The game changed in 1980 when Prince released Dirty Mind and Robert Christgau consequently declared, “Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.” Sex came to the charts in an unprecedented fashion, showing everyone from Jagger to disco divas what true eroticism sounded like. Starting in 1980, Prince released an album almost every year that decade, each one pushing sex onto the Billboard and into your ears with a force and consistency never seen before or since.
The two new albums from Prince, Art Official Age and PLECTRUMELECTRUM, make you pine for those glory days—today, no one sits on ’80s Prince’s throne, not even Prince himself. There’s a dearth of pure, unadulterated sexiness, a gap in the musical landscape. Rihanna’s eroticism is too kitsch, Beyoncé’s too political. As for male musicians, there’s only the creepy brand offered by R. Kelly and (shudder) Robin Thicke. A sad state of affairs indeed.
PLECTRUMELECTRUM is only worth mentioning in a dismissal. It’s a collection of half-baked rock tunes, casual jam sessions that picked up some hip-hop beats in post-production. Art Official Age, on the other hand, at least sounds like a Prince record, if far from his best. It attempts to channel the risqué brand of rock, funk, and R&B that titillated the world thirty years ago. It has the familiar funk and the brash, horny attitude that contributed to 21 percent of births between 1980 and 1989. But regrettably, though predictably, it too falls short.
The Purple One is 56 now and just as short as ever; while his rhythms are still steamy, they’re mediocre and disappointingly familiar. Plus, he can be overly self-aware. The cover art for “Breakfast Can Wait,” Art Official Age’s first single, made headlines with a snapshot of Dave Chappelle holding a tray of pancakes, a joking response to the comedian’s now-famous Prince impersonation. Lyrics like “a kiss on the neck when she doesn’t expect” are a little too heavy-handed to be sincere. Perhaps this kind of forced camp is a necessary move at this point in Prince’s career, but it subtracts from the primal appeal that seduced boys and girls across the world in the ’80s.
The sad truth is that the time has come for Prince himself to pack up his penis and go home, ready or not. The sex on today’s charts lacks the electricity Prince once brought, but Prince can’t bring it any more. Artists like Rhye and FKA Twigs channel his spirit, but their chances of crossing over into wider pop consciousness are dubious. His throne still awaits a successor.