Publication: Q [UK]
Date: April 1995
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Title: "Impish: He Has It All: The Artist When He Called Prince"
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Prince and the Revolution
Music from Purple Rain Prince
Lovesexy Danny Elfman
Batman-Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Prince and the New Power Generation
Diamonds and Pearls Let's not be coy. He's a genius. Popular music in the last years, has, quite simply, produced nobody else remotely like him. No one else has spanned the twin worlds of black and white pop with such aplomb, such verve, such respect and impudence at the same time. No one else seems as bewitched by The Beatles and Joni Mitchell as by George Clinton and Sly Stone. Hence the Hendrix comparison. But, if it didn't have the sulphurous whiff of heresy about it, many would contend that Prince is the more comprehensive talent.

The depth of his talent is seen in these titles, a seemingly random selection from the last decade, give or take a year, and newly available at mid-price. This is not the very best he can do. That honor would have to go to Sign O' the Times, a candidate for the best album of the 1980s. Yet each is marvellous. Sure, he can sometimes exasperate with his Beavis & Butt-head priapism and his stupid symbols. But the music is often so breathtakingly special that you would forgive him anything-even changing his name to the sort of doodle that might get a reluctant ball-point pen working again.

When Warner Brothers signed the 18 year old Prince, he demanded that he be allowed to produce his own records. This is one instance where we can be grateful for a record label's tolerance and patience, for it took five years and five albums for this supernatural confidence to ripen and bear fruit. The record that ushered in Prince's investiture into the pop aristocracy was Music from Purple Rain. When the Purple Rain movie appeared, US critic Mikhal Gilmore commented that he "dominates the screen with all the allure, menace, and vulnerability that made Marlon Brando so irrefutable in The Wild Ones". The Los Angeles Herald declared it "the best rock movie ever made". It certainly has the edge on the Dave Clark Five's Catch Us If You Can but it isn't the story that electrifies, rather the brilliance of Prince's music. The Purple Rain album was the first real evidence that a colossus was abroad. For the most part, it inhabits a genre of its own creation; a pristine, poppy electrofunk with the occasional jaw-dropping foray elsewhere, most memorably on the title track.

As an album, Purple Rain is never less than exuberant and regularly it hits real heights. Let's Go Crazy and Baby I'm a Star are romps that show off the Revolution's live attack to grand effect but it's the more unusual tracks that impress. Darling Nikki melds a silly soft-porn narrative with cheesy, dispassionate style. Prince himself has called it "the coldest song ever written". He then achieves the exact obverse with the wonderful I Would Die 4 U, where the fleet footed rhythms, the supplicant vocal testimonies and (a stroke of genius this) the lone guitar note- ringing through the songscape like a hunting horn- evoke brilliantly the heart-racing thrill of sexual infatuation. Prince is expert at these placings of repeated motifs. The little flurry of strings that punctuates every couplet of Take Me With U makes the song shiver with delight.

To a British audience, Purple Rain's best known tracks are the singles When Doves Cry and Purple Rain. "Dig if u will a picture/Of U and I engaged in a kiss" begins the former, immediately conjuring the obscurely sad and longing nature of the song. One now only has to hear the plangent chord that opens Purple Rain to be similarly transported into the song's aching heart; it's an anthem with none of the brawny gracelessness that the word "anthem" implies. It climaxes with a soprano straight from the high Catholic mass, brilliant axe hero posturing, other worldly strings and the collapse of any reasonable listener into racking sobs. An album this good should end something like that.

Between Purple Rain and Lovesexy, Prince made the charming Parade- Music from Under the Cherry Moon, the indispensable Sign O the Times and an oddity called The Black Album which is not as good as its reclusive status implies. By the release of Lovesexy, in 1988, the world was expecting miracles as a matter of course from the wee fellow. They didn't get them but they did get a first-rate record, highly enjoyable if no masterpiece.

It hardly puts a foot wrong for the first quarter of an hour as the Latino funk of I No, enlivened by new rapper Cat and periodic shouts of "Hundalasilliah!" moves fluidly into Alphabet St. which in turn gives way to Glam Slam. Both are among the best things he's ever done. Alphabet St. works a little modern magic on the bare bones of rock n' roll: a snapping '50s guitar lick, some ancient chords and witty Beatle pastiche harmonies. It also exhibits a naughty humor "Excuse me, I don't mean 2 be rude/I guess tonight I'm just not in the mood," admits the normally rampant Prince, "So if U don't mind I would like to...watch."

Glam Slam positively fizzes with ideas. Although Prince has always talked up his bands, it's obvious that this your de force of guitars, strings and multi-layered voices is straight out of one head. Lovesexy never reaches these heights again but it constantly entertains. When 2 R in Love is a smoochie with goose bumps and Anna Stesia, like the awesome It from Sign O' the Times, reminds that Prince is aware of how sexual obsession can be grimly punishing as well as ecstatic.

Prince wanted to soundtrack the Batman movie single-handedly but Tim Burton brought in chum Danny Elfman, leader of art ensemble Oingo Boingo. Elfman's gloomy, gothic score is not bad but Prince's Batman Motion Picture Soundtrack stands up better in isolation. Partyman and the knowing, hypermodern Batdance strike the right mood of dark humor and impish swagger. And what was Burton thinking of to turn down the Arms of Orion, a limpid duet with Sheena Easton that invests a Lloyd Webber-ish tune with real feeling.

In the first week of 1991, Prince premiered his new band, The New Power Generation, at his Glam Slam club in Minneapolis. More raunchy and less precise than the Revolution, they added a hard, urban edge to Diamonds andPearls, a high quality record that some think is his best since Sign O' the Times. It's just a pity that a new found interest in street culture seems to have fogged his usually perceptive taste radar. The steamy Gett Off is utterly ruined by that horrible line about moving "your big ass round here while I work on that zipper". Similarly, Insatiable's mood of high erotic tension is killed by an asinine innuendo (you think he's going to say "tits" and he doesn't- try not to think about it). All bets are off after this, as conclusively as if Prince had stood revealed in yellowing Y-fronts. Moral: Prince is too smart to nick ideas from Snoop Doggy Dogg. Or Benny Hill.

Everything else is fine though. The Gulf War diatribe, Live 4 Love, bristles with unspoken fear and Money Don't Matter Tonight combines succulent jazz melodies with a sour lyric about life in the underclass. The title track is stately and beautiful and Strollin' sounds like lift-music from a future megalopolis: sanitized, cool, extremely seductive. Cream, the American Number 1 single, is the real star of the show though. It's a T. Rex song in effect relocated to Minneapolis (the "filthy cute" lines are quite deliberate echoes of Hot Love's "dirty sweet" ones) and it's ridiculously sexy. In certain circumstances, the coquettish come-on of those guitar phrases could get you into a lot of trouble- easily a half bottle of gin's worth.

Really, he's got it all. Your eyes will grow wet. Your heart will swell. Other parts of your body will be similarly affected. Funky, funny, tender, incurably romantic and indescribably horny. When he is pulling his next gormless publicity stunt, let's not forget that he is, to re-iterate, a genius. Let's hear it for the little guy.