Within the framework of his career, Musicology‘s success might depend on how deep your fandom runs. Released in 2004, Musicology arrived at a very particular time in the pop landscape: namely, a time during which music criticism held a considerable amount of cache. The internet blogger-as-tastemaker was a culturally-relevant trope; remember, this is the year music critics broke Arcade Fire’s Funeral, propelling it to a cultural phenomenon instead of a well-kept secret. And the internet mostly agreed upon one thing about Musicology: it was the best Prince had been since he parted ways with Warner Bros.
Of this I’m not sure, although I’m sure that Musicology is a good record and worth listening to. It’s easy to see why this school of thought prevailed, though: post-Warners, Prince spent the better part of a decade indulging in lots of whims. Though the Prince diehards cherish a lot of that material now, at the time, it seemed like he was only bloating his body of work with overlong records and vault-clearing exercises. Given that his emancipation from his contract gave him the freedom to wander down every rabbit-hole that popped into his beautiful, labyrinthine brain, it seemed a pipe dream that we’d ever get tight, focused, pop-smart Prince again (even his best record from this time period, The Rainbow Children, is sprawling and unwieldy). So perhaps the deck was always stacked in favor of Musicology — after all, pop music fans love a good return to form.
And yes, Musicology is a return to form, if not necessarily function. At an economical 12 tracks, none of which goes for longer than six minutes (astounding, I know), it’s the leanest Prince record in some time, and it takes precious few detours, Prince getting in and out again without indulging in any freeform jazz or Jehovah’s Witness sermonizing or having a four-minute sex monologue or anything. He doesn’t really stretch anything to — or past — its breaking point here. Musicology is, honestly, more focused and digestible than anything in P’s discography since… I dunno, Diamonds & Pearls? Lovesexy, maybe?
Which is all good. It’s what Prince’s career needed: everybody that stayed on the Prince train post-Warners was content with watching him follow every little thread, but he reasserted his pop royalty with those who hopped off somewhere around Chaos and Disorder. Still, Musicology isn’t exactly Prince’s new-millennium benchmark. To a certain degree, it almost sounds like Prince-by-numbers; it never quite sounds like anybody else, but it does sound a bit like 2004 Prince trying to sound like 1986 Prince. This doesn’t disqualify it from usefulness, to be sure — it boasts far too many ringers for that — but it does give off a weird back-to-the-well vibe that doesn’t always gel.
Those ringers, though. Prince’s best compositions tip a hat to the glory days without settling for mere facsimile. The title track is a love letter to funk music that tacitly posits Prince as an elder statesmen alongside his idols, proclaiming itself an “old-school joint” and directly acknowledging that Prince is an aging superstar: there’s even a coda where P flips through radio stations and hears snatches of his own past glories (“Kiss”, “Little Red Corvette”, etc). The addictive “Illusion, Coma, Pimp & Circumstance” works with space the way “Kiss” did, P’s guitar stabs cutting through a metronome-perfect funk beat, Prince delivering an evergreen-worthy chorus and dropping some humor in the process (“boyyyy, I was fine back in the day”). Later, we get pleasantly self-aggrandizing funk a la “Jam of the Year” with “Life o’ the Party”, and an almost-hall-of-fame Prince pop-rocker in “Cinnamon Girl”, which boasts a big, bouncy chorus and a love-for-all message.
“A Million Days”, Musicology‘s requisite power ballad, is something of an earworm, but lacks punch; P throwing off the song’s groove with a flurry of inscrutable jazz chords near the end is a bad look, too, but I like the guitar and the hook. (Side note: listening to “A Million Days” for this write-up, I’ve been trying to figure out where Prince ripped the melody from. Turns out, I’m thinking of Morris Day & The Time’s reassembly as The Original 7ven in 2011; “Faithful” from that record seems to crib liberally from this track, although I’d argue that it was used in service of a better song, so I’ll allow it.) Really, the rest of Musicology doles out plenty of stuff I like — the sparse, groovy “What Do U Want Me 2 Do?”, “Do Me, Baby”‘s less-dangerous cousin “Call My Name”, even the loping “Darling Nikki”-redux strut of the rock-laced “The Marrying Kind” — but rarely anything essential. Which, of course, is the curve on which we subconsciously start to grade aging artists: in lieu of them turning out vital canonical works, we’ll compromise and settle for the listenable.
And really, there’s no shame in that. Musicology is a good Prince album. The collective swoon over it is kind of smoke and mirrors, sure — for Prince to pull himself out of the weird try-anything-release-anything period of ’96-’03 was enough for casual listeners to tune back in — but there’s an argument to be had that this record and its reception set Prince on track. He’d spend the remainder of his career comparatively reigned-in, reassembling his reputation as a pop craftsman of the highest order.
Grade: B-
Drew's Album of the Day 