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Royal Blush

Prince is back with a major tour and album. After a lost decade, a new generation of artists has rediscovered him. But can he crown his comeback with a fresh burst of creativity?

Sean O'Hagan
Sunday April 4, 2004
The Observer

Last weekend, tickets for the opening show of Prince's American arena tour, his first in nearly a decade, were changing hands over the internet for $1,200 apiece. Simultaneously, in Houston, Texas, over a thousand fans queued for hours outside a 600-seat theatre in the hope of gaining admission to a live telecast of the same Los Angeles show, despite the event having been sold out for weeks in advance.
On Prince-related websites across the globe, fans swapped memories of past concerts, of their fleeting glimpses of the reclusive pop star, of the lengths they had gone to in order to find a ticket for this current tour; 'They have "Fan Club Seats" listed for Atlanta for $475 each!' complained one luckless devotee, though she seemed to be alone in thinking that cost, rather than availability, was an issue worth worrying about.

The buzz of expectation and excitement that accompanied Prince's return to the stage may have had something to do with his announcement that this would be the last time he would ever play his hits live, which, were he to keep to his word, would be the last time anyone would witness what is arguably the greatest back catalogue of pop songs of the past 25 years. Or, it could signal the fact that, though the critics have long consigned the Minneapolis maverick to the dustbin of pop history, the fans think differently. They know that, on a good night, Prince is the greatest live performer pop has ever produced, a talent so instinctive and so disciplined that he effortlessly transcends the sum of his stellar influences. Put simply, he is as funky as James Brown, as sexually charged as Jimi Hendrix, as musically dextrous as the Seventies Stevie Wonder, and as superfly-cool as Sly Stone - often all in the space of a single song. If the early reviews are anything to go by, this retrospective show is a spectacular return to form.

There may, also, though, be another less obvious, and more complex, reason why people want to see Prince right now. While his decline as an artist over the past decade has been protracted and often painful to behold in its self-defeating perversity, he has simultaneously become the single most pervasive influence on contemporary cutting-edge black music. A generation who were not even born when he was at his peak in the Eighties are coming to his songs via the work of artists who have either namechecked his songs, sampled his music and lyrics, or pastiched his slick, funky Eighties sound. OutKast, the most popular rap outfit of the past year, homaged 'Sign "O" the Times', Prince's greatest song, on 'She Lives in My Lap', one of the best tracks on their Speakerboxx/The Love Below album. Before that, Britain's Basement Jaxx's paraded their love for him on 'Right Here Hits the Spot', while in 2001, Alicia Keys had a huge crossover hit with a forgotten Prince B-side, 'How Come You Don't Call Me'. Though his own star may seem to have waned, Prince's reign continues in terms of his invisible, but emphatic, presence in today's pop music.

'He's in a unique position because of his odd trajectory,' elaborates the music journalist Barney Hoskyns, author of Imp of the Perverse, one of the earliest and best Prince biographies. 'For anyone of taste, he was the greatest star of the Eighties, much more cool and musically innovative than Madonna or Michael Jackson. Then, the Nineties came along, and suddenly he meant nothing at all. It was a truly desperate decade for Prince. He started behaving in some really strange ways, not least towards the record company that had signed him and towards the industry in general. It was as if the perverse streak that had always underpinned his best music had suddenly gotten side-tracked, and this ungrateful, megalomaniacal side came out. Now he's slipped back into the frame; you can hear traces of his best work all over the place right now.'

The moment at which Prince stopped making sense as a pop star to all but the most obsessive Prince fans occurred sometime around the end of the Eighties, the decade in which his records set the standards for great pop music. After a run of half a dozen great albums from 1980's lubricious Dirty Mind to 1988's pop-tinged but still funky LoveSexy, Prince suddenly seemed to lose his way in pretty spectacular fashion. Gone was the fertile and playful musical imagination that produced hits like the delirious 'Kiss' and the epochal 'Sign "O" the Times', wherein funk sassiness and political savvy were merged in a way unheard of since the Seventies.

Since then, there have been the odd moments of inspiration, most of them tucked away on 1991's patchy Diamonds & Pearls, and the the hugely inflated triple album, Emancipation from 1996. In the past 15 years, though, Prince has tended to make the headlines more for his eccentric behaviour than for his eclectic musical output. First, there were the various, and increasingly surreal, name changes - until recently he insisted on being referred to as 'The Artist Formerly Known As Prince', which was only marginally less absurd than his brief deployment of a symbol rather than a name. This was the behaviour of a man who, even by the standards of celebrity dysfunction, seemed seriously out of touch with reality. Unsurprisingly, the music press that had once fawned on him now turned on him with malevolent glee: for a time he was rechristened simply 'Squiggle'.

Then came Prince's protracted one-man war with the music business following his dissatisfaction with a new contract he had signed with Warner Brothers towards the end of the Eighties, said to be worth $100 million. Though his case had validity - Warners retained rights to his master recordings which all but denied him performance rights to his own songs - he did not help it by appearing in public with the word 'Slave' written across his cheek in eyeliner pencil.

