Sometime in April, 1985, as Prince was waiting for Around the World in a Day to show up in stores, he walked into a studio, sat down at the drum kit, and began the sessions for his next album by recording the drum parts for its first four songs, consecutively, in a single take. That seems like the practice of a genius auteur who knows exactly what he wants, which Prince of course was—except for the times when he was a genius auteur who kept changing his mind.
After Purple Rain, Prince spent the rest of the decade trying to repeat its success in theaters (he came closest with Batman, in which he doesn’t even appear). Under the Cherry Moon, his second film, is an indulgent stinkeroo: a black-and-white tragicomedy that’s not quite a musical. Its soundtrack album, Parade, on the other hand, is breathtaking. Raw, spare, and unflaggingly eccentric, it sounds radically unlike Purple Rain, Around the World, and everything else released in 1986, but it's baited with that year’s most brilliant No. 1 single, “Kiss”—a song that taught its listeners how to hear the rest of the album.
“Kiss” is a slash in the air surrounded by negative space. Whenever the song is played, it seems to open up a vacuum around it. It’s almost unfathomably funky, but it keeps going silent, and its silence yanks the groove forward. Prince famously gave the song to protege group Mazarati as a demo, then snatched it back once he heard the remarkable arrangement that producer David Z had come up with (most of Prince’s version is actually Mazarati’s recording, including their “aah-AAA-aah” backing vocals). Still, it would never have occurred to anyone else to make the recording’s groove deeper and the performance more thrilling by mixing out the bass altogether and singing it in a delicate falsetto. (That’s why he was Prince and we aren’t.)
The rest of Parade makes similarly ingenious use of the zero mark on the mixing desk’s faders. Prince asked jazz arranger Clare Fischer to score and record orchestrations for every song on the album except “Kiss,” then (mostly) peeled them right back off. Even so, the orchestra is fully present and flickering between dissonance and consonance for the opening track, “Christopher Tracy’s Parade”—although they’ve still got Prince’s mammoth, processed drum sound keeping them in shadow.
Christopher Tracy had been Prince’s character in the movie; “Christopher” was also the pseudonym he chose to be credit by as writer for the Bangles’ “Manic Monday,” released a couple of months earlier. But “Christopher Tracy’s Parade” had formerly been about an actual member of Prince’s band: he’d initially recorded it as “Wendy’s Parade,” a title that survives via a shoutout in the middle of “Kiss.” It echoes the form and subject of the Beatles’ “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” but as soon as its horns and flutes fade (and that gigantic beat pauses for a breath, then continues as before), Prince shakes off the psychedelic dreamcoat of Around the World in a Day. When he grabs the mic again and lets loose a whoop and a groan, we’re in an even starker groove than “Kiss”: the brief, insistent “New Position,” which is mostly about sex and also kind of about the realignment Prince was demanding of his listeners. There’s nothing behind him but the bass-and-drum groove, some steel percussion, and eventually the voices of his invaluable bandmates Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman. (He sings, “I can make u happy,” and they harmonize back at him: “H.A.P.P.Y.!” Then he rhymes it with “I won’t be your pappy,” to which they chirp “P.U.S.S.Y.!”)
Parade was a Top Five album. Given how fresh it still sounds, you might imagine that it would have inspired other artists to try what Prince called his “new funk,” but you’d be wrong. The direction R&B took in the wake of Parade had a lot more to do with Prince’s former associates Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, whose production work for Janet Jackson, the Human League and Force M.D.’s was pointing toward New Jack Swing. What did endure beyond Parade was Prince’s new habit of perpetually tinkering with his albums after they seemed to be finished. The album as initially sequenced would have been very different and significantly less fun: All four songs that were released as singles were added later on. As it is, there are still a few throwaways on it, like the formless instrumental “Venus de Milo” and the interstitial doodle “I Wonder U,” as well as incongruous if charming moments like “Do U Lie?,” a ridiculous stroll through bistro jazz that lets Prince try on a few silly accents for flirtation's sake.
Still, the slow, elegiac “Sometimes It Snows in April” stayed in Prince’s live repertoire right up to his final show. And the core of the album is its dance tracks, bracingly crisp and airy, with those offhanded register-vaulting vocals and that peculiar rhythmic lurch no other artist could duplicate. With “Kiss” as its key and signpost, Parade makes the case that the secret engine of Prince’s funk was what it left out.
