Download It #22: The Cross

April 28, 2009

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I don’t know if Prince Rogers Nelson has ever experienced a threesome in a vat of purple Cool Whip with a pair of Lebanese fashion models dressed like priests, but the plausibility of such an encounter is exactly why it’s so hard to take Prince completely seriously.

Not content with mere navel gazing, Prince is a penis gazer, and he’s borderline obsessive-compulsive about framing eroticism as a soft core religious sacrament…which, unfortunately, is always good for a laugh. Plus, even at the ripe old age 50, he still leans toward outfits that make him look like a perverse Cirque du Soleil clown. It's a wonder he doesn't wear pointy slippers with bells on them.

His talent, on the other hand, is beyond question. I’ve long felt that the greatest guitar solo I’ve ever heard in a live setting was a 10-minute psychedelic tsunami Prince unleashed during an Atlanta stopover on the “Purple Rain” tour, and, 25 years later, I heard a bootleg recording of the show that completely validated my memory.

When Prince gives it everything he’s got, he can be goddamned dazzling. But longtime followers will grudgingly admit he’s silly almost as often as he brings the passion, and that’s a shitload of nonsense when you’ve been cranking out often-misguided, multi-disc albums since the tail end of the Reagan administration.

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Still, a quick scan of the titles on Prince’s greatest hits compilation, “The Hits/The B-Sides,” reveals ten or fifteen of the catchiest, best-recorded, best-performed pop tunes of the past 30 years: “When Doves Cry,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Purple Rain,” “Sign ‘o’ the Times,” “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,” “Pink Cashmere,” “Alphabet Street,” “Raspberry Beret,” “Kiss,” “Peach,” “Cream”…the first time I listened to the disc, I literally sat there with my jaw hanging open. But, even then, the collection merely scratches the surface of his most significant work.

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With so many erratic albums available, it’s easy to miss terrific Prince tunes that weren’t released as singles, or were buried on the album that came before the last one that came after the other one. There are a lot of diamonds to be uncovered if you're willing dig for them, but over the years, one track in particular has never received the attention I think it deserves.

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“The Cross,” which first appeared on 1987’s “Sign ‘o’ the Times,” is both a delicate and hard-rocking testament to the power of Christ that cradles Prince’s sinner-believer dichotomy in a memorably chunky guitar workout. Just as importantly, though, it features lyrics about other people, the kind who don’t wear silk harlequin suits while counting their royalties. Gazing outward does this songwriter a load of good.

The opening of “The Cross” is almost certainly inspired by the Velvet Underground’s (almost certainly less sincere) “Jesus”...if you click the drop-down arrow on the right of the mp3 player, I've included the VU song so you can hear what I'm talking about. Both tunes feature a recurring, vaguely Middle-Eastern electric guitar figure and an all-but whispered lyric. But Prince’s prayerful, echo-laden vocal, backed by a strummed guitar, is one of the loveliest passages in his entire oeuvre:

Black day, stormy night
No love, no hope in sight
Don't cry, He is coming
Don't die without knowing
The cross

Ghettos to the left of us
Flowers to the right
There'll be bread for all of us
If we can just bear
The cross

Now a bass drum starts pounding out a lonely backbeat—
THUMP…THUMP…THUMP…THUMP…THUMP…

Sweet song of salvation
A pregnant mother sings
She lives in starvation
Her children need all that she brings

We all have our problems
Some big, some are small
Soon all of our problems
Will be taken by
The cross

Now an unexpected roar breaks loose, as a churning electric guitar overrides the prayer and converts the song into a coupling of the Soul Stirrers and Neil Young. It's a startling, dramatic change of gears. And it works.

Black day, stormy night
No love, no hope in sight
Don't cry for He is coming
Don't die without knowing the cross

The lyrics are then repeated from beginning to end, with Prince becoming a straight-up soul shouter along the way; he even drops the phrase “all of us” in favor of “all, y’all,” just to get everyone up and out of their pews. Otis Redding couldn’t have done it any better, and he definitely wouldn’t have done it while a Stratocaster fuzzes out through a huge tube amp.

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“The Cross” is an eccentric, absolutely brilliant Prince-specific accomplishment, one of the more powerful songs of the 1980s. If he could just keep his foreskin whimsy in check, new releases by this determinedly off-the-wall artist would still be reasons to celebrate, rather than reasons to scratch our heads and wonder when he’ll completely grow up.

But unless you were paying close attention at the time, you might have missed that Prince already did grow up with this recording. He just gets too overwhelmed by his own gifts and that ol' purple haze to build on his maturity with any consistency. It's apparent by now that he likes his asses shaken just as much as he likes them stirred, and we may just have to accept that.

Download: "The Cross" by Prince. Album: “Sign 'o' the Times” (1987). While you're at it, go ahead and download any or all of the tunes I mentioned from his collection, "The Hits/The B-Sides." Believe me, you won't be sorry.

Paul Tatara

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