Publication: Village Voice [US]
Date: December 10, 1996
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Title: "Glyph Notes"
Reviewed By: Daisann McLane

*Emancipation* -- the title of the new album from The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (whom I shall henceforth, in the interests of readability, refer to by birth name only) -- is a word heavy with meanings, and Prince means them all. Earlier this month, when he debuted his 36-song, three-hour-long triple CD for press, friends, and his new wife (he's married now, and a dad, though the health of his baby is the subject of speculation), he opened by playing a recording of Martin Luther King's "free at last ... free at last" oration. At first this seems like a grandiose gesture from a musician celebrating his freedom from the oppression of a $100 million contract with Warner Bros. A George Clinton might've pulled off this play by squeezing the last drop of high-ironic juice from the juxtaposition. But irony, especially the self-reflective kind, has never been a Princely quality. We're asked to buy Prince's emancipations -- economic, emotional, physical, sexual, and artistic -- at face value, as a package deal (albeit at a discounted price of $25.99). The question is, should we?

One of the truisms of pop music is the incompatibility of artistic freedom with the machinery of the marketplace. The old saw goes that the Artist needs to be set loose in the playground to pursue his or her own unique vision, free from the fetters of the Company. It's a high-modernist view of artistry that's faded from fashion in other spheres, but it's still accepted in the music business despite all evidence that freedom gets you at least two George Michaels for every Springsteen. What's more, the Artist myth obscures the reality that much of the greatest pop's been crafted by anonymous, often exploitative, hit factories from the Brill Building to Studio One.

Though the latest press release on Prince would have you believing that the issue of artistic freedom and total control materialized over the last four years of his frustrated relationship with Warner's, that's not so. control was a front-and-center there in Prince's career right from the get-go in 1978 -- why else make your debut LP (For You) a one-man-band affair if not to make sure you are the one calling all the shots? For a black musician trying to bust open pop's segregated genres and playlists, the control-freedom thing took on even greater resonance. Yet, paradoxically, by claiming pop's whites-only modernist myth for blacks, Prince distanced himself from other black musicians still working the home turf where community and collaboration are aesthetic priorities.

His 1984 and 1990 movie musicals, Purple Rain and Graffiti Bridge, illustrate -- cartoonishly -- the racial and cultural tensions of Prince's position. In both films Prince's character, the Kid, has to hold forth against the subversive plots of the jive-talking, vaudeville-circuit figure of Morris Day, whose groove-machine band, the Time, threatens to wipe the Kid's less commercial rock-funk off the map. Day, the quintessential party down crowd pleaser, just wants to have fun, and he, not the Kid, is the people's choice. "Nobody's ever gonna appreciate my music," the Kid laments in Graffiti Bridge. Of course, by the end of the film, the public has come around to Prince's side -- it's his movie, after all -- and both films close with triumphant performances, tours de four as passionate as they are personal.

Real life didn't turn out like the movies. In 1984, the Purple Rain soundtrack sold 13 million copies, and soon after, Greg Tate saluted Prince for "securing the black rock revival." Though it's true that Prince's mega-success paved a path for black rock artists from Living Color to Me'shell N'dgeOcello, when it came time to write the book on black-white crossover pop in the '90s, Prince wasn't at the keyboard. Nor was it his trademark sound, the Sly-Hendrix-cum-Van Halen funk and metal, that persisted as the groove to conquer. Instead, Prince got nudged from the vanguard by hiphop, a music that in its embrace of postmodern techniques like sampling, its insistence on authenticity and populism, and its exaggerated masculinity was just about the antithesis of everything that Prince, the pop modernist, stood for.

Meanwhile, Prince, self-isolated in his Minnesota playground, Paisley Park, continued to turn out music that was at worst good and at best brilliant -- but never as galvanizing or of the moment as his breakthrough albums of the early '80s. Finally, he resorted to parody of the genre that had rushed to fill the space that he had opened, on The Black Album. His sales sagged, his feud with Warner's escalated, and he turned his name into a glyph. Now he's free at last -- at least on the business side. In his new deal, Prince makes the music, packages it, and then *pays* EMI to manufacture and distribute it. The total control, though, comes at a price, for if Prince stiffs at the box office he stands to drop a bundle.

Well, I'm rooting for the happy ending. Emancipation is a sprawling and at times self-indulgent work that probably could have been trimmed to a double CD. That's the obvious thing to say, and most of the critics have said it -- but then when they suggest what cuts should stay, not one comes up with the same list. I'm not surprised. Emancipation is a fully stocked candy store: too much, but oh so luscious and you want to try everything. Songs begin in one key and tempo, then suddenly a shimmering bridge slips in out of nowhere, or there's a sharp right turn into a whole different genre. From slow groove, funk, swing, jump, techno, cha-cha, psychedelic, and mainstream rock to, yes, even hiphop, Prince lays them all down, reminding us that he's probably the only American musician alive who can do this all so well.

Although Emancipation's breadth may overwhelm, there is a structure to it. CD number one has a party jam-midtempo feel; number two drifts off into Quiet Storm land as Prince meditates on his favorite recurring motifs, sex and redemption; number three gets more contemporary, with samples, rap, and techno beats used to cast a dark, ominous mood. As you'd expect from this modernist holdout, the Artist's personal preoccupations are central. It's all about his emancipation: from corporations and adversaries (the explosive "Face Down" with its "Dead like Elvis" sample), and from empty relationships (in "The Holy River," 38-year-old Prince finally discovers the joys of monogamy).

Emancipation treads dangerously close to the banal and solipsistic but never trips over the edge, because in celebrating his newfound personal freedoms, Prince is getting off so good that it gushes out of the speakers. Interestingly, the musical era that Prince quotes more often than any other is the black music of the late '60s and '70s, a time when black pop musicians, liberated from the commercial strictures of the three minute single, stretched out to meditate, politicize, prophesy, and sexualize on "concept" LPs. Echoes of Sly's "Family Affair," the Isley Brothers' "Fight the Power," the O'Jays', and Curtis Mayfield lurk in almost every track on the first of Emancipation's CDs; the sex and romanticism of Marvin Gaye and Gamble-Huff get their due implicitly in Prince's jaw-dropping displays of falsetto, and explicitly with covers of Thom Bell classics "Betcha By Golly Wow" and "La La La (Means I Love You)."

Black music of the '70s was both utopian and romantic, and certainly, in hindsight, overly optimistic. Anybody who hung out in Philadelphia during the Gamble-Huff days couldn't help but notice the disjuncture between the lush universe of the Philly sound and what was going on in the neighborhood. Still, there were healing and transcendence coming out of those hermetically sealed worlds of those studios, and Prince's Emancipation brings that back not only as nostalgia, but as an alternative for an audience that isn't old enough to remember the first go-round.

Whether Prince has stumbled onto the next period revival trend remains to be seen. All I know is that against the current pop background of grunge angst, hiphop posturing, and general despair and cynicism, the pleasure Prince communicates practically feels revolutionary. It's part of his emancipation that doesn't belong only to him, that's beyond his control. It's the part everybody can share.