Jazz

148. Meshell Ndegeocello, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams (2007)

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Genre-defying has long been Meshell Ndegeocello’s forte; even her most traditionally “r&b” albums are flecked with bits of punk and jazz, plumped with nasty, gritty funk that’s more Funkadelic than Parliament. It’s what’s made her such a force of nature to those in the know, this expectation that no flight of fancy, no aural whim will go unindulged. She’s adventurous, but disciplined and skilled enough within that gung-ho spirit to make it sound effortless, and each of her records sound like cohesive, borderline-conceptual affairs.

Meshell’s second decade as a recording artist was perhaps less-lauded than her first, as the triptych of her first three albums is far too mature, musical, and frankly brilliant for the ravenous music fan to resist; still, it yielded 2002’s fiery Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape and the mellowed-out, reggae-indebted Comfort Woman in 2003. They’re both divine and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise; and yet, it’s The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams that has received the most continual plays since 2007.

Perhaps that’s inevitable for someone with a constantly-shifting musical identity. I’ve diverse tastes, sure, but I rarely require all of my tastes to be thrown into a blender and fed to me through a straw; as a guy who values the art of the album, which requires some modicum of cohesion to truly succeed, Man of My Dreams probably shouldn’t be my preferred Me’Shell record of the 2000s. And yet.

What Man of My Dreams feels more like than anything is a best-of, an alternate-world compilation that hits on all the bullet points of Meshell’s career. “The Sloganeer” is pointedly satirical, angular art-rock, replete with chugging bass and jagged guitar; jazz trumpet flits in and out of the percussive, hypnotic “Elliptical”; “Evolution” is a lurching, deliberate hard-rocker in the hands of anyone else (say, Queens of the Stone Age) but in Meshell’s paws becomes skeletal, strangely groovy apocalypse-funk, pinned to a big, distorted, John-Paul-Jones-in-Hell bass figure. Meshell’s jazz obsession turns “Virgo” into dynamite, those subtle acoustics and trademark slinky basslines rubbing elbows with modal, surreal horn stabs, while thick reggae guitars splash across “Solomon”. And then there’s “Soul Spaceship”, which smacks the “liquefy” button on Meshell’s general ethos, rock and funk and reggae and soul all swaying to the same fat rhythm, a sumptuous suite of sound that, name-appropriate, tears off into the cosmos before it’s over.

Such is this record, and indeed, Ms. Ndegeocello’s entire career: it’s difficult to pin down, thematically and aurally, but it’s an ever-compelling, colorful platter with mood to spare. I dream of an alternate musical landscape where Meshell Ndegeocello was influential enough to inspire legions of fiercely independent musical dynamos that all put out records this exciting, but hey, at least she’s prolific enough to have provided us with an utter treasure trove of a career, one that’s kept her just left of the spotlight enough to continue exploring her singular vision even this late in the game.

Playlist track: “The Sloganeer”

The Purple Files: Prince, Lotusflow3r/MPLSound (2009)

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With the man’s renaissance in full swing, even if largely out of a combo of notoriety and an ever-growing reputation as a scintillating live act, it was only a matter of time before Prince got a weird idea in his head and, because Prince, willed it into fruition. Musicology, 3121, and Planet Earth were tight, focused albums of varying degrees of quality; they were fairly safe records in the Prince pantheon, his penchant for weirdo stylistic detours remaining relatively reined-in throughout, none of them overlong or daunting listens. This sort of sustained wheel-spinning could have sustained Prince for the rest of his career, and it’s true that P’s post-resurgence output often sounds like a studied recreation of his past triumphs; but, just as we were getting used to a Prince without jazz-fusion flights of fancy and three-discs-at-a-time release schedules, along came Target. Prince partnered with the megastore chain to exclusively distribute two brand-new albums bearing his name, Lotusflow3r and MPLSound, and a third, Elixer, attributed to new protege Bria Valente.

A bold move? Maybe. Maybe not exactly. I mean, consider the source: if you’ve been following this series, has anything led you to believe that Prince wouldn’t drop three albums on the same day? And given his innovative means of record release over the years — song-subscription web services, packaging albums with concert tickets and newspapers — is the Target deal really that out of character? Nah. What’s most surprising about this set is… well, how good it sounds.

That shouldn’t be surprising. After all, this is Prince, the man whose castaways sound better than most people’s proper records, the man who can deliver a borderline-classic on autopilot. Still, it’s appropriate to note that after the solid Musicology and the excellent 3121, Planet Earth took a couple of big steps backward. Did Prince still have the magic to pull off two long discs of new material? Short answer, yes, although the longer answer is a wee bit more complicated.

You see, the big-ticket item here is Lotusflow3r, almost without argument. In the history of pop artists releasing multiple albums concurrently, Lotusflow3r/MPLSound is less Use Your Illusion and more Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Instead of functioning as one big record simply too long to cram onto one disc, each disc is a distinct, separate album, each fostering a distinct mood. MPLSound is a workaday funk-electro record, the kind Prince has dropped over and over again in the past, and a perfectly functional one at that. It’s also a bit fly-by-night, a somewhat rote exercise in patented Prince-isms; it’s enjoyable, but hardly essential.

