Prince: Prince (1979)

So much of Prince's eponymous sophomore effort can be summarized by its hysterical cover. Where For You functioned as primarily a disco record, Prince fit more into the funk mold. The move from a hot and current genre to the (relatively) old-fashioned sound that helped spawned it is matched by the change from For You's blurry, flashy cover to the almost-pastel colored photograph that adorns Prince. Featuring a visibly bored Prince standing with his shirt off, the album art suggests Prince at once in his own skin (figuratively stripped down from disco to funk and literally stripped down to a bare chest) and uncomfortably and artificially donning an image in the fierce hunt for success.

That contradiction holds back Prince's second LP, but the fact that Prince is at least somewhat at home with the material marks a step up from his debut. It still sounds more like For You than Dirty Mind, but Prince shows its maker starting to consolidate his early sound into something more focused, capable of setting trends instead of merely following them. Hell, even as Prince starts to distance itself from disco, it does disco better than For You, managing to give even single-length numbers the elasticity and bounce of extended dance mixes and just having groove in the first place, an element sorely lacking from so much of the first album.

Prince opens with the extended cut of its lead single, "I Wanna Be Your Lover," instantly announcing the leap in quality and cohesion between this album and its predecessor. Adding a tighter low-end to For You's spacious synth lines, the track actually has a danceable beat to hook a crowd. Prince also develops his vocal style more, adding funkier, raunchier yowls to his slick falsetto that start to lay on the sex merely talked about in For You's more ribald tunes. "I Wanna Be Your Lover" proved to be a smash, climbing to the top of the Soul chart, going gold on its own and helping push the full LP to platinum status within months.

But it is not even remotely the highlight of the album. "Sexy Dancer" anticipates the compositional busyness that would make Prince's compositions among the densest pop ever recorded. With a female choir chanting the title over funky, spare guitar lines, programmed handclaps and drum patterns and humming synths, "Sexy Dancer" sounds more like a great b-side for Prince's next album than something from this era of his music. "Bambi," meanwhile, expands upon the rock-tinged For You closer "I'm Yours" with a much more refined guitar showcase that still makes an appearance live when Prince wants to cut loose with his axe. Best of all is "I Feel For You," which is not quite as Dirty Mind-ready as "Sexy Dancer" but is nevertheless the runaway highlight of the album. With giddy synths and a bassline that seems to pass through and back out of the song as if it were traveling in elliptical orbit around it, "I Feel For You" wouldn't fit in the arenas Prince would soon fill. But none of his songs to this point feel as primed to set a club going than this, even "I Wanna Be Your Lover," which clearly hooked listeners more.

As with For You, Prince suffers from an excess of uninspired filler. Generally, the fluff on this record rates higher than that of its predecessor: The half-rocking, half-funky "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?" and swooning "Still Waiting" are solid numbers that simply do not stand out the way that the superior tracks do. "With You" and "It's Gonna Be Lonely," on the other hand, start slipping from memory even before they conclude. Both recall those weighted standing punching bags that always seem about to tumble, only to frustratingly whip back to their starting point unaltered. Even they seem like early classics, however, when stacked against "When We're Dancing Close and Slow." Easily the worst song off Prince's first two albums (and several LPs beyond that), this travesty lives up to its title by listlessly trudging through its approximation of a prom night slow dance. In fact, it so captures the awkward maneuvering and desperately repressed hormones of a teenage dance that the song may actually be a brilliant work of subjectivity.

But never mind the dross; Prince clearly develops from its artistically and commercially disappointing predecessor, and if it occasionally seems over-calculated to appeal to an audience, that planning clearly worked. In going platinum, the album helped conform Warner Bros' faith in the young artist when they signed him to a three-record deal. It must have also boosted Prince's confidence, as the man who mumbled nervously at the microphone of a rehearsal show for label executives would subsequently go out and support this album, proving so popular that he soon became Rick James' opening act. Before long, Prince and his assembled band would regularly sabotage James and win the open preference of the attending audience. That is more rebellious than anything on Prince, but Prince's music would soon match this brashness, and more.

