With Two Funky New Albums, Prince Still Putting in Work

With Two Funky New Albums, Prince Still Putting in Workby Frank Paul, Jr. | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
For his fans, Prince Rogers Nelson occupies a uniquely personal space thanks to his ability to stay relevant in five different decades, by building a tapestry of songs spanning our phases of life. Scan his canon and folks-of-a-certain age find joints that were edgy in high school (e.g. “Little Red Corvette”), seductive soundtracks in college dorm rooms (“International Lover”; “Adore”), political commentary in formative adult years (“Money Don’t Matter 2 Night”) and today’s "That's My Jam!" karaoke fodder  (“Kiss”, “Lets Go Crazy”, “Rasberry Beret”, etc.)
So it is with a dubious ear that one approaches Art Official Age and Plectrumelectrum, albums number 30-something and 30-something-plus-one from Prince, who no doubt saw indefatigable icons like James Brown (who cranked out more than 70 albums) as a hero. But James’ groove tended to circle a particular orbit - he had a “sound”.
Like several of the aliases he has assumed in his career, Prince’s product tends to be a wildcard -- his “sounds” are many: you never know which one to expect, and it's always hard to think he can match his much-loved hits. Perhaps that is what makes the 56-year-old musician’s two new albums, the second a collaboration with all-female band 3rd Eye Girl, such a worthwhile challenge.
To be sure, these are works Prince fans will embrace far sooner than some pop-radio sampler, someone looking for a companion to Meghan Trainor’s “All About that Bass” (even though the sassy superhit recalls Prince’s “Daddy Pop” and “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad.”) In fact, Art Official Age and Plectrumelectrum represent the dawn of Prince’s new amiable relationship with Warner Music, after nearly 20 years of ugly legal wrangling. That seems to have freed him to unlock that vault of songs about which he has boasted.
Myriad phases of Prince can be heard here: Guitar-raking electric Prince ("Aintturninround”, “Fixurlifeup”); ‘Sgt. Pepper’ Prince (“Tic Tac Toe”); Wendy and Lisa-era Prince (“White Caps”) and some of that “Purple Rain”-style -ish that makes no sense the first three times it runs through your head (“Art Official Cage”, “Marz”), but clicks on the fourth. With radio-ready joints like “The Gold Standard”, “This Could Be Us”, and “Clouds”, the artist shows he can still drop falsetto-frosted rhythm and blues gems, rich with grown-folk talk:  
“Everybody knows/That a woman needs love/Like a river flows (inside)/If it’s good thats all she thinking of/Sleep alone if you wanna/But like a new pair of shoes/You gonna wanna show me off to your friends when I..OOH/You are the cage to my dove/Forever and ever in love/This could be us.”
The recently Afro-coiffed Prince even slips in his pro-black agenda, sort of. While a far cry from historical haymaker “Family Name” (from 2001’s The Rainbow Children), he does stretch from sexy whimsy in “Breakfast Can Wait” (“You can’t leave a black man in this state/Come here baby/let me put you on my plate/Breakfast can wait”), to losing a fast food job (for giving away too much food to hungry young brothers and sisters) and suggesting there’s another Great Migration in order, in “Marz”: “If a rocket ship didn't cost more than a car/The brotherhood might just move to Mars."
Prince lets the members of 3rd Eye Girl -- Hannah Ford, Donna Grantis and Ida Nielsen -- flex on a few cuts, including the gentle “Stop This Train,” energetic “Another Love” and “White Caps”, where one singer sounds eerily like Haley Williams of the rock-pop group Paramour. That’s a problem, since on this 3rd Eye Girl album, its hard to tell which of the musicians is featured at any moment, especially since we know Prince can do it all himself.
Ambiguity of origin, if such a sin exists, is perhaps the project’s most glaring question mark. Prince’s deep cache of songs leads to moments when you wonder if a song was recorded when Mr. Nelson was performing as Prince, The Man with No Name, The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, or “Prince” post-2001.  
No matter. On albums number 30-something and 30-something-plus-one, Mr. Nelson proves to be the manifestation of his 2001 tune “The Work, Pt. 1”, an homage to James Brown’s legacy, in which Prince insists: “I’m willing to do the work/Do what I gotta do.” Its possible religious subtext aside, this could be his mantra to the artistic process since the late 1970’s. Five decades later, Prince is still doing the work.
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Frank Paul, Jr. is Americas Desk Editor at Thomson Reuters