Prince: Looking for gems in Diamonds and Pearls

Grappling with the reality of the Purple One's legendary Vault.

At the height of his fame and creativity, Prince gave a song to Kenny Rogers. He cloaked his presence, adopting one of his many pseudonyms—this time, he was "Joey Coco"—but he nevertheless gifted Rogers "You're My Love," a breezy little adult contemporary pop tune that bore no purple imprint. "You're My Love" was part of They Don't Make Them Like They Used To, which appeared in October 1986, just as Prince was battling with Warner Bros. Records about the length of his ninth album: he wanted it to sprawl over three LPs, the label wanted it shorter.

Prince and Warner came to a compromise, releasing the double album Sign O' the Times in the spring of 1987. Sign O' the Times contained elements of not one but three scrapped album projects: the double LP Dream Factory, the triple Crystal Ball, and Camille, a record by Prince's pitch-shifted alter ego. This abundance of material buttressed a central part of Prince's mystique: he couldn't contain his creativity. He obsessively wrote and recorded material, squirreling away unreleased and unfinished material in The Vault, a term that became fairly familiar among Prince watchers by the late 1980s. 

For decades, the prospect of The Vault was tantalizing, particularly because, save the occasional "You're My Love," the music Prince gave away was exceptional. There were all his protegees and acolytes in Minneapolis—if he played almost everything on the Time's debut, as it was rumored, it was further proof of his brilliance. There was "The Glamorous Life," the bustling hit he gave Sheila E, and "Manic Monday," a wistful psych-pop tune he gifted to the Bangles, both as good as many of his hits. His B-sides teemed with masterpieces like "Erotic City," "17 Days" and "Another Lonely Christmas"—songs that were nervier, weirder, and sometimes better than the accompanying album. He could write made-to-order MOR hits for Martika, while neglecting "Nothing Compares 2 U," a song Sinead O'Connor turned into an enduring standard. He could scrap an album as good as The Black Album at the last minute in the 1980s without really hurting the momentum of his career. 

Prince seemed to be coming to terms with mining the vaults not long before his unexpected death in 2016. He greenlit an expanded reissue of Purple Rain in 2014, a couple of years after he teased in a YouTube clip that "Every good thing in the vault…coming 2013." No archival work happened in either '13 or '15 which didn't come as a shock: Prince made it a habit of backtracking on promises.

His death guaranteed that The Vault would eventually be cracked: it was too lucrative to not disseminate in some form. It didn't take long for the truth of The Vault to upend long-held fantasies. In 2017, court filings said that material locked within The Vault suffered from water damage, mold, and other forms of degradation. Further reporting revealed that Prince simply forgot the code to The Vault and let it wither away. Comerica Bank & Trust—at that point the executors of Prince's estate, as he died without a will—hired a safecracker to gain entry to The Vault, then ferreted away its contents to an Iron Mountain facility in California. 

The immediate dissonance lay in Prince caring so much about his music that he documented every note possible, yet he apparently didn't care about the preservation of the actual tapes. The very existence of The Vault suggested that these recordings were worth preserving yet Prince's neglect suggested otherwise, even if it certainly was the behavior of somebody who didn't bother to write a will. Both actions suggested that Prince forever remained eternally of the moment. 

That lust for the present served Prince well artistically until it didn't, a transition that happened sometime during the 1990s, a period when he slowly left his eccentricities in the past. It's a process that began around the time of Diamonds and Pearls, an intentional streamlining of his sound that achieved his goal: it became his biggest commercial hit since Purple Rain. He had a couple of other Top Ten hits in the next few years—"7" fittingly went to seven in 1992, "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" went to three in 1994—and managed an impressive commercial comeback in the mid-2000s with Musicology and 3121 but Diamonds and Pearls was essentially the end of the road as far as his imperial period went; he no longer was a potent creative force in the mainstream after Diamonds and Pearls. Looking back, it’s the point where the demystification of Prince starts: he made some great music in the 90s and even the 2000s, but he seemed mortal here.

Fittingly, the new Super Deluxe Edition of Diamonds and Pearls also feels like the place where the reality of The Vault comes into focus. Prince’s phenomenal hyperactivity of the 1980s serves as something of a smokescreen, distracting from how his aesthetic shifted dramatically in the 1990s. After over a decade of expanding his horizons, he decided to contract, using his weirdness as an accent instead of an emphasis. The best of his '90s records—Symbol, The Gold Experience—leave space for genre-bending, sex, and humor, elements that are either softened or abandoned after Emancipation, the triple-CD that celebrated him finally getting free of Warner. 

