Prince Peculiar

Prince fans are a strange breed. Like Morrissey, Prince is an artist who drives people to build shrines in their basements; whose fans have a tendency interpret their lives through the lyrics of the said artist. Prince is a performer who, for whatever reason, inspires a kind of awe usually reserved for deities – and being one of his admirers seems to bring with it the responsibilities that are usually associated wit a devotional religion. Prince doesn’t have fans; he has followers, converts, disciples

In my life I’ve known three people who were Prince obsessive. All three of them – and this is not an exaggeration – suffered from serious forms of mental illness; one was a schizophrenic, one a manic depressive, the other obsessive compulsive. One of them in particular used to walk around my town with a huge silver symbol around his neck, the same symbol that Prince changed his name to between 1993 and 2000. There’s definitely something about the famously petite artist that attracts, how shall we say, a ‘certain kind of fan.’

Perhaps it’s the fact that Prince himself is, to put it bluntly, absolutely fucking nuts. Let’s take a quick recap of his career that spans nearly thirty years in the music business: he changed his name to a squiggle that represents ‘a combination of the male and the female’, forcing the press to refer to him only as TAFKAP (The Artist Formerly Known As Prince); spent a large period appearing on stage with the word SLAVE painted on his face; he toured the world with a $250,000 giant gold pretzel that supposedly represented a clitoris; he once wrote an album which was to be released by prince under the guise of a female hermaphrodite. Not yet convinced? As if to prove his oddball credentials, he became a Jehovah's Witness in 2001 and released a mind-numbingly bad album, The Rainbow Children, in expression of his new-found faith.

Like many black artists (Sly and the Family Stone, Marvin Gaye, etc), Prince is a musician caught somewhere between the pure and the profane, the intensely sexual and the puritan. However, even during Sly Stone’s most insane, drug-addled periods, even at Marvin Gaye’s most eccentric, both look decidedly normal in comparison to The Purple One.

Following The Rainbow Children, things went from bad to worse, with Prince releasing the album NEWS in 2003. Even more self-indulgent that his previous musical disaster, NEWS failed to chart at all, a new low for an artist who during the 1980s appeared to have the world at his feet. Prince seemed the least likely artist in the world set to enjoy a comeback. And yet, in February 2005, Rolling Stone magazine published the list of top money makers of 2004. Surprise surprise, Prince was on top with estimated net earnings of $56.5 million.

Prince’s latest album, 3121, released in March, is the most recent manifestation of his comeback. Gone are the 14 minute instrumental jams of NEWS, replaced instead with sexy horns, funky pop and songs made for MTV. The first single from the album, ‘Black Sweat’, is a kind of reminder of where people like Pharrell Williams get their ideas from, a glorious slice of dirty RnB that sounds most unlike the kind of thing that a good Jehovas Witness should be performing.

The press, too, have been quick to heap praise on Prince, variously being described as ‘a masterpiece’, a ‘classic’ and his best work for twenty years. The fact that it’s a fine pop album isn’t to be denied. But something tells me that people right now want to see a Prince comeback so much that they’re overlooking some of his musical shortcomings. 3121 has an admittedly impressive opening, but somewhere around the middle of the album, things start to go badly wrong. It all starts to sound like mid-tempo, sickly RnB, performed by a second rate James Brown imitator. And what’s more, just when you we’re least expecting it, Prince decides to start sermonising. Lyrics begin to make dangerous sounding predictions of Armageddon, and the listener is advised to "safeguard against the forked tongue and the treachery of the wicked one". It’s a perfectly good pop album, but one which perfectly supports my primary thoughts about the man: you have to be a little bit unhinged to really, really dig it.

© Tom Wilson / Business Magazin 2006