Exactly how normal is an album that starts with the title track and "In Love" supposed to be, anyway? The title track is a multi-tracked a capella piece that doesn't last much more than a minute, and "In Love" has one of the goofiest underpinning grooves of any disco song I've ever heard. One thing this song is definitely not is commercial in any reasonable sort of way: the melody might have made this into an acceptable radio single, but the synths sound so strangely lightweight and novelty-ish that they would have scared a lot of people away. Personally, I think the song is an absolute hoot, and I like to imagine the confused look of the first record company executive who got to hear these weird synths combined with lines like, "I want to bathe in your river." Continuing in this goofy pop-funk vein is "Soft and Wet;" this was actually released as a single (even with that title!), and not surprisingly it didn't really do very well on the charts. Still, it's a decent enough song, and it sure sounds way ahead of its time.

Of course, the album starts to get spotty past this point. One area where Prince struggles a bit on this album is in his ballads: "Crazy You," "Baby" (which at least has an interesting lyrical topic) and "So Blue" (which actually has a countryish feel to it and some interesting guitar/synth noises here and there) each start off seeming to have some potential, but they all fail to develop them adequately, and they drag down the rating considerably. "My Love is Forever" is more rhythmic and up-tempo than those songs, but it still lacks in hooks, and it doesn't really work as a ballad or as funk.

The album's other tracks, though, amply show that Prince, even at this stage in his career, had some serious bonafide strengths. "Just as Long as We're Together" is the album's stretch-out funk/disco workout (and don't forget, all the instruments here are played by the man himself), and it shows that Prince could fill a track of this kind with good ideas as well as anybody at the time could. Especially pay attention to the extended coda (an instrumental piece that Prince originally recorded separately), where the bass/percussion groove switches into something noticably more intense and where all sorts of synth and guitar parts are thrown into the mix. This is the way I wish more disco grooves would go; it's a perfectly fine genre if you fill the space above the groove with a nice variety of ideas (note that Prince would continue to show himself amply capable of this in the next album's best tracks).

The best track on here, though, is easily the closing "I'm Yours," featuring a knock-your-socks-off epic-sounding guitar line in the introduction (and more great parts in the breaks), and featuring a red-hot groove that doesn't let up for the whole five minutes. The way Prince builds the tension in the verses up to the "I'M YOURS" climax each time is fantastic, and when combined with everything else it's enough to make this one of my very favorite Prince tracks. The man might not have had any semblance of consistency yet, but heck, he didn't really have that in spades later on; let's recognize and tip our hats to a great Prince song when we get it.

So ok, the album is no Dirty Mind, and he wasn't going to gain a mass audience with this exact mix of styles, but it's most definitely a better album than not. No Prince fan should feel embarrassed to own this.

Once again, the ballads are not very good on the whole. The closing "It's Gonna be Lonely" is a highlight (the rising synth line in the chorus is a winner), but the other three ("When We're Dancing Close and Slow," "With You" and "Still Waiting") are incredibly dull numbers that could have been done by any soul artist with a tenth of Prince's talent. The falsetto singing is decent enough and somewhat emotional, but there's a serious lack of strong melodies or atmosphere or anything interesting to keep my mind from wandering. These songs need some personality, dang it.

The non-ballad tracks tend to be much better, though they somewhat pale to what would come within just a year or so. "Bambi" is a great piece of funky hard rock, with a great set of crunchy riffs and aggressive, passionate singing as needed; it may well be the missing link between Jimi Hendrix and Lenny Kravitz, but I won't hold that against it. The opening "I Wanna be Your Lover" is a nice piece of funk-lite, with a strong chorus hook and amusingly eyebrow-raising lyrics like, "I wanna be your lover, I wanna be your mother and your sister too." "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad" is even better, featuring another decent groove, another solid chorus and a great guitar solo in the extended coda. "Sexy Dancer" is an all-out disco groove, and it's not up to the standards of "Just as Long as We're Together," but it's decent, and Prince's vocal exhales are amusing enough. And finally, "I Feel For You" may have some terrible-sounding synths high up in the mix, but the vocal melody interacts with them well enough, and I like the song more than not.

Overall, Prince has some nice aspects, but it's a clear step back from the debut, and if Prince had continued in this same vein he would have been forgotten within a couple of years. If you can't get the best songs from a compilation or thereabouts, consider getting it, but don't pay full price.

Today, the album sounds relatively conventional: a New Wave-influenced, stripped-down dance-pop album, with lyrics about various bawdy topics sung at a volume where you don't easily notice them. The funny thing is, I feel like this album would have been plenty enjoyable no matter what the lyrics were, simply because this a fantastic collection of tunes that weirdly benefits from the minimalist arrangements. "Gotta Broken Heart Again" might be a little too conventional and short to make much of an impression, but every other song on here does something interesting enough to make it stand out in a strong way. It's all dance-pop, sure, but it's all dance-pop done in a refreshingly "organic" sort of way, and the hooks are some of the best of Prince's career. The lyrics add an interesting extra layer to the songs, sure, but these songs would all do just fine without them.

The opening title track is nothing short of a dance-pop classic, prominently featuring a great keyboard riff and a great vocal melody (with lyrics about what his mind wants to do to a girl whenever he sees her) that mirrors the keyboard chord sequence impressively. There are no clear verses or choruses, but somehow that just works with the general aesthetic. "When You Were Mine" prompted a ton of controversy because one of the verses mentions a threesome, but I think that focusing on that line kinda misses the gist of the song. Ultimately, the song's topic is as old as pop music itself: "We used to date, now you like another guy more than me, but I still like you, and maybe even more than before." This song takes that idea into previously unexplored territory, of course, but it's hardly the giant leap into degradation that it's made out to be (and that Prince's lyrics would involve in future years, or even later in the album). And besides, I don't think the lyrics should overshadow the song itself: it's essential synth-pop, with a nice texture of guitars and another terrific vocal melody in both the verses and the chorus. Prince once said that he got the idea for the song from listening to John Lennon, and that doesn't surprise me in the least: this is just a great pop song, no matter what else.

