Publication: San Diego Union-Tribune [US]
Date: April 11, 1993
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Title: "Purple Reign Grows Less Innovative: But Prince's Legacy, Drive Undiminished"
Written By: Karla Peterson

Forget, for a moment, all the weird stuff. Forget the polyester-look jumpsuits and the apparent inability to spell. Forget the Kim Basinger thing and the chain-link veil he wore on "Arsenio". Forget "Under the Cherry Moon", the mutant 5 o’clock shadow and the fact that you saw his bare butt on the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards and were not particularly impressed. Since materializing out of Minneapolis 15 years ago in all his mad-professor glory, Prince has obscured his talents with a smoke screen of eccentricities, distracting as often as dazzling, frantically dancing in place when he could moving forward.

He is not nearly the innovator he used to be, but with his latest album crossing the million-selling mark and his extravagant North American tour crossing the country (and making a stop this week at the Universal Amphitheatre), he is still a powerful advance man for his own legend, for the revolutionary who shook up Top 40 radio, helped integrate MTV, and combined James Brown and the Sex Pistols into one glorious burst of anarchistic noise. With a willful disregard for musical formats, racial and sexual barriers and the fickle fancies of the listening public, Prince has messed with our minds and fiddled with our frequencies, leaving a sly smile on the face of pop music that will never go away.

In the beggining, he didn’t seem like much of a genius. His 1978 debut, "For You", and 1979’s "Prince" were good chunks of R&B flavored pop. They were fun and danceable, but not particularly memorable ---until you looked at the credit line that read (and still reads), "Produced, arranged, composed and performed by Prince".

He was a whiz kid, no question. But with the 1980 release of "Dirty Mind", Prince made it clear that he was something more than a younger, skinnier Stevie Wonder. On that album, Prince emerged with his hair-raising persona in full X-rated flower.

Sexually ambiguous and musically subversive, Prince mixed disco beats with raunchy rock guitars and edgy new-wave grooves, mingled visions of God with promises of hot sex, and posed on the back cover wearing black leg warmers and not much else.

He sang about incest ("Sister"), oral sex ("Head") and bisexuality ("Uptown") in a coy falsetto that indicated he knew about these things. He danced around in high-heeled boots like a cross between James Brown and the Rockettes. He rattled the censors when he performed on "Saturday Night Live" (did he say "funkin’" or something worse? ), and when he opened for the Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Coliseum, the white, middle-class crowd took one look at his leg warmers and his sexually and racially mixed band and booed him off stage.

Whether they knew it or not, that 1981 audience had discovered whta the rest of the world would soon find out. Prince wasn’t just talented – he was terrifying.

How terrifying? With Ronald Reagan in the White House, Indiana Jones in the theaters and Madonna just a gleam in her own eye, Prince’s gender-bending lyrics and steamy stage antics were both liberating and threatening. "Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?" he teased in 1981’s "Controversy", and the only thing more arresting than the questions themselves was the fact that Prince was so willing to leave the answers open for debate.

MUSICAL STASH.

In the early ’80s, no one said the things Prince said, and no one sounded the way he did when he said them. With rap, new-wave and alternative rock banished to the outback of college and urban radio stations, Top 40 stations were getting fat and happy on the bland, creamy, mostly white pop pumped out by Daryl Hall & John Oates, Phil Collins and Lionel Richie.

But simmering beneath the goo was a multi-instrumentalist who wanted to conquer the airwaves with every weapon in his musical stash. Prince had heavy psychedelic guitars and frothy keyboards, cooing falsettos and down-and-dirty growls. He had his stories of sin and salvation, which he told with with a Little Richard yelp in his throat and a Jerry Lee Lewis gleam in his eye. It was a potent combination, and in 1982, it began to explode.

"I was dreaming when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray", Prince wrote in "1999", but he needn’t have worried. With its dizzy blend of party till the apocalypse sociology, dance-floor swing and hot rock licks, the double "1999" album captured the greedy confidence of the coked-up, junk-bond happy ‘80s in all their tacky splendor, and the people who had been frightened by Prince began to think maybe the weird little guy had a point after all.

The title track went to No.12 on the Billboard magazine charts. The zippy "Delirious" went to No.8. The steamy "Little Red Corvette" went to No.6. Thanks to the "1999" and "Little Red Corvette" videos, Prince joined Michael Jackson as one of the few black faces on MTV. It was a triumph, but it was just the beginning. Because in 1984, a low-budget movie and a high-concept album made Prince’s face visible everywhere.

"Purple Rain" (the movie) starred Prince as a rising rocker named the Kid whose daring music threatens to make him an outcast in his own town. "Purple Rain" (the album) starred Prince as a pop star at his peak.

With his band the Revolution in tow, Prince barnstormed Top 40 radio, sending two songs to No.1 ("When Doves Cry" and "Let’s Go Crazy"), and two others ("Purple Rain" and "I Would Die 4 U") into the Top 10. "Purple Rain" also brought Prince and the Revolution two Grammy awards and Prince an Oscar for best original score. The movie was a box-office success, and the album sold in the millions. But more importan than the trophies and the gold and platinum albums was the music and the enigmatic man who was making it.

