Prince - The Prince of Minneapolis

Minneapolis, Central High School, circa 1973

Two strapping young Black men stroll calmly down one of the high school's endless corridors. One is Duane Nelson, the archetypal trendy big guy, sports-obsessed, idol of the local girls, agreeably lazy. Walking beside him is his brother, the quiet Rogers, sporting a typical afro and an outfit most people would call eccentric - perfectly pressed flared trousers and shirt, a Sly Stone-style cap and oversized but rather handy platform shoes. Rogers rarely speaks, his shyness is chronic, he tries to draw as little attention as possible, and at parties he doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, doesn't dance! The definitive turning point comes at lunchtime one spring day, when a group of friends rope him into a little musical show put on in the cafeteria. Rogers appears transformed in the eyes of his young schoolmates - wild, charismatic, a hugely talented musician. But who is this Rogers Nelson? Some start to wonder. Someone comes over to invite him to the movies. Innocent yet provocative girls called cheerleaders try to worm their way into his afternoons. Aside from them, the other displays of friendliness don't seem to interest the reserved Rogers much, who's usually busy in his friend Andre's basement trying to play everything in sight. Meanwhile, for a few months now he's also put together his own band, with the usual Andre and a drummer named Morris Day. They call themselves Champagne and manage to play Ohio Players songs, as well as a few jaw-dropping originals penned by their taciturn leader.

Minneapolis, Moon Sound Inc., circa 1976

A certain Chris Moon, a lanky Englishman abroad, owns a recording studio where radio jingles and the usual demo tapes of local artists get cut. Short on cash and desperately searching for a pianist, the enterprising Moon remembers a tape by the notorious Champagne and, above all, their pianist. He decides to call him. Rogers plays the requested piano part and takes the liberty of suggesting a bassline too. Fantastic, says Moon, but who's going to play it? Me, replies the fearless Rogers, who ends the evening by also recording the guitar parts, the drums, and even the vocal tracks, leaving a dumbfounded Moon in his wake. Not satisfied with that, young Nelson asks as payment to be allowed to use the studio whenever he likes, and proposes to the Englishman that they form a company together. A few weeks later, armed with some demos, the two decide to head for New York to seek out the usual contacts at the record labels.

The results aren't satisfying, and while Prince continues scouting the Big Apple, Moon heads back to Minneapolis, where he has the brilliant idea of handing the demo (which contains, among others, "Soft And Wet") to producer and manager Owen Husney. This is the second turning point. Husney, as if struck by a revelation, quits his job, drops everything. He strikes a deal with Rogers Nelson. He buys him equipment, advises him to focus on choruses, pays him a weekly wage. And plots his rise. The already-recorded tracks would be packaged inside a special press kit designed to impress label executives: on the black cover, the unsettling image of the musician topped by the word Prince.

Los Angeles, near Record Plant, circa 1977-78-79: the debut

And indeed, the labels' attention is immediately caught. A&M, Columbia and Warner all scramble for the inevitable signature. Prince's demand calls for the recording of at least three albums. Warner's people exchange glances and accept. Prince is dispatched to the studio, but someone still seems not to trust him fully: while the young musician amuses himself alone among the instruments and mixers, having turned down the support of Maurice White of the legendary Earth Wind & Fire, deeming them washed up, he finds his new kingdom constantly invaded by strange cleaning staff. They are, in fact, famous producers in disguise. Everyone agrees unanimously that Prince can do whatever he wants.

In April 1978, Warner released the debut For You right in the thick of the post-punk upheaval, with disco music reigning everywhere and a certain strain of AOR, often disguised as hard rock, still winning converts. Prince comes across as enthusiastic and fresh, though certainly not essential listening on these early grooves. His funk and soul roots surface everywhere, as shown by the single "Soft 'n' Wet", while here and there you can spot small steps toward a less conventional approach, as in the blues of "So Blue", the ballad "Baby" and the African-tinged "For You" - a kind of testament to the little sprite's ever-open, receptive ears, always on the hunt for novelty even outside the usual mainstream. The whole album is dominated by keyboards weaving over a powerful rhythmic bed still very close to the disco formulas dominant at the time. Other fragments worth noting: the aggressive rock of "I'm Yours", the jazzy guitar inserts in "Crazy You". But there's one trait that keeps both this debut and its follow-up from being truly memorable: the production is too pompous and grandiose, tied to the fashions of the day rather than minimal and distinctive.

And the follow-up to the debut, titled Prince, suffers quite a bit from this. As usual, the album's conception is self-sufficient, with the Prince handling performance, arrangement and production entirely on his own. Still, the twenty-one-year-old multi-instrumentalist does take a step forward in the art of crafting a hit song: the syncopated "I Feel For You" already contains the seeds that would lead Prince to glory in the mid-80s. But the song would hold even bigger surprises in Chaka Khan's cover five years later - an eloquent sign of Prince's struggle to find, if not his own path, at least a sense of proportion.
Pleasant but still anonymous in terms of personality are "I Wanna Be Your Lover", his first real chart success, and the ballads "When We're Dancing Close and Slow" and "With You". On an album that's clearly struggling, Prince is at least smart enough to offer one surprise: "Bambi" is a massive yet sensual slab of hard rock, performed with real conviction and built around a striking guitar line - a kind of early preview of the crossover that would make the fortunes of Living Colour and Fishbone more than five years later.

But the future Prince of Minneapolis now has promotional duties to fulfil. And while he can always get by alone for TV appearances, a live dimension has to be built from scratch. No sooner said than done: his onstage debut is dated January 5, 1979, in Minneapolis. Prince appears before the local crowd at the Capri Theater flanked by Bobby Z on drums, Matt Fink and Gayle Chapman on keyboards, Dez Dickerson on second guitar, and his old friend from his Champagne days, Andre Cymone, on bass. During a performance that's anything but memorable, our man still seems held back by his old shyness and, unusually for him, by a pair of jeans. He finally shakes it off at his second appearance, about a month later, when the first local fans are left stunned by a bare-chested Prince covered only in stockings and a pair of zebra-print briefs. The show is a furious blend of street funk wrapped in irreverent attitude, in line with the lyrics of some new songs - the very ones that would shortly define his imminent third album.

Minneapolis, circa 1980-82: the birth of the Minn-Sound

The decade opens with Prince wrapped in an alienating sense of depression - romantic, professional, aspirational. An existential condition that seems, almost unconsciously, in step with the one afflicting the youth of the era. A leaden period, undermined by a looming recession and by a conservatism that again seems to be seizing control (Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher are beginning to dominate the world's political stage), fuels an anguished sense of loneliness that is mirrored in music that's metronomic, at times robotic, often unsettling, yet never losing its intrigue. New wave, in all its many facets, is starting to spark serious debate. While in Europe we witness the explosion and sudden dissolution of Joy Division, across the Atlantic Talking Heads are definitively shattering the classic pop-song structure, tearing it apart with a mix of Third World sounds and urban rhythms. The Prince, again working entirely alone, is plotting the leap in quality everyone's been waiting for. No more sentimentality, no more strings, no more flared trousers. Make way for sickness, for perversion, for crossover - not just musical but socio-racial too. The predominantly Black audience, still devoted to classic R&B, is first dismayed, then disappointed by the behaviour of a young man who surrounds himself with eccentric white musicians and invites the crowd to chant encouragements to oral sex and incest.

Dirty Mind, recorded on a sixteen-track in total solitude once again, was released in October 1980, marking the first great revolution of Prince's career. Everything feels drier, darker, with streaks of desperation clashing against the party atmosphere and instinct-unleashing vibe that's supposed to define Prince's output. The result paints a menacing picture. Starting with the cover itself, a close-up shot in black and white of the musician dressed only in briefs and a duster coat, with an overturned bed in the background, almost like the chronicle of a night spent in vice. But the real jolt comes from the stories the bandleader decides to set to music: we're essentially looking at the first pop-rock album to make pornography its main source of inspiration. In fact, its only source. There's not a moment's pause in the chase for maximum pleasure coupled with a sense of sin. "When You Were Mine" and the title track shamelessly blend increasingly explicit forbidden dreams with a melodic-harmonic structure that leaves behind the outdated disco-funk mould to land in territory related as much to 60s beat as to the precise, dark-tinged cadences of new wave. Everything seems calculated down to the last detail to lead into the trio of songs that perhaps best capture the album's spirit: "Head", the implausible - for anyone who's never leafed through tabloid smut - tale of a fresh-faced bride who ditches her own wedding reception to run off with our man, only to wear him out with her particular brand of lovemaking, its outcome slyly sung by newly recruited keyboardist Lisa Coleman. Next comes "Sister", where Prince spins tales of the erotic-sexual lessons supposedly imparted by his own sister, while the minimal rhythm sketches out hysterical punk scenery; the last track on this shortlist, and the album's closing statement, "Uptown", opens yet another chapter of the Prince project: the depiction of a fictitious community life, both a protective shield for our man and a wellspring of inspiration. Another device for grabbing attention - essentially, the test-tube conception of an entire scene.

The Prince immediately puts this idea into practice by officially forming The Time, a group made up of figures already well known for stoking Minneapolis's musical scene. Among them, singers Alexander O'Neal and Morris Day, and the future multi-millionaire producers Terry Lewis and Jimmy "Jam" Harris, for whom he would produce a string of albums, writing almost the entirety of their self-titled debut. Thematically, though, Prince has pushed things a bit too far this time, and as a result the album earns less commercial success than his debut.
And while the touring schedule intensifies, with Andre Cymone stepping aside and being replaced on bass by Brown Mark, the musician has two surprises in store: the fourth album Controversy, and a stint as opening act for the Rolling Stones, stars of yet another tour of the year, in front of the crowd at the Los Angeles Coliseum. But the musician's image proves far too controversial to win over rock fans, who in fact pelt him with all sorts of objects, eventually nailing him in the face with a fried chicken. The set lasts twenty minutes, after which Prince boards a plane and heads home!
Against all expectations, Controversy nevertheless becomes his most commercially successful record to date, going platinum. Shame that musically it doesn't feel quite as bold as its predecessor. The decisive impact comes from the title-track single, an irregularly shaped dance song that, while not exactly outlandish, still stands out, alongside the frantic "Sexuality", the rock'n'roll pastiche of "Jack You Off", the pseudo-political pathos of "Ronnie Talk To Russia", and the stunning melody of "Annie Christian". By this point Prince has trained hard enough to make the definitive leap toward becoming the supreme ruler of the 80s rock scene. A purple-tinted empire in which to await the end of the world, amid frenzied dancing and desperate yearning.

From Minneapolis to Hollywood, circa 1982-1985

Punctual as a Casio watch of the era, in October 1982 Warner released the double album 1999 worldwide, eleven songs that definitively shifted Prince's music into new territory entirely his own. In that mild autumn, the celebrated Minneapolis Sound was born - the true sonic and stylistic signature of a musician once a faithful disciple of James Brown. A genuine wall of sound, obsessive, almost tribal, yet thoroughly sophisticated too. A rhythm that sounds as if played with brushes caressing electronic toms, further filtered to create the sensation of a train that always seems on the verge of speeding up while actually holding a steady pace. A foundation that serves to keep in check the revelry breaking out inside each individual carriage. It starts with the title track, which mocks consumerism and humankind's lack of sensitivity, projecting it into 1999, the chosen day of judgment, in a continuous exchange of voices - this time not handled solely by the author - set within a syncopated, exhilarating rhythm. The extended coda paves the way for the other hit single, "Little Red Corvette", the first concrete manifestation of the brushed Minn-Sound. The frenzy builds further with "Delirious". "DMSR" confirms our man's principal interests, after which he hits the automatic button to unleash endless dancing: "Automatic", nine minutes long, built on a single riff, minimal in approach, very new wave yet so personal, so revolutionary. There are two moments of relaxation, where Prince rediscovers his own melodic ballad-writing streak with "Free" and "International Lover", slow songs written in traditional form, stripped of heavy strings and over-the-top arrangements. The backing is bluesy, the guitar let loose between rage and tears. But Prince has other things on his mind: he is the Black rival to Frank Zappa, as well as to David Byrne and Brian Eno. The shared challenge is to dismantle the preset mould of the classic pop song without fully disowning it. Hence "Something In The Water", caught between drum machine and overlapping melodies, the new funk of "Lady Cab Driver", and the extraordinary achievement of "All The Critics Love You In New York", six minutes spoken-sung over a minimal techno backing, with a chorus that appears and vanishes, repeating the title phrase like a genuine mantra.

