Suddenly, as if it was the most logical choice in the world, Jarvis Cocker is playing Sometimes it snows in April with Prince in his Sunday program on BBC alternative 6music. He does it just after a most obscure Dennis Hopper recording of Fred Neil song.
At the same time, I can not stop listening to the Californian and easy wizardry artist Ariel Pink, whose new mixtape contains lots of music I can not even deduce the geographical, linguistic or even temporally - and When You Were Mine by Prince.
Robyn gives out the first of three new albums in a career where Prince has remained a constant and clear source of inspiration. MIA doing a DJ gig at a club in east London and fills her set with Prince. And Oscar Linnros picks up the baton from the Swedish pop - with Gadd, Orup and Scocco in the forefront - from the 80 century when Prince taped out a new path through music history.
2010 avoids not escape Prince.
Now, when he comes to Roskilde for its first Scandinavian festival gig, his classics, right from 1978 until the 1990s, last year are more present now than they were when they came out.
It's June.
Tudum-dum-dumdum.
When I heard Jarvis presenting Sometimes it snows in April awakened my once almost boundless love for Prince to life again.
And the day after, I try, for the first time since it was issued, taking on Princes latest album from 2007.
So terribly much hasn't really changed, musically. But it is almost terrible to listen to and ridiculous in its own retrospective tone.
Fleshy aerobics rock on his beloved guitar, ballads that sound just like most of us wish that a Prince ballad should sound but fail to reach. Pop songs are just on the borderline between a new wave struttig Tom Petty and his own patented Minneapolisfunk.
And the Beatles and Joni Mitchell tune flora which he always returns to,his falsetto voice is intact and texts are sometimes just as surreal wayward as they were in Around the World in a Day and Parade.
I continue to marvel at how it happened until I discover that after the disc I listen to - Planet earth - a new album has arrived. As recently as last year, the triple abum Lotus Flow3r.
My fascination for Prince is actually intact. So how I miss entirely new triple album? The fault lies with me or Prince? Or is it even about something as boring as the choice of distribution channels and the lack of traditional public relations?
The night I saw the Prince of Ice Stadium at the Lovesexy tour in the late 80th century belongs to probably the best concerts I have ever seen. The two shows I saw with Prince on the same Isstadion a year earlier on the Sign o 'the Times tour undoubtedly does.
Nevertheless, a new album with Prince walk me unnoticed. That would never happen to another world artist, barely even with those I do not care about.
And, at the same time, he was appointed as late as 2005 - the American Rolling Stone - the world's most successful artist with an annual income of nearly sixty million.
Someone listening apparently more accurate than what I do.
But how did he get from the wide open experimental sad ballad of snowfall in April to a jazz funk with neither edges, meaning or purpose? As Jehovah's Witness Prince has become, he would probably answer like Al Green's priest did when Green asked why the music in the church was so sad:
-Mr Green, we sang to catch your attention, we would sing as you want us to sing. But it's not you we want to reach. We are trying to reach a little higher.
I wanted to write that Prince is musics counterpart of Woody Allen, an auteur whose every new work incorrectly treated as a magnificent return to what he does best, what once made him a global affair.
But it is not really. I have this week asked several musicians and British critics of what they wish Prince would do.
What do we really want to have a new album with Prince?
No one answered anything particularly interesting.
The common opinion was that Princes story is finished narrated. It should not be. Prince's born the same year as Kate Bush, Charlie Kaufman, Madonna, Thurston Moore, Madonna and Paul Weller.
The album Musicology generated amounts of statuettes at the 2004 American Grammy Gala. In summer 2007 he performed 21 nights at London's O2 Arena, and sold 140,000 tickets. The ticket price (£ 31.21) included a copy of his latest album with the same title as the fare, 3121st
Still, it's an opinion I, myself, agree on, although I do not want it.
On 14 November 1996, I sat in a taxi in Minneapolis. It turned out on Highway 94 and headed towards the suburb of Chanhassen. The driver stopped outside a pure white building at 7801 Audubon Road that looked like a drug factory futuristic glass triangles on the roof.
Paisley Park.
I remember that there were lots of little Prince fans outside the gates out there on Minnesota's frigid winter tundra. There, inside, Princes combined home and studio, the release party for his trippelabum Emancipation, the first in a long series of triple album.
Around a strange buffet tables - which are mostly composed of breakfast cereal - saunter guests D'Angelo, Mavis Staples, parts of Goodie Mob and designer Donatella Versace around. It is said that James Brown will be in the house, but I never see him.
And then Prince enters the stage. I no longer remember which songs he played.
For up there, he treated his song treasures like small trampolines to take the music higher up, to the next plateau. There I got the explain why Miles Davis, when someone once claimed that Prince is a brilliant soul singer, just laughed and replied that the Prince rather is the world's best jazz musicians.
Even then, for nearly fourteen years ago, Prince, for a white European audience, was seen as has-been. The reason was that he had stopped making music for them or in any case a music they immediately knew and associated with "his" Prince; by Purple Rain.
