Jennifer

Rave Unto The Joy Fantastic (October 27, 1988 configuration). On October 27, 1988—while still in the middle of the Lovesexy Tour—Prince completed the first known sequence of an album he had been assembling since mid-June. The project, titled Rave Unto The Joy Fantastic, never reached a final master. Warner Bros. and Tim Burton’s Batman intervened, and the material was either shelved, reworked for Graffiti Bridge, sampled into Batdance, or left in the vault. What survives is a snapshot of Prince at his most spiritually charged and restlessly prolific, still riding the high of Lovesexy but already reaching for something denser and more communal. The exact running order is unknown, but the known contents form a coherent spiritual funk suite. “The Voice Inside” (tracked just two days earlier) opens the door with horn-driven urgency—Eric Leeds and Atlanta Bliss cutting through—and lyrics that urge the listener to “pray, the voice inside, it don’t stop.” It was designed to segue straight into “Melody Cool,” the Mavis Staples vehicle later polished for Graffiti Bridge. The combination feels deliberate: an internal summons answered by an external, gospel-tinged call. The title track itself is the 1988 original (basic tracking in June, reworked in London in July), the same recording later edited and released on the unrelated 1999 album. It carries that late-Lovesexy psychedelic shimmer—sparse yet insistent, trippy and hippie-adjacent without losing its funk spine. Around it sit heavier statements. “God Is Alive” is pure Pentecostal announcement (“News is comin’ like a hurricane”), recorded in June and briefly featuring Mavis Staples overdubs. “Elephants & Flowers” and “Still Would Stand All Time” (both early-October recordings) would later anchor Graffiti Bridge; here they sit in their original, slightly rawer forms—faith as both ecstasy and endurance. “If I Had A Harem” appears in its studio rockabilly-leaning version rather than the bluesier live arrangement that later surfaced on the Lovesexy Live 2 video. Closing the known material are the more anthemic vault tracks: “Stimulation” (an earlier Graffiti Bridge movie holdover), the unreleased “Big House” (“I hope that God lives in a big house so I’m taking all my friends with me”), and “We Got The Power,” recorded on October 15 and later cannibalized for Batdance chants. The latter’s robotic countdown and group vocal energy point toward the communal, almost New Power Generation-adjacent direction Prince was already testing. Musically the set sits in the distinctive 1988 Paisley Park zone: cold, stark drum machines that still swing, layered keyboards, guitar that can turn both liquid and abrasive, and horns used more for punctuation than pure jazz. Thematically it is the purest expression of the Lovesexy worldview extended—sex and spirit not opposed but continuous, God as both party and sanctuary. It is less conceptual than Sign o’ the Times, less manic than the Black Album, and less polished than the eventual Graffiti Bridge, yet it feels like the missing bridge between them. Because the project was abandoned mid-stream, the October 27 configuration is incomplete by definition. Several of its strongest songs later found better homes or better mixes; others remain stubbornly vaulted. What it reveals is a Prince who, less than a year after Lovesexy, was still generating album-length statements of faith and funk at a rate that outstripped any commercial calendar. The Batman soundtrack that replaced it is leaner and more focused; this version is messier, more ecstatic, and more revealing of the private cosmology he was living at the time. It never received a cover, a final sequence, or a release. Yet the surviving pieces confirm that the rave, at least in intention, was real. #PrinceOnThisDay