"Do it All Night" has a less-than-ideal synth tone in the introduction and in the bridge, but it has a nice enough groove, full of tasty bass-guitar licks, and it's a keeper. After passing through the slight filler of "Gotta Broken Heart Again," we come to "Uptown," a terrific (and almost angry in places) funky groove that talks about a place where people aren't hung up on race and other differences. Well, it also talks about how people there express their lack of racism and bigotry by getting it on with any-and-everybody there, but I guess that's to be expected. Personally, I like to focus more on the fantastic low-key guitar playing than on the message, but everything about the song is good, in the end.

The next two songs almost sound to me as if Prince made a bet with somebody about how vulgar he could make his lyrics and still get them released on an album. "Head" is a solid dance groove that details Prince's, um, interactions with somebody else's soon-to-be-bride (and her wedding dress) and how he steals her away for himself. Whatever, it's a good song, and the synth solo in the middle is very interesting. "Sister" is a decent (though very brief, at 1:31) rock-funk groove, telling the story of a woman teaching her teenage younger brother the birds and the bees ("Incest is everything it's said to be!"), then making him turn tricks for her financial benefit. Holy moly. The last song, "Party-up," is refreshingly not about sex (I'm relatively tolerant of such things, but the previous two tracks start stretching me thin in that department), but instead is about ending military conflict through the power of partying. It's kind of a silly juxtaposition, but it somehow works, and there's something strangely satisfying about hearing a solid funk-disco track climax in "We don't want to fight no more!" What a fascinating dude.

So ok, this isn't Prince's greatest work, and it's a little short (30:14, and not filler-free) to be considered an all-time classic, but it's still a bold statement that contains some of Prince's best music. If you're not sure whether Prince is for you (and for some reason Purple Rain doesn't grab you), this is probably the best place to start.

One of the most amazing aspects of this album is that Prince was still in one-man-band mode; only the closing "Jack U Off" (a hilarious cheesy-synth-based rockabilly ode to mutual masturbation; it's ironic that this is the one song on the album that isn't Prince literally playing with himself) has any contributions from others. In terms of thickness of the arrangements, the songs on here could have easily fit on any of his Revolution albums from the next few years, and that's a pretty remarkable feat. It's one thing to sound like a young kid experimenting in the studio: it's another to sound like a full-fledged 80's synth-based art-funk band all by yourself. I mean, how in the world is the opening title track the product of one person's incessant overdubbing? This is one of the most fascinating combinations of beat-heavy groove and of multiple non-trivial song ideas I could possibly imagine, and it was all done by one man! Putting that aspect aside, this is just one fantastic song: lyrically, it focuses on Prince's fascination with other people's fascination towards him, and even features a recitation of the Lord's Prayer in the middle (another way to tweak people, I suppose) and a fascinating mantra near the end that seemingly sums up his life philosophy ("People call me rude, I wish we were all nude/I wish there was no black and white, I wish there were no rules"). Musically, it's one of those tracks that I can recognize as having a lot of elements in common with 80's music that I don't necessarily enjoy, but where the combination as presented here is enough to suck me in and then some. The verse melody, the chorus, the fascinating beat, the subtle rhythmic guitar parts, the cool use of synths and other things I'm not thinking of make for such a great use of seven minutes that I'm almost ready to forgive him for the Batman soundtrack. Almost.

Up next is "Sexuality," essentially a sexualized version of the old adage of "free your mind and the rest will follow." It doesn't especially break new ground for him lyrically (though the random diatribe against "tourists" who come into his sexual utopia is hilarious) or musically (it's basically just a fast funk-rocker), but gosh does it have one heck of a groove and some GREAT vocals. And speaking of great vocals, the following "Do Me Baby" is easily the best Prince ballad to this point; once I was able to accept the possibility that a song that so prominently features a lengthy sex noise sequence in the second half might be something I could enjoy without feeling ashamed of myself, I began to see it as an obvious highlight of the album. We're a long way from the plastic, go-through-the-motions ballads of Prince; this is rife with real passion in both the instrumentation and in the singing, and you can't ask for too much more than that in a song like this.

The second half kicks off with "Private Joy," which kinda sounds like a Dirty Mind leftover, and it's almost certainly the album's weakest track. Still, the main synth line is nice enough, as is the vocal melody, and I can think of more than a few Prince albums where this would have been a highlight. The track is also deceptively normal compared to the next three tracks, which fill out the album before things finish with "Jack U Off." "Ronnie, Talk to Russia" is a two-minute, almost punk-rock (except that the arrangement is way too thick and grumbly and synth-heavy) political statement about nuclear disarmament, and it's so catchy that I can overlook the fact that it's so ridiculous. "Let's Work," which follows, at first seems like a relatively simplistic dance-pop groove (about "working," wink wink nudge nudge), but the synth parts and the vocal melody are both pretty intricate, and it's a fun interlude before what comes next.

"Annie Christian" is just freaking bizarre. It's a weird mishmash of incongruous synths and guitars, with Prince eschewing singing for a rhythmic spoken rant (with overdubbed backing vocals as needed) about ... lots of things. I guess the Annie Christian character is supposed to be Satan or Evil Incarnate or something like that (there are allusions to materialism, lying, capital punishment, and the shootings of Lennon and Reagan), and the song keeps coming back to the curious phrase, "Annie Christian, Anti-Christ/Until you're crucified/I'll live my life in taxicabs." I'd say something along the lines of, "the meaning of this track could only be understood by Prince," but I'm not even sure that he'd be able to tell you what exactly he was literally going for. This kind of messing with his audience would eventually get a little tiresome, but this time around I'm totally on board with Prince's expression of tweaked paranoia.

The rating might seem a smidge high, but after some consideration (I waffled between a 12 and a 13) it's totally justified. It has only one clear weak link; it has a fascinating mix of styles (especially for an entire album that's basically 80's dance-pop); it has some strong, definite highlights, and it's soooooo interesting. For now, with Prince near the height of his powers, his self-indulgence was only a good thing, and if you're not somebody who thinks catchiness is the primary rubric by which Prince should be judged, it's tough for me to see how you could be a Prince fan and not really like this. This is a must own.

