The guardian has a review of 3121 on its website...One quote from the review Was funny as hell to me..I had to share it with u guys...

In dispute with his record company, Prince spent the 1990s insultingly comparing himself to a slave, and churning out contractual-obligation albums with no thought for the poor saps who were supposed to buy them. By the millennium, he had successfully reduced his fanbase to a rump of enthusiasts so nutty they made their idol - a man who once toured the world with a $250,000 giant gold pretzel that supposedly represented a clitoris - seem a model of reason.





full review below...


Three years ago, anyone betting on a Prince comeback would have been welcomed by the bookies with open arms. Said bookies would have hung out the streamers and booked a band, confident in the knowledge that payday had arrived. Prince had long since joined that select band of superstars who achieve an apparently inexorable decline without recourse to drink or drugs. His monumental hubris brought him low all on its own. You could see where the hubris came from - in an era so musically barren that anyone with the ability to sing and dance at the same time got labelled a polymath genius, he really was a polymath genius - but that didn't make it easier to swallow.

In dispute with his record company, Prince spent the 1990s insultingly comparing himself to a slave, and churning out contractual-obligation albums with no thought for the poor saps who were supposed to buy them. By the millennium, he had successfully reduced his fanbase to a rump of enthusiasts so nutty they made their idol - a man who once toured the world with a $250,000 giant gold pretzel that supposedly represented a clitoris - seem a model of reason. The Rainbow Children (2001), a jazzy concept album about the Jehovah's Witnesses, made 109 on the Billboard chart, his worst showing for 23 years. It sounded and sold like Prince's Greatest Hits compared with its 2003 follow-up, NEWS, which contained four 14-minute-long instrumental jams and failed to chart at all.
Theoretically, a career marked by inexplicable name changes, berserk public pronouncements and giant golden clitoris pretzels should prepare you for any eventuality, but what happened in the next year beggared belief. Prince became America's highest-grossing live performer, ending 2004 $56.5m richer. He achieved this turnaround by the simple expedient of playing his hits in concert and steering clear of jazz-influenced concept albums about the Jehovah's Witnesses and 14-minute instrumental jams.

Like Morrissey's triumphant comeback, Prince's success had more to do with a sort of mass wish-fulfilment than the album, Musicology, on which it was based. Hearing his influence everywhere from OutKast to Alicia Keyes pricked people's memories. They wanted the genuine article to be great again, which meant turning a blind eye to Musicology's flaws - not least Dear Mr Man, which did its bit for the American democratic process by suggesting that blacks shouldn't bother to vote.

With the public's nostalgia fix satiated, the trick now is to maintain their interest. Initially, 3121 appears more complex than its predecessor. The packaging and title track suggest a concept album about a sumptuous pleasure palace. Judging by the photographs in the CD booklet, the sumptuous pleasure palace has been decorated by an interior designer in the throes of a nervous breakdown, hence the placemats made of peacock feathers, the cushions embroidered with the word SATISFIED and, most troubling of all, the wildly impractical glassware: "Drink champagne," the title track urges, "from a glass with chocolate handles."

Any concept, however, vanishes as quickly as said handles would in the dishwasher, to be replaced by something more prosaic. Prince may be many things, but an idiot isn't one of them - he knows his resurgence is founded on fond memories and seems happy to provide the occasional prompt. The title track reintroduces the electronically altered vocals first heard on Sign O' the Times' If I Was Your Girlfriend, while the lyrics echo those of 1999: "We gon' party like there ain't gonna be another one." The declamatory synthesized fanfares of Lolita and Fury are close relations of the declamatory synthesized fanfares of Let's Go Crazy and Little Red Corvette. Black Sweat's tough, atonal, lewd, Afro-centric funk - "You'll be screaming like a white lady," he leers at the song's conclusion - recalls The Black Album.

But there's more to 3121 than the prickle of nostalgia: amid the title track's murky, unsettling groove and the grinding techno noise of Love, Prince sounds thrillingly alive, a veteran throwing down a cocky, confident challenge to any young pretenders. The polymath genius of legend seems to be reasserting himself in the album's casual stylistic shifts - from Lolita's pure pop to Te Amo Corazón's Latin smooch to Satisfied's southern soul.

Then, just when you're wondering what could possibly go wrong, everything goes wrong. The genre-hopping collapses in a hail of dribbly mid-tempo R&B and central-casting James Brown pastiches, and the lyrics take a sudden detour to Kingdom Hall: there are intimations of imminent Armageddon, and the listener is advised to "safeguard against the forked tongue and the treachery of the wicked one". It's as if Prince has tricked you into opening your front door, then jammed it open with his foot and started trying to flog you the Watchtower. Before this unfortunate turn of events, 3121 does enough to remind you what a remarkable artist Prince was and can still be.
[Edited 3/16/06 18:05pm]

one day, those 'contractual obligation' albums are going to be looked as objectively and completely revisited by music critics and music snobs in general...and we'll see who's laughing then.

i know that sounds fammy fam fammish of me to say, but there's gold in them there turkeys...

Anx said:

I respectfully disagree. I think the attitude in this review regarding those albums is the prevailing one.


I think that the brief running-time of those releases, coupled with unremarkable artwork and sparce liner notes,in addition to the unenthusiastic promotion accompanying those albums, create easily dismissive packages. Regardless of the quality of some tracks.

Most record stores I know fail to stock those releases. I would not be suprised if those albums are out of print within 10 years.


Those "Contractual obligation" albums, more than anything, were most responsible for Princes' downturn of popularity.

Imagine if Prince just said to himself:"I'm gonna put out the best albums possible for the fans and show Warner what they're gonna lose". His stature and legend would be so much bigger today.

Don't take it personal. The above "review" -- more of mini-analysis of Prince's career than anything else -- represents the mainstream musical press views on Prince. And like everything mainstream, it tends to be heavy on the conventional no matter what the critic himself/herself thinks of his/her nuanced, "ear-on-the-ground" opinion. I can't explain it, but a lot of reviews written before 1968 on music and movies don't fit the views we have today, while since then the "consensus opinion" seems to fare better. My best explanation is that it's been a baby boomers world (and now their children, who are emulating the tastes of their parents to some extent, at least when it comes to critics. That said, I do agree myself with some of these opinions -- just not wholesale.

Anx said:

I don't consider Come, TGE, The Black Album to be bad at all (tho I suppose you can't count TBA as one of those as it was made earlier, but you get what I'm saying). It's not fammy fam to say at least Come and TGE are good ...nay great albums. They are...even if they were meant to be other than what they became in terms of concept and track listing.

See I think when they say "those albums" we know they most likely mean Chaos and disorder, which was more like prince spitting on the ground and even then there was some good stuff on there (just a bit).

Come is one of my favorites. ANd I know TGE is a big Fan favorite...because they know.

even prince fans make fun of yall.

Aerogram said:

Print media needs say such things to exist. If they didn't that rag would just fade away.

superspaceboy said:

TGE, Come, C&D... a great era of Prince stuff... Exodus.... All good stuff. The down turn came when he was FREE of WB and went and made "the album he was born to make"... A triple CD snooze fest of mediocrity and crap - Emancipation. From that point on it all went pear shaped...

Indeed, the "contractual obligations" will one day be revisited by the critics and deemed a great era in Prince's musical direction...

warning2all said:

what's this "gold pretzel shaped clitoris" about???
is that the O+(-> symbol??