R&B

147. Beyonce, B’Day (2006)

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It’s difficult to get through a discussion of the 2000s (or the 2010s, for that matter) without mentioning Beyonce; she is, like it or not, pop royalty, the sort of artist you mention in the same breath as the world-busters, as the Princes and Madonnas and Michael Jacksons. In fact, for folks of a certain generation, zeroing in on the phenomenon that remains Beyonce Knowles is the closest you can get to explaining the scope of MJ’s popularity; she boasts a level of cultural iconography that transcends race and sex and social standing. And, like the best of these artists, Beyonce is no slouch in the recording department: she released three solo records in the aughts, one of them a double-disc effort, and they’re all some degree of worthwhile. Somewhere between Dangerously In Love‘s mechanical pop machine and I Am…Sasha Fierce‘s peak-and-valley sprawl, though, lies the underrated B’Day, an album so fierce and tight that it could have been a Betty Wright or Tina Turner record in a different universe.

The album roars to life with the irrepressible “Deja Vu”, a “Crazy in Love” redux down to the Jay-Z feature, the clattering percussion, the staccato horn-section pumps; it arguably grooves harder than its mega-hit big sis, even if it’s hardly as culturally iconic. Better than either one? “Get Me Bodied”, a sparse, clattering, Swizz Beatz-curated banger that sees a sweat-slicked, hair-down Beyonce seamlessly navigating the negative space between Lil’ Jon and Tina Turner with a deliriously great vocal; listen to the “a little sweat ain’t never hurt nobody” and “while y’all standin’ on the WALL” one-two combo and tell me B doesn’t have some of the best phrasing in the business.

Later, Beyonce applies the same conceit to “Ring the Alarm” — draping a perfect vocal over a skeletal, almost-minimalist composition to great affect — this time committing to the most frenzied, hellfire-scorched, woman-scorned anthem since Kelis hated you so much right now. And it’s a barnburner, too, highlighting another one of B’s strengths as a singer: the elastic vocals are a plus, but she applies them with vein-popping conviction. If Beyonce songs had a Mount Rushmore, “Ring the Alarm” would be forever etched in granite.

This is where Beyonce excels on B’day; on this album more than any other, she’s in her bag when she’s mining heartbreak for rage. Listen to the mid-tempo “Irreplaceable”, draped in pleasant acoustic chords and a clattering drum track; it’s a classic kiss-off, for sure, a spiritual and music cousin to Rihanna’s immortal “Take A Bow”, but it’s a thing of beauty to watch Beyonce spin betrayal into defiance. She sings “I can have another you in a minute” first in a delicate, uncertain falsetto and subsequently in a full-bore wail. It crystallizes what she does best as a vocalist: through phrasing and subtle shifts, her performances double as theatrical drama. (See also sparse closer “Resentment”, wherein Bey winds a by turns wounded and vicious vocal performance around a warm, fluttering acoustic.)

Which isn’t to say that Ms. Knowles forsakes the art of the banger here: on the contrary, B ramps up the tempo on enough delirious dance jams to keep the pace varied here, which saves B’day from being a little too reflective and wounded. The aforementioned one-two of “Deja Vu” and “Get Me Bodied” is the best possible distillation of B’day‘s party aesthetics, but I’m also quite fond of “Freakum Dress”, which threatens to turn into a “Crazy In Love” before morphing into another typically elastic, frenzied Beyonce vocal. “Green Light”, on the other hand, sounds an awful lot like “Milkshake” until it unleashes stomping drums and a bleating brass section to the mix.

To date, B’day is Beyonce’s finest hour: her every album, typical of an artist of her stature, is some degree of worthwhile, but she never perfected the mix as well as she did here. By turns danceable, funny, fraught, frenzied, pensive, kinetic, and edgy, it’s the sound of an iconic artist firing on all cylinders.

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, HITnRUN Phase Two (2015)

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It’s so, so tempting to overrate HITnRUN Phase Two. See, this is the last album Prince released in his lifetime; it was, without fanfare or warning, dumped on Spotify in December, and then in April, Prince was gone. And, naturally, we’re left to dwell on his final recording, and talk about what it means, how it encapsulates his career and relates to his death, all those things that people who think way too hard about music do.

