April 19, 2023 New Yorker
“Prince, the Heir of Seventies Soul
For all his ambition, the singer seems a more fitting wayward eccentric than pop standard-bearer.
By Mark Moses
](Prince, the Heir of Seventies Soul | The New Yorker)
This week marks the seventh anniversary of Prince’s death, at his boxy, sprawling estate, Paisley Park, in his native Minnesota. The house, now partly a museum (it always sort of looked like one), has few windows, but the walls are painted sky blue, with white, cottony clouds. There is a marble-floored atrium, a basketball court, and a cage of pet doves preserved in the singer’s memory. On special occasions, the exterior glows purple after dark.
“Prince seems the self-conscious culmination of every dream that rock and roll has ever had about itself,” the New Yorker pop critic Mark Moses wrote in 1988, in his review of the singer’s album “Lovesexy”—the dirtiest batch of songs in Prince’s boundary-testing career. (At the time, much of the country considered the cover of “Lovesexy”—featuring the singer perched naked on big, open flowers—too sexy. Some stores wrapped the album in black, or banned it entirely.) While Moses complained about the record’s dull “philosophical junk”—flimsy notions about God and love, emanating from somewhere on high—he admits that it also “sticks in your craw” in a way that makes you forget about the singer’s shtickier impulses.
It’s “The Black Album,” however—which Prince never officially released, and Moses reviews in bootleg form—that places the singer among his own kings: James Brown, Sly Stone, and George Clinton. One difference is that Prince—an emblem of impatient, percussive eighties pop—can do without all the old-school equipment. “He could have a hit single,” Moses writes, “using only his elastic voice and the clomp of his footsteps.”
August 7, 1998
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.)