Indeed, the major fundamental change on this album didn't come from the addition of a band, but rather a change in what kind of listening experience Prince was going for. Controversy, simply put, is not an ideal album for background listening; it's an 80's synth-funk album, but it's deeply twisted in the sort of way that makes it geared towards the kind of "serious" listening that music geeks like me do while we make "deep" observations and tell ourselves we're oh-so-clever for noticing them. 1999, on the other hand, is an album designed for mass-consumption; it front-loads with radio-friendly material, then packs itself with seemingly endless, beat-heavy jams that would've been ideal for parties, and finally sticks anything remotely draggy or difficult in the second half (where it won't register heavily in the minds of casual listeners). Now, I'm not somebody who's really thrilled with the "developments" of this album, at least not in the abstract; I am a music geek first and foremost, after all, and while I certainly don't mind when artists soften their approach to make themselves palatable to a wider audience, I'm not somebody who's strictly going to equate greater popularity with greater quality. Plus, the fact that something is "great party music" or "great dance music" isn't going to win me over automatically; I've always felt that the worth of a piece of music is tied primarily to its effect when the listener isn't doing anything else, as opposed to its benefits in specific applications (e.g. dancing, partying, running, lifting weights, etc). The only category of music that regularly does more for me when I'm not actively listening to it is Ambient, and even then the Ambient music I value most is music that has features that let it stand somewhat on its own.

Not surprisingly, though, this album is more difficult to evaluate than the album's on-paper general attributes might suggest, and this mostly works in the album's favor. Let's step through, chunk by chunk, shall we? The "big hit single" part of the album is terrific, especially the opening title track. Yes, I know that it got overplayed through the years, and it's been completely anachronistic since the 90's ended, and that it's become one of 80's pop music's biggest cliches, but have you ever sat down and thought about how much great stuff is in this song? The twisted subject matter (having a party at the end of the world because the world is facing imminent nuclear annhilation) that hides behind the big shiny chorus; the stroke of genius in splitting the verse melody into three separate voices; the fantastic vocal melody, and plenty else to boot (especially the creepy "Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb" child spoken interludes at the end). Do yourself a favor; take a couple of years off from listening to this song, then go back to it and listen to it with fresh ears, and if you're anything like me you'll have a blast with it.

"Little Red Corvette" and "Delirious" are the other major singles from the album, and they further confirm Prince's ability at the time to create music that could both be interesting and popular with a wide audience. Both songs are rife with thinly-veiled sexual metaphors that nonetheless never become distracting, and they're both just well-written songs. "Corvette" seems a little more self-consciously anthemic (which is probably why it was such a huge hit), while "Delirious" goes for a goofier vibe (what with the combination of the weird synth line and the rockabilly bass), but they both deserve to be considered among Prince's most successful songs of this period. So far, so good.

Where opinions start to get split in half is in the next three tracks: "Let's Pretend We're Married," "D.M.S.R." and "Automatic," which exceed seven, eight and nine minutes respectively. Could they have each been half their respective lengths and still been decent songs? Probably. Do they set a bad precedent for much of the rest of Prince's career? Possibly. And yet, I can't look upon any of them with significant disdain. Look, if you're going to extend a funk-based track past the point of "normalcy," then I ask basically two things: (1) you make the groove underpinning the song as intense and interesting as possible, and (2) you overlay the groove with as many fun gimmicks as possible (in other words, follow the same rules that Prince himself followed with "Just As Long As We're Together"). Each of these three tracks is plenty different from one another given that they're all basically extended dance tracks, and they're each filled with a strong variety of contrasting ideas (monologues, random guitar solos, random call-and-response sections etc). I wouldn't want to listen to any of these tracks in versions that matched in length but came up short in the gimmicks, but as is, I'm pretty strongly hooked, even if it is primarily booty-shaking music.

What makes the album take a slight dip in quality, as far as I'm concerned, is in the last five tracks, which are pretty inconsistent. "Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)," in its first ten seconds, sounds like it has the potential to be one of the album's best tracks, but it ends up being a confused mess without having the intensity that made "Annie Christian" such a success. "Free" tries to be a strong anthemic ballad, but aside from one idea that I find mildly nice, I consider it kind of an uninvolving bore. "Lady Cab Driver" is a nice callback to the extended jams of earlier in the album (this one featuring a very soft, subtle groove, and a bunch of unsettling sounds in the second half), but the following "All the Critics Love U in New York" is a weirdly unsuccessful attempt at creating some kind of proto-rap-crossed-with-hard-rock thing (albeit with some interesting guitar lines here and there). And finally, "International Lover" is basically a sequel to/retread of "Do Me Baby," but while it's slightly tiring (and not an especially great way to close the album), it's also kinda hilarious (though I'm not sure how much of that was actually intentional).

So in the end, the album probably would have been better off as a single LP, but not for the reasons often suggested (needing to cut the lengthy jams in half). There's just too much middling stuff tacked on in the second half for this album to hold up as one of the greatest accomplishments of his career. Still, the album's a heck of a statement, and I like it far more than not. I understand that several Prince fans wrinkle their noses a bit at this one, and while I get their complaints, I would certainly never go so far as to agree with the idea that this is somehow a mediocre album. Don't go looking to this as a career highlight, but certainly get it early on.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not saying that Prince is autistic. Please don't sue me, Prince and Prince's army of lawyers.

What this album had that so many others of his didn't (and which ultimately gave the key to making this so great) was a clearly-defined goal: to make him into one of the absolute biggest musical sensations (though not acting sensations, sadly) in the entire world (even moreso than did 1999, which definitely veered off the path near the end). This largely meant that Prince had to push aside ideas that would only especially interest him and instead channel his talents towards songs like the hit singles from 1999, except better. With a set-in-stone goal in place, Prince was able to churn out an album of filler-free, hook-overflowing material that still bore Prince's unmistakable imprint, and the result is my favorite album of his career (not an especially creative choice, I know, but I can't help that I really like it). A couple of the tracks might be a little more slight than the others, but for once there's not a single track that stands out as a clear weak link. Of course, the album is unmistakably from 1984, and since I don't instinctually gravitate towards music that obviously comes from this period, I have enough reservations about it that I can't quite name it as one of my all-time favorites. Still, I can only wish for a world in which more famous albums from 1984 were as bursting with great songs and great ideas as can be found on this album.