Problem is, HITnRUN Phase Two is no last will and testament. Those records exist: think Warren Zevon’s The Wind, or Bowie’s (incredible) Blackstar, albums created by artists who knew their departure was imminent, and made good with their fans on the way out. There are no such strands running through Phase Two: it’s an album clearly and obviously made by an artist who not only had no designs on slowing down, but arguably had tapped a fruitful new-old vein of creative fertility. I spoke in my review of Phase One about how both HITnRUN “phases” highlight individual facets of Prince’s artistry circa 2015, the first one dwelling on his exciting ability to integrate his own distinct palette into the fabric of modern popular music. This one, on the other hand, feels far more distinct as an identifiable Prince record, and it’s the other half of the same concept: this is a celebration of Prince’s distinct vision, an organic, tuneful, joyous romp through most of his major modes. And it’s pretty great.

See, HITnRUN Phase Two just feels like a classic new-millennium Prince record. It, of course, doesn’t stand toe-to-toe with the classics — it should go without saying that we’ve completely ditched those comparisons at this point — but it does rub shoulders with the best post-comeback Prince platters (3121, Lotusflow3r, Art Official Cage) with no forced experimentation and an effortless sense of the celebratory. Perhaps part of that is how big a part the reunited New Power Generation plays in the sound of this record; perhaps the way large swaths of it are made up of previously-released internet singles allows the record to feel like a fresh new blast of classic Prince without forcing him to knuckle down and embrace every idea he has in a short time span. Either way, it sounds like vintage Prince in a lot of ways, and boasts a lively, freewheeling spirit that doesn’t betray that he’d be gone in a few short months.

Take “Baltimore”, for example, Prince’s Freddie Gray tribute that functions more as a call to peace than a call to arms; it’s the sound of Prince aligning himself with the Black Lives Matter movement, but with a soaring, flower-child lilt, riding on a simple four-four drumbeat and some heavenly multi-tracked background vocals. As statement-making goes, it’s not as incendiary as, say, a Kendrick Lamar, but it is a thing of aching beauty, a pleading, yearning call for equality that bleeds empathy and oozes soul. It, like so much of HITnRUN Phase Two, dials up some of Prince’s notable forebears, particularly Sly Stone; on the opposite end of the record, “Big City” closes out the record with nimble Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder-esque horn charts and a breezy, open-hearted soul strut. It’s not exactly retro, at least not in the slavish reconstructive sense, but it’s indebted to Prince’s past and his vast span of influences.

And in between the bookends? It’s just Prince being Prince, albeit a more focused, tuneful, effortless Prince than we’d seen in quite a while. “Stare” is the centerpiece, a hypnotic funk workout with a gnarly, popping bassline, peppered with strutting horns and winking odes to P’s past (that “Kiss” drop is extra funny, although I wonder if the “Sexy Dancer” nod flies over heads). It’s a late-era masterclass that deserves to be enshrined alongside “Black Sweat” and “Clouds”; equally potent in this context is “Xtraloveable”, a catchy dance cut that dates back to at least ’82 finally surfacing with a crisp, horny (in both senses) arrangement. It, along with the swaying Otis Redding soul of “When She Comes” (of course it’s a double entendre, need you ask?) and the guitar-rock 3rdeyegirl holdover “Screwdriver”, reveals another layer to HITnRun Phase Two: Prince’s legendary libido, lately sidelined by his Jehovah’s Witness beliefs, makes a welcome return here. It’s not in full force, but there’s still a naughty streak on Phase Two; sure, “I’m your driver, you’re my screw” is a flagrantly dumb lyric, but Prince sounds like he’s having a blast singing it. Likewise, “2 Y. 2 D.” comes off a little lecherous (“old enough to do you, too young to dare”), but boasts such a breezy bounce that it hardly matters.

