Damn!”-sound like a cameo by one of the Chipmunks. “Housequake” combines live horn solos, an irresistibly noisy digital drum-machine pattern that Brown himself would never have used, blasts of guitar and horn that paraphrase Brown’s late-sixties work, and Prince’s own voice, sped up in pitch just enough to make his opening announcement-“Shut up, already. Take several songs from his 1987 masterpiece, “Sign o’ the Times.” On “Housequake,” Prince turns one of James Brown’s vamps into a hybrid that is simultaneously homage, parody, and elaboration. His songs can be maudlin, clever, obvious, as ornate as Versailles, as simple as pencils, hilarious, crude, breathtakingly wise, corny, and so musically rich that he seems to be working with instruments nobody else owns. He cannot limit himself to one voice, style, or emotional position. The nature of Prince’s implausibly enormous gift made this overambitious work arrangement seem logical. (Prince had three of his own that year-as he often notes during his set, “So many hits, so little time.”) This tally doesn’t include the work he did for acts within his orbit that he produced, played with, or wrote for: the Family (for whom he wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the ballad of unbearable longing later made famous by Sinéad O’Connor), Vanity 6, Madhouse, Jill Jones, the Time, and Apollonia 6. and Chaka Khan scored top-ten hits with songs he had written. Prince’s songwriting heyday, which stretched from 1979 to 1988, is rivalled only by the Beatles’ in generosity, formal variety, and intensity.įor a while, songwriting seemed to be Prince’s primary gift, and unstoppably so.
The fact that, as he says during his live shows, “my friends all look different-I look just the same” simply enhances the impression that he is our Dorian Gray, if Gray had been raised by Cher and James Brown.
He is perhaps the greatest living performer in the pop tradition. It doesn’t matter that the artist, who is forty-eight, has released only a handful of decent recordings in the past fifteen years. Prince has been performing midnight shows there on Fridays and Saturdays since November (though he’s missed a few weekends). Why would you do this? Because the musician you are seeing is Prince, who made an agreement with the Rio hotel-its purple décor reportedly pleased him-to turn Club Rio into a club called 3121, after Prince’s agreeably funky but modest 2006 album of the same name. Photograph by Martin Schoeller / Corbis Outline Weekends in Vegas: Perhaps the greatest living performer in the pop tradition.
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