(#366: 21 May 1988, 1
week)
Track listing: Eye
No/Alphabet St./Glam
Slam/Anna Stesia/Dance On/Lovesexy/When 2 R In Love/I Wish U Heaven/Positivity
(Author’s Note: The first song is listed with an “eye” symbol in its
title rather than the word “eye.” Also, I only have so much time on this
planet.)
Getting to Prince this late is a bit like Bowie’s
first number one album being Lodger,
except that Bowie
hadn’t suddenly withdrawn a “darker” record before releasing the latter. The elaborately
rude whiteness of the Jean Baptiste Mondino cover shot contrasts, as I am sure
it was meant to do, with the eternal night of The Black Album, which was supposed to sneak out just before
Christmas 1987 but was pulled by its creator in apparent distress.
Actually, withdrawing The
Black Album was the best thing that he could have done with it, since the
record is more embarrassing than shocking. “Dead On It”’s jibes at hip hop are
on a par with Stan Freberg’s “Old Payola Roll Blues” and carried the risk of
making Prince suddenly seem very old-fashioned. The best thing about “Cindy C.”
is Steve “Silk” Hurley’s closing reference to the two-year-old “Music Is The
Key.” “Bob George” is no more than moderately disturbing. “Superfunkycalifragisexy”
is none of these. The album eventually slunk out as an official release in
November 1994, to a world newly aware of Snoop and Biggie who reacted to it
with near-total indifference.
Whereas Lovesexy
was his last lascivious flourish whose invention sends its immediate TPL predecessors to another planet. “Eye
No” is perhaps the record’s most conventional song (the whole was initially
intended as a continuous 44:58 sequence of music), ushering us in via a
Radiophonic Workshop sample (“Passing Clouds” by Roger Limb if you must know)
and the quiet voice of Ingrid Chavez, the future wife of David Sylvian, intoning
“Welcome to the New Power Generation” and other things. This all resolves into
an agreeable, but no more than agreeable, funk jam, the likes of which would
become progressively less agreeable as they became the mainstay of Prince’s
subsequent and quite overextended output.
The tune leads directly to “Alphabet St.,”
his last great single (as Marc Bolan would have recognised “great singles”),
although the car engine-starting effects, out of “Close (To The Edit),” suggest
that Prince was already beginning to follow other people’s ideas rather than
blaze a trail of his own. Cat Glover’s excitable rap is fun but takes the song
far beyond its natural end.
“Glam Slam” suggests somewhere Bolan might have ended up had
he lived, although the keyboard work in particular (the Fairlight takes the
place of any string sections) seems more indebted to Miles’ semi-random organ
blasts throughout Get Up With It. The
song is immaculately constructed but gradually veers away from comfort and
tonality, culminating in a pointillistic free Fairlight cadenza which slowly
runs out of steam.
But “Anna Stesia,” the record’s best song, sets out the
record’s central battleground, between good (Camille) and evil (Spooky Electric
– who said Iron Maiden?), most effectively and movingly. Rising from, and
finally returning to, the same eight-chord piano motif (see also “At Last I Am
Free”), the song builds up from troubled lonesome-soul ballad to handclapping
redemption; well, if I want to hear people singing “Love is God, God is Love,”
this would be several galaxies ahead of Erasure’s yahooing.
Side two is as dense and confrontational, as in daring the
listener to keep up, as the second side of On
The Corner. “Dance On”’s funk is progressively derailed by a skittering,
randomly-stopping-and-starting rhythm which I am sure must have been an influence
on early drum n’ bass. The title song takes the gender-swapping template of “If
I Was Your Girlfriend” and runs with it, Prince and Cat’s voices being varisped
up and down a silver curtain rack of ecstasy. Even the two ballads aren’t
straightforward; “When 2 R In Love,” the only song to survive from The Black Album, is sweet enough until
you notice that Achilles’ heel of a catch in the bassline, and indeed the song
turns on that dime of harmonic indeterminacy. Likewise, “I Wish U Heaven” is
more a mantra echoing the distant memories of a love song than the thing
itself; along with the segueing and studio chatter, the whole album gives the
air of an eighties Something/Anything?
Both side and record close with the darkest of these nine
songs: “Positivity” is advised more as a warning than a way forward, dispensing
happiness like a blithely-spirited pharmacist before picking up on a couple of
strands originating from Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message,” blowing them up and
rubbing them in the listener’s face; the harmonic ambiguity of the song
combines with the words to suggest that all of this might just be in vain.
Overall, then, Lovesexy
might be interpreted by some as representing the last dazzle of light before the bulb burns out completely (although it
is far from Prince’s last number one album). I don’t buy what he says, either
here or on The Black Album, but the
least that can be said is that this music would still stand up as a lugubrious
appendix to Black Messiah.