The album turned out to be the fifth best-seller on American soil in the year of grace 1983, helped along by an acrobatic tour. But up to that point it was also Prince's most experimental album, with each individual song carrying a coda of at least a couple of minutes, as if to heighten the ecstasy further. And it was precisely during the tour across North America that Prince surprised audiences by previewing some songs that would go on to make up his sixth album. It all happened one evening in August 1983, in Minnesota, when the crowd gathered at First Avenue for a charity concert found themselves applauding, among others, "I Would Die For You", "Baby I'm A Star" and "Purple Rain". Things worked so well onstage that Prince decided to use those recordings for his new studio project. But there's more: during the long tour, the musician had seriously considered a film script to be turned into an actual feature film with an autobiographical flavour, telling the story of Kid, Prince's own alter ego, torn between a far-from-idyllic family life - with a despotic, violent father - and his own artistic ambitions, often frustrated. In the middle of it all, the love story between the protagonist and the usual gorgeous girl, inevitable in a script of this kind. Filming began in Minneapolis in November of that same year and would lead to the rock movie "Purple Rain", directed by a certain Albert Magnoli, who found himself shooting a production that was anything but a lavish, big-budget affair. The soundtrack would be entrusted to new tracks this time recorded by Prince in full collaboration with his band, named the Revolution - an ensemble that had just welcomed new guitarist Wendy Melvoin, replacing the departing Dez Dickerson.

The film experience confirms the expansion of our man's interests but also his intention to broaden what is fast becoming a genuine clan. And among the musicians and artists rotating alongside Rogers Nelson, there's naturally no shortage of beautiful women, whose sensuality is often celebrated in the artist's explicit, provocative lyrics. And while during the tour following "1999" his main companion had been Vanity (later the leader of Vanity 6, produced by Prince himself, an actress and the wife of other musicians), by 1984 the leading lady is the then-unknown Apollonia Kotero, even brought in front of the microphones during the recording of the upcoming sixth album. And what happens during the year that celebrates America and the Los Angeles Olympics is simply incredible: in a star-spangled season dominated far and wide by the Second British Invasion (with Duran Duran, Culture Club, Eurythmics, but also Def Leppard riding high), and against the immense success of Michael Jackson and the nearly dissolved Police, Prince shatters nearly every record, edging out the contemporaneous comeback of Bruce Springsteen, born in the USA: Purple Rain, in its LP form, sits atop the American charts for twenty-one consecutive weeks (only "Thriller" managed better, with 28!), spawns two number-one singles, "When Doves Cry" and the title ballad, sells eight million copies (a figure that has since climbed to 15, in the US market alone), and spreads out into an exhausting, spectacular tour. But the surprises are far from over: the film, made on a far-from-extravagant budget, becomes a massive hit, grossing over 100 million dollars, and even sends the soundtrack all the way to the Oscars!

Amid this whirlwind of events, Prince certainly doesn't lose sight of the musical side of things. The first notable change is instrumental: while the previous record had essentially been dominated by a keyboard-driven sound, on Purple Rain Prince decides to put the guitar front and centre. And between the flourishes, the embellishments and the facial expressions of its owner, everything seems to point back to the myth of Jimi Hendrix. The media don't hold back, fuelling the comparison. One that Prince, often judged vain and arrogant, finds uncomfortable and resents: "I'm more drawn to the style of Carlos Santana, to his gentler, more feminine way of playing", murmurs, on more than one occasion, a prince now determined to reveal nothing more to the press. But the album's opener leaves no room for argument: "Let's Go Crazy" is a fierce, remarkably agile burst of adrenaline-fuelled rock; an opening entrusted to Prince's voice in preacher-like poses, his invitation to leave your worries behind and lose yourself in a cathartic dance. The Revolution build a framework always propped up by the now-classic Minn-Sound, with the master's guitar leading the charge right through to the final sacrifice, the last notes ripped out at breakneck speed with an obvious Hendrix-style debt to the wah-wah pedal. But there's no time to breathe: the pyrotechnic drum rolls, the enchanting synth sounds tinged with psychedelia, a relentless pace apt for describing the new love story between Prince and Apollonia, who is also brought in to sing backing vocals on "Take Me With You". A passion that stops at nothing: "The Beautiful Ones", a spatial ballad graced by hyper-modern production, with slowed-down drumming and relentless use of delay, Prince's plea never tipping into schmaltz, helped by a vocal performance that's now desperate, now wanton, often hysterical. The return to fierceness comes courtesy of the insinuating guitar of "Computer Blue", though the stellar production, with its incredible layering of echo and overlapping vocals, erases any trace of rawness without stripping the track of its rock soul - and in the closing section Prince even pays his respects to the school of heavy-metal singers. The new episode, erotically charged and at times quite hardcore, stars a ravenous femme fatale, that "Darling Nikki" whom the young genius meets in the lobby of a five-star hotel, catching her in the act of masturbating with the pages of a newspaper. Carried by a bold harmonic structure and a futuristic groove, the woman seduces Prince and gives him a night of extreme sex, leaving him alone and lifeless in the rumpled bed.

The massive success of "When Doves Cry" (over two million copies sold) opens with a distorted pentatonic sequence before settling into a syncopated, oblique groove with no trace of bass whatsoever! It's almost like the description of a story that's reached its end, the author's ultimate confession in the face of a broken love's loneliness. The finale is entrusted to a stunning, unexpected keyboard solo, blisteringly fast yet poetic, worthy of an almost cinematic ending. With "I Would Die For You" we enter live territory, with Prince confessing, over the usual thrilling Minneapolis-Sound groove of brushes, keyboards and echo, that he's neither man nor woman, just an understanding lover. The set continues with perhaps the most traditional track in terms of its funk-soul groove, "Baby I'm A Star", marked by a powerful, sharp, precise rhythm. The now-legendary finale is entrusted to the ballad "Purple Rain", the Prince's eternal evergreen, the aesthetic manifesto of his purple period: solemn, romantic, with a lyrical, Hendrix-like guitar outpouring and a sprawling orchestral conclusion, nine minutes of pop ecstasy.

Prince finds just the right formula to definitively break through on a social level too. The secret lies entirely in a leaner songwriting style, shaped into a more classic song form, at least in terms of individual track lengths, yet never compromised by market logic - only by Prince's own. He has fun piling up accolade after accolade, driving crowds wild, but meanwhile he already has a new album ready: it's called Around The World In A Day, a record destined to stir controversy with both fans and his record label. The problem for Warner is that Prince has already decided to shelve this phase of enormous success and veer off in another direction - the one glimpsed in the last three minutes of "Purple Rain", with its psychedelic flavour. A taste the musician spreads liberally across the album released in the spring of 1985, with kilometre-long queues outside stores hailing its triumph. Which, however, never quite arrives. Immediately number 1 on the US charts, the album is met with fierce criticism from both the media and from fellow musicians suddenly disillusioned with the new messiah. The album is a surprising excursion by Prince into the 60s, focused squarely on his own vision of the summer of love, transplanted from 1967 to 1985, without abandoning the flourishes and theatrics typical of that period, while preserving its ideal, spiritual essence and updating its harmonic-melodic structure. Some even try to bring up "Sgt. Pepper's", reinforcing the sense that Prince wanted to pack his tribute to a golden age of pop into forty minutes. But the public only wants "Purple Rain part two", while critics are careful not to analyze the work as a whole, accusing Prince of megalomania.
So while the sparkling single "Raspberry Beret" even phonetically evokes the strawberry fields of Beatles lore, while the melodic opening of "Around The World In A Day" brings back scents straight out of Beatles-era India, while the limping gait of "Paisley Park" slides elegantly into druggy psychedelia, cleverly masking our man's shape-shifting talent, the public sees only a way of turning its back on glory, disowning its own nature as the genius of new funk. A groove that hasn't disappeared entirely, though, as shown by the sugar-coated rhythms of "Pop Life", the obsessiveness of "America", the rough sound of "Tamborine". But Rogers Nelson's musical vision doesn't dwell much on skin colour, on the thoroughly white - and not even all that subtly racist - idea that a "negro" should only and exclusively make hyper-rhythmic dance music. Proof of this, defying every convention, is "Condition Of The Heart", with a solo piano intro leading into a pop ballad that couldn't care less about the genre's usual formulas, managing to come across as traditional and anything but lightweight at the same time.

Perhaps Prince dared too much, didn't dig deep enough, staying on the aesthetic surface of an era he hadn't fully lived through; perhaps it was simply the whim of a bored star, a departure from the main road, the one leading to innovation - and yet the record contains first-rate melodic gems that deserved far greater appreciation. So as the doors of 1986 swing open, Prince seems to have lost all his potential, and he's no longer cool either. Too bad for his detractors that yet another chapter is already about to launch...

Sign of the times: Europe at his feet, circa 1986-1988

When (after wrapping up his psychedelic phase, gifting the Bangles an acoustic restyling of "1999", updated with a beat-oriented chorus and retitled "Manic Monday", the first number 1 for the four American girls), in February of that year the video accompanying "Kiss" was scheduled across TV networks around the world, and quite a few people were left open-mouthed (in Italy the clip debuted during the Rai show "Italy Sera", with host Piero Badaloni, almost disgusted, wondering where good taste had gone, sigh...). There's a whiff of soul revival here, and an almost mathematical essentiality. Over an r&b base built from a drum machine, Prince drives the groove with a heavily muted funky guitar. In between, his vocals swirl from guttural lows to piercing highs. A super-sexy, gripping, perfectly synchronized song, a masterpiece of minimalism. An irresistible single that tops the American charts and gives Prince a triumphant arrival on European soil as well. In a sudden move, the little genius ditches the lace and dresses in black and white, stepping decisively into a world where Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, John Coltrane and Miles Davis dine together. Serving up the dishes of an exquisite menu are the two true patron saints of the short, multi-instrumentalist genius: Duke Ellington and James Brown.

The album Parade arrives in its usual spring slot and catches everyone off guard. Critics and peers bow before the mastery of the prince of surprises. A record that's both earthy and extremely elegant, rich in harmonic solutions that are formally perfect and deeply emotional. It's a return to the past, to black&white, but completely reimagined. The opening is spatial: "Christopher Tracy's Parade" is a polyrhythmic sarabande in Minn-Sound style, made dizzying by an orchestra that moves against the grain of the main melody. The effect is dissonant and stunning. As the last chord dissolves, in comes the dry, scraped, diabolical percussion of "New Position", with lyrics dedicated to his favorite workout, carried with a sure hand by an essential yet torrential bassline, and a voice that pants, warns and scolds. The orchestra returns, led with a minimal touch, to embellish the Middle Eastern aftertaste of "I Wonder You", three notes and yet another dizzying effect. There's an intimate air, complete with a piano solo, velvety vocals, a soothing melody, for "Under The Cherry Moon"; the imagined scene is that of a grand ballroom, captured during a lavish 1920s-style party. Behind it, though, menacing and unsettling, an unusual, seemingly out-of-place percussive movement grows ever more obsessive, until it pushes itself into the foreground. And suddenly the evening comes alive: "Girls&Boys" is a classic r&b number, rich with horns, overflowing with references, a testing ground for the Revolution's skills.
"Life Can Be So Nice" sends the orchestra spinning at breakneck speed, in a whirlwind of horns and strings, perfectly synchronized and wild at the same time. But Prince loves to wrongfoot people, perhaps himself before anyone else; hence the unexpected pause of "Venus De Milo", piano arpeggios, a delicate orchestra answering back, symphonic jazz, a short instrumental that's rich and complex yet enchanting. In the second half of the evening, the dancing turns more dreamlike: "Mountains" revisits the Minn-Sound in a more traditional form, amid frenzied percussion set against vocals covering the usual mix of different registers. "Do U Lie" sends everyone sliding under the tables, teasing each other to the measured step of a typical 1940s swing, with Prince performing with rare mastery, now in his highest falsetto, now in an ogre's voice. We're in the heroic territory of early musical theatre, except it feels like a genre invented on the spot by Rogers Nelson himself. After the celebrated acrobatics of "Kiss", it's once again the wall of sound from Minneapolis, tilted a little more towards rock, "Anotherloverholenyohead", before closing with what is perhaps his finest ballad: "Sometimes It Snows In April", the sorrowful farewell for piano, voice and orchestra to the now-deceased Christopher Tracy, remembered in a poignant lyric, a melodic-harmonic tribute to one of his least-mentioned idols, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. Such a masterpiece comes accompanied by a film adaptation, "Under The Cherry Moon", with the album's protagonist played by Prince himself, set within a lavish, nostalgic backdrop, shot in black and white. The film, however, is a pointless mannerist mess, with little to do with the intelligence shown by the album. Its failure strains relations between the American public and Prince, whose artistic persona is by now too extravagant for the average listener's taste.

