Before Joaquin Phoenix

Hahaha. Prince’s music for the Joker’s laughter worked perfectly. Get it?

‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ is a box office disaster, but the most common question is why it’s a musical? It’s not an extravagant idea, and it’s been done before. The well-known Prince composed an eccentric thematic album for Tim Burton’s 1989 film ‘Batman’, making all the characters sing, including the Joker, played by Jack Nicholson.

Prince’s Batman isn’t necessarily the film’s soundtrack. Danny Elfman once said he and Prince were going to co-write the film’s iconic incidental music. The project fired Elfman for refusing. The producers reconsidered and asked Elfman to return after Prince delivered a score that couldn’t be used to score a superhero movie, which at the time wasn’t even known how it should sound if it wasn’t an imitation of John Williams’ Superman score. The move worked: Elfman’s first multimillion-dollar hit and Prince’s album sold well.

Prince’s eleventh studio album was released immediately after the devastating ‘Lovesexy’ and is his only soundtrack to a film in which he did not act. It started simple: Burton used Prince’s songs ‘1999’ and ‘Baby I’m a Star’ in an early cut of the film and liked them so much that he asked him to re-record them or write new ones.

After visiting the set in January 1989, seeing what they had recorded, and discussing a concept album with Burton, Prince became interested. Because it would have cost him a fortune, he decided not to cancel the Japanese Lovesexy Tour to record it. After the tour, he recorded a three-song album demo in a month. Two would replace Burton’s. The work was approved, so he started. He ended the album with ‘Batdance’.

Batman Bomb
Prince needed a hit (six weeks at number one) because ‘Lovesexy’ and ‘Sign O’the Times’ had been critical successes but not public successes, hence Warner’s support for him to compose the soundtrack for an almost certain success like ‘Batman’. Even though the album isn’t a commercial success.

It’s odd that their album-closing ‘Batdance’, a rushed collage of funk sounds and samples lasting almost seven minutes, is their most popular song. It features a dialogue between all the album’s characters and references the Bat Man as a pop icon (those choruses were brilliantly stolen from the 1960s TV series’ theme tune). The result is unclassifiable and shows the album’s variety of textures.

Batman sings ‘The Future’ and ‘Scandalous’, the Joker sings ‘Electric Chair’ and ‘Trust’, Bruce Wayne sings ‘Vicki Waiting’, Vicki Vale sings ‘Lemon Crush‘, and both sing ‘The Arms of Orion’. Half Prince and half Joker, Gemini appears in ‘Batdance’ as a Batman for Prince. Prince sings in ‘Trust’ and shouts “Stop!” in ‘Batdance’.

Confusing? It is: the lyrics are cryptic, relying on sensorial saturation and idea explosion rather than plot. They also explore Prince’s interests, such as Wayne and Vale’s romance and his fascination with the Joker, as shown in Gemini and the album’s best song, ‘Partyman’, which he wrote after meeting Jack Nicholson.

Prince plays the Joker and makes us want a shameless and carefree Folie à Deux. With iconic lines like “All hail the new king in town,” Prince’s Joker channels Jack Nicholson’s performance, buried by time but funnier than Heath Ledger or the whiny Joaquin Phoenix. It also shows why the comic book Joker is so terrifying: he just wants to laugh. Hell or high water.

Before Joaquin Phoenix

Hahaha. Prince’s music for the Joker’s laughter worked perfectly. Get it?

By ki0nk

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