He had rather grown up to be a Prince who constantly came back to the late seventies jazz funk colossi. Bands that never reached Europe, mostly to those with their dozen bare-breasted members could not afford to tour here, but also because the music is often met a local function. Each little town had its funk orchestra. His own fusion of the largest, its own hybrid of James Brown, George Clinton and Earth, Wind & Fire.
The Fatback Band, Slave, Ohio Players, Mass Production, Faze-O and Zapp took all of the most danceable elements from p-funk and James Brown and was the live soundtrack to every black high school dance.
Prince also grew up with these bands, they have colored all of his most timeless records. But its also those discs that the majority of the European public never really understood. The rapid and almost furious big band funk that always form the backbone of Princes concerts - and more and more of his album - is still underestimated and too difficult to transport across the Atlantic.
When my interview with Prince of Paisley Park was published had the title The Last of the artist. It is a description that is even more true today.
He is not just jazz musicians and soul singer or a sexy funk squiggle. He, more than anyone - or anything else - just Artist with a capital A. Probably the only live singer, dancer, composer and guitarist who is equally at home in every music fan generation of expression that constitutes a bridge between popular appeal and snobbery, between Hornstulls or Hoxtons hipster colonies and funk academics in a ponytail.
Prince is as logical as desirable reference American Idol, in a theoretical rock historians notebooks in both the youngest and most feminine electro production or hip-hop world.
That is why he is still one of the world's greatest artists.
The only fair comparison, if you try to place the Prince in a historical perspective, it is the right of James Brown and especially Brown seventies. He released two albums after the double album without Sweden even notice them, let alone reviewed them.
Today they are recognized classics, much more so than the boards with his greatest hits from the sixties ended.
A new Prince album, with the working title Androgynine, was about to be released any day for half a year now. Just one week ago, on his 52nd birthday, premiered played Prince song Hot Summer from it on a local radio station in Minnesota.
But first readers of the Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad and the British Daily Mirror next weekend a whole different newly-recorded Prince album - named 20TEN - wrapped in plastic in its Sunday supplement.
Yet, says Prince to Hot Nieuwusblad to 20TEN already "feels like old music."
I located the three albums before you, he argues.
I have a nagging feeling in the stomach and the heart that says both 20TEN and Androgynine simply sounds like Prince, that his genius did not have one iota of decades or time to do.
We are many who seriously need another twenty years for us to even find the time it takes to catch up with the Prince.
Lokko lists the musical highlights
Lokko LIST MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS
Dirty Mind (album, 1980)
On 8 October 1980 Prince became Prince. Before that, on his first two albums, he was a soul singer, among a thousand others. With Dirty Mind, he stopped trying to be something other than the philosophical pervert deep down he wanted to be or become: from the cover image of the Prince in only black leather underwear and a coat military coat to his patented meeting between pitch black funk and pure white pop with lyrics about oral sex and incest fantasize tier.
Nothing in Princes huge production sound nearly as modern and relevant today as precisely Dirty Mind. And it is still difficult to understand how this music was created exactly the same time as Joy Division, on our side of the Atlantic, had just released his last album, Closer.
The most beautiful girl in the world (single, 1994)
And on the seventh day Prince decided to return to soul singer. After beating knot on himself and his career by changing his name to a peculiar symbol, fighting against multinational windmills and lose himself in pumping big band funk as he composed only the simplest declaration of love with the finest melody and fluffiest guitar loop of them all.
Nothing compares 2 u (livelåt, 1985-2010)
Prince wrote to his side project The Family in 1985. No one reacted. Five years later played the Irish singer Sinead O'Connor in and wrote forever into the history books as one of the last century's most accomplished songs about broken hearts. But when the Prince himself sits down at the piano on a stage and decides to go up in the ring against Sineads interpretation is it always a breathless moment to kill for.
Sign o 'the Times (single and double album, 1987)
I would so much rather invest any of Princes pure funk works - any The Black Album - up here. But it would also be a lie. For nowhere else in either their own or someone else's career fit as much of the entire 1900s musical palette in the same small purple squiggle that right here.
The music, the ideas, texts, politics and ambition crowding on this double album still lacks precedent. Sign o 'the Times is the moment when all pages of a highly complex genius decides to create his masterpiece. The most fascinating is how the music is so tightly nailed in the late 80's precisely why, 23 years later, manages to appear as art hovering above time and space.
Sign o 'the Times is one of the ultimate evidence that music that strives timelessness rarely or never reaches its target; it is always the opposite that makes it in the end.
Sometimes it Snows in April (album tracks, 1986)
All the greats have this kind of singing. Whoever does not fit in anywhere. Like Scott Walker Nite Flites. Closing song on Parade - which was also the soundtrack to the remarkable film Under the Cherry Moon - is an almost ambient eight-minute ballad about a friend's death, which has close to the music we normally rather associate with art musician David Sylvian and Robert Wyatt than to funk - tradition smallest managers and innovators.
[Edited 6/9/15 15:11pm]
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