Two years on from his triumph, the prince has gone back to being a Black musician—the most talented, certainly, but also the strangest. But while the American market doesn't fully do justice to his mutant genius, Europe suddenly finds itself infatuated with his kisses. The time has come for Prince to establish his own fiefdom on the Old Continent: the setting of choice is London, a series of pyrotechnic shows at Wembley Arena, attended—and snapped by greedy cameras—by a string of celebrated pop stars, for once starstruck in front of an idol who is also one of their own. What looks like a genuine soul manifesto, more than a typical rock concert, with a band that sweats, pounds and reinvents a shapeshifting setlist every night, conceals a strange tension pervading the backstage. In truth, under the Revolution's startled gaze, Prince has already mapped out a new path that no longer includes Wendy & Lisa and their travelling companions. The prince retraces his steps and decides to record the ninth album of his career in near-total solitude.

Sign O' The Times shows up unexpectedly in stores in April 1987, as a double album, with sixteen songs that trace, with startling clarity, a myriad of styles, managing the feat of honoring and rewriting them at the same time. What's more, despite its varied inspiration, the album doesn't suffer at all from a lack of cohesion, coming across as perfectly compact. A chaotic cover photographs an urban cityscape, a Cadillac half-hidden by a drumming set, neon signs, Prince's face caught almost in passing at the far right of the cover, a dazzling golden-yellow hue running through it all.
Previewing the new record is the title track, accompanied by a groundbreaking video in which the lyrics chase each other at a frantic pace. All the musician needs is a drum machine, a stripped-down, muted blues guitar and a dramatic vocal delivery, free of falsettos and flourishes, fit to describe a sick society teetering between delinquency, corruption, drugs (the notorious new crack epidemic devastating the young Black community) and diseases with short, peculiar names. The memory of traditional revelry, untouched by the chemical influences of our times, runs through "Play In The Sunshine", a wild ride with an irresistible groove.
But nostalgia isn't the only stylistic hallmark of an album that still looks ahead: "Housequake" is a genuine earthquake that does justice to hip-hop and the then-emerging house music culture. "The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker" recounts the meeting between its protagonist and Rogers Nelson, carried by an eccentric, irregular melody, with an almost spoken-word lyric that brings to mind reading the pages of a book. "It" is about sex, described with an obsessive, minimal rhythm, furious and unsettling, courtesy of a red-hot drum machine. "Starfish And Coffee" is serene everyday life set to a samba beat. "Slow Love" is a smooth description, in the form of a classic and precious ballad, of amorous foreplay. "Hot Thing" harks back to "It", a single note repeated mechanically to let Prince direct his obsessive attentions towards the fairer sex. "Forever In My Life" alternates speed and stillness and represents Prince's (temporary) repentance over a life lived, until then, without solid emotional foundations, always chasing mystery and adventure. A sign of maturity? The unrestrained boogie of "U Got A Look", blending technology, Sly Stone and Hendrix, with new flame Sheena Easton on backing vocals, brings the musician back down to carnal reality.
The sequence of dancing, hymn-like notes in "If I Was Your Girlfriend" plunges Prince into sexual ambiguity, but actually reveals his deep respect for women's roles, imagining what life as a couple would be like if he were the girl. Relationship troubles are picked up again, slyly, through the feigned naivety of "Strange Relationship". A powerful, melodic pop-rock line, handled jointly by keyboards and guitar, revives the theme of intellectual honesty in a relationship on "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man", where a pause near the end seems to push the song towards jam territory, before imploding into a furious reprise of the theme. "The Cross" is the least original track on the record, the one closest to classic rock patterns, à la "Vicious", with an almost identical harmonic structure, but slowed down into a swelling ballad, useful for looking in the mirror and rediscovering one's own spirituality. But just as the pace seems to drop, the stage lights come up and the nine-minute live recording, taped the previous year in Paris, of "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night" kicks in, the definitive celebration of nightlife and unrestrained partying, in a constant back-and-forth with his mentor James Brown, where the whole Black musical tradition is conducted by Prince with orchestral flair. The closing act perhaps delivers the most stunning surprise of all: "Adore" is an absurd, suspended ballad, between explicit soul references and futuristic jazzy movements. Rumor has it that the erotic trumpet discreetly weaving through the track might belong to an incognito Miles Davis...

The supporting tour features a revamped band, with the majestic Sheila E. behind the drums, crossing continental Europe while snubbing Britain and the United States. Even the Italian audience, embraced by Prince for the first time, receives the musician's eccentric invitation to show up dressed in peach! The shows are filmed and released to video stores as a concert film. The album earns outstanding reviews, strong public response (top five on both sides of the ocean) and a decisive boost from its singles, with the title track and "U Got A Look" both climbing to number two on the US charts. And just as Prince's story seems to fade back into the shadows, awaiting yet another springtime return, the media are rocked by news of the Black Album. Word has it that the little genius has taken seriously his virtual challenge to rock's sacred monsters, and wants to go head-to-head, twenty years on, with the Beatles' White Album. Shortly before Christmas 1987, the release of the mysterious record seems confirmed, with a number of copies already pressed by Warner. But suddenly the machine grinds to a halt, and Prince orders the masters and the ready-to-ship copies to be destroyed. Years later, it's still hard to make sense of such a move: the fruit of the musician's insecurity, or a clever marketing ploy? Whatever the case, a wave of bootlegs floods the market regardless. The Black Album is a genuine party album, a bacchanal of unrestrained funk, where the melodies, however, feel like leftovers from a studio lived in 24 hours a day. A fun, well-played record, but lacking the constant flashes of genius that had marked Prince for at least five years. Standouts, in an otherwise fairly uniform work, include the opener "LeGrind", the disco groove of "Bob George", the usual pitch-black pulse of "Supercalifragisexy", and the soft, pornographic ballad "When 2 R In Love". One truth comes from backing singer and dancer Cat, on stage with Prince between 1987 and 1988: the recording was supposedly just a gift from the boss to himself for his birthday. A joke, in other words, a divertissement.

The album will nonetheless be officially released in 1994. The real event for devotees and admirers, however, is pushed back a few months: Lovesexy hits stores in May 1988, with a cover showing Prince completely naked, sitting in a suggestive, rapturous pose on a bed of petals. A display of egocentrism and exhibitionism, disgusted record store owners comment, to the point that some of them refuse to sell the album. Too bad for them, since the record is yet another proof of the shapeshifting genius of the Prince of Minneapolis. This time he benefits from the cohesion of his band, forged on stage the previous summer, with horn player Eric Leeds pushing Prince towards territory more closely tied to jazz than ever before. The sound is a further refinement of the Minn-Sound, made even fuller and deeper by a lush production. It opens with "Eye No", amid initially almost ambient atmospheres, a spoken voice, Prince's welcome to a mysterious New Power Generation, then the party starts, with the band spinning through dizzying funk-soul grooves, and the horns taking over, flooding the track with orchestral swing. The ending is a chaotic babble of syncopation and the last gasps of brass. Such a dazzling opening, thematically centered on the eternal struggle between good and evil, heaven and hell, is answered by the single "Alphabet St.", an unrestrained digression by the Prince into 1960s beat territory, something not heard since the days of "Dirty Mind". But light years have passed since those turbulent beginnings, so the song turns into a perfect blend of bubblegum music, funk and aggressive rock, thanks also to the sonic power of guitars that are at times light and playful, at times launched into short, evocative mini-solos. Lush horns swirl around it all. At the end, Prince invites Cat to deliver a thunderous rap over an extremely syncopated bass-and-drums rhythm.

With the following track, "Glam Slam", we enter the realm of extravagance: a futuristic pop song, with a production fit for the Arabian Nights, yet never overblown, between overdubs, a highly distinctive melodic line obsessively repeated by the guitar, and the usual horns. Midway through, jungle rhythms break loose, leading to an orchestral finale marked by unsettling strings. A series of piano notes introduce one of the most disorienting ballads ever heard in pop: "Anna Stesia" deals with spirituality in the manner of "The Cross", but benefits from a sonic architecture of an altogether different level, with a limping rhythm and continuous piercing, lightning-fast guitar flourishes. Keyboards and strings creep in until a declaimed rap arrives, while the guitar floats light and daring. In the end, only the kick drum remains to mark the quarter notes, alongside the usual fading piano. Hugely powerful, thanks also to the extraordinary Sheila E. behind the drums, is the thunderous "Dance On", a kind of runaway train with the bass up front that morphs into a beat marked by a once again pyrotechnic guitar, always resting on the drummer's varied rhythmic work. Electronic beats, the distorted six-string's fury appearing and disappearing, an orgy of keyboards framing the jagged vocal line, now slowed down, now sped up, horns peeking in to double the synthesized sounds, a steady rhythm skillfully accompanying the insinuating melody that captures the impatience of Lovesexy, a state of mind both animal and spiritual, hard to hold back. After this dancing multitude, Prince wisely decides to slow things down, doing so with the clarity of the already familiar "When 2 R In Love", a smooth ballad that conceals the erotic tension so evident in its lyrics, before reaching the paradise of "I Wish You Heaven", a crystalline synthesis of melodicism that is hyper-structured yet so clear, peaceful and dreamlike. The finale of this sonic fresco, one that a Todd Rundgren wouldn't have minded, is entrusted to "Positivity", a feverish rhythm punctuated by an almost-spoken vocal, a dragging pace, almost the simulation of a restrained orgasm, designed on purpose so the pleasure can be drawn out seemingly forever. The ending has an avant-garde flavor, with a volume pedal alternating atmospheric swells over the effect of a waterfall, symbolizing the purity achieved.

The tour that follows is as spectacular as can be imagined and conceived: designed to always be staged indoors in arenas, it features a circular stage set at the center of the venues, a multicolored set design, polka-dot costumes and nearly three hours of dazzling performance. Total cost: two million dollars. The album is a massive success in Europe, Italy included, while being partly snubbed by the American public, which, growing increasingly resistant to flights of fancy, hands it only an eleventh-place chart finish. And it's at this point that Mr. Prince starts doing the math...

Back to Minneapolis, from Batman to Tafkap, the decline, circa 1989-2002

When, at the start of summer 1989, MTV begins putting the single "Batdance" into heavy rotation, the feeling is that of being faced with the first disappointing single to spring from Prince's fertile mind. Best not to dwell on it. Around the corner lies the prestigious project bringing together the deus ex machina of the last decade's music and one of the most mysterious and fascinating icons in the world of comics. This time Rogers Nelson has really gone big: he will score the cinematic event of the year, the film adaptation of Batman, directed by the visionary genius of rising star Tim Burton. A project that promises richness, yet nothing ordinary, with terribly gothic tones, a blockbuster twisted into a nightmare. Rumors multiply, theories pile up, people imagine a subdued, dark-toned Prince, or perhaps a variation on his futuristic funk schemes seen through an obsessive-tribal lens. A masterpiece foretold. And one that falls short. Nine tracks in total make up what should be the most celebrated soundtrack of all time. Too bad that, amid the voices of stars Jack Nicholson, Kim Basinger and Michael Keaton, Prince appears exposed, almost inert, grappling for the first time with compromise. The result is a string of second-rate funky songs: the aforementioned single, a kind of reworking of old formulas suddenly worn thin, amid exasperated, cold, technological rhythms, guitar riffs and the usual vocal repertoire, with no chorus, no surprise to justify so much noise; "Party Man", a classic Prince-ian song, complete with horns over a syncopated beat, essentially a leftover; "The Future", a bare-bones song, the last remnant of the old Minn-Sound, limping and forgettable; "Electric Chair", strangely hard-edged, almost hard rock, a bit thrown together. Were it not Prince, there'd be fun to be had with a record good for dancing, perhaps at some era-defining party. But concern grows with two songs that, unknowingly, will come to define the stylistic hallmark of 1990s Prince: "The Arms Of Orion", a duet with Sheena Easton, and "Scandalous", a tribute to his new flame, that same Kim Basinger who would bring him to the brink of marriage! These are cloyingly sweet, at times garish songs, overproduced and pompous, almost bombastic, betraying the philosophy balanced between live immediacy and apparent lo-fi that had marked his previous work—work that was in fact meticulously crafted, but never let it show.

