http://www.timesonline.co...81,00.html

Rock and Pop


April 17, 2004

His Purple reign continues
Remember when Prince was cool? Musicians do, says Tom Gatti



“Don’t you miss the feeling music gave you back in the day?” Prince asks on his new single, Musicology, leading an album of the same (awful) name. The answer, of course, is yes. Back in the day Prince’s album Purple Rain could sit at No 1 in the US charts for 24 weeks. Always prolific, in the Eighties he was a one-man Heath Robinson hit factory.
Head-turning, life-changing music poured out of Prince so quickly that he had to create off-shoot bands to mop up the excess — the Time, Vanity 6. He shrugged off Top Ten hits (Manic Monday to the Bangles and Nothing Compares 2 U to Sinead O’Connor) like so much extra baggage. He gave us the licentious post-punk of Dirty Mind, the apocalyptic pop of 1999, the dizzying stylistic range of Purple Rain, and the twisted house party of Sign o’ the Times. His musical virtuosity, androgynous sexuality, enigmatic pronouncements and demonic stage presence set a celebrity standard that remains unmatched.

So yes, Prince, we miss the feeling. For however maverick and perverse he seemed, Prince always cared about commercial success. His signature tune, the power ballad Purple Rain, was a calculated move to cross over into the Middle American mainstream.

And now, after several years of subscription-only internet releases and consistently disappointing “returns-to-form”, he has recently joined the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, stolen the show at the Grammies, embarked on a major tour, and persuaded Sony-owned Columbia Records to take up the mantle of Musicology. Will it give us back that elusive feeling? It seems unlikely. The single is a jolly, tight funk jam, referencing Prince’s mentors James Brown and Sly Stone. It tastes pretty good, but, unsurprisingly, it’s not the prelapsarian pop apple we have all been waiting for.



If His Royal Badness himself isn’t going to give it up, we need to look elsewhere for our fix of Princely spirit. Where to start? Well, I’ve gone to a dingey North London pub, where I’m watching five white boys rock backwards and forwards across a tiny stage like milk bottles on a float. Over a clip-clop machine beat, a stop-start bassline and a saw-tooth synth, the short bespectacled one sings in an impassioned falsetto: “I’m sick of motherf***ers trying to tell me that they’re down with Prince.” I’m laughing in disbelief, but this isn’t a joke — it’s exhilarating. They are Hot Chip, and they are, as their first EP trumpets, “Down with Prince”.

“I was so tired of people namedropping Prince that I decided to retaliate,” said vocalist and bandleader Alexis Taylor, when the EP was released in February. “What we’re trying to do is serious. Everyone is trying to pastiche Prince, so we thought if we do it in the most blatant way possible, it might still stand up in its own right.”

Hot Chip’s mission is a timely one: as Prince’s own popularity sinks, his influences are bubbling to the surface. His heirs are said to include Alicia Keys, Beck, Basement Jaxx, and OutKast. But what’s the criteria? Soul sister Alicia Keys covered the Prince B-side How Come You Don’t Call Me? while the mercurial Beck created a whole album — Midnite Vultures — that sounds freshly torn from the Purple One’s songbook. “I wanted to like it, but there’s no real love for the music there; it feels like a joke,” Taylor complains.

But there are worse offenders. The wittily monikered Har Mar Superstar makes a career out of his Seventies porn reject looks and clownish, Prince- derived electro-funk sex jams. Electric Six, the band behind last year’s ubiquitous Danger! High Voltage!, smother themselves in camp carnality. When Britain’s favourite band is a Queen tribute act (the Darkness), is the empty jest of the novelty nostalgia act threatening to eclipse original pop music altogether?

There is still hope. Thankfully, the Princely spirit also works in slightly more mysterious ways. The trademark falsetto returns in Justin Timberlake’s swoon-inducing Justified, and OutKast’s inventive hip-hop crossover success, Speakerboxx/The Love Below. The Brixton dance duo Basement Jaxx harnessed Sign o’ the Times’s use of skipping drum-beats and synth riffs in their second album, Rooty.

But perhaps Prince’s richest legacy can be found in those whose claims are not so obvious. Taylor points to the hip-hop producers the Neptunes (who have worked with Kelis, Britney Spears and Timberlake) and Timbaland (the studio genius behind Missy Elliott): “The people who I admire are the ones who are inventive in the Prince tradition without Xeroxing his songs.”

The essence of Prince survives in sparse, spacious productions like Missy Elliott’s Get Ur Freak On, which made the bold move of removing that vital funk/hip-hop ingredient — the bassline — just as Prince’s wonderfully strange When Doves Cry did in 1984. A return to the simple magic of the drum machine and synth informs many of these pop successes, like Kelis’s insistent, innuendo-led Milkshake.