It definitely helps that the opener is my long-time favorite Prince song. "Let's Go Crazy" is simply one of the funnest songs to listen to (and sing along with) that I know. Starting from the ridiculous spoken introduction ("Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life") with the cheap organ-y synth underpinning it (I love, LOVE to do a little air-playing at the "There's something else" *pause* "The afterworld" *upward arpeggio* part) and heading through the main part of the song, this track is a giant pile of hooks with a fantastic groove filled with insanely tight playing. This song shows right away that The Revolution is now a living, breathing force of nature, as opposed to a few vocalists over drum machines, and in this song and the rest of the album, it sounds like one of the greatest bands that could possibly exist (too bad that only lasts through this album, though). The interaction between the guitars and synths is just fantastic, culminating in in a joyous wanky guitar-solo leading into a slow finish that culminates in a massive "TAKE ME AWAY" at the end. It's the ultimate Prince song, I tell you.

The rest of the album is terrific, too. "Take Me With U" is one of the album's two major pieces of sexy, exotic psychedelia (the other is "When Doves Cry," mentioned later), and everything about it (especially the well-written string parts) is top-notch. The parts where Prince duets with Appolonia (especially in the verse culminating with "All I want is to spend the night in your arms") are as moving emotionally as anything Prince had done to this point, and the exchange of "You're sheer perfection"/"Thank you" has got to be one of the smoothest things I've ever heard.

"The Beautiful Ones" is a track that, on paper, has the potential to be a weak link. Except for some subtle guitar work in the second half, the song is basically just Prince singing a slow ballad over a bunch of synthesizer bleeps and bloops for five minutes. Well, songs aren't played on paper. Prince's singing on this song is almost undoubtedly the most emotionally charged I've ever heard from him: the falsetto singing in the line "The beautiful ones ... you always seem to lose" is gorgeous, and the way he sings everything starting from "Do you want him? Or do you want me? 'Cos I want you!" onward ... wow. He does some horrible, ugly, self-destructive things to his voice in this song, but it's all in the name of sheer emotional power, and that means it's for a good cause. We're a long, LONG way from "When We're Dancing Close and Slow."

"Computer Blue" starts off sounding a little fillerish (aside from the bizarre spoken intro from Wendy and Lisa), like a Controversy outtake, but the jam in the second half is pretty great (and features a fantastic lengthy guitar solo), so it's definitely a keeper. "Darling Nikki," the album's most controversial track (and little wonder with these lyrics) and the one that made it a lightning rod for Tipper Gore and others, is a little distracting lyrically, but gosh that's one hardcore dose of funk underpinning it. I'm not sure about the backwards voices at the end, but I tend to forget about those quickly anyway.

"When Doves Cry," of course, is most famous for completely lacking bass, thus becoming a completely undancable song that still has one heck of a sexy, exotic feel to it. It's a song packed with elements that make little sense together, especially the guitar (and weird vocal sounds) in the beginning and the lengthy synth solos in the second half, but somehow these things combine with the drums, the plinky synths and the vocals to create an unforgettable experience (that the guitar solo in the second half is one of the best on the album certainly doesn't hurt either). Could anybody else in the history of pop music have made a song like this, and more importantly made it work?

It's tempting to consider "I Would Die For U" fillerish, but the only real justification for doing this is the length, which comes in at a relatively paltry 2:49. It's a little excessively repetitive with the chorus and its underlying chord sequence, but the chorus and that chord sequence are both awesome, so that's forgivable. The mid-song synth-break irritates me a little, but this is more than made up for by the vocals and vocal melody, especially in the lengthy "verses," and by the quiet (and surprisingly moving) synth plinkings in the last thirty seconds. And besides, the song is really just a lengthy first-half to "Baby I'm a Star," which is nothing less than four minutes of sheer awesomeness. I'll put it this way: if every Prince song was as great as "Let's Go Crazy" and "Baby I'm a Star," Prince would probably be one of my five favorite musicians of all time. The keyboard melody about as good as it gets, and the combination of the exuberant up-tempo drums and Prince's excited vocals (singing lyrics that are absolutely perfect for the music that's going on) was enough to win me over from the very first listen.

And the closing title track, well, it's freaking "Purple Rain!!!" It's just a big, dramatic, bombastic ballad with a perfect set of chord sequences for making a big, dramatic, bombastic ballad seem great and not stupid. Oh, and with one of the best epic guitar solos of Prince's career, of the 80's and maybe of all time. It's eight minutes of slow, heavenly bliss, marking Prince's momentary ascension to the absolute elite of pop music. Put this song in the hands of most anybody else and you get a generic piece of prom-filth, but somehow it feels completely right with Prince.

I can understand somebody not enjoying this album, but I cannot comprehend somebody today not enjoying this album but still considering themselves a Prince fan. Yes, it exposed him to a wide audience, so it could have been dismissed at the time by "real" fans as a bandwagon pick, but today, decades after release, it stands up so well that it's almost mindboggling. And, of course, it goes without saying that anybody who likes 80's pop music but doesn't own this is seriously missing out.

... so what on earth is this?? In trying to come up with an explanation for the circumstances surrounding this album, the best I can do is to think about how a lot of actors, once they've won a major award or two, get a little self-indulgent and decide to go off and do the work that they've "always wanted" to do. Well, Prince was coming off a year in which he won both a Grammy and an Academy Award (for best original song, thanks to "Purple Rain"), and he now had his own recording label (nominally, anyway). Prince had been gift-wrapped a situation that would allow his latent eccentricities to run wild, and it shouldn't be too surprising that things turned out how they did, on this album and in the future.

But still, I wouldn't have expected things to happen like this. It's one thing not to issue any advance singles, but why basically avoid doing any advance promotion for it? Just to prove that you can make a #1 album without a marketing department? And why go for a sound like this? The bulk of the album is geared towards an 80's update of 60's music, but while the leanings in this direction on Purple Rain were a success, here they're much less so. A good chunk of this album sounds like Prince going for something along the lines of "When Doves Cry," but failing. It doesn't help that Prince's supporting band now kinda sounds like it's getting in the way of both Prince and itself; I see the word "claustrophobic" used all over the internet in describing the sound they produce here, and it's an apt description if I ever saw one. There's sure not many significant doses of excitement or energy jumping out of the album like there were last time.