The album is a success, nearly ten million copies sold worldwide, driven above all by a film that grosses 300 million dollars in the US alone. Prince finds his way back to commercial success, though still far from the glory of "Purple Rain", and gives his wardrobe a makeover. But the new outfits are excessive and uninspired in design. While "Batman" dominates the close of the decade, our man keeps working on side projects: having already created the various Family and Vanity 6 acts, and generously fueled the mysterious Madhouse (for a funk-jazz-rich 1987), he produces "Time Waits For No One" for Black singer Mavis Staples, with more-than-decent results, briefly sends Madonna into orbit with their duet on the eerie "Love Song", an unusual pop song included on "Like A Prayer", Veronica Ciccone's fifth record, and tries to launch the mediocre Carmen Electra, squandering a pile of money in the process. By the time 1990 rolls around, some start to notice that, despite the sales figures, Batman has left no social imprint, let alone a musical one, failing even to raise a shiver. A pairing with the silver screen that brought him huge satisfaction, but also some notably embarrassing missteps.

Prince, however, won't let go of his prey. The new toy will once again be multimedia, straddling music and film. Graffiti Bridge is a portrait of a Black generation captured in a period of transition that above all concerns its author. The script was originally meant to tell the story of the legendary The Time, whose lineup is reassembled for the occasion, but in the end it's Prince who prevails over everyone, in all his egocentrism, within a kind of musical where the characters face off through music. A bad film, followed by a rather tired album, marked by a formulaic soul-funk blend, with a handful of decent hooks: "Question Of You", "Thieves In The Temple", "Joy The Repetition" (a "Sign O' The Times" leftover, but a classy one), "We Can Funk" (with George Clinton alongside the prince). Overall, the project seems constantly out of breath in the face of a scene that has crowned hip-hop as its absolute religion and Living Colour as the new heroes of Black crossover, with Prince, for the first time, seemingly unable to keep pace with the changing seasons, both rhythmic and temporal. The album easily climbs into the upper reaches of charts worldwide, but vanishes just as quickly, without regrets. In support, the extremely costly "Nude Tour" kicks off that summer, as usual, though undermined by a sense of grandeur that hurts its success considerably. In Italy so few tickets are sold for the stadium shows that Prince suddenly cancels the last two concerts, disappearing without warning. A legal dispute forces him to pay a penalty the next time he sets foot in the country (and indeed he won't return until 2002).

Despite this, 1990 still sees Prince at number one everywhere: "Nothing Compares 2 U", a song written in 1985 but never released, is reinterpreted with great pathos and the austerity that once defined him by Sinéad O'Connor, catapulting the Irish singer to worldwide success. She would later claim to have been repeatedly threatened by the Minneapolis musician, fueling a media clash that further damaged Prince's image, though certainly not his well-padded bank account. By early 1991, Graffiti Bridge is already a thing of the past, with few regrets at that, and the most prolific author of the last ten years feels the need for a hit all his own. His first move is to put together a new band, called the New Power Generation, a kind of multiracial eight-piece orchestra, thrown straight into the studio seven days a week for an album meant to bring Prince back to his rightful level. And things do seem to fall back into place when, in October, the media go into a frenzy over the prince's new record.

Diamonds And Pearls consists of eleven tracks and shows, without much fuss, the artist's new dimension: a refined, normalized sound, stripped of eccentric and original sparks, a calibrated funk-pop-soul, played superbly, yet at the same time generic. There's an easy slide from the glam-disguised bit of pop, complete with a classic filthy lyric, of "Cream", to the hip-hop of "Get Off" and "Jughead", both unfortunately lacking the "edge" that defines the new generation. "Willing And Able" is a bit of swing fit for elevator music, "Strollin'" is watered-down pop-jazz, "Insatiable" and "Money Don't Matter 2 Night" are two plastic ballads suited to a nice middle-school dance. Everything is polished, almost too polished for a market that, unfortunately for Prince, is opening its doors to the roughness of indie rock. Polish doesn't suit the music of the early '90s, and the Prince of Minneapolis proves, for the first time, rather out of touch. A glimpse of the old Prince world flickers through in the closing "Live 4 Love", a claustrophobic ride that seems to bring back the old glories of the Minn-Sound, with harmonized vocals, an insatiable, minimal rhythm, and a wild, evocative guitar. An episode, however, overshadowed by the garish (and truly kitsch) instrumental breaks of the title track.

The album still struck a chord, and not a small one, especially with those who had never been moved by material perhaps too alienating to fully appreciate its innovation. Despite the commercial success, though, in less than three years Prince slid into pop anonymity - that state shared by a myriad of artists able to sustain two or three generations of fans without the strength to set a trend, to generate news or curiosity. The following tour, lavish and meticulously planned, showcased a glittering band, musically capable of playing anything, finally free to set fire to a recent repertoire that had grown decidedly limp. Concerts running nearly three hours, experimental soundchecks lasting two, electrifying impromptu after-shows. But above all, yet another album of new material. And that's where everything went wrong. Prince renegotiated his contract with Warner and rewrote it for a sum exceeding $100 million. Not satisfied, he decided to challenge the conduct of a stunned record label, guilty of curbing, if not outright blocking, his proverbial prolificacy (though the first signs of this unhealthy state of mind had already surfaced when he had insisted on releasing a triple album titled "Crystal Ball," later scaled back into the epoch-defining Sign O' The Times). The first move against all this materialized with the abandonment of his stage name, replaced by an unpronounceable symbol. It looked like an ordinary publicity stunt; it was instead the beginning of the end.

In late spring, Warner released the single "Sexy Mf," a horn-laden party song with funky-jazz flourishes. In September, Prince tried his hand at hip-hop again with "My Name Is Prince," adopting a rougher style in the year Body Count and Rage Against The Machine exploded onto the scene, the chief chroniclers of the fiery mood of 1992 Los Angeles. The album, released in October and titled Symbol, with only the symbol representing the artist, offered no fewer than sixteen songs in the classic powerful, sprawling pop-rock rollercoaster typical of him. Unfortunately, it wasn't matched by the inspiration of old. Along the same lines came further forays into Prince-made hip-hop, like "Love 2 The 9's" or "Arrogance," ballads such as "Damn U," exotic folk with a gospel flavor (the decent "Seven"), and full-blown mini-operas like the pompous, over-structured "The Sacrifice Of Victor," with choirs and arrangements that even bring Queen to mind! A journey touching on sex (obviously...), celebrity, the oppression of fame, and spirituality, complete with a final sacrifice. Critics seemed to appreciate it (the public rather less so), though without going overboard (though today there are those who rate it as Prince's definitive masterpiece - look no further than the list of the 50 most representative albums of the '90s compiled in Italy by "Mucchio Selvaggio" just two years ago, ed.).

By now the Minneapolis musician reserved his real surprises for the stage, as shown by the repeated encores during an endless, blazing night at New York's Radio City Music Hall alongside Earth, Wind & Fire, and a show at Harlem's Apollo Theatre where the audience saw Lenny Kravitz and Vernon Reid join him onstage at the same time. A walking greatest hits show that moved on to Europe, captivating thousands of fans and surprising even his detractors with a performance broadcast on Radio One, BBC Radio - the first pop artist to do so 25 years after Jimi Hendrix.

Warner, however, wanted to see a first, substantial return on the advance paid into Prince's accounts following the new contract. Indeed, toward the end of 1993, while grunge mania raged all around, the double hits collection The Hits/The B-Sides was released, featuring nine previously unreleased tracks, including the now-famous "Nothing Compares 2 You." The money-grab, however, didn't produce the desired results. But by that point Prince was out of the game, utterly uninterested in the fate of his record label as much as in that of his own career. The rift became irreparable to the point that, when asked for a new album, he "gifted" his devoted employers with Come, a horrendous dumping ground of leftovers, of the worst kind at that. It was the summer of 1994 when loyal fans found themselves listening to the monotonous, endless title track, twelve minutes stuffed with orchestral horns in which nothing happens. The sequence continues with a string of danceable trifles like "Space" and "Pheromone," before reaching the collection's most interesting track: "Papa," a tense, concise, dramatic and musically restrained digression on childhood abuse. Then it's back to the ugliness: "Dark," "Solo" and "Letitgo" go by, until the "fitting" conclusion of "Orgasm," where Prince whispers sweet nothings to his lover while she climaxes in a ridiculous crescendo of sighs...

The year did hold a few more surprises, some more welcome than others: a tough, if somewhat monotonous and underwritten, slab of funk-soul, at least free of the embellishments that had by then compromised the Prince's touch, titled Exodus, credited to the "New Power Generation" with no mention of the musician's name, who appeared masked in the videos and promotional material - a showcase for the band's instrumental solidity, comfortable revisiting fairly classic grooves. A project that was openly old style but played with real feeling. Even before that, Prince had done everything on his own, without Warner's help - who then handled distribution - producing "The Most Beautiful Girl In The World," an unexpected hit built around a catchy if slight soul tune. It was enough, among other things, to lay the groundwork for yet another attempt at a return to the most prestigious circles. Indeed, overly optimistic predictions had him set for a 1995 close to the glories of his golden, once again revolutionary era.

Warner, however, decided to stick to the delivery schedule for the new record right down to the wire. One had to wait until early autumn of that year to see the long-awaited release of The Gold Experience: eleven tracks of varying nature, full of enthusiasm, with a sound not overly weighed down by instrumental mannerism, though still searching for that cohesion that now seemed to elude Prince, almost excessive in his desire to put his overflowing talent fully on display. As a result, the album loses substance, drifting into a space where the music becomes merely a pleasant backdrop. It fails to find its focus, scattering a handful of decent ideas. A Prince who trivializes things right when he should be striking at the heart. An artist suddenly unsure which path to follow, both sonically and thematically. The man no longer even certain of his own name now went by Tafkap, that is, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. He revisits all the obsessions that had captivated him, from unrestrained lust toward women in "Billy Jack Bitch," to fear of women themselves, now determined to take revenge by possibly killing their lovers in "Shy," to a vaguely sixties and hypocritical spirituality in the super-mannered pop-rock of "Dolphin," the saccharine soul of the already familiar "The Most Beautiful Girl In The World," the martial "We March," an official defense of women's role within a sonic mess that fruitlessly tries to mix electronics, funk and overblown, ultimately monotonous rhythms. "319" sounds like a caricature of the old Prince, almost an acknowledgment of his current mediocrity, a mood that translates musically into an ironic, wild dance number backed by a good melody - the high point of an album that wraps up with the pomp-soul-rock of "Gold," a track full of fake emotional outpouring, complete with solo and orchestra. Unfortunately, miles away from the velvety power of a "Purple Rain." The album sold well and once again brought Prince back into the spotlight, helped along by a few well-judged, evocative videos.

In concert he came across as fighting like some pointless Don Quixote, complete with the word "Slave" written on his right cheek - a slave to the industry, to a Warner that, after so many hits, refused to indulge all his whims. In spring the label released the soundtrack to "Girl 6," Spike Lee's film about the perversions of phone sex, an album made up of old material, often left off other albums (the spectacular "Erotic City" from 1984, an early example of electroclash avant la lettre?), padded out with three unremarkable new songs. But Prince's attitude turned self-destructive in the summer of 1996, when Warner released the dreadful Chaos And Disorder - and never was a title more fitting: a shapeless mess of ridiculous tracks, cheap little rock numbers like the title track or "I Like There," absurd outbursts born of Prince's sudden urge to grab a guitar and hammer out crude, unimaginative riffs. A raw attitude that pairs, with rather poor results, with certain hip-hop cadences, as in "I Rock Therefore I Am" or "Zannalee," finding at least a faint glimmer of light in "Dinner With Dolores," yet another take on the pop-soul myth.

