Publication: New York Times [US]
Date: January 13, 1997
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Title: "Still a Master of Precision, And Still Bathed in Purple, Prince Learns to Let Go"
Reviewed By: Neil Strauss

On his new three-CD set, "Emancipation," the Artist Formerly Known As Prince) hereafter abbreviated as Prince) tears his heart out in a song with the chorus, "I can't make you love me if you don't." It is the ultimate ballad of frustration for a pap potentate, an admission that there is something in this world he can't make someone do. Since the beginning of his career, Prince has been about control, from his insistence on playing almost all the instruments on the majority of his recordings to his recent battle for autonomy from Warner Brothers Records to his idiosyncratic rules about what names he is to be called, how business is to be conducted with him and how interviews are to be carried out.

But this kind of obsession with detail isn't necessarily a bad thing. On Saturday night at Roseland, Prince and his five-member back-up group, the New Power Generation, performed a riveting, celebratory show that, at just under two hours, went by all too quickly. (The show, at $50 a ticket, was a benefit for Prince's charity, Love 4 One Another.) Every dance step, every wave of the hand, every entreaty to the audience was precise, methodical and effective. Verses were dropped from songs, samples were changed and extra instrumental bridges were inserted so that what was built up in crisp, beautiful layers in the studio could be scrupulously stripped down to adrenalized electro-funk. Lurking behind the virtuosity and the showmanship was another attribute Prince has rarely been given credit for, a sense of humor.

Despite criticism since the beginning of the decade that he has lost the abiltiy to filter good material and ideas from bad (an extension of various types of has-been accusations that have dogged him after the success of "Purple Rain"), Prince remains one of pop's most gifted control freaks, performing a crossover pop that few have been able to match, though many have tried. During the show, Prince, bathed in purple lights, traded off between emoting on a guitar shaped like the glyph that his name has become, finding raunchy funk on a bass guitar and working out on an electric piano.

The show contained a few gems from the back catalog, "Purple Rain" and "If I Was Your Girlfriend, and an awkward cameo from Chris Rock, but most of the time was spent bringing "Face Down," "Mr. Happy," "One of Us" (a version of the Joan Osborne song with the word "slob" changed to "slave") and other songs from "Eamncipation" (NPG Records) to life. Though sometimes it seems as if Prince hires band members for their looks, his group had the skills to match, playing virtuosic slide guitar, fretless bass and synthesizers that approximated whatever instruments were missing.

One of self-discipline's great advocates, Prince ahs been playing down the carnal and focusing on the things he cannont control: God, love, mysticism, freedom, record contracts and the gray area where they all collide. When subjected to what he should be able to control, like a record company and false friends, Prince is miserable, complaining that "everybody keeps trying to break my heart" in songs like "Slave." But when it's a higher power he's subjected to, he's ecstatic, rapping in concert: "I'm even with the blindfold, gagged and bound/See this ain't about sex/It's all about love being in charge of this life and the next." For Prince, there's a thin line between victimization and transcendence.

The audience was one thing Prince didn't have to worry about losing control of on Saturday. It was in the palm of his hand cheering wildly for every nuance in his voice and gesture. With only the slightest provocation, the audience sang the first half of "Raspberry Beret." Prince, who plans to return later in the year on an arena tour, not only worked the paying crowd in the tradition of funk acts from James Brown to Zapp, but he worked music executives, entreating them by name to dance. His self-obsessed side only came out when he dedicated "Mr. Happy" to "the emancipator", L. Londell McMillan," who wasn't a civit rights hero, but the lawyer who helped him out of his contract with Warner Brothers.