The New Yorker
DORIAN PURPLE
Prince’s new temple.
by Sasha Frere-Jones April 9, 2007

Weekends in Vegas: Perhaps the greatest living performer in the pop tradition.
Permit me to plan your dream weekend. You’re going to see a musician, a great one, play at a small club in Las Vegas. For a hundred and seventy-five dollars, you could stand on the dance floor in front of the stage. But, if you want to sit down, house policy requires that you buy at least two tickets and pay an additional three hundred and seventy-five dollars, which entitles you to a bottle of alcohol and seats at a V.I.P. table at the edge of the dance floor. At midnight, the performer will begin a hundred-minute set. Afterward, as you wait half an hour in a queue for a taxi to drive you to a hotel that is roughly three blocks away but inaccessible by foot, you will see adults throwing up into garbage cans and waving plastic necklaces above their heads. You will get to bed at approximately 3 A.M.
Why would you do this? Because the musician you are seeing is Prince, who made an agreement with the Rio hotel—its purple décor reportedly pleased him—to turn Club Rio into a club called 3121, after Prince’s agreeably funky but modest 2006 album of the same name. Prince has been performing midnight shows there on Fridays and Saturdays since November (though he’s missed a few weekends). It doesn’t matter that the artist, who is forty-eight, has released only a handful of decent recordings in the past fifteen years. He is perhaps the greatest living performer in the pop tradition. The fact that, as he says during his live shows, “my friends all look different—I look just the same” simply enhances the impression that he is our Dorian Gray, if Gray had been raised by Cher and James Brown. Prince’s songwriting heyday, which stretched from 1979 to 1988, is rivalled only by the Beatles’ in generosity, formal variety, and intensity.
For a while, songwriting seemed to be Prince’s primary gift, and unstoppably so. In 1984, both Sheila E. and Chaka Khan scored top-ten hits with songs he had written. (Prince had three of his own that year—as he often notes during his set, “So many hits, so little time.”) This tally doesn’t include the work he did for acts within his orbit that he produced, played with, or wrote for: the Family (for whom he wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the ballad of unbearable longing later made famous by Sinéad O’Connor), Vanity 6, Madhouse, Jill Jones, the Time, and Apollonia 6. The nature of Prince’s implausibly enormous gift made this overambitious work arrangement seem logical. He cannot limit himself to one voice, style, or emotional position. His songs can be maudlin, clever, obvious, as ornate as Versailles, as simple as pencils, hilarious, crude, breathtakingly wise, corny, and so musically rich that he seems to be working with instruments nobody else owns.
Take several songs from his 1987 masterpiece, “Sign o’ the Times.” On “Housequake,” Prince turns one of James Brown’s vamps into a hybrid that is simultaneously homage, parody, and elaboration. “Housequake” combines live horn solos, an irresistibly noisy digital drum-machine pattern that Brown himself would never have used, blasts of guitar and horn that paraphrase Brown’s late-sixties work, and Prince’s own voice, sped up in pitch just enough to make his opening announcement—“Shut up, already. Damn!”—sound like a cameo by one of the Chipmunks. The menacing “Hot Thing” comes from Prince’s Hymnal of Lubricity, a style that he developed on the 1981 “Controversy” album. He pairs tiny music—often a buzzing keyboard bass line and a minimal electronic pulse—with a big come-on: “Hot thang, you should give your folks a call. Hot thang, tell them you’re going to the crystal ball. Hot thang, tell them you’re coming home late if you’re coming home at all.” But “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” is the emotional inverse of “Hot Thing” ’s priapic monomania. The song is breezy pop rock, with lyrics that recall the psychological sophistication of Smokey Robinson’s “The Tears of a Clown.” A woman is crying, looking for “a good man” at “10:35 on a lonely Friday night,” to get over a departed lover who has “left her with a baby and another one on the way.” Instead of taking advantage of the woman, Prince sees the situation from her perspective and demurs honorably: “I said, Baby, don’t waste your time, I know what’s on your mind. I may be qualified for a one-night stand, but I could never take the place of your man.” Pop songs this empathic are rarely so free of sanctimony. Prince does not present himself as anyone’s moral better; he even pauses to mention that, despite her despair, “she was looking all right.” And these are just three songs from one album. So little time.
Though Prince is no longer writing at this level, or with such frequency, his performing skills are undiminished, as demonstrated by his recent Super Bowl half-time medley and by a set at 3121 a few Saturdays ago. Before he appeared, at midnight, his personal d.j., DJ Rashida, presented a two-hour primer on Prince and his affinities, using hits of his that he wouldn’t be playing in that night’s performance (“When Doves Cry,” “Let’s Work,” “Pop Life”) and interspersing them with a catholic selection of songs by Sade, Beastie Boys, Jimi Hendrix, and Cocteau Twins. As the d.j. played, a series of film clips were projected on screens around the perimeter of the club. Images of John Travolta from “Saturday Night Fever” and Bill (Bojangles) Robinson tap dancing were followed by shots of Prince, in tuxedo, doing his own moves, in the 1986 film “Under the Cherry Moon.” The visuals ended with a sequence of redundant testimonials from celebrities, including Randy Jackson and Salma Hayek, who informed us solemnly that Prince is “creative.”
