Lovesexy II

Prince gets back to the meat of it all

by Stephanie Zacharek

There's something naively charming about the "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" label on the front of Prince's new three-CD Emancipation (NPG). Of course there are dirty lyrics on Emancipation; would it be worth buying if there weren't? Yet Emancipation, Prince's first CD since he was released from the Warner Bros. contract he despised, is totally different from any other Prince album. (For the record, I don't believe that my refusal to refer to him by an unpronounceable glyph makes me the Floyd Patterson of rock critics.)

Prince is still obsessed with sex, redemption, yadda, yadda, yadda, but there's a new wrinkle this time: a good portion of the songs on Emancipation refer to his recent marriage to Mayte, a back-up singer in his band, with whom he's had a child. So on the one hand, you have the Prince we know and love singing without shame about the joys of cunnilingus ("Every man's got a duty, and tonight I'm going to do mine"), and on the other, you have a new Prince pledging love until the end of time to one woman ("Friend, lover, sister, mother, wife/Air, food, water, love of my life"). Weirder still is that on "Sex in the Summer," he uses a sample of his unborn child's ultrasound heartbeat -- it's a soft, breezy whoosh -- to echo one of the song's themes (the delight of seeing a woman's light summer dress flutter up around her legs in the breeze).

Suddenly, Mr. Bad Example himself -- remember, it was Prince's 1999 that gave Tipper Gore the idea for the PMRC -- has become the model of monogamy, and an incredibly likable, genuine one too. Which raises an interesting question. How would the bluenoses react if they knew that the artist who embodied everything they hate -- and an African-American male, to boot -- is now singing the praises of committed, caring relationships? It's strange to think that while the nation's country singers are raking in millions by singing about cheatin' and lyin', Prince gets a parental-advisory sticker on an album that contains some of the sweetest, most utterly devotional love songs he's ever recorded.

Then again, anyone who's followed Prince's career knows that he's a sucker for romantic excess, and so though Emancipation is different from any other Prince album, it doesn't represent a particularly shocking turn. For one thing, it's a sprawling release, just what you'd expect from an artist who had pestered Warners to release three or four albums a year. It's three solid hours of music, untrimmed and floating free: songs drift on minutes past their natural expiration time, hanging on like overripe fruit. You have to pick your way through Emancipation, avoiding snoozer ballads like the Caribbean-flavored "Soul Sanctuary," or the album's two Philly-soul covers -- of the Stylistics' "Betcha by Golly Wow" and the Delfonics' "La, La Means I Love You" -- both completely sincere and totally unnecessary.

But the majority of songs -- even the ones that go on too long -- hang together beautifully. Prince sounds more engaged here than he has in a long time. Emancipation is a wonderland of sound, from the boom-shacka-lacka beat of "Sleep Around" to the buttery piano-and-bass of "Let's Have a Baby" to the rat-a-tat tap performance by Savion Glover that he works into "Joint 2 Joint." Prince doesn't seem to have censored himself much, which is why though Emancipation isn't close to being a masterpiece, like Purple Rain, it does have flashes of brilliance.

As explicit as Prince is, you never think of him as particularly revealing; he was always pretty good at conveying the subtleties of heartbreak, but he'd do it with lines like "When you were mine/I used to let you wear all my clothes." On Emancipation he sounds more open than ever, even singing, at one point, "The more they [people] say they love you, the more you just wanna die."

What's most amazing is how little he sounds like himself when he gets to this line, about proposing to his wife: "That night I drowned in her tears and mine/And instead of a glass of sorrow, oh, wine." The line is trite, but it's the way he sings it that's striking. His phrases are flattened and stretched out, but clipped at the end -- you'd swear he's doing Dylan.

And maybe he is. The message of Emancipation seems to be "I'm not the person I was before, and I've never been just one person, anyway." Now more than ever, Prince is free to be Dylan, a Stylistic, or just the self-described skinny-mother-fucker-with-the-high-voice. He's also a family man and an unrepentant hedonist, a curious and wonderful combination. He'll probably be getting parental-advisory stickers when he's a grandfather.