Admittedly (and not surprisingly), there are good songs to be found here. "Raspberry Beret" is a great upbeat psych-pop song with an unforgettable chorus, and "Pop Life" is a great piece of quietly intense pop-funk. "America" is the best dose of driving rock energy on the album; apparently there's a 20-minute version of the song that stretches out the jam that unfortunately fades out way way too soon here. And ... uh ... I guess "The Ladder," as ridiculous and overblown as it is, is still a nice tribute to gospel music of yore.

That's only four songs, though. "Paisley Park" is a decent poor-man's "When Doves Cry" (come on, I can't be the only one who hears the resemblence, can I?), while the title track is weaker than even that level of "praise" but still basically acceptable. "Condition of the Heart" makes the mistake of combining a huge opening with a mediocre ballad that brings little catharsis; split the two parts up, you might have something, but as is I'm not impressed. And "Tamborine" mostly just goes in one ear and out the other.

That leaves the album's closer, the worst track on the album and an ill harbinger of woe to come. "Temptation" has some nice guitar and horn work in the first half, and had the track shut down after five or six minutes, it wouldn't be perfect (it still feels kinda sluggish and confused), but it would still be pretty nice. But then he ruins the track by engaging in one of the most ridiculous dialogues I've ever heard in a musical setting. Has a deep, slowed-down voice, used in a non-ironic, earnest way (not like at the beginning of "1999," I mean), ever worked at all? Did Prince really think the listener had to be explicitly told what kind of temptation he was talking about? Did he think that anybody in the whole world except for him would care about this little tacked-on morality play of his? The thought of ever listening to this track again is enough to raise my blood pressure 15 points.

Look, I can see where a Prince fan would like this album. It's an interesting change of pace, there are some good songs, and it has many of the markings of "underappreciated great album." Unfortunately, I just can't buy into this line of thinking; variety is good, but clumsiness isn't, and this is one awfully clumsy album. Make sure you get the hits in some form, but don't rush out for the rest.

It's a good thing the last three tracks actually sound like real Prince songs. My wife has long hated "Kiss" (it's one of the only Prince songs she really knows, courtesy of its inclusion in Pretty Woman), but I find it a total blast. It's just a solid old-fashioned funk-rocker, with a great guitar-based groove, hilarious falsetto vocals and a fantastic chorus, and one that, aside from the drum machines, doesn't date to the mid-80's at all. Just slightly behind it, though, is the piano-dominated dance-pop single, "Anotherloverholenyohead." It doesn't break ground for Prince much at all, but if breaking ground at this point meant tracks like on the first half of the album, I'd take this kind of conservativism any day.

The closing "Sometimes it Snows in April" somewhat annoyed me the first couple of times I heard it, but I've come around to it pretty well. My initial assessment was that it was closer to "Condition of the Heart" than "Purple Rain," and seemed a little too overdone and nowhere near as moving or as poigniant as it seemed to think it was. I still think these things to an extent, but at the same time I don't think the song does anything that makes it especially tacky, and that goes a long way with me. The stripped-down acoustic arrangement is a nice change of pace from the rest of the album, and for once on this album the rawness and lack of polish (the song was done in one take without cleanups) gives an emotional kick. I'd never consider this a moment of serious beauty (the melody was written by Wendy and Lisa, not Prince, and as such it's not especially brilliant), but it's a decent enough song.

Still, a few nice songs is nowhere near enough to save this album. It's apparently regarded pretty highly among serious Prince fans, but I guess that means that this is an album that separates the "real" fans from the frontrunners like me. Oh well.

If there's a serious weak area in the album, it's in the second half of the first disc. Ok, "Starfish and Coffee" is a terrific pop song, unlike anything Prince had done before, with weirdly evocative lyrics that help make the song seem close to the coolest thing ever. "Slow Love" is also a strong point, showing that Prince could write a perfectly "authentic" old-fashioned soul ballad; it's a long way from original, but it's still fun to see that Prince had developed the ability to return to his influences and interpret them with some flair. The other three tracks, though, are pretty weak. "Hot Thing" has a mildly interesting keyboard riff, but it's not enough to carry a song for almost six minutes, and neither "It" (rather monotonous) nor "Forever in My Life" (not a single strong hook or interesting aspect in 3:30) do enough to escape the dreaded "filler" tag.

The first half of the first disc is considerably better, even if on first listen it's tempting to tag it as the title track and some filler. The title track, of course, is Prince's great big political/social statement, touching on drug use, AIDS, various disasters (hurricanes, the Challenger explosion), nuclear weapons and more. The lyrics are pretty amazing here; they manage to touch on all of these various hot-button issues while still sounding enigmatic and veiled, and they definitely make the song as good of a candidate as any to have functioned as The Big Anthem of the late 80's. Music-wise, it's stripped down more than anything since Dirty Mind, only going further than the material from that album in that the keyboard touches are very light. Just a few relatively simple drum machine patterns, a popping bassline and some sparse bluesy guitar lines, combined with a nice vocal melody, are all that are needed to make in this into a classic.

The other songs on this disc are fine, too. "Play in the Sunshine" could have come from Controversy and I wouldn't have known the difference, aside from the main rhythm obviously coming from a drum machine rather than Prince's own drumming. It's just a solid up-tempo pop song, full of fun vocal hooks and energy that strangely seemed missing on much of the last couple of albums. "Housequake" sounds, at first, like a somewhat dolt-ish funk song that Prince could have come up with in ten minutes, but while that might not be terribly far from the truth, it's grown on me considerably over the years. I think the main key is bothering to have a prominent trumpet part, making the song just feel like a solid update on the traditional soul/funk rave-up or whatever. Whatever the case, it's neat to have a fun song like this, built around the simple phrase, "Shut up already. Damn!"

"Ballad of Dorothy Parker" is another track that somewhat passed me by the first few times, but I've come to like this one quite a bit as well. It's quiet and low-key without having any clear direction or strong hooks, but the lyrics are sufficiently intriguing, and the song has atmosphere to spare. Plus, the song may be low-key, but it manages to have a deep funk element to it that largely reminds me of similar things from There's a Riot Going On, and as with most everything on that Sly and the Family Stone album, the song takes hold strongly once it takes hold.

