Planet Earth review from cokemachineglow

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Thread started 02/08/09 3:48am

IstenSzek

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Planet Earth review from cokemachineglow

i could not agree more if i tried lol planet earth was and still is the
single biggest disappointment in prince records to this date for me. even
musicology, which i hate, has more moments of shine and the few songs the
album has that are actually worth repeated listening are very good indeed.

planet earth, however, left me dumbstruck. to this day i still don't have
a clue as to what the hell prince was thinking. anyway, here's the review:

It's never been surprising that Prince is a contradictory presence, an icon that seems to emit pure sexual energy while only releasing perverted little notions of licentiousness, or a man of elaborately modern fashion that ends up relentlessly retro; the lithe self-appointed slave that broke his binds with a major label and then cashed in. Maybe the fact that his recent contradiction is just plain laughable is a matter of age or maturity or boredom, but make no bones about it: Prince is befuddled by technology even when he seeks to ride its cusp.

He's got that deal with Verizon wherein only Verizon users could download his "Guitar" single, and then only through their phone. He gives away his album in Sunday Mail issues in the UK. He gives a shout-out to "MP3!" during "Mr. Goodnight" after previously crooning, "In this digital age you can just page me / I know it's the rage, but it don't engage me / Like the face to face" over smooth jazz sax and piano chords dropping blots of nubile dewishness. (He, um, encourages people to test out his new fragrance by having them visit a website.) And because his marketing intentions zip out in illogical directions, he often reduces his sexy wit to insular retreads. "Page" you, Prince? Get this killer of a date from the same "Mr. Goodnight": "Watch Chocolat on the big screen / Before we convene in the pool." Fuck, and then you can offer her a sarsaparilla, maybe. And remember how you wooed that fancy female by telling a "little Spanish man" to have her call your cell in order to discuss matching outfits for the night's festivities? Before, you would have been in the bedroom waiting, helping the poor girl undress, and telling her exactly what to wear. And there's a chance she would have been your sister.

Of course his new geriatric stance towards technology isn't graceless. Prince is still able to make classlessness into weird vogue, going all Sigur Rós in his liner notes for the benefit of some cracker jack hologram that flips between his Symbol and the type of artist-confronts-world Galactus Photoshop shitball that has the same idea as the cover of the recent D12 album, only gayer. OK, slightly less gay. But "gay" is cheap and Prince looks as naïve as he's ever been, which has been something of a strength for his career, him transforming every gesture into genderless butterfuck. So, we accept a dopey cover like Planet Earth's and know deep in our hearts that Prince is more of a man than any other human being, that he screws like a champ, chews gum, and takes names. (Only to forget them.)

And of course, what actually lies inside Prince's twenty-somethingth album is more than disappointing; it's thinly if grandly produced, tapped with a veneer so dumbly decades behind any sense of interesting or intriguing taste that one can't help but sit back and swallow the benign whole, thinking all along, Who the fuck even makes music like this anymore? The last two songs alone are simultaneously ghastly and gorgeous, such soul-obliterating dreck that it surpasses kitsch and sidles alongside Har Mar Superstar's hirsute stench: "Lion of Judah" stumbles between a muddy guitar tone and hermetically sealed harmonizing, the border a transparent wall of religious imagery; "Resolution" -- incorrectly named in the coding on some presses of the CD, once again tagging Prince the unintended old man Luddite -- provides the perfect counterpoint to the opening track, because first Prince hopefully wails, "Planet Earth must commit to balance with the One," as his guitar agrees, and then later he admits, "The main problem with war / Is that nobody ever wins.The main problem with people / Is they never do what they say." Then he shifts his bastardized Jimmy Buffet lick into a starry show tune, and then he pees out the worst-mixed guitar solo I've heard all year. Oh, and then? He fades in and out a synth crescendo. Try to imagine how that actually sounds. It's like Prince's What's Goin On (1971) only instead of Detroit it's about, like, the whole world.

So, you're expecting a Prince album, I know, and this one pays a healthy daub of ballads and splatting funk. It's not bent on any comeback as Musicology (2004) or 3121 (2006) might have been, because Prince is back, born again, tempered, mainstream, Super Bowled and American Idol'd, replete with shrapnel of the Revolution ooh-ing and ahh-ing between his legs. But 3121 had "Black Sweat" and Musicology glowed with post-post-"emancipation," so, if anything, Planet Earth is limp and predictable; catchy, sure, and funny, but the dude's dead serious. And Prince has always been dead serious, or, at least, if he's as great as I know him to be, he's always been dead serious even when acting tongue-in-cheek. Now he's just dissolved the world he's spent the last thirty years building and is existing in our reality where all the shit he does contradicts and grates, frills and slips backwards in time and farts out tired moments of nostalgia.

Bring back the unbridled, selfish Prince of 1995-2004, the one that indulged in contradiction and didn't give a shit; his logic was his world's logic, and that was enough to make each doofus-y record from that time an event or, at least, a novelty. The closest we get now is a half-baked turntablist scratch somewhere inside "Chelsea Rodgers." It's as if he's just discovered the joy of tape manipulation. A couple decades too late.
Dom Sinacola :: 10 August 2007 |

makes me wonder how non fans will review LotusFlower and MPLSOUND. although i
believe both albums will be far far faaaaar superior to planet earth. well,
anything would be at this point i guess.

i was born with the wrong sign, in the wrong house, with the wrong ascendancy

THEREALWORLD	*OPINIONS ARE LIKE ASSHOLES. WELL, THEY ARE ASSHOLES.* love is the only aspect of human life worth having.
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ReginaCarman	My God, what happened to Cokemachineglow that he's so angry sounding in that review. Whats it to him if Prince chooses to write music such as what is on Planet Earth? Can someone answer that one for me?
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THEREALWORLD	love is the only aspect of human life worth having.
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RodeoSchro	That review seems to have been written by someone very young. "Deedle-eedle eet deet DEE! Deedle-eedle eet deet DEE! Deedle-eedle eet deet DEE!" Second Funkiest White Man in America
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