The response last year to Prince’s “Sign ‘O’ the Times”—warm critical praise and lukewarm chart success—marked the latest step in his transformation from megastar to the kind of large-scale cult performer who is free to do whatever he pleases, and both he and we are probably better off for it. After 1984’s “Purple Rain” album and movie (known to its detractors as “Royal Pain”), he rushed out the curiouser-and-curiouser “Around the World in a Day,” which laid neo-psychedelic overproduction on top of the thinly pulsating grooves that have become his trademark. (For all the album’s annoying clutter, one song, “Raspberry Beret,” communicated as much wit and euphoria as anything on “Sgt. Pepper,” the album it was meant to take off from.) “Parade,” unfortunately having to support the 1986 cinematic bomb “Under the Cherry Moon,” found Prince and his band, the Revolution, fooling around to better effect—particularly on “Kiss,” where Prince becomes Little Richard and his band becomes the Famous Flames, and “Girls & Boys,” an entrancing piece of slow funk pushed along by a saxophone line that could have been recorded thirty years before. These are by no means stellar records; often what comes through is just the strain of thinking up something novel, not the fun of experimentation. But as efforts to avoid repeating the familiar highs of “Purple Rain,” which now stands as Prince’s shining pop moment, they have a grubby, whacked-out integrity, especially evident in the obsessive density of instrumental mixes that cram in riffs and growls and asides to the hilt.
On “Sign ‘O’ the Times,” all this desultory sonic energy jells consistently in the course of the album’s two records. The spare title track could have come across as a recitation of doomy headlines (about aids, the Challenger disaster, crack), but the cold blues of the song’s guitar and the lurch of its mechanical rhythm make the phrases convey nothing but fear. The two large-scale R. & B. ravers, “Housequake” and “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night,” show a rhythmic breadth and a feeling of band interplay that are rare in Prince’s usual one-man studio displays. And while “U Got the Look” momentarily transforms Sheena Easton into a wild-eyed rocker, the song “It” manages to turn a crummy two-note electronic hum into a bona-fide melodic hook. (There’s something fetching about how Prince treats Easton with more respect than her career has led her to deserve; maybe he knows something we don’t.) Throughout the album, there are solid hints of a new emotional generosity: “If I Was Your Girlfriend” is an almost pathetically tender piece of sex-role reversal; “Adore” is a big, tortuously styled soul ballad that shows off Prince’s finest, freest vocalizing. Granted, some of the aggressive layering of the settings can be distracting; for example, the electric sitar threading through “The Cross” makes the song sound musty, though its message is tough. But sometimes the quotations from an earlier musical era are dead accurate: “Adore” catalogues the vocal tics and the slippery, shy sexual ambiguity of a slew of seventies falsetto soul men with a thoroughness that removes all doubt about Prince’s being their proper heir.
At such moments, when all the elements of a song coalesce with what seems inevitability, Prince seems the self-conscious culmination of every dream that rock and roll has ever had about itself: from the racial and sexual integration of his bands, through his broad knowledge of black and white musical history, to the renewed promise of sexual thrills. Proving himself the precocious master of every seventies R. & B. move on his second album, 1979’s “Prince,” and going on to take in punk and the most nervous brand of rockabilly on 1980’s “Dirty Mind,” he willed himself into becoming this decade’s most interesting, least tractable major star. Yet, for all his ambition, Prince seems a more fitting wayward eccentric than pop standard-bearer. On his new “Lovesexy” (Paisley Park), he gives us the most dissolute batch of songs in his entire career, and a band lineup that may be the most exciting he has ever worked with. (This is much the same band he worked with in the excellent concert film “Sign ‘O’ the Times,” which featured a credible version of Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time,” of all things.) Pandemonium has always been Prince’s métier, and here on the title track and the opener, “Eye No,” the melodies start and shut down with an abruptness that recalls the sharp, bitter turns of bebop but lacks the accompanying cascade of ideas. With the forward motion of the rhythms—nearly all of it provided by the drummer, Sheila E., who manages to transfer the detail of her earlier work on timbals and congas to the trap set—the music itself feels static, overworked, concocted of frills. There may be enough rhythmic digression here to sustain most careers, never mind albums, but it usually points nowhere except back toward itself.
It would surely help the songs if Prince’s lyrics did not emanate from somewhere on high, but “Lovesexy,” like 1981’s often dreary “Controversy,” finds him pontificating to the faithful rather than writing the perfectly scaled miniatures that “Sign ‘O’ the Times’’ is full of. Prince may be the latest in a long line of soul men befuddled by the contradictions of divine and secular love which arise from the black-church tradition, but, unlike his predecessors, he has never been able to make his supposed dilemma believable, make it more than the dutiful fulfillment of a minimum daily requirement of religious lip service. Prince makes a pale object of pity, and on “Eye No,” “Anna Stesia,” and “I Wish U Heaven” even his impulsive vocals can’t animate lyrics as schematic as “Love is God/God is Love” (from “Anna Stesia’’). What’s worse is that by now—at least since the famously awful dialogue between Prince and God on “Temptation,” from “Around the World in a Day’’—fans have come to expect this philosophical junk as a necessary part of his act, as if it validated his rampant sexuality. There’s something about the way a rotten line like “Have you had your plus sign today?” (from “Positivity,” a future One-A-Day Vitamin jingle) sticks in your craw that makes you forget all about the calculated outrage of the notorious nude photo that adorns “Lovesexy.” (By the way, it’s worth noting that Prince appeared nude—on a winged white horse, no less—on his second album, back when no one, not even K mart, cared.)