The first disc, overall, strikes me as quite good, but not quite fantastic: it would be a high 7 or low 8 out of 10, a solid 11 out of 15 for me. The second disc, though, is mind-bogglingly stupendous, and enough to drag the album up to its present overall grade. If there's any flaw to it, it would be in the closing "Adore," which is yet another somewhat overlong (6:30) ballad to close out one of Prince's albums, but that's a minor flaw at worst. Prince has done better slow ballads, but he's definitely done worse, and there isn't any serious amount of cheese to drag it down a lot. The first six songs of the disc, then, are easily the best six-song stretch Prince has ever done. "U Got the Look" (with a guest vocal from Sheena Easton) was one of the album's major hit singles, and this is a time when I can definitely say the public got it right. It's full of big dumb hooks, set to a big dumb dance beat, full of ridiculous lyrics (with references to "The World Series of Love" and a chorus that includes the amazing lines: "Your face is jammin'/Your body's heck-a-slammin'/If love is good, let's get to rammin'." If that's not poetry, I don't know what is), and it's easily one of the very best big dumb dance songs I've heard from the 80's or ever. On paper, I shouldn't be big on it at all, but I love it, and I came oh so close to making it a 4th choice for best song on the album.

Of course, the next track serves as an instant reminder that Prince isn't just a great writer of hits; he's also borderline nuts. "If I Was Your Girlfriend" is a leftover from the "Camille" project, and it's as disturbing as a blatant gender-bending track sung by Prince can be. In addition to being disturbing, though, it's also surprisingly memorable and even moving, showing insight into the idea that a man, in the role of a boyfriend, can often not be as close to his girlfriend in various ways as her various close female friends can be. The lengthy ending monologue is somewhat horrifying, of course, but it manages to be funny, and if anything it makes the song even better.

The next two tracks originated in 1982, and they sound every bit as great as most material from Prince at that time sounded. "Strange Relationship" gets somewhat overshadowed by all of the greatness surrounding it, but make no mistake; were it on the first disc (not to mention on the last two albums), it would have stood out strongly. It's a relatively conventional mid-tempo dance-pop song, but the hooks are strong and the lyrics are interesting, and they make for an interesting number. Yet for all of this song's charms, it pales to the utter greatness that is "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man." The track is a roughly 4-minute pop song followed by a 2-minute coda, and both portions are amazing. The main song portion is one of the catchiest things Prince ever wrote, combining yet another great simple keyboard line with yet another set of perfect vocal hooks, all while singing the most infectious lyrics possible about a topic as sad as a man turning down a woman desperately looking to fill a recent void in her life. It's a nearly perfect pop song, and yet the song portion is almost overtaken by the coda, a blues-funk workout that goes from the up-tempo bliss of the main song into something incredibly moody and expressive. In the world of tracks that start as one song and finish as a completely different instrumental, this track absolutely belongs up there with "Can't You Hear Me Knocking," "Layla," "Freebird" and whatever other songs that can be thought of along these lines.

And yet, for all this praise, I definitely like "The Cross" just as much. Prince doing a Gospel song? Prince doing a Gospel song with political overtones?? Prince doing a Gospel song, with political overtones, that has a heavy Eastern tinge to it??! Prince doing a Gospel song, with political overtones, with a heavy Eastern tinge to it, with heavy metallic elements??!! Somebody pinch me!

Finally, the album's penultimate track is "It's Gonna be a Beautiful Night," a 9-minute funk rave-up recorded live by The Revolution in 1986. You might know it as the funk piece Prince did that was based around the "oh-wee-oh" vocal chant from The Wizard of Oz, and it's possible you might want to dismiss the track as a silly gimmick. Well, as mentioned before, I like my lengthy Prince funk jams piled high with gimmicks, and this track has plenty of them. There are great horn lines, and fun falsetto vocal parts, and call-and-response sections between people on stage, and Prince generally directing the action with reckless aplomb and showing that he could work an audience as well as anybody could. There's even a somewhat indecipherable, fast-paced rap near the end, which, uh, appears to be some sort of parable of some sort. Whatever, it's just another great element in one of the greatest doses of fun on any Prince album.

Now, of course, let's not get carried away; this album is too inconsistent in the first half to claim quite the pedestal that people want to put it on. There might be a better single-album's worth of material on here than on Controversy or Purple Rain, but there's more dead-weight than on those albums, too, and it's hard for me to think of this album leapfrogging either of those in my mind. And yet, the album is still really terrific on the whole, and it's definitely one of Prince's career highlights.

PS: For all of the praise I heap on this album, like so many others do, I want to offer a caveat. Because so many critics love this album, this often ends up becoming an initial entry point to Prince's career. As great as this album is, it is clearly one for those who have already familiarized themselves with Prince enough to have a good feel for all of his various quirks and eccentricities. This is not an album for the uninitiated, and from traveling around the internet I know there are more than a few people who bought this and gave up on Prince because it was too hard of a nut to crack. So in short, it's a classic, but if you don't know any Prince, maybe you should start with Dirty Mind or Purple Rain first.

Here's the thing: if this album was really Prince's attempt to immerse himself in contemporary black music, it's hard for me not to think that Prince didn't have a very high opinion in 1987 of contemporary black music. According to various accounts, one of the things that Prince disliked about this album the most was the tone of the lyrics towards sex and women; it treats both subjects in a very base and vulgar way, far from the pedestal that Prince usually put them on (Prince might usually be overly obsessed with sex, but it's clear that he treats it as a spiritual experience more than anything, and he clearly values women as something more than just objects of carnal desire). This is indeed a problem with the album; Prince is clearly not comfortable in taking this lyrical approach, and whereas all other Prince albums to this point had at least some goofy levity to them, this one is mostly just really uncomfortable (even the part in "Cindy C." where he's pleading to know why Cindy Crawford doesn't like him, sounds less like an overly smitten fan and more like a psychotic stalker). My favorite song on here, not coincidentally, is the one that sounds the least like Prince trying to sound like somebody else; "When 2 R in Love" isn't a spectacular ballad, but it's a good one, full of light touches and without any attempt to sound tougher than needed.

