Publication: The Boston Globe [US]
Date: August 19, 1990
Section: Arts & Film
Page Number(S): B25 P
Length: 882 Words
Title: "A New Album For Prince"
Written By: Jim Sullivan and Globe Staff

Claude Monet. David Cronenberg. Flannery O'Connor. Steve Reich. John Ford. All artists who've spent much of their careers exploring and reexploring a limited number of crucial themes, burrowing deeper into the possibilities with each endeavor. Or at least into the potential of those possibilities.

Add Prince - His Royal Badness, the one-man-band and self-styled funk/rock revolution from Minneapolis - to the list. (Skip the fine art vs. popular art debate, please.) Prince's chief preoccupations, going back a decade-plus: God, sex, redemption, the funk. Secondary concerns: the appocalypse, social ills, romance. What we know of him, personally: near nil, not subject to interviews-analyses, just speculation. Reputation: mercurial, beloved, despotic, mysterious visionary. Musical scan: funk, Jimi Hendrix, Sly & the Family Stone, pop, psychedelia, rap, progressive rock. Critical status: big ups, big downs, often tries to fill very big britches. Major hindsight revelation: Was writing about nasty, controversial sexuality when 2 Live Crew and Ice-T were in diapers. And doing it much better, then and now. Star status: on top again, due to "Batman" sound track's ascendency to the No. 1 spot.

Prince shoots for the stars once again with his new double-disc sound track, "Graffiti Bridge" (Paisley Park), due Tuesday. The film reportedly picks up the story of The Kid, the temperamental-rock-star character of Prince's 1984 massive, mainstream-breakthrough movie/album, "Purple Rain." However, "Graffiti Bridge," the movie, isn't slated for release until next month, so - perhaps as it should be - the music stands or falls on its own. (For the record, "Purple Rain" was a stellar album and a sexist, oft-dopey film.)

It should be stated at the outset that, though it's quite a substantial effort, and one in which additional layers are revealed upon each listening, "Graffiti Bridge" is no "Purple Rain" - no immediate knockout. "Purple Rain," of course, set a standard. But so does a 4 1/2-star review of "Graffiti Bridge" in the Aug. 23 Rolling Stone. The magazine grabbed an early-early tape and splashed the laudatory review big, bold and, well, early, establishing itself as the inside, authoritative voice. Clever positioning. USA Today even reported the review's rating. These things raise expectations and set a tone.

So let's downscale "Graffiti Bridge" by a star-and-a-half, which still puts it in the well-worth-your-time category, but places it below, say, the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" or Prince's 1982 masterwork, "1999." "Graffiti Bridge" is more funk-oriented than "Purple Rain" and not pitched as much to the rock/funk crossover crowd. Neither does it boast the one mind-blowing killer song that "Purple Rain" had in its elongated title track. "Graffiti Bridge," the song, is similarly positioned near the album's close, but it's not a transcendent climax - it's sappy movie-music fare: "Everybody wants 2 find Graffiti Bridge/Something 2 believe in/A reason 2 believe that there's a heaven above/Everybody wants 2 find Graffiti Bridge/ Everybody's lookin' 4 love." It's ultralight and lilting; you can practically envision a credit roll.

"Graffiti Bridge," we have to assume, is some passageway to a better place - spiritual, mental, physical. More seriously, the central concept is not made crystal-clear by the 17 songs, although those God-sex-funk themes are wound throughout. It would seem from the moody, disarming "The Question of U" that Prince's character is wrestling with stardom and selling his soul; from "Thieves in the Temple" that he's hoping God and love will give him the strength to survive; and from "Graffiti Bridge" that he's resisted temptation. There are some saucy, sassy moments. The George Clinton/ Prince double-team on "We Can Funk" stands proud, where everyone testifies by upending conventional conservative wisdom: "I'm testin' positive 4 the funk/I'll gladly pee in anybody's cup/And when your cup overflow/I'm testin' positive and I'll pee some more."

Actually, the Time - the Prince-encouraged group with a recent comeback disc of its own, a funky unit fronted by suave cheeseball singer Morris Day - has some of the sound track's best songs. Perennially squawking "What time is it?," Day and his band turn in a wild and ribald funk workout in "Release It" and "The Love Machine"; a Doug Sahm-like Tex-Mex organ bleater-celebration in "Shake!"; and (with Prince) the album's standout, "The Latest Fashion." Here, the going gets glib real fast and the line "This year the latest fashion is to lie" works perfectly with Day's crass, Kid Creole-derived, playboy persona; "The horse! The horse!" gets chanted ridiculously, somebody gets fired midway, and the bragging rights swell with each utterance. Silliness reigns supreme. "Joy in Repetition," by contrast, closes side one with an intriguing blend of celebratory rock and becalmed danger, ecstasy and ennui. Prince is on his home ground here - sex and degradation and rock 'n' roll.

"Graffiti Bridge," the sound track, though, is less a masterful concept album than it is an oft-scintillating, somewhat puzzling, collection of thematically linked bits and pieces. It's a jumble of genres, compacted with a pulse and with some wit. A pastiche of more and less.