The album was such a flop that few even noticed its release - perhaps not even its author... It marked the point of no return in the relationship between Prince and his label, which he abandoned in order to finally be free, in his artistic ambitions ("Warner is stopping me from releasing a ballet," he repeated on several occasions), from contractual constraints. A move that, once made official, once again turned the spotlight on the face of the artist once known as Prince. Ready, in his own way, to hurl at an audience now more alarmed than admiring as many as thirty-two new songs, contained in the triple album Emancipation, released under the Emi banner, steeped in love and spirituality, in hope for the future and for his wife Mayte, backing dancer and singer with the New Power Generation and soon-to-be mother of the artist's first child. The change of label, the grandeur of a project anachronistically spread across three albums, and the allure of hoping to hear a Prince in dazzling form all pushed critics and audiences to declare it a success even before it hit record store shelves (Enrico Sisti wrote in "Musica!," the supplement of "la Repubblica," that "Emancipation" was Prince's "Songs In The Key Of Life"!).
In reality, little had changed from the musician's recent history: the sense of excessive pomposity hadn't gone away, as shown by the video for the first single "Betcha By Golly Wow!," a cloying soul ballad, one of three covers included, originally recorded by the Stylistics (the other two being "La, La, La," by the Delfonics, and "One Of Us," Joan Osborne's recent hit). The project can be roughly divided into three distinct parts: the first leans mostly toward funky dance tracks, with "Jam Of The Year," "Get Yo Groove On," and "Who Gets Up" serving as weapons to get guests moving; the second disc makes variety its main appeal, with "Sex In The Summer" playing with electro-funk, "Saviour" and "Soul Sanctuary" inviting lighters into the air, and "The Holy River" painting heavenly scenes; the third disc perhaps leans too heavily on a certain electronic-rhythmic monotony, though with very good results on "Slave," while elsewhere, as on "My Computer," the technological element takes over at the expense of the man's legendary melodic gift. What's appealing about Emancipation is the willingness to take risks, the push toward an experimental intent that had seemed to vanish, and the ability to see such a massive project through to completion. But Rogers Nelson wanted to astonish everyone, wanted to share his newfound joy, rather than rein in a creativity that had once been blinding and had now suddenly gone blind. Half the included tracks, maybe even fewer, would have been enough to make a truly worthy album. But Prince was still unsure of where to point his music, having yet to find a sound that could once again set him apart from the crowd.

The artist once known as Prince, however, faced darkness once again: the long-awaited baby was born with a malformation and died shortly after. The musician threw himself back into work, into concerts, with a now well-established band in which another woman - after the chapters written at various times by Wendy & Lisa and Sheila E. - took center stage for much of the spotlight thanks to her charisma and talent: her name was Rhonda Smith, and she knew her way around a four-string bass. Not to mention his ongoing, if not steady, collaboration with blonde saxophonist Candy Dulfer.

In 1998, Prince, still going by various symbols, entered fully into his Zappa-esque phase - one marked by the unbridled planning and release of projects, often of uneven quality, and certainly disorienting for his countless followers. The definitive starting point came with the triple album announced in 1997, Crystal Ball, a box set that became one with the addition of a fourth chapter, the legendary The Truth, an experiment that found Rogers mostly in acoustic mode, and eventually even a fifth disc called Kamasutra, a sort of orchestrated soundtrack for his own wedding. A tour de force that recalls, if only loosely, the legendary and much-discussed Lather, the triple album that put the Baltimore composer at odds with the official music industry in the second half of the '70s, pushing him to broadcast its contents via radio and fuel the bootleg market until its official release a full twenty years later. But while the tracks that made up Lather would nonetheless go on to concretely shape the history of the Mustache Man, filling out the tracklists of his many subsequent works, Crystal Ball instead contains almost entirely unreleased material, aside from a few fragments later reused in some properly released songs.

The opening is decidedly fascinating and demanding: the title track is an eccentric piece running over ten minutes, recorded in 1986, with an obsessive yet soft drum machine, over which a rising electro rhythm builds, with Prince's voice pitched up an octave to the point of resembling a cartoon character's (counterpointed by Wendy and Lisa's vocals). The theme is revisited in various ways, from funk to big-band jazz, eventually turning dissonant and brushing up against avant-garde touches, with an ending marked by a string section that smells of mystery but, as the recording date indicates, harks back to the artistically fortunate era of Parade. The same vocal style returns on the following "Dream Factory," taped in 1985, a dazed, chaotic dance song with polyrhythmic interlocking parts and near-alien synth lines that collide with the frantic rhythm without ever losing the thread. Boni Boyer's scream opens "Acknowledge Me," a classic choral soul-hip-hop track in the Prince style of the mid-'90s, complete with an insistent rap at the end, while the following "Ripopgodazippa" is a reggae number backed by jazz trumpet. "Lovesign" is a remix of a duet with Nona Gaye, another somewhat predictable but well-grooved rhythmic soul number. "Hide The Bone," which was meant to be part of "The Gold Experience," is a noisy, semi-electronic funk-rock track. "2morrow," on the other hand, comes from the "Emancipation" sessions and is a dazed pop-soul song with remarkable jazz harmonies. "So Dark" is instead a remake of "Dark" from Come, a classic soul plea from the Prince with a horn backdrop somewhere between jazz and musical theater. "Movie Star," which harks back to the Parade era, is a fun electro-funk-jazz number, decidedly memorable in its dragging yet wild groove, Prince at his best.
The first disc closes with "Tell Me How U Wanna B Done," a kind of remix of "The Continental" from Symbol (1992). Overall, this is an excellent showing that, despite drawing on tracks born in very different contexts, betrays a surprising underlying cohesion.

The second disc kicks off at full speed with "Interactive," straight from 1993: a super-synth backdrop, live drums with prominent cymbals, a stunning, compressed bass, and a wild vocal performance. It ends with a dazzling guitar solo. The following "Da Bang" starts off almost hushed, following bluesy lines, before suddenly exploding and then abruptly returning to the earlier mood. "Calhoun Square" has a very seventies feel, with organ, a possible clavinet doubling the bass, a very live sound, a super-chaotic interlude and a rather noisy choral coda. Also dating from the early '90s is "What's My Name," with Prince whispering, vaguely unsettling, over an electronic backdrop that gets blown apart by an explosion of drums and bass - truly funky, rocking and intricate - all seasoned with hip-hop scratching. All of this leads into the hugely powerful ballad "Crucial," with a very present sound. It was supposed to be the closing track of "Sign O' The Times," but was replaced by the more sensual "Adore." It's a ballad sui generis, with rhythmic interlocking parts that are far from easy and a very driven guitar solo. Then come the seventy seconds of "An Honest Man," an almost entirely gospel piece, colored by a few dramatic synth lines only in its final moments. "Sexual Suicide" sounds like a stand-in for "Girls & Boys," and it is: less danceable, but with virtually identical sonic solutions, plenty of horns and magnificent bass work. Striking is "Cloreen Bacon Skin," a fifteen-minute jam with Prince on vocals and bass and Morris Day on drums, recorded in 1983, a perfect cross between James Brown and George Clinton, with Tom Waits dropping by only to find the other two completely drunk. A masterpiece. "Good Love," on the other hand, was recorded and released for the soundtrack of "Bright Lights, Big City" (released in Italy as "Le mille luci di New York"), the 1988 film starring Michael J. Fox as a career man hopped up on cocaine. It's an urban track that drew plenty of applause at the time, if a bit fewer handshakes today. But with that furious mix of voices and polyelectronic rhythm, it could still hold its own at some retro party. The disc closes with the pompous "Strays Of the World" from 1992, with Prince seemingly throwing away his voice, turning it into a caricature, all while trading electric guitar phrases. The ending is a furious chase of breaks and unisons.

The third part opens with "Days of Wild," a funk-rock jam that sounds like it was recorded live onstage, with backing vocals egging on a possible crowd. Which does in fact exist and can indeed be heard, just as the excellent instrumental performances, recorded straight from 1995, can be heard directly, with the four-string bass once again front and center. And it's once again the bass that stands out on "Last Heart" from 1986, very jazz funk-oriented. Minimal, stripped-down, multi-voiced, a sly tribute to the female anatomy, is "Poom Poom," a funky track from the "Emancipation" sessions. But it all dissolves into the sinuous "She Gave Her Angels," a whispered, sophisticated ballad that opens with discreet piano and synth before opening up emotionally and musically. The final guitar solo is processed but loses none of its feeling. Aimed squarely at erotic subject matter is the soul-hip-hop "18 & Over," complete with the breathy voice of a girl who has, predictably, just turned legal age. But for Prince, the step from hip-hop to blues is a short one, and here he lets loose onstage on the often-performed but never-released "The Ride," a performance from 1995 with great feeling, an elegant reminder that Prince can really handle a guitar. The following pair of tracks isn't exactly memorable - "Get Loose," a fully electronic, almost entirely instrumental reprise of "Loose" from "Come," while "P-Control" is the remix of the opening track of "The Gold Experience." Super funky soul, on the other hand, is "Make Yo Mama Happy," a wish of all the best to Susannah Melvoin, Wendy's sister and his girlfriend at the time. We're in 1986, with Eric Leeds's increasingly jazzy sax and a hint of a tribute to Sly Stone. "Goodbye" is the farewell, taken from the Emancipation sessions, with prominent falsetto and a mood somewhere between lush and romantic.

The unusual acoustic version of Prince found on The Truth kicks off with the slow, raw blues of the title track: the little artist alone with his guitar, whispered and shouted vocalizing, and a few disturbing noises beginning to creep in. And so it goes for all eleven tracks on the album, with the occasional percussive touch coloring the compositions. The mood is that of a man asking questions, pleading, screaming, crying and reasoning, with no frills. In "Circle Of Amour" we find him in a super-soul version, made even more striking by the stripped-down arrangement. The rhythms are almost always restrained, yet once again one senses the history of black music running through these grooves. More striking is "Man in Uniform," with (h)umorous effects recalling a military bugle call. Notable is "Animal Kingdom," a measured blues-rock with a few unexpected electric guitar flourishes, matched by the protagonist's vocal virtuosity. Even acoustic funky-dance gets its due, as shown by "Fascination," with processed phrasing that has an almost sitar-like flavor and a final solo with an old-jazz mood. Two airy ballads are "One Of Your Tears" and "Comeback." A different, perhaps overly uniform body of work, but one that deserves attention.

Surprising beyond all expectations is the notorious fifth installment, that Kamasutra conceived as the soundtrack for his 1996 wedding to Mayte. And while such a title might suggest an unruly funky-soul orgy centered on porn-erotic themes, and thus rather overused territory, listening to it instead brings wonder. These are eleven tracks forming an unprecedented orchestral suite coming out of Minneapolis, at least on this scale. Inside: classical-symphonic scores, orchestral jazz, Eastern echoes, Duke Ellington-style arranging, often theatrical but never vulgar, with a generous display of brass, no room for strictly pop-rock instrumentation, and the piano handling connective, accompanying and even solo roles. A demanding yet thoroughly enjoyable work, never heavy or pedantic, and certainly not an empty gesture. One suspects Prince truly knows no limits. The public's patience, unable to make sense of the box set's distribution, was another matter: the work fell into the black hole of indifference.

At the dawn of 1998, Prince is just a musician, in his purest form. The trouble is that, carrying that name, even if still hidden and camouflaged, the public now sees him as a has-been rockstar. A feeling that, given his well-known vanity, our man suffers from considerably. The media-commercial reorganization kicks off with New Power Soul, an album credited to the New Power Generation, made up of ten tracks performed by an eleven-piece band, with the affectionate participation of Larry Graham and Chaka Khan. The record nimbly retraces the musician's most recent sonic coordinates, turned toward a more accessible key, at least compared to the monumental Emancipation and Crystal Ball. So, funky-soul, sometimes caressed by a velvety pop, as in "The One", more often by a rhythmic flavor that's maybe a bit rowdy, but fun nonetheless — the second single "Come On", with a video showing Prince as an elderly homeless man who, armed with a guitar, begs for change. Enjoyable and well-paced, if not unforgettable, are "Push It Up", which quotes the already-released "Jam Of The Year", and the joyous, cartoonish "Mad Sex". The "new" manifesto "New Power Soul", the usual centrifuge of modern Black music, at once certifies the debt that recent generations owe to their idol and the evident lag of a Prince running short on breath and ideas, searching for a path that might lead him back to more profitable outcomes. And 1999 confirms, if not expands, the vision of a Prince as an auteur-replicant of other people's music — one who even manages to set aside his instrumental-artistic pride, surrounding himself with help from the world of show business: Chuck D. and Gwen Stefani make the offering appealing to a variety of tastes, Maceo Parker tickles the interest of old jazz fans, Ani Di Franco intrigues supporters of a certain socio-musically engaged art form.

