Pr*nce & the R*volution - A Shock to the System (2 CD)

Compliation (single artist)

Hey kids! In the interest of keeping up momentum until the Rock Box drops, here's something for you all to dig into. Basically I've always considered myself a fan of That Purple Guy Who Shall Not Be Named, but my enthusiasm for his work comes and goes in phases and nearly always centers around what I guess is considered his Golden Age, roughly 1983-87 or thereabouts. During that five year span he was the dominant force in both the rock and, ahem, urban formats, and it seemed like no matter what type of music you were normally into, you couldn't wait to see what the Short Guy would come up with for his next masterpiece.

So while I as a young lad gobbled up his releases on vinyl and, later, compact disc, I was really only aware of the songs that were on the albums proper. It wasn't til much later on, during that weird, long forgotten era we refer to today as the "Mid Nineties", when I finally started getting into club deejaying, that some dude or other turned me on to "Erotic City" for the first time. Well slap my ass and call me Aunt Sally! If that tune wasn't a good old fashioned ear opener, well then my name isn't Fonzie J. Robocop.

In what I'm sure for you the reader is a predictable turn of events, young me went out and scoured the bins for all the old 7" and 12" vinyl singles that the Flaming Funkateer had released during the old days. Now I'll be honest here, having felt perplexed by Lovesexy, let down by Batman and abandoning ship sometime around Graffiti Bridge, I had little use for his new stuff. I had of course heard the few singles he did with the NPG that received airplay, but apart from "Money Don't Matter Tonight", none of them did a damn thing for me, and so I regressed back into smoking pot and listening to 311 and Sublime in my mom's basement. (Hey I was like 18 at the time, so keep the shut-in jokes to yourself!)

But yeah, the vinyl singles! Now that's what got me back into old Unpronounceable Symbol Head. And so of course I did what any other young lad trapped in 1995 would do-- I made a CASSETTE TAPE with *all* the b-sides on it! I mean, my God, the sense of achievement that I felt for being-- you know-- the only kid in Prospect Heights, or possibly the whole of the Northwest Chicago Suburbs (excluding the cities of Schaumburg, Park Ridge and perhaps Palatine) to own such a thing! Yes folks, I remember the good times: rollin' down the mean streets of Suburbia, bumpin' "Erotic City" in the Honda and giving the screwface to any and all retirees or school children that got in my way. Hells yeah.

Um, yeah, so anyway, this would be what is referred to in industry jargon as the "digital" equivalent of those old cassette tapes of mine. In most cases these are sourced from the same original vinyls that I dubbed the cassettes off of all those years ago, so be prepared to share in the magic, folks. One note: I encoded a bunch of these tracks like ten years ago when drive space was actually still a consideration, so the bitrate may not be up to your audiophile standards. That said, I listened back to this mix numerous times as I was putting it together for y'all, so you can trust me when I tell you it's a good listen if you just take it all in and don't sweat the numbers. This is the Purple Yoda in his prime, making music so good, it might just cause A Shock to the System.