Lotusflow3r, on the other hand, is a big, textured guitar-pop record, the likes of which Prince often teased but never really delivered outside of Chaos and Disorder. And where Chaos was the sound of Prince intentionally trying to piss off his record company, Lotusflow3r finds him unleashing his innate tunefulness and guitar virtuosity all at once, resulting in one of the most front-to-back likable latter-day records of his career. As hokey as “4Ever” reads on paper, it plays like a big, affable power ballad, full-hearted lighter-waving chorus and all; Prince shows off his rock guitar bonafides on an agreeable “Crimson and Clover” cover, stapling a hectic take on “Wild Thing” in between verses for good measure; the restrained, sizzling attack-and-release of “Colonized Mind” conjures up some swell Santana-meets-Me’shell Ndegeocello vibes, while Prince flirts with joyous funk in “Feel Good, Feel Better, Feel Wonderful” and jaunty new wave in “$”. Prince even revisits his jazz-fusion era with two bookending instrumentals, ones that present P as an artist ever-capable of continued evolution, even at this late stage, even on a small scale. Lotusflow3r at large captures his restless artistic spirit with verve and panache; it’s a genuinely captivating record on its own terms, and a scene-stealer in this set.

By comparison, MPLSound, a calculated attempt to revisit Prince’s legendary Minneapolis sound, can’t help but to sound a little canned, a little all-in-a-day’s-work. Where Lotusflow3r leaps forward, MPL reaches back, dipping into P’s past for a record that sounds inspired by his heyday but rarely of it. It’s hardly trash, though: honestly, it’s at least as good as Planet Earth, maybe even Musicology. It gets a boost from a few ringers: “U’re Gonna C Me” is cheating, perhaps, having appeared in sparse, haunting form on One Night Alone, but that aces melody still slays with a drum track and slow-jam synths. “Chocolate Box” offers up angular electric bounce and a Q-Tip cameo; a skeletal drum-machine groove and sprightly electric piano lace the groovy “Dance 4 Me”, a banger even with the inverted chord structure from “Thunder” (perhaps it’s the hallelujahs, they are for some reason incredibly satisfying).

On the other hand, “Ol’ Skool Company” takes too long to make its point (“the white house is black, we gotta take the radio back”), and “Valentina” (a song addressed to Salma Hayek’s daughter about trying to seduce her mother) is uninteresting beyond the hilarious concept and that reedy “Nuthin’ But a G Thang” synth line. It’s more wheel-spinning from Prince, which is fine at this stage as long as it sounds good (and it mostly does). It just feels like a momentum-killer after hitting some transcendent moments on Lotusflow3r; it’s hard to take Prince-by-numbers wholly seriously when he’s demonstrated, in the same breath, that he’s capable of mining new territory after all this time.

But taken as a set, the Lotusflow3r/MPLSound double-shot hits more often than it misses. Thirty years removed from his debut, that’s a pretty startling level of relevance. As we settle into the final stretch of his career, Prince is still demonstrating that, even in the twilight of his life, his worst albums are perfectly listenable affairs with a dash of transcendence. There are worse ways to go out.

Lotusflow3r grade: A-
MPLSound grade: B-
Cumulative grade: B

The Purple Files: Prince, N.E.W.S. (2003)

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I guess there’s a certain lens through which, while we’re looking back, we must refer to Prince’s “jazz period”. It’s a short one, of course — Prince was never one to stay in one lane for very long, so we’ll have to note that the “jazz period” is pretty much just “2003”, although he let the style inform plenty of recordings both pre- and post — but it’s there. Xpectation arrived in January of 2003; we got N.E.W.S. in July, and while neither record is ever what the Prince casual or devotee is gonna reach for to get a quick fix, both demonstrate Prince’s innate talent as a bandleader, a band member, an arranger, a composer, and simply as a musician.

Marketed as an EP, N.E.W.S only boasts four tracks (or sections), but they’re all 14 minutes in length, totaling up to almost an hour of music, so while I’ve elected to glaze over most EPs in this series, one that’s significantly longer than Dirty Mind seems silly not to discuss as an album. Each track is named after a cardinal direction (“North”, “South”, “East”, “West”), and the excursion finds Prince approaching jazz with a different set of personnel, this time enlisting New Power Generation and Madhouse members (we get Eric Leeds, son!) for a quartet of lengthy, suite-like, jazz-fusion workouts. Colored with rock, funk, and world music where Xpectation works with a more traditional palette, it almost feels like Prince’s love letter to Miles Davis’s more experimental ’70s output (Bitches Brew and beyond).