The lyrics, though, are not the biggest problem here. The overemphasis on getting back to Prince's funk roots leads him to make the songs overly dependent on relatively mundane (but, I guess, "authentically" funk) beats without bothering to put a sufficient amount of variation in the songs. The songs aren't exactly interchangable, of course, but there are none of the huge left turns in style or mood that had allowed Prince to make so many interesting albums in the previous decade. The one time he tries to engage in a lengthy funk jam ("2 Nigs United 4 West Compton," one of the worst song titles of all time), the results are sadly stiff, as if he was afraid to do anything interesting in it for fear of eliminating his cred. Aside from "Rock Hard in a Funky Place," a somewhat decent song with old-school horns and decent guitar work (it would have made for a nice filler track on Sign O' the Times, which is kind of a compliment, I guess), the other songs are barely worth discussing.

I don't know, honestly, if my reasons for disliking this album line up with the reasons Prince disliked it enough to pull it (and to do things like flash messages in his videos telling people not to buy this). I do know that many people who enjoy Prince enjoy for him for different reasons than I do, and the types of things they look for in Prince's music could, conceivably, lead them to enjoy this album a lot. As is, I just can't pretend that I like more than a couple of songs on here at all. Since this album is no longer in print (it got pulled again after its 1994 release), I can't even recommend trying to seek it out cheap.

The album sounds okayish at first as background music, but it fails to hold my attention when given any more than a cursory listen. The only track that stands out in any effective way is the closing "Batdance," and that's only because it's one of Prince's most insanely awful ideas ever. Two of the songs from the album, "Partyman" and "Trust," were prominently featured in the film itself, and while they serve a function as a strange counter to the standard orchestration of the rest of the movie, they sound completely limp and lifeless when listened to on their own. Just a couple of lazy throwaways that Prince could have come up with without breaking a sweat, that's what these sound like. "The Future" (which only appears briefly in the background near the beginning of the film) is no better, featuring what almost sounds like half of a melody missing its companion, over a lazy never-changing beat. Of the other songs, only "Electric Chair" shows any life and energy, but that still has little else. The only other track that especially stands out for better or worse is "The Arms of Orion," a ballad duet with Sheena Easton that reaches galactic proportions of tackiness. The rest just kinda sucks.

One could make the argument that this album is mostly harmless, and aside from something like "Batdance" doesn't feature anything that jumps out as an offensively bad idea. The problem I have is that most of the album contains ordinary bad ideas, and these bad ideas could have come from one of a thousand hacks that normally wouldn't have been fit to carry Prince's high-heeled shoes. There are many musicians who could have grabbed a dozen or so audio samples from the movie and stuck them at random through an album of tossed-off material, and the idea that such a thing could come from Prince is pretty infuriating. Avoid.

This is really too bad given that a 40-minute album, featuring just Prince performances of his own material, wouldn't be bad at all. I would never be able to adore it - there's a little too much aping of various 80's and early 90's trends that I'd tried to forget about to make this great - but I would definitely feel warmer towards it than not. "Can't Stop this Feeling I Got" (a leftover from 1982) isn't exactly one of Prince's best lightweight pop songs, but it's definitely not one of his worst either, and it's a fun enough way to start the album. Another highlight from early on is "The Question of U," a leftover from Parade (I actually guessed this before I read it for sure; in parts it sounds like an alternate version of "Under the Cherry Moon") that has a neat atmosphere and moody guitar work to spare.

Covering all the other good songs: "Elephants and Flowers" is a stomping, noisy groove that would have been a highlight on any late 80's Prince album (including Sign). "Joy in Repetition" is clearly a Sign outtake, and that's a good thing; there's a lot of low-key moody guitar and bass work, and while there's a lot of rambling vocals, the parts that emphasize the message of the title are enough to rein it in. "Tick, Tick, Bang" is a Controversy outtake, and it has appropriately inventive synth and drum work that makes it worthy of that period. "Thieves in the Temple" was the album's biggest hit, and it's probably the album's best song as well: it's catchy, it has a deep effective throbbing sound, and it's just oh so delightfully moody. Finally, "Still Would Stand All Time" is a little too slow and draggy to be especially noteworthy, but it mostly avoids tackiness, so it's nice enough.

Things aren't all wine and roses on the Prince side, of course; the two "New Power Generation" tracks are as embarrassing today as anything from the collaborative portion of the album. Ultimately, then, this album ends up being the most frustrating disc Prince had made to this point, and that says a LOT. There are eight, count them eight perfectly solid Prince songs on this album, and in any other circumstance that would lead to a pretty decent rating at minimum. Yet the rest of this album, for somebody like me with no nostalgic attachment to the music of this period, is pretty much unlistenable, and this is enough to discourage me from even going as high as a 6/10. If you can get the good songs from this album in a cheap way, go for it, but stay away from the rest.

Anyway, for the second time in a few years (the first being The Black Album, of course), Prince made an album that served as a response to continuous criticisms that he had veered too much towards pop and away from "urban" music. Much like The Black Album, this is an album that acknowledges the developments that had happened in this vein without Prince's direct input, and as on The Black Album a good chunk of it sounds really embarrassing today. In particular, this album makes prominent use of a guest rapper (that would appear on other Prince albums as well), Tony Mosely (formally a member of The New Power Generation, Prince's new backing band), and every contribution he makes sounds to me like it's drawing from all of the ridiculous stereotypes that I've built up in my mind for the genre. I can take a little solace, at least, that most people who enjoy rap seem also to think that these aspects kinda suck on this album.

Rap aspects aside, a lot of this album is basically dance club muzak, overly emphasizing generic 90's rhythms that are primarily intended to bring in people who don't actually like to listen to music. Oh, and a couple of the ballads are pretty icky and gloppy, without much in the way of hooks that please me. Truth be told, you could cut out the last three tracks (the closing "Live 4 Love" has some nice noisy guitar work, but it's too little too late), which take up almost 20 minutes by themselves, without me feeling the least bit of loss, and the less said about the awful "Jughead" (the album's rapping nadir) the better.

