30 straight days, y’all! We’re really doing it! Let’s keep it going with “Eye Hate U.”
I hesitate to post the video for “Eye Hate U” on the site because there are some…questionable choices. I’ll politely call this video cringeworthy. I’ve had a conversation about podcasting with a few people recently. This past Thursday my buddy Tyson and I were discussing possibilities. Well, I’ve found our first topic. A frame-by-frame analysis of everything that’s going on in the “Eye Hate U” video. If you think we couldn’t mine an hour of material out of this you’re dead wrong. So much baffling shit I don’t even know where to begin. I’ll tease the eventual podcast by saying that the highlight of this video for me is the guy with the gigantic keytar. He looks like 1990 Michael Bolton with a purple baby grand strapped to his torso. You have to stay alert to find him. He only shows up a few times very briefly, but his appearances are glorious. You don’t have to be alert to find Prince’s first wife, Mayte Garcia. She stars as the love/hate interest.
Enough about the video. Let’s discuss the song. One of my favorite Prince ballads. It sounds like an 80’s power R&B ballad, but it was recorded in 1994 and released on 1995’s The Gold Experience. Everything in this song sounds big, for lack of a better way to put it. Like it was recorded in an arena. Despite the R&B ballad sound, Prince still manages to finish the song with a wild electric guitar solo.
Lyrically Prince establishes in the first few lines of the song that he’s been cheated on by a longtime lover. He spends the rest of the video wrestling with the fact that he hates himself because he allowed himself to fall in love with her, and he hates her because of what she did to him after he fell in love. It’s a messed up situation for our boy Prince. Following the second chorus he takes his soon-to-be ex to the courtroom to charge her with “one too many counts of heartbreak in the first degree.” After a minute or two of struggling with wanting to make her love him again as much as he loves her so he can break her heart he finally leaves us with the classic line, “I hate you because I love you, but I can’t love you because I hate you.” Perfect.
I struggled scoring this song. It deserves a high score because I really like it, but this is Prince. I’m trying to be stingy with high scores. I’ve already given out two 5/5 stars so far out of 30 songs (“1999” and “Darling Nikki”) and I don’t anticipate giving a lot more. I can’t give every song I love 5 stars or what would be the point of a rating system? Even a 4/5 stars from Prince is a classic. With that in mind, I’m going to give it 3 out of 5 stars, but I’ll say this: Someday I’m going to post my ultimate Prince slow jam mixtape and I can say with 100% certainty that this song will absolutely be included.
mookiefantana 