At this, it’s a success, although when these two albums landed I couldn’t have imagined a time when I’d be forced to listen to and evaluate them consecutively, so it’s getting long in the tooth from my perspective. That’s only because of the chronological nature of this project, I think: N.E.W.S. not only sounds too good to dismiss on its own merits, but feels like a fascinating progression from Xpectation. Where X was exploratory and free-wheeling, N.E.W.S. feels less breezy, more focused, zeroed-in.

And, for what it’s worth, genuinely emotional. “South” is a showstopper, a pair of beautiful, aching, atmospheric bookends sandwiching a middle-third that brings the funk. “East”, appropriately, travels to the Middle East for much of its meat, a mystical, shape-shifting number with surprises around every corner. “North” finds Prince bringing his a-game to his guitar-god status, while the insidiously funky closer “West” works itself into a flurry of sax theatrics. It’s impeccably structured for maximum impact, each section seguing seamlessly into the next, Prince the Arranger stitching together a compelling Frankenstein’s Monster of instrumentals.

So, no, N.E.W.S isn’t particularly noteworthy if you’re looking to sample the later works of Prince the Pop Impresario. But as a document of Prince the Musician, it’s aces — as a pure exhibition of skill, largely devoid of lyrical trickery and studio magic, it’s a big accomplishment. That all being said, of course, after two consecutive records of Prince backing away from pop music — more, if you consider that One Night Alone… Live! offers no new songs and that One Night Alone is a moody piano-and-voice exercise — I think we’re all ready to allow Xpectation and N.E.W.S to exist on their own terms and move along, satisfied, from Prince’s jazz period. Fortunately, after several years of waning sales and no pop hits, P was more than happy to oblige, but that’s a subject for the next write-up.

Grade: B

The Purple Files: Prince, Xpectation (2003)

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I’ve gone into it a little bit, but there’s a reason why I’ve always been drawn to Prince as an artist, and why he’s ultimately morphed into my favorite musician of all time. You see, I’ve always been interested in music as a whole, and have become increasingly uninterested in folding myself into a cozy little genre box. I’d argue that this has become the norm in a lot of ways, but the older you are, the more I think you can relate: I (and several generations before me) came of age in the era of the clique, a time when people, particularly young people, found themselves corralled into groups of like-minded individuals. This is a thought process that has and always will persist, but I do think that the importance of diversity has increased at least incrementally in society, and that’s led to more folks straying from their comfort zones.

Which, I know, I know, you didn’t open this up to read some corny moral parable about individuality. But I think it’s important to the conversation of why Prince means so, so much to many of us who don’t feel like we exactly fit in anywhere — or, more optimistically, like we fit in everywhere. Prince is a whirlwind of musical ideas, a cavalcade of concepts that in his best moments streamlines into a very unique, specific style; at his most ambitious, he explores these avenues individually, following the rabbit-holes of his big ol’ brain until he gets the proverbial carrot. These aren’t all successful, but they’re proficient to some degree, and Prince fandom has allowed someone like me, someone who never fit in with the punk kids or the rap kids or, god help me, the hillbillies, but to dive headfirst into each of his whims with abandon.

This brings us to Xpectation, Prince’s instrumental jazz record released through the NPG Music Club. (Another aspect of Prince’s innovation that I feel like I may have glazed over is his forward-thinking relationship with the internet, or really any number of unconventional modes of release; many of these reviews have been of net-only releases, exclusively for fan club members, and later on we’ll touch upon a record that was straight-up included with the newspaper.) While I am unquestionably a fan of jazz — I own many of the accepted classics, Take Five and A Love Supreme and Kind of Blue and the like — I’m a bit ill-informed when it comes to discussing it, so I’m finding it hard to launch into writing about the music. I know that I like it, because I know I like jazz music; I also know that there’s nothing definitive about Prince’s take on it, but that’s hardly the point.

Xpectation strikes with calculated classicism; given the source, it’d be appropriate to anticipate a new wrinkle or a left-field turn of events, but P respects the art form too much for that (remember, this is the son of a jazz musician we’re talking about here). Here — perhaps because of the form’s relationship to his pops? — he opts for reverence and homage over redefinition. It seems like a smart play, because The Weirdo Prince could have easily have toyed Xpectation into oblivion, delivering strange for strangeness’ sake (something he’s certainly no stranger to); instead, he delivers a subdued, pleasant instrumental record, surrounding himself with valuable session players to grant the venture authenticity.

If anything, “Xpand” offers us a glimpse into what Prince attempting to mold modal jazz into his image would sound like: where much of Xpectation sticks to breezy trots and swing jaunts, “Xpand” is bigger and funkier, saxes strutting over funky wah-wah guitar and a sauntering beat straight from the Rufus playbook. “Xotica” teeters on slow-jam territory, all electric keys and deliberate, deep bass work and cool blue moonlight spilling through the shades. It’s “Xemplify” that (appropriately) represents Xpectation the most cogently: lots of bright, floral Candy Dulfer sax and a warm, loose shuffle bolster the composition, with Prince providing burbling organs and Vanessa Mae coda-ing with some see-sawing violin theatrics.