HITnRUN Phase Two leaves us abruptly; “Big City” doesn’t so much wind down as it simply stops, with Prince uttering its final words — “that’s it” — and bouncing. It’s a hell of a way to leave a career, and yet, innately Prince: “Well, there it is, the most diverse, interesting, innovative, fearless, frustrating, fruitful, prolific career in pop music history. Hope you liked the last 40 years. Deuces!” He didn’t know; of course he didn’t know that he’d be gone before he dropped anything else. But it’s poetic nonetheless, just one of those casual moments of unintentional genius that was Prince’s calling card. HITnRUN Phase Two will always be Prince’s final album as a living, breathing artist; it, along with Phase One, is the sound of Prince going out on top, reestablishing his pure ability with verve, panache, and his own indomitable spirit.

Grade: B+

[This concludes the album-reviewing portion of The Purple Files; stay tuned for the wrap party, where we’ll be talking about Prince’s legacy, attempting to rank albums and songs, and tying up loose ends.]

The Purple Files: Prince, HITnRUN Phase One (2015)

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And so we reach 2015, and the final pair of Prince albums released in his lifetime. As befits the latter part of his career, the HITnRUN series is tied together by serializing the titles — they were released separately, but labeled as Phase One and Phase Two — continuing to confirm that Prince routinely had too many ideas to be contained in one platter. And they’re a pretty fitting curtain call, all told, a pair of substantially different efforts that each highlight an important factor in P’s continued artistic development: the first, Phase One, finds Prince stranded firmly in the present-day, crafting (along with co-producer Josh Welton) a decisively modern platter of clubby, EDM-influenced modern pop. It’s a song cycle that perhaps isn’t a great Prince album, but is a very good pop record with Prince at the helm, and drizzled with just enough Prince sauce to differentiate it from, I dunno, Jason DeRulo or someone.

Where the first HITnRUN platter differs from Prince’s last record, Art Official Age, is pretty simple: AOA sounded like its concept, a freeze-dried Prince awakening years in the future and attempting to reconcile his aesthetics with the current landscape, an analog musician trying to function in a digital age. It was a freewheeling, diverse platter that largely achieved the synergy he desired. HITnRUN Phase One, meanwhile, boasts very little in the way of “man out of time” aging blues: it’s a full-scale embrace of the spit-shined, modern, dance-y, digital pop musics of today. It’s almost reminiscent of one of his most notorious pop contemporaries, Madonna, the rare ’80s relic who continued to churn timely hits out well into the 2000s, and did so largely based on a willingness to embrace the shifting tides of the mainstream.

So it’s not archetypal, and isn’t easily identifiable as a Prince record if you don’t already know it is; but I like it, a lot actually. Why is this?

Setting aside the obvious answer (rabid fanboyism, I mean jeebus Drew you liked Come and Chaos & Disorder), it’s that HITnRUN Phase One‘s unimpeachable pop bonafides are right at the forefront of a kinetic, effortlessly fun song cycle. Or, more to the point of this being a good album but not a great Prince album, I daresay I’d enjoy this record as released by any contemporary r&p star. It’d be a swell album by Bruno Mars, or The Weeknd, or Usher.

And, almost as a bridge, Prince is quick to nod to his past before leaping feet-first into his present; “Million $ Show” drops quick samples of the iconic “1999” and “Let’s Go Crazy” intros before noted P collaborator Judith Hill rides a swift horn-laced chorus directly into a bus full of Prince raps. “Shut This Down” follows with more double-tracked Prince raps over dagger synths and booming canned drums; “Ain’t About To Stop” finds P trading verses with perennial pop underachiever Rita Ora over a clattering, loping platter of crisp drums and dissonant guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on, like, a Run the Jewels record. (Our hero still manages to drop falsetto yawps and wailing guitar on us here, because come on of course he does.)

The doubleheader of “This Could Be Us” and “Fallinlove2nite” finds Prince reworking very recent successes; both fare better than their earlier counterparts to a certain degree, most notably the former, which sees P and Welton updating Art Official Age‘s lush ballad with a quicker pulse and some neat pitch-shifting in the chorus. “Fallinlove2nite” simply finds Prince carrying the bulk of its energetic nu-disco verses instead of conceding half of the vocals to Zooey Deschanel (as per its original single incarnation), and I like it more despite not being quite as tired of Ms. Deschanel as most folks are; in either iteration it’s one of his catchiest confections in quite some time, so bravo all around.

