When Prince issued Batdance as the lead single from his Batman soundtrack album, it marked the start of a new era for blockbuster movie tie-ins while also pointing towards future developments for Prince himself. Built on samples from his own music, as well as snippets of dialogue from the film, the song made plain Prince’s growing interest in hip-hop. And yet, as a collage of ideas that also doubled as a promotional tool for the biggest film of the year, Batdance was undeniably the work of the Minneapolis maverick, bending even the Batman franchise to his own vision.
This is the story of how Batdance helped to create a pop-cultural moment not even Prince could have predicted.
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Why did Prince make Batdance?
Ever since scoring his own box-office smash, with the Purple Rain movie, in 1984, Prince had recorded increasingly complex albums which, in the case of 1987’s Sign O’ The Times and the following year’s Lovesexy, were promoted with high-concept tours that blurred the boundary between pop concert and theatrical production. Asked to provide songs for use in Tim Burton’s big-screen adaptation of DC Comics’ Batman, Prince, who already had eyes on returning to the silver screen with his Purple Rain sequel, Graffiti Bridge, saw an opportunity for a no-fuss Hollywood takeover that was too good to resist. A full album’s worth of Batman-related songs soon spilled out of him, culminating in Batdance.
“I said, you, the Bat, Batman,” Prince’s then manager – and the director of Purple Rain – Albert Magnoli, told The Ringer, recalling how he pitched the idea to Prince. “And he went, ‘Cool.’”
The recording: “It’s really crazy, and we probably won’t use it”
A longtime fan of Batman, Prince had taught himself the theme tune to the kitsch 60s TV show as a child, learning to play it on his dad’s piano. Drawn to the psychological complexities in Burton’s version of the story, he began recording new songs and reworking old cuts, crediting each track to one of the film’s three main characters: Bruce Wayne/Batman (as played by Michael Keaton); Batman’s nemesis, The Joker (Jack Nicholson); and Wayne’s love interest, Vicki Vale, whose role had been taken by Kim Basinger, the 9 1/2 Weeks star who would soon begin an intense relationship with Prince himself.
Of the mass of songs Prince recorded for potential use in the film, Burton selected six, among them the gothic funk of The Future, the boudoir ballad Scandalous and the James Brown throwback Partyman. Left on the cutting-room floor was 200 Balloons, an upbeat four-to-the-floor jam that Prince would rework into Batdance. Six minutes long, Batdance was a collision of chopped-up samples, quickfire grooves and furious guitar riffage that would be attributed to all three of the film’s characters, with interjections from studio technician Matthew Larson (“Get the funk up!”) and Prince himself, largely in the guise of his new-found alter ego Gemini (“Keep bustin’”).
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Recorded in one all-night session in his Paisley Park studio complex, the song put a maximalist full-stop on Prince’s Batman project, throwing into the mix snippets of other unused cuts from the era, among them We Got The Power and House In Order. Soon to replace the album’s original closing song, a spiritual distress signal titled Dance With The Devil, Batdance was, even in Prince’s estimation, a bold gambit for radio play. Crossing paths with Albert Magnoli while leaving the studio in the morning, Prince handed the new recording to his manager, along with a warning: “It’s really crazy, and we probably won’t use it. It’s really long.”
“Not only do I like it,” Magnoli told Prince when they next spoke, “but it is going to be the opening single to the album.”
