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F.U.N.K. is a track originally believed to be recorded in 2003. Both this song and an early version of Life ‘O’ The Party use the same Camille-like voice. The song originally went into the vault, but in November 2007 Prince saw it fit to debut it online.
Earlier that month, a group of fans had started an initiative called Prince Fans United (the acronym of which, not entirely incidentally, could also be read as P, f.u.!). This was in response to Prince wanting to have control over the content of fan-sites. Thus the website PrinceFansUnited.com was born. But in an unexpected turn of events, within two days of the site’s opening, Prince sent them the song F.U.N.K., cleverly renamed by him as PFUnk to stream on the site.
At the time is was believed Prince had written or at least updated the song to address the fans grievances, but in hindsight it seems much more logical that Prince sent the 2003 song unchanged, with the lyrics in the context of the PFU situation seemingly fitting the issues at hand.
Two days after offering the song to stream on the fan-collective’s website, it was also featured on PrinceFamsUnited.com, a url the Prince camp had hastily registered. Within a week after that the song was featured as the Jam Of The Week on 3121.com — where the PrinceFamsUnited.com url now also redirected to, now under its original title F.U.N.K.. And within a few days, F.U.N.K. was available as a stand-alone download single on iTunes. Shelby J. also streamed the track on her MySpace page, along with a brief spoken intro by her (without any known Prince input).
Initial recording dates are unknown, but engineer Jesse Sutcliffe says this song was recorded around the time the Musicology album was conceived, which places its initial recording around late 2003.
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