By Ann Powers, Times Staff Writer


The Purple One reinvents himself again, and the result it as catchy as it is cutting edge.

Prince must wake up some mornings — or, let's be realistic, afternoons — and wish he'd never recorded "Purple Rain." Dozens of albums into his career, with a sound as sharp and renewable as anyone's in pop history, he's still slapping away the assumption that he peaked in the 1980s.

Lately he's been getting attention for innovative sidesteps, playing in unusual spots such as the Roosevelt Hotel and giving away close to 3 million copies of his new album to lucky Brits in last week's Mail on Sunday newspaper. But the music at the center of this latest whirl of activity will still be judged against the 49-year-old rebel's youthful landmarks.

On "Planet Earth" (due in stores today), Prince confronts this problem by creating a cunning homage to himself. This tour of the master's cabinet of wonders opens with a spiritually minded power ballad that evokes 1987's "The Cross" without imitating it; the kundalini-stimulating slow jams and genre-hopping hook-fests that follow — a few reuniting Prince with Wendy and Lisa, the main muses of his big-hair heyday — explore old themes with just enough variation to stimulate affection instead of a yawn.

What each listener likes will depend on the corner of Prince's aural empire he or she fancies. So far, many prefer "Chelsea Rodgers," a funk throw-down about a book-reading model who "likes to talk to Jimi's ghost," with Prince's new favorite earth mama, Shelby J, nabbing the vocal lead. (Ms. Rodgers, not evident on the track, is apparently flesh and blood; she was by Prince's side during at least one Roosevelt Hotel after-party, and has a website, though it's still under construction.)

One-time wearers of raspberry-colored berets might prefer "The One You Wanna C," a Wendy and Lisa-powered slice of sunshine that brings back the mechanical hand clap, or "Resolution," an offhanded sing-along in which Prince explains how to save the world.

The pimp rap "Mr. Goodnight" also deserves mention, for its smooth delivery and lyrics that would have fit into the script of "Under the Cherry Moon." "I got a mind full of good intentions, and a mouth full of Raisinets," Prince murmurs. Just listen to that eyebrow rise.

There's also "Guitar," in which Prince gets bored with mining his own mother lode and turns to U2's, modifying the Edge's famous riff from "I Will Follow." "Guitar" is a slap at an unfaithful lover and a sly satire of rock 'n' roll grandstanding: "I love you baby, but not like I love my guitar," Prince spits as that riff chases him around the corner. As if he'd ever have to make a choice between the two.

Uniting seeming opposites has always been Prince's mission: masculine and feminine, rock and soul, spirituality and sex come together in his utopia. The deepest track on "Planet Earth" has him working toward this vision again.

Pulled forward by a kick-drum and a thick current of open-tuned guitar, "Lion of Judah" is a cry from the wilderness — whatever wilderness a multi-millionaire pop star experiences — blending scriptural references, bedroom musings, and even a veiled reference to John Lennon's "Instant Karma." A ghost of the melody from 1991's "Money Don't Matter 2 Night" lingers around the song, but this is something different. It's Prince now, as conflicted, imaginative, and wonderfully weird as ever.


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It’s never been surprising that Prince is a contradictory presence, an icon that seems to emit pure sexual energy while only releasing perverted little notions of licentiousness, or a man of elaborately modern fashion that ends up relentlessly retro; the lithe self-appointed slave that broke his binds with a major label and then cashed in. Maybe the fact that his recent contradiction is just plain laughable is a matter of age or maturity or boredom, but make no bones about it: Prince is befuddled by technology even when he seeks to ride its cusp.

