I've always wanted to see the expression that was on Tim Burton's face when he found out that Prince did in fact want to provide music for his Batman movie. The brainchild of the geniuses at Warner Brothers (the studio making the movie and Prince's record label thru the mid 90's), I'm sure that Burton was certain that the notoriously persnickety Prince would reject the idea out of hand and that his film would remain safe from such heavy handed and sketchy outside interference. But little did he know that the Batman theme was the first thing Prince learned to play on his daddy's piano as a child (or so the story goes). Prince was thrilled to be asked, and thus the peculiar shotgun wedding of Tim Burton's weird, dark, Gothic, pop fantasy and Prince's erotic city came to pass.
One of these days somebody's going to produce a properly scholarly work on Prince Rogers Nelson and his immense body of music, and I can't wait to read it because this isn't it. In short, by the late 80's Prince had burned through much of the pop capital he'd banked in the wake of Purple Rain, even though he was producing his most artistically impressive and important work, his star was fading somewhat the further he got from 1984, and his record label went into action to stem the tide and get one of their marquee stars back into zeitgeist by hitching him to the Batman zeitgeist they were whipping up to hype their upcoming blockbuster. Not an altogether terrible idea... except for the fact that Prince's recent work from Around The World In A Day (the dud follow up to Purple Rain) on largely consisted of psycho sexual morality plays expressed through psychedelic funk and sex jams, and his Batman would be no different.
Which brings us to Prince's Batman soundtrack itself. I've also always wanted to see the expression on the faces of the Warner Brothers executives and Tim Burton when they first heard Prince's Batman soundtrack and realized that it had almost nothing to do with Burton's film whatsoever. Sure Prince delivered a few songs they could use in the movie, but for the most part it's a piece separate from the film it's supposed to be providing music for, a collection of funk jams through which Prince continued his own ongoing personal and musical explorations in the guise of songs written in the "voices" of the characters of the film that almost exists as a Prince penned oversexed Batman musical. In the end, even though he played ball, Prince still ended up not really playing ball, leaving Warner Brothers to do the best they could, putting the album in shops and hoping that everybody would go along with it, which they did, making it Prince's first #1 album in years.
But does it hold up? Listening to the Batman album for the first time in years, I was immediately struck by how much of a quintessential Prince album it really is: the preoccupation with sex, the Manichean duels between Prince's good and destructive sides as expressed through the Batman and the Joker, and his/our never-ending quest for spiritual salvation, it's all pure 80's Prince... with sound clips of Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, and the ecstatic moans of Kim Bassinger. I was also impressed by the prescience of some of the music, in particular "The Future," with it's talk of "the systematic overthrow of the underclass" and karmic and spiritual admonitions against "going out like a jerk" while society crumbles around us; and the institutional cynicism of "Trust" that jibes all too well with contemporary America's growing distrust of it's institutions and growing sense of chaos. Batman, the Joker, Vicki Vale, Gotham City, Prince himself, and the rest of us are all looking for something, and true to life, nobody finds it. Except for Prince, who later became a Jehovah's Witness and eschewed the naughty and nastier aspects of his oeuvre in favor of religious solace... to the chagrin of many of his fans. Ah well, at least we still have Prince in the 80's, and Batman.
Speaking of Prince when he was dirty, "Scandalous" easily ranks as one of his finest sex jams. I still laugh at the fact that even on his Batman soundtrack, Prince had to include an obligatory Prince sex jam, and a Prince sex jam of Batman seducing Vicki Vale at that... a Prince sex jam that he even extended into a 20 minute "The Scandalous Sex Suite" for a now legendary 7" single complete with copious and allegedly real Kim Bassinger sex moans.
Enjoy... especially if you were left unsatisfied by The Dark Knight Rises.
Enjoy... especially if you were left unsatisfied by The Dark Knight Rises.
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