At some point, it becomes tedious to sketch out all of Prince’s various eras and comebacks; for an artist with a career as lengthy and weird as his, it becomes an exercise in futility. How long must Prince remain dormant for a record to qualify as a comeback? We all heralded Musicology as a comeback record in 2004, despite Prince consistently (if less visibly) releasing music ever since his split from Warner Brothers; likewise, there’s a four-year gap between the UK-released 20Ten and Prince’s return to his record label with the double-shot of Art Official Age and Plectrumelectrum, and the time off appears to have energized him considerably. So is this comeback Prince? Is it third, fourth, fifth, sixth-wave Prince? Who has the energy to tell anymore?
What’s immediately apparent from a listen to the more “traditional” (and I play fast and loose with that word, considering the source) album, Art Official Age, is that Prince and Warner Bros appear to have made peace with one another. Consider: Prince’s biggest complaints with being a slave to a record label were the hampering of his artistic whims and their refusal to allow him to flood the marketplace with music, but Art Official Age is a future-funk sci-fi concept record released on the exact same day as a full-fledged guitar-rock album. All concerns seem to have been settled amicably.
Perhaps a consensus was reached. Perhaps in the intervening years between the end of Prince’s initial WB contract and Art Official Age, both sides came to the realization that Prince is an artist that needs to be prolific to succeed, wildly scribbling out new songs until a few stick, and that he’s also prone to flights of fancy that sometimes need reining-in. Whatever the case, the balance appears to be right, at least on AOA: at the time of its release in 2014, it was easily some of the most exciting and interesting new music Prince had put to wax in a while.
Part of that is due to its wholehearted embrace of modern pop, EDM, and r&b. Aging-artist Prince has frequently tipped his hat to the contemporary style of whatever era he finds himself in; it’s often in the name of showing-up the young jacks, usually with mixed results. Art Official Age is essentially and recognizably Prince, as even his worst records are, but it feels tons more participatory than, say, “Dead On It”, Prince’s hip-hop pisstake from The Black Album. It’s the sound of Prince finally attempting to integrate himself into the pop landscape, instead of trying to provide an antidote to it; as a result, he sounds more ageless than ever here, the experiment almost cyclically granting him the youthful energy to sound, paradoxically, like his old self. We didn’t need to wait for Prince to come back; we needed a pop landscape welcoming enough of an artist like Prince for him to sound at home in it.
And he sounds so comfortable here. Pseudo-title track “Art Official Cage” boasts more than a little Daft Punk in its DNA, strands of Skrillex and Justice skirting the fringes, a stadium-ready slab of EDM-prog-sci-fi beauty setting-up the bones of AOA‘s loosey-goosey futuristic concept. Even better is the sublimely silly “Clouds”, a bit of randy and romantic space-r&b that achieves liftoff through Prince’s syncopated harmonies in the chorus and its grab-bag of silky-smooth synths and guitars. “U Know”, deliberate and angular chilled-out soul, proves that P can hang with the likes of Frank Ocean and The Weeknd. The glitchy sensuality of “Breakfast Can Wait” proves that he can do seductive as well as he ever could; “Breakdown” shows us that he wasn’t quite done delivering the emotional goods, a stunning ballad that takes the old yowling falsetto out for a spin during the outro.
The crux of the record in a lot of ways is the “Way Back Home”/”Funknroll” tandem, the former serving as the perfect thematic encapsulation of Prince’s penchant to embark on journeys without destinations, the latter a crisp, genre-melting romp delivered with a twitch and a grin, a guitar-and-hip-hop-and-electronica-laced slab of funk-without-borders that welds more Daft Punk-esque stadium disco to the exploratory modern r&b of, say, Van Hunt, or Miguel. “I don’t really care what y’all be doin’,” Prince repeats on “Funknroll”, and while that seems a bit blustery on P’s most blatantly pop-courting record in ages, it serves as the bow atop his entire career in a lot of ways. Because, while Art Official Age slides more comfortably into the mainstream of its time than most other Prince records, the most important thing about it is Prince’s ability to work within the pop sphere and still maintain the most crucial parts of his identity. It’s a reliable Prince pop album with a modern kick, and an utter delight.
Grade: A-
Drew's Album of the Day 