love is sexy

It was a great disappointment considering all the hype that surrounded it.

First came the whispers: the next joint was going to be his return to grace, his unofficial comeback. No more Beatle-esque psychedelia or baroque orchestrations or French-infused jazz noodling, no more pat Top 40 pop designed to skyrocket to the top of the dance charts...

No, Prince's next album after Sign O' The Times was supposed to be the Death Blow to all the haters and naysayers out there who claimed he'd gone soft.

It was going to be released without a title or any cover or sleeve art. It was tentatively known as "The Black Album", perhaps a hyper-parody of the memorable gag from This Is Spinal Tap. Certainly, with all the interference Warner Bros. was creating in conjunction with his releases, Prince may have been making a sly joke, one that poked fun at the absurdity of the music industry in general.

Then, a few months before its slated release date, the word got out that Warner Bros. shelved the album and another one was slated to be put out in its stead. Fans were taken aback but not disdainful-- after all, this was Prince: a bona-fide musical genius with a proven track record for penning successful hits and selling millions of funky albums worldwide. They figured that if the album was getting 86'ed, there was probably a good reason.

We all awaited the coming of the next album. I was in the 8th grade and my parents were on the verge of splitting up. I needed this album.

A single dropped from out of the sky: "Alphabet St". Catchy, yes, and it went on to be a hit... but it seemed like a bad omen. Soon the fans were wondering if maybe shelving "The Black Album" was such a good idea.

I bought a copy of Lovesexy when it came out. I still own the vinyl, with its garish cover art portraying Prince in the airbrushed nude sitting on a flower, posing demurely. It was embarrassing to look at-- I would've felt more comfortable carrying home an S.O.D. album or a Skrewdriver cassette than Lovesexy.

I gave it a listen. It was good, but it wasn't "The Black Album"... it wasn't even Around The World In A Day.

It became my least favorite Prince album, and also the least listened-to album of his in my collection. With the sole exception of one song, "When 2 R In Love" (the lone holdover from the aborted "Black Album" sessions) there was very little for me to gush over, even as I went out and bought all the accompanying singles on 45 (I was hoping the B-sides would be better, and they were).

My verdict: Lovesexy was a dud. Oh well, maybe he'll come to his senses and release "The Black Album" after all. Perhaps the next album will be better.

I was 14 years old at the time.


*/*


I'm 33 now.

In the time between Lovesexy's release and today, much has happened to me, the rest of the world, and Prince in particular. Contract disputes, name changes, ups and downs, and even Super Bowl appearances have overshadowed the substance of his music. Still, the man has undergone a genuine revival, heralded as a pop icon, a living legend and an accomplished musician in his own right.

The Black Album eventually saw the light of day, if only to help Prince get out of his seven-album contract with Warner Bros., and even then it was released as a limited edition CD... not that any self-respecting fan didn't already own a bootleg copy of their own.

When I finally heard The Black Album (around the time that he was doing the soundtrack for the first Tim Burton-directed Batman movie) I thought it was spectacular. "How could he release Lovesexy in lieu of this?" I asked myself. Granted, The Black Album didn't quite live up to its storied hype itself, but it was definitely funkier and harder than Lovesexy.

And speaking of stories, there were several to speak of that haunted Prince's reputation: Warner Bros. thought The Black Album was too risque; Prince was the one who pulled The Black Album because he had a vision from God; Prince was hooked on drugs and Lovesexy was his rehab effort...

The only way I could ever really listen to Lovesexy was to dub it onto one side of a blank cassette with The Black Album on the other side; this way, it served as an exotic double-concept album.

As the years passed by, Metallica released their own Black Album, thereby imploding the Spinal Tap joke on itself. Life was now imitating art twice over, and by the time Jay-Z released his own Black Album I'd had enough of the whole notion.

Meanwhile, Prince was free from the WB and became a Jehovah's Witness, and began to retool his public persona. He went from appearing as an out-of-touch rich recluse to a pop visionary who had been so far ahead of his time that only now were people beginning to catch up.

His music got better. It sounded more soulful, more passionate. He seemed at peace with his dual nature, that impulse torn between God and Satan, a theme that has permeated nearly all of his work.

And with that, I began to look back on the classic albums and reevaluate them. Some of them needed no reappraisal (1999, Parade) and some of them were surprisingly revealing when I revisited them (Purple Rain, Dirty Mind, Controversy).

And in the latter category, Lovesexy stands alone.


*/*


Looking for cover tunes for my upcoming solo acoustic show, I thought about "When 2 R In Love" and sought it out. Unfortunately, my older brother has all of the Prince vinyl in his possession. Luckily, I still had that dubbed cassette of Lovesexy/The Black Album in my archives.

