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Album: The Gold Experience
Year: 1995
“Shy” is my favorite Prince song of the 1990s.
Disclaimer: the 1990s is the decade from which I’ve heard the least amount of Prince’s music, so I have huge knowledge gaps from both the beginning and the end of that decade.
Still, it’s an absolute tour de force of restraint and tension-building. Oh, and singing. Always with the singing.
Starting off with footsteps and chicken-scratch guitar that leaves entire universes of space between every phrase, “Shy” is one of Prince’s darker fucksong stories:
After a month of just bein’ alone, he said
“I wonder what L.A.’s thinkin’”
Streets he roamed in search of a poem amongst the wild and drinkin’
When he sees cool dark skin in hot virgin white
The search was over at least for tonight
When she co-signed and then told him she wasShy
Cool dark skin in hot virgin white
Shy
Lips say won’t but her body say might
Shy
Looks like we’re gonna take the long way home tonight
After it hits that first chorus, the chicken-scratch guitar recedes, it’s place taken by an shimmering guitar that curlicues around the rest of the song, prodding and poking it, never quite ever getting comfortable, echoing the noirish lyrics.
After a look much louder than words she said,
I passed my initiation
A friend of mine, he got killed and in retaliation
I shot the boy, huh, twice in the head
No regrets, no sorrow, I’m goin’ back tomorrow to make sure he’s dead
‘Cuz if I don’t, they’ll call me a chicken, but you can call meShy
Cool dark skin in hot virgin white
Shy
Lips say won’t but her body say might
Shy
Looks like we’re gonna take the long way home tonight
That uncomfortableness is echoed by the vocal, because as Prince repeats the somewhat problematic “lips say won’t, but her body say might” over and over again he starts overdubbing himself with various vocal inflections cris-crossing each other.
Shapeshifting and restless, at one point he’s sounding like Sly Stone, at another, Stevie Wonder. And I swear there’s a moment where he’s doing an Axl Rose impersonation.
“Shy” is a deeply unsettling combination of beauty and darkness, and never once does it wink at you or let you have a moment to even breathe.
“Shy”
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The post Certain Songs #523: Prince – “Shy” appeared first on Booksquare.