Ledger-Enquirer.com
Posted on Mon, Apr. 19, 2004

Right from the start of Musicology, on two party jams that could have been written any time during the last 25 years, Prince hammers home his theme: He's going to take listeners back to "the day."

"Wish I had a dollar for every time we say, 'Don't you miss the feeling music gave you, back in the day?' " he chortles on the title track, a rumbling James Brown-style jam dedicated to the "true funk soldiers."

Before the next song can begin, Prince twirls the knob on a staticky radio, where - naturally - every station is playing one of his classics. Then comes "Illusion, Coma, Pimp and Circumstance," a lust-and-money allegory not unlike those that lit up Lovesexy back in 1988. And in a sudden stop-time shout, the Minnesota iconoclast affects an old man's voice to boast, "Boy, I was fine back in the day."

Which day was that? Anyone around in the early '80s, when "Little Red Corvette" "1999," "Kiss," "When Doves Cry," and "When U Were Mine" were everywhere, knows the answer to that.

What's remarkable, and unexpected, is that after more than a decade of indulgent music-making heard by a dwindling audience of Internet faithful, the 45-year-old auteur is fine once more.

With the surprising Musicology (Columbia ***) and its live-performance corollary, a hits-for-the-last-time tour that has him selling out arenas again after nearly a decade, Prince couldn't be hotter.

Taken together, the album and tour provide the chance to witness a mad talent with a penchant for career self-immolation grind his way through flippant, not-exclusively-retro funk freakouts.

In other words, do anything to get his groove back.

The renewed interest in the Jehovah's Witness convert, who has retired some of his more salacious tunes, is largely thanks to the act of contrition he began earlier this year. He strayed, then saw the light. And now the new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee is begging for another chance.

Go ahead, give it up. Take a ride in the magic purple jalopy that's been up on bricks at Paisley Park. It's a time-machine now. The wizard of rococo dance-floor funk has scrubbed the "slave" markings from his face and resumed his place at the wheel. He's zooming past his indulgent recent work to return to his core competency: that dance-floor business, and the gilded age when his songs defined what was possible on the radio, and taught a generation of artists the virtue of audacity.

With Musicology, Prince does what his many detractors - pretty much the entire community of critics, radio tastemakers, and pop-culture gatekeepers - believed was beyond his present-day capability: He crafts a disciplined pop-rock-soul statement that's fun from start to finish and doesn't require a fan club decoder ring to appreciate.

It's got crazy-grabby hooks and moments of unexpected euphoric bliss. It takes swipes at Prince's rival in weirdness, Michael Jackson ("My voice is gettin' higher and I ain't never had my nose done," he sings on "Life of the Party"). And it delivers slivers of showstopping guitar cast in contrasting shades, from the metallic crunch of "Cinnamon Girl" to the liquid jazz that enriches the gentle bossa "What Do U Want Me 2 Do?"

In songs that resist overt religious proclamations and outright booty calls while flirting, as ever, with both extremes, Prince comes close to the fireworks-erupting energy of old. He looks to his Purple Rain heyday, then back further to display a formidable command of music history. There's a minute of ripping avant-jazz swing appended to the otherwise uneventful "If I Was the Man in Ur Life," and those organ chords of "On the Couch" align with the Sam Cooke gospel phase.

But he never succumbs to outright nostalgia. His vamps are as dense and culturally diverse (sitar over here, turntables there) as those of Outkast. His melodies are endlessly inventive when compared with the drooled sweet-nothings of the celebrated neo-soul crooners.

It's possible to read Musicology as not merely late-innings career reclamation, which it surely is, but as Prince's periodic table, a codification of funk's essential elements. The creator of "Soft and Wet" and "Gett Off" has appointed himself a Wynton Marsalis-style conservator of all that's "true" about funk. He connects the slow-cooking rituals of groove associated with Eddie Hazel-era P-Funk to the age of spotless and symmetrical computer music. He finds new application for the restraint that made James Brown a drama machine. He recasts Sly Stone utopianism in a language the hip-hop fringe can understand.

The pan-generational lunge works because it's based on the old-school ideal: Everything's so tightly wound it squeaks, each instrument contributes just what's necessary and nothing more. After years of struggle, Prince has decided that revisiting the past doesn't have to be a craven glory-grab. You hear the razor-sharp sounds, and fleeting mention of "terror wars," and you begin to think that the old purple eccentric hasn't lost it after all. Then you hear him utter the rallying cry "Watch me now," and for all his romantic, self-referential yammering about "the day," it's clear that this guy has his feet planted firmly in the present.

Contact music critic Tom Moon at 215-854-4965 or tmoon@phillynews.com. Album Review: "Prince: Musicology Columbia," *** (out of four stars). In stores Tuesday, Apr. 20.