May 31, 2019
And now we return once again to the summer of 1989...and to the undisputed champion of that summer’s movie season: the cultural juggernaut that is Tim Burton’s Batman. I checked this flick out again recently and, you know, I still think it’s the first and last word on superhero movies. I mean...I was 10 years-old when it came out and I don’t like superhero movies so really what the hell do I know? I know you couldn’t pay me to sit through a 3 hour Avengers movie (I mean...maybe you could pay me. How would that work? Venmo?). It came out in early June and a group of us catholic school heads went to see it for the 3rd...4th...maybe 5th time during the first week of 6th grade that September. Shit had staying power back in the day, folks! You drank the Kool-Aid (grape AND red) or you stayed home and cried. This week I’m gonna skip the beat by beat and instead talk about the Batman Soundtrack. Not the one by Oingo Boingo frontman tuned uber composer Danny Elfman...but the one by the late Prince Rodgers Nelson. The fact that Prince got to make music for a PG-13 summer tentpole blockbuster seems insane because it is absolutely friggin’ insane. This is the guy whose “saw her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine” lyric so enraged slash turned on Al Gore’s wife that she formed a committee with the express purpose of bullying record labels into censoring their artists. The committee had a list of the 15 filthiest artists. Where was on our man Prince on that list? #1 with a bullet! (for what it’s worth Sheena Easton was #2...so...there’s that). But still, Warner Bros decided that Prince was the right guy to pen tunes for their family-friendly flick. I’m thinking the reason for this is that no other artist made more cash money for WB in the 1980’s than Prince did. He was also, at that point in his career, in a bit of a slump...which seems like a total dick thing to even bring up given all that he had accomplished. No disrespect to Mr Springsteen but do you know how many albums he released between 1984 and 1989? The answer is one. Michael Jackson? One also. The Batman soundtrack is Prince’s FIFTH album since 1984’s Purple Rain...and 11th album overall. The man was forever creepin’ while y’all were sleepin’! So Price made a full-length album of songs inspired by Batman...and it was a hit. I know it was popular because I had my ass parked in front of MTV that entire summer and they showed the video for “Batdance” like 20 times a day. But I didn’t realize just HOW popular it was until I did some research...which means I typed Batman Soundtrack into Google and just saw what I saw. This was the #1 album in the country for six consecutive weeks....pretty much the entire summer...and sold ELEVEN MILLION copies worldwide. I mean...stop the casual Prince fan on the street and ask them to name his biggest albums and I’m fairly confident no one would say Batman. Yet here we are! The aforementioned “Batdance” hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100...which is kind of amazing because this song is friggin’ BUH-NANAS. It is barely even a song (actually it’s two songs randomly shoved together...but more on that in like 2 seconds). There are no verses...no choruses...and while I personally hate dancing more than anyone except for maybe John Lithgow’s character in Footloose, I’m almost positive that one cannot possibly dance to “Batdance”. The first half of the track is a rash of sampled dialogue from the movie laid over a techno beat. A chorus of voices calls out “Batman!” while Prince, in character as The Joker, responds with what sure sounds like “shut the fuck up!” No one has ever been able to convince me that he’s saying anything else but that. At the halfway mark the song changes into a hard ass funk groove over which Prince sings “ohh yeah...ohh yeah...I wanna bust that body”. Somewhere in Massachusetts 10 year-old Danny Tebo turns to his dad and says “dad, what does ‘bust that body’ mean.” His dad replies by staring at the floor and saying no words. What I REALLY want to discuss today is this here long lost artifact that you see on the right-hand side of this photo. There were five singles released from the Batman soundtrack. “Scandalous” was released in November ’89 in the form of this maxi-single after the film’s theatrical run had finally concluded. It came and went with little fanfare. I consider myself a pretty hardcore Prince completionist and I had no idea this CD even existed until I found it in a thrift store a few years back. This version of “Scandalous” differs from the one on the album in two fairly major ways. 1. It is almost 19 minutes long...and 2. It contains a recording of Prince having intercourse with Kim Basinger. What’s that? No, I am NOT shitting you! This thing totally exists! It is called “The Scandalous Sex Suite” and it is divided into 3 parts; The Crime, The Passion, and The Rapture...none of which have absolutely anything to do with crime, passion or rapture. What happens, though, is this; we start off with your basic factory setting Prince slow jam. Voices cry out “Scandalous!’ and then also “Marvelous!”. Prince unleashes some orgiastic screams about wanting to wrap his legs around someone. A friend much smarter and funnier than me once observed that Prince talks about sex like someone who has never even had sex. That has never been truer than it is on this mini album. Seduction level=horny 6th grader. Prince and Kim Basinger begin a dialogue. He says it’s getting warm. She agrees. And then:
Prince: Let’s go to the bedroom
KB: What’s in there?
