song I ever loved. By loved I mean, went out to a club with the hope in my heart that the DJ would play it, and I could dance with that girl to its beats. It was an unrequited love, alas. Only my lonely bedroom walls of my Brooklyn apartment shared the tune with my soul. If you ask me the day the music died, it wouldn't be after Diamonds and Pearls - there was surely other music and there still is for me, but not for dancing. I remember standing somewhere in a packed Manhattan dance club shaking my head in shame when they started playing some character named Woody Wood destroying that song by Frankie Beverly. There was no more joy, only pain. It was 1992. It was the end.
It sounds incongruous when you play Jughead today. It's hard to remember when the hip lingo talked about 'kicking the jams' and 'low pro' was a flavorful description. Back in the day, people were still 'clocking freaks' on the dance floor, and the best rapper money could buy (as Prince did for that album with his band, The New Power Generation) still sounded something like Chuck D. Even as I heard it the twentieth time at my lonely pad, I knew it was the last gasp of funky dance music. It felt like a last ditch by Prince himself hearing him say 'Get stupid!' and then passing the mic.
But at least there was that bit of New World Afrikan flavor in it. Marbella was one of the shout out cities, as was Stockholm; a far cry from New York, Cackalacka and Compton. That was then.
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