In the album’s back half, P unfurls a few real ringers for your illicitly-assembled “best of Prince” mix tapes: “Hardrocklover” rips out some heavily-distorted guitar interludes (as supporting evidence for his assertion that his guitar can make a woman scream, which is probably a phallic reference but who wants to dig that far in?), “1000 X’s and O’s” rides breezy, comparatively minimalist funk to medium-slow-jam glory, and atmospheric endcap “June” is a bare-bones treat, awash in synth flourishes and some of P’s best vocals here.

What it all adds up to isn’t, I must reiterate, a great Prince album. At this stage in a career, almost 40 years removed from his debut, a great album from any artist is difficult to hope for. But this is perhaps the next best thing, an album that feels like in can hold its own in the current pop landscape, can be interwoven into a playlist of modern radio hits without interruption or head-scratching; it’s kind of a banger, honestly, an upbeat and busy song cycle with plenty of tricks to spare. It’s proof that Prince could turn it on whenever he felt like it, proof that he still had the pop smarts to compete with the new jacks at any stage in his career, and proof that aging doesn’t have to equal decline.

Grade: B+

The Purple Files: Prince & 3rdeyegirl, Plectrumelectrum (2014)

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Ever the wellspring of surplus material, Prince wasn’t quite content to release Art Official Age and let it stand alone as his umpteenth comeback record; the same day, he released Plectrumelectrum, a full-scale guitar-rock record with new backing band 3rdeyegirl that stands in stark contrast to AOA, both through its sound (analog recording techniques, chunky riff-rock instrumentals) and its relative lack of diversity. Where Art Official Age found Prince checking in with modern-pop filtered through his unique artistic perspective — complete with all the genre-hopping that description implies — Plectrumelectrum is comparatively black-and-white. It’s certainly not bad; it’s just not nearly as colorful as its companion record.

That being said, it’s a nice milieu to see Prince work in. I’ve waxed plenty about enjoying Prince in guitar-rock mode — even giving Chaos and Disorder a positive notice despite it literally existing just to tell Warner Brothers to suck it — so it’s been interesting to see him take so many strides towards re-establishing his guitar-hero bonafides in the aughts and 2010s. Of course, his inability to stay in one lane for too long often causes his guitar albums to veer off of the highway; Plectrumelectrum doesn’t hit quite as nicely or as frequently as Lotusflow3r from a few years prior, but it consistently buckles down and works within its established stylistic blueprint, which itself is a fascinating descriptor to lob at a Prince record.

Perhaps that’s the influence of his prefab all-female rock trio, a triptych of ringers in drummer Hannah Welton-Ford, bassist Ida Nielsen, and former NPG guitarist Donna Grantis; as with all Prince records, Plectrumelectrum is recognizably the product of its creator, but there’s an awful lot of sonic influence from his collaborators present here, which is so infrequently the case, historically speaking. They form the bones of Plectrumelectrum, the foundation on which Prince constructs his full-length rock spectacle.

This is a double-edged sword. Prince committing to rock music for an album should probably sound a little more idiosyncratic than this; loads of the material here sounds like Led Zep and Hendrix fetishization (blues-rock gone heavy), elsewhere it kinda sounds like Audioslave or something. Still, Prince’s knack for an off-kilter melody remains intact, and the chunky barre chords and Bonham drums of “Pretzelbodylogic”, for example, service one of P’s most serpentine, sassy hooks. Ditto opener “Wow”, which seems like a trial run of “Pretzelbodylogic” — early on, it’s easy to get concerned that this record is gonna be way too samey for Prince’s standards — and “Fixurlifeup”, which sounds kinda like Collective Soul fronted by Lenny Kravitz.

Also appealing is Prince’s willingness to play well with others here; this is his most collaborative, band-like record since perhaps Love Symbol. A lot of that has to do with his willingness to turn lead vocal duties over to others, a perfectly understandable decision if you’re playing in a rock band with the level of six-string chops Prince boasts. Welton-Ford assumes lead duties for a handful of agreeable ringers, including the fierce “Aintturninaround” and the breezy r&b-flecked “Stopthistrain”. Elsewhere, P invites Minneapolis femcees to front “Boytrouble”, which only tangentially sounds like Prince was in the room but is agreeably silly enough to not matter.

