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Date Posted: 11:41:34 03/21/06 Tue
Author: Jes
Subject: Review of Prince's new album

Prince throws a party
By Dan DeLuca
Inquirer Music Critic

Random questions ran through my mind at the Royalton Hotel while sampling a cocktail called a "Purple Prince" at a listening party for 3121, the new album by the artist formerly known as a glyph.
No. 1: Has there ever been a pop musician (outside of maybe Stevie Wonder) so skilled at genre-hopping that he's made everything he does - a killer guitar solo, an effortless falsetto, a super-tight funk jam - seem so easy?
No. 2: In a quarter-century-plus career - stretching back to his salacious 1980 breakthrough Dirty Mind on through the new album's creamy "Satisfied" (in which he scolds, "turn off your cell phone, can't you see I just want to get you satisfied?") has anyone ever worked so hard, and so imaginatively, in pursuing sexual pleasure as a path to salvation?
No. 3: And if this "Purple Prince" is really a mixture of vodka, triple sec, pomegranate juice and Curacao, then how come it tastes like spiked Welch's Grape Juice?
OK, dear reader: You deserve an explanation. So you're wondering, what does a "Purple Prince" have to do with Prince? And what about the real question at hand: Namely, is the mysteriously named 3121 a classic Prince album, an embarrassing Prince album, or another solid-if-unremarkable effort like its predecessor, Musicology, which sold 2 million copies and propelled the aging imp to surprise stature as the most successful touring act of 2004?
The cocktails - sipped only for investigative purposes, of course - along with the flickering candles and arrangements of purple lilacs, orchids and roses, were in the penthouse suite of this chic Philippe Starck-designed Midtown hotel. Because somebody decided that this was the way critics needed to hear the great man's music before it hit stores.
The music industry, you see, is paranoid - if that's not too strong a word - about the prospect of pirated CDs, and the threat of illegal downloading, which probably contributed to CD sales falling (yet again) by 7 percent in 2005.
This makes critics' jobs tricky. (I won't say difficult.) With labels like Universal, which just signed Prince, reluctant to provide the music ahead of time, you've got to go where the music is. (It's surprising that Prince signed with Universal, another big label, since he famously considered his old deal with Warner Bros. akin to slavery.)
Thus, I found myself among other members of the fourth estate, as well as a passel of Prince fans, listening to 3121 three times, in circumstances far from ideal for reviewing purposes. No chance to stop a song and listen to it again. But plenty of perky food servers offering chicken satay to go with your "Black Sweat," 3121's current single, and its only halfway-successful attempt to conjure up the stripped-down funk spirit of the '80s minimalist masterpiece, "Kiss."
3121 is essentially a party record, so it sounded good in a party setting, particularly the horn-happy jam "Get on the Boat," which features James Brown alum Maceo Parker on sax, as well as the robotic electro-funk of "Love" and the hard-charging rocker "Fury," which Prince tore up when he performed last month with his latest fetching protege, Tamar, on Saturday Night Live. (Her album, produced by Prince, is due out in May.)
Not that the event was a nonstop celebration. 3121's down-tempo tunes didn't seem to rank with his best. I'm convinced that the 47-year-old Prince Rogers Nelson, who's married to his second wife, Manuela Testolini, wrote the tepid Latin ballad "Te Amo Corazon" just so he could spend quality time with Salma Hayek, who directed the video. (And, really, isn't that reason enough?) And while the vocal arrangements on the duet with Tamar, "Beautiful, Loved & Blessed," are gorgeous, it's not a substantive song.
And then there was the paranoia. Halfway through "The Word," a bubbling dance groove that proselytizes so subtly that you hardly notice, I whipped out my cell phone. Big mistake. A record company publicist was on me as if she were channeling the Purple One himself. Sorry, ma'am: I wasn't trying transmit the music to the Internet; I was just trying to find out a Villanova score.
Not the ideal circumstances to make a fair and balanced judgment. And thankfully it didn't come to that. Last week, on deadline day, 3121 showed up, allowing me to spend some time in concentrated listening - while slurping coffee, barreling down the Schuylkill to the office, and sitting at the computer sending e-mail - through which reasoned assessments of artistic merit could be made.
So what's the verdict on 3121, whose exact meaning is known only to Prince, and which is being ingeniously marketed with a Willie Wonka-like promotion in which a handful of fortunate CD buyers will find "purple tickets" admitting them to a concert at Prince's house in Los Angeles, which he's said to have renamed "3121"?
(What secrets will be revealed? Can Prince's prolific output be explained by the presence of hundreds of musical, live-in purple Oompah Loompahs, even more diminutive than he?)
3121 isn't stone-cold classic Prince. It doesn't measure up to 1999, Purple Rain and Sign 'O' the Times, let alone the Black Album. But from the slurpy Sly Stone funk of the title track to "Lolita," which recalls his '80s collaborations with The Time (and vows that a nymphet "will never make a cheater out of me"), it's a *** release that continues his return to form that began with Musicology.
While that album's disciplined approach was a relief from such indulgent releases as Chaos and Disorder and Rainbow Children, it suffered from an old-school, schoolmarmish approach. Attention, class! Professor Prince will now show you insolent hip-hop whippersnappers how real music is made.
3121 is looser, less pedantic, and all the better for it. He's not as great as he once was, but Prince can still run the musical gamut with awe-inspiring ease. And if he often fails to use his staggering skills to say anything all that fresh, that's always been his singular weakness. And you wouldn't expect, or want, him to change at this late date, would you?

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Replies:

[> Re: Review of Prince's new album -- taurus, 11:52:39 03/21/06 Tue [1]

I love love Prince.

He will nevr fade away and the thing I love the most about him is he ofourse he wants a listener to his music, but I really think the guy just keeeps making music because it's all he knows how to do. It's like breathing!

Anyway,Prince rocks! and he doesn't sellout to the music biz either!

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[> Re: Review of Prince's new album -- lump, 11:57:34 03/21/06 Tue [1]

I never thought to compare him to Stevie Wonder, but I totally see it.

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[> Re: Review of Prince's new album -- lump, 11:59:32 03/21/06 Tue [1]

I never thought to compare him to Stevie Wonder, but I totally see it.

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[> Re: Review of Prince's new album -- Robert, 17:39:45 03/21/06 Tue [1]

A bad Prince record is still better than most anything that anyone could ever hope to release.

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