“Alphabet St.” by Prince

"Alphabet St." led the way for Prince's tenth album, Lovesexy, in 1988, and it started life as an acoustic blues before he turned it into something else entirely: a track crammed with samples, with a rap from Cat Glover, who shares the lead vocal. Prince arranged and produced it and handles guitar, bass, synthesizer, drum machine and even a cuíca, while Sheila E. adds drums and handclaps, Eric Leeds saxophone, Matthew Blistan trumpet and Boni Boyer Hammond organ, with a spoken-word part from Ingrid Chavez.

Its themes run straight back into the rest of Lovesexy. It was the album's first single and its only top 10 hit, making the top 10 in both Britain and America, and in the UK and Japan it became the first Prince single issued on CD, backed with a remix subtitled "This is not music, this is a trip".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.