And turn-by-turn, it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but Xpectation is certainly a functioning, proficient jazz album; this isn’t a fly-by-night record by a clueless neophyte, but a professional, economical, pleasant listen. It’s an instrumental jazz record by a grown-up kid who grew up on this stuff, and it’s perfectly nice to listen to.

Grade: B

The Purple Files: Prince & The New Power Generation, One Nite Alone… Live!, (2002)

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Ever a unique fellow, there’s no single definitive live document for Prince, an artist well-known for his scintillating live performances. Bootlegs abound, of course, but the closest he ever came to delivering a killer live record was One Nite Alone…. Live!, a multi-disc effort that highlights lots of captivating concert stuff but doesn’t boast the “greatest hits” x-factor that can make a great live record so compelling. I mean, there are hits, of course — an artist with the breadth and depth of Prince’s discography can’t make a great live album without touching on some hits — but One Nite Alone… Live! is an interesting specimen, in that Prince keeps a pretty large amount of this material contained to a specific section.

We’ll touch upon that later, of course, but largely ONAL succeeds on the basis of its sound (incredible) and energy (infectious). Which isn’t to dismiss the tracklist, but in terms of universality, it isn’t the career-spanning hit-parade one might hope for (although, realistically, if you haven’t yet come to the conclusion that Prince will subvert your expectations at every turn, you haven’t been paying attention). Disc one is heavy on The Rainbow Children material, which alone makes it a relic of its time: The Rainbow Children is a terrific record, but one that’s become lost in the shuffle of Prince’s many great (and, let’s face it, not-so-great) works. But both P and the NPG sound excellent on these then-fresh cuts — my two faves from Children, “Muse 2 the Pharaoh” and “Mellow”, are both present and accounted for, and an energetic take on “Family Name” crops up on the second disc, so good work all around — and P’s got the various crowds wrapped around his purple little finger. “I dare you to sit down on this one,” Prince intones (you can practically hear the raised eyebrow) before closing the disc with a speedy, lively “When You Were Mine”.

Disc two doles out bigger pop goods — we get “Take Me With U” and “Raspberry Beret”, for starters — before spotlighting some solo piano-and-voice work from Prince. He kicks it off with the title track from his piano record One Night Alone before a vamping, stop-and-start, captivating, winking “Adore” steals the show; here Prince demonstrates his highly-undervalued sense of humor, tossing in a quick “Twilight Zone” riff and offering some preening dramatics in the wake of the “maybe not the ride” line. He then zips through a series of snippets — pieces of “I Wanna Be Your Lover”, “Diamonds & Pearls”, “Do Me, Baby”, etc. — in a breakneck, whirlwind tour of fan favorites, touching on each one for about a minute. It plays like a medley, the audience is (naturally) delighted, and it’s highly interesting stuff to hear in this context. Near the end of the disc, we get a one-two of “How Come U Don’t Call Me” (glorious, of course) into a fervent, elastic “Anna Stesia” and it’s perfect.

The third disc, packaged and sold as It Ain’t Over: The Afterparty, is a funk clinic, guest-heavy and sweat-soaked. This is where P and the NPG flex their considerable chops, blazing solos igniting “Joy In Repetition”, a breathless George Clinton juicing “We Do This” with strutting energy, lengthy jams stretching “2 Nigs United For West Compton” and “Peach” to their limits. It’s the most fun, dance-able disc of the three, a veritable masterclass in keeping the crowd moving.

It’d perhaps be hard to come up with the definitive Prince live document: he was notoriously impulsive about his setlists, and toured for so many years that it’d be nigh impossible to craft a truly representative experience. But with a wild, varied setlist and killer, crisp sound, One Night Alone… Live! works nicely, the sound of a veteran doing what he does best.

Grade: B+

The Purple Files: Prince, One Nite Alone… Solo Piano and Voice by Prince (2002)

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Reason #1,460 to love Prince: the man literally has an album for every mood. Euphoric or reflective, upbeat or downbeat, a night out on the town or a night at home in bed — looking at Prince’s discography as a vast, intricate, monolithic structure allows you the perspective to pick your poison. Enter One Nite Alone, a fan club-only release that features Prince at his least adorned, and therefore his most vulnerable: it’s no one’s idea of an accepted Prince classic, but it’s an achingly beautiful, understated record that deserves attention, even as it’s usefulness is largely niche.

What Prince has created with One Nite Alone isn’t a carnal record; he’s got far too many of those to point this one out as an outlier. It could certainly function as a post-coital record, though — seems crass to point it out, sure, but we’re talking about maybe the single most sexual person to ever grace the airwaves, so I feel like it’s germane to the conversation — a moonlit, late-night record for lovers falling asleep or whispering the night away.  Billed as “solo piano and voice”, One Nite Alone essentially functions as a flipside to The Truth, a record meant to showcase the artist’s voice, hushed and unadorned, accompanied only by his instrument of choice.

