Ranking Prince’s Top Ten Songs
I love so much of his work, how could I force myself to choose?
I’ve been missing Prince and playing the old songs and then one day a thought flashed through my mind—what’s his top ten? I dismissed the idea right away. I couldn’t try to rank Prince’s songs. The idea of it was too scary. There’s so many great songs and they’re great for different reasons.
Susan Rogers, my friend the music professor at Berklee who was Prince’s engineer in the mid 80s, says songs can get you on a rhythmic level or a lyrical level or an emotional level — and Prince is one of the few who knows how to wield all three. And Prince has had so many different sounds from new wave-y funk like “Sister” to arena rock like “I Would Die 4 U” to quirky late Beatles-ish pop like “Paisley Park” to gospely soul like “Nothin Compares 2 U” to cute and weird tales told in soulful tones like “Starfish and Coffee.”
And how do you judge the majestic rock of the Purple Rain era against the edgy soul of the Camille era (circa Sign O’ the Times)? I love so much of his work so much how could I force myself to choose? What kind of a person would take on this fool’s errand? But I always tell young writers that if you’re afraid to write something then you absolutely should write it. And I wanted to write something fun about Prince to spark a conversation and promote my new podcast Love City which opens with an essay about Prince in 1984! Go to howl.fm/lovecity! #Shamelessplug!
Ok, here’s my list. Friend, I agonized over it! Songs went up and down the charts in my mind as I tried to compare them. I somehow settled on this order. I tried to put aside my pre-existing love for these songs and all the memories that go along with hearing them again and what they mean to the culture. I wanted to try to judge them just on songwriting and sound and performance and what Prince says or reveals about Prince in them.
10. “Darling Nikki”
This is the greatest of Prince’s sex story songs (a league that includes “Little Red Corvette” and “Raspberry Beret”). In these he meets a very sexual woman, he sees how sexually liberated she is, and they have hot sex. He always gives these characters a big entrance and none could be bigger than, “I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating in a magazine.” She quickly takes control — as women often do in Prince’s songs. And I love how his guitar riff and some of the details make it all seem a little spooky — “she had so many devices…” Prince is up in a funky, haunted S&M castle getting totally turned out by one of the greatest song characters in rock history.
9. “Sign o the Times”
Prince takes the most depressing news report ever and makes it funky.
8. “If I Was Your Girlfriend”
This is more than a funky ballad about intimacy. Prince was playing with gender fluidity before that was a term and here he’s playing with gender but he’s not wishing to be a woman, he’s wishing to feel the intimacy that women friends seem to have. A profound statement about the desire for a truly spiritual closeness with another person and a lament at how hard it is for men to find the intimacy that women have with each other. I love the way his speaking style in the song moves from singing in a sort of begging way in the first half to a pimp spitting crazy game in the spoken section at the end. So he moves from one edge of the continuum of masculinity, sort of the weakling, to the other edge, the stud.
7. “Sometimes It Snows In April”
A song so soft, so delicate, and so sad. A song that uses silence to convey more sadness. Prince is known for great story songs and this is one of the greatest. A heart-achingly beautiful tribute and a song where he shows us his vision of heaven as a vibrant, almost tangible place.
6. “Another Lonely Christmas”
Song kills me every time. This is another song about a friend’s death but this one, done with towering energy, powerful crescendos, is so sad. He’s crying out in pain here.
5. “The Beautiful Ones”
This song is a long, slow, methodical build and when it gets to its zenith and he’s screaming, it’s everything.
4. “Let’s Go Crazy”
The song begins with a sermon where he lays out his religious philosophy that Heaven is real and it’s a better place and God is here for us and the way to get through this life is not with pills or manmade tricks but with the spirit. And with the spirit you can overcome anything. And then he takes us through a rollicking church service in which he’s getting the spirit. He’s preaching here, and far from fearing death, he’s looking forward to the afterlife. This is Prince describing what he was taught about spirituality in Seventh Day Adventist churches as a kid and giving us the baddest service ever.
