Prince – Batdance / 200 Balloons
Vinyl rip in 24bit 192 khz |  Artwork at 300 dpi
Original release 1989
This Record Store Day release, April 22, 2017
Warner Brothers 21257-0

Scout’s honor, I swear I was already preparing this long before the news that Adam West, who introduced me and a lot of my generation to Batman and Eartha Kit with its campiest iteration, had passed away.  I was going to share it anyway because Prince would have turned  59 years old this last Wednesday,  and the 1989 Batman soundtrack  has such a mixed legacy that I imagined Robin Williams pranking him with it in the afterworld:  “Happy birthday, Prince.  I called the house DJ and asked him to play ‘Batdance’ on repeat all day long….”   The record was hyped up a lot as a “comeback” by the fickle music biz press, ironic considering that he had been putting out some of his most interesting and creative work with albums like Lovesexy and Sign O’ The Times, but those ambitious records did not take the world commercially by a Purple Rain-style storm.  When word got out that Tim Burton – who apparently was listening to those aforementioned albums while working on his Gothic reinvention of the Batman mythos – had asked Prince to put together a soundtrack, the hype machine began heralding that this high profile film was going to put Prince back in the “biggest star on earth” slot.   In the end the truth is probably best encapsulated by the phrase, “THROW IT!” from Shaun Of The Dead, when Prince’s Batman is separated from Shaun’s record collection, including several Prince LPs set aside as worth saving during a zombie apocalypse, and chosen instead to be used as a projectile weapon.  It’s a kind of distinction.