And what we forget when discussing Prince’s virtuosity, all too often, is his brilliant way around a piano. He’s a noted, storied guitar god by this point — “hey, didja know Prince was actually a really good guitarist?” is old news and has been for a while — but with 88 keys sprawled out before him, he’s every bit as dazzling. Lots of impossibly nimble runs, lots of black keys, and a razor-sharp knack for composition. This makes — and this might be heresy in some circles — this makes One Nite Alone markedly better than The Truth. Here, Prince actually explores the boundaries of his instrument; The Truth is cool n’ all, but it’s all jazzy chords with overdubbed runs. One Nite Alone really explores the space.

The title track, mysterious and sensuous, might be my favorite — it’s also the one where Prince goes most hog-wild on the runs, which is a tasty thing to behold. “U’re Gonna C Me” and a heart-stopping cover of Joni Mitchell’s “A Case Of U” both traffic in atmospherics and P’s elastic, sumptuous falsetto. External instrumentation crops up in “Objects in the Mirror” and “Pearls B4 the Swine”, but it’s sparing, serving to augment the central conceit rather than upstage it, all seesawing strings and brushed drums. And that little descending riff that opens the brief, pointed “Have a Heart”? Legend.

But it’s a mood record, through and through, and a beautiful one at that. One Nite Alone isn’t Prince at his most dynamic, but it’s one of his most accomplished creations in a different way: it’s an album that proves that Prince can captivate with little more than an instrument and that world-changing voice. It’s a neat little curiosity, and a useful rainy-day or late-night venture, and it’s got beauty and chops to spare.

Grade: B+

The Purple Files: Prince, The Rainbow Children (2001)

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After 1999’s Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, it feels safe to say that Prince’s stock was low. Comparatively so, anyway: for an artist who’d been so vital for the better part of two decades, it felt like the Prince well had kind of dried up. A lesser artist, of course, could have revitalized their career with a big shiny pop record like that (Santana did); alas, warmed-over Prince didn’t quite win over a commercial public that had largely left him behind. He’d eventually return to the charts — conventional wisdom places his 2004 record Musicology as the “return to form”/comeback record — but Rave‘s follow-up, The Rainbow Children, wouldn’t quite do the trick. Rather, Prince retreats from Rave here, crafting a long, strange, organic, restrained record — and, easily, his best proper studio album since The Gold Experience.

This, of course, is taking the entire thing at face value; The Rainbow Children might be the least recognizably Prince album in the artist’s entire discography, and so it needs to be approached on its own merits to be truly appreciated. Complicating things is P’s Jehovah’s Witness conversion, which predates and informs Rainbow Children; his renewed spirituality both gives the record its inspiration and coats it in a pretty thick layer of pretense. This is a concept record about a power struggle between “the Wise One” and “the Banished Ones”, and it features hearty doses of Prince, pitch-shifted low “Bob George”-style, narrating the album’s plot. Tedious? Sure. But once you commit to glazing over the concept, the music of The Rainbow Children is downright unassailable.

First off, it’s an album that essentially exists out of time. Prince was ever-interested in shifting with the times. Often, the fun of combing through his discography comes from listening to him put his individual spin on timely trends: new wave in the early ’80s, hip-hop in the early ’90s, alt-rock and britpop in the mid-’90s. This can result in embarrassment occasionally — say, “Jughead” — but it’s a hallmark of his career. The Rainbow Children, however, offers precious little such concession: it’s an organic, kinetic record that looks deep into the history of black music to find its muse, constructed from a foundation of jazz, gospel, smooth soul, and JB-esque funk. In spots, it sounds of a piece with the then-flourishing neo-soul scene: Jill Scott, Me’shell Ndegeocello, even D’Angelo’s Prince-indebted Voodoo (released a mere year earlier, and if you can listen to both Voodoo and Come and not see the connection, I’m gonna respectfully ask you to explain yourself). In retrospect, maybe hooking up with Arista to bid for mainstream success wasn’t Prince’s most savvy move; maybe, given how natural and smooth The Rainbow Children sounds, he shoulda hooked up with the Soulquarians to mount a commercial comeback.

But that’s neither here nor there. The Rainbow Children is a gem, Prince at his most honest, earnest, earthy. Consider it a masterclass in the things The Truth (organic instrumentation, stripped-down arrangements) and The Vault (jazzy overtones, soul classicism) only kind of pulled off, a synchronization of Prince’s most elemental, least heady tendencies. The deep, percussive funk of “Digital Garden”, the energetic JB-isms of “The Work Pt. 1” and “1+1+1=3”, the trio of escalating, elastic funk workouts that close the record: the head-nodding stuff here knocks nicely, prodded with flourishes of jazz and rock (Prince unleashes some finger-melting guitar histrionics on “Family Name” straight outta Maggot Brain), never feeling canned or phoned-in. For an artist who (at least in part) built his name on being funky, it’s interesting to hear some of his most authentic work in the medium tucked away on the tail-end of one of his least-celebrated records.