Humor and sex are apparent on the three discs of unreleased Vault material on the Super Deluxe Edition of Diamonds and Pearls—perhaps in trace amounts but they're there—but the genres stay firmly in place. Prince intentionally focuses on funk, R&B, and pop, working hard to find a way to bend hip-hop to his will. It was an act of reassertion: he wanted to reclaim his spot at the top of the charts. 

Listening to The Vault material on Diamonds and Pearls, it's possible to hear Prince perfecting themes and melodies, returning to motifs--or even flipping the beat, as he does on "Work That Fat," a workout built upon the foundation of "Martika's Kitchen." "Work That Fat" is an anomaly on the Super Deluxe D&P, one of the few times Prince goes wandering instead of hunkering down into a groove. It's not the only interesting detour among this material but it stands out because it does hearken back to his purple period of the 1980s, consciously reviving the demented electronic growl of "Bob George." The gonzo bad taste of "Work That Fat" (and the cheerfully pornographic "Schoolyard," for that matter), highlights how tasteful the rest of the unreleased material is—not just in terms of topics but execution. Where the Revolution was a kinetic blend of personalities, the New Power Generation were professionals specializing in tasty chops, a sensibility Prince found increasingly attractive in the last decades of his career.

By the end of the third disc of outtakes, it's possible to hear Prince growing a little restless with his concentration on the charts. He dabbles in psychedelia with "Alice Through the Looking Glass," writes a nifty little pop tune in "Standing at the Altar," writes a jazzy tribute to Miles Davis a couple of days after the trumpeter's passing, and in "I Pledge Allegiance to Your Love," he crafts an expert soul-blues slow burner, the kind that Bobby "Blue" Bland could've torn up. All of these are nice additions to Prince's canon yet, overall, The Vault material from Diamonds and Pearls feels kind of dull; these aren't explorations, they're a bunch of variations on a theme. 

Some of this is certainly due to Diamonds and Pearls being the musical opposite of Sign O' the Times, the last Prince album to receive such a generous expansion. Sign O' the Times is a mosaic, Diamonds and Pearls is a snapshot: the leftovers are bound to be more homogenous, possibly less interesting. While the concert captured at the Glam Slam club is potent, a lot of the unreleased studio recordings on Diamonds and Pearls feel slightly damp, a problem that's now persistent among the archival releases culled from The Vault. 

To be sure, there has been plenty of enjoyable, even essential, Vault material released since 2017, it seems less likely that there are revelations tucked away deep in the recesses of Iron Mountain. Years of fantasies, hope and expectations are being adjusted by the reality on the ground. Cat Glover, a former backing vocalist for Prince, said in 2015 that "some of his best stuff is in the vault," a claim that raised expectations…but it's important to remember Glover worked with Prince during the late 1980s, when he was still flying high creatively. After he parted ways with Glover, he had another twenty-five years of recording ahead of him, filling the vault with agreeable funk and pop—records like Welcome 2 America, a pleasant enough 2009 jam session that shaped into a completed album in 2021.

Diamonds and Pearls' unreleased material also suggests that recordings crammed in The Vault may essentially have been musical sketchpads. Upon the release of the Super Deluxe Sign O' the Times in 2020, his old engineer Susan Rogers—the woman who gave Prince the idea to archive his leftovers in the first place—recalled how he pulled "Slow Love" and "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" out of The Vault when he needed a certain flavor for the double-LP. Listening to the outtakes on Diamonds and Pearls, it does seem like he's either testing out ideas, having a laugh or getting a song far enough along that he could finish it somewhere down the road.

Thinking of The Vault not as a treasure trove but as a series of notebooks also helps to put into perspective Prince's former manager Alan Leeds claiming that somewhere in the early 1990s, Prince said that "one day he'd just burn everything." Given this sentiment, it's little wonder that he let The Vault fall into disrepair: he didn't care much about it unless it served a need at hand. Prior to the opening of The Vault, when rumors and bootlegs fueled fantasies of the wonders within, losing these recordings to either fire or water seemed like a sacrilegious claim but after a series of excavations, there's some sense in Prince's logic: these were work tapes, not meant for public consumption. The cohesion of the albums he released during his life makes this case, as does the fact that the very best songs either appeared as his B-sides or were given to other artists. Even the Super Deluxe Edition of Sign O' the Times, which overspills with wonderful music, doesn't have a single cut that would've elevated the final album. It's nice that this music is easily available but when it's heard in conjunction with the rest of the material released from The Vault, the cumulative effect is less than the individual parts. It doesn't diminish Prince's legacy so much as suggest that he was always keenly aware of his best material and concentrated only on that, not caring what he left in his wake.