Publication: Minneapolis City Pages [US]
Date: March 18, 1998
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Title: "Slave to the Grind"
Reviewed By: Rob Nelson

Credit O{+> with being prolific, of course, but also with being resourceful - enough to bankrupt his fans, in fact. More than a decade ago, Prince's 10-minute "Crystal Ball" was a wannabe epic in search of a concept album: his umpteenth ode to fucking ("crystal ball" - get it?), but with police sirens to signal the apocalypse and a string orchestra to match the size of his engorged, um, ambition. He'd considered it as the title track of a proposed three-record set in 1987, until better judgement (or Warner Bros.?) compelled him to pare the project down to the double disc Sign O' the Times. But now that the Artistis free at last, Crystal Ball has come out of cold storage to serve as the centerpiece of a five-disc set. The concept this time: Artist eliminates the middleman by selling exclusively to Best Buy, Blockbuster, and his 1-800-NEW-FUNK faithful, thus making a killing on cob-webbed vault material. And whaddya know, the old lyrics fit the new concept like a glove: "Take off your clothes, babe... Come on get the Crystal Ball."

Accordingly, what we get is less like good sex than a fairly good deal: Fifty bucks buys two and a half hours of unreleased "bootleg" tunes stretching back to the 1999 era; a new (and rather heinous) acoustic lp called The Truth; and, by mail-order only, Kamasutra, the album-length wedding symphony that the Artist composed for his bride, Mayte. As if this weren't intimate enough, the Artist has personally scripted the liner notes, referring to himself in the third person (as "Prince," that is). Seems the title track "was written in a deepbluefunk depression as Prince pondered his future in a music business that had become more business than music." Indeed - and so it has remained for a decade. Even the ostensibly liberating Emancipation (1996) came straightjacketed by its spiritual quest for a higher profit margin. Some thrilling grooves snuck their way in , but the star's vision still seemed woefully nearsighted. Earlier that year, his unusual lack of concept was the concept behind his spiteful swan song to Warner Bros., Chaos and Disorder - which, among other things, chronicled the control freak's frustration with his malfunctioning camcorder.

Whether the result of his enslavement on the time Warner plantation (now there was a concept), it's as a lyricist that O(+> has fallen most precipitously off the pop landscape. Hell, even the Prince of "Batman" was lucid enough to comment on the blockbuster enterprise to which he'd sold himself ("Systematic overthrow of the underclass/Hollywood conjures images of the past," he reasoned on "The Future"). But that was '89: These days, we're lucky to get the likes of Crystal Ball's "18 and over/I wants 2 bone ya." at least that one's funny, whereas the Truth's lactose-intolerant "Animal Kingdom" - inspired by Spike Lee's milk ad, of all things - suggests the Artist's stern lecture to his waiter or some other captive audience:"No member of the animal kingdom nurses past maturity... Don't gimme no blue cheese." Yes sir. Would the Artist care for soy milk instead? Another guest appearance on Sesame Street, perhaps? How revealing that the long-awaited "Welcome 2 the Dawn (acoustic version)" defines emancipation as follows: "When the voice U hear commands U/2 entertain the absurd... Welcome 2 the dawn."

Unlike kindred androgyne icon Michael Stipe, O(+> wouldn't dream of singing, "I'm not a commodity." (And yet, while the Artist was busy wearing "SLAVE" on his cheek, Stipe's the one who made out bigtime with the label.) Clearly, Automatic for the People would make a more honest title for Crystal Ball, which marks the ultimate downsizing of Prince's community-building worldview - from the mythic, all-inclusive "Uptown" in 1980 ("White, Black, Puerto Rican/Everybody just a-freakin'") to the blockbusting First Ave., the impenetrable fortress of Paisley Park, the ill-fated Glam Slam and NPG stores, and now, finally, his sweatshop mail-order outlet and Web site peep-shows. As much a measure of this lonely trip as Emancipation's "My Computer" ("Make believe there's a better world/A better life"), Crystal Ball's "Calhoun Square" is "actually about the NPG store," according to O(+> - and yet, truth told, it rocks. Rhyming "square" with "in the ay-yah" and pumping his ax like (insert rock-crit hyperbole here, including the words "Hendrix" and "funky"), the man hasn't sounded this ebullient since before the store opened. Call it another Prince classic - or at least until next year, when he hocks it to the mall for use as a jingle.

If O(+> is working for himself these days, he's no less a slave to the commercial grind. Indeed, in so many ways, none of this is new. Eleven years ago, just before embarking on his own Vegas shtick for MTV, critic Kurt Loder concluded his Rolling Stone review of Sign O' the Times with the equivocal praise that has since attended each of the Artist's royal droppings: "When a full-blown feast is so obviously within Prince's capabilities, one wonders: Why doesn't he go for it?" Well, what kind of businessman-cum-gigolo blows his wad all at once? Amid his inevitably waning sex appeal, it's the Artist's resourcefulness, his throbbing compulsion to make it last until the dawn, that remains his chief endowment - which is to say that there's surely enough left in the vault for another pair of Balls at least.

For now, as Crystal Ball begs a programmable multidisc player more than any record in history, here's the abridged review: This die-hard Prince fan counts nine essential cuts (most of them on Disc 2) out of a total 53 - which includes five remixes, four previously availables, and a dozen that are simply not fit for human ears. And yet I bought it and I'll buy the next one, too, because to give up on Prince is to quit my adolescence and goddammit I'm not ready. Surely O(+> knows just how I feel: This is the Artist's nadir and yet his intuition has never been better. After all, the '80s revival is in full swing - and 1999, God help us, is less than a year away.