His Majesty (Page 2)

Musicology is a showpiece for Prince's lavish gifts. As usual, his songwriting is effortlessly sophisticated, balancing pop-tune accessibility with jazz chords, tricky key changes and moments of dissonance that resolve with a satisfying crash into a major chord progression. Prince plays some astonishing lead guitar, and sings superbly throughout, summoning different vocal timbres in nearly every song. In "On the Couch," a ballad, he croons lush blue notes in a feathery falsetto, while a background choir of overdubbed Princes chimes in with low and high harmony parts. He delivers the Teddy Pendergrass-style soul ballad "Call My Name" in a robust baritone; in "Illusion, Coma, Pimp & Circumstance"--the rawest and strangest funk on the album--his voice is nasal and gasping; in "What Do U Want Me 2 Do" he sounds clipped, boyish, bashful.

All this skill and formal polish is familiar from past Prince albums, but Musicology is in certain notable ways a departure. By far, this is Prince's most prudish record. Sex has always been his supreme subject, and unlike so many other musical lotharios, Prince is--or at least was--genuinely kinky. His dionysian streak first emerged on his third album, Dirty Mind (1980), and thereafter Prince made it his project to banish all double-entendres and fill his records with as many fantasies and perversions as possible. He sang about a 32-year-old woman who keeps her 16-year-old brother as a sex slave; he sang plaintively of his desire to be his girlfriend's girlfriend, so he could help her pick out clothes and dress her for a night on the town (and, while they were at it, have some lesbian sex); he wrote what may have been history's first cyber-sex ballad, back in 1996; he sang an ode to the pheromone.

On Musicology, Prince has tamed his lust. There are sexy songs--"Call My Name" and "On the Couch" are make-out tunes par excellence--but the sex is implied in the slow-simmering grooves, not spelled out in the lyrics. The closest Prince comes to talking dirty is when he begs an angry lover to let him back in bed, so he can "go down south"--rather coy words from the creator of "Jack U Off" and "Pussy Control."

In fact, the Prince we encounter on Musicology sounds suspiciously like a married, middle-aged Minnesotan (all of which he is). He's concerned about politics (three songs take swipes at George W. Bush), in love with his wife and, despite the obligatory party tunes, in a subdued, meditative mood. The album ends with one of the most touching songs Prince has written, "Reflection," a loping ballad, nudged along by woodwinds and a high-riding bass, which offers as poignant a picture of mid-life happiness and resignation as you're likely to find in a pop song. Its lyric meanders from tender domestic scenes ("Did we remember to water the plants 2day?...Tell me do U like my hair this way?") to some cryptic lines about death and loss ("It's nice 2 know/That when bodies wear out/We can get another... Eye was just thinking about my mother") to an almost pastoral concluding verse, in which we glimpse Prince strumming a guitar on his front porch at day's end, like a crusty bluesman.

The gentleness of "Reflection" suggests that Prince is aging gracefully, easing into the late afternoon of middle age. But elsewhere on Musicology, we meet a more cantankerous figure. The fact that Prince is no longer a sex fiend comes as a mild surprise; it's a real shock, though, to find Prince, who for years was the embodiment of everything musically new and weird, embracing a schoolmarmish brand of musical traditionalism. Can the man who gave us "Computer Blue" and other masterpieces of robotic-funk really have become a roots-music snob?

It sure sounds like it. Musicology's title track is a shamelessly note-perfect James Brown pastiche, an "old school joint/4 the true funk soldiers" that centers on a rhetorical question: "Don't u miss the feeling/Music gave ya/Back in the day?" With its horn stabs, cracking snare drum and percolating bass line straight out of "Sex Machine," "Musicology" is designed to stoke nostalgia for that allegedly better, nobler musical era, and to set up another question, Prince's big punchline, a dig at hip-hop, delivered with a gruff harrumph over a stop-time: "Take ur pick--turntable or a band?"

As a marketing ploy, Prince's newfound nostalgia makes some sense. For the past several years, r&b has been overrun by earnest young singers, wielding tattered copies of Stevie Wonder's Innervisions and Fender Rhodes electric pianos, who revive, with varying degrees of skill and slavishness, the sound of 1970s soul. After a decade in the commercial wilderness, Prince may have decided that neo-soul was good business. After all, he's capable of disappearing into the studio for an afternoon and churning out a period piece that young stars like D'Angelo, Erykah Badu and Alicia Keys would labor over for weeks.

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