Prince: For You (1978)

Before Prince Rogers Nelson turned 20 years old, he cut his teeth in a funk group where he soon eclipsed peer and mentor alike, got himself an astonishingly generous record deal from a major label (including publishing rights for all his work), and released his solo debut with the proud boast of having been entirely "produced, arranged, composed and performed" by its maker. Never mind the misleading half-truths of that claim: For You's artistic credit sent a message of intent and announced a musician of ambition and creative drive. Indeed, Prince may well have been less satisfied with the impressiveness of his accomplishments at such a young age than he was irritated by the two interminable years it took to turn his demo into a full-fledged, official product.

Adding to the sense of For You as more an announcement of what was to come, the opening title track unfurls as a layered a cappella choir of Prince's cooing vocals soothingly telling the listener, "All of this and more is for you./With love, sincerity, and deepest care,/My life with you I share." To call this a precursor to Prince's musical openness would be inaccurate, as even at his most soulful and vulnerable, Prince throws up emotional walls to shield himself. Nevertheless, its quasi-spiritual overtones, especially when juxtaposed with the sex-drenched disco that dominates the rest of the record, offer an insight into dialectical forces that would soon propel Prince to superstardom.

But not here. The problem is not instantly apparent: For You quickly moves from its title track to "In Love," its bubbling synths and come-hither falsettos clearly linked to the previous song but worlds removed in execution. The unexpectedly logical progression from saint to sinner, linked through arrangement and effeminate vocals, hints at Prince's future embodiment of a gender- and race-bending Madonna/whore complex that took Elvis' mix of flagrant sexuality and gospel purity and shattered it into a million pieces. Better still is "Soft and Wet," perhaps the most "Prince" song of the pre-Dirty Mind era. On it, the not-yet-Purple One revs up the synths of "In Love" into staccato, sleazy bursts of cyber funk as an air of hunger creeps into the vocals and such lines as "All I wanna hear is your sweet love sighs." Though still tethered to en vogue disco sounds rather than simultaneously more old-fashioned and futuristic like Prince's best work, "Soft and Wet" is the best indication on the record of where the artist would go.

Scattered among the rest of the album are a few other gems. "Just as Long as We're Together" and the closing "I'm Yours" show off Prince's ability to craft a one-man jam, be it the former's robotic propulsion or the latter's layering of traditional instruments into a solo showcase. "Baby," on the other hand, demonstrates how he could take well-worn lyrical territory and give it an unexpected twist. In this case, he sings about having a child out of wedlock with his lover, traversing the fears of financial hardship and unwanted maturity such an event will bring. Yet there is also positivity and hope in the song, especially in the way that Prince offers to stand by his woman no matter her decision. Further down the road, Prince would turn more to didacticism in serious lyrical matters, but there is a refreshing, humble generosity here that would all too rarely be seen again.

Yet none of these songs has the instant classic feel of tunes the artist would start churning out regularly in just a few years. To judge these songs by what connection they have to later work may seem unfair, but these are works of potential, not fully realized pieces of songcraft. They are reasons to keep listening to see how this new talent develops, not reasons to become a fan. Saddled with two other listless ballads ("Crazy You" and "So Blue") and a mid-tempo dance track that never gives off enough energy to get someone on the floor ("My Love is Forever"), For You does not match the braggadocio of its nearly solo construction. Unlike any Prince record before the '90s, it sounds hopelessly locked into current musical trends rather than rooted deeper and searching outward for new sounds. The man who would redefine pop, funk and R&B here offers nothing more than a decently promising disco record that sounds conventional at a time when the genre was being stretched and redefined on a regular basis. Ironically, its singular sonic focus may be the biggest flaw, for Prince operates best when he can bounce conflicting sounds and ideas off the wall. It is strange to feel deflated by a 20-year-old's debut on the grounds of it being well-honed and contemporary, but then, nothing is ever sensible when it comes to Prince.

Sign 'O' the Times (Prince, 1987)

Like Purple Rain, the film of Sign 'O' the Times matches the album it supports. The former visualizes the artist in ascendancy, matching the jubilant, youthful bravado of songs like "Let's Go Crazy" and, of course, "Baby I'm a Star." Its narrative progression is basic but executed with sufficient weirdness to allow for idiosyncrasy and the odd bit of emotional resonance (the belabored journey of the title song within the film, to say nothing of the track itself). And like the album to which it is linked, Purple Rain is at once dated and outside time, a relic of outlandish '80s pop culture and a refinement of that culture into an enduring piece of art.

Sign 'O' the Times has almost nothing in common with Albert Magnoli's film, but then Sign 'O' the Times the album so scarcely resembles the music of Purple Rain. Like the double LP, Sign 'O' the Times begins with what appears to be a story, the theatrical staging of the movie analogous to the lyrical collection of headlines that is the album's opening title track. But then, as quickly as a story emerges, it dissipates, giving way to a pure rush of eclectic songwriting and performance that shows off the best pop star of his time at the top of his talent. From the overbearing stage design to the colliding moods of the 13 songs chosen for the final cut, Sign 'O' the Times matches the unwieldiness of Prince's cobbled-together album (these two haphazard vinyl discs themselves the result of whittling down three separate abortive projects, two of them multi-LP themselves, into one release). Yet it also matches the music's sense of unexpected cohesion and its uncontainable skill and force. There are better directed concert films, and ones that feel more definitive, but no other live document so immaculately captures the filth and fantasy of rock's id.

The stage onto which Prince rolls out his housequake serves as a receptacle for the 20th century's seedy underbelly. Its flashing neon signs, mock-up high rises and chain-link fences combine a 1930s/40s film noir aesthetic of urban underworlds with a contemporary layer of drug crime and porn. Bathe the whole thing in smoke that looks as if it rose carrying stink and disease from manhole covers and you get a set that looks as if it sprung from the nightmares of the buttoned-down, socially conservative forces who went apoplectic with sexual shock when Prince released "Darling Nikki." In his own review of the film, Robert Christgau brought up the sharp contrast of this cluttered, grimy setup to the minimalist, clean staging of the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. That movie deservedly has a reputation for being perhaps the greatest concert document of them all, but it is hard to argue with Christgau and co-writer Carola Dibbell that Prince's body-fluid-crusted grease pit feels more aligned with the spirit of rock than the arty chiaroscuro that frame David Bryne and co.

What links the two artists and movies, however, is the sense of sheer delight in the party atmosphere of the music. The Heads of 1984 and Prince of 1987 could even be traced back to mirror reflections of each other: Talking Heads the group of art-school students who made angular post-punk before growing outward into the unlikeliest of funk acts, Prince the disciple of Sly & the Family Stone and James Brown who grew into pop's most prominent and aloof auteur. And just as a whole assembly of musicians and dancers joined the original quartet of Talking Heads members to transform their austere anti-pop into a jam, so too does Prince, fresh from firing the Revolution, combat his own musical insularity with a gang of backup players, dancers, even a horn section to literally jazz up some arrangements.

But if Talking Heads were tight and well-rehearsed, Prince's lineup was tighter and downright regimented. They blister through sharp pop like "Sign 'O' the Times" and "Play in the Sunshine" while letting the groove stretch until just before the breaking point on jams like "Housequake" and "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night." Prince finds the balance between incessantly rehearsed perfectionism and spontaneity, both in the music and the dancing. As his backups (a blend of men and women headed by a forcefully exuberant little spitfire named Cat) hit their marks with honed precision, Prince sometimes dances in step with them and sometimes thrashes around in a way that trades his balletic grace for sheer hoofin' passion. The addition of horns, a precursor for Prince's later live shows and recording lineups, manages to show off his gift for (re-)arrangement that also offers a simultaneous look forward and backward, musically speaking. The hot jazz brought by the horn section meshes surprisingly well with the hyper-processed, fat-bottomed electronica of Sign's solipsistic construction, its aural hat tip to the roots of raunchy, racial, radical 20th century popular music also the first of Prince's many on-the-nose but welcome reminders that jazz is no longer "pop" only because the vague "they" say it's not.

Furthermore, the jazz instrumentation modifies Prince's status as a bandleader at a crucial point. Prince was coming off the acrimonious dissolution of the Revolution just as Wendy & Lisa were establishing a significant input into the group's creative process, marking a return of the one-mand-band aesthetic as heard on early gems like Dirty Mind. By employing so many new players that one wonders how anyone even has space to dance on stage, Prince could still exert authoritarian control while focusing those control issues onto just the music rather than the tedious behind-the-scenes politics that drives wedges between friends. Yet the most striking aspect of the concert is the amount of screen time Prince cedes to the others. This is true not only of established collaborators like Sheila E (who gets more than one chance to steal the spotlight) but of the band as a whole. Indeed, though the setlist contains "If I Was Your Girlfriend," which upends the love song along gender and romantic lines, the most transgressive and shocking moment of the whole film may come when Prince leaves to let his band have all the attention with a rendition of Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time."

Sign 'O' the Times (the album) has since become a convenient marker post for Prince fans to delineate his classic period from "the rest." (An overly restrictive assessment, one that ignores such gems as The Black Album, 3121 and pretty much the whole of his early '90s material, which has aged incredibly well. It also overlooks how much fluff Prince put out even in his golden period, but this is an argument for another article.) Nevertheless, the record certainly does feel like a snapshot of the artist at that stage of his career, and so too does this concert film. Prince's subsequent tour backing Lovesexy serves better as a curtain call for his '80s work, amping up both the porn and religious exaltation while sprinting through his vast catalogue as if making his own mixtape. But Sign 'O' the Times is a better view of both the massive ambition and the raw skill and visceral impact of Prince's music. It is also a better forecast: its almost exclusively new material looks forward to the New Power Generation, and the return of the funk anticipates the Purple One's attempt to reclaim some of his black audience in the '90s after swinging so fully into outright pop. Yet its base impulse, to acknowledge concerns of nuclear annihilation and then push those fears out of mind with carnal pleasure and spiritual salvation, represents the pinnacle of Prince's fundamental musical drive in the '80s. The film ends with a rousing version of "The Cross," but it could just as easily have concluded with the great "1999" and the desperate optimism of its line, "I don't wanna die/I'd rather dance my life away."

Stuff I Like: Prince

Having been fortunate enough to miss the '80s and unfortunate enough to grow up solely on classic rock radio (home of the Eagles catalog and five played-to-death Zeppelin songs), Prince flew under my radar for many years. I believe the first real exposure I had to him came in the form of the Chappelle's Show sketch making fun of his weird personality. Shortly thereafter, I heard Kevin Smith's epic account of briefly working for the diminutive pop star in which every facet of an obvious Napoleon complex came to the fore. Content to let these less-than-flattering portraits make up the entirety of my awareness of His Royal Badness, I never thought twice about him until, on a whim a few years later, I listened to Purple Rain to see what the fuss was about.


By the time that deliriously glorious opening speech, half-cheesy and half-earnest, melted into the crunchy riff of "Let's Go Crazy," I was rewriting my simplistic, uninformed assessment of the man. By the time the album came to a close on its anthemic title track, I was a fan.

Moving deeper into Prince's discography, I found a series of albums that could drive the careers of several pop stars. Not only was he damn good, he was prolific. During his gold run through all of the '80s and the first part of the '90s, he put out double albums the way some release singles, and damn near everything he touched turned to gold. Sure, Diamonds & Pearls and Around the World in a Day weren't masterpieces, but he had four classics in the '80s alone and another two or three in the '90s.