Prince: (magical pause)....A window....
A window, huh? Smooth smoothie, that Prince. Some cheese whiz Dave Sanborn sax starts to ooze all over the track.
KB: It’s so dark in here
Prince: I can see you
KB: How do I look?
Prince: (long mystical pause) ...overdressed
Prince: You’re shaking
KB: I know...I can’t help it..
Prince: (does something sexual that we can’t see).....is that better
KB: (moaning) YES!
So I think we can all figure out where this is headed. The cable guy didn’t just come to fix the cable, you dig. The moaning gets louder and louder until...
KB: Where AM I??
Prince: Where do you want to be??
KB: RIGHT HERE!
That’s right...he’s got her so twisted up with sex stuff she doesn’t even know where she is! Also--I hate it when someone answers a question with another question, don’t you? Prince was the king of that shit. And now the ballin’ is on like donkey kong. What does that sound like? About five minutes of Kim Basinger making low, guttural, staccato dog yelps. Of course Prince makes so sound whatsoever...although I bet if he had recorded his own sex noises they would sound like a crying baby dolphin with a head cold. OK! Now let’s take a deep breath here and hit the pause button for a second. I mean...I know Axl Rose recorded himself having sex with his drummer’s girlfriend and then made those sounds part of the already-awesome-without-sex noises tune “Rocket Queen”...sending said drummer on a 30 year booze and cocaine bender that even a debilitating stroke could not put an end to (although I kind of suspect his booze and coke bender was really fueled by the fact that he was a guy who just loved to drink and do coke). No disrespect to the young lady in “Rocket Queen”....but Kim Basinger was the STAR of Batman. The leading lady, you dig? Vicky Vale! She was an A-list actress in 1989 and, according to my aunt Lorie, “banging Prince.” Do I think they are actually fucking on this recording? I mean...yes? No? Maybe? My gut tells me no...but I really have no idea! Maybe if you played it for Alec Baldwin he could tell you...right after he punched the shit out of your jaw. What I do know is this: Prince walked into Warner Bros. and played them a track of what certainly sound like him having sex with the star of their family-friendly #1 movie of the year...and they fucking RELEASED IT AS A SINGLE! It has the official Batman logo on it and everything! It’d be like if that ginger wanker Ed Sheeran made a song for Avengers that was just the sound of him balling Scarlett Johansson But wait! I haven’t even mentioned the two other tracks on this single yet! One is called “Sex: the 80’s are over and the time has come for monogamy and trust”. Wait...stop laughing...that’s the actual title of the song. This one, with its pitched up vocals, sounds like it was possibly cut from Sign O the Times...which saves it from the distinction of being the one bad song on Sign O the Times. Prince opens this one by claiming to be a sex alien and then just says a ton of shit that doesn’t even make crazy sense.
S is for scandalous!
E is for exciting!
X is for adults only!
Umm....sorry to harsh your vibe, pal, but “adults only” does not begin with the letter X. He tells the boys to say “Yeah!” and tell the girls with no underwear on to say “Yes!” What about the boys with no underwear, huh Prince? Sexist. He ends the song by chanting “One lover...SEX!...Two lovers...DEATH!” Seriously...death? You mean like two lovers in a row or...like...at the same time? (nervously looks at watch). And finally there’s “When 2 R in Love” which had already come out on the 1988 album Lovesexy. It’s inclusion here makes no sense at all...unless Prince was trying to put together a mix of his ickiest nonsensical sex songs. Then it makes perfect sense. Did you know that “When 2 R in love their bodies shiver at the mere contemplation of penetration (let alone the actual act)”? Now I know! I wonder how many moms and dads picked up this Batman tie-in for their kids...heard Prince sing “bathe with me/let me touch your body till your river’s an ocean” and had to explain to them that he wasn’t talking about the Pacific. So that’s pretty much that. No one ever let Prince near a blockbuster movie again. He became a Jehovah’s Witness in the late 90’s and refused to curse or sing sexual songs for the rest of his life. His music almost always sucked. The next Batman movie to have a pop soundtrack was 1995’s Batman Forever...and no one gets laid on that one...although I think one of my friends told me he lost his virginity to Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” in a Hampton Beach motel room that summer. The end.