The album Rave Un2The Joy Fantastic, released by Arista, contains the unreleased version of pop and soul, funk and rock, settles the score with the previous record and, like it, travels a regressive path compared to Emancipation and to some moments on Crystal Ball. Nothing new under the sun, the same well-tuned score aimed toward strong success, at least in theory. That these hopes don't fully pan out seems predictable given tired songs like the title track, a danceable number lacking a contagious groove, the duet with Gwen Stefani, with a groove that's appealing only on paper, the uninspiring encounter with Sheryl Crow, and the mic shared with Eve on the decently paced "Hot With You". Things work decidedly better when Symbol and Tafkap decide to call on the old Prince, as in the aggressively sung ballad "I Love You But I Don't Trust You Anymore", which echoes the melodic boldness found on the old grooves of Purple Rain.

The start of the new millennium brings Prince's not-so-hidden project to its conclusion: to definitively reconnect with his audience, the vast one from the '80s, immediately satisfied by his reclaiming, after almost ten years, his old name.

The best surprises, though, the artist seems almost to want to keep hidden. He thus becomes aware of the web's potential and begins flooding it with material. The Vault... Old Friends 4 Sale, from 1999, is however a so-called official release, on Warner Bros; a collection of tracks recorded between 1985 and 1994 that show a Prince unleashed, having fun, often inspired. Ten vignettes that can hardly be elevated to classic status, but that certainly don't look out of place within Rogers Nelson's most acclaimed body of work. Quite the opposite. The model is that of the big band, with a great profusion of horns playing counterpoint, a lean but explosive production, with the instruments up front but never noisy, in a balance that makes compactness its strongest weapon.
The opener, entrusted to "The Rest Of My Life", is pure energy, with almost rock'n'roll piano, a breezy gait, mini solos of sax, synth, piano. It's a brief, dazzling start, skillful in surfacing a reference model, that of the little-celebrated "Sexy Motherfucker", released in 1992. A sort of mega-jam with several irresistible themes, and that's how things proceed without a break in continuity into "It's About That Walk" too (with a super sax blast halfway through), or in the more rhythmically moderate "She Spoke To Me", with a jazz break, brushed drums, horn and synth runs and a clean, very swinging guitar solo in the style of 1960s George Benson. It's a Prince in a credible soul-crooner guise, with a measured rhythm and another break with spacious keyboards, velvety trumpets and razor-sharp blues guitar phrasing in "Women+". "When The Lights Go Down" has a dragging intro, with percussion, before stretching out between guitar touches and jazz piano. Brief, experimental and almost surreal is "My Little Pill", with Prince speaking over a very demanding backing track where the piano still dominates, accompanied by various percussive modes. The difference is made by a ballad like "There Is Lonely", where, in similar performances, the Prince has often overdone the orchestration — here he appears concrete, dramatic, concise. More tons of jazz and soul in the retro "Old Friend For Sale", with an imposing horn backdrop supporting our man's heartfelt voice. Overwhelming funk rhythms instead guarantee a great hook for "Sarah", with filtered bass, lightning-fast synths, octave guitar. An effective finale with the other semi-orchestral ballad, "Extraordinary". In the end, a great showing.

The album The Rainbow Children represents another turning point and sees Prince veer toward a fusion poised between (mostly) the '70s and a pinch of the '80s. In the end, it's the continuation of a style that had been settling over the musician's last few albums, a kind of expansion of his recurring pop-soul-funky schemes. What emerges is a selection of thirteen tracks marked by a listenability that carries the whiff of laborious studio work, used by instrumentalists flaunting their chops. A cohesive album, with some fine songs, like the insistent pulse of "1+1 Is 3", the slow "She Loves Me 4 Me", the mini-jam "Rainbow Children", the gentle "The Sensual Everafter".
Elsewhere, but also within the title track itself, the band stretches things out too long, basking in performative vanity, producing notes that are formally flawless but artistically negligible. In the album's closing stretch, "Family Name" simply runs on too long. It seems Prince now conceives of music as a group event, no longer as a reasoning process that's first and foremost personal. In doing so he loses his identity and loses his memorable melodic qualities. After about twenty listens it's hard to recall even a single track in its entirety. Too many instrumental interventions, excessive harmonic variations. It's a proposition that makes sense in its possible live dimension, but that on record would need a good trim.

2001 is suddenly the year in which Prince, having reclaimed his name, tries to step out of the media darkness, organizes a large-scale tour, and puts together an elaborate show in which he retraces his career, reinterpreting its coordinates. Almost three hours of performance in which the jazz element takes on a prominence never heard before, not even during the 1988 European tour. The following year, as the band lands on Italian soil after twelve years' absence, the prince celebrates the occasion with the release of a three-album box set, One Nite Alone... Live!, all recorded on stage: the first two are captured during the shows, the third is a compendium of the so-called after-shows he's always held dear. Thirty-six tracks unfolding between digressions, improvisations, caricatures and acclaimed comebacks ("Sometimes It Snows In April", to name one finely crafted example).

Meanwhile, during that same season, the revived prince makes One Nite Alone, a piano album where Rogers Nelson accompanies himself on the ivories with only the support of John Blackwell's drums and a few ambient effects. Nine tracks, one of them instrumental, sober, a bit cold, among which the cover of Joni Mitchell's "A Case Of U" stands out. What doesn't fully take off is our man's vocal delivery, perhaps too shackled by the rigid structures of the compositions. The record would never be released through official channels, but made available through his website.

World, circa 2003-2004, the return

Just two years later, in 2003, Prince is still not completely satiated with his image as the grand guru of a wordy music, executed with precision and presumed warmth, with the stage five meters away. News, which sums up in four paragraphs without any vocals, one for each of the four cardinal points, is made up of a quartet of mini-suites that have the look of genuine collective improvisation. The oddity lies in the fact that, faced with a succession of notes played between jazz-rock and soul-fusion — territory that would push toward mannerism — the wallpaper never overdoes it with excessive coloring; quite the opposite: sobriety echoes here and there, closing a circle that began fifteen years earlier from the same foundation and then plunged into production bombast, only to be embraced again, albeit subtly, in Prince's "new" dimension. The year before, he had taken on the world with an ambitious tour that also landed on Italian soil, in the bowl of Milan's Palamazda, with 10,000 fans in ecstasy before the prince's usual three-plus hours, between orchestral funk with nods to the bluesexploitation tradition, renowned jazz (with Maceo Parker and Candy Dulfer lending their horns), Sheila E. back this time behind the percussion, the ever-present Rhonda Smith dueting on strings, and a Prince who skillfully quotes "Third Stone From The Sun" and even rearranges "Whole Lotta Love", also delving deep into blues and pop-rock.

In 2003, after the piano and live releases, Prince "gifts" members of his club (read: the NPG Music Club website) Xpectation, a fully instrumental work with ethno-jazz-fusion overtones. Nine pieces performed with great professionalism and commitment by his current band — the usual Rhonda Smith, John Blackwell, Candy Dulfer, among others — to whom he adds the violin of the captivating classical musician Vanessa Mae. There are no sudden surges, no visceral outbursts, rather a cohesive, progressive, very quiet journey, if we exclude "Xpand" and "Xpedition" (all the tracks carry the letter "X" in their titles), in which the more sustained rhythm carries the work toward shores dear to Blaxploitation. The latter of the two tracks mentioned especially raises the level of groove and rhythm, with a final duet between distorted guitar and violin, dropping the listener aboard a Ford Torino in the middle of a police chase.

C-Note, from 2003, shows Prince increasingly in Zappa-like mode. Five long fragments (the first over thirteen minutes, two others close to ten) drawn from soundchecks performed in Copenhagen, Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo, plus a thunderous and very noisy live version of "Empty Room", all downloadable from his website. Like the genius from Baltimore, Rogers draws resources from every type of performance and transforms them into something artistic, or at least highly enjoyable. The sonic spectrum reeks of jazz fusion from a mile away. Warm-ups and automatisms that condense into themes often of remarkable craftsmanship. There's a bit of everything, including hyper-distorted guitar solos, collective improvisations, by-now-indispensable horn arrangements (with the trio of Greg Boyer on trombone, Candy Dulfer and Maceo Parker on sax), hip-hop scratching. What comes out of Osaka is a fabulous ambient-jazz mix, with atmospheric synths, piano hinted at but always present, often soloing, and a fiery close with a six-string poised between Santana and Hendrix.

More anchored to certain pop canons is Chocolate Invasion from 2004 (again available as a download on his website), yet the intro entrusted to "When Eye Lay My Hands On You" comes across as eccentric, almost hysterical, with disturbed guitar frequencies, gospel choral parts and a finale with wild, furious guitar acrobatics. "Judas Smile", "Sex Me Sex Me Not" and "High" bring Prince back into minimal electro-funk-soul-dance territory, with virtuosic vocal interplay. "Gamillah" is an instrumental pop piece orchestrated with jazz mastery. Closing things out is the super-soul ballad "U Make My Sunshine" with gospel choirs, frequent stop-and-go moments and seasoning provided by delicious harmonies.

Then comes Slaughterhouse (released via the official website in 2004 but with tracks originally produced in 2001 and re-recorded for the occasion); a record that bursts out of the gate on entirely electro-hip-hop foundations and never strays from that base, rigid, very rhythmic but almost never akin to the kind of R&B in vogue over the last decade. Here and there the now-classic jazz intrusions emerge, small fragments, as in the unison horns of "Y Should Eye Do That" or in the dragging duets between octave guitar and insinuating trumpet in "Golden Parachute". More broadly pop in a choral sense, but with an exotic feel and some reminiscence of Parade, is "Hipnoparadise". But there are few compromises, as "Props N Pounds" makes clear, very Black, dark, between hip-hop spoken parts and funk-soul rhythms, choral vocal arrangements. It's a Prince fully immersed in street Black culture, as shown by the hypnotic final six minutes of "The Daisy Chain", with call-and-response vocals that sound like heated neighborhood arguments, horns run through synths, a constant drum machine, a tireless wah-wah rhythm guitar and occasional staccato bass stabs.

The famous circle finally closes in 2004, when flocks of hip-hoppers, soul men (D'Angelo, though anything but prolific, offers proof of just how significant an effect Prince's lesson — his crossover, at once faithful and irreverent — has had), new converts to "Black" dance music, yet so malleable (Pharrell and his Neptunes, practically everywhere in today's pop), pay sincere homage to the "Prince-ian" philosophy, our man signs with Sony, changing his mind about major labels, and releases Musicology, a mini-encyclopedia of his passions, though seen in a more humble and considered way. What comes out is an album made up of twelve songs, the result of a perfect blend of funk and soul: the title track, minimal, with the bassline running the show, "Illusion, Coma, Pimp & Circumstance", its natural continuation, if anything even more breathless, in a precious rhythmic interlock. Much the same happens with the surprising "What Do U Want Me 2 Do", marked by lean, evocative sounds, almost as if it were a reply to the glorious "The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker" — modern, technological, but not at all artificial, with its spoken-word delivery set against a rhythm that seems detached from the rest yet skillfully underpins it (a similar moment is found a little further on in "Dear Mr. Man", with plenty of thanks owed to Maxwell...).
Elsewhere Prince relies on the airy melody of "A Million Days" or "Call My Name", where it would be easy to fall into the overproduction of The Gold Experience, but instead the artist manages not to lose a balance often forgotten over the last ten years, turning syrupy ballads into good songs. Just as contagious as in the old days is the second single "Cinnamon Girl", an infectious, catchy pop-rock number that's never banal, with its all-too-current story of a female suicide bomber who blows herself up inside an airport terminal, and "The Marrying Kind", a track with clear rock inflections, full of pauses and off-beats that help build its tension. The finale is marked by a semi-ballad, "Reflection", restrained, composed, without high notes but also without any disastrous missteps. Much like the album as a whole, it lacks memorable jolts, but is solid and sufficiently inspired. And the public seems to notice, rewarding Musicology with a full, rich, exhilarating success.

The album is well received in Europe and triumphantly in the United States, where it stays in the top ten for months. Behind this result lies the latest stroke of genius devised by Prince, this time not strictly musical: in practice, the musician decides to raise the price of a single ticket to the American tour shows by ten dollars, and in exchange hands the eager fan who shows up for the presale a copy of the album, managing to sell three million copies on friendly territory. Twenty years on from Purple Rain, Prince comes back home, at peace (with his second, Italian wife), aware of his own strength as well as his inspirational worth. He writes and plays, having fun like in the old days. Of course, the calendars keep turning and fading, innovations dwindle when they don't vanish altogether. But who else can say they crossed almost thirty years of pop as a leading figure without a single gray hair to hide?

