Post Description

PART ONE: 
01 - [intro]
02 - DJ Rashida Intro
03 - Prince - 3121
04 - Nina Simone - Westwind
05 - DJ Rashida & Ezekial skit - Housequake (7 Minutes Mo'Quake)
06 - Prince - Dream Factory
07 - Funkadelic - (Not Just) Knee Deep
08 - DJ Rashida Segue
09 - Támar - Can't Keep Living Alone
10 - DJ Rashida Segue
11 - Graham Central Station - I Can't Stand The Rain
12 - DJ Rashida Segue
13 - Björk - Come To Me
14 - DJ Rashida & Ezekial Black Sweat skit
15 - Prince - Black Sweat
16 - DJ Rashida & Ezekial Black Sweat skit
17 - Mother's Finest - Baby Love
18 - DJ Rashida Segue
19 - Sly & The Family Stone - In Time
20 - DJ Rashida Segue
21 - David Bowie - Fame
22 - DJ Rashida Segue - 2020
23 - Les McCann - Sometimes I Cry & Harlem Buck Dance Strut
24 - The Spanish Harlem Orchestra - La Banda
25 - Rubén Blades - Prepara
26 - DJ Rashida Segue
26 - Jimi Hendrix - Hey Baby (New Rising Sun)
27 - Prince - Beautiful Strange [live at 3121 Residence]
28 - DJ Rashida & Ezekial - Beautiful Strange
29 - Joni Mitchell - Help Me
30 - DJ Rashida Segue

PART TWO:
31 - DJ Rashida & Ezekial [intro]
32 - Prince - The Dance
33 - Tower Of Power - There Is Only So Much Oil In The Ground
34 - DJ Rashida Segue - Parliament - Chocolate City
35 - Aaliyah - Rock The Boat
36 - DJ Rashida Segue
37 - DJ Rashida & Prince - True Knowledge
38 - Sanaa Hamri Interview
39 - DJ Rashida Segue - David Bowie - China Girl
40 - Támar & Prince - Rock Steady [live MPLS 2006-02-25]
41 - Támar & Prince - Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough [live MPLS 2006-02-25]
42 - Támar & Prince - What Have You Done For Me Lately [live MPLS 2006-02-25]
43 - Támar & Prince - Partyman - It's Alright [live MPLS 2006-02-25]
44 - Támar & Prince - Play That Funky Music [live MPLS 2006-02-25]
45 - DJ Rashida Segue
46 - Marvin Gaye - Come Live With Me Angel
47 - DJ Rashida Segue
48 - J*Davey - No More
49 - DJ Rashida Segue
50 - Prince - Satisfied
51 - [outro]

vanityfair.com

Inside the Prince Radio Show That Never Was

In 2005, the artist made a demo with DJ Rashida for a channel called 3121 Radio. The station didn’t materialize, but one early run at it will now be released.

BY DAN ADLER

APRIL 29, 2020

In the mid-2000s, Prince rented a house in Los Angeles from the NBA player Carlos Boozer. By this point he had achieved his suffusion of pop music and culture and emerged with a possibly even rarer status: a living folk hero. He was busy throwing parties too, and at the house he called 3121 — also the title of the album he released in 2006 — a DJ he’d heard in town handled the music.

Eventually DJ Rashida became Prince’s touring DJ for a decade, and before that they developed a concept for a radio station, 3121 Radio. They recorded a two-and-a-half hour demo episode, but hardly anyone has heard it: “Nobody,” Rashida said, laughing, in a phone interview on Tuesday. She’d just been on the phone with other Prince collaborators. “I don’t think anybody knows that it exists other than the people who directly worked on it or were there while we were working on it,” Rashida said.

In 2005 Prince and SiriusXM (Sirius Satellite Radio at the time) had talked about starting an artist-designed show that could play unreleased and live recordings, interviews, and music he’d been listening to. “I really wanted Prince to turn his full creative genius into a curated radio experience,” SiriusXM president and chief content officer Scott Greenstein wrote in an email.

The channel didn’t pan out in the end, and before Tuesday, Rashida hadn’t listened to the initial episode herself since just after its creation. But the demo tapes, Greenstein said, have sat in his desk drawer ever since. The coronavirus pandemic prompted him to figure out a setting to release the recordings, and on Friday, SiriusXM is launching a monthlong Prince channel in the model of its existing artist-devoted stations (the Grateful Dead and the Beatles are permanent examples). The 3121 Radio demo will publicly play for the first time during the channel’s run.

Rashida plays host, and Prince is mostly heard through his music, though he appears on the microphone too. The surface purpose of the show was to promote the album 3121, but 15 years on it is also a sly and vibrant slice of Prince’s life and personality at the time, and a sampling of the music he and Rashida had been listening to: Parliament, David Bowie, Aaliyah, Marvin Gaye, to start.

“It’s a mix of things I was playing at the parties at the time and music he’d introduced me to,” Rashida said. “It’s such a trip listening back to it just now.” She picked the Björk, he the Mother’s Finest. It was a “mix of my stuff and his stuff,” Rashida said. “Really our stuff.”

Part of the variety on display has to do with the length of those parties. Many of them “were so long that I had to spread out,” Rashida said. “In the beginning for the dinner before the party, I would get to play Ahmad Jamal and jazz records, samples. The Joni Mitchell.”

She hit upon a memory at the mention of Mitchell. “At the end of the night, the sun is coming up, it’s five in the morning, and the last two people in the party were Joni Mitchell and Herbie Hancock,” Rashida said. “And thankfully that night, I think I had played the dinner beforehand, I had all my jazz and rare grooves and stuff that’s not really party music per se. I was playing for them while they played pool. I just remember thinking in my mind, Yeah, this is it. This is great.”

Some familiar radio cues are in place during the demo. Rashida plays a leisurely host, brushing past songs with brief anecdotes or reflections, and conducts an interview with the filmmaker Sanaa Hamri, who at the time had recently directed Something New. But the episode is also an immersive stretch of audio art that takes some dreamlike turns, most notably when the comedian Katt Williams appears. Prince thought the show should have a comic element and enlisted Williams to come to the house and voice a caller named Ezekiel. “Oh man, I couldn’t even have banter with Katt,” Rashida said, “‘cause all I could do was just laugh at him.”