Podunkian Music Club

Prince-Little Red Corvette

The Purple one returns to the spotlight Sunday at that most American of spectacles the Super Bowl. Prince will be the featured entertainment at the football game’s half time show recreating some of his hits and maybe showcasing some newer material, though mysterious as always we’ll all just have to wait.

He’s led a fairly fascinating if reclusive career over the years, an innovator in the early days of videos and taking funk and rhythm and blues to new directions, melded into rock and electronic grooves.

From the early eighties until the early nineties he was ever present, his tunes the soundtrack to the explosion of the video age, sultry at times and energetic always, he and his backing group of the day the Revolution ruled the recording charts and numerous radio play lists for a fair chunk of time.

At one time he seemed to personify a new sound dubbed the Minneapolis sound, even if it seemed he was the only practitioner of it at the time. In 1982 he released what became his opening salvo on the music charts, the recording 1999, it was a funk fest to an industrial beat and signified his arrival for good on the musical scene.

Our selection tonight is probably one of his most recognizable songs and is culled from that breakthrough recording; Little Red Corvette with its over-charged imagery was most likely the most heavily played video of its day. Like Elvis wiggling his hips on Ed Sullivan, when the smoke cleared and Prince delivered his lines the masses were entranced.

Videos at the time were still very much a new thing, with few having joined up with the MTV generation. Network TV caught the wave with a late, late night version of music television, it was the era of NBC’s Friday Night Videos and its imitators and one has visions of giant battles raging in the network offices as they tried to decide if this much raw emotion needed to be unleashed upon the youth of America.

From those days Prince would go on to larger projects and more than a few name and image changes, only recently returning to the moniker that made him and his music famous.

With a new recording just released yesterday, his path takes him from the seclusion that he sought to perhaps the most public of all American stages on Sunday, just another change of direction for a completely unpredictable artist.

Artist-Prince
Recording-1999