Classic or Dud: Prince's Batman "Soundtrack" Album

Prince would've totally made a project out of Marion Cotillard.

Time passes by for those who slowly wait.

Then Play Long reaches Prince and his music for Batman, which is more than you might think: http://nobilliards.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/prince-batman-motion-picture-soundtrack.html

"Scandalous" is fantastic.

I love this record. Just played it on Friday.

"Partyman" is a good time

Carlin's essay nails it, on both the album and the film. Some related ephemera:

* "I have seen the future, and it works" is a quote by the famed American muckracker Lincoln Steffens regarding his 1919 visit to the Soviet Union. Two summers after Batman, Soviet communism collapsed.

* Prince really was extremely enthusiastic about Batman, and constructed his own elaborate mythology around the character inspired by not just the Black Album, but Camille and Spooky Electric. Prince's long-suppresed Batdance video is much more interesting to watch than Burton's film.

Because the biggest flaw of the character, in almost any iteration, is that nobody really seems to know how to handle his sexuality. Some writers attempt to make him a hyper-sexual billionaire playboy who beds tons of women. The problem with this is that the "billionaire playboy" thing is a transparent pretense, and therefore anything he does in that persona is implausible. Batman has, since 1940, been an implicit pederast, and this reading continues to complicate the character.

Prince's solution is utterly fascinating. His reading of the character, because he's Prince, is intrinsically sexual, but he is just as disinterested as everyone else in the alleged Wayne-Vale "relationship". His most passionate expressions of sexuality, such as "Scandalous", are expressed in the character of the Joker, who in Prince's reading becomes an androgynous and pansexual Baphomet-like figure of misrule. The central conflict of Prince's reading of the Batman mythos is the sexual tension between Batman and the Joker, which is not something that exists in any other version of the character I have encountered.

* "Batdance" was edited down from a nearly nine-minute first cut. The sub-four minute single edit removes the reprise of the "A" section of the "song", thereby making the song even stranger.

* A dark record? Yes, definitely. However, Prince actually cut one track from the record, "Dance with the Devil", for being too dark. The song has never been released, but circulates as part of the five-billion-CD Prince studio outtake bootleg collection. It's pretty dark.

If you want to delve deeper into Prince's sexual take of Batman, I'd recommend acquiring the Scandalous Sex Suite EP, which includes an extended three part version of "Scandalous", complete with some orgastic moaning by Kim Basinger (she briefly dated Prince at the time, so he invited her to do this in the studio), and a track titled "Sex (The 80's Are Over and the Time Has Come 4 Monogamy and Trust)", which has got to be the most Princean title of all time.

Most of the Batman OST singles are well worth acquiring too, they have some dope B-sides like "Feel U Up" (Camille again!) and "200 Balloons", plus nice alternate mixes - the house remixes of "Batdance" and "The Future" by William Orbit and Mark Moore are even better than the originals, IMO.

I'm in this liminal state where I haven't googled anything in Tuomas's post yet to see if it's real. feels good.

Is it heretical to prefer "The Future" to "Sign o' the Times"? Fine.

Carlin's essay nails it, on both the album and the film.

yup

defenders of the film are baffling imo

I like the movie, but Marcello's idea of asking Keaton to play both characters intrigued me too

The central conflict of Prince's reading of the Batman mythos is the sexual tension between Batman and the Joker, which is not something that exists in any other version of the character I have encountered.

wait waht are you serious, this has totally been explored in the comics

xp

and in pretty canonical stuff too - Dark Knight, Arkham Asylum etc

I don't really follow Batman comics but I've read enough to know that take is basically Batman 101

Marcello's piece seems to be happily unaware that Batman comics have ever existed, while we're talking

idk if the comics are really relevant tbh - he's by and large correct about what he does discuss

"* Prince really was extremely enthusiastic about Batman, and constructed his own elaborate mythology around the character inspired by not just the Black Album, but Camille and Spooky Electric. "

Please PLEASE direct me to further reading on this?

it might be truer to say that reading hasn't really shown up *outside* of the comics? nicholson's joker is lascivious, but in an omnisexual kinda way

maybe not explicitly, but Joker's always been an essentially camp figure, and I think that includes the usual pansexual connotations

Cesar Romero was gay after all

jon not jon the liner notes/lyric sheet for batman kinda demonstrated it, songs were in character, the whole album kinda played like a rock opera. that the batman soundtrack is basically a sequel to the black album is something i wouldn't have picked up on at the time but seems super apparent. it was interesting to learn why 'partyman' and 'batdance' haven't been on any of his comps. all his comps have left off something so it didn't seem too odd, that one of his number one hits wouldn't be on a greatest hits comps was more of a marker of how many hits prince had than anything else (though obv that #1 hit would definitely be 'batdance', it's been at least 25 years since i heard it on the radio).

batman '89 is still my favourite superhero movie, it has this jagged tangle of sensibilities that marvel and DC would never really permit again

joker sparing the francis bacon painting, jack palance acting like a reptile that put on your dad's skin, the long metropolis tribute near the end...

