In 2010, Prince released an album, called “20Ten,” that ushered in the
longest silence of his thirty-five-year career as a recording artist.
For most of Prince’s creative existence, he’s put out an album a year,
sometimes double and triple sets. After “20Ten,” though, came nothing.
Well, nothing by Prince’s standards: plenty of singles trickled out,
along with rumors about upcoming projects, but there was no major
release. Then, earlier this year, he announced a return to Warner Bros.
records, at first for the purpose of assembling a thirtieth-anniversary
edition of “Purple Rain,” which would include outtakes and rare demos.
This has not yet materialized. What has emerged is his first album of
new material since “20Ten,” and the second: this week, Prince resurfaces
with “Art Official Age,” a solo album, and “PlectrumElectrum,” a
long-delayed collaboration with his all-female backing group, 3rd Eye
Girl.
“PlectrumElectrum” is easier to understand and easier to dispense with,
which doesn’t mean that it’s subpar, exactly. It’s a short rock record
with plenty of guitar, and includes meditations on sex, self-empowerment
treatises, and energetic songs about energy. The more ambitious songs
often spotlight someone other than Prince. Hannah Ford, the band’s
drummer, sings the plaintive ballad “Whitecaps,” and “Boy Trouble” is a
strange flower of a song with an out-of-left-field speed rap.
The so-called solo record, “Art Official Age,” is considerably more
interesting. For starters, Prince has dispensed with his typical
“Produced, Arranged, Composed, and Performed by Prince” credit, the one
on which much of his mystique as a one-man band and all-around genius
was founded, and has shared production credit with Joshua Welton, who
also happens to be Hannah Ford’s husband. Was this an admission by
Prince that he needed another pair of ears? Was he in search of a more
contemporary sound? The quasi-title track that opens the album (“Art
Official Cage”) seems to suggest so. It’s a strange welter of E.D.M.
clichés and Europop, with some gnomic lyrics, some grinding guitar, and
some rapping. It’s a mess, provocative but not exactly successful; it
sounds like a track that was left off Prince’s 1989 “Batman” soundtrack,
updated for 20Fourteen.
But the rest of the album is easily Prince’s most coherent and
satisfying record in more than a decade. In the past few years, the
Prince songs that leaked online seemed to be less about paving the way
for a new album and more about trolling the Internet. “Breakfast Can
Wait,” a lithe and light funk number, was released with a cover photo of
Dave Chappelle as Prince. Only a snippet of “This Could Be Us” leaked,
but it was enough to confirm that Prince had written a song about a
popular Internet meme that used a picture of him from his “Purple Rain”
days. As proper singles started appearing, though, the album came into
sharper focus. Songs like “Clouds” and “U Know,” slower and more
repetitive than the kaleidoscopic funk-rock we’ve come to expect from
Prince, suggested a new direction—a kind of gelatinous, futuristic R.
& B.
These tracks worked in concert with the other singles to sketch out a
theme: that technology separates us from those we’re close to, and even
from ourselves; and that the lack of integration may well result in
disintegration. “Clouds,” the second track on the album, which opens
with the sound of a radio tuning, critiques the way the computer age
offloads experiences to distant servers (that’s what the clouds are);
the song instead prioritizes romance and human connection (“You should
never underestimate the power of a kiss on the neck when she doesn’t
expect a kiss on the neck”). It also folds in a well-constructed
argument about the way the Internet era has encouraged empty exhibition
and a half-baked argument about violence and bullying, before ending
with a sci-fi monologue delivered by a British female voice that seems
to suggest that Prince has been placed in some sort of centuries-long
suspended animation.
“Clouds” is a kind of manifesto: “When life’s a stage in this brand new
age / How do we engage?” Prince’s answer is to do a version of what he’s
always done, which is absorb nearly every kind of music available and,
via alchemic wizardry, turn it into something that produces thoughts and
emotions. That’s even more evident on “U Know,” which is built on a
sample of the singer Mila J’s “Blinded” and alternates wordy half-rapped
verses about romantic misunderstanding and spiritual crisis with an
irresistibly seductive chorus. The songs seem like R. & B., but
they’re statements of deep unrest. Then the album hits a lull, with
tracks that declare the power of music rather than demonstrate it, and
insist on the superiority of the past. It’s grumpy-old-man music, done
with plenty of panache. None of this, though, is sufficient preparation
for the homestretch of “Art Official Age,” which is where Prince stops
worrying about the future or the past and truly inhabits the present.
Beginning with “What It Feels Like,” a duet with the singer Andy Allo,
Prince delivers a series of ballads, broken up by interludes and a
red-meat dance song, that are like nothing he’s done before.
It’s worth thinking about what it means for Prince to step into new
territory. He has spent years trying to recapture pieces of his old
self: the provocateur in black lingerie who got booed as an opening act
for the Rolling Stones, the New Wave-inflected keyboard freak of “1999,”
the motorcycle-riding rock god who ruled the world after “Purple Rain,”
the tortured psychedelic introvert of “Around the World in a Day,” the
jazzy genius of “Parade,” the pop polymath of “Sign O the Times,” the
deeply divided spiritual pilgrim of “Lovesexy.” These old selves then
became albatrosses. His albums of the late nineties and the past decade
found Prince making gestures toward those personas without ever really
inhabiting them again. And how could he? Here, for the first time, he
suggests an alternative: maybe there’s an entirely new Prince music,
possibly aided and abetted by Joshua Welton, that harnesses his talents
and his vision. Maybe he’s not condemned to auto-pastiche.
The closing songs are hard to absorb at first. “Way Back Home” sounds
sluggish for a while and then, suddenly, it sounds revelatory. It’s a
self-portrait painted in the strangest and most accurate colors
imaginable, a melancholy confession and bruised boast in which Prince
cops to the fact that he’s out of place, out of sorts, pushed forward at
times by desperation but “born alive” in a world where most people are
“born dead.” And “Time,” which runs for nearly seven minutes, is a love
song, briefly lickerish, that’s mostly about the loneliness of the road.
In both cases, Prince brings the tempo way down, focusses on the
nuances of his melodies, shares the spotlight with female vocalists,
weaves in motifs from earlier songs from the album, and adds a steady
supply of surprising touches (such as the superbly funky, if subdued,
horn outro to “Time”).
The ballads are broken up by “FunkNRoll,” a straightforwardly exciting
party song that also appears on “PlectrumElectrum,” but the version here
serves the album’s over-all message—it’s knotty, both playful and
eerie, with sonar-like sound effects that create a sense of distance and
mediation. The closing track, “Affirmation III,” is a haunting reprise
of “Way Back Home.” And while it’s abstract (the clipped, angelic
backing chorus, which seems to be on loan from Laurie Anderson, is even
more prominent), it’s also concrete. For the first time in years, Prince
seems not just carnal but corporeal. Way back on “Controversy,” he
challenged categories: “Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?” By
the time of “I Would Die 4 U,” the challenge had turned to taunting:
“I’m not a woman / I’m not a man / I am something you can never
understand,” and then, messianically, “I’m not a human.” Here, he
presents himself as something understandable and fully human. In
“Breakfast Can Wait,” he pleads with his lover that she can’t “leave a
black man in this state.” But that black man is in this state: he’s in
his fifties, grappling with loneliness, aging, creative inspiration,
self-doubt, a shifting cultural landscape, and love. As luck would have
it, he’s also Prince.
