ITS FUCKING NUTS. some poetic licence was taken in places.

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Physical nakedness is much easier than emotional nakedness. Especially if you're someone whose personality seems about equally divided between extreme introversion and extreme extroversion.

On Lovesexy Prince, huffing and puffing angrily, takes Wendy, Lisa, Susannah, Wally, Chuck Huntsberry and Steve Fargnoli and throws them all in a closet. He locks the door, tosses its key into the deep blue underground, and positions a large ceramic cock sculpture in front of it just to be sure (he has many large ceramic cock sculptures around Paisley Park...just in case). He then paints over the door, the keyhole and the big ceramic cock in bright pastel colors. Humming Parliament songs to himself, he frantically paints the first coat. Then he paints another coat. Then another. Then another, and another, and keeps going until his mural is a thick, almost deafening blowout of bravura spirituality. Then he winks suggestively, and asks you if you'd like to swap coats, and points towards his....but, really, the much-ballyhoed god-is-love-is-sex-or-thereabouts axiom of "Lovesexy" was for all intents and purposes just a louder, more obnoxious redux of Parade/Under The Cherry Moon's equivalent aesthetic, and essentially an self-intervention to reconvince himself of his own god after his post-Revolution slide into secular "nasty bitch!" Blackness. Whatever gets him to come at night, I guess. At least it's more exaltation than sermon, unlike certain other religiously-bound moments in Prince's discography.

You or I, who are not Prince (unless you are, in which case what's up man), can happily dig his oh-lord-bless-me-on-the-one gospel some of the time, but for most of the album the lyrical substance of Lovesexy is completely bulldozed by the very restraint-free bluster with which it's delivered, rendering the album a talkin'-loud-and-sayin-nothin' dull knife of the worst kind. Prince gets everything absolutely right on the title track, which is a joyous swagger down to a perfect utopia located at the center of a triangle formed by his spirituality, his libido and his sense of humor. The lead single Alphabet Street also works fairly flawlessly (though like almost every track here kinda overstays its welcome by about two minutes. But Eye No, Glam Slam, Dance On and Positivity are overcooked to the point of absurdity; tightly wound rollercoaster arrangements or knowingly complicated drum programming go for naught when all the songs seem to do is thrash around like a Jesus Fish on a shipdeck. It's not too hard to compare him sabotaging his own never-released tortured lament Wally with endless overdubbing because it was too honest, and him ruining with endless overarrangement his own joyful resolution of the tumultuous series of events that Wally was originally supposed to document; religious ephiphanies don't go so well with irony.

I'm sure all musical critics, from Pierre Boulez right through to Johnny Vaughan, would agree that a pretty admirable accomplishment for a pop song is to make the listener want to be God, or at least Jesus. The heartwrenching Anna Stesia grabs the painfully physical planet earth and holds on for dear life while screaming to the heavens, and whatever they might contain, for help. It's by far the closest Prince gets on this album to the emotional nakedness suggested by the physical nakedness of the cover, and to the intense vulnerability you suspect is what truly lies behind the rest of the album's blindingly bright pantomime of grinning joy. Its spine-melting transcendence takes aim with a quivering hand before splattering the listener's emotions all over the wall, creating a bright pastel-colored mural as diverse as it is homogeneous. Any cynicism regarding religion, Prince, or the force that is created when the two are combined, is completely blanketed by a mix of sympathy, pity, joy, slack-jawed awe and - gulp! - idolatry. A diverse list of feeeeelings, all combining to form a single entity known as....love, maybe? This Lovesexy bullshit sure is hard to follow. Whatever the case, you wish you were God, or Jesus, or Anna Garcia (do I have the dates of my dates right?), just so you could shut him up. If God truly is love, as the conclusion of the song states, then the overpowering kaleidoscopic emotional attachment and anguished yearning that Anna Stesia manages to create surely marks a unarguable success for this album's attempt to celebrate that concept.

Prince buried Anna Stesia for 13 years (like pretty much every other track on Lovesexy) before digging it out to serve as the setlist climax for his first truly full-on "Prince, Brought To You By The Jehovah's Witnesses" tour, the now-legendary One Nite Alone jaunt. Before having the entire auditorium singing its refrain "God Is Love, Love Is God, Girls & Boys Love God Above", he occasionally asked if any of the audience believed in God. I said yes.

WHAT'S HE DONE TO ME!!?!?!??? DO THE JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES HAVE ANY IDEA OF THE POWER THEIR NEW TOY WIELDS!?!?!?

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I just watched the concert and it kicks the CD's butt.He was too beautiful for words. The performance is out of this world....but I digress...