Posted on Tue, Apr. 20, 2004

Prince makes royal re-entry with new album

http://www.kansascity.com...082.htm?1c

By TOM MOON

Knight Ridder Newspapers

Right from the start of “Musicology,” on two party tracks that could have been written any time during the last 25 years, Prince hammers home his theme: He's going to take listeners back to “the day.”

“Wish I had a dollar for every time we say, ‘don't you miss the feeling music gave you, back in the day?'” he chortles on the title track, a rumbling James Brown-style jam dedicated to the “true funk soldiers.”

Before the next song can begin, Prince twirls the knob on a static-y radio where, naturally, every station is playing one of his classics. Then comes “Illusion, Coma, Pimp and Circumstance,” a lust-and-money allegory not unlike those that lit up “Lovesexy” back in 1988. And in a sudden stop-time shout, the Minnesota iconoclast affects an old man's voice to boast, “Boy, I was fine back in the day.”

What's remarkable, and unexpected, is that after more than a decade of indulgent music-making heard by a dwindling audience of Internet faithful, the 45-year-old auteur is fine once more.

With the surprising “Musicology” out today and a tour that has him selling out arenas (it comes to Kemper Arena on May 4), Prince couldn't be hotter.

Taken together, the album and tour provide the chance to witness a mad talent with a penchant for career self-immolation grind his way through flippant, not-exclusively-retro funk freak-outs.

In other words, do anything to get his groove back.

The renewed interest in the Jehovah's Witness convert, who has retired some of his more salacious tunes, is largely thanks to the act of contrition he began earlier this year. He strayed, then saw the light. And now the new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee is begging for another chance.

With “Musicology,” Prince does what his many detractors — pretty much the entire community of critics, radio tastemakers, and pop-culture gatekeepers — believed was beyond his present-day capability: He crafts a disciplined pop-rock-soul statement that's fun from start to finish and doesn't require a fan club decoder ring to appreciate.

It has crazily catchy hooks and moments of unexpected euphoric bliss. It takes swipes at Prince's rival in weirdness, Michael Jackson (“My voice is gettin' higher and I ain't never had my nose done,” he sings in “Life of the Party”). And it delivers slivers of showstopping guitar cast in contrasting shades, from the metallic crunch of “Cinnamon Girl” to the liquid jazz that enriches the gentle bossa “What Do U Want Me 2 Do?”

After years of struggle, Prince has decided that revisiting the past doesn't have to be a craven glory-grab. You hear the razor-sharp sounds and fleeting mention of “terror wars,” and you begin to think that the old purple eccentric hasn't lost it after all. Then you hear him utter the rallying cry “Watch me now,” and for all his romantic, self-referential yammering about “the day,” it's clear that this guy has his feet firmly in the present.