Even better, though, are Rainbow Children‘s remarkably restrained neo-soul cuts. We know that Prince has a spotty record with ballads, having committed some of the best ever (“Adore”, “Crucial”, “Purple Rain”, “Nothing Compares 2 U”) and some of the clunkiest (“Free”, large swaths of Emancipation‘s middle-third) to wax; here, however, he excels at the soft and the moody, each slow cut providing a new texture to this beautifully layered record. The warm electric piano and hushed harmonies of “Muse 2 the Pharoah” are so effortlessly cozy and cool, culminating in maybe Prince’s least-embarrassing rap (“there’s so much information for the next generation, who gonna drop it if you’re not there?”); even better is the slow-burning, jazz-flute-and-horn-juiced “Mellow”, one of the artist’s most lithe, slept-on slow-jams. “She Loves Me 4 Me” has more than a little Stevie Wonder to it, opening with a run of jazzy seventh chords, Prince’s voice more restrained and lovely than usual.

Even the textured interludes enhance the ineffable mood of the record. “Deconstruction” fosters ambiance effortlessly with swelling, cinematic strings and more of that low-pitched narration (easily the worst thing about this record, but that’s quibbling); “Wedding Feast” is a compelling curio, a baroque narrative number that lasts under a minute; even “The Sensual Everafter”, largely instrumental with more narration, provides a smooth lead-in to “Mellow” with its surprising chord chart and P’s soulful electric runs.

What it all adds up to, then, is one of Prince’s most startling innovations yet, a wonderful, studied, lived-in platter that not only deserves better than its reputation, but deserves to be entrenched with the classics. The Rainbow Children ain’t exactly the Prince you’re used to, but it’s innately Prince all the same, a focused, deliberate, beautiful album the likes of which he’d never release again. In other words, it’s a lowkey classic.

Album grade: A

The Purple Files: Prince, The Vault… Old Friends 4 Sale (1999)

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Even as Prince was enjoying his newfound independence, celebrating his artistic freedom with monstrous three-disc records and releasing music at a faster clip than Warner Brothers ever allowed, he still had a contract to settle. As we’ve extensively addressed here, this friction allowed for plenty of exciting art — P’s efforts to release commercially-unsatisfying records in Come and Chaos and Disorder yielded challenging, fascinating musical experiences, and even the unwieldy Emancipation gets a lot of traction from amounting to a gigantic kiss-off — and then, on the other hand, there’s The Vault…. Old Friends 4 Sale, a patchwork of vaulted cuts shipped to the Warners to satisfy contractual obligation. As is so often the case with Prince, the music’s largely unassailable from an academic perspective — Prince knows songs and music, to be sure — but also generally unexciting. So it goes.

Still, there’s something sorta hypnotic about The Vault. Recorded between 1985 and 1994, it as an album achieves a sort of cohesiveness of mood that even the most exciting Prince albums don’t offer; though it’s undoubtedly an album of castaways, it’s stitched together like a proper studio recording, and it flows as such. These ten tracks are among the jazziest Prince ever put to wax — I mean, not counting actual jazz albums, which we’ll get to later — colorful, horn-heavy, gently funky numbers that rarely pop out of the woodwork at you, but that sound just fine taken in one quick burst.

Short opener “The Rest of My Life” seems to signal a vivacious sense of fun for the record, a fleet-fingered, scampering electric piano intro leading into some tight harmonies and a tasty sax solo; “It’s About that Walk”, perhaps the tightest track here, follows, an effortless strut over swinging horns and burbling gospel organ, playing like Prince’s very own classic Stevie Wonder cut. Later, the funky “Sarah” and the smoky, “Damn U”-esque nightclub jazz of “Extraordinary” round out the record nicely. The bookends are nice. It’s the middle of the record that sags, for lack of a better word: it never offends, but it rarely excites.

Part of this is Prince’s unwillingness to edit himself and tendency to let songs stretch out a little longer than is palatable. The jazzy “She Spoke 2 Me”, a refugee from the soundtrack to Spike Lee’s Girl 6, shows up here in an extended version, stretching a fun genre exercise out to interminable length; later, the Sade-esque “When the Lights Go Down” lives in its own mood for 7 long minutes, and it only really pops when the drums come in during the final third. Sinatra horns and Mancini strings are draped over “Old Friends 4 Sale”, busying up an arrangement that maybe didn’t need the window dressing. Understand that it’s all quite listenable; The Vault never exactly flatlines, but it doesn’t provide a truly enlightening musical experience, either.

