Review of TRC from University of Mayland's Diamondback (via University Wire).

http://www.uwiretoday.com...01004.html

CD REVIEW: Prince listens to wrong muse again on 'Rainbow Children'

By Josh Korr

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- There's a sticker on The Rainbow Children's shrink wrap that tells me I've purchased "The controversial new album from Prince." Said controversy presumably involves the concept album's treatment of religion, but I can't figure out if the content is somehow taboo or if I'm just supposed to be bowled over that Prince is overtly addressing religion at all.

Either way, he forgot one thing: Nobody cares.

But hey, that's never stopped Prince before, has it? Never one, lately, to let a bad idea borne of raging ego and talent slip by, the artist formerly known as [insert joke here] bogs down a perfectly good album what could have been his best in a decade with an incomprehensible storyline told by an excruciating, computerized voice that sounds like Andre the Giant on a 78 rpm record slowed down to 33 speed.

Filler like this isn't always a CD-killer Pearl Jam's Vitalogy suffers from "Heyfoxymophandlemama," but that and other dabbling tracks can always just be skipped but the croaking narrator shows up at the beginning of the first song, in between tracks, in the middle of guitar jams, and everywhere else you least want it to be. Skipping the end of one song might only take you to the voice-over at the start of the next track, or you might miss a good solo at the 7:45 mark of the one before.

Take "1+1+1 is 3." It starts with 45 seconds of grating voice-over, at which point a snaky funk guitar line comes in, but the voice keeps going for almost another half minute. Then the song turns into a proper descendent of "Delirious," "Partyman" and "It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night" but when this happens on just about every song, even the strong ones lose some oomph.

And there are some killer tracks here: "The Work pt. 1," "1+1+1 is 3" and "The Everlasting Now" reaffirm Prince's place as godson of funk; "Family Name," after three minutes of robotic narration, slinks into a Sly and the Family Stone (or Prince and the Revolution) rave-up until the croaker comes back, along with an Alvin and The Chipmunks voice reciting a line of Thomas Jefferson's. And there's finally a decent amount of Prince's usually restrained guitar mastery throughout the CD.

So why does Prince insist on essentially wasting some of the best music of his career on what I don't want to call self-indulgence but can't think of a better way to describe the 10-15 minutes of Rainbow Children that isn't music? He did the same thing on 1991's Love Symbol album, but there his interlude conversations with Kirstie Alley are brief and few; the concept is clearly subordinate to songs like "7," "My Name Is Prince" and "Sexy M.F."

Here, Prince deflates the music with his pretensions and an unyielding belief that people care about them; he seems to assume that his audience will accept anything he does regardless of how seriously he takes his music and unparalleled talent.

But Prince essentially has no mass audience anymore. He has a probably sizable cult following including most popular musicians and music critics, it seems but continues to act as though he's the mega-star of 1984 and that anyone's paying attention. Which is fine, except by now even his fans roll their eyes at his ridiculousness. And just when Prince fell out of the public eye and should have concentrated on doing what he'd always done and let his music speak for itself, he went the other way and tried to assert his importance without much to back it up. Even when he did have the music to back up his claims, his games overshadowed everything.

You see the same thing, though to a much greater degree, with Michael Jackson. Another artist of unimaginable ability, Jackson has for years let his bizarre internal contradictions run rampant over his music and dancing. Prince never stopped putting out music like Jackson did and his work from the last decade is underappreciated, but he has increasingly let his idiosyncrasies speak for his music rather than the other way around.

The Rainbow Children is frustrating because those very idiosyncrasies are what make Prince so interesting in the first place. It's a tough balancing act, and we'll have to wait yet again to see if he can still pull it off like he used to.