In advance of an upcoming deluxe vinyl reissue of Purple Rain, NPG/Warner Bros have shared a previously unreleased Prince track on Spotify and Apple Music (which, you’ll recall, only just recently got the rights to stream Prince’s music). While it’s easy and fair to get cynical about the corporate repurposing of beloved dead artists’ scrapped music, this reissue was being planned prior to Prince’s death one year ago last Friday — and this new-old track happens to be awesome. (And you may have already heard some iteration of it: live versions from the early ’80s have been in circulation for a while.)
It’s called “Electric Intercourse,” and if I didn’t know better, I’d think the companies releasing this had thought, “what should we name a Prince song, based on quintessential things people expect in a Prince song?” But alas, Prince himself just happened to come up with the most wonderfully on-brand title imaginable. The song itself slinks along as various Princes growl and whoop around each other, while another Prince sings in an intense staccato, falsetto stage whisper, “Electric is my body, baby/I will shock you with my lips/Darling don’t you know/Your Technicolor climax is at my fingertips?”
The full deluxe (and extended deluxe) reissue will be out June 23, and will include 11 previously unreleased tracks. As Pitchfork notes, a press release states that six tracks “have never been released or distributed in the collector or bootleg community.”
Here’s the list (via NME) of the new releases that’ll appear on the second disk of the reissue:
- The Dance Electric
- Love And Sex
- Computer Blue (“Hallway Speech” version)
- Electric Intercourse (Studio)
- Our Destiny / Roadhouse Garden
- Possessed (1983 version)
- Wonderful Ass
- Velvet Kitty Cat
- Katrina’s Paper Dolls
- We Can Fuck
- Father’s Song
Listen to “Electric Intercourse”: