Prince makes me scared for the future. When you have one of the greatest musicians of his time visibly sucking at every turn, what does it mean for us mere mortals? What does it mean for creativity in general? Is it fleeting till it's gone and then you die?
Prince released a multi-CD set this week that includes two new albums from him, LotusFlow3r and MplSound. Both are bad enough to make me long for the days of an over-stuffed mess like Emancipation. "Letitgo" from 1994's inconsequential Come shuffled onto my iPod the other day and I swear a wave of sadness for how rare even the most relative of past glories have become.
It's easy to say where it all went wrong (uh, "Batdance?" although there were still flashes of greatness much after that); it's much harder to say what exactly is wrong (besides, you know, everything). As a performer, he's as compelling as ever. It's not like he forgot how to play all 5,000 instruments in his arsenal. Did the guy just run out of melodies? Is that the price of musical prolificacy? Is the funk of a squeaky clean Jehovah’s Witness just not stinky enough? Does he just no longer have anything to say? Maybe! Over 90 minutes and two discs worth of groaning is propelled by lines like, "If you never know how much I care / I swear / It’s not fair" (from the positively Whitesnakian "4Ever") and, "You’re still fine / Like wine / You get better with time,” ("Better With Time") and perhaps most offensively: "Upload a child without a father/ Download no respect for authority / Upload a child with no mother / Download a hard time showing love." Amazing that a man through the course of a single career could go from the incest anthem "Sister" to Quayle-style "family values" (with crappy Life 2.0 imagery, to boot), but there you have it. When Prince's (more-) feminine alter-ego, Camille shows up here and there (courtesy of his pitched-up voice and amped-up sass), she no longer seems like a gender-fuck. She sounds neutered.
If you hit the heights that Prince has, your eventual fall is bound to be grand, but I feel like there's more there's more than inevitability going on here. Certainly, the sound of his music is no longer as rich as it once was. When it's sparse, it sounds more sterile than clean. When it's beefed up, it sounds like a designer impostor version of Justin Timberlake doing Prince -- he busts out his trusty LinnDrum for much of MplSound (LotusFlow3r is its consciously rockier counterpart). When Prince did this three years ago with "Black Sweat" and some lesser selections from 3121, it seemed endearingly novel. Now that it's retro repetition, it seems desperate and, even worse, self-fetishizing: he'll stick that synthy, hydraulic-sounding percussion under any old thing these days from pseudo-jazz to plastic calypso to ballads treacly enough to make "Diamonds & Pearls" seem like an ideal.
It makes sense that a former studio visionary is having a hard time keeping up -- technology creeps up on and threatens to lap us all. But instead of aging gracefully, Prince seems committed to showing his sagging ass whenever possible. Last week, he launched the paid subscription site, LotusFlow3r.com. It is Flash-heavy enough to suggest that Prince is the type of guy who wonders who's bringing the ice cream to the social networking. He probably pronounces "HTML" like "huhtumel." He probably thinks that Twitter is for clitorises (but only when he's feeling retro naughty). But beyond its hot-for-'01 aesthetic is a whole bunch of nothing. What was proposed as a way of granting access to his piles of unreleased shit and live footage is in reality a YouTube alternative that offered LotusFlow3r/MplSound a few days before their official release and a few hours before they spread like a big disease with a little name all over the Internet. LotusFlow3r.com will supposedly be updated consistently, but its launch felt more like a thud and suggested that this guy has no fucking idea what he's doing. The little content that it did have upon opening was plagued with tech problems. There's been a fair amount of outrage from his fans. And look, if you can't satisfy the die-hards that are willing to plop down $77 on essentially a blind buy in your name, you are fucking up. And you're fucking up because you're lazy, Mr. Legendary Vault. The air of mystery that has made Prince so compelling for so long (even after his music ceased being so) is quickly becoming the smell of bullshit. Really, Prince just seems kinda sad anymore.
Weirdly (although, is any other adverb about Prince ever more appropriate?), the bright spot of this release is its third disc, a Prince-helmed album from Bria Valentine called Elixer. As with all proteges, Bria seems dim (she pronounces "serotonin" as though it has a "ton" sound in the middle, not "tone") and not particularly talented (when it's at its best, her voice sounds like Vanessa Williams at her worst). Elixer is brimming with pseudo bossa nova that's sub-Sade enough to sound sub-Chanté Moore, and put-on sappiness that sounds like it should be coming from a wedding band playing the Steak Pit. It's all crap, but as something tacked on to an otherwise unrelated release (because if it weren't, less than nobody would care about it), there's a certain awareness of that. During the straight-up house track, "2nite," the best song on any of the three discs here, we're reminded of Prince's special talent as a trash trafficker who can make vapidness seem artful. It's not much, but at least he can still do something right.
xuHOSY
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