I didn't know the reasons for their omissions until I read the Wiki last night

xpost

Xpost yeah I have imbibed the internal evidence (though I haven't read the liner notes since purchasing the cassette in 89) I just thought for a sec there might be some prince interview where he talked about it.

OTM that batman plays like a black album sequel. They even have similar arcs (killer a-side, b-side peters out a little)

idk if the comics are really relevant tbh - he's by and large correct about what he does discuss

Not that it's super-relevant to the album, but saying things like there was no precedent for the darkness of the movie and Burton had to build his own antithesis of the '66 TV show, whimsically speculating what the characters might have been if they'd existed in the '40s - rhetorical asides that clunked specifically due to by-and-large non-correctness

Agree that the album is good and the Scandalous Sex Suite is ridiculous obv

lemon crush is the best thing on here, though i like the whole album, even if it could be a bit less rushed sounding in places. i want to hear the 9 minute version of batdance.

sex is one of his great b sides.

lemon crush and vicki waiting.

electric chair is fantastic but a bit throwaway sounding.

Is the Batdance video really "long suppressed"? Easily accessible via Google. Though maybe not commercially available. Anyway, I showed it to my kids not long ago, they didn't know what to make of it.

Also, I reviewed the album when it came out for my college paper: "as bizarre and carefree as anything he's ever done, though not as stunning as his best work." More otm than most of my 19-year-old opinions.

i dont remember the mark moore or orbit mixes of the singles, but always felt after the future, and maybe loveleft loveright from graffiti bridge, that i wished prince let more house/techno producers remix his songs. or that he went down that route rather than hip-hop. though who knows if it would have turned out as badly.

He's had housey/ravey moments on several of his post-Batman albums, most notably "Loose" on Come and "The Human Body" on Emancipation (I'm pretending Joy Un2 the Rave Fantastic doesn't exist)

The "Batdance" video was an extra on a "Batman" DVD I rented a long time ago. Maybe they got rid of it since then but I think at least first run DVDs have it.

i try to pretend loose and human body dont really exist. sleep around was house-ish too.

I started a thread on this subject a while ago:

Prince and house

Whoops, sorry, here's the correct link:

Prince and house

best bit of Batdance; "Hey Ducky"!

Otm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTkglWrB5xE

Love Prince's hand moves at 1:00 in here.

Classic dig at Bubbles the chimp ~4:40 yo MJ

http://en.musicplayon.com/play?v=478997

Best version of Batdance I could find.

just listened to that song for the first time in about 15 years. wish the drums on parts 1 and 3 were a bit less rigid. but the 2nd part has to be one of the funkiest things hes ever put on record. need to find that vicki vale mix on the 12" i used to have.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/5667047/prince_the_future_remix/

this remix is obv a tad dated but good.

'hollywood conjures images of the past'

prince could see the 00s.

I always thought this album was too claustrophobic due to his reliance on samplers. Samples all over the place: voices, guitar chords, film dialogue. It's almost too much at times. This sound carried over somewhat into "Graffiti Bridge" but with much more space.
I love some of the weirdness but it's nowhere as weird as "The Black Album".

black albums weirdness has also been overstated somewhat over the years. it was better when it was a 5th generation bootleg to hearing it as it was meant to be released.

Side b of black album is boring as fuck, that's the other problem with black album

boring? Really? I think it's far from his best but it's still odd, funky and pisses from a great height on most of his subsequent 90s releases. And I'm familiar ( and own) it as a "5th generation" boot as well as the sonically spiffy Warners release.

Ok I was exaggerating a little

The boot I got in Ibiza was pretty decent, sound quality wise. 1991 or thereabouts

prince was right to kill "black album" and replace it with "lovesexy", imo. now, banding the whole cd as one track was maybe not a super-smart idea, but the album itself is super fantastic.