I clearly thought this song's title was "Seven" instead of the single numeral, explaining its placement in this list. How did I flub this, with my eye-rolling awareness of Prince's love of "edgy" phonetics, and numerals in general?
To me, this song is the greatest Prince composition. The '90s beat is still so funky. The melody ideas just keep coming, all so extremely memorable and singable.
I've written before about Prince's messianic impulses, the way he beckons to people who are willing to lay down their own wills and become listeners as he stands on stage issuing semi-coherent spiritual orders. I find this suspect, but in this song, his lyrics hit home even for me, crafting a true sense of hidden mystery and intuitive coherence. I'll never be able to fully unpack it, but I accept that he really came up with an enduring message here, with lines that I've felt ricochet around my brain since I was young.
What are the seven? There are the possible Christian references, of course, to the seven seals in the blood-bath firescape of Revelation's telling of doom and some hope but mostly doom for most people.
If we're going down the road of a song about coming apocalypse, we can also talk about one of the central conflicts in Christianity that has always tripped me up and maybe got to Prince a little too. Remember: As much of a Christian as Prince thought of himself, he had a hedonistic lifestyle that many hard liners would never accept, and maybe he felt like calling out some conflicts in the established pulpits. So in this song, we see him seem to address how Christianity, ostensibly a religion of love and patience, has a future date set where all that charitable pretense will disappear and fire and wrath will commence for the unbaptized and the "immoral" alike.
Two lines in the song seem to encapsulate the tension:
"Words of compassion, words of peace
And in the distance an army's marching feet"
Further on, there are more lines that feel like the same subject, of a Christianity where implied violence (not only between believers and non, but between sects within) puts the spiritual definition of love continually into question:
"And before us animosity will stand and decree
That we speak not of love only blasphemy
And in the distance, 6 others will curse me
But that's alright (That's alright)
For I will watch them fall"
The chorus lyrics also reference doing violence to rivals - "smoke them all." But here is where things turn - for, in Prince's idea of a sect, we do not smoke each other with weaponry, but with "intellect and a savior-faire."
He declares "I am yours and you are mine."
He's sure that "one day all seven will die," and the seven seem to be some kind of oppressive force. But what will kill them isn't murder but instead education and self-enlightenment.
And then comes the idealistic, multicultural vision of the future that must have white supremacists quaking every time they hear this catchy tune:
"There will be a new city with streets of gold
The young so educated they never grow old
And a, there will be no death for with every breath
The voice of many colors sings a song
That's so bold
Sing it while we watch them fall"
Let's digress a minute. Will we ever get there? I believe there is a kind of salvation in a primary scientific principle: Entropy.
In many cases, people see entropy as a destructive, negative force in the social realm, where traditional goods eventually break down. But what will also break down, inevitably, are any sorts of "purity" that even seem to exist. And that includes racial purity. Mark this down. Eventually, and it doesn't matter how long, racial variation will either have disappeared or become vastly gradated. And when those rooting interests are gone, no matter how long it takes for them to erode, there potentially will be removed a major source of conflict and subjugation in the world. And religious conflict is really nothing more than a front in all-pervasive, all-ridiculous racial conflict.
And therein is a second Judeo-Christian-racial significance of the number seven: The seven tribes.
On the music side, there is one great principle at work in this song, and that is the seamless handoff of the spotlight between vocal and instrumental, never allowing the listener's interest to wane at any moment. The best example of this the handoff from the last chorus line "One day all seven will die" to the acoustic guitar riff that underlies the verse. I listen to this song, and as much as I worship every one of the multitude of vocal melody ideas in this song, I still think its most magnetic aspect is that two-chord guitar part in the verse, just a seven chord to a one. Over that beat, strummed with the hammer-on, it flows with such compelling funk.
The various accents of diverse musical instruments all build the tapestry.
The song is a moving hieroglyphic.