The bubbling-over percussiveness and the cropped melodic phrasing that dominate “Lovesexy” combine to good effect on two tracks. The single “Alphabet St.” has a clear, clean latticework of beats crushing up against some sharp, jumpy guitar strokes; its jittery strut evokes nothing so complex as a leisurely stroll down the avenue at the first hint of spring. (Oh, yes, it does evoke, by virtue of its title and that chattering guitar, the Jackson 5’s “ABC.”) “Dance On” is a broken-up garage rocker rearranged according to the measured stutter of Sheila E.’s drumming. Everything about the song seems backward, or even missing: there’s barely a whisper of guitar, and when the requisite high-pitched organ comes rolling in, you hear it as the call of a faraway police siren rather than as an invitation to the dance floor. In both of these trim songs, you can feel the air blowing through the arrangements, and though they, like so many of Prince’s songs, are little more than deft, tightly reined-in collages, they breathe a sense of exploration which has been bled out of the album’s other tracks.
“Lovesexy” was not intended to be the follow-up to “Sign ‘O’ the Times.” A collection of big-band funk workouts called “The Black Album’’ was scheduled for release last fall, but Prince may have been scared of the album’s lasciviousness (or, maybe, its departure from his other work), and held it back. (Recently, he has renounced that album as “evil”—a move that explains the dull, conciliatory namby-pambyism of “Lovesexy.”) As happens with most unofficial work, bootleg copies of “The Black Album” have surfaced, and it’s difficult to tell why Prince should want to suppress the most jagged funk of his career in favor of the scattershot “Lovesexy.” (The only song the two albums share is the drippy ballad “When 2 R in Love.”) “The Black Album” makes it clearer than ever that Prince’s great unrecognized gift lies in his work as a bandleader—in his ability to organize and direct a rhythm with unusual force, and to add the small, unexpected accents that make that rhythm drive and shake. As lyric-and-tune, these songs aren’t much, but they weren’t meant to be, and the reliance on the rhythm section’s hard shove frees Prince from needing to make anything but the most cursory commands in “Le Grind’’ and “Rock Hard in a Funky Place.” Often the fat downbeat that anchors most of the songs makes it difficult to differentiate between their grooves (they all seem to derive from “D.M.S.R.,” on the album “1999,” and “Housequake”), but, except for a couple of digressions (“When 2 R in Love’’ and the vigilante fantasy “Bob George”), the album sounds like one long dance track, with horn blasts and screams escalating and repeating and falling away throughout.
A self-appointed successor in the lineage of R. & B. bandmasters that stretches from James Brown, through Sly Stone, to George Clinton, Prince is somehow diminished by their shadows even though he seems as emblematic of his time as they did of theirs. On “The Black Album,” the loose, limber motions of earlier eras are solidified into a single-minded trudge that doesn’t have much give. Prince doesn’t have Brown’s Latin-derived delicacy or Clinton’s fluency with chaos—all he has is the methodical sound of a fist hitting a table every few seconds. And that mechanical violence is what gives “The Black Album” so much of its dark, nagging power. Prince has never had much of a sense of humor, so what his form of party music conveys is not an openhearted good time but just compulsion—anything to fill in the empty spaces between those beats. The pursuit of sex, of release, becomes tantamount to finding the perfect riff.
One of Prince’s signature achievements is his compression of everything he lays his hands on. In the high flights of the falsetto singing that dominated his early career you don’t hear much yearning, simply a shrill ardor. On “Dirty Mind,” “Controversy,” and “1999,” he applied a punkish curtness to the usually long, discursive bass lines of late-seventies funk, cutting up the movements with a thug’s impatience. In the scavenger spirit that has guided so much eighties music, Prince can make music out of next to nothing—he could have a hit single using only his elastic voice and the clomp of his footsteps. To people who think that rap and hip-hop are barbaric and are bored with the smooth seductions of an ever-lengthening line of matinée-idol balladeers, his rhythmic risks and melodic boldness convey the kind of pop concision that R. & B. hasn’t much cared about since the early seventies; they are the testimony of an after-the-fact formalist in an age when no one else has the patience, or the stamina, to pick up the pieces. And so, in a landscape of debris, he stands as the wobbly scarecrow at the top of the junk heap, his straw arms jutting out of another man’s clothes as he dotes over old records that nobody else can quite remember. ♦
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