3. “When Doves Cry”
The song is epic. The verses describing an intense moment between lovers, mentioning the animals who feel their heat. The chorus taking us into Prince’s mythology. It seems like Jungian analysis set to heavy drums as he’s wrestling with who he is, talking about scars from his family. It’s an extremely well-written song, I love the tension between the verses that deal with the present and the relationship he’s working through, and the chorus about his deep past and the troubles there. It’s a song about himself, where it feels like he’s revealing himself — not just in the chorus where he talks about his parents, but in the verses, too, where he’s giving you the feeling of what it’s like to be in a sexual encounter with him. This is a song where he seems to be talking about the real Prince as opposed to “Darling Nikki”, which is an imagined scene or “Sign O the Times,” about the external world. In songs like “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” “Another Lonely Christmas,” “The Beautiful Ones” and “When Doves Cry” Prince is letting us into his real feelings, his real life, telling from his spirit and unveiling his deepest longings. “The Beautiful Ones” is about wanting Susannah Melvoin before they were together. “If I Was Your Girlfriend” is about him wanting to be closer to her when she’s his girlfriend. “When Doves Cry” feels to me like it’s his self-portrait in song.
2. “Adore”
This is probably the ultimate love song. Prince promises to love you until the end of time — a love that continues beyond this life. And that’s really meaningful in a song that mentions God and describes angels watching them have sex and crying at how beautiful it is. (I love this vision of angels as a sort of spiritual NSA, spying on us.) This is an inter-dimensional love song. And it’s a song that takes on the shape of sex. It has a long, slow build like foreplay and then, in the third minute, it rises to a climax and there’s an explosion where Prince is screaming and it’s like he’s in church getting the spirit or in bed getting off. Those two moments of ecstasy are very similar. And after the explosion there’s the heavy breathing and the drum thump like the heartbeat and the hard breath after you orgasm. This song is so gospel and also so sexual. It’s the ultimate pimp song but it’s also the culmination of so much in the R&B tradition, bringing together Saturday night and Sunday morning in one beautiful, soulful love song. R&B, since it’s inception, has about playing with the tension between spirituality and sexuality and exploring how you can combine the two. Indeed, one of the core theses of Prince’s whole career is saying the sexual and the spiritual are not opposites, they are linked impulses. That’s what he meant by Lovesexy. This is the song where he combines those two dynamics most powerfully. In that way, this song is the culmination of his career with the lone exception of…
1. “Purple Rain”
I tried to not put “Purple Rain” at the top because it’s the obvious choice — almost every Prince top ten list has it #1 — but after I played all the songs over and over and I couldn’t resist. This is his magnum opus. The song is operatic. It’s scope is gigantic both sonically and spiritually: this is a song where Prince likens himself to Jesus. If “When Doves Cry” is about who he was, about his past, this is about his future, who he wishes to be. Your rock n roll savior. This is the song he wrote in order to become that rock God figure and he succeeded. The song is about absolving someone who is at a sad, difficult moment, someone at the end of a complex relationship. No one’s to blame here, he’s saying. He’s offering forgiveness and absolution. And in the third verse Prince addresses his part in the exchange — “You say you want a leader, but you can’t seem to make up your mind, I think you better close it, and let me guide you, to the purple rain.” The rain symbolizes cleansing in this song about forgiveness and absolution. The rain here is baptismal. Prince is the one guiding you into the baptismal rain. The rain is purple because it comes from Prince but the important part is that it’s cleansing, it’s forgiving, it’s absolving. He’s here to absolve you with his holy water, the purple rain. He is the redeemer. He is the Jesus.
11–15: Songs that just missed my top 10 in no particular order
“Sister,” “Take Me With U,” “Starfish & Coffee,” “Kiss,” “Raspberry Beret.”
Thank you.
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