Since both albums contained the song in question, it didn't matter which one I'd put on first. However, the tape was wound somewhere in the middle. I put the Black Album side in first and found that it would take considerable winding before I could cue up the track; when I flipped the cassette onto the Lovesexy side, lo and behold "When 2 R In Love" was playing.

So I listened, and I learned the song, and a chill came over me, and I cried.

I'd forgotten how beautiful a love song it was, and I replayed it over and over until I got it down.

Then, I let the rest of the album play. Since it was technically Side Two of the album (the vinyl version anyway) I figured there would only be two more songs before it got to the end; then I could pop the cassette out and put on the other side.

By the end of Lovesexy, though, I realized that I hadn't heard this album in a long time. Moreover, I realized that I never really gave it a chance either.

Chalk it up to being (much) older and (not much) wiser, but I am listening to the album right now as I blog this, and let me tell you: Lovesexy is severely underrated. It's better than the majority of Prince's work after 1988. In fact, it may be the last great Prince album of his classic era (I always felt that Sign O' The Times was the end of that line, but I have since reassessed this opinion).

First of all, never has the God/Satan dichotomy been more transparent and obvious than with Lovesexy. Prince went so far as to divide his soul up into two different personas on this album: Camille (the feminine, positive side) and Spooky Electric (the masculine, negative side). With Gemini as his astrological Sun sign, Prince has always explored the duality of mankind (vice and virtue, good and evil, love and hate) but never in such a manner as in this collection of songs.

Then, there's the recent light shed upon the whole album release controversy, provided by longtime friend and collaborator Matt Fink, aka "Dr. Fink" (you know, the keyboard player who wore doctor's scrubs in the videos):


[I]n 2001, his long time keyboard player Dr. Fink told then-Internet radio host Ernest L Sewell IV of The Ernest Experience Radio Show that Prince said he saw the devil. He was paranoid due to drugs, and instead of the popular story of him seeing God, he in fact had thought he saw Satan. He told his bodyguard Gilbert Davison this, and Gilbert in turn related it to Fink and possibly other band members. It was this hallucination that had Prince running scared and decided to ditch releasing the album. He even asked for the cassettes of the album back from the band members that are routinely given to them to learn the songs by ear. Fink had later expressed discontent in that he wished he hadn't given it back, or at least made a copy of it for his own personal use.


Whether it's a true story or merely apocryphal, it fits in with the sincere nuttiness that hovers mysteriously around Prince, that of the sensitive artist who teeters on the brink of genius and madness. Others merely come off as completely wacko due to their peccadilloes, but Prince always manages to emerge unscathed mostly because he doesn't do anything to hide his eccentricity. If anything, he plays with it. Unlike R. Kelly or Michael Jackson, whose alleged perversions are held separate from their work, Prince's perversions and passions (which are tame in comparison to the likes of Kelly and Jacko) are intrinsically tied in with his lyrics and music.

I doubt R. Kelly would ever write a song about his scandal other than rebuking those who accused him, and likewise with MJ; Prince, however, aired his dirty laundry from the get-go, and just kept pushing the envelope as time elapsed. Every Prince album from Dirty Mind on contained at least one line or song that made me blush, causing me and my brother to adjust the volume so that my mother would not get angry. And yet, as embarrassing and inappropriate as those naughty sentiments were to me then, they are nothing if not honest, and the true fans always appreciated that... even if, like me, they sometimes didn't get it until much later on in life.

I think Lovesexy was the album where the once-adoring masses first started to resent Prince, and the backlash that nearly derailed his credibility in the music world began to rear its head. But I think now, almost two decades later, the album should be listened to again. You'd be surprised at how well it holds up. What sounded weird and unusual now sounds relevant and contemporary (all those strange electro-blips and synth-squiggles are commonplace in music today, especially in the work of Pharrell Williams and The Neptunes), and the lyrics are spiritual on an almost Gospel-like level.

And of course, there's "When 2 R In Love", an amazing ballad that captures the torrid passion of romance and the animalistic undercurrent of that very same eroticism, balancing both extremes precariously as a gorgeous backdrop of musical swells and crescendos undulates behind it. It gets my vote for the best love song of all time, because you can listen to it with a lover as well as fuck to it.

Maybe that's why it ended up on both Lovesexy and The Black Album. Maybe Prince recognized that he'd written the perfect slow jam, a Gemini of a track that could do double duty as both lascivious mood music and exhortation to true love.

As His Royal Badness sang in that very tune: Nothing's forbidden/ nothing's taboo...

I think that's the way it should be, don't you?