For me, Prince is by some degree the most notable mainstream musician of the '80s. Every decade has one defining pop star, and the all tend to follow a pattern. The stars who send the fans wildest tend to be the ones to unlock the most inhibited sexuality. Elvis' gyrating hips gave way to the more socially rebellious Beatles, whose long hair perhaps informed David Bowie's androgyny, which in turn undeniably influenced Prince's full-on embrace of sexuality. Prince has a bit of all of them to his act, from Elvis' dancing to the Beatles' immaculate pop taste to Bowie's experimentation and constant reinvention. The next generation always builds off the previous ones, and Prince threw it all into one dripping stew.

He was sexually liberating, if you use "liberating" in the same sense that the US government did when we invaded Iraq: Prince tore down the infrastructure of sexual propriety and left people to pick up the pieces. His sleaziest material, released at the start of the '80s, epitomizes the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDs state of sex in America: Bowie played at being bisexual, but Prince never disguised being straight. It didn't matter. What he represented was boundless sexual euphoria, in which any form of human contact was sex. He left a clue for his unifying concept of love, lust and art on his second masterpiece, 1999 in the song "Dance, Music, Sex, Romance." It's all the same for Prince, and that energy makes his best work so enduringly fresh and wild.

It was only a matter of time before white Christian America caught wise to what he was doing, and when Tipper Gore heard her child listening to "Darling Nikki" she launched a crusade to protect America's parents from the horrible scenario of having to talk things out with their children. Imagine if she'd overheard "Sister" or "Jack U Off." Amusingly, in the endless debates the PMRC held with rock stars who generally acquitted themselves better than the would-be avatars of taste, those defending the PMRC routinely cited the Rolling Stones as an example of an edgy band from their childhood that wasn't as bad (and therefore it was OK for them to listen to then). Prince broke into the spotlight opening for the Stones on their Tattoo You tour in 1981, where he showed up in bikini bottoms and fishnets and was promptly booed off the stage. Before the PMRC cemented the dichotomy, Prince proved how tired and boring the Stones had become and how he'd come to embody all the roiling sexuality of their early, fierce work. Now it had its true outlet.

At his height, Prince's music aligned with his outrageous live presence: biracial and androgynous, Prince filled his bands with members of both genders and all races, and the music blended race music and white noise like no other. He embodied everything in himself, which is probably why he made so many of his albums practically alone, capable of playing any instrument and too egomanical to suffer anyone's opinion anyway. When he did bring players in, he drilled them as much as any jazzbo: the Revolution and the New Power Generation may not be as talented, but in terms of professionalism I would pit them against any of Zappa's lineups. The regulation and modulation of the band at Prince's every gesture can be heard even on scratchy bootleg audio, bands the size of a P-Funk house party at once loose and taut, capable of snapping to attention at a moment's notice before splintering off into conflicting yet united riffs and beats.

Trying to describe the effect of a great Prince song (especially a live one, as I've assembled a nice collection of bootlegs) can be tricky. After Elvis, Prince is the only male star who can effortlessly embody a Madonna/whore complex. Elvis stopped gyrating and glutting to sing some gospel, and Prince found the spiritual line underneath his sex long before he became a Jehovah's Witness. He finds a religious experience in that split-second after orgasm in which all control is lost and the brain just slacks before snapping back to attention. Every great Prince album builds to that climax then revels in the euphoria until worship and lust become the same thing: either way, you're on your knees.