Which, yeah, maybe that’s a lot to ask of an artist 20 years into a career releasing a contract-filling album of odds and ends; except, I don’t know that it is, because we’re talking about Prince. Prince’s b-sides collection is better than most artist’s proper records; Prince’s most consistently high-flying album of the 1990s was a triple-disc hodgepodge of previously unreleased material. Also, The Vault is impeccably produced, economical, and pleasantly cohesive; so it flows like a record, and my knee-jerk reaction is to want it to satisfy like one. It doesn’t always, but it has its moments; like The Truth, it’s more interesting as a historical document and as a mood-fostering genre exercise than anything else.

Grade: B-

The Purple Files: Prince, The Truth (1998)

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It might’ve been easier, in retrospect, to include my opinion on The Truth in my review of Crystal Ball — certainly, it would’ve made sense, what with the disc’s genesis as an addendum to the Crystal Ball set, and plus I could’ve gotten away with writing a little bit less about it. Still, The Truth was not only an entire disc of new material (whereas the rest of Crystal Ball spanned unreleased tracks from throughout his storied career), but something fans had been kind of clamoring for: an acoustic record from Prince. We learned during the Musicology tour that Prince and an acoustic guitar is a spellbinding prospect indeed; hyper-critical, fun-wrecking guitarists who cited Prince’s fondness for digital effects in his electric guitar playing as a reason to proclaim him overrated were unable to deny that he knows his way around his instrument.

And so The Truth presents Prince at his bare bones, or at least as bare as Prince is willing to be on record. His playing here isn’t particularly showy, nor does it shift into folksy finger-picking or simplistic three-chord shuffles: rather, it’s precisely what a Prince acoustic record should be, an altogether different-sounding platter that highlights Prince’s tight rhythmic chops, his vocals, and his songwriting.

That’s the good. And The Truth is a great-sounding record: Prince has such a command of styles that he can pretty much sell anything, be it a backwoodsy shuffle on “Man in a Uniform”, or a restless, funky samba on album highlight “Fascination”. It’s not whether or not Prince can sell the songs, it’s how good they are; in this, The Truth doesn’t exactly fail, but it’s far from an unqualified success.

Prince dips back to the blues well for the opener & title track, which fares nicely in its simplicity (even if it sounds a bit like a demo, but whatevs); “Don’t Play Me” builds around a nice 2-chord figure, and while it’s hypnotic, it’s a bit get-off-my-lawn, lyrically, P pointing out a number of things about himself that would distance himself from the mainstream at the time (“I’m over 30 and I don’t smoke weed,” “I’m the wrong color and I play guitar”). It does, however, feature the immortal line “my only competition is, well, me, in the past”, even though “I use proper english and I’m straight” seems like a headscratcher. “Circle of Amour” is silk-smooth r&b, “Comeback” reverent and boasting a lovely wall of harmonies (honestly, it’s a beautiful reflection on loss and mortality, and another highlight), “Animal Kingdom” strange, lurching, skeletal funk.

It’s all quite listenable, as many Prince records would be; I’m not sure he really explores the boundaries of the acoustic record, though. Somehow, in this stripped-down setting, Prince’s tunes for this bad boy sound a little less potent (largely, anyway — cuts like “Fascination” and “Comeback” work like gangbusters and need nothing more to sound terrific). Which, to be clear, isn’t to suggest that Prince needs bells and whistles for his songs to work; on the contrary, his acoustic sets from the aforementioned Musicology tour prove that his most enduring compositions are evergreens no matter how you frame ’em. Witness the following clip, wherein Prince trots out bits of “Cream”, “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man”, and “Sometimes It Snows In April” for a delighted audience: nothing is lost in translation.

The Truth isn’t a failure. Far from it: it proves that Prince can succeed in most any milieu. But it loses something past the initial spin, and I think it’s because the songs largely lack the magnetic spark that makes Prince such a fascinating songwriter. Still, it works as a mood record, a record of dusky, late-night soul with a stunningly talented guitarist and singer at the helm, so it’s pretty difficult to dislike.

Grade: B-

The Purple Files: Prince, Emancipation (1996)

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There’s a reason why being a Prince fan is a full-time job: the dude, quite frankly, recorded and released music at such an absurd clip that playing catch-up is exhausting. Consider that, for the purposes of this project, I’ve chosen to mostly focus on proper studio albums (we’ll see a couple of internet-only releases and some live stuff a little later), and I’m still at least 20 write-ups away from seeing the light of day on this thing; that’s a ridiculous rate for an artist that also locked dozens of albums away in his legendary vault, an artist with a series of bootlegged recordings entitled The Work that I’m not even planning to touch in review form, an artist who two years after Emancipation would dump a three-disc rarities set, an acoustic record, and an instrumental album onto the market at the same time. In 1996, Prince feuded some more with his record label, soundtracked Spike Lee’s Girl 6 in March (a release not covered here because it’s mostly previously-released material and WHAT AM I A MACHINE), released Chaos and Disorder in July, and then split from Warners and dropped Emancipation in November.

OH AND EMANCIPATION IS THREE DISCS LONG.

