In addition to drumming with the Roots, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is a brilliant DJ, and he wrote a Twitter thread about his top ten most reliable dance floor fillers. Prince figures heavily in the thread, first because he once tipped Quest $100 for having the audacity to slip Miles Davis’ “Milestones” into a DJ set. But of course the thread also talks about Prince’s own music, including “I Wanna Be Your Lover”. This reminded me that it’s one of the best funk songs ever recorded, and that I should transcribe it.
Songfacts says that Prince wrote the song about Patrice Rushen, who did some synth programming on his first album. They never got together, though. As with so many of his classics, Prince wrote, performed and produced the track himself. The album version includes a longer jam at the end, and rightly so. It’s a killer funk instrumental in its own right. And it’s Prince jamming with himself!
My sister had a copy of this album when we were kids, and I was not ready for its expressions of complex gender and sexual identity, from the cover image on down. I probably liked the music, but it seemed to come from a very grown-up world that I could not make sense of. Questlove talks in his thread about how Prince has never received the recognition he deserves, in spite of his undeniable musical brilliance. He was just too far ahead of his time.
P is a king. And y’all know he is my creative North Star. But never has an artist so deserving of capn obvious placement of a list like this almost fumble his way in. Like I’m telling y’all Prince is a HARD sell. All these songs work cause they work for audience OUTSIDE the 🎯
— ?st (@questlove) June 27, 2022
“I Wanna Be Your Lover” is a great example both of the pleasures of Prince’s music and its challenges. Here’s my transcription of the intro, half of the first verse, the prechorus, and the chorus.
The drums are mostly simple: kicks on one and three, snares on two and four, light hi-hats on the eighth notes, and the occasional snare accent on a sixteenth-note offbeat. Prince plays with feather-light sixteenth note swing and drum-machine-like steadiness. According to Jason Draper’s book Prince: Chaos, Disorder, and Revolution, the track originally used a drum machine, but that Prince replaced it with live drums. If you have ever tried to play drums along with a drum machine, you know that it is not easy. Anyway, on top of this relatively simple foundation, Prince builds a rhythmic edifice of extraordinary complexity.
Here’s a radial MIDI visualization of the first four bars of the intro. The outermost ring shows the keyboard part with the chords written in.
Given that the track has at least two guitar parts and at least two keyboard parts, it’s remarkable how much empty space there is. Just from looking at the image, there are a lot of places where the arrangement is totally empty aside from drums. Every one of those holes in the sound is a rhythmic event in its own right, and they are all ear-grabbing. Prince can shred on guitar better than just about anyone, but I really love when he uses the guitar as a groove engine.
Here are the first four bars of the chorus, essentially the same groove as the intro but with the vocal melody on top.
Let’s try to verbalize everything that’s happening in this intro/chorus groove. It’s a four bar pattern.
- In measure one, the E chord in the keyboard hits on the downbeat. The next E is on the sixteenth note offbeat before beat three. Aside from beat one, beat three is the second strongest beat in the bar, and coming in just slightly ahead of it is intense! The B chord falls on the “and” of three, and the next E is on beat four. One of the guitars follows the keyboard, while the other plays F-sharps in octaves on each eighth note onbeat. Against all the syncopation, the straight rhythm feels like a kind of meta-syncopation.
- Measure two begins with an E on the downbeat and another on the sixteenth note offbeat before beat two. Then there’s a long sustaining B on the “and” of two. The strong beat F-sharp octaves continue.
- Measure three begins with E, B and E on the first three eighth notes. Then there is an agonizingly long pause while you wait for that resolving B, but it never comes! Instead, there’s a G#m on the “and” of four, practically in the next measure.
- The first half of measure four is just the G#m from the previous bar sustaining. At the end of the bar there are a couple of quick G#m stabs on weak beats; they vary in their placement in different passes through the pattern.
This is already a lot of rhythmic information, and the vocal melody layers on significant additional complexity. The phrase “I wanna be your” is a pickup before the chorus starts. A normal person would have the word “lover” come in on the downbeat of the first measure, but Prince is not a normal person. He delays the word so the first syllable falls on the “and” of one instead. This is an extremely weak beat, and accenting it this way destabilizes everything that follows. There are no more vocals in the rest of this bar, or in the first half of the next one, I assume so you have time to process the crazy thing that just happened.
To illustrate the importance of Prince’s weird choices, I made a version of the chorus that places the word “lover” where you would expect it, and that also fills in the suspenseful gap before the G#m chord.
This version sounds… fine. If you heard Prince perform it rather than terrible computer MIDI sounds, you would probably enjoy it. But it wouldn’t stick in your memory the way the real version does.
I won’t talk through the rest of the vocal melody, but I do want to draw your attention to one line: “I wanna be the only one who makes you come… runnin’.” Behind the naughty wordplay is a musically important event. The word “runnin'” starts on D-sharp, the fifth of the G#m chord. But Prince slides off that pitch to a note somewhere in between D-sharp and D natural before sliding back up. That is a blue note, a microtonal pitch in between the piano keys. Where did Black musicians ever get the idea to sing “out of tune” like this in the first place? There’s a plausible theory that blue notes are descended from African tuning systems based on the natural overtone series. Prince might be singing a harmonic eleventh or a narrow tritone. He might also just be singing an intentionally flat fifth or sharp fourth, but that would make him sound out of tune. He doesn’t sound out of tune, he sounds in tune. Maybe we can’t explain blue notes with just intonation, but there must be some reason why they sound so good. (By the way, Prince sings conspicuous blue notes between the major and minor third in “Starfish and Coffee“.)
The protagonist in Jonathan Lethem’s book Motherless Brooklyn is a Prince fan with Tourette’s Syndrome. Here’s a quote from his narration:
I don’t know whether The Artist Formerly Known As Prince is Tourettic or obsessive-compulsive in his human life, but I know for certain he is deeply so in the life of his work. Music has never made much of an impact on me until the day in 1986 when, sitting in the passenger seat of Minna’s Cadillac, I first heard the single “Kiss” squirting its manic way out of the car radio. To that point in my life I might have once or twice heard music that toyed with feelings of claustrophobic discomfort and expulsive release, and which in so doing passingly chamrmed my Tourette’s, gulled it with a sense of recognition, like Art Carney or Daffy Duck — but here was a song that lived entirely in that territory, guitar and voice twitching and throbbing within obsessively delineated bounds, alternately silent and plosive. It so pulsed with Tourettic energies that I could surrender to its tormented squeaky beat and let my syndrome live outside my brain for once, live in the air instead.
I love this description, it exactly gets at how “I Wanna Be Your Lover” sounds to me. Prince songs are about pleasure, and they deliver it, but you can also hear anger and anxiety underneath them. Prince is holding these emotions tightly in check, but they are in there. He has that in common with Michael Jackson. It’s satisfying to hear someone under such intense emotional self-control, but it’s scary too.