"I’m disposed to like Prince…" New York film critic Pauline Kael said in her review of "Purple Rain", "… because he is, as a friend of mine put it, ‘the fulfillment of everythig that people like Jerry Falwell say rock ‘n’ roll will do to the youth of America’."

SHINY PACKAGES.

As usual, Kael was right. With "Purple Rain", Prince took his heady blend of punk attitude, R&B rhythms and rock ‘n’ roll firepower, replaced his vague sexuality with a reassuring lover-man masculinity, threw in his bop-till-you-drop (or until planet explodes) hedonism, and wrapped it up in a shiny package that made it seem like the most delightful form of corruption possible.

(Not everyone agreed, of course. After hearing the salacious "Darlimg Nikki", Tipper Gore was inspired to start the Parents Music Resource Center, and its parental advisory warning sticker policy. For better and worse – with the profanely purposeful Public Enemy at the good end and the useless 2 Live Crew at the other – Prince was once again breaking new ground.)

Like Bruce Spingsteen, Van Halen and Cyndi Lauper, Prince had turned 1984 into the most successful year of his musical life. And like his comrades on the charts, Prince did not emerge from the fireworks unscathed.

After the mind-blowing success of "Born in the U.S.A.", Springsteen didn’t release another album for three years. Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth responded to the multiplatinum victory of the "1984" album by leaving the band for what turned out to be a bust of a solo career. Lauper kept trying, but she was never able to duplicate the mix of wit and whimsy that made her 1984 debut, "She’s So Unusual", such a mini pop masterpiece.

Instead of backing off or burning out, Prince just kept on going. Beginning with 1985’s misty "Around The World In A Day", he continued to release an album a year, and continued to toss off songs that artists from the Bangles ("Manic Monday") to Chaka Khan ("I Feel For You") and Sinead O’ Connor ("Nothing Compares 2 U") turned into hits.

EASY TO DISMISS. In his post "Purple Rain" period, Prince has been unstoppable, occasionally unfathomable, and often uninspiring. Like Elvis Costello and Neil Young, Prince is a relentless, restless creator with an endless supply of songs and an unfortunate need to record as many of them as possible.

The result of his workaholic ways is a flurry of albums that range in quality from 1987’s triumphant "Sign O’ the Times" to the "Batman" soundtrack, a collection so unambitious and derivative that Prince should have sued himself for defamation of character. By releasing an album a year whether he needs it or not, Prince makes himself both indispensable and easy to dismiss. Don’t have the money or inclination to buy this year’s model? Just wait a year and there will be another one.

But overkill is not the only threat to Prince’s pop throne. With the exception of "Sign O’ the Times", which explored everything from sexual politics ("If I Was Your Girlfriend") to faith ("The Cross"), monogamy ("I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man"), and the end of the world ("Sign O’ the Times"), Prince’s albums have been unfocused, indulgent and strangely safe.

Gone are the flirtations with bisexuality and the easy familiarity with his female side. The same goes for the wiggy but sincere interest in social issues as the anti-nuke "Ronnie Talks To Russia", and the outlaw persona that made 1988’s "The Black Album" so outrageous that Prince himself refused to release it.

As he continues to dilute his formula to make it spread over yet another album, Prince has become predictable and dated. With Madonna pushing sexual outrageousness to laughable extremes, the members of Nirvana wearing dresses on stage and rappers Digable Planets and Arrested Development blending rock,jazz, and rap into genrebending music, Prince needs new frontiers to explore, and he hasn’t found them yet.

On each successive new album, Prince takes the old sound and cranks it up a notch, giving it another layer of polish and another infusion of skill. He gets better each time, but he doesn’t change, which puts him in the odd position of being great, but no longer groundbreaking.

SEX AND SALVATION.

The most recent proof comes from last year’s Prince album, the one with the male/female sign as the title.

The sprawling 18-cut epic – which he recorded with his latest band, the New Power Generation – dances from the witty funk of "Sexy M.F." to the power pop of "The Morning Papers" and the slow-grind of "Damn U" with master’s aplomb and a newcomer’s fierce energy.

But if Prince has retained his ability to impress and charm, he isn’t the surprise package he used to be. He has taken his sex-and-salvation message about as far as it can go without substituting anything new in its place, and with the exception of some awkward experiments with rap, he hasn’t expanded his musical horizons much, either.

But there are two things you can’t do when Prince is involved. You can’t visit him at home, and you can’t write him off. He has survived three unsuccessful movies ("Under the Cherry Moon", "Sign O’ the Times" , and "Graffiti Bridge" ), multiple recording disappointments, and frequent critical grumblings about overexposure and creative burnout, and he has given no sign of slowing down or giving up.

Even if he were to slip out of sight, his legacy isn’t going anywhere. With his brave blend of musical styles and his brash sexuality, Prince paved the way for such young bucks as Bobby Brown and Bell Biv Devoe, and producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (Janet Jackson), L.A. Reid and Babyface (Paula Abdul and Whitney Houston), and Teddy Riley (Bell Biv Devoe, Michael Jackson).

It has been almost a decade since Prince crowed "Baby I’m a Star", and no one could argue otherwise. But as long as there are dance floors to fill, parties to pump and romantic conquests to be made, Prince’s nova will keep shining above our heads, providing heat and light, blinking to a mysterious beat only he can hear.