Right about here is where the spoiler should go. You know what I mean, right? This is where I address my Prince fandom and talk about how he’s my favorite musician and all; then, I reveal the wrinkle that Batman is my favorite superhero, and talk at length about how it’s impossible to feign objectivity about Prince’s Batman soundtrack simply because it literally combines my two favorite things. (Seriously, if Prince could have found a way to revisit this concept while shoehorning in a narrative about the New England Patriots, I’d be apoplectic.)

Alas: Batman is a subpar Prince record, arguably his weakest up to this point. (The case could be made for his debut, but it contains far too many kernels of idiosyncratic genius to dismiss as such.) It’s the first record that truly sounds like Prince-by-numbers, like someone devised a “Prince” setting on a Casio keyboard and he used it for a couple of cuts to be ironic; the silver lining, of course, is that this is still a Prince album, and perhaps I’m biased, but Prince albums don’t really land without at least a few highlights.

But let’s back up: Batman is P’s soundtrack for Tim Burton’s 1989 film about the Caped Crusader, itself something of a classic. It’s a truly befuddling piece of work in a lot of ways — not musically, as it’s always listenable even when it’s not exciting, but thematically. You see, Batman, the film, revolves around Bruce Wayne/Batman’s efforts to thwart The Joker, while simultaneously courting Kim Basinger’s Vicki Vale. And Batman, the record, is kind of about that too, except it’s a Prince record so it’s largely a conceptual slab of fan-fic about the three principal characters wanting to bang each other, and I don’t think I could make that up if I tried.

Which makes Batman an entertaining listen, if not necessarily an artistically fruitful one. Take “The Arms of Orion”, for example, an electric piano and synth-draped ’80s ballad-by-numbers (it’s basically “After All”, “Almost Paradise”, and “The Next Time I Fall”, et al): I daresay that if Prince’s name wasn’t on it, I’d like it a lot more, in that gooey, cheesy, easy-’80s-harmonies sort of way, but as the weakest spot on arguably his weakest album to that point, it kinda comes and goes without impact. But then it bleeds into “Partyman”, which finds Prince stirring up chaos and disorder while embodying Gotham’s own Clown Prince, The Joker, and it’s an agreeable funk-rocker that wouldn’t sound out of place on 1999. Better still is the percussive, groovy, Gap Band-by-way-of-Robert Palmer “Lemon Crush”, and the timpani-and-sitar-laced midtempo dance-rock of “Vicki Waiting”. The latter is also Batman‘s most agreeably silly example of Prince exerting artistic license over the characters he embodies therein; it opens on P’s version of Bruce Wayne lobbing a ribald joke at Vicki Vale that doesn’t quite land (“I told the joke about the woman who asks her lover ‘why is your organ so small?’ He replied, ‘I didn’t know I was playin’ in a cathedral’… Vicki didn’t laugh at all”) and progresses from there. Later on, during Prince-patented “Beautiful Ones”-esque slow jam “Scandalous”, Bruce/Batman is straight-up horny for Vicki (“why don’t we just skip all the foreplay, mama, and just get down on the floor?”).

But “Scandalous”, as entertaining as it is in its own right, is worth noting as part of the problem with Batman – it sounds rote by Prince’s own lofty standards. It sounds like a pastiche of every great Prince slow jam distilled into something that delivers the sound without the essence. It’s useless, stacked up next to “The Beautiful Ones”, “Do Me, Baby”, even “When 2 R in Love”. Though little on Batman is straight-up bad, it is frequently inessential, particularly in the wake of a run of albums that each gave you a reason to listen to.

Really, the only instance where Batman becomes truly head-scratching is in closing track “Batdance”. An inexplicable #1 single, it just pastes soundbytes from the movie to a churning instrumental that never crests or goes anywhere interesting. It’s lazy to even call it a proper track, honestly; it’s a time-wasting exercise, a cheap tie-in. But that’s Batman; even if it’s listenable, it’s Prince at his absolute laziest, a tossed-off cash-in on his fame and cultural cache. I won’t call it garbage — paradoxically, I like it too much to do that — but it’s the least-essential Prince record I’ve covered in this series thus far.

Grade: C+