I think the Daily Prince Song Randomizer is broken, or at least stuck on the Love Symbol album. 1992’s Love Symbol album was his second credited to Prince and The New Power Generation. It’s clear from the opening track on the album, “My Name is Prince,” that he was starting to cave in to pop music’s trend toward hip hop. This album is full of rap verses, scratching, and Prince doing a lot of spoken word vocals himself. Because of that I think the album is really uneven as Prince was still finding his place in a music landscape that was unrecognizable compared to the one he ruled over just a few years earlier.
Then there’s “Arrogance.” Its runtime is only 95 seconds, but Prince and NPG pack a lot in to that brief period of time. I imagine Prince composed this track after listening to some early Red Hot Chili Peppers, or maybe something like “What Your Favorite Color?” by Living Colour. It’s bass heavy speed funk. The song makes repeated references to Prince’s own arrogance with questions like, “What makes a man wanna rule the world? Make him man enough to say he’s 50-50 girl?” It ends on a strange and completely unrelated note with Prince saying, “like a flame she came and I was no longer cold,” and a woman’s voice (Kirstie Alley?) saying, “that’s a little shady, for this lady was only 16 years old.” Wait, what?!?
Anyway, the song is brief, so the post will be too. “Arrogance” has the makings of a cool track but it ends before it really gets going. Like so much of the Love Symbol album, it’s overly chaotic. For the second day in a row I’m going to give a song from this album an average score. It’s not particularly good, but it’s not bad either. It’s just there.
mookiefantana 