Purple reign

Prince performs during the Super Bowl half-time show in Miami on Feb. 4, 2007. (Sony Music Canada)

Not since that gilded moment in 1984 when he had America’s No. 1 single (When Doves Cry), movie and album (Purple Rain and its soundtrack) has there been such an abundance of Prince-ness. If you’re in the U.K., the new Prince album, Planet Earth, might have fallen out of your newspaper. Brits who somehow missed out on one of the nearly three million copies of Planet Earth inserted into The Mail on Sunday on July 15 could still receive a complimentary copy by purchasing a ticket for one of his 21 concerts in London in August. Sony BMG in North America released Planet Earth on July 24 in a rather more conventional fashion, i.e., they expect people to pay for it. But downloadable versions of the disc are already clogging up the Internet, not so surprising considering the glut of the physical version.

Though British music retailers were apoplectic over Prince’s unusual business move, he defended it as an example of “direct marketing.” What he’s marketing is his live shows, which are becoming the primary way musical acts earn their livelihood, seeing as album sales — both Prince’s and everybody else’s — have eroded significantly over the last several years. His strategy does make a certain amount of sense if his only objectives are encouraging people to hear his new music and buy tickets to his concerts. (In 2004, the singer used a new CD as a consumer incentive, giving the album Musicology free to concertgoers.)

Planet Earth is more than simply a marketing enticement. At its best, it’s a sprightly showcase for Prince’s enduring ability to mix up pop, rock, funk and R&B in a pleasing fashion; at worst, it’s mediocre. The album’s two sunniest songs, The One U Wanna C and All the Midnights in the World, are evidence of the return of Prince’s long-absent and much-missed collaborators Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman (a.k.a. Wendy and Lisa). But what’s most troubling to Prince’s older fans — and considering his career peaked commercially in the mid-’80s, that group comprises the vast majority — is his disdain for the idea of the album as a sacrosanct art object. Shouldn’t it be a coherent encapsulation of an artist’s ethos and aesthetic? Short of that, isn’t it supposed to have all his new hot tunes?

Both of those ideals can be found in Prince’s string of masterworks in the ’80s, a period bracketed by two much-revered double albums: 1999 and Sign o’ the Times. Fuelled by his obsessions with sex and religion, the music was heady, lusty, witty and unpredictable. Such was his brilliance and productivity, even his B-sides or giveaways to other artists — like Nothing Compares 2 U, which he originally wrote for funk-pop protegés the Family but which later became a smash for Sinéad O’Connor — were gems.

We couldn’t have expected him to keep up that pace forever. True to form, Prince’s flameout was as idiosyncratic as everything else he’s done. The first sign of trouble was his last-minute decision to spike the release of The Black Album in late 1987. (It instantly became a much-coveted bootleg.) Reportedly unsettled by the disc’s “evil” vibe, he substituted it with the more upbeat Lovesexy in May 1988. Though both discs were flawed, together they comprise a startling vision of his artistry at the time. (Amazingly, he released both albums and Sign o’ the Times within the same 13-month period.) The same cannot be said of his soundtrack to Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), a set of mostly lame, gimmicky funk, or Graffiti Bridge, a slapdash collection of music for his third and most widely ignored movie vehicle.

As the Purple One’s most devoted subjects know, what comes after this juncture has been a lot to endure. Indeed, the typical Prince fan has experienced almost 20 years of bewilderment and frustration, with just enough glimmers of his old magic to keep us from giving up on him entirely. Though the quality of his recorded output never declined as badly as it did for other major artists (e.g., Rod Stewart after Smiler, the Rolling Stones after Some Girls), Prince nevertheless became distressingly cavalier and sometimes wildly counterproductive.

One reason was his war with Warner Bros., the record label that first signed him in 1979, when he was 19. The enmity arose over the ownership of his master tapes. Prince’s guerrilla tactics in the fight included writing “slave” on his face for public appearances and replacing his name with a symbol. (Hence the phrase The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, which yielded the unlovable acronym TAFKAP.) Later Warner albums like Come (1994) and Chaos and Disorder (1996) put the “obligation” in the phrase “contractual obligation.” Once he’d been released from his contract, Prince formed his own label, New Power Generation, also the name of his backing group since the end of his fabled Revolution line-up in the mid-’80s. The three-disc set that followed, Emancipation (1996), suggested that he had indeed been holding back goodies from Warner, but the set wasn’t exactly free of chaff. A daunting number of NPG releases ensued — including ones only available online or to fan-club members, self-indulgent instrumental discs and The Rainbow Children (2001), a stupefying though intermittently brilliant concept album devoted to his new faith as a Jehovah’s Witness.

Every so often, he would make a temporary alliance with a major label (like Arista for 1999’s Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic) to release a disc that was inevitably — if implausibly — trumpeted as a comeback. But only with the greatest-hits tour that accompanied the release of Musicology (2004) did Prince make a strong return to the charts. The upcoming world tour should also buoy the fortunes of Planet Earth.

Concertgoers may take a shine to Guitar, a recent single that repurposes half of the riff to U2’s I Will Follow with infectiously funky results, or Planet Earth’s breezy closer, Revelation. Part of what makes these songs so appealing is that they could have surfaced during Prince’s heyday. Having heard so many of his new ideas misfire over the last 20 years, I’m not the only fan who’s happier when he relies on the tried and true.

In many ways, Prince has been unable to progress past his innovations of the ’80s because he fell out of step with a music scene for which he’d once been at the vanguard. As critic Michaelangelo Matos outlined in his book on Sign o’ the Times (part of the 33 1/3 series on classic albums), Prince’s artistic crisis in the late ’80s stemmed in large part from his inability to face the challenge posed by hip-hop. At first dismissive of the new sound, he later tried to integrate it, with poor results: 1991’s Diamonds & Pearls was badly marred by the lacklustre MC action by rapper Tony M. and Prince himself. Once the quality that allowed him to unite previously disparate rock and R&B (read: white and black) audiences, Prince’s genre mashing became a liability in the ’90s. He was too much of a showboat polymath to adopt the trendier, neo-traditionalist take on soul and R&B practised by artists like Maxwell and D’Angelo in the ’90s, and Ne-Yo, Musiq Soulchild and Robin Thicke now.

Ultimately, Prince belongs in a category of one, a situation that likely suits him fine. A generation ago, a residency at a Las Vegas casino was a sure sign of an artist’s decline, but Prince’s profile received an additional boost after the brisk sales and rave reviews of his recent six-month run at the Rio. (Lest you think he’s giving everything away for free, tickets for the Rio shows started at $125.) Still the consummate entertainer, he provided the only spark of life during the moribund Super Bowl telecast this past January. Planet Earth may only be modestly engaging, but it’s enough to stave off demands that Prince abdicate his lonely throne.

Planet Earth is in stores now.

Jason Anderson is a Toronto-based writer.

Prince seeks some crowd response during a concert in 1991. (Frank Micelotta/Getty Images)