Planet Earth
We were listening to the radio on the way home from dinner a few weeks ago."Something about that song sounds familiar," I said.
"It's really good," Gloria said. "Who is it?"
"Hang on," I said. "I've almost got it." Just then, there was a burst of guitar.
"Holy crap," I said. "It's Prince."
"Prince?" she asked. "No way."
"Way," I said. "That's definitely Prince."
"It doesn't even sound like him," she said.
"It does, though," I said. "His hooks are all over that song."
"Whatever happened to him, anyway?" she asked. "What was up with his name being a symbol?"
"It got much worst than that," I said. "After he used that symbol for a while, he dropped it and started using a sound effect. Then, right before he went back to using 'Prince,' his name was actually a cipher."
"A cipher?"
"It required a 128-bit security key to break the encryption," I said. "It took a team of over five thousand researchers to break the code. It was Bletchley Park all over again."
Just then, the song ended.
"We'll never find out who it was," I said. "This is public radio. He'll just start talking about the tomatoes in his garden for the next half-hour."
"That was Prince," the disc jockey said.
"It WAS Prince!" Gloria said.
The song was 'Guitar," and it's fantastic, and I wound up buying the album. It's titled "Planet Earth," hence the name of this post.
And it's really, really good. 'Guitar' is a terrific, signature Prince song, and the entire album is full of catchy, clever tunes. Plus, on one song ("Mr. Goodnight"), Prince sounds like he's channeling Jemaine of Flight of the Conchords. There aren't many things funnier than that.
I didn't realize this, but I pulled up the Wikipedia entry for Prince after writing this, and the guy has had an incredibly prolific and interesting career. Take a look here, if you're interested, and here's an Amazon link for the album.
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