Where the two previous entries of my Stuff I Like series have entertained me for the totality of their careers and can still be expected to produce quality work, I'm sad to say I can no longer depend on today's subject to rock out. During his heyday, Prince blew everyone out of the water, not just live but in the studio. Sadly, after fighting to break with Warner Bros. throughout the mid-'90s, during which time he pulled such eye-rolling bullshit as changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol and scrawled "Slave" on his face. Once free from the major labels, however, Prince demonstrated that his genius needed a third party to separate the wheat from the chaff. Since 1995's The Gold Experience, Prince has not released a truly great record, though Musicology and Planet Earth are solid and 3121 comes so close to classic status that part of its maddening, alluring tease is that it never quite reaches that level. Furthermore, for all the forward-thinking techno savvy of his records, Prince has proven to be something of a curmudgeon regarding the Internet, first attempting to break ground with a pioneering Web-based distribution service and perhaps growing bitter from the backlash he received over the disastrous results. Recently, he's hired representatives to troll the Internet ripping down all photos and videos of himself by claiming copyright, which stands as one of the most boneheaded artistic decisions ever made: it's as if he feels we collectively missed our chance to appreciate him so he won't let us figure it out now.

Nevertheless, the man still tears it up on stage, even if it may or may not be true he needs a double hip replacement and he no longer swears or slinks around like an animal in heat. Prince fought hard to be the next Hendrix, and he had the chops to pull it off. But it never quite materialized: people got tired of him before he got his dues or he let his image overshadow his considerable music skills. Either way, it's a damn shame one of the few great mainstream acts of the '80s got discarded when people pretended that decade never happened. Prince's recent efforts to concentrate on his guitar-playing abilities and live presence have reminded people of what a dynamic performer he is, though little in the way of studio gold has come from his efforts. Perhaps some day soon he can let loose again, not inhibiting his funk for the sake of Jehovah. But even if he doesn't, he'll still be one of the greatest showmen who ever lived, and the most underappreciated giant of late-20th century pop. It may be in the past now, but sometimes you just have to party like it's 1999.

Top Five Albums

1. Sign 'O' The Times

The spiritual successor to David Bowie's Station to Station, Sign 'O' The Times is apocalyptic robo-funk that only just manages to stay one desperate step ahead of the doom it portends throughout. Stripped of the Revolution, Prince returns to his one-man band ways, not just slinging the axe but laying down stiff but funky keyboard riffs as only he can. When he does invite the players back to help him out, he successfully condenses the manic energy of his stage show to the studio, from the rave-up "Housequake" to the actual live cut "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night." The album is certainly disjointed, and it's strange to think this double album is actually the focused condensation of the planned triple album Crystal Ball. Where else could a song about AIDs, the Challenger explosion and nuclear war rub up against a tune as joyous and bizarre as "Starfish and Coffee"? But it's all unified by a common idea: we could die any second, so dance and fuck until so you can go happy. W.H. Auden later rejected the idea behind one of his most loved poems, "September 1, 939" and wanted to change its most famous line, "We must love one another or die" to "We must love one another and die." The latter informs the mindset of Prince's greatest masterpiece. Question: anybody know about the quake?

2. Dirty Mind

After his eponymous second album yielded the disco leftover hit "I Wanna Be Your Lover," Prince had enough of a foothold to do a proper album but still needed to prove himself. The result was a scuzzy masterpiece, an icy-hot combination of over-processed but under-played digital noise and sultry analog funk. Sweat practically rolls out of your speakers when you play Dirty Mind. The stylistic evolution from the previous album is immense, introducing a number of hallmarks of Prince's sound (New Wave funk, poppy punk rock and burnin' hard rock) while still leaving space for all the exploration Prince would do over the next decade. The twin attack of "Head" and "Sister" are so tasteless they burn the buds off your tongue, but that just prepares you for what will come down the pipe in years to come.

3. Purple Rain

It's strange to think how much tinkering Prince did with the track listing, ordering and even individual track lengths for this album considering how the final product is so cohesive it sounds as if always planned to be one giant party song. (Having heard it, I do wish the full version of "Computer Blue" might have made the cut, though with an old vinyl another one of the record's perfect cuts would have had to be sacrificed.) From the fiery guitar work of "Let's Go Crazy" to the pleading "I Would Die 4 U" bleeding into the triumphant ode-to-self "Baby I'm a Star," Purple Rain covers so much ground but spotting the breaks not only between songs but during them is a near impossibility. If you're not a fan by the time the guitar solo in the closing track morphs into a sing-along, you have no soul.