By the time the album climaxes, it’s been a fun enough ride; far from a stone-cold classic, to be sure, but there are gems to be harvested. Late in the record we get an alternate take of AOA‘s “Funknroll”, which predictably errs more heavily on the rock side of the equation, and a scintillating barn-burner in “Anotherlove” (particularly energetic background vocals from 3rdeyegirl here, who excel in this area throughout the record). And then there’s “Marz”, so weird and short and pogo-fast that it feels like an offshoot of Dirty Mind‘s immortally disturbing “Sister”; the conceit, “a brother might move to Mars”, is a little more chaste this time around, but it feels similar.

Plectrumelectrum isn’t half as big or weird as it should have been. But it’s loose and raw enough to feel like Prince is really enjoying himself again — listen to how exuberant he sounds on this version of “Funknroll” — and that’s kind of enough, isn’t it? If it’s not as grand of a statement as Art Official Age, it’s a worthwhile companion piece with jams to spare.

Grade: B

The Purple Files: Prince, Art Official Age (2014)

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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-

The Purple Files: Prince, 20Ten (2010)

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Sometimes I wonder: what’s the archetypal latter-day Prince album? Do we grant the honor to one of his better late-period records, like 3121 or Lotusflow3r, or do we pull a less-flattering move, gifting the title to one of the many perfectly-serviceable-yet-inessential platters he dropped in the aughts?

After experimenting with non-traditional album release modes for basically the entirety of the new millennium, Prince returned to a well he’d already been to before for the release of 20Ten, giving the record away, for free, in a UK newspaper, the same way he released Planet Earth. This happened hot on the heels of a lot of controversial Prince actions: getting aggressive about getting his music pulled from Youtube, releasing albums exclusively through target, and proclaiming the Internet to be dead in an interview. In a hilarious twist, the Internet proved itself very much alive by the very fact that I’m listening to 20Ten right now. And yet, amid all the controversy, the record that’s left is… well, it’s a latter-day Prince recording. No more, no less. It’s fine, sure; the grooves are nice enough, some of them even improving upon MPLSound, the record 20Ten is a clear continuation of, and it sounds good and all. But at this point in his career, Prince continuing to spin wheels sounds… unexciting. Anemic, even, at times.

And sure — a lot of that’s frustration over Lotusflow3r, the other half of the Target double-shot, which was both adventuresome and tuneful, a dynamic reassertion of Prince’s innate musicality and sense of innovation. Hearing a dime-a-dozen Prince record just a year after hearing an exciting, special one is disheartening to the superfan; one can’t help but think that he’s resting on his laurels. Witness album opener “Compassion”: clearly, the goal here is for P to turn to his past for inspiration, given this song’s similarity to “Delirious”, but it’s a pretty pale imitation, a pencil drawing of the Mona Lisa. Flip to the end of 20Ten to hear the “Walking in Sand” and “Sea of Everything” doubleheader, a pair of drippy ballads that see Prince at his absolute snooziest (very-nice gospel backgrounds on “Sea of Everything” notwithstanding). See, 20Ten too often sounds like a canned Casio-demo version of a Prince record, like it’s following a template: electro-pop opener, a handful of funk grooves, a romantic ballad, a bedroom ballad, Prince raps, weird new-wave thing, okay guys let’s knock off for the day and put out a new record tomorrow.

But, of course, this is Prince, and we’re hard-pressed to go the entire duration of a Prince record — even a boring one like 20Ten — without a highlight or two. Here we get “Future Soul Song”, a stunningly vintage-sounding quiet-storm slow-burn, and the peculiar sugar-rush of “Everybody Loves Me”, a sweet cut of twitchy, pogoing, piano-laced new wave. We get elastic, “Take Me With U”-esque pop-funk in “Lavaux”; we also get the gloriously silly self-aggrandizing funk of “Lowdown”, forever enshrined as the track where P refers to himself as “the Purple Yoda”.

