In an era when not even Prince wants to be Prince anymore — he’s been the Artist Formerly Known as Prince for most of this decade — two new albums recall the glory days of Paisley Park’s Soul Brother No. 1.
One of the new albums comes from Beck, whose “Midnite Vultures” (Geffen), out Tuesday, plays like both an homage to and a parody of the ’80s Prince and his wildly suggestive, genre-hopping dancefloor madness. The other is by the Artist himself, “Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic” (Arista), and he’s brought the “Prince” name out of retirement to serve as the album’s producer. “He knows a hit,” The Artist has said of his alter-ego. “He’s a good editor.”
Prince did indeed know a hit — he made lots of them in the ’80s, while taking funk ‘n’ roll to hysterical extremes. During that time, no rock star could touch the seam of his purple bikini briefs. Prince was the sex freak with a sense of humor, the streetcorner mystic juggling sin and salvation like flaming batons, the singer rangy enough to evoke both Sly Stone’s rasp and Minnie Ripperton’s soprano trill in the same song, and the funkiest guitar player since Ernie Isley. His records weren’t linear journeys but madly spinning tops, throwing off sparks in a dozen directions at once. He was the most consistently innovative, watchable and entertaining artist of the ’80s, and the guy whose records you had to play if you wanted to party like it’s . . . well, you know.
Lately, the top has spun out of control, with The Artist putting out too much music in too little time. In one recent 20-month span, he disgorged nine albums’ worth of new or previously unreleased material. Those albums contained some wondrous moments, but they were also brimming with filler, and The Artist has been banished to the outer fringes of a pop culture he once so inscrutably ruled.
Now he’s back with the more carefully conceived and highly hyped “Rave,” his first for a major label since his acrimonious split with Warner Brothers in 1996. Like his ’80s work, the music on “Rave” ranges from funk to folk, but it’s not consistent enough to rank with his best. Nor is it even the best Prince album released this month.
That honor goes to Beck’s “Midnite Vultures.” It too is a flawed work, mainly because Beck carries his tongue-in-cheek soul-singer parody too far. But the album also exploits the 29-year-old Californian’s greatest strengths: He has a fan’s appreciation for many kinds of music and a deejay’s ear for mixing them, layering textures and words in ways that suggest multiple meanings.
Beck established his credentials on the acclaimed 1996 album, “Odelay,” a dizzying, dazzling pastiche of styles that brought hip-hop’s cut-and-paste production to bear on everything from rock and funk to bluegrass, blues and even classical music. “Midnite Vultures” is even bolder, with more explicit lyrics that traffic in the decadence of late-’90s Hollywood, if not early ’80s Paisley Park. Beck has made exactly the kind of pushy, witty and sexy party album that Prince used to crank out all the time.
“I’ll be your mistress,” Beck coos in a Prince-like falsetto on “Mixed Bizness.” On “Debra,” he again reaches androgynous vocal heights to declare, “I wanna get with you . . . and your sister.” But all this talk of menage a trois, gender reversals and mixing “business with leather” in “a garden of sleaze” is done with a humorous air that suggests the singer is winking at us, and himself. “Sexx Laws” kicks in with swaggering horns worthy of Tom Jones’ Vegas revue and wah-wah funk guitar. A banjo plucks away, oblivious to the keyboards whirring in otherworldly spirals around it, and Beck heads down Sunset Strip like a miscast low-rider: “Can’t you hear those cavalry drums/Hijacking your equilibrium.” In other words, strap in because we’re in for a wild ride.
At times, Beck’s parodies come perilously close to mockery. “Hollywood Freaks” finds him slurring like a wino binging on Ripple and Wu Tang-Clan bootlegs, and “Peaches and Cream” and “Debra” so completely absorb the Prince sound and attitude that it’s a wonder Beck didn’t hire Vanity to lip-sync backing vocals. But for the most part, Beck has a ball tweaking R&B’s I’m-a-hawg-for-you explicitness, joining in on the over-the-top fun even as he comments on it from his outsider’s viewpoint.
Always Beck sounds as though he’s aware that he’s not where he belongs; he’s not as suave and assured as Prince, and the music reflects the unsettled world of temptation in which he’s immersed. There’s a queasy undertow to his celebrations, heard in Roger Joseph Manning’s keyboards, which honk, flutter and splutter like “Star Wars” robots at a busy intersection. Beck and his band rewire Kraftwerk’s sci-fi techno (“Get Real Paid”), mate Tom Waits’ barnyard percussion with Stevie Wonder’s clavinets (“Out of Kontrol”) and slip away to revisit the singer’s acid-folk past during the coda of “Milk and Honey,” yet the arrangements play off each other to create a work more coherent than the scattershot “Odelay.”
The Artist aspires to similar heights on “Rave,” but its triumphs are undercut by weak material. “Undisputed” is its nadir, with The Artist bragging about his bad self while complaining that “commercialization of the music is what brought it down.” (Memo to The Artist: Should have thought of that before you signed that ill-fated $80 million deal with Warner Brothers a decade ago).
“The Sun, the Moon and Stars” finds The Artist resorting to rap-style toasting, complete with faux Jamaican accent, and his cover of Sheryl Crow’s “Everyday is a Winding Road” is a turgid gospel-style jam. But the creamy “The Greatest Romance Ever Sold” returns the singer to his between-the-sheets glory. Best of all is “Baby Knows,” with its carnival keyboards, insatiable drive and general air of delicious horniness.
It’s a taste of classic Prince, but buyers of “Rave” should get acquainted with their CD player’s fast-forward button because they could likely edit together a tighter, more listenable album than The Artist has made. It’s as though he provided all the ingredients anyone will need for a good party — some pre-cocktail meditations, a few shake-’em-to-the-floor jams, a handful of after-hours ballads — but never got around to mixing them into a strong, heady cocktail. Beck, on the other hand, puts it all together on “Vultures” — and suggests he knows more about what makes Prince great than The Artist does himself these days.
