Get It Up

What distinguishes this from the harder funk that would come later in the Time's catalog is its relative restraint — the arrangement is almost skeletal, built primarily on a synthesized bass line that snakes with a fluid persistence, a drum machine providing the architecture that human drummers might have made slightly less precise and slightly more alive. That tradeoff is partly the point; the mechanical regularity creates a kind of erotic tension, everything locked in place while Morris Day's vocals move freely above it. His delivery here is more languid than commanding — he is not yet the full theatrical character he would develop, but the charisma is already unmistakable, the sense that he finds all of this slightly beneath him in the most flattering way. Prince produced this debut material with an almost pedagogical intention, constructing a sound identity for this band that was adjacent to his own Minneapolis aesthetic but pointed in a different direction: less mystical, more social, more interested in the specific negotiations of the room. This song belongs to late nights when the crowd has thinned and the ones who remain have committed to the hour, when the tempo can slow slightly and the air thickens. It is a track that rewards attention but asks for it indirectly, through the body before the mind.