Unlike OutKast or the Neptunes, Hot Chip might not yet have much commercial clout in the bid for Prince’s vacant throne. They evoke suburban barbecues rather than decadent sex sessions. They sing about driving around Putney in a Peugeot. But by compressing a huge range of influences into stripped-down, fresh, oddball pop, they show an understanding of what golden era Prince was all about: assimilating, innovating, surprising. “Don’t you miss the feeling music gave you back in the day?” Well, actually, no. It’s still here. You’ve just got to look in unexpected places. See you in Putney, Prince.

Click here to read the review of Musicology




The Musicology album is released on Monday. Hot Chip’s debut album, Coming on Strong, is released on May 10, on Moshi Moshi Records

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Then, the actual review...
http://www.timesonline.co...27,00.html

Prince
The Prince of pop comes in from the cold
Musicology (NPG/Sony)

A decade ago, Prince had a strop with his record company, replaced his given name with a hieroglyph and fell out of the charts. Musicology appears to be a tentative request to be allowed back in.

Prince has spent the past ten years releasing records solely for his most devoted fans, and ignoring the wider world — which has, in turn, ignored him back. And he has certainly tested the patience of even his most ardent supporters with everything from ballet scores to Jehovah’s Witness-fuelled jazz.

But now, just as he looked to have settled in to life on the musical fringes, he has begun to edge back into the mainstream. He opened the Grammys with Beyoncé, was inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame last month and is currently playing his greatest hits across the arenas of the US. And everyone who attends a show is handed a copy of this new album.

So Musicology is a sampler to be heard by the uninitiated. Each of the 12 tracks is brief, taut, succinct and utterly distinct from the tune that precedes it. The ballads (Call My Name, A Million Days) are tender but not sentimental, the jams (Life O’ the Party, Illusion . . .) are idiosyncratic and witty, while the rock’n’pop songs (Cinnamon Girl, The Marrying Kind) are playful and fun.

Combine that with the imminent 20th anniversary DVD release of Purple Rain and an appearance on these shores with his greatest hits tour, and — unlikely though it sounds — we should see Prince rehabilitated before the year is out.

David Kelly

First

DONT 4GET THIS:


Rock and Pop
April 16, 2004

Album: A sign o' the old times from Prince
By David Sinclair



PRINCE 3/5 STARS
Musicology
(NPG/Columbia)

SINCE losing his way in the corporate jungle sometime in the 1990s, Prince has arrived at a tumultuous juncture of his life. He has divorced, remarried, lost both his parents and become an active member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, all in the past four years. At the age of 45, he is a mid-life crisis on high heels.
The last album he formally released in this country, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, in 1999, sold a mere 5,000 copies, since when he has conducted his business through the internet. But on Monday he rejoins the race when Musicology becomes his first album on a major label for five years. Yet his music remains stuck inside a familiar comfort zone that he clearly has no intention of abandoning at this stage of the game.

Bearing the time-honoured legend “Produced, arranged, composed and per4med by Prince”, Musicology is a sleek, groove-rich experience governed for long stretches by the 11th commandment: Thou shalt not forget to party.

The opening two tracks — Musicology and Illusion, Coma, Pimp & Circumstance — set the tone with their sparse funk rhythms, high-maintenance vocal harmonies and abrupt horn-section punctuations: “Let’s groove, September/ Earth, Wind and Fire/ Hot pants by James/ Sly’s gonna take you higher.” It’s a blast, albeit an unapologetically nostalgic blast.

There are references in several songs to how much better things used to be “back in the day” and little reminders of his old hits — If I Was Your Girlfriend, Kiss, Sign o’ the Times — sneak in surreptitiously, as if being tuned in on an old radio between the tracks.

The ballads are similarly moulded to the highest of standards while sticking to the most reliable of formats. On the Couch finds him in falsetto mode pleading for a bit of nookie with a succession of outrageous chat-up lines: “It’s undignified to sleep alone”, indeed.

Elsewhere he does attempt to provide a more pertinent commentary on the goings-on in the world and his current preoccupations. Cinnamon Girl, the only rock track, looks at the social fallout from the 9/11 atrocities. But talk of a “big ol’ hole in the ozone” in Dear Mr Man sounds a little dated for a current-affairs commentary.

The album is being heralded as something of a new beginning for the star who dominated the 1980s more than any other. And it certainly finds Prince making a more considered effort than he has for many years to woo the mass audience. But like other artists who have bequeathed a similarly influential legacy — David Bowie, Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones — Prince doesn’t really have anything particularly new or startling to add to the musical story.

ALSO ON APR 16TH - MUSICOLOGY GOT 4/5 IN THE DAILY EXPRESS saying that after 10 years of "rubbish music" (not my opinion AT ALL!) Musicology sounded like James Brown had gone through Prince's back catalogue as it has some great funk jams. It was mostly positive!

I was surprised to read Rave only sold 5,000 copies, can this be true?? Maybe its UK only but still...?

The above article was in the Times.

these seemingly opposong views are easily explained.

The review of the album is treating as a body of work on it's own merit. The article is reviewing prince and his whole back catalouge. in fairness no-one can argue that Musicology is anywhere near the masterpiece's of the songs highlighted.

what publication is this one from?

TheFreakerFantastic said:

The Times