The Times
4 out of 5

http://entertainment.time...42,00.html

In the Sixties, when record companies thought nothing of squeezing two albums a year from their artists, the music industry benefited rampantly productive artists. As such, it didn’t seem incredible to anyone that, during a six-month period in 1967, the Beatles released the Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane double A-side, Sgt Pepper and All You Need is Love. Back in those days, no one dreamed of likening major record labels to slave-drivers. When Prince made the analogy, writing “slave” on his face at the 1995 Brits, it was hard not to smile at the irony. Interviewed at the time, the singer criticised a record company that refused to put out his records when he wanted them released, citing “market saturation” in their defence. They wanted him to slow down, but Prince’s work-rate defied the notion. By the end of the decade he was hawking CDs over the web to a dwindling fan base. With hindsight, it’s easier to see both sides. When supply outstrips demand — whether it be Crazy Frog merchandise, solo projects by ex-members of Blue or noodly treatises on cosmic sexuality by once-great Minneapolis monoliths — people’s interest inevitably wanes. Perhaps it’s something that he has belatedly come around to realising. Two years after the patchy Escapology he sounds like a man set on arresting his commercial decline. At last month’s Brits performance he adhered to the first rule of commercial rehabilitation: the best way to get people interested in your new stuff is to mix it with the old. So along with a honey-dripping Purple Rain and a rousing Let’s Go Crazy, we got a balmy, Santana-esque newie, Te Amo Corazón, and Fury. If the latter sounded familiar, that’s because its synth riff first appeared as the chorus of Boys and Girls in 1986. It’s not the only time you suspect that Prince has been perusing his back pages for inspiration. Black Sweat, more of an erotic mood piece than a song, sees its creator deploy a trick its creator first used to thrilling effect on When Doves Cry: forgoing bass for space, in which his priapic falsetto gets busy over a primitive robot groove. The levity that seems to permeate almost every track here is unmistakable. On the title track he’s cast as a pygmy pied piper of funk, supplying helium harmonies over a moreishly sluggish rhythm: “You can come if you want/But you can never leave.” He also wants us to know that he may be dirty but he still has standards. In Lolita he ventures into the same treacherous terrain as Björn from Abba when he wrote the belief-beggaringly bad Does Your Mother Know. The 48-year-old singer rebuffs the advances of his teenage muse, but where the Swede came a cropper Prince prevails with prizewinning couplets such as: “You’re much too young to peep my stash/ You’re trying to write cheques your body can’t cash.” Better still is The Word, a lithe, locomotive call to arms against unspecific satanic forces, in which Prince intones: “Get up, come on, Let’s do something” over a sinuous acoustic loop. He’s still practically peerless when he’s funky; less so when he’s soppy. As such, it’s no coincidence that the two skippable songs on 3121 merge to form one sloppy suite. Beautiful Loved and Blessed — a ploddingly generic duet with his current purple protégé Tamar — is just the kind of joyless soul ballad that made Prince such hard work through most of the Nineties. And while you have to admire his insistence on playing everything himself, Prince’s Claydermanesque plinking on The Dance does little to stop the song resembling the incidental music you might hear when a postcoital James Bond pours himself a cognac. But, of course, there’s no telling a control freak. He has to learn his own lessons. And Prince’s 25th album portrays an artist learning to make peace with his past without turning into his own tribute act. If the generous proliferation of tunes on here is anything to go by, Prince has freed himself from a more pernicious form of self-inflicted slavery. Which can only be good news for all of us. PETE PAPHIDES



The Guardian
3 out of 5

http://www.guardian.co.uk...52,00.html


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.

Pffft! I never agree with these reviews. Even when they say something positive about something I don't agree with how it's put.

mdn7 said:

PANDURITO said:

Was it deliberate?

mdn7 said:

He's talking about The Word there, one of the best songs on the album! To each their own.

TheEnglishGent said:

My fav song!!!

Not appreciating the Dance kills their credibility. Although, I needed about 10 spins on headphones - doubtful these people can make that committment.
[Edited 3/17/06 5:43am]

I'm not a big fan of the Alex guy that does the Guardian reviews. Strikes me as a bit lazy. In this review he's loving the first half, and as soon as Prince reveals a hint of religon he hates it.

I'm not a fan of the religious stuff, but a good song is still a good song (i.e the word).

Anyway, each to their own