The second half of the decade, Las Vegas between mannerism and returns to the past (future)

Midway through the decade, the restored Prince is honored at the NAACP Awards, an association that, in practice, tends to recognize artists of color. The citation leaves no room for doubt: "Prince was the musical prophet of the 1980s, releasing a series of albums that managed to capture and describe the spirit of the times." A mark of esteem of the highest order, then, but also a way of telling a story whose focal point had come twenty years earlier. Almost a slap in the face for someone who had, since his debut, claimed to give popular music that extra edge needed to always look ahead. And Prince keeps glancing back over his ephebic shoulders with ever greater insistence. So here he is, settling in toward the end of 2005 at (Universal) Motown. A return to his roots, one might say. A newfound leaning toward more dynamite-charged, visceral soul music.

By now, though, the imp is above all a mannerist who plays with styles, who doesn't innovate but equally doesn't photocopy. He moves somewhere in between, without particular shame. At Christmas, here he is again, sensual and knowing, riding the languid rhythms of "Te Amo Corazon", mistaken by assonance for an attempt to jump on the Hispanic bandwagon that had been sweeping through pop for the past five years. But it's a slight mirage: a few Latin rhythms can be glimpsed, but it's an illusion. The song is a classic, slick, sly soul ballad. Is this the imp's new direction? No! A few weeks pass and, at the start of spring, along comes the album 3121, a mysterious title, an aborted project for a new line of perfume or who knows what. Twelve songs, the classic funk-soul blend, top-tier production, not many emotions. There are indeed melodies aplenty, likeable effects too, and electrifying rhythms as well. But the déjà-vu is obviously lurking around the corner. The title track that opens the record warms up the engines, turns danceable right away, toys with pitched-up vocals, but doesn't have an unforgettable chorus. "Lolita", on the other hand, is a classic bout of raw funk, precise but not especially sharp. With sounds that are somewhat uncertain and not quite in line with the new heights reached by the various Timbalands coming out of Neptunes.
Tighter and far more exciting is the metronomic "Black Sweat", erotic and electronic, excellent and ripe for remixes that in fact never materialized. Then comes a string of soul-pop tracks that are almost always forgettable, if not outright bad. And between a "Love" and a "Satisfied", you do genuinely let out a few sighs of satisfaction, even if the pages are visibly yellowed. "Fury" proves it: a new live-show warhorse, a guitar-heavy charge that, in its brashness, ruins the memory of "1999", which it resembles quite a bit. Nothing dramatic, though. The record is professionally flawless, a decent diversion that suddenly darkens on the sheet music of "The Dance": a ballad with a gloomy prologue, heavily piano-driven, that builds with mathematical precision, even becoming moving, thanks to a happy classical-jazz blend that never slips on an unwelcome banana peel. A fine showing immediately marred by the ending of "Get On The Boat", yet another tribute to the funk-soul school, with the instruments mixed far too far forward, inelegant and noisy.

A week later, Prince finds himself at number one on the American chart for the first time in seventeen years. Applause, emotion. A month and a half later, the album has already fallen out of the top hundred. And its author doesn't even set off on the usual tour. Word has it he has some family matters to sort out. Indeed: after five years of marriage comes news of his second divorce. This time it's Italian Manuela Testolini's turn to pad her bank account. And Prince, for his part, disappears into obscurity for a while. Every so often he pops up for some surprise, or semi-surprise, appearance (in Milan in autumn 2006, during "Fashion Week." Rumors of a surprise concert circulate, hysteria builds, but nothing comes of it—instead he plays and sings only for Donatella Versace's invited guests). An appearance of his at the Super Bowl stirs up a bit of scandal over some phallic shadow-play, but nothing more. Las Vegas becomes the venue of choice for the occasional hour or so spent reliving the good old days. And then comes the news that the Prince will once again deign to set foot on European soil: a London August packed with a good pile of concerts, with tickets flying off the shelves like bread in a famine. The usual, fitting marketing move: affordably priced tickets and 3121 thrown in for free. All while waiting for some new surprise. Utopia?

In 2007, the return with Planet Earth. A work more rock and less electronic than 3121, but equally faded and disappointing. Even the much-awaited return of Wendy & Lisa amounts to nothing more than an unconvincing "Lion Of Judah". Only three songs are worth saving: "The One You Wanna See", "Guitar" and "Chelsea Rodgers". The first sounds like a faded copy of "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man", the second a new "Peach", though less fun, and the third one of those endless grooves Prince often improvises live.
The album was officially released on July 20. It was put out by Universal in America and Europe, but not in Great Britain. Prince struck a deal with a famous English newspaper to give away a copy with its Sunday edition. The result was three million copies sold in a single day, but not without consequences: Universal blocked distribution in stores across the UK, and the stores themselves were alarmed at having lost out on a huge profit. Prince's audience, on the other hand, was delighted. And for the Minneapolis musician it was a small victory over the record industry.

Indigo Nights-Live Session, as the title suggests, is a live performance from the stage of London's Indigo Club, nearly an hour and twenty minutes of blazing music, also dated 2007 and likewise made available through his website. A medley that condenses the whole of Prince's artistry on stage. A rough-and-ready tribute to the entire Black music saga. Amid the by-now classic big-band backdrop with its supersonic horn section, one can recognize, among others, Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" (the theme from "The Sting"), "Rock Steady", "Dance Sex Music Romance", "I Wanna Take You Higher", "Girls And Boys", "Alphabet Street", "Whole Lotta Love", "Delirious" and even "All The Critics Love U In New York"... All of it seasoned with sharp, fiery solos, atmospheric breaks, funky passages, Zappa-esque unison lines, and Latin, even Caribbean, flourishes. With the audience actively taking part. An all-out sax finale with Maceo Parker in the spotlight. An indispensable shot of life.

The Prince's artistic bulimia, however, knows no bounds and now clashes head-on with the demands of a record industry inclined to scale back the scope of his releases. Nelson's strategy therefore calls for an increasingly pronounced do-it-yourself approach via the tools of multimedia. His umpteenth album thus takes shape starting from the web, not before offering generous previews of the new recordings over the radio. This happens toward the end of 2008, when a Los Angeles radio station airs a series of tracks, titles that are further expanded upon through additional previews in the press. Then it's the Internet's turn, with dedicated sites opening, closing and updating. Finally, once spring 2009 has bloomed, comes the release of LotusFlow3r, initially distributed as a digital download. It's a box set of three albums: the first, self-titled, with vaguely space-rock traits, jazz-funk urges and lengthy instrumental digressions; the second, MPLSoUND, with more traditionally electro-funk-soul leanings; the third, Elixer, on which Prince and his band provide the musical backdrop for the voice of Bria Valente, a girl the boss seems to be banking a lot on. Or perhaps it's just an illusion, given that the fortunate Bria performs over anonymous R&B backing tracks that often do a disservice to her mentor's old genius: ten sterile tracks, an elevator-music backdrop that leaves no trace, almost a breathless chase after the girl-group formula (TLC, Destiny's Child) that had, in any case, already had its day a good five years earlier. If anything rises above the pointlessness, it's perhaps only "Immersion", an unresolved piano ballad. The following "Another Boy" even dusts off the dry electronic rhythm of mid-Eighties Prince. Valente's voice doesn't even have that distinctive quality, and by the end of the relentless listen you're left with the feeling that Prince has a lot of time on his hands.

Things don't go quite so badly, however, with the other two chapters of the box set, especially the first, which alternates jazz-rock improvisations ("From The Lotus"), stretched-out blues ("Back To The Lotus"), but also charging rock ("Boom"), Hendrix-style tributes ("Crimson & Clover", "Colonized Mind"), R&B mixed with Henry Mancini ("Love Like Jazz"), and flights of fancy that nod to something Latin ("77 Beverly Park"). The guitar is present as never before, with solos, counterpoints, outbursts and caresses. MPLSoUND, on the other hand, is the more dance-oriented Prince. The first three tracks make that clear right away, seemingly echoing the Black Album period, but they're less inspired and less minimal. It feels like being in the presence of something truly old-style ("Dance For Me" has sounds that reek of 1982 from a mile off). Nor is the honeyed, "Scandalous"-style ballad missing, in "U're Gonna C Me". The nod to the old school is confirmed by "Ol' School Company", a sort of variant on "Housequake".
On the whole, a forgettable record, a compendium of Prince's least inspired artistry, or even a parade of leftovers. The album was also sold in stores and went on to sell nearly 200,000 copies in its first week in the US, climbing to number two on the chart. Then it vanished. Prince, too, was by then thinking of other things.

20Ten (2010) – also given away for free through certain magazines, and only in select European countries, Italy excluded – starts again from the idea of bringing back a vintage Prince (specifically, the one from the very early 80s), grappling with the dry beats of the Linn Drum, liquid funky guitar riffs and swirling synths, as if the Minneapolis imp now felt, at all costs, the need to prove to his audience that he was still "that Prince", the one who had put his most personal stamp on the Black sound of the 80s.
From the opening "Compassion" (a synthetic rockabilly in the wake of "Delirious") all the way to "Everybody Loves Me", passing through "Act Of God" and "Lavaux", it's one flashback after another taking us back to the days of "Controversy". Things are no different on the ballad side: ever since Prince embraced his new faith, renouncing his past of excess and transgression, his slow numbers have lost that erotic tension and morbid fascination that used to counterbalance an undeniable, and still-present, underlying preciousness; in other words, it's hard to listen to even two of them in a row ("Walk In Sand" and "Sea Of Everything", formally flawless as they are) without the experience becoming cloying.
It's a shame that this time the clarity of approach isn't matched by the right dose of bite and courage, and yet so little would be needed—perhaps leaning a bit more toward the records of his early 90s, which, all things considered, were even more influential than his debut work and are still being raided by today's new R&B generation: when he tries, on "Beginning Endlessly", he may not touch the brilliant heights of the past, but at least he shows he can keep pace with the times without losing himself.
Will he manage to understand that before the times change again?

Apparently not. Evidently old age is starting to take its toll on an inspiration that's become increasingly erratic, when not altogether absent. After a full four years of absence—which, as far as anyone can recall, should be a record by Minneapolis standards—and after a few scant appearances on some prestigious stages, Prince reappears not with one but with two brand new albums. Containing, unfortunately, old and outdated music. The first, Art Official Age, serves up the usual soup—by now not even reheated—of pop, soul, funk and former oddities that might have made sense thirty years earlier. An album thick with over-produced mustiness, that looks like a consolation prize for adoring fans.
The second disc, Plectrumelectrum, instead picks up where the wretched scraps collection Chaos And Disorder left off almost twenty years earlier: a messy, hard-rock-tinted picture, with exhausting solos, flashes of old-school rap and ballads that are anything but memorable; all backed by three girls, relegated to bass and drums, of regional-level artistic caliber. Disaster served. But who cares?