And it’s not a multiple-disc release in the vein of, say, Wilco’s Being There, a double album short enough to squeeze onto a single-disc but released as a double platter as tribute to the vinyl era. Nope, Emancipation is a full-scale flood of music, each disc totaling one hour, its runtime amounting to three total hours of music. That’s a full Lord of the Rings movie’s worth of music, although, to be fair to the artist, Emancipation is actually something I largely want to spend three hours partaking in.

It’s still a very unwieldy record, but that’s kind of by design. See, the Warners weren’t necessarily very supportive of Prince’s restless creative muse: they wanted a proper promotion and tour cycle for each individual record, while Prince just wanted to flood the market with his material, assuming (perhaps correctly) that his devotees just wanted as much music as possible to devour. They also put the kibosh on P covering other artists, and Prince valued the practice of the cover version, seeing the history of pop music as something up for grabs for him to reinvent in his own image (he didn’t have the same free-love view of other people covering his songs, but hey, if you’ve come this far on this journey with me you’ve also come to accept that Prince was kind of cuckoo-pants). Emancipation, then, is a post-Warner Brothers kiss-off, as much as Chaos and Disorder was: it finds Prince flooding the market with too much music at one clip, liberally sprinkling cover songs throughout, and basically doing everything the Warners wouldn’t allow him to. It’s the sound of Prince creating on his own terms again, basically, and if the result is messy and undigestable, it’s also one of the happiest-sounding records in his entire discography.

It’s right there from jump street, in leadoff track “Jam of the Year”, celebratory with piano trills, funk guitar, and a terrific Eric Leeds sax riff. It’s apparent that P is in full-blown r&b mode throughout disc one: “Right Back Here in My Arms” boasts a tasty g-funk bounce, “Get Yo Groove On” is disco-ready r&p, and “Somebody’s Somebody” finds Prince going full Keith Sweat for a whole cut. Prince also transforms Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” into a candlelit slow jam, makes detours into swing (the strangely delicious “Courtin’ Time”) and pop-rock (“Damned If I Do”, kind of addictive), and really ’96es the hell out of The Stylistics’ saccharine classic “Betcha By Golly Wow”. (“Betcha By Golly”, in particular, juices up the elevator-ready soul ballad with one of P’s most glorious falsetto performances; there’s a “thinkin’ of YOOOOOOOOOOOU” at the climax that makes me applaud every time.) The first disc rounds out with “In This Bed I Scream”, one of P’s great unsung pop songs, a guitar-and-synth laced gem that morphs into a dark NIN instrumental in its last minute.

If the first disc ramps things up, disc two downshifts: recently married at this point, Prince dwells on love-besotted ballads for the middle act of Emancipation. It’s reflective of P’s newfound romantic bliss, which is great and all, but it’s also a touch boring: “The Holy River” is wonderful, what with its waves of fervent, starkly honest sermonizing, and the shimmering “Dreamin’ of U” is an utter jewel, but the perfunctory, similar “One Kiss at a Time” and “Soul Sanctuary” bleed into one another too easily, “Emale” gives us go-nowhere funk and “Curious Child” plays like a forgotten number from a lesser Disney musical, and “Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother / Wife” closes the disc out, with an endearing but slow and interminably long ode to Mayte, his new bride. One of many things Emancipation teaches us: for the likes of Prince, marital bliss is kind of a snooze.

Disc three largely returns us to the dancefloor, “Slave”, “New World”, and “The Human Body” all offering up big, groovy funk tracks; the latter, in particular, experiments with acid-fried house and gives us a tasty P falsetto to chew on. Prince punches up a cover of “La La Means I Love You” with a Sade groove, and later drags Joan Osborne’s “One Of Us” into the arena with great solos and dubious vocals on the chorus; his “One Of Us” feels like he just decided to do it in the original key and realized too late that the hook exists in that weird grey area between his natural voice and his falsetto, and so he just kinda cheeses it. Like a lot of Emancipation, it kinda works, but it’s kinda sloppy too. The best cut of the album’s third hour, “Style”, kinda sounds like “Jam of the Year”, with an endless supply of Prince ‘tude and Leeds sax.

Look, I won’t lie: Emancipation is a lot. It’s so much music. And yet, I can’t help but feel that it’s kind of cohesive in a weird way. This isn’t 69 Love Songs, another landmark triple-album, wherein Stephin Merritt ping-pongs wildly between styles and giddily jumps genres; largely, Emancipation exists in Prince’s r&b/funk sweet spot, with the occasional stylistic (and Stylistics) detour just to stir the pot. It sags in the middle, drastically, and far from every cut is essential, and the first disc just pops in a way that the following two hours simply don’t. Think of it as a big ole sampler: Lovesexy this ain’t, where Prince never gave you the opportunity to jump around. Its finest moments, in pure Prince fashion, are resplendent; it’s almost impossible to take as a whole, but the fact that it hits as often as it does is a feat unto itself.

Grade: B-