On Musicology, Prince gestures in the direction of 1970s nostalgia, invoking Earth, Wind and Fire and Sly Stone, recalling the good old days "when we would compare whose afro was the roundest." But the yesteryear he's really wistful for is his own mid-1980s heyday. "Musicology" ends with a cute little audio montage: the sound of a spinning radio dial, picking up snatches of old Prince hits--"Kiss," "Sign 'O' the Times," "Little Red Corvette." The implication is clear: This is the good stuff; this is what you've been missing.

But there's a problem: Those one-bar snippets of Prince classics show up everything on Musicology. In the 1980s Prince moved brazenly from invention to invention. His hit singles offered a virtually unbroken sequence of sonic shocks, each carrying new kinds of weirdness onto the pop charts. The young Prince Rogers Nelson was bored with r&b production clichés--he had a particular aversion to horns--and in response, crafted his signature sound, the jagged keyboard-propelled funk of early hits like "I Wanna Be Your Lover," "Controversy" and "1999." These stark, irrepressibly danceable songs gave a virile edge to ticky-tacky synthesizer pop and established Prince's preference for spartan arrangements--and it is that eerie minimalism, the sound of something stripped out, that even today strikes the ear with such electric force. Think of "When Doves Cry" (1984), the spooky Number 1 hit from Purple Rain, which completely eschews bass; or "Sign 'O' the Times" (1987), which thrusts a chewy bass out front and brings in guitar only for an occasional bluesy accent; or the delicious "Kiss" (1986), a funk song so spare it seems scored for voice and rattling bones.

Musicology contains no such jolts. Prince the minimalist weirdo has become Prince the maximalist craftsman. The new album is a collection of impeccably realized stylistic exercises, with each horn line and gospel piano chord in its proper place, every song burnished to perfection, sounding exactly like it should. Prince has made a good record, and paid himself a poor tribute.

One of the little-discussed leitmotifs in pop music history is the role of competition in producing great music. All the arts have their rivalries, but popular music is a particularly intense contact sport; antagonisms play out on the Billboard charts and MTV and concert stages, with anxiety-of-influence neuroses hanging thick in the strobe-lit air. Consider the mid-1960s rivalries between the Beatles and Beach Boys, or between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Rap still thrives on the verbal blood sport of rhyme battles; and the extraordinary sonic richness of today's hit radio is due in large measure to competition between hip-hop producers, who vie to outdo each other with the freshest and most unusual new sounds and rhythms.

Prince has had his own history of rivalries, and on the evidence of Musicology, his competitive impulse is still robust. In the 1980s he was pitted against Michael Jackson in a clash of freaky-eccentric natural-born pop geniuses. Since then, the rivalry has cooled, but on the new record, Prince can't resist getting a dig in. "My voice is getting higher/And Eye ain't never had my nose done," he sings on "Life 'O' the Party," adding, "That's the other guy."

In any case, the real target of Prince's ire these days isn't sad, grotesque Michael Jackson but the rappers and deejays he dismisses in that snide lyric about turntables. Here is a great big snarl of artistic neurosis that Harold Bloom could appreciate. Prince exerted a powerful influence on the first generation of hip-hop MCs and producers, who sampled his records, copped his hauteur, studied his genre-melding and found inspiration in his talent for coaxing beautiful sounds from new machines. Sometime around 1990, the weight of influence shifted, and for years Prince expended a great deal of effort trying to incorporate hip-hop into his sound--hiring producers to punch up his beats, adding a pitiful rapper named Tony M. to his New Power Generation touring band, even attempting, in a few embarrassing instances, to rap himself.

Now, having failed to master hip-hop, Prince rails against it. His argument--that a turntable is no match for a band, that hip-hop isn't real music, etc.--is a case that even the woodsiest classic rock fans stopped making years ago, and should really be beneath the dignity of a guy whose synthesizer-steeped early records make most hip-hop sound as earthy as an Alan Lomax field recording. It's obvious, anyway, that Prince doesn't believe his own rhetoric. He's clearly obsessed with hip-hop; on Musicology, he keeps mentioning rappers--Missy Elliot, Dr. Dre and Eminem pop up out of nowhere, hobgoblins of Prince's subconscious--and it can't have escaped his attention that the best, most interesting, most beguilingly odd--most Princean--pop music is being made by rappers and their producers. Back on Grammy night, Prince watched the coronation of Outkast, the Atlanta hip-hop duo whose monster hit "Hey Ya!" is, in spirit if not in form, a Prince tribute, and is, truth be told, as woolly and irresistible as anything in the master's own songbook. If Prince is spoiling for a fight, is it because, deep down, he knows that his hip-hop followers have stolen his mojo?

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