http://www.sundayherald.com/54696


Sweet Prince

Despite a succession of disappointing albums, Prince has always maintained his mystique. Now he seems to have rediscovered his musical magic too. By Leon McDermott

The Big Album
Prince - 3121 (UNIVERSAL)

Rating: 3 stars

The song Prince Alone In The Studio, by Smog is, unsurprisingly, about exactly that. A budget epic, it details the solitary pleasures behind the Purple one’s musical triumphs. The girls – the ones who wore their special underwear in the hopes of having sex with him – are gone. He sits there, with his raspberry headphones on. He hasn’t eaten in 18 hours. Dinner’s burned on the stove, and Prince doesn’t even realise. This portrait manages to be both hilarious and touching, thanks to Bill Callahan’s dour rasp and his economical way with a narrative.

However, it’s hard to imagine any other musician who could serve as a template for a song like this. None of them have the requisite eccentricity, the almost feverish obsession with nailing down the sound inside their own head. None of them would have their own custom-made raspberry headphones.

Prince, though, was – and still is – of a different order to the two other kids born in the summer of 1958 who would go on to shape the music of the 1980s, Michael Jackson and Madonna. Each of them played their part, Jackson thanks to the studio skills of Quincy Jones and Madonna almost entirely due to her judicious appropriation of whatever scene was currently hip in downtown New York.

Prince was something else. A mere 5'2''. Scrawny. Androgynous. He looked like he’d been beamed down from space, some kind of alien sex dwarf whose sheer oddness made people sit up and listen. He wrote all his own material, sometimes playing all the instruments. And the music itself marked him out; it too seemed mercurial and otherworldly, the product of a brilliantly warped musical mind. In the decade following his first album in 1978, he churned out material for himself and others at a terrifying rate – his collaborators ranged from Miles Davis to Sheena Easton. The fact that one of Reagan-era America’s biggest selling artists was a skinny black guy with a penchant for heels and dresses – and who occasionally adopted a female alter-ego, Camille – still seems faintly unbelievable.

Michael Jackson, for all his love songs, seemed asexual, and Madonna spent her time touting an increasingly cartoonish simulacrum of female sexuality. Prince, on the other hand, was full-frontal: he brought to pop music the bump and grind of the sleaziest funk, he toyed with gender and sexual identity, and he did it all on primetime television and in huge stadiums. You can barely imagine him being able to do the same thing now, in an America that torpedoed Janet Jackson’s career after her “wardrobe malfunction”.

That his last album, 2004’s Musicology, sold six million copies and still wasn’t considered a bona-fide comeback tells you a lot. Though it was far better than the preceding decade’s output, Musicology still failed to reach the heights of his best 1980s work. The new album comes closer, grounding itself in the taut funk, which nobody else does better, and offering intermittent flashes of brilliance.

The forthcoming single, Black Sweat, is one of 3121’s highlights , sinuous and sinister . Like When Doves Cry, it lacks a bassline, the grooves residing instead in the stuttering, booming percussion and in Prince’s multi-tracked vocals.

At other points, 3121 produces songs that could easily slot into classic albums 1999 or Parade. Fury’s guitar-heavy tale of woe is driven by the kind of synth blast which powered Little Red Corvette. The syncopated funk of Lolita, meanwhile, has an older Prince turning down a younger groupie, claiming that if he was younger they could paint the town “like Frank and Ava”. It’s either hilarious or slightly icky. Maybe it’s both; it’s hard to tell when Prince is being entirely serious, and when he’s winding you up.

There are misfires – Te Amo Corazon is a tepid latin workout, The Dance a slightly overcooked ballad and The Word meanders along like a Prince tribute, rather than something by the man himself – but there are also compensations. The title track features an appearance by Camille’s tweaked falsetto and Love, a jittery, jacking piece of classic Prince, is stripped down to a few bare essentials: whipcrack percussion, a needling synth line and curlicues of itchy guitar.

We’ll likely never again see as perfectly-formed a set of songs such as Purple Rain or Sign O’ The Times, though we don’t tear into Bob Dylan for every album failing to match Highway 61 Revisited. With Prince, as with Dylan, you learn to take what you get and be thankful for it. That he’s managed to claw things back from a disastrous religious escapade (at one point, he became a Jehovah’s Witness, and decided that he would stop performing his old material) and still has the capability of writing something as downright filthy as Black Sweat, should suffice.

It’s been a rough decade for Prince watchers – particularly those who forked out for his subscription-only music club, downloading seemingly endless albums of jazz-funk odysseys from his website – but, finally, he seems to have recaptured some of the untouchable brilliance of the 1980s. If Prince is still alone in the studio, you hope he’s happy with what he’s doing.

Cool review.
But ("his last album, 2004’s Musicology, sold six million copies") ummm

.

The Dylan reference sums it up for all to see..What makes the midget any different from Bob in that his current music is incessantly judged by his past works? No excuses here, because 3121 is far from a great release (it's focused and confident, if anything else); But I will always suspect that there's another more subversive reason why Prince's music is consistently judged against his past...And it ain't for the faint of heart...
[Edited 3/19/06 2:24am]

I think it's a pretty decent review. I particularly liked the part looking back at what he really did accomplish in the Reagan era.

But yeah, Musicology supposedly only sold around 2 million copies and half of those were concert giveaways.

Also,you don't have to fork out (it's only $25 for heaven's sake!) to download music from Prince's site, and while there has been a lot of jazz-jams there has also been lots of plain and simple pop like on Slaughterhouse and TCI.

metalorange said:

Maybe he was referring to the first years of the club when membership was $100?

Glad I'm waiting to hear it for the first time when it comes out this week. With all of the mixed reviews I'm going in with a open mind.

I didn't notice that there wasn't a bass line...hmmm, let me listen now.

>>> Like When Doves Cry, it lacks a bassline, the grooves residing instead in the stuttering, booming percussion and in Prince’s multi-tracked vocals.

endorphin74 said:

Well actually you could pay month by month if you chose in the first year, also back then there weren't the endless albums of jazz-funk odysseys that the reviewer mentions and which leads me to believe he was talking about the current incarnation.