A comeback or just a marketing ploy -- either way, Prince has reclaimed his pop throne
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So Prince is back, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. To his purple bag of tricks he can add a new accomplishment. Having once revolutionized rock 'n' roll, Prince can now say he defied the rock establishment and survived.

That's not supposed to happen. When the music business power brokers -- and their enforcers in the pop press -- decide you're down, you're supposed to stay down (unless maybe you're Cher). For an object lesson, see David Bowie. Prince has not only survived, he's provoked a love fest that seems unprecedented. It's bizarre, really, as though he cast a counterspell on the meanies who derided and ignored him over the past eight years, making them now break into broad smiles and dance pirouettes to his purple grace.

The peak moment of this curious phenomenon, at least so far, occurred when Prince made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine earlier this month. As the Prince hard core well knows, he's been feuding with Jann Wenner's minions for years, demanding that they put him on the cover as a quid pro quo for any interview they requested, just as they used to in the days when he was making hits by the bushel. No go. But there he was last week peering out from the magazine racks with that eerily preserved 45-year-old face.

What's most curious about the current resurrection is that it doesn't seem to have anything driving it other than Prince's singular charm. There's been a lot of gush over how the new Prince CD, "Musicology," is a grand return to form, but that's hype. When the dust settles in a few months, the disc will be recognized for what it is: a midpack Prince album that's about evenly divided between good and bad tracks. "Musicology" is fascinating in the way that most Prince albums are, weak ones included, because even his failed tunes have ideas.

It is conceivable that "Musicology" could yield a hit with one of its ballads -- any of the four here, each a silky masterpiece, would do -- but the album has none of the kind of trend juice it takes to launch an artist into the pop stratosphere.

So if it's charm that Prince is using to turn the world purple again, what's behind it? Seems to be a combination of things: reputation, marketing skill, timing and -- here's the rub -- talent. Talent of a kind that's let the world know what it's been missing. But first, it bears recalling how Prince got in the hole in the first place. To a certain category of Prince fans -- and they're an influential bunch, including the Swedish crew who put out the respected fanzine Uptown -- Prince's career follows an arc.

It peaks in 1987 with "Sign o' the Times," probably the greatest double LP of all time, then heads steadily downhill after he fires his Revolution band featuring the beloved Wendy and Lisa, and finally crashes in a heap of glitter, froth and mire in the '90s. This story is dubious, at best, sort of like saying Philip Roth has been all downhill since "Portnoy's Complaint." What seems to bug these guardians of Prince's '80s freakitude is that he evolved out of it. The '90s, inasmuch as it's possible to generalize, found Prince experimenting more with the soul side of his persona, and conjuring magic at the production console that to this day influences hotshots like the Neptunes and Beck. As for Prince's ability to write tunes -- beautiful melodies wrapped in resplendent packages -- that has never faltered.

But the '90s was when Prince let his ego crowd him out of the spotlight. There was never any question that Prince had an exalted opinion of himself. It was on display from the very first, when, as a teenager in 1978, he insisted that Warner Bros. give him a contract that ceded him complete control over his recordings. Prince rewarded that faith by making thrilling, groundbreaking music that sold in the millions of units, so nobody minded that he acted like, well, a prince.

The hits kept coming in the early '90s, but he started having issues. They seemed valid, too. He wanted to own the rights to his master recordings, and he wanted to release music on his own timetable. Warner Bros. refused on both points. Rude of them, eh? One thing, though: In 1992 Warners offered Prince a $100 million contract, the most lucrative ever in pop music up to that point. And he signed it. So when Prince went parading around with "slave" drawn on his face, it seemed a bit churlish. Then there was the whole name- change thing.

Having taken the money, Prince -- at that point "the Artist" -- kept his battles very public, and he started looking more eccentric than productive. Finally let out of his contract in 1996, Prince had the opportunity to make amends, but instead he put out a testament to his ego, a three-CD, three-hour- long set of music, "Emancipation," which, while probably his most brilliant album since "Sign o' the Times," simply overwhelmed everyone except his hard- core fans. Another multi-disc set arrived soon afterward, this time in an inept direct-mail marketing effort -- and Prince (still the Artist) stoked the bad vibes by threatening to sue fans who published unauthorized photos of Prince on their Web sites.