In April 1996, it looked like the stress of that bitterly contested business battle had taken its toll when Prince was admitted to hospital suffering from chest pains and nausea. His partial collapse was exacerbated by his impending fatherhood. He had married one of his onstage dancers, Mayte Garcia, back in February of the same year. In October, she give birth to a child who died a week later from complications brought about by a rare skull disease called Pfieffer's syndrome. Prince seemed to go into total denial, and the chain of events that followed suggested a man approaching the end of his tether. In November, he shot a promo video in which he dressed up in medical garb and visited a smiling and visibly pregnant Mayte in hospital. That same month, while rumours of his child's death were spreading through the media, he appeared on Oprah Winfrey's show. When asked about the rumours, Prince replied: 'It's all good - never mind what you hear.' Emancipation, a series of hymns to the joys of marriage and family, was duly released. Prince's refusal to publicly acknowledge the death of his child continued until the baby's former nanny, having been fired by Prince, sold her story to the News of the World which ran with a typically lurid story entitled 'Prince Pulled Plug on Baby'. The layers of subterfuge and denial that led to a poignant story of personal tragedy becoming scurrilous fodder for the tabloids suggested an immensely troubled man.

Given all that has happened, then, it is perhaps unsurprising that, like many pioneering black artists before him, Prince has sought solace in the church. Though he was brought up as a practising Seventh Day Adventist he has recently, like Michael Jackson before him, become a Jehovah's Witness.

The story of his conversion broke in typically surreal fashion last October, when a newspaper in his hometown reported how a married couple had answered their door to find Prince proffering a copy of the Watchtower. Though they were orthodox Jews, and it was Yom Kippur, they were also Prince fans. They welcomed him into the house where, with his friend Larry Graham, erstwhile member of Sly & the Family Stone, one of Prince's core influences, he spread the word of Jehovah for 20 minutes before moving on to the next house.

Although he has always spoken openly about his religious beliefs - 'The Cross' from Sign 'O' the Times was a veritable hymn - and his conversion had been signalled in retrospect by his recent album The Rainbow Children, which can now be read as a paean to his new-found faith, the media viewed his outing as further confirmation that Prince was now second only to Michael Jackson in the pop oddball stakes.

What this means in terms of his musical direction is probably of interest to none but the most diehard of Prince fans. The rest of us, many of whom anticipated Prince's Eighties releases with the kind of excitement that only attends the work of the truly gifted, now look forward to the release of yet another Prince album with a mixture of resignation and wishful thinking.

'You hope against hope for him to come back and cut it like he used to,' says DJ Norman Jay, a man who played at several Prince parties in the Eighties, 'but with every hyped record that turns out to be just another Prince album, that hope diminishes. He's the classic illustration of the old A&R adage that if you give an artist total creative control, you'll destroy them. He's been allowed to release far too much stuff, and he's probably surrounded himself with people who are all telling him everything he touches is great. That's a recipe for pure self-indulgence even - especially - where genius is concerned.'

The direly named Musicology, released on 19 April but already available on the internet though the Musicology Download Store, where you can access Prince's new and old music at 99 cents per track, is, it has to be said, one of those above-average Prince albums - but only if measured against his post-1990 back catalogue. It kicks off with the title track, which is the kind of taut, exuberant pop-funk that will send a shiver of recognition down the spine of anyone who, like me, has spent the best part of a decade willing him to revisit past heights. Then, like too many late Prince albums, it settles into something approaching the formulaic: too many half-hearted songs, too many muscular but empty studio jams. You have to wait until the final song, 'Reflection', for a taste of the vintage laid-back pop-soul that nobody else can do quite like Prince. 'Sometimes I just wanna go sit out on the stoop and play my guitar', he sings on the final line, 'and just watch all the cars go by.' For a moment, you sense that he, too, is thinking what the rest of us are thinking.

'You just wish he would do something stripped down and important,' says Barney Hoskyns, 'maybe just 16 tracks, a guitar, a keyboard and a drum machine. Something unforced and instinctive.'

For the time being though, that seems like just more wishful thinking. Only time will tell whether Prince can do what only the greatest of pop stars can do, and arrest a long middle-period decline with a late surge of creativity, if the perverse genius that fuels his eccentricity can once again ignite his music. In the meantime, his current tour, if it ever reaches these shores, may well be the last glimpse of the last truly great pop genius of modern times, the end of something we may only truly appreciate when it is gone.

Heirs to the throne


Alicia Keys


The soul sensation turned Prince's B-side 'How Come You Don't Call Me' into a hit, and last month paid homage when he was inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame.

Basement Jaxx


According to co-founder Simon Ratcliffe, listening to Prince helped them 'take dance music and combine it with other forms, fusing black and white music'.

Beck


His 1999 album Midnite Vultures was inspired by the playful lasciviousness Prince showed during the Eighties.

Outkast


The hottest band of 2003 obviously revisited their Prince LPs before making their multi-platinum album, Speakerboxx/The Love Below.

Interesting article.

Thanks.