Prince Lays Out His Worldview on ‘D.M.S.R.': 365 Prince Songs In a Year
To celebrate the incredibly prolific, influential and diverse body of work left behind by Prince, we will be exploring a different song of his each day for an entire year with the series 365 Prince Songs in a Year.
Dance. Music. Sex. Romance. Add God into the mixture and you've more or less got the formula for every song Prince released in his life. Still, those four words made up the acronym for "D.M.S.R.," an eight-minute cut from 1999.
Over an elastic early-'80s funk groove, Prince created one of the defining dance-floor anthems of his early days, vamping over one chord. As was often the case, he played all the instruments, getting vocal help from Lisa Coleman and Brownmark of the Revolution and several others.
Lyrically, he makes his life's intentions as clear as day. "I don't care to win awards / All I wanna do is dance / Play music, sex, romance / And try my best to never get bored." But it's the third letter in the title that got the most attention from him in the first couple of verses. Sure, there are plenty of James Brown-esque shouts for everybody to get up and dance, but he also tells a girl to "work your body like a whore" and "strip right down to your underwear," while suggesting that haters "take a bite of my purple rock."
Still, even a straightforward Prince song has to have a little bit of mystery in it. After the breakdown, he calls Jamie Starr, who produced the first few records by the Time and Vanity 6,'s only record, a "thief." In a 1983 profile in Rolling Stone, Prince said flat-out that he wasn't Jamie Starr, an assertion backed up by Time singer Morris Day.
Jamie Starr was Prince.
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