Though Prince became a Jehovah’s Witness a few years ago and stopped performing some of his filthier songs—“Darling Nikki” must remain eternally alone in the hotel lobby, amusing herself—Prince the Physical Presence has not stopped transmitting sexuality, something he can do even while changing guitars. He took the stage at 3121 in black hip-hugging flares, a red shirt, and what looked like the top half of a tuxedo jacket. Almost thirty years into Prince’s career, there is still nobody else in the pop market who sends a similar combination of signals. Though he’s just over five feet, lithe and pixieish, he never seems dwarfed by others onstage, and he is absolutely at ease guiding his ten-piece band. His backup dancers—Nandy and Maya McClean, twenty-six-year-old twins from Sydney, Australia—were energetic and effectively underclad, but Prince was still the most seductive presence onstage. When he simply cocked his head and smiled, it seemed like an act of public lewdness. He is androgynous but not effeminate, perfectly formed (one of the V.I.P.s at my table kept pointing out his butt to her husband, who didn’t seem to mind) but not in the way of a gym rat. Prince’s casual virtuosity, combined with his evident joy in wearing tight clothing, made every song he did entertaining.
Too much time was devoted to recent material, like the underdeveloped funk vamps “3121” and “Musicology,” which gave the young rhythm section—the thunderous drummer Cora Coleman-Dunham and her husband, Joshua Dunham, the bass player—a chance to solo and allowed Prince time to retire to his private lounge below the stage. “Housequake” would have been preferable to the band’s spirited cover of James Brown’s “Pass the Peas,” a nod to the recently departed. Prince doing James is entertaining, but his own songs are so valuable that it’s disappointing to watch him dwell on someone else’s, no matter how well his young sax player imitates Maceo Parker.
Still, he gave us more than enough. He has long been adept at mimicking the voicelike cry of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar playing, but he has often settled for impressive flurries of notes rather than attempting more structured improvisations. (When everything comes easily, distinguishing the good from the very good—not a challenge most performers face—can be a problem.) Prince’s rhythm-guitar playing was terse and unpredictable during “Kiss,” a simple song that usually limits the guitar to brief punctuation, and when the show ended, with “Purple Rain,” he did more than simply wail. He played the long, ecstatic notes that you would expect, but at odd intervals, interrupted by hiccups and pauses. Grimacing, he walked out onto a small platform that extended slightly over the dance floor; he threw in a few blasts of noise and picked out dog-legging figures on the low end of the neck, sounding a little like Television’s Tom Verlaine.
The obvious sign that Prince has shifted his focus from songwriting to playing is his latest single, “Guitar,” which was briefly available on one of his Web sites. At 3121, he strapped on an acoustic guitar and began another mini medley by playing several verses of this simple new song: “I love you, baby, but not like I love my guitar.” He smiled and shimmied and made Borscht Belt jokes as he segued into an extended blues vamp: “If your girl says you’re not in shape, fellas, tell them round is a shape.” It felt slightly bittersweet to hear Prince add verses from two older songs, the gorgeous and melancholy “Sometimes It Snows in April” and the still astonishing, Beatles-y “Raspberry Beret,” whose carefree melody and conversational lyrics are simultaneously salacious, wholesome, and ludicrous. “A raspberry beret, and if it was warm she wouldn’t wear much more.” Prince’s inamorata may not have worn a lot of clothing, but could he possibly ever have worked in a “five and dime”? Can you picture Prince on anybody’s farm, much less Old Man Johnson’s? For those three minutes, sure. This is pop songwriting at its finest, where unlikely images seem more vivid than your own memories. ♦

nice


(and first)

This is a great article. The kind of write up I would hope would influence my friends to become more appreciative! I'm a bit confused by the date, though. Today is only the 2nd.

Nice article. I wonder if she went to the aftershow. Doesn't it seem that all the critics are on the late show to what we've been in awe of for 30 years?

yeah. good article

A great line that pretty much sums up Prince's music:

April 9? wow you can go to the future and bring stuff back? that is AWESOME!!!

metalorange said:

i loved that line too. it was a nice article.

I'll have to print this one out and read it...I can't read that much on the monitor screen

babooshleeky said:

I thought it was only me, my eyes were going-

metalorange said:

ditto

all the critics love you in New York.

I saw this on another site today; it's one of the better articles written on Prince in some time.

Article are dated into the future. Hell, my latest keyboard magazine say May 2007.

Graycap23 said:

Thank you, Graycap!