By 1998, purgatory was officially in session. It seemed that the main thing freedom had unleashed in Prince was his inner control freak, and it looked a lot like Godzilla. But if Prince dug his own hole, the music industry was happy to throw in dirt. The rock press revealed itself to be just as ego- driven as Prince, less interested in discussing music than in doling out reward and punishment.

At the century's turn, Prince released a milestone, a CD called "The Rainbow Children" that was breathtaking, as musically radical as anything he had ever done. Featuring Prince on guitar, bass and keyboards and John Blackwell on drums, the disc was the antithesis of Prince's usual dense, heavily produced sound. Built on a sylvan layer of Fender Rhodes keyboards and breezy drumming, "The Rainbow Children" was utterly fresh, an amalgam of R&B and Broadway, glowing with gospel choruses, sprinkled with odd narrations and shot through with more hair-curling guitar solos than Prince had ever stuck on a record. It even contained a tribute to Gilbert and Sullivan.

But no one except the Prince hard core heard "The Rainbow Children." The Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll is the national critical barometer for the year's output, and the 2001 poll placed "The Rainbow Children" at No. 129. Could it possibly have been that bad? Or did the critics just not bother to listen to it because Prince failed to mail out review copies? Yes, the album was a Christian parable, reflecting Prince's adoption of the Jehovah's Witness faith, and some of the lyrics were challenging. But to ignore an artistic breakthrough by one of pop music's major figures was some kind of low point for the rock press.

And then, another milestone, also ignored: a three-CD set of music culled from his 2001 "One Night Alone" tour, remarkably enough the first time Prince had released a live album (although hundreds of his concerts have been bootlegged over the years).

Purgatory -- it's never pleasant. But there's a plus side, and we're seeing it now: Prince clearly was motivated to get back in the spotlight.

And he accomplished it swiftly. Prince knew he was going to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March, and he paved the way to that appearance by agreeing to perform at the Grammys in February. His duet with Beyonce stole the show. At the Rock Hall ceremony, he scorched the audience with three reworked hits, "Let's Go Crazy," "Sign o' the Times" and "Kiss," then blew down the house with his guitar solo during a jam with Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."

That led to what could be called a mini-tour of talk shows, capped with a half-hour Prince special, "The Art of Musicology," televised on all the MTV stations. The show featured an extracted bit from Prince's current "Musicology" tour in which he plays a few songs alone on acoustic guitar -- a dream come true for the Prince faithful. The plangent sound out of his guitar suggested an odd tuning, and the chords he played on songs like "Sweet Thing" and "Never Take the Place of Your Man" were otherworldly. His singing on "Cream" was a road show of rhythm and blues vocal stylings. By the last stunning jazz chord on "Sometimes It Snows in April," the audience was practically weeping tears of joy.

Prince's spiel on "Musicology" is that he's bringing us "the old-school joint," the real funk for people who "miss the feeling music gave ya back in the day." And he loves to tell Leno and Letterman that none of these young rappers today know how to play real musical instruments, blah blah blah.

Forget about that. After all, is "When Doves Cry" an example of classic musical values? No, it's a one-of-a-kind creation that stands out of time, not in the past, not in the future.

That's what Prince is about: the potential to be dazzlingly original in whatever style he chooses. Long may he reign.



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Prince: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday at the HP Pavilion, 525 W. Santa Clara St., San Jose, and Sept. 9 at the Arena in Oakland. Call (408) 998-8497 or see ticketmaster.com.
E-mail David Rubien drubien@sfchronicle.com.

DorothyParkerWasCool said:

So Prince fired the Revolution after SOTT? Timeline is a little strange there..


good article though.



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[This message was edited Sat May 29 9:59:08 2004 by Universaluv]

Universaluv said:

Yeah I caught that too.