Still, there's quite a bit of nice material strewn throughout the first 3/4's of the album. "Thunder" is big stupid anthemic pop at its most glorious, and I even don't mind that it's clearly overlong (at 5:45). "Daddy Pop" and "Cream" are fun pop songs (funny that, on an album so devoted to reclaiming "urban" fans, there are still a nice bunch of pop songs) that show Prince jumping out of his skin to sound like the Prince from a decade earlier, and while they don't quite succeed on that level, I'm glad they're here. "Strollin'" is neat lightweight jazz-funk that gives some nice diversity to the album, "Gett Off" has enough oomph (lyrical and otherwise) to make its club-pop foundation almost sorta work, and even "Willing and Able" and "Walk Don't Walk" have enough charms to make me want to listen to them once in a while. The most pleasant surprise, though, is the oh-so-lovely Philly soul of "Money Don't Matter 2 Night," where it sounds (to me) like Prince managed to pull off an almost dead-on imitation of prime 70's Stevie Wonder. The keyboards and the percussion might be updated, but it's got a silky smooth delivery, an effortlessly catchy melody, and just such a warm vibe to it that I can't help but make the comparison. It may be just a genre exercise, but it's a great genre exercise, and it's easily my favorite song of the album.

As on the last album, there's a a lot of good material here that makes me feel a bit ridiculous giving this a mediocre rating, but I just can't get over how bad the lesser stuff is. Plus, while Prince's new band is really solid, there's a weird sterility in the sound that saps away some of the enjoyment even in the songs I basically like. Find a way to get the best songs (especially "Money Don't Matter 2 Night"), but use good judgement.

If there's a serious problem with the album, it's in a stretch in the middle of the album. Starting from the first "Segue" track, which introduces the Kirstie Alley thread, the only tracks I like in an eight track stretch are "Blue Light" (light reggae that's hardly substantial but is nonetheless an amusing stylistic diversion) and "The Continental" (a somewhat pro forma beat-heavy track that actually becomes disturbingly entertaining once it turns into light porn), and those hardly rise much above the level of "pretty okay." The other tracks in this stretch just have the same Prince autopilot feel that bothered me with much of the material on the last album, though maybe these have somewhat "darker" production.

Everything outside this stretch, though, is really great, for both quality and kitsch reasons. The opening "My Name is Prince" takes the "self-promoting hip-hop" genre into previously unreached stratospheres, featuring amazing lines like this page's main tagline, or "I did not come to funk around/'til I get your daughter, won't leave this town." There's a completely ridiculous rap in the middle, but it just feels right, even featuring off-the-charts lines like "Boy, I'll sink u like the ship Poseidon Adventure/U're bumping dentures 2 to be cocksure." The big synths, the beat, the popping basslines, the generic turntable scratching, everything makes this feel like a huge important statement about how Prince is the greatest force in the universe, and it's so earnest and funny that I can't help but enjoy it. I don't know how much it's meant to be taken as a comedy number (I'm guessing little to none), but I sure enjoy it as one.

"Sexy M.F." and "Love 2 the 9's" also fall into the "so ridiculous they're kinda awesome" category. Prince actually seems to have this rap thing somewhat down, and the combination in the chorus of that neat simple horn line and Prince's little kiss before the chorus is a strong enough hook to lift the song on its own. The instrumentation is varied and a lot of fun (horns, organy synths, solid guitar and bass, all very lively), and of course there's those ridiculous "SHAKING THAT ASS SHAKING THAT ASS" shouts that have me mentally rolling in the aisles. Yeah, this is one entertaining M.F. of a song. "Love 2 the 9's" might be even better, though. The song starts off as one of Prince's best, most playful lightweight ballads ever, but in the middle it starts its shift into more beat heavy territory until it culminates in the epic "DANCE GIRL, LEMME SEE THAT BOOTY BOOM!!" chants in the middle, before returning to the main song somewhat. I'd rather Prince rode the main portion of the song more than he did, but going off in such a weird direction seems about right for him, and I enjoy the song completely.

The remaining tracks before the aforementioned cruddy section are nice, too. "The Morning Papers" is a solid gospelish rock song with fine guitar, and "The Max" has a great "cosmic" opening synth sound that gives way to a terrific funky piano/bass riff that Prince rides well through the song. The guest rapping starts to get a little tiring on this track, but it doesn't bother me too much. Many tracks later, after about half an hour of relative mediocrity, we come to the album's other main highlight, simply titled "7." Try to imagine an Arabian-tinged funk/gospel song, with one of the best melodies Prince would write post-Signs, and you'll get an idea of how terrific this is. It's definitely one of the most addictive songs of the era.

The penultimate "Segue" track is completely ridiculous, and the closing "The Sacrifice of Victor" is a rather boring beat-heavy way to end the album, but the two tracks that come right before it are pretty great. "And God Created Woman" has a mystical sensuality to it that I could only imagine Prince creating, and the combination of this vibe and this melody makes it a classic. And finally, "3 Chains O' Gold" is a (borderline prog rock) adult pop song that could theoretically suck if it didn't keep jumping from interesting idea to interesting idea with such reckless abandon. If there's a better representation on this album of Prince's spastic genius than this song, I can't think of it.

Look, this is a horribly padded out double album, but it could have been an absolutely amazing single album, and that's enough to guarantee this a solid grade. I can't imagine a serious Prince fan not enjoying at least half of this a lot. And besides, for a 15th album, this is pretty top-shelf stuff.

These are some of the laziest tracks Prince had done to this point. They tend to revolve around rather stock, uninteresting beat patterns, vamped seemingly endlessly with little of interest going on above them. The opening title track, at the least, bothers to have a lot of decent horn playing during the track's eleven minutes, making it feel somewhat like a call back to traditional funk of long ago, but it's largely the exception. Aside from a couple of odd diversions, like the track where he largely mutters out lyrics about child abuse, or the closing "Orgasm" which is exactly what the title suggests and is time I'll never get back in my life, the album is just inoffensive beat-driven muzak. I suppose that the unrelenting dark vibe does a good job of reflecting the cover of the album, but it's still really disappointing that the strong diversity and risk-taking of Love Symbol could have disappeared so completely so fast. This is an album with almost nothing worthwhile to say about it, aside perhaps from the observation that multiple tracks follow a similar pattern in the drum machine pattern of speaking/whispering the title of the given song every few beats.

I almost feel like I should give this an even lower grade, but as I said, the title track is pretty nice, and since it takes up about a quarter of the album it counts heavily. Plus, unlike Batman or The Black Album, this does sound like an actual Prince album, even if it's just a totally half-baked Prince album. For die-hard completists only.