Prince's latest album Art Offical Age...

Is fucking phenomenal!

I was a die hard Prince fan from the mid eighties up until his last album with Warner Brothers called Gold. After that I lost interest in his music, his days of Dirty Mind, Darling Nikki and Cream were abandoned for his new religious outlook in life. Hell, even my parents who HATED his music when I was knee deep in his Royal Purpleness, attended his concert in the early 00s.

Being one of the last first world nations to adopt new technologies, Canada finally has entered into the era of Spotify and the first album that came up is Art Offical Age. Fully expecting to skip through most of the tracks I was immediately taken in and funkified for the next 50 minutes or so. Holy shit, he is still in fine vocal form, his sexy swagger and funky grace are all on display, something his early 90 albums were sorely lacking. Only two tracks didn't work for me "Gold Standard" and "Funknroll" but the rest were like a return home.

Sweet baal, how I miss my purple bedroom and being surrounded by my collection of Prince LPs, 45s, newspaper clippings and Rolling Stone magazines. Welcome back your Royal Purpleness.

It's definitely a more solid record than he's done in quite a long time. There are a couple of tracks that are thiiiiiiiiis close to being classic Prince ("Gold Standard", "Art Official Cage", "Funknroll", "Breakfast Can Wait"). But there's a few too many slow jams (and that says something, considering Prince is the MASTER of the slow jam- witness "The Beautiful Ones") and some awkwardly dated 1990s/New Jack kind of stuff going on.

"Art Official Cage" demonstrates that he's listening to Daft Punk, which is a good thing. There's a lot of good Prince stuff coming back...all of the weird voices, the mix of clever innuendo and direct "let's fuck" lyrics...but most importantly, one of the subtle things that I've always loved about Prince is that his records, his look, his band- the total package- created this alternate world. Look at those old videos, the band standing there on that white background in all of that dandy foppery. Lace and studs, punk and sex. Rock and soul. Romanticism and urbanity. It even extended into the side projects...Sheila E's records for example. That's almost felt in this record and I think that's what sets it apart from (god help us) "The Rainbow Children" and iffy records like "Musicology".

I like it a lot more than I expected...I figured it was going to be another cursory listen to the new Prince album to check and see if he's back from la-la land or not,

Very weird that it's on Warner Bros.

There is another new Prince record out, did you listen to 3RDEYEGIRL, "Plectrum Electrum"? It's an all-girl rock band...if you want rock Prince, it's pretty decent. Guitar playing is totally bad ass of course, Prince sings on most of the songs and he wrote all the songs of course. It seems about 15 years past its sell-by date, but it's also better than I expected.

Wow, I really want to hear "A Love Bizarre" right now.

Oh those slow jams hearken back to the "She's Always in My Hair"s and "Ballad of Dorothy Parker"s, which resally made the album for me. I could listen to that stuff forever. It's interesting that what we feel are classic Prince tracks are in opposition to one another. That may say a lot about the album itself.

I have yet to try the other album but will do so this weekend.

I'll always thank Prince for making the Superbowl memorable:

New album is pretty cool from a first listen, thanks man.

I listen to this acoustic performance of cream once a year or so.

www.mojvideo.com/video-prince-cream-mtv-...fa2348c62847d811759d

Prince did one 8-minute medley on Saturday Night Live this past weekend (one... I don't remember the last time a musical guest only performed once) and it was fantastic. I'm going to have to get one or both of those albums.