Publication: New York Newsday [US]
Date: August 21, 1990
Section: Part II; Album Review
Page Number(S): 2
Length: 769 Words
Title: "Prince Breaks Out Of His Royal Isolation"
Written By: John Leland

IN THE last few years, waiting for another good Prince album has begun to feel like waiting for a good record from Jerry Lee Lewis: a test of faith, and not necessarily a fruitful one. It's not that Prince's records have been bad (though the two most recent, "Lovesexy" and the soundtrack to "Batman," came close enough). It's that his music has seemed increasingly to have no room for us. No other pop star has worked so hard to deny his audience the pleasure it desires. No talent has so effectively strangled itself or turned in on itself on its way to our ears. The portrait of Prince struggling in tortured isolation, real or not, is more than just fodder for the gossip sheets; it has been the overriding substance of his work for the last half-decade. It has turned Prince-watching into a sour sport.

"Graffiti Bridge," released today, goes some way toward remedying this. Sprawling and playful, "Graffiti Bridge" - the soundtrack to a film due out this fall - is a good album, a very good one. It's not the Prince album any of us has been waiting for, but that goes without saying, doesn't it?

The sport may never be the easy fun it once was, when Prince songs served up kinky pleasures with offhand grace. The rhythms on "Graffiti Bridge" are softer than they should be, and Prince seems to have lost either his interest or his facility for creating bite-sized pop songs. The music here creaks from the effort that went into making it, and it's a piece of work to listen to the thing. This time, though, it is worth the effort.

If the problems with Prince records have been complicated, their solutions on "Graffiti Bridge" are astoundingly simple. Instead of closing off his world, he opens it up: to other pop forms, to the homeboys, to us. Five years after Prince declined to perform on USA for Africa's "We Are the World" on the grounds that he doesn't collaborate with others (he instead donated his own track, "4 the Tears in Your Eyes," to the charity album), Prince shares "Graffiti Bridge's" center stage with Mavis Staples, George Clinton and his old Minneapolis colleagues, the Time. For once, his collaborators aren't proteges, and the collaboration isn't Svengali-ism. It's accommodation, and they're all on board for the party. The songs with the Time set the tone for the album. As the group goes through call-and-response routines, with cartoon lothario Morris Day in the lead, Prince plays the funk as the stuff of communal experience. This ship has room for everybody.

And it has room for their pursuits as well. Prince borrows from ? and the Mysterians' garage classic, "96 Tears," dips into Clinton's heavy carnal funk, glosses hip-hop "break" beats, and even dishes up a straightforward rock song along the lines of his own "Let's Go Crazy." He offers these nuggets as simple truths, points of reference amid some of the album's more harmonically and texturally complex moments. He's still experimenting with new forms, but he's tweaking old ones along the way. Taking joy in other people's music, he allows us to take joy in his own.

More importantly, instead of isolating himself in his songs, on "Graffiti Bridge" Prince makes himself part of a group. The album is as democratic as it is idiosyncratic. A handful of the songs aspire to be anthems, and one of them, "New Power Generation," which pops up twice, all but declares itself to be one. Again, Prince does himself and us a favor by simplifying his lyrics to feel-good mantras. "We're the new power generation," he sings, "We wanna change the world / The only thing that's in our way is you / Your old-fashioned music, your old ideas / Sick and tired of you telling us what to do." Because Prince's lyrics have always worked a lot like religious dogma, the more facile they are, generally the more effective. Flattened to pure rhetoric or melodrama, they become professions of faith.

In the six years since "Purple Rain" sold 10 million copies, Prince's relationship with pop music, particularly black pop, has reversed itself. After inventing what became the dominant pop forms of the '80s in the beginning of the decade, Prince now seems to be experimenting with them from one step behind the pack. Since hip-hop established itself as a pop form and not just a cultural outlaw, Prince's harmonic inventions no longer feel like the vanguard. Pure rhythm is in; harmonic destruction is the order of the day.

Which is one reason that Prince, even when he was stumbling, was still so valuable. It's also why he may never be the force he once was again. But this won't stop Prince-watchers from watching for signs.