And so, in a lot of ways, 20Ten is the perfect representation of the artist at this time: a short, uninvolved blast of a nostalgia-tripping Prince, peppered with moments of inspiration and brilliance that cunningly remind us of his prowess. It is, unfortunately, also the most slight of these records; as a canonical work, it’s best regarded as a record from which to harvest a few nuggets of mixtape fodder, and probably nothing more.

Grade: C

The Purple Files: Prince, Planet Earth (2007)

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In the immediate flurry of post-comeback Prince releases — “post-comeback”, for these terms, meaning the period of time where he regained some semblance of commercial viability on the heels of his Rock Hall induction and the generally-liked “return to form” record Musicology — each album can, essentially, be pinned down by genre, something rarely attributable to Prince. There are the requisite exceptions and excursions, sure, but it seems as though Musicology is the old-school r&b record, 3121 is the extra-funky party record, and Planet Earth is the pop-rock record. This trio of records affords Prince the opportunity to try on his various masks; and, to a certain degree, they all feel like attempts at approximating his most transcendent highs, to varying degrees of success. Of these three albums, 3121 is almost unquestionably the best, but it’s interesting: while I’m very predisposed to seeing Prince lean towards power-pop (see “When You Were Mine”, “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man”, “Gotta Stop Messin’ About”, “Dinner With Delores”), Planet Earth is an album with a few terrific moments that never really takes flight.

Originally released in copies of a UK newspaper — seriously — Planet Earth strives for pop glory from the opening cut (which, like loads of Prince records, is the title track; like an essayist, he knows the importance of stating his hypothesis in the opening paragraph). In this case, the opening cut is almost an almost unbearably hokey and long slab of apocalyptic piano-prog. His focus here is environmental, focused on preserving the earth for future generations; his heart is in the right place, but his musical synapses are misfiring. It only gets better from there — seriously, this is bar none the album’s weakest cut — but mostly only by degrees. It’s a record that finds us waiting around for a Prince that only occasionally drops by.

Lead single “Guitar” squeaks by on pure personality; as a song, it’s fairly unremarkable, and the six-string theatrics are uncharacteristically disappointing for a track so focused on the instrument, but Prince delivers the absurd premise (“I love you, baby — but not like I love my guitar”) with winking, cocksure humor. Later, “Lion of Judah” sounds promising from the get-go, resurrecting that glimmering, brilliant guitar tone from “Purple Rain”, but there are like two notes tops in that monotonous chorus and it’s a whole lot of revving without ever taking off. “Resolution” kind of works, though; with loads of clean guitar bolstering an antiwar “can’t we all just get along?” song, it’s a milieu that’s relatively fun to hear Prince work in.

Strangely, despite Prince’s success rate in guitar-pop, the only song of that ilk that really works on Planet Earth is “The One U Wanna C”, a bouncy, insidiously catchy “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” rewrite with a big multi-tracked chorus and better, more fluid solos than “Guitar”. What works across the board here are the slow jams: “Future Baby Mama” is one of P’s best latter-day seduction numbers with its timely-sounding synth bounce and a breezy, “Most Beautiful Girl”-esque lilt, while “Mr. Goodnight” is an immaculate, vintage loverman rap with shimmering keys and effortlessly smooth background vocals. And file “All the Midnights in the World” with Prince’s most intriguing oddities: it’s a brisk, melodic piano-pop love song that bears all the characteristics of an alternate-world Disney song.

Perhaps Planet Earth‘s only stone-cold classic arrives near the record’s tail end: “Chelsea Rodgers” is pure vintage, a kinetic disco number decorated with “Sir Duke” horns, and tasty enough to have sprung up on any number of early Prince records. But much of Planet Earth is Prince doing Prince-by-numbers; which, if you’re keeping track, has been the prevailing theme of his resurgence, but largely with better results. The weakest album of this Prince era, Planet Earth manages to only glimpse at greatness; as usual, the results are listenable, but they’re only fitfully satisfying.

