The bass part Prince removed from “Kiss”

Listen to the kick in “Kiss” before imagining a bass player alongside it. David Z told Mix that an effect on that drum supplied the low end after Prince removed an existing bass part. He recalled Prince saying, “We don’t need this.” Bass notes and low-frequency weight were separable.

The recording was not Prince’s work alone. Brown Mark’s account, quoted by Rhino, describes a song handed to Mazarati and then reclaimed: Prince added his guitar and replaced the lead vocal, but kept the group’s backing vocals. Taking parts away did not erase the collaboration.

Prince’s official discography places the single within a rather fuller-sounding project. Parade, released in 1986, also featured Clare Fischer’s orchestrations. “Kiss” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks. An album could accommodate both elaborate scoring and this conspicuous omission.

That is a useful question to take back to the record: which job would another instrument actually do? The answer belongs to this arrangement, not to every funk song.