The Small Paybacks

No, you shouldn't call Prince's new album a comeback, but musicology will do just fine

A dozen years ago I ended an account of Prince's epic hissy fit against the Corporation Briefly to Be Known as AOL Time Warner by supporting his demand that the slavemasters let 450 of his unreleased songs out of the can. But by 2000, when Prince launched the NPG Music Club, where a claimed 400,000 fans would pay $25 to frolic among the artist's musical leavings, I'd changed my mind. Prince's late Warners music is far more inspired than it's made out to be. But he's proven too self-involved to quality-control the self-released albums with which he now marks time and clocks dollars between major-label releases, of which the remarkable if over-reported Musicology "comeback" is merely the latest.

In 1996, Prince ditched Warners and by year's end had gone to Capitol with Emancipation, three CDs' worth of blessed excess that never peaks like a pop album should. Having credited the self-released Soul to New Power Generation in 1998, he was backed by Arista on 1999's high-generic Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, where pro forma cameos failed to produce the hits Clive Davis banks on. The Columbia-backed Musicology comes four and a half years and two self-released studio CDs later. Although the latter were augmented by two more three-disc sets--in-concert One Night Alone . . . Live!, outtakes-stuffed Crystal Ball (special bonus album also included!)--the timing is unworthy of the hoopla: Rolling Stone lead review, Time feature review, Newsweek feature, and an Entertainment Weekly cover piece preemptively entitled "Comeback? I Never Went Anywhere!" But hoopla is what corporations are for.

Without question the long, hyperbolic label dispute damaged Prince's star power. But the built-in limitations of that power ought to be equally clear. His heroic campaign to become the first black rock star since Jimi Hendrix never took his hard-earned status to the next level of meaning, the one achieved by Springsteen and Bono and even Madonna (even King of Pop Michael Jackson, who made his obsession with childhood resemble a cause). Famously reclusive, he shunned interviews. Sex was his great theme, but his view of it remained frustratingly polymorphic--designed for stimulation to the exclusion of edification. Sly-like, he worked with musicians of many races and both genders, and as of Purple Rain was publicly biracial himself. Yet this one-man rainbow coalition barely had it in him to come out for brotherhood; apocalyptic, incoherent, or mushy, his rare political lyrics were always poorly informed. So his multitude of dedicated fans never much cared about what he represented. Instead, they cared about what he was. They cared about his talent--his musical talent. Musicology--good title.