It's therefore pointless to expect a new masterpiece bearing Prince's name in 2015. Considering the Minneapolis imp's output over the past decade, it would already be a tall order to find tracks that survive not only into future tours but even into the promotional tour for the very album they belong to. And it hardly helps that he opens his new effort (once again in the company of the all-female trio 3rdeyegirl), HITnRUN Phase One, by mashing up the opening bars of two landmark albums such as 1999 and Purple Rain, only to hand the real introduction over to the voice of his new protégée, Judith Hill, tackling a bland, cartoonish funk number that immediately dampens what little hope remained. And yet the "Million $ Show" about to begin does hold a few surprises in store, even if they might be hard to swallow for the die-hard Prince fan. Having wrung out the rock excesses of PLECTRUMELECTRUM (with the honest "Hardrocklover" the sole, vague callback) and freshened up the saccharine settings of Art Official Age (the previously released "This Could B Us", literally teleported into a sexy club), this is in fact the first time in many, many years that a Roger Nelson record doesn't try to rehash his 80s sound, stale once out of context, or the geriatric style of 70s guitarists, but instead at least attempts to sound as contemporary as possible, while still keeping certain distinctive traits of his style intact.
He does so by giving ample room to a ragged, dark urban-EDM attitude that's new for him, and by reworking certain experiments attempted in the first half of the 90s that convinced few people, himself included. This time, though, the surrounding Black-music landscape has changed, and the electro-invective of "Shut This Down" wins you over thanks to its lovely, groovy bass line and hits as hard as "My Name Is Prince". Even better are the even more aggressive "Ain't About To Stop", a feverish thousand-and-one-nights convulsion in the company of rising star Rita Ora, and the hypnotic, mechanical whirlpool of "X's Face", over which he reels off a sly, singsong chant.
Feeling, however, as if he's already mastered a language that isn't entirely his own, our man occasionally slips into presumption (strange, right?) and stumbles badly: the interlude "Mr. Nelson", stretched out far too long, is nothing more than a (bad) remix of the already-known "Clouds" (again featuring Lianne La Havas) that tries, unsuccessfully, to blend house breakdowns, brostep wobbles and assorted arabesques. The only moment on the album that tries to nail an unabashedly pop melody, a concession meant to recall the classics of the past, paradoxically fails for lack of nastiness. The driving beat of "Fallinlove2nite" is in fact weighed down by a cascade of cheap-sounding horns, and this time an à-la-Camille vocal performance does little to help when the end result is, if not entirely compromised, tinged with the ridiculous. Better, then, to let him retreat into darker territory, blending his ever-present funky riffs with the old-school hip-hop of "Like A Mack", even if he lets himself be upstaged by the Caribbean-flavored rapping of the up-and-coming duo Curly Fryz, and proving, with the sensual curves of "1000 X's & 0's", that he can perfectly keep pace with today's soul crop (John Legend, specifically). And why not, perhaps even look further ahead, since the suspended rarefactions of closer "June" would tempt even a black-souled indie artist like Jamie Woon.
Imperfect and incomplete, stingy with memorable melodies but generous in bite and expressive urgency, HITnRUN is unlikely to go down in history, but among all his late-period records it could claim an unusual distinction. It certainly doesn't bring Prince back to the cutting edge, but the merit of making him seem no more than three years behind the times, rather than fifteen, is enough to reignite a dim flicker of hope for the future.

On April 21, 2016, however, comes the terrible news that freezes everyone: Prince was found dead in his Minneapolis home, at the Paisley Park complex, which also houses his recording studio. He had been rushed to the hospital on April 15, forcing his private jet into an emergency landing in Illinois. But he had appeared at a concert the following day to reassure fans about his health. Nothing hinted at this tragic ending, which fell, on an April day, upon one of the most gripping and fascinating stories in popular music.

Rushing in to fill the artistic and emotional void left by the Minneapolis artist came tributes from across the worlds of art and showbiz, celebratory parades in his hometown, biographies published, reissues of his most celebrated albums, and career honors. The most recent of these was an honorary degree awarded to him by the University of Minnesota for his achievements in the artistic and musical field.

Meanwhile, work at Paisley Park hasn't stopped. From Prince's vast and legendary secret archive, efforts are periodically made to extract material otherwise destined for silence (or decay, if the rumors about the condition of the rooms where the tapes are stored are to be believed). After the release of the original version of "Nothing Compares 2 U", NPG Records and Warner Bros. Records dug up and published Piano & A Microphone 1983, a long piano session (recorded privately in January 1983) that offers a fleeting but crystal-clear glimpse of Prince's artistic genius.
Though not a work intended for release (at least not in its author's original intentions), Piano & a Microphone 1983 captures an unusually composed Prince at the piano, fresh off the frenzied 1999 era, as he unspools, across the notes of a loose medley, all the interpretive talent that would soon be enshrined in pop's pantheon thanks to the massive success of Purple Rain.

Even before renouncing and changing his name amid disputes with his record label, Prince used to write and produce for other artists, generously hiding behind pseudonyms: Christopher, Jamie Starr, Joey Coco, Alexander Nevermind, among many others. Whether it was launching the many starlets of his harem into showbiz (Susan Moonsie, Vanity, Jill Jones or Susannah Melvoin), boosting the careers of close friends (Morris Day and Apollonia Kotero), or simply doing a favor for musicians he admired (Susanna Hoffs and Martika), the intent was clear: to give all these artists something precious while avoiding overshadowing their worth with his own, by-then-unwieldy name. In vain, though, because his touch and his backing vocals were always instantly recognizable, even when he deliberately avoided putting his name on the track, as was often the case with those of the flamboyant percussionist Sheila E. (the unforgettable "The Glamorous Life", "A Love Bizarre" and "Dear Michaelangelo"), among the very few to maintain an on-and-off artistic partnership with him spanning several decades.
These are the premises behind the new posthumous collection Originals, made up not of tracks discarded from his official projects or private home recordings, but of songs written and produced with the clear intent of turning them into hits, or at least standout tracks—just not within his own discography. Fully finished tracks, even ready for release, meant instead to serve as a sort of tutorial for those lucky artists he had honored, tracks that would then remain locked away in the vault forever. Now that these songs are finally seeing the light of day—forgive us, surely displeased, the spirit of Prince—it's remarkable to note how closely most of the aforementioned singers stuck to his directions, almost slavishly, even imitating his vocal takes.
A few extra beats here and there, perhaps a synth line or two fewer, but evidently the respect shown toward such already-incredible tracks (and the reverential awe felt toward the man himself) was such that it discouraged even the shifting of a comma. Saying that Prince's originals are better than the other artists' versions we came to know and love would be predictable and a bit trite, but it's undeniable that the funkier numbers were conceived more scorching and untamed than the tamer versions recorded by the Time or the softened ones by Sheila E., and that when, in falsetto, he tries to imagine himself as a woman ("Baby, You're A Trip" or "Noon Rendezvous"), the tracks take on a more pronounced and unsettling sensuality. Recorded mostly between '82 and '86, these tracks confirm, as if there were still any need to, Roger Nelson's prolific state of grace during those years, and it's precisely for this reason that Originals manages, remarkably, to sound like a proper album rather than a collection of unrelated tracks.
It's the quintessence of Prince's 80s, a vivid snapshot of his finest songwriting and of a Minneapolis sound capable of even predicting the future, as in the stuttering arrhythmias of Vanity 6's "Make-Up", which brushes up against industrial territory. A track that, together with the wild funk of the following "100 MPH" by the Mazarati, delivers one of the record's peaks, rivaling the opening one-two punch of the beloved "Sex Shooter" by Apollonia 6 and "Jungle Love" by the Time, which together come close to completing a Purple Rain soundtrack sung, ideally, by Prince alone. Other surprises come instead from the few, not always satisfying, moments of disobedience that Prince's originals later underwent. At first, "You're My Love" was thankfully free of the piano-bar atmosphere later given to it by Kenny Rogers, and indeed anticipated the bluesier New Power Generation by five years. Also entirely absent is the Caribbean drift of Taja Sevelle's "Wouldn't You Love to Love Me?", which instead proudly shows off rockabilly rhythms, sadly unappreciated by Michael Jackson, who, incredibly, refused to record his own version for Bad. Only the Bangles seem to emerge from the comparison with the master with their heads held high; his version of the famous "Manic Monday", slower and spiced with an Eastern flavor, is certainly one of the most interesting moments in the collection precisely because it's so different from the version we're used to, but Susannah Hoffs and company truly managed to learn the lesson and rework it without ruining it, adding the track their signature jangle-pop backbone.
And then, of course, there's Sinead O'Connor, whose sumptuous cover of "Nothing Compares 2 U" will nonetheless manage to outshine whatever version eventually emerges from Paisley Park's endless archives. Perhaps because, to record her masterpiece, O'Connor never heard a discouragingly good Prince version (none existed at the time), but only the skeletal one by the Family, Susannah Melvoin's group, which today pales even further in comparison with what Prince had in mind. What O'Connor glimpsed in their bloodless version remains a mystery, but she clearly grasped its essence and made it her own, turning the track into both a blessing and a curse for Prince in the years to come—incredulous that, for once, and only once, a pupil (and an uninvited one at that) had surpassed the master.

On July 30, 2021, Prince's first genuine posthumous album was released: Welcome 2 America. Recorded in spring 2010, while Prince and his band were planning the American leg of the "Welcome 2" tour, aptly christened "Welcome 2 America", during which some of these songs were also performed, the album was never released (despite an undeniable quality that places it among the select ranks of the best post-"Lovesexy" output), perhaps due to his perfectionist streak, or perhaps because in 2010 he had already put out another record, the negligible "20Ten".
Welcome 2 America conjures up a kaleidoscopic sonic rainbow rooted firmly in funk, with crucial, gorgeous seventies soul brushstrokes ("Born 2 Die"), his celebrated vision of cross-pollinated pop ("Hot Summer") and a killer ballad among the finest of his career, the supremely sensual "When She Comes", which would surface in an alternative take on "HITnRUN Phase Two", the unwitting epitaph of 2015. There's no shortage of light jazzy shading (as in the middle of the opening title track) and, above all, those Hendrix-style guitar solos that have always been his trademark. The overall mood is decidedly upbeat, at times downright infectious, as in the case of "Stand Up And B Strong", a cover of Soul Asylum.
The state of the Nation in the Obama years ("Welcome 2 America"), environmental concerns ("1000 Light Years From Here") and the struggles faced by a Black artist in a white-dominated music business (sharply captured in the funk of "Running Game"), alongside perspectives on religion ("Same Page, Different Book") and infidelity ("Check The Record"), make Welcome 2 America a politically engaged work, rich in highly topical themes. There are barely any missteps, perhaps save for the superfluous "1010 (Rin Tin Tin)".
The songs on Welcome 2 America are just the first traces of a vast repertoire left to us by Maestro Roger Nelson, amounting to several thousand tracks. The celebratory box set for "Sign 'O The Times" — released in September 2020 and featuring a substantial number of unreleased tracks from the sessions for the apricot-colored double album — was only a tantalizing, generous preview of what was to come.

In the tenth-anniversary year of his passing, at the end of August 2026, Timeless is released, a collection of ten "unreleased" tracks spanning Prince's entire career, although some of them — while never officially released in the versions included here — aren't exactly news, at least not for fans. Such is the case with the less-than-convincing "Tick Tick Bang", a non-definitive take (dating back to the "Controversy" sessions, 1981) of the song that — re-recorded, more effectively arranged and fitted with different lyrics — would end up in 1990 on "Graffiti Bridge", both on the album and in the film. For the die-hards: the song uses an uncredited sample of Jimi Hendrix's "Little Miss Lover", which appeared in 1969 on Axis: Bold As Love.
At either end of "Timeless" sit the two most significant songs in the collection, representing the beginning and the epilogue of Prince's artistic arc. "I Am You" is a previously unreleased track from 1977, dating back to the "For You" sessions, a lively funk number that Prince played during the first two concerts of his solo career, in January 1979, but which never made it onto any album. Some elements would later be reused to complete other songs written by Prince, the rare "I Don't Wanna Stop", from 1980, and "I Don't Wanna Leave You", released by The Time in 1982. At the other end we find "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore", a live piano-and-vocal recording captured during Prince's final live performance, on April 14, 2016 in Atlanta, just a week before his death. "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore", originally the b-side of the "1999" single, was also reinterpreted by other artists, including Alicia Keys, who included it on her 2001 debut album Songs In A Minor (more than twelve million copies sold worldwide), under the slightly altered title "How Come You Don't Call Me".
In between are eight more songs, arranged in strictly chronological order, which touch on a good portion of the musical genres Prince explored throughout his career, from the hyper-glossy ballad "With This Tear" (written for Celine Dion, who included it on her self-titled 1992 album) to the rock-oriented romps of "The Guilty Ones", recorded in 2007. The lively "Calabama" is the title track of a mysterious album that never saw the light of day, the electro-funk "Heaven" was meant to be part of a musical that never got made ("The Dawn"), "I Wonder" is an intriguing unreleased track from 1989, and "Bestest Friend" is the most recent find, recorded in 2012.

The management overseeing Prince's archives and musical estate has recently announced that new projects are on the way: an expanded edition of 3121, an ambitious project built around Parade, live recordings, a couple of musicals — one of them inspired by Purple Rain — and possibly a biopic bound for theaters.
Meanwhile, the massive task of digitizing everything kept in the vault is underway: completing the work will take years, and listening to all of it might take more than a lifetime — but is that really essential?

Contributions by Roberto Mandolini ("Planet Earth"), Stefano Fiori ("20Ten", "HITnRUN Phase One" and "Originals"), Leonardo Stenta ("Piano & A Microphone"), Claudio Lancia ("Welcome 2 America", "Timeless"),