It starts with EMI, calling “regarding The Artist.”
The artist? A huge, multinational recording company is calling about “The Artist?” Has Picasso come back?
Actually, the emphasis was on the first letter of the word “artist.” You could hear her cut-and-pasting in the capital-A over the piddly trivial small-A, to make it The Artist.
Back in the ‘80s, being called “Prince” was enough. It set all the right teeth on edge. All the right people deejays, Stones-lovers, white critics - got nervous.
But not now. His new record company won’t even think “Prince,” not since he skipped from his former record company, Warner Brothers, after 16 albums.
EMI distributes his new three-CD, 36-song, three-hour mega-album, Emancipation. It’s by The Artist, not Prince. Or in its long-form: The Artist Formerly Known As Prince (TAFKAP).
His emancipation came after he cut ties with Warner, in part because the label wouldn’t release his albums as fast as he was recording them. He released Emancipation on his own NPG label.
“Now it’s my team and this is my play,” he said.
Besides, he’s now a married, settled oldster of 38. Perhaps too, he’s a bit weary and wary.
Life hasn’t worked out the way he wanted it to be.
“I’d like to some day give my kids my gold records,” he said. Is this a con? The industry doesn’t want him any more. “Right,” he said, “but what I would really want is to give my kids my records. I want them to know who I was.”
Not that long ago, he was pop’s life force; angry, sexy, the natural heir of Count Basie, John Coltrane, Little Richard, Sly & The Family Stone and George Clinton.
Now, he’s entirely vulnerable, although he tries not to be. Contained and cautious. Terrifically bright, entirely engaging, he’s also skeptical and skittish, and desperate to talk, except to 1 radio or TV. Prince didn’t do many interviews, particularly in Toronto.
“And no tape recorders,” EMI warned. “There are so many bootleg interview tapes going around,” explained a New York EMI employee.
But that’s not the only reason for the no-tape-recorder rule.
The 38-year-old Artist wants to leave “an impression, not a string of words. Write what you feel.” And there are more limits. He won’t talk about the child he and his wife, Mayte Garcia, 24, were only recently expecting. Stories have persisted throughout the recording industry, in his hometown newspaper the Minneapolis Star Tribune and in the British tabloids that the infant died.
“I’m never going to release details about children,” told the New York Times. “They’ll probably name themselves.”
You can sense his wife’s power over him - like his writing music for her dance company. Listen to the CDs, and you’ll hear “The Holy River,” which is his proposal of marriage to her.
He included a sample of the unborn child’s heartbeat on the song “Sex In The Summer,” and a pregnant Garcia appears in the video for Betcha By Golly Wow, his first single and cover of the 1972 Stylistics hit.
He has made zillions (for others, he’ll say, not for himself), from his $100-million Warners deal, from one great movie (Purple Rain), one spectacular failure (Under The Cherry Moon) and other so-so flicks. But by the early ‘90s, the money, the fame and the kicks were running low, and he felt trapped.
Warners wasn’t the problem. Being young and eager was the problem. He signed the contract: “I was 18 years old, and put myself in a box.”
The man who started as Prince Rogers Nelson evolved in 1993 into a symbol, something that looks like an enlarged needle or a pictograph for baldheaded men. He rankled at the money he feels is his due, and thinks of how much the Beatles have kept on making from the songs they own. Yet, he wants to go beyond money-worries.
He wants to write music. He wants to record. He wants the never-ending flow of composition that Duke Ellington had.
“My wife says I’m in the studio too much, you know. I’ve got all the melodies in my head. But she says, ‘Enough.’”