Grade: C

The Purple Files: Prince, 3121 (2006)

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When looking at the entire scope of a career — as we’ve been here for, like, thirty consecutive posts — the question of age and fall-off is gonna have to be be discussed. It’s inevitable: artists age, artists change, some artists eventually suck. It’s those who have operated in the shadows their entire career that avoid this plague, I think: take, for example, Tom Waits, an artist so defined by his lack of commercial viability and his acquired-taste style that he manages, forty years into his career, to still drop records every bit as brilliant as his earliest successes. Ditto someone like Kate Bush. Problem is, not everyone has this luxury: to a certain degree, longtime established artists with pop hits on the old resume have a reputation to live up to. And it happens so often that artists who’ve been resurrected commercially at some point dig their heels into the rut that brought them back in the first place: see Aerosmith’s endless parade of Glen Ballard power ballads, Springsteen’s big-hearted Americana-pop, Madonna’s seemingly tireless trend-hopping.

And so we grade on a curve, because in the absence of the true innovation that these artists once brought to the table, we’ll accept listenability. Prince’s transition period from youthful innovation to safe-zone elder-statesmanism was wildly experimental and often alienating; with Musicology, he returned to a formula to rein himself in and return to the charts. With 3121, released two years later, he honed the formula: medium-length records, tight and streamlined and bearing precious few experimental notions, full of songs that sound just like Prince Songs. Those of us paying attention during his in-between period — the “Slave” years, the tumultuous tail end of the Warner years, the symbol years, the vault-clearing years — may be tempted to dismiss this kind of thing as pandering, but the truth is that our expectations simply need adjusting. By 3121, Prince had basically arrived at where he’d remain artistically until his death; and though the forward-thinking headiness of his big-ticket albums had long dissipated, he still proved more than able to turn it on in fits and spurts. Because, see, even an over-the-hill Prince never released music that embarrassed his legacy: he simply released music that couldn’t quite compete with his gawd-tier moments, and what an impossible standard that is to hold an artist to.

3121 improves on Musicology at every turn, proving that P was ever-capable of evolving, even during his own deconstruction. It’s tighter, more tuneful, funkier, even more adventurous (within the framework of revisiting past glories, of course). The title track rides a nimble “Gett Off” groove before bringing in the big guns with horns, a squalling guitar solo, and some “Superstition” keyboards. “Lolita” roots itself firmly in the past, its silly chorus (“Lolita, you’re sweet-ah, but you’ll never make a cheat-ah out of me”) a mere afterthought in the wake of gnarly 1999 synth stabs and some understated chicken-scratch funk guitar. And, of course, there’s leadoff single “Black Sweat”; those at home making homemade “best-of” mixes should take note, because this track, all jittery percussion and rubbery bass and P’s falsetto exploring the spaces in between better than anything since “Kiss”, feels like an uncorking of a fine vintage. It’s dynamite.

But this is a reinvigorated Prince, and even Prince knuckling down and making a Prince-by-numbers record squashes all comers; to put it more succinctly, Prince simply doesn’t miss here. He proves that he hasn’t full-on abandoned his tendencies to switch lanes on a whim: witness his most overt homage to Latin music, “Te Amo Corazon”, a sashaying samba flecked with flamenco guitar, or “Incense and Candles”, which finds Prince one-upping the r&b lovermen of the day with some of his least-embarrassing raps in the breakdown and still sounding like a boss with his vocals drenched in vodocer effects. (Released today, it’d be a smash for T-Pain or Trey Songz, I’m convinced.) He unleashes energetic guitar-rock with “Fury”, old-school soul on “Satisfied”, communal Sly Stone horn-funk jazzed up with Latin electric piano runs on “Get on the Boat”, flashes of that yelping yesteryear falsetto in the fiery coda of “The Dance”; and it all works. All of it.

It all adds up to perhaps his finest hour since The Gold Experience. 3121 can’t help but be compared to his greatest achievements, but we’re over the chronological hump in our Prince discussions, and it’s frankly the most essential record of his final decade. This is Prince in the 2000s: performing with renewed focus, still weird, but dedicated to putting a rewarding song cycle to wax. There’s nothing new on 3121, but there doesn’t need to be. Taken on its own terms, it’s a whole heap of fun.

Grade: A-

The Purple Files: Prince, Musicology (2004)

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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-