4. 1999

Dirty Mind was Prince's first masterpiece, but 1999 is his first truly definitive album, collecting the steamy, hissing, cum-drenched funk of Dirty Mind and mixing it deftly with the confrontational but awkward politics of Controversy. Prince works best when he uses politics as nothing more than the reason to keep dancing, and this is the first of his attempts to dance his way through the End of Days. The first LP in the double album is perfection, the title track giving way to the mega-hit "Little Red Corvette" (to date, the best musical metaphor for a vagina) and the aptly named "Delirious," which digitizes rockabilly and proves Elvis rubbed off on Prince in the most unexpected ways. On side two are the terse manifesto "D.M.S.R." and the half-gorgeous, half-filthy "Let's Pretend We're Married," with a catchy chorus and verses that actually seem least dirty when the word "fuck" is used; at least it's more direct than the mental images Prince conjures elsewhere. The second record doesn't reach the same heights, but once again the tracks are all great. The anti-hispter "All the Critics Love U in New York" and claustrophobic "Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)" still bite, while the elegiac "Free" is as rousing as any of Prince's finest gentle anthems -- think "The Cross" and "Purple Rain." Proof Prince could do quantity and quality at the same time.

5. The Love Symbol Album

These days, seeing 18 tracks on a Prince album would fill me with dread, as I would anticipate the artist's lack of self-restraint and quality control. But the Love Symbol Album, announcing Prince's change of name and serving as the precursor to his open warfare with his label, carries the same quality/quantity mix as Prince's finest overstuffed '80s efforts. Prince dabbles in hip-hop for the first time (on a record he actually released, anyway) on the opening "My Name is Prince," which distills the self-aggrandizing nature of rap into a fine gin. "Sexy M.F." plays like a sultry, vulgar bit of lounge jazz. "The Morning Papers" is one of Prince's finest (and most neglected) love songs, and the Biblical "7" offers one of his most appealing visions of a heaven on Earth. The album's half-executed conception as a "soap opera" hinders the cohesiveness of the whole, but when the annoying segues drop out of the picture, the incredibly varied styles work together as well as the impossible contradictions of Sign 'O' The Times.

HM: The Black Album

Originally slated to be the follow-up to Sign 'O' The Times, The Black Album wound up in that massive vault of unreleased Prince goodies just before release when the artist had a vision of the record containing a great evil. For a record to scare Prince at the height of his powers speaks to the impact of the tunes, and The Black Album does not disappoint. Sandwiched between two of Prince's solo efforts, The Black Album is perhaps Prince's most straightforward band album, 8 slices of hardcore funk that can compete with Dirty Mind for sheer partyup bump-'n-grime. The experimentation with hip-hop precedes Love Symbol Album by four years. "Bob George" viciously attacks the glorification of violence creeping into mainstream black music to Prince's chagrin, while "Rockhard in a Funky Place" surfaces from the detritus of the Crystal Ball sessions and is one of the few tracks cut from Sign 'O' The Times to be as good as anything on the final product. Profane, sneering and sinister, The Black Album is also rollicking and primal in manners both joyful and fierce.

Best Bootleg: Den Haag, August 19, 1988

The obvious choice, yes, but this recording of Prince's aftershow in The Hague not only boasts superior audio quality but features the best demonstration of Prince's ability to make even a small nightclub into a space open enough to unleash his talent. The guitar solo of "Just My Imagination," the jazzy organ and early-'70s Miles brass of "Cold Sweat" and the final jam "Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic" are explosive, tailored to the switch from stadium to club but also transcendent of time and space. "Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic" may be the shortest 20-minute jam ever performed, free-flowing enough to alternate between instrumental showcases and driving grooves but always focused to prevent the more beleaguering aspects of excess. God I wish Prince would release some of these things as live albums. He and Springsteen just sit on gold mines.