He’s got that deal with Verizon wherein only Verizon users could download his “Guitar” single, and then only through their phone. He gives away his album in Sunday Mail issues in the UK. He gives a shout-out to “MP3!” during “Mr. Goodnight” after previously crooning, “In this digital age you can just page me / I know it’s the rage, but it don’t engage me / Like the face to face” over smooth jazz sax and piano chords dropping blots of nubile dewishness. (He, um, encourages people to test out his new fragrance by having them visit a website.) And because his marketing intentions zip out in illogical directions, he often reduces his sexy wit to insular retreads. “Page” you, Prince? Get this killer of a date from the same “Mr. Goodnight“: “Watch Chocolat on the big screen / Before we convene in the pool.” Fuck, and then you can offer her a sarsaparilla, maybe. And remember how you wooed that fancy female by telling a “little Spanish man” to have her call your cell in order to discuss matching outfits for the night’s festivities? Before, you would have been in the bedroom waiting, helping the poor girl undress, and telling her exactly what to wear. And there’s a chance she would have been your sister.

Of course his new geriatric stance towards technology isn’t graceless. Prince is still able to make classlessness into weird vogue, going all Sigur Rós in his liner notes for the benefit of some cracker jack hologram that flips between his Symbol and the type of artist-confronts-world Galactus Photoshop shitball that has the same idea as the cover of the recent D12 album, only gayer. OK, slightly less gay. But “gay” is cheap and Prince looks as naïve as he’s ever been, which has been something of a strength for his career, him transforming every gesture into genderless butterfuck. So, we accept a dopey cover like Planet Earth’s and know deep in our hearts that Prince is more of a man than any other human being, that he screws like a champ, chews gum, and takes names. (Only to forget them.)

And of course, what actually lies inside Prince’s twenty-somethingth album is more than disappointing; it’s thinly if grandly produced, tapped with a veneer so dumbly decades behind any sense of interesting or intriguing taste that one can’t help but sit back and swallow the benign whole, thinking all along, Who the fuck even makes music like this anymore? The last two songs alone are simultaneously ghastly and gorgeous, such soul-obliterating dreck that it surpasses kitsch and sidles alongside Har Mar Superstar’s hirsute stench: “Lion of Judah” stumbles between a muddy guitar tone and hermetically sealed harmonizing, the border a transparent wall of religious imagery; “Resolution” -- incorrectly named in the coding on some presses of the CD, once again tagging Prince the unintended old man Luddite -- provides the perfect counterpoint to the opening track, because first Prince hopefully wails, “Planet Earth must commit to balance with the One,” as his guitar agrees, and then later he admits, “The main problem with war / Is that nobody ever wins…The main problem with people / Is they never do what they say.” Then he shifts his bastardized Jimmy Buffet lick into a starry show tune, and then he pees out the worst-mixed guitar solo I’ve heard all year. Oh, and then? He fades in and out a synth crescendo. Try to imagine how that actually sounds. It’s like Prince’s What’s Goin On (1971) only instead of Detroit it’s about, like, the whole world.

So, you’re expecting a Prince album, I know, and this one pays a healthy daub of ballads and splatting funk. It’s not bent on any comeback as Musicology (2004) or 3121 (2006) might have been, because Prince is back, born again, tempered, mainstream, Super Bowled and American Idol’d, replete with shrapnel of the Revolution ooh-ing and ahh-ing between his legs. But 3121 had “Black Sweat” and Musicology glowed with post-post-“emancipation,” so, if anything, Planet Earth is limp and predictable; catchy, sure, and funny, but the dude’s dead serious. And Prince has always been dead serious, or, at least, if he’s as great as I know him to be, he’s always been dead serious even when acting tongue-in-cheek. Now he’s just dissolved the world he’s spent the last thirty years building and is existing in our reality where all the shit he does contradicts and grates, frills and slips backwards in time and farts out tired moments of nostalgia.

Bring back the unbridled, selfish Prince of 1995-2004, the one that indulged in contradiction and didn’t give a shit; his logic was his world’s logic, and that was enough to make each doofus-y record from that time an event or, at least, a novelty. The closest we get now is a half-baked turntablist scratch somewhere inside “Chelsea Rodgers.” It’s as if he’s just discovered the joy of tape manipulation. A couple decades too late.

Dom Sinacola
August 10, 2007

i like the second one better, its more truthfull.