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The Artist: A Princely Artist

Having spent the last three years insisting he isn't really Prince, whoever played Boston last Saturday spent two hours doing just the opposite. True, his official name has now gone from that silly symbol to the even sillier "The Artist." But his show at The Venue Formerly Known As Boston Garden amounted to a reclaiming of turf. You got the hard funk, you got the old stage moves, you got the rampant sexuality, you got the blurring of carnal and spiritual matters. In short, you got a vintage Prince show.

You didn't get it without some delay, however. The Artist's strategy of announcing the show just a week in advance only half worked, keeping scalpers to a minimum but causing long waits outside. The show was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m., but barely half the crowd had made it to the ticket windows by then. (Inside the FleetCenter, he was perhaps the first artist ever to use his own CDs as warm-up music). He finally made it on stage around 9:30, playing a shorter-than-expected 90-minute set, then breaking the 11 p.m. curfew for an extended encore.

"I just wanted to see if you all were still funky," he announced at the outset, possibly realizing that some old fans were wondering the same about him. The show seemed designed to remind you that he's still got more in common with George Clinton than with Michael Jackson by offering frequent echoes of the Purple Rain era (including occasional piano humping, by now as much a trademark move as guitar smashing is for Pete Townshend). His years as a studio introvert don't seem to have hurt his dancing, and he paused long enough to play flashy solos on guitar, bass, and keyboards. He didn't have Wendy & Lisa, but he did have the New Power Generation, a funkier outfit than the Revolution were. They showed their mettle, and their metal, on the music-biz treatise "Face Down" -- a throwaway on disc, a mighty mess of venom complete with a "dead like Elvis" vocal sample on stage.

The show's structure was familiar from the old days: a handful of funk numbers to start off, a few piano ballads to show his sensitivity, some wrestling with God in the middle, and a sexual celebration afterward. These last two sections were the highlights. He created the night's one glitch by choosing Joan Osborne's dippy "One of Us" as a spiritual number, but he scaled some heights with his own dark, devotional "The Cross." From there it was a short jump to the gender blurring of "If I Was Your Girlfriend" and the big release of "Sexy MF." Most of his greatest hits wound up going unplayed; the only really obvious choices ("Purple Rain" and "Little Red Corvette") were abbreviated and tossed off early. For someone who's released as much music as this artist -- er, Artist -- the night's mix of new songs and prime album tracks was the way to go. You don't make a comeback just by doing the oldies; you make one by partying like it's 1997.

-- Brett Milano