Publication: Microsoft Music Central [Internet]
Date: November 23, 1996
Section:
Page Number(s):
Length:
Title: Music Central Review
Reviewed By: Tom Moon

Emancipation
The Artist Formerly Known As Prince
(4 & 1/2 out of 5)

r e v i e w

The man is a machine. A compulsive verse-chorus-hook generator. A pop scholar who transforms the most ordinary phrase into a refrain that hangs around way too long in your brain. An absolute groove god — just when you think the stock medium-tempo funk backbeat is worn completely out, he finds another way to make it sizzle, like his drum machine's got extra keys on it or something. There's no getting around it: Even on a bad day, the "Artist Formerly Known As Prince" takes the forms and chord sequences that everybody uses and makes music that's ear-bendingly different, daunting, challenging.

It's no secret why his batting average is so high: He steps up to the plate a lot. While most veterans in the record industry fuss and worry for years over the next "statement," the former Prince just tries shit. Over the last several years, his output for Warner Bros. revealed this tendency to be a double-edged sword. There was healthy experimentation as well as total excess, and sometimes it seemed that in his quest to get the next thing on tape, the Artist didn't spend too much time figuring out which was which.

Of course, being prolific has its disadvantages — even Mozart wrote his share of business-as-usual music to pay the bills. There's some of that on the new three-disc Emancipation, the former Prince's first effort since terminating his long-term contract with Warner Bros. earlier this year, but not much. Of the 36 selections, only three or four beg to be skipped over. The remainder is the work of an artist whose sketchiest throwaways are interesting, whose instincts have a way of broadening the music, whose every vocal improvisation carries some disarmingly potent emotion with it.

Indeed, the vocal performances may be the most compelling reason to dig into Emancipation: It's a scat-singing primer, a showcase for the former Prince's gallery of vocal personas. There are sweet soul ballads (including the first single, a remake of the Stylistics's "Betcha By Golly Wow") that test his agile falsetto, and more agitated urban beats that find him growling, and rock anthems that display his fervent, evangelical determination. There's a cover of "One Of Us" that sends Joan Osborne back to school, and any number of tracks where the official melodies are enhanced by the Artist's wriggling, tormented ad-libs: Anybody looking for a concise summation of R&B vocal styles from 1955 to the present, a thread that links Sam Cooke to Sly Stone to D'Angelo, is referred to "Sleep Around," or "Damned If I Do," or "The Holy River," or "We Gets Up" — the whole sweeping history is in there, made gloriously alive by one of the planet's most gifted voices.

Naturally, the arrangements supporting these vocals are meticulous and imaginative — orchestral flourishes (both live and sampled) adorn otherwise simple songs like "Style," and sassing, catcalling horns send attitude flying in all directions on "We Gets Up" and others. (Of the horn showcases, "Sleep Around" deserves special mention; check the way a sustained single B-3 organ note functions in the instrumental interlude, as a tension-producing agent against the busily bebopping horns.) The Artist doesn't just go with what he knows, either. "Damned If I Do" concludes with an irrepressibly sexy Afro-Cuban son montuno, while the languid dreamscape "Soul Sanctuary" is anchored by an ensemble of hand drums working a calm repetitive pattern that evokes classic bossa nova.

It 's impossible to know whether this bold move — dumping more than three hours of music into the marketplace at one time, less than six months after the last release — will help turn the former Prince's career around. It really doesn't matter anyhow. What we have here is music that demands to be studied and lived with and slowly absorbed, music that defies instant appraisal, music that may well be too deep for the radio. It's an extraordinary creative unburdening from one of pop's more fearless and open-minded characters, and we're lucky to have it.