Prince Plays “Musicology”
Listen to this track by immortal Minneapolitan true funk soldier Prince. It’s “Musicology” the title track to his 2004 album, his twenty-eighth release. After he spent the intervening years putting out more ambient and jazz-oriented albums independently and distributing them digitally through his own NPG music club, Musicology was his first major label release after 1999’s Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. The new record went to fans who caught Prince’s tour starting in March 2004. By the next month, the album became available to the general public as well, representing a return to his signature sound.
Critics and fans met Musicology fondly as a joyful return to the global spotlight and to his roots. This title track expresses those roots in the clearest and most enthusiastic terms, winning him a Grammy for Best Traditional R&B vocal performance in 2005. It finds him namechecking artists who inspired Prince’s own music. James Brown, Earth Wind and Fire, and Sly Stone are among them. Even contemporaries like Chuck D and Jam Master Jay get a look-in on a song that is a celebration of music itself.
“Musicology” is about the vitality and essentialness of music as a binding force. That passion and enthusiasm is the clear throughline that made the song sound so fresh. It felt like the kick-off to a new era for the man who wrote it and recorded it. The song represented a kind of factory reset to his own unique sound while also conjuring music of the past that helped to make that sound what it is. It’s a playful track full of humour as much as it is one about how music has the power to bring people of all backgrounds together. The video that features him and his band plus luminaries like Maceo Parker who toured with Prince and plays on Musicology only reinforces that point.
Along with the celebratory lyrics, Prince communicates the meaning of the song using recognizable musical and textural references. The guitar line and interlocked groove between bass and drums is pure James Brown. He even quotes himself on this cut to reference his past. The wheezy 1980s-style synth interjections are distinctly Revolutionary in their tone and timbre. On this track, Prince brings it all together and puts it all forward as a pocket-sized personal history of his own musical education and development. For generations of fans by 2004, this was kind of a big deal.
Even from his debut in the late Seventies, he consistently wore Prince like an elaborate costume. He was always stage-ready when it came to wardrobe and full hair-and-makeup finery even when not making public appearances. He maintained a feline persona in interviews, never giving away anything he didn’t want to give away, responding to questions with a knowing smirk. Prince was, very purposefully, an enigma. He wore rock star mystique like a suit of clothes—or possibly of armour.
Prince playing MadCat, Coachella 2008. image: Scott PennerIn this respect, one of the most surprising and wonderful things about “Musicology” was its acknowledgement that Prince wasn’t in fact lowered down from heaven fully formed as his image had always suggested. This song reveals that he came from somewhere very real and earthbound as a kid in Minneapolis who loved buying and listening to records because of the way they made him feel. Prince was affected by the music he heard as a young person in the same way we were—and still are. In “Musicology”, Prince gives himself away in a way he hadn’t before. He’s not the aloof and unaffected rock god here on this song. He’s a music fan—again, just like we are.
As we listen, he’s conjuring the idea of reaching back to a time when music hit us differently as young people. This was a period when music was an essential part of our own education, helping us form our identities and shaping the ways we looked at the world. As we listen, this song encourages us to follow its advice to reconnect to what it felt like to hear our favourite music for the very first time. How did it so often bypass the intellect and go straight to the emotional, visceral, and the primal so easily? Why did it make us feel like moving— to get up and dance, or fight, or make our own music as inspired by it? How did it help us form our friend groups, as different as those friends may have first appeared to us? It’s all a wonderful mystery.
That’s another element in “Musicology”. Prince is telling us that when it comes to deep mystique and the enigmatic, nothing is more mysterious and powerful than music itself. Not even Prince was unaffected by it. In fact, it’s what drove him to become the person and the musician and performer he was and for the benefit of us all. That’s the underlying point he’s making in this song; that music, especially that which we first loved as kids, provides us with a kind of rare magic that can’t be denied.
If we cast our memories back far enough, we realize that our favourite music helped us to become who we are, too. No matter how old we get and no matter how many times the grown-up world messes with our joy, the core beauty of the music that entranced us as wide-eyed young music fans full of hope and hormones remains. We just have to remember it and seek it out from time to time. When we do, we often rediscover valuable and treasured parts of ourselves that we didn’t know we were missing.
Prince recorded a lot of music throughout his career that was never officially released. Since his passing in 2016, some of his demos and other unreleased material have become available. There has been a lot of speculation as to the full inventory of recordings stored in his (at one time, literal!) vault. For more on that, check out this 2024 article about Prince on Ultimate Guitar.
For more about Musicology and where it sits in his catalogue, plus some of the highlights of his career by the time it came out, check out the album’s Prince Official Discography entry.
Otherwise, it might also be a good idea to visit prince.com for and assortment of other Princely goodies.
Enjoy!
#2000sMusic #FunkSoul #Prince #songsAboutGrowingUp #songsAboutMusic
