LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

      The story of Prince – like those of his friend and collaborator Miles Davis, and his fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan – confirms the falsehood of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line about there being no second acts in American lives. The myth of America is all about successive rebirth, about self-determination, about putting time into reverse and seeming to grow younger rather than older. If America is also a language experiment, then archetypal Americans – and Prince, Miles, Dylan inhabit that category – almost always take a playfully cavalier attitude to their own creations.

      It’s about time, in both the word’s senses. If Dylan can take a cherished song and put it to a reggae beat or slow it down so drastically that only a few stray lyrics seem familiar; if Miles could turn his back – as he notoriously used to do on stage – on his own part in some of the classic jazz albums and in favour of youthful street music; then Prince has followed them in treating his own astonishing body of songs – many hundreds in the public domain, countless others as yet unheard – as if they were counters on an improvisational game-field, part of an open flow of ‘work’ rather than canonical ‘works’. The hard thing for any student of Prince, but an endless source of delight and discovery for his admirers, is that the real work does not come through to us as settled ‘product’ but as a tricksterish chase after bootlegs, reworked ideas, wilful suppressions and mere rumour. It has kept him, depending on how you look at it, either ahead of everyone else, or in sole charge of his own enigmatic game.

      The time frame is important. As a very young man, Prince appeared to be the most exciting musician in America, uniquely allowed by a major corporation to make his own music exactly as he chose. Not much more than a decade later, Prince – or whatever he then called himself – was a laughing-stock, paranoid, conspiratorial, creatively burned out, broke. It’s hard to judge whether his disappearance from the scene was a personal crisis like the drug-fuelled disillusion that drove Miles Davis away from active music-making at the end of the 1970s or was part of a capriciously contrived withdrawal like Bob Dylan’s much exaggerated motorcycle accident. Whatever the truth, all three men came back, Miles and Dylan with something new in their music, Prince seemingly content to catch up with some of the unexplored dimensions of his own almost absurdly eclectic past where a single record might contain elements of jazz, funk, r’n’b, bubblegum pop, psychedelia and hard rock.

      The comeback wasn’t quite overnight. Prince signalled his intention to be part of the new millennium with 2001’s jazz-inflected Rainbow Children, which seemed to be largely concerned with his becoming a Jehovah’s Witness. Two years later, and this time on the nomadic NPG imprint which allowed him to preserve some degree of creative if not distributional independence, he released N.E.W.S., a set of rough jams that didn’t sound like a finished

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