Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

Over these last few years my Prince audio col­lec­tion has expan­ded considerably.

Not only have I finally man­aged to acquire every “offi­cially” released Prince album, but my col­lec­tion now also includes vari­ous singles, B-sides, remixes, rare out of print side-projects, shelved never-released pro­jects, NPGMC exclus­ive down­loads and stu­dio out-takes, demos and unre­leased ver­sion tracks span­ning over 30 years. For this, I would like to thank NPGMC, Amazon, iTunes, eBay and vari­ous top-secret sources.

I believe very strongly in fin­an­cially sup­port­ing the artists that I love. As a res­ult, I act­ively and avidly go to great lengths to pay (some­times extor­tion­ate amounts) in order to leg­ally obtain the ori­ginal and legit­im­ate releases as opposed to down­load­ing them illegally/free of charge. I have never obtained music through dubi­ous peer-to-peer file exchange ser­vices and have instead pre­ferred to spend years sourcing the genu­ine art­icles, includ­ing rare out of print mater­ial, and will con­tinue to until I deem my col­lec­tion complete.

How­ever, when it comes to out-takes and unreleased/shelved pro­jects, tech­nic­ally there is no “legit­im­ate” way to acquire such things. So what’s a fam¹ to do?

Between 1998 and 2004 I amassed quite a col­lec­tion of Placebo bootlegs (sadly no stu­dio out-takes, just the odd demo and plenty of live record­ings), but for many years I steered clear of boot­legged mater­ial of the purple per­sua­sion, fig­ur­ing that Prince’s back cata­logue was so vast that I’d never need to resort to it. How­ever, hav­ing stumbled upon a valu­able digital treas­ure chest of gems this past fort­night, I have found the allure of unheard mater­ial too much to resist.

I know bootleg mater­ial raises many ques­tions regard­ing eth­ics: Should we be listen­ing to mater­ial the artist never inten­ded to be heard en masse? Should we be part of the “demand” for this dubi­ous “sup­ply”? Can we call ourselves true fans if we par­take in a prac­tise that viol­ates the rights of the artist?

Let it be known at this point, that I do not pay for boot­legged mater­ial. I do not agree in oth­ers earn­ing fin­an­cial profit from ille­git­im­ately acquired mater­ial when the artist receives no recom­pense for its exist­ence. In my book, gift­ing and trad­ing amongst hard­core fams is one thing, fork­ing out untold sums to scalp­ers is quite another.

Eth­ics and mor­als aside, I would like to address some of the many reas­ons why fans/fams, real true sup­port­ers of an artist, want, enjoy and act­ively seek out unre­leased mater­ial. I’m not talk­ing about the garbled and dis­tor­ted crunch of crowd-recorded live gigs, I’m talk­ing about ori­ginal mixes, ver­sions, sketches, scraps and skel­et­ons of stu­dio recor­ded songs that were never pressed, or by the time they were, had been drastic­ally reworked bey­ond recognition.

Artists often refer to their cre­ations almost as if they were their chil­dren. But to me, what sep­ar­ates music from other art forms is the per­vas­ive way in which it soon emo­tion­ally and psy­cho­lo­gic­ally “belongs” to the listener almost as much as it does the artist. Songs, in many ways, develop as much (if not more) of a deep per­sonal mean­ing to those that con­sume them as to those that cre­ated them. We attach ourselves to them and grow to depend on them. They speak to us and become the soundtrack to our lives as we hang our memor­ies, emo­tions, rela­tion­ships and entire eras of our lives upon them. For many they are self-medicating, a ther­apy, a hope, a com­fort, a crutch, a voice telling them that they’re not alone in what they’re feel­ing, an escape. Many a music fan when asked what they would say to their favour­ite artist, if given the oppor­tun­ity, replies with a story of grat­it­ude that often con­tains the phrase “Without X artist, I wouldn’t be here/have met my partner/achieved Y/inspired or encour­aged to do Z etc”.

Would you call your­self a die-hard fan of a par­tic­u­lar artist? You would? Good. I invite you to think of that par­tic­u­lar artist. Now, ima­gine hear­ing your favour­ite song by that artist, the way that song makes you feel, the way each instru­ment car­ries you on an emo­tional jour­ney, the way it inspires you to move or recall a memory of a place, time or per­son par­tic­u­lar to that very song. Great, isn’t it?

Now, ima­gine what it would be like to hear that song for the first time all over again. But this time, it’s not the radio edit. Or the beloved 12″ you treas­ure on vinyl. It’s not the ver­sion that you snuggle up to like a favour­ite comfy fleece or fluffy blanket, coddled toastily in the safe­ness of its famili­ar­ity. Instead, you hear the song in the way(s) the artist first con­ceived it. The raw emo­tion before any tinker­ing, toy­ing or trick­ery has taken place. You hear arrange­ments and lyr­ics in their infant form prior to (re)mixing, rearran­ging and (re)editing. You’re given the oppor­tun­ity to attempt to get a clearer sense of the artist’s ori­ginal inten­tions, to grasp a truer sense of the emo­tions con­tained therein and a chance to wit­ness the jour­ney trav­elled in order to accom­plish the song in the form that you’ve held so dear.

I have listened to one of my most favour­ite songs almost daily for years. Some­times, I would listen to it so care­fully, so intently, peel­ing apart the lay­ers of sound, sep­ar­at­ing every instru­ment, every sample so that I would still man­age to hear some­thing new that I’d never heard on it before. Why? Because I love hear­ing songs in new ways. I love live ver­sions, jam ver­sions, demo ver­sions, acous­tic ver­sions, epic 14-and-a-half-minute-with-a-stonking-guitar-solo ver­sions. I love hear­ing a song as it was first recor­ded, spat through the imme­di­acy of the emo­tions that ori­gin­ally fuelled it and then hear­ing it again, some­times many years later, sang wist­fully with the bene­fit of hind­sight, regret or remem­brance. It’s amaz­ing how a sense of reflec­tion alters the deliv­ery and can totally trans­form the mean­ing of a song.

Hav­ing now dipped my vir­gin ears into the waters of the aural delights, for me, there is no going back. I and no doubt many oth­ers like me, wish that there was a legit­im­ate way to hear songs in this way. To be flies on the wall dur­ing the cre­at­ive pro­cess, to paw at the rudi­ment­ary pages of a sketch­book after hav­ing seen gaped in awe at the fin­ished mas­ter­piece. All the while, act­ively and fin­an­cially sup­port­ing the work without resort­ing to cov­ert meas­ures to get our sneaky fix.

Some would argue that unre­leased record­ings bet­ter serve voyeur­istic tend­en­cies as opposed to accur­ately offer­ing a listener clar­ity or enlight­en­ment. Per­haps there are parts of the pro­cess that are best not “seen” and to wit­ness them would be to des­troy the mys­tique, which would ulti­mately detract from the enjoy­ment of the piece in its ulti­mate form.

All I know is when I hear those songs in their state of undress, just for that short while, I am priv­ileged enough to feel a frac­tion closer to the creator(s) of the sounds that shape my world.

As selfish as that exper­i­ence is, my life would be a darker place without it.

1. The term “fam” is short for “fam­ily” and is the pre­ferred term, when refer­ring to a Prince Fan, as Prince has voiced his dis­like of the word “fan” due to it being derived from the word “fan­atic” [back]